“In my doxology, there is no Higher Power, only the quick and the dead.”
—President J. T. Tower to Jules Meredith
“So what have you been up to?” Jules asked, sipping her Napoléon brandy.
“Besides scaling the Eiger and bow-hunting rhinos?” Tower asked.
“I thought chasing orphans across ice floes was more your style.”
“I only do that in my spare time,” Tower said.
“What do you do full-time?”
“Plot the downfall of Western civilization.”
“And you’re doing a bang-up job.”
“So what’s happening in Jules World?”
“You’re happening, J. T.” She gave him an infectious smile. “May I call you J. T.?”
“Of course—even though you don’t feel that friendly toward me.”
“You could tell?”
“You do have me in your crosshairs.”
“Oh, do I ever—cold zero, dead center.”
“Then it’s lock and load?”
“Cocked and locked,” Jules said.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Tower asked. “What would I have to do to convince you I was really all right?”
“Stop hurting people,” Jules said. “Make the world a better place.”
“There’s not much money in that.”
“Does everything have to have a price tag on it?” Jules asked.
“In Jim World it does.”
“But you’re already rich.”
“No one can ever be rich enough.”
“And what would you hope to get out of more money?”
“Anything and everything.”
“In other words, in Jim World you get to play God.”
“In Jim World, I am God.”
“And the master of all you survey?”
“Not everything,” he said, leaning toward her. “I’ve never mastered you.”
“And never will, Jimmy.”
“I’d like to change that.”
“Say what?” Her face was suddenly filled with shocked skepticism.
“There has to be something I could do to improve your attitude toward me.”
“Cure cancer. End poverty. Outlaw war.”
“Isn’t what I’ve already done enough?”
“What is it you’ve done with your life anyway?” Jules asked. “I’d really like to know.”
“I created an empire out of nothing but my blood, brains, balls and my two bare hands.”
Her laughter was loud and harsh. “J. T., I know all about your business career. Your father was a filthy-rich war criminal, and he started you out with $90 million of his ill-gotten gains.”
“And I parlayed it into billions.”
“Had you put it all into a Class-A New York City real estate fund fifty years ago, you’d have become ten times richer than you are now.”
Jules knew those words would drive him nuts.
“I worked like a sonofabitch for everything I got,” Tower said, his voice menacingly soft.
“I’ll grant you’re a sonofabitch, J. T.,” Jules said, leaning toward him, giving Tower her brightest, most radiant smile, “and that you ran six of your largest businesses into the ground and put them into bankruptcy afterward. But tell me: Do you ever think about the contractors, suppliers and employees whose lives you destroyed while you deliberately eviscerated those enterprises?”
“Those people knew the deal when they signed up for it,” Tower said.
“And what deal was that?” Jules said with a mocking smile. “Kill or be killed? Eat or be eaten?”
“Maybe you think the world’s some fucking rose garden,” Tower said, “but it’s not. It’s war to the knife, and I don’t apologize for not laying down and letting it cut me to ribbons.”
“Well then, what about that ‘great big beautiful wall’ you were going to build along our 1,500-mile Mexican border—the one Mexico was going to pay for? That was your number one campaign promise, but you couldn’t even get your own Congress to go along with it—and your party dominated Congress. When they found out you needed $30 billion and three times the concrete that went into Hoover Dam, they told you to take the concrete and pour it up your butthole.”
“They’re mean-spirited, small-minded little men,” Tower said, “with no vision.”
“Or maybe they understood walls aren’t the answer,” Jules said.
“You know a better way to seal off our border?” Tower asked.
“Isaac Newton said we needed bridges not more walls,” Jules said.
“Isaac Newton’s been dead for 400 years,” Tower said. “When I want advice, I’ll ask someone who’s still alive and understands what I’m up against.”
“So much for Homer, Plato and Shakespeare,” Jules said.
“Homer, Plato, Shakespeare and, yes, Newton, can suck my dick,” Tower said.
“What about selling forty nuclear power plants to the Saudis and their neighbors? Your customers are the very people who bankrolled al Qaeda and ISIS, and those nuclear plants you’re selling them are nothing less than starter kits for a nuclear weapons program. Once a nation has nuclear power they are 99 percent of the way toward building a bomb. Everything else is a low-tech, relatively simple operation.”
“Hey, Eisenhower sold Iran and Pakistan their first reactors, and the Saudis bankrolled Pakistan’s purchase. Why can’t Jimbo and his friends get some of that M-O-N-E-Y?”
Shaking her head, Jules stared at him a long minute.
“Does honor have a place in your world?” she finally asked. “What about simple decency? Basic morality?”
“What’s that got to do with Jimbo’s bottom line?”
“So there is no right or wrong in Jim World,” Jules said, “no categorical imperatives?”
“In my doxology, there is no Higher Power,” the president said, “only the quick and the dead.”
“And all that counts is that you’re not the latter?” Jules asked.
“There are only two choices in this hard life,” Tower said, now leaning toward Meredith, invading her space, staring at her fixedly. “Are you going to be the one on your knees, giving all those long, slow blowjobs—or the one getting them? What’s it going to be, Jules?”
“That’s the Fallacy of the False Choice, Jim Baby,” Jules said. “Life is never black or white, either/or. And none of us ever gets it all.”
“You mean we all fall down?”
“As Dylan says, ‘we all serve somebody,’” Jules said.
“Then can I serve you?” He lifted the bottle and refilled both their glasses.
Jules paused to study J. T. He was pouring with a heavy hand. She had been told he never drank, but because she was a woman with less than half his body mass, he thought he could match her drink for drink and get her drunk.
That was a mistake.
No one had ever succeeded in matching Jules Meredith drink for drink—and stayed on their feet.
Tower had no idea what he was getting into.