WASHINGTON, D.C.
Friday 30 April
Some days, rising alone in the enormous Residence upstairs in the executive mansion, surrounded all day by aides who didn’t know her well and armed agents trained not to look her in the eye, Wendy Upton felt as though none of it was real. She had become the most powerful person on the planet because of a flawed aortic valve. The responsibility was entirely hers, the capability to destroy the earth, the welfare of three hundred million souls, the fears of seven and a half billion. Whether she desired the responsibility was immaterial.
It also wasn’t clear who in Washington wanted her to succeed. The American people did—that she now believed. Just as David Traynor had hoped they might for his own presidency had it gone on longer, they seemed to want her to succeed, too. People felt a bond with her outsiderness, with her independence. To most of political Washington, however, she was a mysterious accident. To which party did she belong? In what did she believe?
She had cabinet members who thought their agendas—not hers—should drive her government, because their party had won the last election. She had White House aides slipping changes into federal regulations, hoping she wouldn’t notice. She had Republicans whispering through back channels that she should undo much of what Traynor had set in motion. There was even the persistent paranoid conspiracy narrative in the firm right media that Traynor had been assassinated and Upton was involved.
She was uncertain, now, about various old partners in the Senate and House. Politics wasn’t personal, she knew that. Still, she was caught off guard by the speed with which old friendships she had considered close had changed.
The oddest feeling, however, was an unexpected sense of peace that sometimes overtook her. In these moments, she felt within herself, removed from the space around her. Yet rather than being unsettling, this sense of being inside herself induced a feeling of serenity, a clarifying confidence she had rarely known before. These moments of quiet certainty came to her most often when she was alone, but in recent days, she also felt it in meetings crowded with people.
She had always felt on some level deeply alone. At least since she was sixteen, the year her parents had died in an auto accident. She had never married, never really been in a long relationship, which of course made some people suspicious. She must either be closeted or repressed. In a sense she was both. Now in her mid-fifties, she felt ready to come to grips with the reality that she loved women, not men. She had finally felt ready to confront that. Then life had gotten in the way. Her presidency probably made facing that exponentially more complicated. She could not imagine announcing now that she was the first openly gay president and had been closeted for years. Sometime in her presidency she hoped to change that. And change the country.
But she was accustomed to feeling that she was on her own. Everyone was alone. Ultimately that is the only truth there is. Loners were just better at accepting it.
What scared her was the thought that she couldn’t succeed alone. Her job was to move people to new places, to new ideas, to lead them. And she was only recognizing now how little her life in politics up to that point had trained her for that kind of leadership. Congress, and the life one spent in it as a House member or senator, had become a science of followership, of party-line votes, talking points, dialing for dollars with bullying donors, and fearing the right flank in primaries. Very little of that prepared one to be president. David Traynor, who knew little about politics, and whose career in it was so fleeting, had understood this—how disconnected experience in government was to actually leading.
A month ago, she’d finished reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. Mandela compared leadership to being a shepherd. Sometimes you led by moving ahead of the flock and showing it the way. Other times you hold back and look for strays, leading, in effect, from behind, waiting for the lost to catch up. How, she thought, could she lead a flock that wasn’t yet hers?
She had begun talking on Friday afternoons with the two surviving former presidents, Jackson Lee and James Nash. They were men from different parties, former opponents, and to some degree they reviled each other. But they had agreed to advise her, sometimes even jointly. The meetings had been Gil Sedaka’s idea. “Those old goats may know something. And it wouldn’t hurt if people knew they were helping.”
The only other souls still living who had shepherded the flock. “You will face more palace intrigue in your first six months than I did in four years or Jim did in eight,” Jack Lee had told her. The Traynor-Upton administration had lasted seventy-five days, the Upton administration so far twenty-five.
Nash had advised her to study Teddy Roosevelt, a man the Republican establishment had only made vice president to shut him up. The last thing Teddy’s party had wanted was for the progressive reformer to become president. Upton could identify. Her presidency was the last thing Republicans wanted. Or Democrats for that matter.
She had decided to shed three cabinet members, each someone Quentin Phelps disliked. Getting rid of them thus had the double benefit of pleasing her inherited but influential chief of staff and taking her three steps closer toward making her administration her own. One new person joining the cabinet would be Susan Stroud, the former Senate majority leader who’d been deposed last year by Travis Carter and the party’s right wing. Stroud would be the new secretary of state. It was a small step. There were many more to come. Upton was a planner, a list maker. It pleased her now that she was beginning to make lists of things that she wanted to do and not just the ones she had to.
There was a soft knock at the door to the Oval Office, and, when it opened a crack, the face of Carla White, her personal assistant, appeared in the narrow gap. “They’re here,” she announced.
“I’ll be right there.”
They were meeting again in the Map Room to hide from journalists. Quentin Phelps and Gil Sedaka were waiting, along with the political consultants Randi Brooks and Peter Rena. Brooks looked energized. Rena looked tired.
She invited everyone to sit.
She saw concern on the faces of the two fixers. She asked them to report what they had learned. Brooks did the talking.
“The program is still probably unsecure,” she began. “But nothing of value could have leaked yet—other than the program’s existence.”
“How can you be sure?” Sedaka asked.
“Because none of the companies so far have developed anything worth stealing.”
Sedaka broke the silence that followed with sarcasm. “Great.”
Gil had been skeptical of the secret climate program from the first, Upton knew, certain the program wouldn’t bear quick fruit and that some disgruntled general or intelligence chief would leak its existence. Then she’d be saddled with a scandal—that billions in critical national security funding had been diverted to a crazy secret solar battery scheme that never had much chance of succeeding. Since she went along with it, Traynor’s “battery fiasco,” as Gil called it, would become Upton’s, “because you didn’t stop it.”
She wasn’t quite ready to do that, however.
Quentin Phelps had a different view. He and Traynor together had made millions in Silicon Valley start-ups. He liked the plan’s audacity, and he liked it because David had loved it. If Kennedy said “go to the moon not because it’s easy but because it’s hard,” Phelps argued that “saving the planet was even harder, and a lot more important.” That’s why Americans would forgive her if the plan failed, Phelps maintained. “The public elected David to take risks that were worth taking.”
When Brooks finished, Phelps pressed his case again: “Let’s say you’re right. One of our enemies has learned about the project—one that would make the U.S. a hundred percent energy renewable in five years. Wouldn’t they respond by trying to create their own battery program?”
“Presumably,” Brooks said.
“Steal what we learned and add to it. Right?”
“Presumably.”
“Then that strikes me as a reason to go on—not to give up,” the chief of staff said.
“Why?” asked Upton.
“Because if they discover our program, we will have goaded our enemies into jump-starting their own—programs long overdue. They can’t take the risk we won’t succeed. If we stop now, we lose that chance.
“Remember Reagan’s Star Wars program,” said Phelps. “The secret plan to build a network of satellites that would bounce any Russian missiles back into the Soviet Union? It never got built, but Reagan thought it was real, and that scared the hell out of the Russians and helped end the cold war.”
“No,” said Sedaka, “if we waste billions on a battery program that fails, we will just have wasted billions on a failure. And we will have inspired our enemies to leap ahead of us in the process. We will be worse off than if we had done nothing.”
“Then let’s not fail,” Phelps said.
Upton had come to appreciate Phelps more than she had expected. He was more strategic than she had given him credit for when they first met during the campaign. He was more than just David Traynor’s organizational man and enforcer, which was how the press caricatured him. In his own way, Phelps was as inventive as Traynor, and almost as relentless.
“If the program isn’t secure, and it fails,” Sedaka countered, “we’ll be skewered for it. And it will leak.”
There had already been the rumor on 5Click.
Upton glanced at Rena. She knew about the online attacks on him. They all did. “What do you say, Peter?” she asked.
“Three weeks ago, frankly, I thought this program was crazy. It might still be. But I’m less sure of that now.”
“Why?” the president asked.
“Three weeks ago I had a normal person’s fear of how bad climate change really is. Now I know better.”
“And do you think the program will leak?” Upton asked.
“Eventually, of course,” Rena said. “And when it does, all our enemies will know about it and presumably try to catch up, which may be a good thing, as Quentin says. But if it’s far enough along, it won’t matter. All you were really ever buying with secrecy was a head start.”
Sedaka felt the momentum shifting away from him. He made one more charge to take the hill. “If you’re right and it does leak—and we have no new technology—we’ll be dismissed as fools, and this will be shut down anyway.”
Yes, that was the great risk, Upton thought. Discovery, failure, and humiliation. Gil was the only person at the top of her administration whose loyalty she didn’t question.
Randi Brooks jumped in. “The two biggest threats to security are foreign investors and employees being recruited by foreign governments to steal technology.”
“What will it take to identify and vet the employees you’re worried about?” Upton asked.
“More people to help us vet employees faster.”
But she saw something in Brooks’s expression. The woman would make a terrible card player. “But that’s not all, is it?”
Rena answered. “We’re looking at something else. When we know more, you’ll be the first to know.”
The program is more flawed than they were letting on, Upton thought. But for some reason they weren’t ready to tell her to kill it. They wanted more time. How much could she give them?
“Won’t sending in more people to help do background checks on employees only make the program even more obvious?” Sedaka asked.
“Call it pressure testing,” Brooks answered. “We want to raise alarms inside the start-ups on purpose. To see who reacts. And to make any foreign government who might be watching think we’re closer to a breakthrough than we are.”
“So you want to create a feint?” Phelps suggested.
“I wouldn’t put it that way. We need more help. But it’s true, making ourselves obvious may help us flesh out who we’re looking for.”
Upton scanned the faces in the room: a final silent vote.
“Three weeks,” she declared. “Then we need to make a final call. Quent, give them what they need.” She turned to Rena and Brooks. “But I’ll need answers—and signs of progress. If all we have in three weeks are the same doubts, I’m shutting this down.”
She rose, signaling the meeting was over, but Rena stopped her. “Madam President, may I have an extra moment?”
Upton noticed surprise in Randi Brooks’s reaction to this. Whatever Rena wanted to talk about, he apparently hadn’t warned his partner.
Did Randi know, Upton wondered, what she and Rena had talked about privately at times after the election? That he had advised her within days of Traynor’s victory back in November that she should open a private back channel of communications with Republicans? That Rena himself had acted as a go-between with Senator Aggie Tucker—until the cyberattacks had made him persona non grata?
Maybe he was carrying some message from the senator now. She glanced at Phelps and Sedaka to signal she would see Rena alone, and when the others had left, she sat down again.
“I wonder if you might be better served, Madam President, if Randi continues on this project with someone else.”
This she hadn’t expected.
“We have a person at the firm who can replace me. Hallie Jobe.”
“Why?”
“It’s personal,” Rena said. Upton studied Rena’s unreadable expression. “I have some things I need to take care of.”
Who didn’t? Upton thought. The president had died. The country was in mourning, the world in turmoil. The new administration was trying to find its footing. There were extremists in both parties calling for a new election. And Rena had some personal things to take care of?
“This because of those cyberattacks?”
They held each other’s gaze, two watchers watching each other.
“I’m not at my best at the moment. You can do better.”
She hadn’t known Peter Rena long, little more than a year, but she liked him. She even trusted him. Stopping the threat against her last year, he and Brooks had gotten to know her in ways few people ever had. They’d learned her failures and strengths and her most private secret—one she barely admitted to herself—about her sexuality. They’d guessed accurately, too, how much it frightened her. When she was young, she had never heard about “spectrums of identity” or other ways of thinking about how people were different from what was once called “normal.” The two fixers’ vetting of her last year had taken on a quality of discovery for her, motivating her to confront who she wanted to be, who she was, and to do more to repair her strained relationship with her sister. It had persuaded her to take this leap, this crazy out-of-character act of political free jumping—into another man’s political party, into the vice presidency, and now the Oval Office. In part, she was sitting in the White House because of this man and his partner.
So she owed him something. She owed him, she thought, almost anything he asked.
“Does Randi know you’re asking this?”
“I wanted to speak to you first.”
It was one of those moments of serene clarity she had been feeling.
“My answer to you is no,” she said without hesitating. “I need you. I need your instincts. And whatever is ailing you, the best way to regain your balance, Peter, is to find yourself in the task.”
For a moment he seemed ready to argue. She decided not to let him. “A year ago, when you wanted to know everything about my life, you told me to trust you. Now return the favor.”
She wasn’t asking. She was the commander in chief, and they were both soldiers once.
Rena stood. “Madam President.”
She held out a hand and he shook it.
“Trust yourself, Peter. I do.”
When he was gone, she walked back to the Oval Office, pressed the intercom on her desk, and asked. “Carla, what’s next?”
ONCE SHE WAS THROUGH SECURITY AT SFO, KIM MATSUDA FOUND a quiet cubicle at the Alaska Airlines terminal. For all its faults, SFO was the most high-tech airport in the country, and Kim liked it here. There were good places to eat, to sit, to have privacy. She wondered why more airports weren’t as clever. She took a look around for a private spot to sit. She kept the text short.
Found something. urgent. Must discuss f2f. Coming to you.
She pushed send, stood up, and melted into the line boarding the plane.