“It’s about that,” Simon said. “Just find the head guy and tell him. I’ll hold.”
Gregory and about fifteen people had been locked up since well before Julia arrived. The receptionist she’d replaced at midnight had warned her there was some crisis going down about Close-up.
Julia grimaced as she went in: drink cans; half-eaten pizza cold and curling on sheets of yellow legal paper all over the central table; the close odour of people who’d been fretting sixteen hours straight. Disgusting… but she loved it. The acrid smells, the heat, the mess, the pressure. At first, no one noticed her. Several pairs of eyes were locked onto computer screens. Maybe eight people had their ears glued to cell phones in various parts of the room. For a second, she wondered if they were phoning each other—campaigns really could make people go nuts. Another two were tapping away on their BlackBerrys.
Gregory was speaking on a landline. Julia had already scratched out a note and put it under his nose. He gave her an irritated I’m-busy headshake but got the sort of stern response that only a sixty-year-old grandmother in a button-up pink woollen cardigan could give without uttering a single word. He read her note: “Joshua (?) holding. Re Close-up. Urgent AND confidential.”
“Hold a second?” Gregory asked Isabel. She was on board her jet to Detroit. Whenever he thought about the plane, he smiled. Even now; he couldn’t help it. The Wall Street Journal had christened the jet ‘Big Red’ after the rose icon they’d painted on the tail, but the campaign team had morphed that into the ‘Big Red Bed’ given how much time many of them spent strapped in it themselves. Originally, Isabel had been scheduled to arrive in Detroit at ten but, as things panned out, she hadn’t even taken off till after midnight. Gregory read the note again and said to Julia, “This guy for real?”
She shrugged.
“Isabel, gotta call you back,” he said. “Julia, I’ll take it at your desk,” and, after snatching a can of Diet Coke, he sprinted out ahead of her.
Simon introduced himself as Joshua again, no surname. “I don’t know if this’ll help…”
“We’ll check it out. Thanks, Joshua. Hey, where’d you get this?”
“Sorry, can’t say.”
“Can I call you back if I need to?”
Simon had already hung up.
GREGORY got Julia to set up an urgent conference call. Apart from Isabel on the jet, the people he wanted would be at home: Bill Edwards who was probably snug in his Chippendale four-poster with a cigar and his latest girlfriend (not bad for a 72-year-old) and the campaign’s chief legal-beagle, Oliver Pryor. Gregory chose to leave Hank out of this, justifying it to himself by assuming he’d be on a sleepover at one of his fancy clubs with no phones. At Gregory’s end, he’d have a half-dozen of his key campaign people listening in on speaker with him.
Julia loved this job, even though there was no money. At least once in every campaign, there was a crisis on her shift and the sheer adrenaline was reward enough. It was years since anything else had quickened her heartbeat during that time slot. Her husband had died a decade ago.
Apart from his six senior people, Gregory kicked everyone else out of the War Room. The door closed behind them and the mystified outcasts floated en masse over to Julia; she had to be in on the gossip since she’d set all this in motion.
“IT’S Professor Robert Dupont.” Gregory intoned into the speakerphone as if he were saying something meaningful. Gregory’s people watched him slipping on his jacket and knew it wasn’t out of deference to Bill and Isabel who couldn’t see anyhow. It was obviously for ‘The Book.’ When it was all over, Gregory would want the world to know that at this crucial juncture he was not some tacky underdressed slob. No, tonight he was wearing Armani. “We’ve got word Dupont’s involved.”
“The Harvard Law Robert Dupont?” Oliver Pryor spluttered over the line.
Gregory wasn’t sure if the campaign’s chief counsel’s reaction was awe or surprise.
“But he’s on our side,” the lawyer continued.
“Du-who?” asked Isabel, unsure of the name over the squeal of the engines. Her plane had just gone into descent.
This was legal territory, so Oliver Pryor responded, “Dupont, Isabel. Robert Fitzgerald Dupont. Emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard… former senior partner at White, Flom & Bay… chief counsel on constitutional issues to the National Security Council across two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat… the list goes on. He’s one of the nation’s most eminent constitutional lawyers. Refused Bush One’s nomination in 1990 to the Supreme Court because it would be too boring. Oh, and he’s, er, my wife’s grandfather.”