“Two more to Germany. Wheels down in a couple of hours.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stabbed his thick finger against the map on the touchscreen monitor.
Manny was listening, but he was also looking at the press release one of his aides had prepared for him on the plane crash that had apparently killed Bill Henderson. The director of the agency had a man in place and a team on the way to make sure it wasn’t anything other than an accident. Just another headache for Manny. Of course the nuclear explosion was the big news of the day, but the president was going to have to say something about Henderson, and she’d have to go to the funeral. Christ. Minneapolis. This was not what Manny needed. Bill Henderson had been a pushy asshole—which was one of the reasons he’d become a billionaire—but he’d also been an unabashed ally of their party in general and Steph in particular. Even if he hadn’t rounded up his richest friends to donate, his own contributions to their campaign coffers had been what put them over the top. It wasn’t that easy to replace a billionaire with deep pockets, and while the other guys each had a clown car full of buffoons driving them to the convention, sooner or later one of them would emerge. It was a miracle they hadn’t figured it out yet as it was. With the loss of Henderson’s money and the fucking Chinese dropping nukes, Manny was suddenly thinking there might be a real race. He knew that’s not what he was supposed to be preoccupied with right now. That was the lie of politics: that they were there to serve the common good. But it was a lie Manny believed—or maybe used to believe?—and that Steph believed. This wasn’t the time for politics. There was a crisis and a real worry here. Nukes weren’t something to be discounted. No. He had to think about the Chinese.
He sighed and watched Ben Broussard finish his presentation.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs looked at the president and then at the rest of the people in the room. “We’ll have them on the ground and operational by eighteen hundred tomorrow, and from there we can have a rapid response here and here as needed,” he said, tapping the map again. “Any questions?”
There were none, so Ben took his seat. The president stared at the map for an uncomfortable second and then she turned and said, “Any comments?”
Manny saw that Alexandra Harris, the national security advisor, had slipped into the room sometime in the last couple of minutes, and at the president’s question, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s the wrong reaction.”
“You think we’re overreacting? To a nuclear bomb?” Ben slammed his hand on the table. He didn’t look pissed. He looked furious. For the first time, Manny considered that maybe the problem with Ben was simply that he was one of those old-guard military men who, no matter what he said, couldn’t quite stomach the idea of having a woman as the commander in chief. Or, in this case, the national security advisor. Billy Cannon, the secretary of defense, didn’t react like that when Alex challenged him, but that’s probably because Billy looked at Alexandra Harris and saw the national security advisor, while Ben looked at Alex and saw a woman. The thought made Manny want to chuckle a little, because really, Alex looked like nothing other than a grandmother. She was sharp as hell, but there was always a part of him that expected her to pull some hard candies out of her purse.
Manny picked up his glass of Diet Coke and took a gulp. The burn of the carbonation helped a little, but what he really needed was that sweet surge of caffeine. He let his eyes shift to Steph then back to the group sitting around the conference table. A quick glance was enough for him to see that the president wasn’t in a hurry to jump in. She was good that way, willing to let people talk and argue before she stepped in, and usually even then her first forays were to ask questions, so that when she did decide on a course of action she knew what she was talking about.
Alex took a cup of coffee from a staff member’s tray with a polite nod and then, without raising her voice, looked directly at Ben and said, “I didn’t say we were overreacting by scrambling troops and thinking about deployment. I said it was the wrong reaction.”