Empire

What kind of ten-year-old watched CNN? She was glad none of her kids was as strange as she had been. Such a loner. Didn’t have any real friends till she was in high school and found a group of proud-to-be-geeks, though now they’d be called wonks. Who but a wonk like her would even be attracted to the studious young ROTC officer who wore his uniform every day as if he was just daring politically correct students to say something snotty. Which they did. And which he always answered with a surprised look and the same chilling little phrase. “I’m willing to die for you,” he’d say, and then go back to whatever he was doing. How could they answer that?

He’d die for his country; and I spend my life taking care of his kids and making his life worth trying not to die.

She remembered those two glorious, hideous years as an intern and then a paid staffer in a Congressman’s office, where she saw what went on behind the scenes, the stuff they never showed on CNN because reporters and cameras were never present when the real work was being done. It’s not that her Congressman was corrupt—far from it. He was a squeaky-clean Mormon from Idaho who never drank or smoked and treated male and female staffers exactly alike. But he knew how Congress worked—it drank campaign money and breathed publicity. He was an expert in finding and using both.

LaMonte Nielson. He had a conscience and strongly held ideas, but not for one second did he let that get in the way of making whatever deal would get things done and make him indispensable to other Congressmen. Now he was Speaker of the House. Not bad for a smalltown veterinarian who got bored with putting old dogs to sleep.

He had liked her. Gave her a job after her internship. Offered her a huge raise when she said she was quitting. But when she explained she was leaving to marry a soldier, he smiled and said, “That matters more in the long run than anything we do in this office. Go for it.”

Today she might have been a senior aide to the Speaker of the House. Instead she was listening to J. P. in his booster seat at the kitchen table, babbling on about garbage trucks, his obsession of the moment. He was explaining the rules of recycling. She wasn’t sure whether he could read yet or not. Could he really have memorized all this after getting one of the older kids to read the brochure to him?

Getting to know these kids was a lot more fun than getting to know a bunch of Congressmen and their aides. Negotiating with them about bedtime and videogame use was a lot more satisfying than wrestling with other wonks about what would and would not go into the legislation. Not just because at home she had all the power (she and Reuben, when he was home) but also because she could actually change things. Help them overcome their weaknesses. Help them discover and develop their strengths. Make them feel better when they felt bad. Rejoice with them when they were happy. Like Congressman Nielson said—this was what mattered in the long run.

Except…

Except she had to hide from the television. Whether it was CNN or, when Reuben was home, Fox News, she’d find herself filled with yearning—no, be honest, she told herself—frustration. Because things were happening and she wasn’t part of it. All these years later, and she still had the disease.

The front door banged open and Mark ran into the kitchen yelling something. She was only half listening as she got his bag of cookies out of the fridge—he liked his cookies cold.

“Turn on the television!” he shouted at her.

“What?” she said.

“They blew up the White House,” he said.

All the channels were showing the same pictures: the White House with a gaping hole in the south wall of the West Wing, people in suits and people in uniforms, emergency vehicles and military vehicles all around. Reporters explaining that all air traffic was grounded so they couldn’t give us aerial shots—thank God, she thought, that’s all we need, the sky around the White House cluttered with choppers—and promising that as soon as they could get confirmation they’d tell us who died.

Because people had died. That much they knew.

The information bled out, each bit savored and discussed till the next one surfaced. An apparent terrorist attack. One or more rockets launched from a distance. From the Mall, then from the Washington Monument, then from the Tidal Basin. That’s the rumor that stuck.

And then there was the video clip—sold to the highest bidder?—on CBS and then picked up by everybody else (but with the CBS logo in the corner—capitalism continues!) taken from a car on the eastbound lane of Independence Avenue, where it bridged the Tidal Basin. The footage showed the terrorists on the asphalt of the westbound lanes just past the retaining wall of the Tidal Basin, and two rocket launchers.

The camera was shaking—obviously a digital snapshot camera with only a short video capacity. But there were pops of gunfire and some of the terrorists turned to fire… almost right at the camera. Was this tourist insane? He should be down inside his car, not vid-ding the whole thing.

Then a dark shape moved right in front of the camera in a blur of motion. A man in a suit. But with a weapon. And then another, only in uniform. And a voice saying, “Get down inside your car!”

Of course the camera stayed where it was.

Pop. Pop. Pop-pop-pop. One of the terrorists went down. Another. One of the launchers was knocked out of alignment and tipped over. But the other one fired and then the video ended.

Mark pushed a button on the remote and things started rewinding.

“What are you doing?”

“Rewinding,” said Mark.

“This is all a tape?”

“It’s DVR, Mom,” he said, like she was kind of dim. “We’ve had this for two years now. You can rewind anything if you haven’t changed the channel in between.”

“But I want to hear what they’re saying.”

“Mom,” said Mark. “Why do we have to listen to them when we can see?”

And then he added, softly: “I think it was Dad.”

The moment he said it, she knew he was right. Dad in a suit. And that was Captain Coleman in the uniform. Somehow they were at the Tidal Basin with rifles and they were shooting at the terrorists only they hadn’t been able to get them all in time.

The video didn’t prove anything. Everything moved too fast and blurred too much. But she knew it was Reuben.

“Again,” said Mark.

“No,” said Cecily. “Let me hear them talk. I have to know what they’re saying.”

A lot of babble about unidentified early responders and then some idiot talking head saying that the range had been quite short and these must not be trained soldiers because those weren’t hard shots. Right, thought Cecily, not hard at the firing range, but damned hard when somebody was firing back at you and you were running from cover to cover.

Then the talking heads were interrupted by a bulletin from the reporter standing just outside the White House grounds.

The President was definitely in the room where the rocket exploded, along with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Mark pushed another button and suddenly everything jumped on the screen. “What are you doing now?”

“Going live,” said Mark. “We were a minute behind because of the replay.”

“The President is confirmed dead,” said a man inside a briefing room that she recognized immediately—it was in the Sam Rayburn Building. Why would he be in the Rayburn?

Because the White House briefing room wasn’t available, of course. But…

There was Congressman LaMonte Nielson with his hand on the Bible. Raising his right hand. Why was he taking an oath of office?

“Apparently the Vice President was killed in a traffic incident only a few minutes before the rocket attack on the White House. I say ‘incident’ because it is hard to believe that this was an accident, a mere coincidence. By the time the President died, this country had no living Vice President. So the law of presidential succession is clear. After the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and—but here’s the new President of the United States, just sworn in. President LaMonte Nielson. Most Americans don’t even