There was no suspense as to how the referendum would turn out. The people's wishes as regards gun control in America were well-known. The last time legislation had been on the table, in 2012, ninety percent had declared themselves in favor of background checks and other safety measures, though the NRA had naturally put enough pressure on Congress (no more money for your campaigns, folks, try, just try to call our bluff) and made sure the bill died an unclimactic death.
This time was a little different, Sara thought, not just because of her use of a nation-wide referendum to obtain popular support rather than a mere poll, but especially because, thanks to what she'd settled to call 'Michael's little black book', she knew exactly where resistance was going to come from, both in the House and in the Senate.
She did give silent thanks to the notebook, every once in a while, when it proved particularly useful. With time, its inherent association with the night that Michael had visited her in the White House Garden faded somewhat, so she could bear to look at it, to have it on her, without reawakening dangerous passions as a matter of course.
And, in fact, Sara did carry the notebook on her, at all times, except when she showered. That is, she slept, ate, and travelled with it always safe in the pocket of her coat. It simply wouldn't do to hide it somewhere in the White House – anything could be found there, probably, the darkest secrets and most private actions all got scraped up in the end. Sometimes, she even thought that had been the point behind the building of the White House; to ensure even the president's private space became public, that there was no being alone, no possibility to retreat away from the piercing eye of your advisors.
It wasn't actually out of sentimentality, of course.
Sara had been busy trying to memorize the notebook, page by page, until she had most of the crucial passages down, and when she'd be satisfied with how much information she'd mentally mapped, she would burn the book, and would like it a lot more as a pool of disintegrated ashes than she did now, in its material form, unlikely to risk discovery but, like any embodied secret, running that risk all the same.
Frankly, Sara would rather focus on what she couldn't help but show, on the things that were definitely going to shape her legacy as president.
"We want to be ahead of this," Kellerman told her, referring to her frequent use of referenda and especially her latest. "At the state-level, they've been a thing for a long time, and they're popular, generally make a governor look good, as you remember. But nation-wide, they're rather a different matter. We want to own that image before it owns us, right?"
"Right."
Sara thought Kellerman handled his being fired as Secretary of State remarkably enough, considering the unusual show of anger he'd allowed her to see in the Oval. Of course, it helped that she'd made him her communications director – much closer to her, to the domestic sphere where she was most focused, probably, a job he would have preferred over his old post ten times over if it had been her initial offer.
That didn't quite erase the humiliation of their last meeting.
Not that Sara could detect the bitterness, lurking in his voice or face, but she knew it was there. When you constantly deal with politicians, you learn to trust the existence of what's invisible, and treat it with more wariness even than what you can see.
That she had chosen to appoint Gretchen Morgan as his successor certainly didn't help, although he would never think her petty enough to believe she had done it to spite him. Quite frankly, hurting Kellerman's feelings simply did not feature on the list of Sara's priorities.
The reason why the two had never taken to each other held no interest for her, either. This was not a schoolyard, and she would not tolerate a player sulking over having been picked second in the team.
Whenever her eyes and Kellerman's got caught in a crossfire, she felt nothing but the coolness of the well-known message passing between them, again and again, free from resent: business is business.
"Oh," he said, always saving the information she would like the least for the last few minutes of their appointments, as if by presenting them as stale cigarette ends, she would dismiss them better and think nothing of them. "Before I forget, Stephen Colbert wants you on his show at the end of the month. I told him you'd think about it."
"I love Stephen, Paul, but this month is a little –"
"Isn't every month 'a little'…?"
She cast him a look of playful reproach.
Maybe it was important in his rebuilding his confidence, his interrupting her like this.
But his face was serious.
"What is it?"
He sighed, though it must have been easy for him, pointing to the flaws in her public image when he'd had his humiliatingly though privately shattered.
"You're doing it. That thing we talked about, said we'd be on the lookout for."
Now, Sara was tempted to sigh back – she'd caught only five hours last night and it'd been four hours since her last caffeine dose.
"Yes, we did talk about it. I thought we agreed a presidency wasn't an advertising campaign."
"Publicity matters, Sara. You don't want to make the same mistakes as the last Democrat who sat in that house, do you? Fewer than ten percent of the population even realized Obama had lowered their taxes back in the 2010s. He trusted the people to keep alert and where did that get him – not to any credit for his measures, did it? Now," he added before she'd had time to open her mouth, "Roosevelt, he knew how to promote his reforms. You might not want to believe it, the way we frame the changes we bring in matters as much as the bills themselves."
"Was that a random invitation from Stephen, Paul, or is there something I need to know?"
He shrugged.
"How deep in are we?"
"Not irretrievable. Some jerks will never stop the smear campaign – there's still a solid troop ready to call you a Russian takeover and a socialist, but we won't quiet those down, no need to waste our time trying. But lately it's been gaining more popular outlets, getting a little closer to the masses."
"Terrific. What are they saying?"
"That you're a bit of an ice queen."
She laughed. At the White House, she'd developed a way of laughing almost always entrenched in hopeless disappointment.
"Well, it was time, I guess."
It crossed her mind to joke maybe she should release that secret-lover video, tame the dumb voices that would call any woman getting by without a man frigid – but even on the tone of humor, it was safest never to mention that secret-lover business again.
"It's not outright misogyny."
"Is that what they say or what you think?"
He cocked his head to the side. "Honestly? You're something they can't grasp, that's all. Hence the idea that you're aloof, although you still do charity work every month. Although you're keener on asking for the people's voice than any other president was before you. It escapes them, that a woman could get to where you're now, without hiding something, without having paid one hell of a price for it."
Sara received this silently.
What would they know, what the price had been?
"We can't root it out," he said, "not entirely, but we can fight it. Hence the publicity business. Hence Stephen."
"Right."
Kellerman waited a couple of seconds, timing his exit window the way he knew how. "If you really don't think you can squeeze in another interview –"
"No," she answered, as she was expected to, "you're my communications chief advisor, Paul." She smiled. "It's your job to give thought to the sort of things I can't bother with. If you say it's a must, then it's a must."
He smiled back without fooling her completely.
There was still something invisibly dangerous about him, something behind the impeccable layer of his polished face.
Something unhinging.
She couldn't really put her finger on it.
"I'll see you tomorrow, then," she said.
He took his cue and was on his feet immediately. "Good evening," he replied, and closed the door quietly behind him – what a tame sky compared to that blazing storm he'd let her glimpse at in the hot glare of his eyes.
'Revenge's a dish best served cold' she thought, without knowing why, as she contemplated his behavior, alone in her office.
Gooseflesh spread down her arms inexplicably.
"Revenge," she said, and looked at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln hanging above the fireplace. "Why revenge?" She asked.
Sara used to speak to herself, like everybody else, but lately her life had gotten a bit mad and instead she spoke to dead presidents.
The imposing, somewhat simian face looked back at her unresponsively.
"Oh, yes," she sighed, "I shouldn't be asking you that."
She always forgot about the murder-at-the-theater business.
If dear old Abe couldn't avoid his own violent death, she didn't see how he could help her solve the tensions within her cabinet.
Still…
Still, Sara wished that Kellerman had never given her a reason to distrust him, and put her in the position where she had no choice but to call him on it.
Kellerman just wasn't the kind of man whose mind you wanted to be constantly probing.
…
It was six p.m. when Kellerman left the oval after his appointment with Sara, and so, a good part of the day's work was still ahead of him.
On his way out of the White House, he was unlucky enough so as to run into Gretchen Morgan, who despite it being the middle of February, was wearing no stockings under her black suit, and her white legs showed not the slightest hint of being cold.
In truth, those in the team who sometimes indulged in gratuitous gossip said Gretchen Morgan was like an ice block, tough, impassive, and external circumstances simply had no effect on her.
"Kellerman."
"Morgan."
He kept an even tone, though that smile, that red smile when she greeted him was enough for him to grind his teeth.
Of course, everything about her behavior seemed tailor-made to flaunt her triumph and rub salt into the still gaping wound of his defeat.
To appease himself, or try to, Kellerman told himself neither Gretchen nor anyone in the White House, aside from Sara, could know his resignation as Secretary of State had been anything but willing.
But he'd be damned if it wasn't victory crawling on Gretchen's face every time she looked at him.
Damned, maybe.
But not all by himself. Oh, no sir.
Kellerman found his car keys, plunging his hand out of the silk-smooth fabric of his pants, and got into his car, where he relaxed, shielded from the outside world by metal and tinted windows.
Really, he didn't mind the demotion on anything but a deeply personal level. The new job Sara had found for him in her cabinet suited him much better than the admittedly more popular position of Secretary of State. It was all fine smiling for the cameras once in a while, but Kellerman disliked all the attention, all the spotlights that came with the job.
Like many others in his line of work, more than you might think, he was a man of the shadows.
And all that time flying from Tokyo to Paris and Jerusalem to Tehran, and traveling economy class at that, because Sara insisted on 'keeping things real', no, that simply wasn't working too well for him, though he would have wordlessly swallowed his distaste for it as long as his president desired him to. Now, handling Sara's image in the media, he was bound to stick much closer to her and he could keep a keener eye on all that was going on, the myriads of plots that were endlessly interweaving with other affairs in this gigantic web that was the world of politics.
Professionally, so, he was more than happy with the change.
But the personal sting of it – ah, that was another matter, wasn't it?
At his apartment, he was glad to find, among the several letters that had piled up in his mail box, though he'd emptied it just this morning, a list of the employees that had been working at the Everest for the past couple of years.
It wasn't where he'd begun his inquest, naturally. The odds that some prying ear at the restaurant where he had met with NRA representatives, not just once during the campaign, as he had said to Sara, but half a dozen times since the beginning of her presidency, would have been around, picking up enough of his conversation to report it to her – well, those odds looked very slim, and Kellerman wasn't one to waste his time on shots in the dark.
After a while though, after making absolutely sure the leak couldn't have come from the NRA spokesman he'd met with, that there'd been no successful attempt at hacking his phone or email account recently, he had to jump to the more obvious conclusion.
True, there'd been nothing incriminating said by either party during that handful of dinners; they were a mere formality. But the fact alone of being seen with a member of the NRA would have been enough for someone to draw conclusions.
It couldn't have been another client, as the whole restaurant had been cleared each time that these ad hoc meetings took place. Kellerman was a man who liked privacy. That only left members of the staff, who'd have access to reservation records.
Kellerman dropped on one of the armchairs that circled his immaculate coffee table, like a small ambush of leather seats. All his furniture had that gleaming untouched look, the look of objects fresh out of the store, his whole apartment too clean, too obviously unlived in.
As he started browsing the pages of those names, he realized just how desperate the search was – a needle in a haystack – but Kellerman was a patient man.
And he'd get to the bottom of that nasty betrayal business.
Oh, yes.
Whoever was responsible for making him look anything but faultlessly loyal to Sara's eyes, he would have their names – possibly their heads.
Kellerman wasn't a believer in that an-eye-for-an-eye doctrine, he much preferred its more political variation: if someone's going to take out your eye, you fool, you take their whole head, seeing as the more you leave them, the more material they will have to betray you again.
Kellerman sighed, and dropped the document on his table; there was more urgent work he needed to get done by tomorrow. The document could wait.
It was only at the last moment, after he'd got up, and his eyes were lost in a vague haze, half-focused on the page, that his focus narrowed on one of the names –
Waiter of the year, he read.
Employee at the Everest from November 2020.
There were no pictures, but the name spun on its head back and again, in Kellerman's mind, pushing back all the crazy amount of work that had piled up since Sara had been sworn in as the forty-sixth president.
Pushing through it, behind it, getting his memory working until he was almost certain he knew it, yes, it was ringing a bell.
Lincoln Burrows.
"Lincoln Burrows," he said aloud
Why did he know that name?
…
Ends Notes: I so apologize for the delayed update. If it's any comfort, what's keeping me so busy is an original novel version of 'Welcome To the Jungle', I'm having such an extraordinary time going back to the roots of the story… Anyway, I hope this chapter makes you spend a good time in your confinement, wherever you are in the world. Now more than ever, take care!
