Rena didn’t head straight back to the office. He had to clear his head.
He circled Lafayette Square outside the White House several times, then wandered onto the urban trails of Rock Creek Park near Georgetown.
Request denied. The president had given him an order. We are all soldiers, Nash had told him. I need you, Upton said.
He was forty-three years old, and he now wondered where taking orders all his adult life had brought him. He had believed all the blandishments about committing one’s life to something larger than self. But he had begun to doubt the institutions behind the orders. And in war he had seen the dark side of belief. People did the worst things in the name of creed.
He was also unsure of Wendy Upton, which surprised him. For all its rough edges, Traynor’s aborted presidency had been like a shot of adrenaline for the country, energizing everything with a strange mix of hope and apprehension. Since his death, Traynor’s ephemeral agenda had morphed into something bigger, a promise of national renewal, one that had to be fulfilled or the country would suffer another blow to its confidence. Was anyone up to it? James Nash could move you with his candid charm, but even that had been insufficient. Traynor inspired people by overwhelming them with his urgency. Despite her decency and her strength, Upton remained a mystery, cautious and remote.
For all their cartoonish excesses, when presidential campaigns ended, we knew, in some odd but intimate way, the strangers we had chosen to govern us. But the country hadn’t chosen Upton and didn’t know her.
Her command to him a few minutes ago implied he had obligations. To what? To Nash’s imagined army in a long struggle toward justice? To a country that no longer believed in its own ideas? To a government that didn’t work? Or maybe Upton just needed an errand boy, someone to vet David Traynor’s secret climate plan so that she could protect herself politically. Maybe it was nothing more than that.
RANDI WAS WAITING IN HIS OFFICE WHEN HE RETURNED TO 1820.
“Where you been?”
“I asked the president to let me withdraw.”
“You what?”
“Hallie could do a better job than I am.”
“Peter!”
“She refused me.”
He sat down beside her on the sofa. Brooks, at just under six one, was almost an inch taller than Rena.
“What are you going to do?”
“There’s nothing to decide,” he said.
“Sure there is.”
“Let’s get to work. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me?”
“You really asked to resign?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He could see it in her face. Randi was thinking about what he must have been feeling all these weeks, and the pressure she had put on him in the last few days about carrying his weight. “You have nothing to prove to anybody,” she said. “Especially not to a bunch of assholes on the Internet.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything.”
“Sure you are.”
She waited for him to look her in the eye.
“The point of the game, Peter, is to leave the board better than you found it and also find what makes you happy. It’s taken me a long time to realize that doing something that matters isn’t enough—even for people like us. You have to find what makes you feel”—she searched for the word—“complete. If you want to not lie to yourself. If you want to live truthfully. Then you have to be able to live and to work in a way you can believe in.”
Randi in the last year had gotten married to the woman she had been with for several years, named Rochelle, a more public celebration of her personal life than she had been comfortable with before. “It’s harder than it sounds. You have to be looking for it. To know it, when you see it. You have to work at it.”
Was she talking about Vic? Or was that just who he was thinking about?
“I’m serious, Peter. If you want to stop, stop.”
He had told himself the same thing on his walk. But that conviction seemed now to be draining out of him. Or maybe old chords had hold of him again.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
“Don’t let this go, Peter.”
“I promise.”
The look on Brooks’s face made him want to keep the promise, or at least learn how to start.
Then, as if just remembering something, she picked up her phone. “Did you see this?” It was a text message from Kim Matsuda. Rena hadn’t looked at his phone in hours.
“She says she found something. She’s jumped on a plane. She’s heading out here.”
Rena read the message: “Found something. Urgent. Must discuss f2f. Coming to you.”
“What’s f2f?”
“Face-to-face,” Brooks said. “And she should have been here by now.”