Schneider noted Marilyn’s strained formality, and couldn’t help looking up to scan the skies.
“AT forty-fucking-two?” President Foster drummed his fingers against the rim of the Resolute desk, the one that most presidents since 1880 had leant on in times of stress. “A fatal heart attack…? You kidding me? Mitch worked out. Hey, Don,” he nodded to his chief of staff. “Are we sure this wasn’t…?”
Foster’s teary, strained eyes fell to one of the quotes that President Barack Obama had asked to be woven into the Oval Office’s centrepiece rug: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
“Mr President, nothing showed up in the bloodwork, and,” Don said, checking his watch, “St Anthony’s are doing a full body-scan.”
Foster shook his head, “He goes through all the pressure of the campaign and… bam! We’re in office a few measly days and his body packs up? Go figure. I’ve got to visit with Julia and their kids. The First Lady, too… I’ll tell her to pack some things when I get to the Blue Room. There’s no way I can dump the Chancellor tonight—Kurt just got here—so we’ll fly out in the morning. He’ll understand. Don,” he added, “fix the rest, okay?”
“Yes, Mr President. There’s something else…”
The President said nothing, but his heart was pounding.
“We’ll need to announce your new vice…”
“Fuck that. This isn’t the time…”
“It’s precisely the time, Mr President. Section Two of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment requires you to nominate…”
“Not before I pay my respects to the family of the last one, it doesn’t.”
“Yes, sir, but…”
Exasperated, Bobby squeezed his chin and exhaled, “There are no buts, Don. Even after I nominate whoever, it’ll take months. Both Houses of Congress have to confirm it, and they’re not gonna do that till after all the damn hearings, so a day here or there, even a week… it’s all fucking irrelevant, orright?”
Don had gotten used to Bobby’s temper. This time it was personal, sure, but the unseemly behaviour was nothing new and he would let it wash over him, as usual.
He scrolled his mind to the following morning when the President would run across the South Lawn to his helicopter Marine One, ducking to avoid the rotors. Don would be beside him, stooped no more than usual, but whether Foster wanted to read it or not, Don would be passing him a detailed brief on the succession procedures, including a list of twenty potential nominees.
It was a shock, for sure, but both men knew this was no unique moment in history, although the details would come in Don’s brief, which three of his best staff were already preparing. It would tell Foster that no fewer than seven vice-presidents had died in office and two had resigned. In 1973 when Spiro Agnew resigned and Richard Nixon nominated Gerald Ford as his new Vice-President, it took nearly two months of Washington gum-chewing before Ford got to take his oath of office. When in 1974 Nixon himself resigned, Ford just one day later nominated Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice-President, but it took almost four months for Rockefeller to take the oath of office; four months with no vice-president to step up should President Ford really stumble. And neither of those precedents remotely compared to the days before the Twenty-Fifth Amendment got passed in 1967: Lyndon Johnson had no vice-president for 14 months after President Kennedy’s assassination—some said there still wasn’t one even after Hubert Humphrey was eventually sworn in.
“But sir, what if you, er, suffered a… um… a heart attack?” Don was getting to his real concern. “Under the succession rules, it’s the Speaker—Diaz—who steps up. And after that FOX segment, there’s not even a scintilla of an argument to stop her.”
59
IN THE THIRTY minutes of snow and slush that Isabel had put between herself and the shack, she’d tramped not quite two miles, and had long discarded her snowshoes as virtually useless. The curtain of nightfall was closing in, and would slow her even more as the thickening cloud cover threatened to block the moon.
Her breath was streaking ahead faster than she was. Normally she loved it out here but tonight she felt totally isolated. Vulnerable. Petrified.
It wasn’t the moose tracks that worried her; Isabel imagined she could deal with a moose. It was the ripped-open logs and digging marks, signs that screamed of a black bear. Normally, a bear would be no problem unless you got between a mother and her cub but, right now, Isabel could only imagine the worst. For comfort, she glanced at her handheld GPS map-tracker as though it could reveal the whereabouts of vicious animals.