“India? Shit. Has Pakistan retaliated?”
Manny looked at her for a second, confused, and then shook his head. It was an obvious conclusion for Stephanie. India and Pakistan had been at war or on the verge since the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. One of those brilliant British ideas, the partition of India. There hadn’t been an outright conflict in a while, but both states were nuclear, and some years the governments were more stable than others. Right now, neither country was exactly led by a group of levelheaded people. But they had a playbook for hostilities between India and Pakistan. Scenarios sketched out by analysts. Backup plans and contingencies and coordinated lines of communication. Guns and bombs and jets and escalation were all things they had planned for. But they hadn’t planned for this.
“No. Not Pakistan. Think China.”
“China?”
“The fucking spiders.”
“Okay,” she said. “How bad is it?” No hesitation. No disbelief. Just a need for information.
That was one of the things Manny liked about Steph, one of the reasons he’d pushed her to go for it. Because, despite all his political manipulation, despite his thinking of politics as a game, despite his ability to read a poll and spin a message, despite the way he could work a phone and twist arms and his willingness to ruin somebody’s life if they didn’t deliver a vote, he was still a bit of a romantic. A realist, but a romantic one. And he believed in the idea of the president of the United States of America. He believed the president had to be the one to step up, that most of the time it didn’t matter who was sitting in the hot seat, but those few times, those once-in-a-generation moments, it mattered, and with Steph sitting in the chair, with Steph’s finger on the button, he knew she’d make the right decision. She had that knack of filtering out the noise, of letting go of distractions and cutting to the core, and as soon as she heard him say “spiders” she did the math. China. Nukes. Henderson’s body in Minnesota. And now India. She wasn’t going to waste her time thinking that it couldn’t be possible, and she wasn’t going to dither.
Something wicked this way comes, Manny thought. Any time for hesitation was gone.
“Manny, how bad?” she asked again.
“Bad,” he said. “It’s on television. NBC, but I think everybody’s going to pick it up soon.” He walked her out of the Oval Office and into the President’s Study, where she did most of her real work. An aide looked up and Manny asked her for some Diet Cokes and to make sure that Alex, Ben, and Billy were brought in immediately.
He picked the remote control up from the coffee table and turned the television on. Or, he tried to. After a few pointless jabs at the power button, Steph took it out of his hand. “Seriously, Manny? You can’t work a remote?” She got the television on and flipped it to NBC. They were playing the video in a loop: people running and screaming, then the black flood coming out the doors.
After about thirty seconds, she turned her back to the television.
“That’s it?” Manny said. “You don’t want to watch more?”
“Is there more to watch?”
“Not really.”
“So let’s get moving. And Manny?”
“Yeah?”
“Call your wife.”
Manny couldn’t stop himself. “Ex.”
Steph waved her hand at him in frustration. “Whatever. Don’t be an asshole.”
“Very presidential.”
“Manny, how about you go f—”
Steph stopped herself as the door opened. Alex Harris didn’t bother coming all the way into the room. She looked at Steph and then Manny. “I think we’re past the point of us sitting in the President’s Study and chatting,” Alex said. “Ben’s already down in the Situation Room, and I went ahead and called everybody in.”
“Come on, Alex, rein it in,” Manny said. First one and then the other phone in his pocket started buzzing again. And those were the phones he handled himself. His aide must have been getting slammed. “The press is going to sniff this out and have a field day with us overreacting.”
“Grow up, Manny,” Alex said. “We’re past that. The press is going to have a field day if we don’t start overreacting. You want to think politics, think 9/11.”