The woman at the podium in the Grand Ballroom on the third floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel was winding up her short, nervous speech.
The wife of the chairman of one of New York’s great museums, Nadia Hibbert was in her late thirties, dressed in blue silk, and with every movement she made her diamond choker spark like a fusillade of flashbulbs.
She was a regular and familiar figure in the glossies and on the magazine pages, portrayed as a wealthy socialite with time on her hands and money to burn, an image she resented but the one which the media preferred. They did not give her any real credit for the constructive, philanthropic things in her life, did they? Like all the hours and energy she devoted to the charitable institution of which she was president and which provided much-needed food and care for the city’s homeless.
Not glamorous enough, perhaps. Only when there was glitter and superficiality did they take an interest; like this, the annual charity dinner, to which they came not in deference to the cause but in order to spot the rich and famous, to analyse what they were wearing and see who they were with.
But it was a bit more heavyweight than that tonight. There were political writers scattered around, as well as the usual society page people, and the television crowd were out in force, which made Nadia edgy as she stood in front of the fifteen hundred guests.
Cameras were trained on her, their hooded stare impersonal and cold in spite of the heat of the lights. She could see NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN, as well as the locals, but she was well aware that it was not her face which would make the news bulletins.
But aren’t you lucky, my dear, she told herself, that he agreed to come? Some of the publicity was bound to rub off on the charity itself and that would be all to the good.
She came to the end of her introduction. With an exuberance born partly out of relief that her ordeal was over she announced: ‘And so, ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome . . . Senator Aiden Ross!’
She stood back and began to clap with polite enthusiasm, the fingertips of her right hand beating on the heel of her left.
Others were not so restrained. As the cameras and lights swung to the big table at the front of the room where a tall sandy-haired man was pushing back his chair, people rose to their feet and applauded with vigour.
Aiden Ross smiled in acknowledgement and began theshort walk to the podium, the spotlight and the audience with him all the way. He did not hurry, nor did he idle; his pace was measured and confident.
When he reached Nadia, he took her hands in both of his and thanked her warmly and generously and just long enough for the cameras to see how genuine and gracious he was. Then he turned to face the room, his hands raised in what he hoped would be a futile attempt to still the applause.
And it was. At that moment, as he looked at the room full of smiling, expectant faces and listened to their approbation swirling all around him, he knew that in a year’s time, if he played every single card right from here on in, he would be the next President of the United States.
He glanced quickly down towards his wife, seated at the table he had just left. Her eyes danced with excitement. She mouthed a kiss at him and he blew one back.
Then he looked in the direction of a table over on his left, seeking out three other familiar figures. They were applauding, too, but their smiles were different, more knowing. They felt what was in the air the same way he did.
This was the nucleus of Ross’s election machine, the best and the brightest, his most trusted. There were other people involved, of course, the hidden engine room that would drive the campaign, but he did not like to parade around with a vast entourage. There would be plenty of that, unavoidably, once he was President.
‘The people,’ he was in the habit of saying, ‘the people of the United States of America – they’re my campaign team.’
Phyllis Halpin was in her mid forties, a dark-set woman with flecks of grey in her hair that she did not bother to cover up. A Texan, she had inherited from her father a huge General Motors dealership with hundreds of outlets and she had been its CEO for the past ten years. Now a change of life was galloping rapidly across the ridge towards her. Ross, whom she had known for a long time, had asked her to become his White House Chief of Staff when – he never said if – he became elected.
Recently divorced, very rich and just a touch bored, she had said yes. Listening to what was going on around her, she could not wait to get started.
‘Paydirt,’ she said, smiling triumphantly up at Ross, although she knew he could not hear her.
In Ross’s experience, people who loved the work but had their own wealth did the job better than someone who needed the money. They were tougher, their personal security meant their decisions were clear-cut and unemotional, and how they themselves would be affected entered less into the equation. That was certainly the case with Phyllis who never hesitated to tell him what she thought, often in a tangy Texan turn of phrase which could shock those not used to it.
Stan Rybeck, Ross’s speech writer and designated Director of Communications, was not one of them. And anyway, once he got his head into drafting a speech, he rarely heard anything being said around him. Rybeck was thirty five, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from Wisconsin who had become News-week’s chief White House correspondent. He was not doing the job for the money either. It was the action, the juice, that he craved.
At the moment, he also craved a cigarette from the packet of Marlboros in the inside pocket of his tuxedo. They bulged there against his heart, forbidden.
He loved writing the speeches but he hated the nerve-wracking business of having to listen to them, even though he knew Ross would more than do justice to this one.
They had been over and over it together, ever nuance, every pause, getting the pitch absolutely perfect. It was not the most important address which Ross would make; there would be many more to follow it. But it was a milestone, his first major speech since announcing his candidacy. From this moment on, he would have to swing popular opinion firmly behind him, to carry him through the Primaries, on to the nomination at the party convention and up to the door of the White House itself.
The people in this room had money. Old or new, it didn’t matter, it was money. They had a feeling that Ross was a guy who wasn’t going to monkey around with their profits, pissing on them with new taxes like that bastard currently in the White House had been doing.
Tonight’s speech was designed to reassure them further but Ross and Rybeck were aware it would be tricky. Here he was, talking to the rich, at an event for the poor. He had to stroke the wealthy and at the same time not alienate those who weren’t, which was the vast bulk of the American public. He had to hold out the hand of friendship and hope to everyone.
Rybeck had crafted a speech which would be all things to all people, which would be long on heart but short on specifics. It would be about Ross, his hopes, his dreams, his mistakes. It would be the speech of an honest American.
The contrast between that image and the growing public view of the man at present in the White House would be striking. But the speech itself would not attack the President, Todd Vernon. That was something Ross hoped people would note: the positive approach, always looking forward. The negative stuff was taking care of itself and for that he had to thank the third member of his team: his younger brother.
As the applause faded at last, Matt Ross sat down. He was a stocky, muscular man, sombrely handsome, with looks that came from their mother’s side of the family, whereas Aiden strongly resembled their late father.
He took a sip from the glass of Chardonnay at his hand and turned his chair at an angle away from the table so that he could get a better view. Even he, who had heard it all before, who saw the way his brother rehearsed, pacing the room, watching himself in a full-length mirror, never failed to be caught up in the mood. Somehow, on the night, there was always that extra, exhilarating edge.
The President did not have it; that was for sure. Todd Vernon sounded weary and slow and he was looking older than his fifty-seven years whereas Aiden Ross, roughly ten years his junior, seemed full of an inviting blend of youthful vigour and wise counsel.
But then it was unlikely that President Vernon was sleeping much these nights since he was trying to fight his way out of a sleazy swamp that just kept on pulling him back in again.
For a start there were the girls from the old days who kept popping up with embarrassing inconvenience, drowning out any campaign message he wanted to give. No one gave a damn about what he had to say on the subject of welfare reform or the crisis in the Middle East when there was some blonde with a make-over prepared to talk about what he liked to do in bed.
Whether the allegations were true or false, they were all from a long time ago, not relevant to the present, which is what Vernon supporters clutched at, but what the public saw on their television screens was Todd Vernon’s lined and prematurely old face, verging on the haggard, not the virile handsome man he used to be, and the thought of him in action between the sheets turned their stomachs.
Then there was the other matter which had begun to surface recently: a complex story about an engineering company which had been awarded Government contracts shortly after Vernon was elected and whose chief executive had just been charged with filing false income tax returns. Off-shore bank accounts were involved, too, apparently, and, lo and behold, he was being represented by a law firm with which Vernon had been associated in former times.
It was a simple matter of fact. Admittedly, the connection to Vernon was tenuous, no actual impropriety was being alleged in any of the reporting, but his name was always right up front, either in the headline or in the first couple of paragraphs.
There was a smell in the air and people knew it had to be coming from somewhere.
Matt Ross had not made any of this stuff up; it had all been out there waiting to be discovered. What he did, through a network of clandestine contacts and a communication system of Chinese whispers, was to give it a gentle tug and help it on its way to the surface. As his brother’s special adviser, that was his job.
There was just about nothing he would not do for him.
What he felt was much more than brotherly love; it was close to adoration. All his life he had looked up to him, even physically. At law school, which they had attended a year apart, he had watched proudly as Aiden had begun to gather a clique of admirers who appreciated his charm and his nimble mind. Aiden was a young man with ideas, with the imagination that could start the endless late-night conversations, fire the campus debates.
They had had some high times together, both then and later, but Aiden had never allowed pleasure to get in the way of his progress.
Eventually, they had both joined the same legal firm in Boston, Aiden first, and Matt was conscious that his own employment there had been assisted by his brother’s obvious talent. Aiden found promotion within the firm easily but his eyes had always been on politics. He had worked hard at cultivating those who could help him, who would be useful patrons, and in Boston his Irish roots had not exactly been a hindrance.
By the time he was thirty-five he was a Senator and until recently he had been chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, from which he had now resigned in order to compete for the greatest prize of all.
At the convention before the last election, it had been he who had sponsored his party’s candidate, introducing him with a speech far more thrilling than anything the man himself had had to say. In the election, the candidate had sunk without trace but everyone remembered Aiden Ross’s words, seeing it as a speech which undoubtedly marked the beginning of his own campaign for office.
It was a long, hard road but the end was in sight.
Matt looked around the room. They were listening intently. Aiden was in full flow.
‘We are all Americans, whether we are on Wall Street or on welfare. That is our unique bond, our greatest resource. Together we must find ways to harness our ideas, our energy, our strengths . . .’
When Aiden had begun to gather his closest cohorts around him, Matt was one of the people he had come to first.
Since Boston, their career paths had diverged. Matt had not stayed long with the law firm. Instead, through some of his brother’s political contacts, he had found himself being recruited by the CIA, eventually working for them in Central America, the Middle East and in Europe, his speciality being political analysis and the creation of strategies designed to undermine organisations and individuals whom ‘the company’ believed were not helpful to American interests.
But then the Director of the Agency had fallen foul of a couple of old adversaries on the National Security Council and as a result there had been one of those tedious stable-cleansing operations.
Matt had jumped ship, again thanks to his brother’s influence and assistance, finding friends and a home in the State Department. His intimate knowledge of difficult corners of the world was an asset which the diplomatic service found attractive and so he had landed himself a new career as a US Consul.
That was where he was in his life when Aiden came to him. He would never forget the day he accepted the offer, the day his world changed.
He took another sip of wine.
Aiden was on the subject of money now, which was dear to the hearts of his listeners.
‘American business corporations make a huge contribution to national economies all over the world, providing literally millions of jobs. But sometimes I think we forget just how much they are the heartbeat of our own country, how much they do for our economy and our well-being here at home.’
He spread his arms wide. ‘This great land of ours was founded on the spirit of enterprise. We’ve got to make sure that that spirit continues to thrive. Whether it’s the corner drugstore-owner or the Fortune 500 corporation, we’ve got to provide incentive for people in business, not bleed them dry.’
He waited for the hearty agreement that he knew would come. ‘I know,’ he said, as it began to trickle away again, ‘I know you’re all wondering out there: what kind of a President would this guy be? We’ve seen it all before, right? How people change when they go behind those great doors, how election promises just evaporate into thin air.’ He held up his right forefinger and waved it from side to side, smiling. ‘Uh-huh. Not this time. This boy’s not going to make promises he can’t keep, he’s not going to say anything he’ll regret. You can read my lips all you want.’
There was laughter. He paused, serious again. ‘What I will promise you is smaller government. Smaller government – and bigger people. I want to see families and individuals who feel secure in their own country. I want to get the wheels back on the wagon of child care, of better education. We’ve got to make this a greater nation than we’ve ever known, a nation we can be proud of again, a nation leading the way in the global economy, the information age, in new technology that can enhance how we live, how we work, in unimagined ways.’
Something seemed to occur to him. ‘Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.’ He pondered on the words and let the audience do so with him. ‘George Washington said that. The first State of the Union address. 8 January, 1790. And he was right.’ He thumped the lectern. ‘Let’s get working on it. Not tomorrow. Today.’
He stood back. The acclaim rose. People were on their feet, Matt and the others among them, applauding with just as much vigour.
‘That’s our boy,’ Phyllis said.
It was several minutes before Ross could leave the podium and go back to the table to take his place beside his wife and a delighted Nadia Hibbert. People began queuing up to come and speak to him, shaking his hand and slapping him on the back.
‘Fine speech, Stan,’ Matt said. ‘Well done.’
Rybeck was never satisfied. He shrugged and nibbled a fingernail. ‘Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things I think I could have changed for the better.’
‘Never mind,’ Matt told him. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’
‘Washington say that, too?’ Phyllis cracked.
‘No – Joe E. Brown, Some Like It Hot,’ Rybeck informed her.
Their glasses were empty. ‘Hey,’ Matt said, ‘what do you think – we could order a bottle of champagne on the strength of this?’
‘We could, honey,’ Phyllis said drily, ‘but we won’t. Let these other folks do that, if they want. Better not look too uppity, you know, even if you are his brother. We’re just the workers, don’t forget, down in the dirt, brows furrowed from sweat and honest toil.’
She tickled him under the chin, then stood and lifted her handbag. ‘But I could sure use another glass of that very fine domestic Chardonnay we’ve been drinking. Why don’t you find a flunkey and get us a bottle while I go and locate the ladies’ room?’
‘I’m going somewhere for a smoke,’ Rybeck said and scurried off in her wake.
A waiter came and took the order. Matt watched the continuing parade to Aiden’s table.
A tall, broad-faced man rose from his seat and began to make his way across the room. A couple of nervous acolytes got up from the same table and tried to come with him but he turned momentarily and waved them back. They fluttered uncertainly for a second or two, then sat again.
The face was familiar. Matt could see others recognising him as he passed and then suddenly, with a start, he knew who it was. Of course.
The man did not attempt to attach himself to the group around Aiden. Instead, he seemed to be heading in Matt’s general direction.
Their eyes met. Matt got to his feet as he drew near.
The man held out his hand. ‘You’re Matt Ross,’ he said, ‘the Senator’s brother.’
‘That’s right.’ They shook hands.
‘A wonderful occasion,’ the man said. ‘Congratulations. You’ve got a good man there.’
‘Thank you.’
‘My name is Brian Malone.’
‘Yes,’ Matt Ross said. ‘I know.’