The Secretary of State had set up her Presidential campaign headquarters on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem as a demonstration that she was a woman of the people. It was a strategy that had carried her husband, another politician who had since retired, far up the American power structure, and she had taken for granted that the same success would be transferred to her by way of matrimony. So she put herself among them: the ones who struggled, the ones who felt pain, the ones who hungered and lived daily with the burden of poverty. She then set armed Secret Service guards at all the doors, because there was close and there was too close.
“Madam Secretary, the CEO at Silverman & Baggs wants to confirm that you’ll address their annual management seminar on Ethics and Social Responsibility.” The former Secretary of State’s aide-de-camp, Yaba Dabadouin, looked far older than her years. She had joined the team back when the Secretary was just the First Lady of a southern state everyone ignored. Later, when the Secretary moved up to First Lady of the United States, Yaba’s position improved and her responsibilities increased tenfold.
The years had not been kind to Yaba. She was happy back when she had started her career, and married to a political climber herself. Richard Johnson was a man who loved her more than life itself. They had a marriage that was everything her boss’s was not. As she spent more and more time with her boss, Richard spent more and more time with her boss’s husband, playing golf, smoking cigars, and learning new and unusual things he could do with his smart phone’s built-in camera.
“What’s their donation status?” the former Secretary asked without looking up from her desk.
Yaba tapped her pad a few times. “Thirty million, PHONUS,” she replied. Once upon a time, the Secretary of State had her heart set on an open Supreme Court seat. Her team had created the acronym—PHONUS—as part of a social media campaign to put pressure on the President to appoint her, urging the country to pick up the call, “Put Her On Now, U.S.!” The extrapolation of the acronym was actually born out of necessity after an intern had been overheard using the word. When the Secretary was still the First Lady, her habit of regularly losing cell phones with official data on them had earned her the new codeword. The Secretary loved the acronym as it had been explained to her, and insisted everyone on her team use it as a nickname. The team was secretly grateful she had not overheard them using the longer version of the name they had given her, PHONUS BALONUS, as they would have then had to have come up with a much longer acronym to explain it.
“Get them to up it to thirty-five first,” she replied. “Then get me a copy of one of the old speeches I gave to the Cattleman Investors Alliance and edit it so that it’s relevant to Silverman and Baggs.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Yaba. “I’ll email you the finished draft.”
“Good. Wait. Get me another phone first,” she said. “I can’t find the one I was using.”
“I’ll have one ordered right away, ma’am,” said Yaba. She took out her pad and tapped the shortcut to the retailer they kept on retainer. She then tapped the “Order This Item Again” button. Again.
“Where are we on that bridge thing?” PHONUS asked.
“We’re sticking with the pollution and global warming theory at the moment,” said Yaba. “But the White House science advisor has told me confidentially that all signs point to some sort of terrorist activity.”
“Well, for God’s sake, don’t go repeating that!” she barked. “The people start hearing ‘terrorism,’ we may as well hand the election over to the Republicans! Find some way to make the algae story plausible, and keep that in the news cycle. Global warming always plays well for us. Use that. Then find out who’s really blowing them up, and see how much they want to stop doing it.”
“I beg your pardon, boss?”
“Well, you said it was likely terrorism, didn’t you?”
“I said that’s what the White House science advisor said,” she repeated carefully. “But if it is truly a terrorist act, it’s not one being committed by any of the groups I’m aware of.” The campaign frequently had to tamp down on stories about Yaba’s family connections to offshoots of the Daesh terror network. Her father’s relatives were all members of the Disciples of Mohammad. On her mother’s side were the Fathers of the Caliphate. Among the direct family members, there grew to be a merger of sorts between the two groups, although neither would adopt the name of the other. In the end, everyone else just began referring to them by both names strung together, giving rise to the Disciples of Mohammad and the Fathers of the Caliphate, producing the acronym DoM-FoC.
PHONUS was, of course, aware of these connections, though she denied them to the press and dismissed them as right-wing paranoia. In truth, however, the campaign felt it was in their best interests to have someone with Yaba’s family connections on their side.
“Prove that it’s not terrorism,” the former Secretary ordered. “Lie if you have to. But these bridge collapses absolutely cannot be a terrorist attack, or we’ve already lost.”
· · ·
Not too many miles away, in the superficially more sophisticated borough of Manhattan, Kendall T. Rumpp, billionaire real estate mogul and populist candidate for the Presidency, admired his reflection in the mirror while fiddling with the knot in his Rumpp-branded necktie. The ties were specially designed to hang long, past the beltline and below, making it impossible to conjecture at the presence of any bulges that might otherwise be seen.
“So where are we at on this bridge thing, Stewie?” he asked his campaign advisor, Joel Ward.
“I’m Joel, Mr. Rumpp, sir,” Joel replied. “Stewart was the last campaign manager. And, uhm, the best we can find on the Internet is that they really have found small samples of this algae at the site of both collapses, which is well within statistical norms for any river bridge.”
“Well for Christ’s sake, we can’t go with that story,” Rumpp groused. “May as well just wrap up the election and give it to the Democrats as an early Christmas present. No, it’s got to be terrorists.”
“I thought our story was that it was crumbling infrastructure, sir?”
Rumpp waved him off. “It’s not infrastructure. Those were good bridges. The best. I know construction, believe me. Algae doesn’t crumble concrete,” he said. “Besides, terrorism is a better sell. Get us a terrorist in America, and we’ve got the voters’ attention.”
“Right, sir,” Joel nodded. Then he paused. “Sir, where are we going to find this terrorist?”
“Not my problem,” Rumpp replied, satisfied that the tie was as good as it could be. He turned and surveyed the walls of his campaign office, complete with golden support columns and gold wallpaper accented with red velvet patterns. He had the room decorated years ago, even though it was just a storage area for the excess furniture he was not using in the penthouse apartment he shared with his latest supermodel wife. Turning his own property into his campaign headquarters was a stroke of genius. It was already paid for, there was no new overhead, and the publicity would pay dividends for years even if he lost the election, which he did not plan to do. Plus, he got to charge the Republican Party rent for the space.
“It can’t be global warming, it can’t be ecology, and it can’t be infrastructure,” Rumpp insisted, ticking off the list on three stumpy fingers. “I promised America I was going to build a border wall. Nobody will trust a wall if all our bridges are falling down. Find me a terrorist doing this, or we may as well cancel the elections.” He then picked up a white trucker’s cap embroidered with his campaign slogan—Bring Patriotism Back in Style—and wedged his bird-nest of hair into it so that it floated slightly over his head, incongruous with his Brioni suit. “How do I look?”
Joel swallowed and gave him the right answer.