“Fuck!” he yelled again, not caring who’d hear. He struggled to find a Marlboro that was still vaguely smokable and hung it off his lip.
Don was seething. Despite the odds, he had personally dragged this ungrateful bastard over the line and instead of just grabbing the flag that Don had handed him and waving it aloft in their carefully thought-out victory move, Bobby fucking Foster had over-reacted and pissed into the wind and was going to get it back all over his face.
Don lit the cigarette and sucked as though this was his only way to get air. The smoke seared into his eyes, sending his tear ducts crazy. At least, he told himself, it was the smoke that caused it.
TWENTY-FOUR hours before Election Day, with Don Thomas’ last-minute ad campaign turning the fetid tide, he again grabbed a longneck of beer and a package and, hunched over, ushered Foster back inside the candidate’s hotel suite, closing the door behind them.
“What?” snapped Bobby.
“I’ve been digging around,” said Don and he handed his boss the package.
The ex-lawyer noted the red ribbon. He pulled on the bow and, with his law background, was able to skim through the hefty folios of expert opinions very quickly. Bobby regarded himself as good a constitutional lawyer as anybody so, at first, the analysis Don handed him had stunned him. Three separate experts (from Yale, Harvard and Chicago) had opined, in writing, that the House of Representatives could virtually appoint anyone they liked as Speaker. The person didn’t even have to be an elected representative nor even, more amazingly, a citizen.
“This says,” Bobby noted with subdued deliberation, “that the House can elect anyone Speaker. Even a British monarch or an Afghani warlord. Or, for Christ’s sake, Britney fucking Spears.”
“Hell, no,” said Don, a smirk spilling over his pudgy face, “it’s got to be someone real.”
Foster shot him an icy stare. “All the same, every single Speaker since Congress first sat in…,” he looked down at the sheets for confirmation, “in 1789 has been a Member of the House.” And as both men knew, a Member had to be a citizen of at least seven years’ standing.
Don explained that though his proposal—okay, Spencer’s, but he wasn’t about to jog memories—had not one single precedent in American history, it was still 100 percent legal. “Sure, we’ve got over two centuries of precedent against us. But all that is merely what’s happened; convention. It’s not the law.”
Slowly Foster nodded, and his eyes zigzagged down the pages, carefully analysing the words of the Constitution and the commentary Don had put before him.
Don’s nostrils flared as he inhaled the cool clean air. He needed a cigarette. The longer Foster took, the more he could feel the excitement brimming. He was going to say yes. This was going to be one of Don’s finest moments; not only would his candidate triumph tomorrow night with the unofficial declaration of the polls, but he’d be forever marked as one of the few leaders truly able to unite a divided country.
He’d already crafted a spellbinding three paragraphs for Bobby to weave into his victory speech and he passed them to the candidate.
The writing was stirring—up there with his best—though, if truth be told, it was clichéd: that Bobby intended to be a president for all Americans especially in these troubled times; that sores needed healing; that Isabel had much to give the nation; that it was a tragedy she’d been barred from the opportunity of serving, but that Bobby had personally blazed a new track for her; and that, if she were willing, he would prevail on the House to propose her as its Speaker immediately.
BUT Don’s plan went badly wrong… election night went badly wrong… Despite their preparations, no one in the Foster camp had predicted the turmoil that erupted on the celebration floor.
In the midst of his victory speech, before hundreds of supporters and millions watching TV, when Foster got to the page surging with Don’s vibrant prose about Isabel and the Speaker’s role, instead of galvanising the historic moment and pulling the rug from under the protesters, the combative trial lawyer still in Bobby had ripped out the sheet, screwed it up and hurled it onto the floor, crushing it under his foot.
No way was Bobby going to elevate that fucking witch now, he decided, not with those ImposterFoster fucks not more than fifty feet away wreaking havoc on his hard-won victory. This was orchestrated, he fumed as his eyes panned across the floor for clues.
Foster didn’t know it, but Isis’s plan had just reached its spectacular destabilising climax.
Yet those who had engineered the disruption had no idea their actions were self-defeating; that because of Foster’s hot-headed reaction they had foiled Isabel’s elevation as Speaker, something at that stage they didn’t know was even a possibility.
More so than Foster’s, their own victory that night was pyrrhic.
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