WASHINGTON, D.C.
Monday 12 April
As the country mourned, political Washington plotted. Traynor’s aides had wanted the funeral to boost the fallen president’s popularity in order to tie Upton more firmly to his agenda. This was still “David’s presidency,” she overheard Moss declare to Phelps. It wouldn’t be “hers until she won herself an election.” In private, Republicans urged her to end the most brazen elements of Traynor’s tumultuous agenda. One congressman, a pleasant man from Indiana, publicly suggested it was God’s will that Traynor had died and that she should abide by that will and put the nation on “a corrective course.” He refused to apologize amid the controversy that followed.
The defeated GOP presidential nominee, Michigan Governor Jeff Scott, was omnipresent on television. “The president should now remake her cabinet and appoint an even number of Republican and Democrat members,” he declared. “And let them govern by consensus—to finally make good on Traynor’s promise of bipartisanship.”
Everyone had counsel for her, about everything, from her clothes to a potential vice president. The Internet vibrated like a radioactive pool. “Proof Upton murdered the president with KGB-supplied poison.” “Why the new president should refuse to serve and call for a new election.” “Six things Upton must do to prove her legitimacy.” “Upton associates involved in assassination of Traynor.” A cyber forensics team from the National Security Agency delivered a daily report on the conspiracy theories. The briefing included which of the theories were produced by bots rather than real people, which were managed by foreign state-agents, and the virality of each.
“Forget all that,” Phelps advised her. “You have to answer just one question, the same one David did. How do you govern when the government is broken?”
They were sitting in the Oval Office the afternoon following the funeral. She nodded to Phelps that she understood. But she recognized what her inherited chief was trying to do. He wanted her to repeat the threats to congressional Republicans that Traynor had made: the GOP leadership had to end its internal rules, which blocked compromise and bipartisan governing. He also wanted her to repeat Traynor’s promise to serve a one-term presidency if the lawmakers agreed—and sue if they did not.
Phelps and Traynor had been convinced this threat of an outright war was the only way to break the ropes that were strangling the government, enforcing party hegemony and crushing any hope of congressional compromise. But Upton wasn’t ready to make that threat. The problem with David’s approach, she thought, was that the obstacles weren’t as simple as Traynor defined them. Nor would they be as easy to sweep away. The presidency and the state of the country weren’t a company you launched and then sold to someone else—with an exit strategy and money at the end. The presidency was your final moment in public life, your legacy. Your last act. The only exit strategy was history’s judgment.
David Traynor had risen to power out of nowhere, a businessman who turned himself into a celebrity and a sports team owner because he was bored and, at fifty, bored again, into a change-management populist who promised to fix broken government. In the few months she and Traynor had known each other well, she had begun to think David’s greatest strength might have been his pragmatism. He had been open to suggestions from all sides, in part because he had no interest in the old political feuds and no allegiances to old policies. From his background in start-ups, he believed in experimentation and learning from failure. Had he lived, those qualities would have been sorely tested. Now that he was passing into myth, they seemed like a promise unfulfilled. In the six days since his death, his approval rating had risen by twenty-five points. Americans had come to admire David Traynor in death as they never had in life.
And it was his myth she was inheriting.
Senator Lewellyn Burke’s counsel rang in her ears. “Of course, you have to promise to keep Traynor’s agenda.” Everyone who ever inherited the presidency after a death pledged that. “But the only way you can really succeed as president is if, at some point, you begin to move away from that pledge. Eventually you have to do what you believe. But not yet.”
Of course, that had to be true, but it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. What did she believe? What did she want to accomplish? Once you are president, that stops being a hypothetical question. And the answer becomes infinitely more complicated.
A day earlier, Upton had summoned the climate scientist Kim Matsuda to the White House. She wanted to know what was happening with Traynor’s classified program to invent a new battery that would store the power of the sun, his classified Hail Mary scheme to jump-start a new American renewable energy program in secret.
She knew there was pressure from at least some inside the intelligence community to get their funds back. The odds were high that someone, at some point, would leak the program’s existence to the press, framed as a scandal, a reckless and possibly illegal scheme by the Silicon Valley amateur president.
Upton needed to know what was happening and whether there were any signs of success. For Traynor had been right about one thing: the best way to protect the program was for it to succeed. She invited three others to join the meeting: Quentin Phelps, Gil Sedaka, and Cheryl Kingsley from the White House counsel’s office. Upton wanted some sense of the plan’s legality.
Matsuda sat down on one of the floral sofas in the Oval Office in front of the presidential desk and looked at Upton, her expression betraying her doubts about Traynor’s successor.
“Tell me about the battery program.”
Matsuda handed each of them a three-page memo. Upton, glancing at it, asked for the highlights. They had made substantial progress, Matsuda declared, especially given that it was only a little over two months since the program’s launch. They’d identified five different companies around the country doing the best work on flow batteries, four in California and one in Colorado. All five had begun to ramp up operations.
She mentioned the companies, their slight differences in approach, and how quickly each had grown.
“How is the money coming to them?” Upton asked. In the Senate, her committee work had involved energy and natural resources, so she knew the process of making federal grants as well as anyone.
Some funds came as federal grants, Matsuda said, some in the form of contracts. If one or more of the companies showed real promise, the second phase might involve the government taking an ownership stake. For now, to keep things low profile, none of the original investors in any of these companies had been asked to leave.
Matsuda was not able, however, to tell her precisely how much money had been spent.
The president was now more worried than she had been when the meeting started.
“Are any of these investors foreign?” she asked.
“They’re venture capital funds,” said Matsuda, with a glance at Quentin Phelps. “Is there foreign money involved? Almost certainly—given the level of foreign money in venture capital.”
Matsuda was a scientist, not a financier. But Quentin Phelps knew this world. And Upton had the sense he seemed to know the details of Traynor’s favorite program, too.
She asked for more specifics and wasn’t very pleased with the answers. Matsuda knew the science here but seemed to have left the companies in many ways to their own devices. The level of oversight sounded thin. This felt like the government throwing money around recklessly, not funding a classified project.
Upton glanced through the memo. It told her little more than Matsuda had just offered verbally. “I’d like more detail,” she said after reading it through. “On the science. The approaches of each company. Why they were chosen. The level of security in the program. If it’s classified, we need it to be kept secret. Something about the CEOs. And the investors.”
Phelps shifted in his chair. “Madam President, I can tell you that in David Traynor’s mind this was the single most important initiative of his presidency. Finally addressing the climate crisis was the centerpiece of making government functional again. I think he might have told you this himself. If you want to keep faith with his vision, we need to act on climate and do it now. The program may be two months old, but it was years in the planning. If you are considering pulling out now, after the groundwork we have laid, that would set us back years. I have to say, if you were to step away from this, that would give me pause.”
The three sheets of paper that Matsuda had given them were shaking slightly in Phelps’s hand. His anger had risen quickly, almost overtaking him, but his message was unmistakable. David Traynor’s best friend and chief of staff, whom she had begged to remain at his post to keep her fragile credibility with his party intact, was giving her an ultimatum.
The words of her first mentor in politics, Senator Thurman Morgan, echoed in her mind. He often told her, “Your job as a leader is to not lose your temper. Especially when the people around you are behavin’ badly. ’Cause that will only make them behave worse. You need to be the one cool head. Remember that.”
Her job was to not get mad.
She couldn’t count how many times she had recalled those words in the last twenty-five years, watching people accustomed to having their way lose their tempers, especially when others were attempting bipartisan work and tenuous coalitions. “Your job is to not lose your temper.” For the next many months, until her presidency was her own, she would have to hold Morgan’s admonition close.
“I understand, Quent. But I’d like to take a closer look. David may have known details that I do not. And now it is my responsibility to know them.”
“Of course, Madam President,” Phelps said.
“I want a detailed report, Kim. Can you do it in three days? Spare nothing. I’ll read every word. Don’t overthink it. Just tell me everything you can.”