“Blood in your urine or stool?”
“No.” It’s hard to be humble when they play a song for you every time you enter the room, when the world financial markets hang on your every word, and when you command the world’s greatest military arsenal, but if you need to knock yourself down a few pegs, try checking your stool for blood.
She steps back and hums to herself. “I’m going to draw blood again,” she says. “I was very concerned by your count yesterday. You were under twenty thousand. I don’t know how you talked me out of hospitalizing you right then and there.”
“I talked you out of it,” I say, “because I’m the president of the United States.”
“I keep forgetting.”
“I can do twenty thousand, Doc.”
The normal range for platelets is between 150,000 and 450,000 per microliter. So nobody’s throwing a parade for a count under 20,000, but it’s still above the critical stage.
“You’re taking your steroids?”
“Religiously.”
She reaches into her bag, then gets to work rubbing alcohol on my arm with a swab. I’m not looking forward to the blood draw, because she’s not great with needles. She’s out of practice. At her high level of specialty, somebody else usually performs the rudimentary tasks. But I have to limit the number of people in this world who know about this. My ITP disorder may be public knowledge, but nobody needs to know how bad it is right now, especially right now. So she’s a one-person show for the time being.
“Let’s do a protein treatment,” she says.
“What—now?”
“Yes, now.”
“The last time I did that I couldn’t string a sentence together for the better part of a day. That’s a nonstarter, Doc. Not today.”
She stops, the swab in her hand trailing down to my knuckles.
“Then a steroid infusion.”
“No. The pills mess with my head enough.”
Her head angles slightly as she considers her response. I’m not the usual patient, after all. Most patients do whatever their doctors tell them. Most patients are not leaders of the free world.
She goes back to prepping my arm, frowning deeply, until she has the needle poised. “Mr. President,” she says in a tone I heard my grade-school teachers use, “you can tell anyone else in the world what to do. But you can’t order your body around.”
“Doc, I—”
“You’re at risk of internal bleeding,” she says. “Bleeding in the brain. You could have a stroke. Whatever it is you’re dealing with, it can’t be worth that risk.”
She looks me in the eye. I don’t respond. Which in itself is a response.
“It’s something that bad?” she whispers. She shakes her head, waves her hand. “Don’t. I—I know you can’t tell me.”
Yes, it’s something that bad. And the attack could come an hour from now or later today. It could have happened twenty seconds ago, and Carolyn could be rushing in to tell me about it right now.
I can’t be out of commission for even an hour, much less several. I can’t risk it.
“It has to wait,” I say. “A couple of days, probably.”
A bit rattled by what she doesn’t know, Deb just nods and plunges the needle into my arm.
“I’ll double the steroids,” I say, which means it will feel like I’ve drunk four beers instead of two. It’s a line I have to straddle. I can’t be out of commission, but I have to stay alive.
She finishes in silence, packing away the blood draw in her bag and getting ready to leave. “You have your job, and I have mine,” she says. “I’ll get the labs back within two hours. But we both know your count is cratering.”
“Yes, we do.”
She stops at the doorway and turns to me. “You don’t have a couple of days, Mr. President,” she says. “You might not even have one.”
Chapter
6
Today, and only today, they will celebrate.
He must give them that. His small team has worked day and night, with purpose and devotion and with great success. Everyone needs a break.
The wind off the river lifts his hair. He pulls on his cigarette, the orange tip glowing in the dim early evening air. He savors the view from the penthouse terrace overlooking the river Spree, the city bustling across the water—the East Side Gallery, the entertainment center. The Mercedes-Benz Arena is hosting a concert tonight. He doesn’t recognize the group’s name, but the muted sounds, audible even from across the river, tell him that the music involves heavy guitar and a thumping bass. This part of Berlin has changed considerably since he was last here, a mere four years ago.
He turns back to look inside the penthouse, 160 square meters, with four bedrooms and a designer open-plan kitchen where his team is laughing and gesturing, pouring Champagne and probably already halfway drunk. The four of them, all geniuses in their own right, none of them over the age of twenty-five, some of them probably still virgins.
Elmurod, his stomach hanging over his belt, his beard unkempt, wearing an insipid blue hat that reads VET WWIII. Mahmad, already with his shirt off, showing off his decidedly unimpressive biceps in a mock bodybuilder pose. All four of them turn toward the door, and Elmurod goes to answer it. When the door opens, eight women walk in, all wearing teased-up hair and skintight dresses, all with bodies of centerfolds, all paid princely sums to show his team the night of their lives.
He steps carefully along the terrace, wary of the heat and pressure sensors—deactivated right now, of course—rigged to detonate the entire terrace should anything heavier than a bird land on it. It set him back nearly a million euros, these precautions.
But what’s one million euros when you’re about to earn a hundred million?
One of the prostitutes, an Asian who can’t be over twenty, with boobs that can’t be real, with a sudden interest in him that can’t be sincere, approaches him as he walks back into the penthouse and slides the door shut.
“Wie lautet dein name?” she asks. What is your name?
He smiles. She is just flirting, playing a part. She doesn’t care what he tells her.
But there are people who would pay anything, or do anything, to know the answer to her question. And just once, he’d like to let down his guard and answer the question truthfully.
I am Suliman Cindoruk, he’d like to say. And I’m about to reboot the world.
Chapter
7
I close the folder on my desk after reviewing the various items that my White House counsel, Danny Akers, and his staff have prepared for me in consultation with the attorney general.
A draft executive order declaring martial law throughout the nation and a legal memorandum exploring the constitutionality of doing so.
Draft legislation for Congress and a draft executive order declaring the suspension of habeas corpus throughout the nation.
An executive order instituting price controls and rationing of various consumer goods along with authorizing legislation where needed.
I just pray that it doesn’t come to this.
“Mr. President,” says JoAnn, my secretary, “the Speaker of the House.”
Lester Rhodes smiles politely at JoAnn and strides into the Oval Office, his hand outstretched. I’m already out from around my desk to greet him.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” he says, shaking my hand and sizing me up, probably wondering why I have the scruffy beginnings of a beard.
“Mr. Speaker,” I say. Usually I follow up with a Thanks for coming or Good to see you, but I can’t summon pleasantries with this man. Rhodes, after all, was the architect of his party’s reclamation of the House during midterm elections, based exclusively on the promise of “taking our country back” and that ridiculous “report card” on my performance that he blew up for all the candidates, grading me on foreign policy, the economy, a number of hot-button issues, with the tagline “Duncan is flunkin’.”