She had. Culver well remembered Kipper’s shock upon discovering that his wife had been quietly working with the resistance to the then General Blackstone’s martial law regime, imposed upon the Pacific Northwest in the panic and chaos of spring 2003. She hadn’t surprised Culver, however. As soon as he’d met Barbara Kipper he’d judged her capable of reaching hard conclusions and acting upon them in a way that her husband wasn’t. Not immediately, anyway. Kip was just too trusting of people. He wanted to think the best of them and it often stayed his hand when he needed to do his worst.
‘Guess we better bring them on in, if they’re ready,’ said the President.
He started to straighten up his tie before thinking otherwise and loosening it further instead. A fire blazed and crackled in the small hearth, adding its warmth to the under-floor heating. As always, Kipper had discarded his jacket as soon as he sat down that morning. He worked with his sleeves rolled up, citing the Kennedy precedent if anyone questioned him. ‘Anyone’ usually being his wife, and occasionally his Chief of Staff. If they didn’t keep a close watch on him, he’d turn up to work in jeans, boots and one of his old hiking shirts.
Jed buzzed Kipper’s secretary, Ronnie, to check whether the Cabinet group were ready yet, and when she answered yes, told her to send them in. Barney Tench was first through the door, still licking his fingers from the small tray of pastries set out for visitors in the anteroom, and looking only marginally guilty. Like Barbara, Kip’s old pal Tench had thrown in his lot with the resistance; but unlike her, he had suffered for it. Blackstone had issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of sedition. That had been enough to convince Kipper, then a mere city engineer working closely with Blackstone, that the man had to go.
It was tempting to imagine they’d all moved on such a long way from those first horrible days. Barney would seem to be living proof of that, thought Jed. Instead of being arrested and possibly hung or shot under martial law, Tench was now the chief of Kipper’s national reconstruction efforts, a job that brought him into regular contact with Blackstone, who’d gone on to become the Governor of Texas. But they hadn’t moved on that far, had they? Because Blackstone was still a gigantic pain in the ass, still the most dangerous man in America, at least to Jed’s way of thinking. But to a lot of other people, he was a hero.
Kipper and Barney greeted each other as old friends and co-conspirators, with smiles and handshakes devoid of any pro forma posturing. For one brief moment they really were just a couple of old college buds who didn’t get to see each other nearly enough. Not outside of the crushing demands of their respective jobs, anyway. Tench was frequently away from Seattle, either supervising some project out in the boonies, or overseas wrangling aid and redevelopment funds out of the small coterie of allied nations willing and able to lend a hand.
Behind him entered the Treasury Secretary, Paul McAuley, followed by the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sarah Humboldt, and the country’s newly minted National Security Advisor, Admiral James Ritchie. Jed was happy to have the old salt on board. Were it not for Ritchie, the chances were pretty good that Jed himself wouldn’t be standing here. They’d met in Honolulu during the first hours after the Wave had swept across the continental US, when Culver had understood the importance of attaching himself to what was left of the nation’s power structure. He believed that Ritchie’s leadership had been one of the main reasons the remnant population of America hadn’t turned on each other in a snarling tangle of fear and madness. He lobbied Kip hard to rescue the man from the backwater he’d been lost in for the last couple of years, securing the military’s stock of WMDs; important work, for sure, but not the best use of Ritchie’s talents.
‘Admiral, good to see you,’ said Culver. ‘Pull up a pew, and let’s get started, shall we. The President’s not one for standing on ceremony.’
‘So I’ve learned,’ replied Ritchie, who still insisted on the formalities. A little like Jed, in fact.
As everyone distributed themselves around the room, Kipper’s secretary wheeled in a trolley bearing coffee pots and plates of cookies.
‘Thanks, Ronnie,’ said Kip.
In a nod to his constant reading of presidential history, Kip referred to the informal working group as his ‘Garage Cabinet’, riffing off Andrew Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. They met in this form once a month. If Kip could’ve pulled it off, they would have met in greasy Levi’s in a garage with a fully stocked beer fridge. His Chief of Staff, ever the crusher of dreams, killed that one off but allowed the name to stand. Andrew Jackson might have had Culver shot for such a thing, whereas Kip merely sighed and agreed. A sign of the times.
Full Cabinet meetings were scheduled as frequently, but Jed programmed them to run two weeks out from the small meetings. It meant he had to endure constant grumbling from the other Cabinet secretaries, who felt themselves locked out of the more important decision-making group, but bottom line, this was a much more efficient arrangement. They had everybody at the table - in this case a coffee table - whom Jed thought necessary to deal with the most pressing problems and rolling crises.
When everybody had found their places, settled themselves into chairs, and in most cases poured themselves a coffee and grabbed a cookie - peanut butter and chocolate chip, a specialty of the First Lady - Chief of Staff Culver got the meeting under way.
‘Thanks, everyone. It’s not much fun travelling through this weather, I know. And I know you’re all up to your eyeballs in work. You’ll have seen on your agenda papers that we have just a couple of things to get through today, but it’d be good to shake these out before we take them to the Cabinet in a fortnight. The President’s not looking to lock down a caucus position today. But we’ve been kicking some of these issues around for a couple of months now, and the time is coming to deal with them so we can move on to our next end-of-the-world crisis. Mr President?’
‘Thanks, Jed,’ said Kipper, examining his fingernails. The presidency had not entirely removed the calluses or the stains of engineering work from his hands. He had a single sheet of paper with the meeting agenda sitting in front of him, held down by a mug of coffee and covered in crumbs from one of his wife’s cookies. ‘What Jed said … Miserable weather, and it’s only getting worse. Gonna be a snowed-in Christmas, I reckon.’
Kipper brushed the crumbs away, folded his arms to hide his hands, and leaned forward over the large teak desk, looking like a student worrying over a term paper.
‘So, let’s get it done. Two items today are related, I think. The budget deficit and Texas. So I think we should deal with the other item first - the prisoners from New York.’
Jed could see Paul McAuley consciously subdivide his attention, the Treasury man listening closely enough to be able to follow any discussion about the captured enemy aliens in Manhattan, while leaving most of his thoughts swirling madly around the Gordian knot of the budget deficit. Sarah Humboldt, naturally, sat forward, putting aside her coffee and fetching a sheaf of documents from the tote bag she had carried into the room with her. The National Security Advisor nodded slowly, but his expression remained masked.
‘Jed tells me we have just under four-and-a-half thousand people in detention on the East Coast,’ the President continued. ‘Most of them women and children, relatives of the jihadists who fought for that asshole Baumer.’
‘I believe his formal title is “the Emir”,’ deadpanned Barney Tench.
‘Okay, that asshole the Emir … Anyway, we have thousands of displaced people, and about three hundred of his former soldiers, or fighters, or whatever you want to call them.’
‘“Assholes” works for me,’ said Tench.
Because of Kipper’s almost pathological informality, anybody in the room could probably get away with talking like that. But only Barney, his oldest living friend, felt comfortable enough to do so. The President answered his interruption with a lopsided grin, before carrying on.
‘Question is, as it’s always been, what are we going to do with them? I don’t want to force repatriations on women and kids, when we’d be sending most of them back to a radiated wasteland. Thank you, Israel. On the other hand, having tried to take something by force, these people shouldn’t be rewarded by being given what they tried to take. In this case, the right to settle. So, suggestions?’
Jed had one, but it involved putting them all on a garbage scow and towing it out into the mid Atlantic at the height of hurricane season. Perhaps if he’d been working for Mad Jack Blackstone he’d have put it forward, but having tried a few times in this forum, he knew it wouldn’t float. So to speak. Instead, he picked a few pieces of lint from the cuffs of his trousers.
The silence in the room ballooned into significance. Sarah Humboldt, as the ICE boss, had responsibility for the matter, but Sarah was a lifelong bureaucrat, more comfortable implementing policy than developing it. Nonetheless, she obviously felt the weight of expectation fall upon her. Clearing her throat, she began to sort through the stack of papers she was carrying. If she was looking for something specific, it remained lost in there and she grew flustered at her inability to find it. Kip interrupted her embarrassment with a gentle question.
