FRIDAY MORNING. OCTOBER 30. Anne Lynn Murphy woke up happier than she had in months. And later, too. Hagopian had left her schedule light and loose. She argued with him about it. It seemed obvious, so obvious that you had to go all out, sprint for the finish line, hit every city, shake any hand, scrounge for every vote.
Hagopian said, “No, we go for broke Thursday night. If it doesn’t work, you’ve lost and it’s over. If it works, well then, we’ll need to be flexible, the phone will be ringing off the hook.”
But, she realized, that if she’d slept late, it hadn’t rung. Something must be wrong. She’d been sure . . . Hagop . . . the polls . . . everyone told her she’d scored her twelfth-round knockdown last night. Now all she had to do was remain standing, the only knockdown of the fight . . . so it was hers . . . but the phones weren’t ringing.
She flung on her robe and stumbled out of the bedroom, heart palpitating, a vertiginous sense of something wrong. There was her husband sitting with Hagop. Her husband had his coffee and her adviser had his tea, looking so smugly Zen it made her want to pour it in his lap to see him yelp but it made her feel good, too. It was like having a wizard. It was scary because he operated in certainties that were beyond logic, no, not beyond logic, a product of his own special worldview, and once you saw the world that way, then he was logical. Like holding back, letting Scott have his lead, being patient until five days before the election and going for the one perfect shot. To do it, she had to believe that if she fought and clawed all the way through, all out, giving it her best and utmost every round, the way she had gone at everything her whole life, the thing that had worked for her in everything else she had done, she had to believe that wouldn’t work. She had to be calm and sit and watch the time slip away, disappear, and do, seemingly, little about it, watch the lead never change, watch Scott appear more and more invincible, a very dangerous tactic, because the appearance of power brought him more actual power, money flowing to the front runner in ever-increasing amounts.
In order to bet it all on one shot, she had to believe that she’d lose every other way. She had to believe that Scott would respond like Hagopian predicted he would and not just laugh at her and say, hey, that’s old news, hey, I volunteered, did my bit, and the army decided what to do with me, you’ve been in the army, you know that’s how it works. If Scott had done that, he would have kept his ineradicable seven points.
What a gamble. And waiting three months to play it. With Hagopian telling everyone that they were imitating his hero, Muhammad Ali. So the enemy could have, should have, known.
So why weren’t the phones ringing.
“We took the phones off the hook,” her husband said. “Not literally,” he said. “We forwarded everything to headquarters.”
“But don’t . . . aren’t they . . .” She cupped her hand to her ear to mean wiretapped.
Hagopian nodded his head, agreeing, agreeable, yes, sure, they probably were. Then he said, “Everybody wants you.”
She smiled. A girlish cute smile that she rarely showed anymore. They all knew that he meant that everyone from GMA to Meet the Press to Conan to Montel and Oprah, again, wanted her. But the phrase resonated with her girlhood, with any girl’s girlhood, and the smile came from there. Hagopian was letting a scheduler and a handler work with the television and radio shows so that she would move from studio to studio, Washington most of today, New York for the evening and the following morning, then L.A. the next evening, and that worked because you were flying with the sun, making up three hours on a five-hour flight, and that was Saturday, fly back through Saturday night, sleeping on the plane, more shows in D.C. Sunday morning, then New York, again, Sunday night. Monday, however, was the campaign trail, Louisiana and Florida, swing states, and then Tuesday, home to Idaho, to vote. Idaho had gone big for Scott last election and was expected to again. It was a conservative stronghold and Murphy was considered an aberration. So, Idaho seemed like a waste of time. Maybe, fly in to vote, fly back out for all the last-minute campaigning.
Anne Lynn said, “No, win or lose, I want to be home. And besides, I think it’s good luck.”
“Hey, if it’s good luck,” Hagopian said, agreeing entirely.
Now, her husband got up and went to the kitchen and poured her some coffee. She drank it with no fat for her weight but hated the thin blue stuff. He put whole milk in, it was sort of saying I’d love you even if you were fat, or maybe here’s a small celebration, or doing what you really like, at least sometimes, is the key to living, or some combination of all those things. It was a communication between them and when she tasted it, and she could taste the difference, instantly, with pleasure, slightly guilty pleasure, she smiled at her husband for doing it. She was grateful. She knew it had to be hard to be the husband of a woman running for president. He’d been playing his male consort role with Prince Albert dignity. Grace under pressure.
While she sipped, Hagopian went over to the preposterous music system he’d insisted that she have and put on some Gregorian chant. Anne Lynn had come to hate Gregorian chants, partly for their own sake and partly as a Pavlovian response. Gregorian chants meant that Hagopian was going to tell her things that he did not want overheard by the microphones that he believed were ubiquitous. Whether they were or were not, she couldn’t be certain, but that was his belief and he was adamant in his belief. But why Gregorian chants? Because he believed that they vibrated in a special range that was not only healing; they also vibrated with his own voice and that made his speech unintelligible to electronic systems.
He wandered close to one of the speakers, drew her along, and said, “You know they’re up to something.”
“What?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well?” she said, meaning, How can you say the one and not the other?
“They must be,” he said, “because that’s who they are.”
“But we don’t . . .”
When Hagopian had first insisted on recruiting spies in the Scott campaign and in the White House as well, Anne Lynn had been resistant. He quoted Sun Tzu, Lao-tzu, and from a recent history of the Jesuits.
She replied that in all her years in politics she’d never used spies and gotten along without them just fine. He pointed out, in reply, that she came from a state so small that nobody ever did anything without everybody else instantly knowing. And it was true, as soon as somebody did something, someone else was on the phone to let her know, sometimes it had to go through two or three or four people before it got to her, but it did always get to her. Then he said, “If you get to be president, you have to use spies.”
“But that’s different,” she said, and it even sounded naive to her own ears, like gentlemen don’t open gentlemen’s mail, naive, old-fashioned, and foolish.
“They are the enemy. And . . .” this had been before the convention, before the plane crash, “. . . and, if you get the nomination, or if they even realize you are a serious candidate, they will regard you as the enemy and they will subvert, buy, lie, whatever, to have people inside here.”
“Isn’t the point to be better than they are?” she said.
“Better at,” he said. “Better at campaigning, better at getting votes, better at running a government.”
“You are a most amoral man,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” he said, quite seriously. “I’m just different, consciously different.”
“No,” she said.
“If you’re president you will use spies. You will rely on spies. You will wish you had more spies, more and more and more. To see into the hearts of your enemy before they act is efficient, economical, intelligent. You must be astute at listening to your spies. If this president had been astute at listening to his spies, the terrorist attacks on our own soil probably would not have happened. It is not easy because there is so much to listen to, too much to listen to, and the voices become a billion droplets of water joined together to make the waves on the beach, unless you know how to listen. So one of the great skills of being a president is learning how to listen through all the voices, shouting, begging, wheedling, demanding, hoping, conniving, manipulating, all that noise, and how do you listen, how do you listen to this great asset, your spies?
“A man who gets into the ring who has never sparred and practiced will, I guarantee you, fail. Even against a smaller, weaker, less fit opponent who has practiced and knows the ways of the ring. This is your chance to practice, your chance to learn, and if you don’t take this opportunity, then you will not be fit to be president. But that won’t matter because you won’t get to be president.”
“Back in Catholic school,” she said, “they would have told me that men who reasoned like you were the snake in the garden.”
“No, my dear, they would have recruited me for the Jesuits.” Then, bored by trying to be cute and witty, he said, “If I regarded a political campaign as something other than a trial by fire, in which the voters get to see which candidate can stand the flames best, then I would, indeed, be immoral or amoral.
“My opponents,” he said, “Wallace and Hoagland and some of the others, see it in roughly the same way, that anyone who doesn’t win doesn’t deserve the winnings. Are there differences between us, them and me? Yes. Their weapons of choice are righteousness and blunt force. These are good weapons and powerful ones. I like to think mine are intelligence and insight and intuition and that I can, at some point, find a way to redirect their forces and use them against them.
“Now, as to not using spies, that would be like fighting blindfolded. In order to fight blindfolded you must first decide that it is more important to you to do that, to fight blindfolded, than it is to win. Which is fine, and interesting, for a martial arts student or even for a candidate, but it is unacceptable in a president. A president, a leader of a country, a person responsible for the fate, the life and death of others, does not have the elegant, marvelously elegant luxury of saying it is more important that I fight blindfolded than that I win.
“This president, this Gus Scott, as I said, part of his strength is righteousness. He said to himself that his predecessor was unrighteous and therefore everything the predecessor had done had to be disrespected and disparaged. When his predecessor passed on warnings about Al-Qaeda and about airplanes being used as flying bombs, which he did, Scott indulged himself in his great righteousness and in that moment his strength became a blindfold, and more than three thousand people died terrible, frightening deaths. Of course, later on, many more died in his wars, which followed.
“Now you are telling me that you want to be able to indulge in the same luxury. A little different language perhaps, but you want to feel righteous about yourself and morally superior to your opponents and will even wear a blindfold to do so.
“And I am telling you that makes you unfit, in my morality, to be president. You’re one of the game masters when you’re president, except that when you fail, it’s real people who die, not pieces on a board or computer-generated icons.”
Anne Lynn Murphy said, angrily, “Follow that logic and anything can be justified.”
“What I’m saying is that not being smart can never be justified. That when you’re in a position of responsibility, being wrong, when you could have been right, is immoral. Being ignorant when you could have had clear sight is immoral. That’s what I’m saying. And to use the tools of power, you must practice using the tools of power, just as with any other skill or craft.”
So he had convinced her, reluctantly, to use spies and they did so. She worried that it might corrupt her, that she would come to like having inside knowledge, secret knowledge, foreknowledge. She did, indeed, come to like it. Especially in the long, dark days, when she had to appear weak so that Scott’s arrogance could ripen and grow. To do that in the dark, simply having faith in Hagopian’s assessments . . . no, faith was for God or perhaps for principles of science, but faith in a reality TV producer? The reports from their spies had become her secret comfort, and sometimes when the tension got to be too great and patience began to seem impossible, she would crave the reports and the feedback, and the right news would calm her just as if she’d taken a Valium.
So now, when Hagopian was telling her that he believed that her opponents were planning some counterstroke, she expected that her spies had information and that Hagopian had contacted them and could now deliver that information to her.
But instead, he said, “Nobody knows anything.”
“What do you mean?” she said. The choral of monks with their liturgical Latin moaning kept moving sound waves around them and it felt like they were weaving some strange acoustic cloak.
“I mean,” Hagopian said, “that none of my sources has heard even a hint of what they’re planning.”
“Well, if they haven’t heard anything . . .” Their network had been quite good, better than she’d expected, Hagopian, or somebody in his employ, had a knack for finding pain and discontent and exploiting it and they’d found informants very deep inside the Scott campaign, “. . . then maybe there isn’t anything.”
Her adviser looked at her. He looked, in his manner and demeanor and even in the papery quality of his skin, like the old monk in that silly TV show that used to be popular . . . when was it, before she went to Vietnam or after she came back? . . . Kung Fu. There were boyhood scenes when the hero as a youth was in the Shao Lin Monastery and if the boy made a mistake the old monk gave him a look that said, You are a child, you know nothing, I have striven so hard to teach you and yet you know nothing and only a blow across the back of your head can communicate how blind you are. Of course there was no blow from Hagopian, and the look only lasted a moment. When you see something that lasts a very short time, there is frequently an afterimage that somehow lingers after the event is gone and you can see things defined in the afterimage that you could not see in the actual moment. So, in the afterimage of the Old Monk you could always see how much love he had for the boy, that really, he was the father and this was his special son and he was only harsh to prepare him for his special destiny, which was likely to be a hard one, a very hard one, and likely to come too soon. What Anne Lynn saw, also, in the afterimage of this moment, in this master’s face, was the revelation that his skin had grown papery and thin, that age or illness was stalking her teacher, and a frisson of fear touched her, she needed him, needed him and she truly loved him, not in a romantic way, or a sexual way, whatsoever. He had not just been running her campaign and playing his media games and being a star in his own movie, his own reality TV show, which was how she normally thought of him. No, he had been teaching her, he had, all this time been Merlin and he saw her as his Once and Future King, to be raised, taught, matured, for the burdens, for the difficulties, for the tragedies of leadership.
The doctor in her raised its diagnostic voice and opened her diagnostic eye. What was it? Had she underestimated his age? Did he lie about his age? Was he merely tired? Was it cancer? Or AIDS or some other agent of mortality, one of the other deadly assassins out of the chaos?
But before the doctor could juggle preliminary lines of inquiry, or even begin to take a closer look, the moment was gone, his face was normal again, businesslike, calm, and thoughtful.
Yet neither of them resumed. Both of them stood there, the chanting, she felt for the first time, moving her spirit, she knew not where or how, but she felt the spiritual currents in her moving. There was fear where she was going. Fear behind her and fear up ahead. For the first time she truly understood that as much as she feared losing, feared losing at anything, and how that drove her, she now understood that she needed to fear winning just as much. Then, to the next level, that she had to accept that fear and overcome that fear, the warrior king, the Warrior Queen, dare not fear winning, could not afford to fear to win, because she was responsible to her tribe, she must take on the burdens of guilt and pain and failure, for the whole tribe. This made her understand some of Scott’s popularity and success. He took on the responsibility of killing our enemies with blithe, football game cheer, without apparent guilt or trouble or worry over the blood of innocents or other such ambiguities and that made it easier for those who believed that these wars and killings needed doing. For if a thing needs doing, as with a medical procedure, you don’t want the additional pain of feeling that the microbes you kill along the way are anything more than microbes.
“What,” she said, finally, “do our spies say?”
“They say nothing,” Hagopian said, staring at her, demanding that she understand.
Then she did. “They must be planning something, because that is their character. They will not let go of this government, will they? Not easily, no. And if we have no word of what they are planning it is because it is a very dark secret, so dark that only a very few can know. That’s why we haven’t heard and that’s why silence is what you are worried about.”
He nodded, almost imperceptibly, and almost imperceptibly, the old, old monk inside the reality TV producer twinkled out at her, secretly pleased by the young grasshopper. “All we can do, all you can do,” he said, “is stay in balance, so that when the blow comes you flow with its force before you strike back.”
Hagopian had heard one thing. A hint of something, an arrhythmia in the beat of his enemy’s march, a tremble in the web. He’d heard of some wild to-do at Stowe Stud among the Golden Elephants and a man jumping out the window running from some real heavies, Homeland Security people, maybe, possibly private security, and horses run amok. But there hadn’t been a police report. Or even a call to the police. At least as he’d been able to determine so far. A disturbance, but no call to the police. That meant there was something to keep quiet. But Homeland Security called in. That meant it was political. Not international terrorism. The Abduls and Mohammeds didn’t have a clue who an Alan Carston Stowe was. They liked big, symbolic targets.
It was donkey and elephant politics. He was certain of it. And maybe it had to do with the big secret that he was certain must exist.