Chapter Thirty-Three

Prince of Whales

“Pee-wee Paul Ryan says the lawmaking process in this country is broken, and for once I agree with him,” Trump said. “Maybe we should do things a little more like our good friend Russia. What is it you do over there, Vlad? You write it down and hand it to a bird, right?”

Putin, seated beside the president, nodded. “Is owl.”

“That’s right,” Trump continued. “You write the law down—say, no more abortions after the fourth trimester—hand it to the owl, and send the owl out into a snowstorm. If it stops snowing within twenty-four hours, the bill becomes law. If not, you just try again, I guess?”

“We have many owl,” Putin said with a tight-lipped smile.

The president was just over ten minutes into his remarks, but already Jimmie’s mind was wandering. He looked down at his open notebook. He hadn’t taken a single note so far during the event, unless you counted the sketch of the first family’s wiener dog. It had shown up, humped the leg of a Secret Service agent for three minutes, and then chased off after a squirrel into the Rose Garden. Opulence was probably humping the poor squirrel right now.

“I’m issuing all these executive orders, but there’s no funding for any of them. They’d just sit there if I didn’t find creative ways to fund them. Whoever thought about opening a Chase business card for the United States before? I was the first to do it. We’re getting a very, very good rate, too. Plus Amazon rewards!

“Unfortunately,” Trump continued, “there’s this little document called the Constitution—”

A chorus of boos momentarily drowned Trump out.

“Settle down, settle down,” he said, raising his voice. “The Founding Fathers can’t hear you—they’re dead! What do they care if the entire legislative branch is a joke?

“The pressure’s on Congress now. I shouldn’t have to go begging to them every time I want a few billion bucks or want to declare war on a bunch of tea-drinking pansies. If they don’t give me the authority I want, maybe I’ll just give it to myself. What do you think?”

Cheers from the audience. Jimmie glanced around to see who among the press corps was cheering—turned out, nobody. It appeared Trump had filled in the empty seats with ringers outfitted in Trump gear. One woman three rows behind Jimmie was wearing a shirt with a cartoon drawing of Prince Charles and several rather robust women, with the caption “PRINCE OF WHALES.”

“The new process—and this could change—is that I’ll write the bills myself and sign them. Then I’ll hand them to my bald eagle courier, who will fly them to Massachusetts, where a Mayflower descendent will seal them into law by chiseling them into the Plymouth Rock. If that doesn’t work out for whatever reason, we can always—”

“BEAR!”

Jimmie craned his neck around to see who’d interrupted the president. People were standing, row by row, and exiting in a panic. They were being split down the middle, like a parting sea. All hell was breaking loose in slow motion.

“Bear?” Trump said. “No, we’re going to use an eagle—”

Jimmie heard the great beast before he saw it. The creature’s deep, bass growl rumbled across the green, like thunder across the Midwest plains of Jimmie’s youth. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention, even as he was frozen in place.

“What in the hell is going on out there? I’m not finished!” Trump yelled into the microphone. “I’m not finished!”

Trump’s demand fell on deaf ears. People were fleeing the seating gallery haphazardly, tipping their folding chairs over. Cat ran past Jimmie on her way back into the White House, where everyone seemed to be headed for cover.

That’s when Jimmie finally saw the animal cutting its way through the middle of the crowd.

It was no bear.

It was a giant panda.

Which was technically a bear, Jimmie supposed.

He also recognized this one: Mei Xiang, the adult female from the National Zoo. Not only had she survived Trump and Putin’s hunt, but she’d escaped! Maybe they’d released the animals from their cages and made the hunt a little more sporting than Jimmie had first thought.

The panda batted chairs to the left and to the right with its massive tree-trunk arms, roaring all the while. Its dark eyes blended into the black patches of fur that encircled them, but Jimmie was sure he could see more than a flicker of rage in them. This creature was out for blood. This creature was out for revenge.