Chapter Sixteen

Winter Is Coming

Jimmie retraced his steps back toward the hotel. He’d known kids like Connor Brent back in college. Kids with Che Guevara T-shirts and hemp necklaces. Kids who camped out on the steps of the college president’s office for “change.”

That was all they ever wanted: “change.” They knew what they were against but didn’t have the imagination to think up a viable alternative. Jimmie wasn’t much different. He didn’t like war, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think he could devise a better alternative to the way things were. True intelligence meant knowing the limits of your intelligence.

Jimmie had reached the limits of his intelligence long ago.

The kid was wrong—as kids often were.

There was no way Trump would ever give the order to fire nukes. If Jimmie knew the phrase “mutually assured destruction,” Trump had to know it too. The man owned too much real estate to let it all go up in a mushroom cloud.

What bothered Jimmie a little, though, was this whole business with Lester Dorset.

He had specifically asked Emma Blythe if Cat and Lester were still together, and she’d artfully dodged the question. Even more suspicious, she hadn’t said a word about the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter being the previous ghostwriter.

There was a perfectly acceptable reason for her to avoid such talk: She might have sensed some professional animosity between Jimmie and Lester. That Jimmie felt inadequate next to somebody with the pedigree of a New York Times byline.

Well, the joke was on her. Jimmie couldn’t care less about any of that. So what if he won a Pulitzer? It was for feature writing—the easy Pulitzer. Find a sob story, crap out ten thousand words, hello, Joe.

What he did care about, though, was the fact that Lester had—rather abruptly—overtaken Jimmie in Cat Diaz’s affections. Did it bother Jimmie that his girlfriend had left him for that old bag of bones? Of course. But he’d let go of his anger long ago. Cat had made a choice—a dumb choice, but it was her business. He’d moved on.

Jimmie paused at the water fountain at the entrance to the park. The bronzed sculpture of Bill Clinton not having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky glimmered under the moonlight. A soft breeze blew through the park, kicking up leaves. Jimmie shuddered as a chill came over him.

He tried to tell himself the chill was just because he didn’t have on a heavy enough jacket. Fall was here, and the nights were getting longer and colder. The chill had nothing to do with the nagging suspicion that even if the kid was full of shit, some of what he’d said had resonated with Jimmie. That America, while strong at home, was assuming the reputation outside her borders of the crazy guy you cross the street to avoid. That the map he’d seen in the Boardroom was more than a simulation. That it wasn’t just winter that was coming—it was war.