White House Situation Room, Year 38
“Mr. President?”
Nancy could tell that General Banks was struggling to keep his tone even. He’d been appointed over the heads of several others because he was fully committed to the fight against cognition-based terrorism. But after eight months in the job, she could tell that he was starting to see the point of his predecessor’s criticisms that he’d once called “unprecedented, disloyal and dangerous at such a time in the history of our nation, not to mention the world”.
Nancy shuffled the papers in front of her on the desk loudly. It had the desired effect of bringing the President’s attention back to the room. He looked at her, then followed her gaze to Banks’s not-so-patiently waiting expression. He did the thing where he screwed up his eyes, which she knew meant he was trying to bring to mind what he hadn’t been properly listening to the first time, but which others who were willing to give any benefit of the doubt generally interpreted as an attempt to size them up, intimidate them, or just concentrate really hard on the matter at hand. “Yes,” he said finally.
“Yes, we should divert a portion of the Southern Fleet? Or yes, we need them at full strength when they reach New Zealand?”
The President tapped the table. “New Zealand, New Zealand. Don’t trust them.”
“Indeed not, Mr. President,” General Banks said. “If we trusted them to comply with League of Nations requirements we wouldn’t need to send a fleet at all.”
“So, yes, don’t divert them. That’s what I said.”
Further down the table, the duty intelligence officer coughed. “But, sir, we have credible–“
General Banks turned everything that he’d been holding back against the President on the hapless agent. “There is nothing whatsoever credible about these stories of some sort of underwater base. Even the idea of our enemies co-operating to the extent required to construct such a thing, if it were even technically possible, which the Navy has ruled out–” Nancy could tell that even in the midst of his rant, it rankled Banks to be admitting that the Navy had ever been right about anything “–strains the boundaries of plausibility to the utmost. Just because they’re all opposed to the motions passed in Geneva doesn’t mean they don’t violently disagree with one another about almost everything else.”
“Unless we’ve pushed them into putting aside their differences,” the agent said wearily.
“Wait, this is the Jules Verne thing, right?” One of the few scientific advisors the administration had invoked the author to dismiss the idea as fantasy in a meeting a couple of months ago, and ever since then the President had always referred to it this way.
The agent decided to make one last try. “Our analysts have triangulated a series of anomalous ELF radio signals picked up over the years to the South Pacific. All we’re requesting is that a small detachment — maybe half a dozen vessels — make a slight diversion to undertake dedicated sonar sweeps in the area.”
Nancy wasn’t sure if he’d finished or just paused for breath, but Banks jumped in anyway. “Mr. President, the operation has been planned around having the full force allocated available. Need I remind you that this is a simultaneous strike on multiple widely separated targets around the world. We can’t allow–“
Nancy had spotted the general’s mistake as soon as he made it, but it took the President interrupting for the penny to drop for Banks himself. “No, you needn’t remind me. I have a great memory. Practically photographic, that’s what they say. You say this is a slight diversion?”
The agent nodded. “It’s practically on their way already, sir.”
“All right, all right, now listen. What if we don’t divert anyone but they all… spread out a bit? Do the sonar whatsit on their way. No diversion, which is what you want; and you get your scans. Everybody wins. See, this is why the American public put me here, to cut through this sort of bureaucratic bullshit. You just need some lateral thinking and everybody wins.” He turned his gaze on the EEE representative in the room. “Well, almost everybody.”
Nancy strongly suspected that Deputy Director Hill had been sent here as a kind of punishment for having overseen the botched operation. “Sir, the situation in Toronto was complicated by a number of factors–“
“What’s complicated? Even my idiotic predecessor had told you that your agency’s top priority was to put the Voss woman in custody and heaven knows how many times I’ve said the same thing. You had her and she slipped through your fingers!”
This wasn’t going anywhere productive. Once he started on Voss, he was capable of going on for half an hour or more. Nancy decided to divert the flow a little. “Not to mention the little stunt that those Canadian terrorists pulled.”
The bait worked. “Didn’t we have a poll in the field about that?” the President asked.
“Yes, we do, sir,” Nancy said. “The calls are underway as we speak.” She glanced at the array of clocks telling the time all over the world. “They’ll have just started on the Midwest.”
“Can we do the early numbers thing?”
“It’s a little too early for anything reliable,” she cautioned. “The margin of error–“
“I don’t care about margin of error. We need to know what people are thinking. Very important for leadership.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Nancy said.
“Good, good,” the President said. “I gotta go to the … what do you guys call it, the head?”
“That’s the Navy, sir,” Banks said, loud enough to satisfy his own pride but quiet enough that the President didn’t catch it over the sound of his chair scraping.
Nancy immediately picked up the phone. “Get me the head of the field team for the poll,” she said.
It was longer than she would have liked before she was connected. “Ms White? Why are you calling on a secure line? They said–“
“Never mind that. How soon can you get me preliminary numbers from the responses so far?”
“Well, we don’t really have enough to be able to apply a decent weighting model yet. And–“
“How soon? Any numbers at all that I can share with the President.”
“Er, an hour, I guess?”
Nancy covered the microphone with her hand and hissed at Banks, who was deep in conversation with the agent, “How much longer is this briefing going to take?”
“Ten more minutes, maximum.” He stiffened slightly. “As per the guidelines your office circulated, all briefings are to last under 25 minutes unless the President has questions.”
“Drag this one out a bit, would you? Show him that battle order thingy, he likes that.” She uncovered the phone and did a quick evaluation of how long the President would be out of the room and her estimate of Banks’s skills at keeping the President entertained. “You have half an hour. Fax them straight to me at the White House.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the pollster on the other end, but she only heard it as a tinny echo as she was putting the receiver back down.
Banks looked at her with barely disguised contempt. “With respect, is public opinion really your priority right now?”
“The President’s priorities are my priorities, General Banks.”
“Ms White,” he said, drawing out the syllable to emphasise her lack of rank, “we are about to engage in a military operation with a level of complexity the world has arguably never seen before, and certainly not in the lifetime of anyone who isn’t now retired. It requires coordination across the globe and with allies some of whom were considered enemies very recently–“
“And against enemies who were once allies, yadda yadda yadda. Don’t quote a speech back to the person who wrote it.”
“Ms White, you are the White House Chief of Staff and we all understand that you were appointed–“
“You were appointed, General, because we believed– the President believed you have the right skillset to pull this off. Does that evaluation need to be revisited?”
“No, it does not.” He sighed. “But it’s impossible to work with contradictory orders.”
“Excuse me?”
It was the agent who answered — Nancy was no longer sure whether she’d forgotten his name because he was unimportant, or because she’d assumed it was false. “Ma’am, we were talking while you were on your call. The President’s … solution doesn’t meet either of our needs. If the fleet is still progressing at full speed they won’t be able to do the sort of detailed sonar work we need.”
“And if they ‘spread out’ they won’t be able to maintain the proper defensive formation,” Banks added.
“You brought this problem to the President’s attention and he gave you a solution. Implement it, or come up with a better one and implement that.”
Banks turned to the agent. “I can ask if we can sortie the ASW aircraft while the fleet is en route.”
“Better than nothing,” the agent said. With a pointed look in Nancy’s direction, he added, “And nothing — nothing useful, anyway — is what we’d be getting the other way.”
A long bout of flushing noises indicated the President was about to return. They all returned to their seats and did their best to look appropriately purposeful. He walked over to the head of the table and put his hands on the back of his chair, peering down at each of them in turn. “You were talking about me, don’t try and deny it, I know when I come in the room it goes quiet it’s because you were talking about me. What was it?”
Nancy gave him her biggest smile. “We were celebrating your ability to bring people together in times of conflict, sir.”
“Good, good, yes,” he said. “We’re done here, right?”
“I believe General Banks had a few more details to go over with you,” Nancy said.
“Er, yes, sir, if you don’t mind.” He nodded to one of the Marines who staffed the room in full dress uniform, who started up the projector.
Soon after the slideshow had begun, another Marine brought her a stack of fax papers that had been torn off so quickly the ink had smudged slightly. His training forced him to adopt a neutral expression, but Nancy could still sense his disdain beneath the surface. As far as his naïvete was concerned, politics stopped at the water’s edge and the door of this room. As if it ever stopped, anywhere.
She whispered “Thank you so much,” more to mess with him than out of politeness, and turned her attention to the numbers. The top sheet was freighted with caveats about the unreliability of the data; reminders that the margin of error only captured random errors, not systematic ones; and even the word “PROVISIONAL” written in huge marker pen letters diagonally across the whole thing. Nancy quietly slipped it to the bottom before the President saw it.
She flicked through the detailed tables quickly, focusing on the questions she’d added personally to the poll, the ones testing various messages — both the administration’s preferred lines and some of the ones that had started to proliferate in op-ed columns and TV talking heads. Even media outlets that could usually be counted on had been busying themselves “examining both sides of the debate”.
From Nancy’s point of view, there were definitely two sides. But why examine the arguments of troublemakers and terrorists? The outcomes of their actions spoke plainly enough.
The problem was, that sort of examination was going on in bars, offices and living rooms up and down the country, and the conclusions being reached, as reflected in the polls she was reading, were decidedly mixed.
Ask about the events in Toronto with a framing of frightened civilians sheltering in place while an unnatural storm raged around them, the collateral damage of the power cut, operating theatres suddenly without power during surgery, and the public condemned it, but only by a thin majority.
Ask about the message the terrorists had used the stunt to broadcast in isolation, however, and a similarly thin majority saw some merit in it. The pundits had started to talk in terms of “not being able to put the genie back in the bottle” and the polling showed some alignment with that view, the part that the terrorists had phrased as “We will always be here”.
When Nancy had first seen it, it had been almost startlingly clear to her that it was an ominous threat, almost cartoonish in how sinister it was. But for these numbers to make any sense, provisional as they were, some of the respondents to the poll must have been willing to see it more positively while still recognising the threatening circumstances around it.
She paused before turning to the questions on military action. Officially, nothing was happening, but it was the worst kept secret in the world. You couldn’t move that amount of personnel and equipment into position without it being obvious. They were at least primarily going by sea rather than air, as it was known — or at least rumoured — that the terrorists employed by the rogue states to monitor the right-thinking world had difficulty with the vastness of the ocean. But that meant a longer deployment, more time for service families to get anxious about their spouses, parents, kids being far from home. The polling numbers were another mixed bag. There was majority support — just — for the general principle of stopping the state sponsors of terror. But there was also a thin majority for not taking action at this particular time. Those worried families, she surmised — yes, something should be done. No, it shouldn’t be done by the people I love.
She tuned back in to the conversation when the President called her name.
“Yes, sir?”
“What do those polls say? People are in favour, right? Decisive action. Bold action.”
“Well, as you can imagine, it’s hard to ask questions directly about something that isn’t being publicly acknowledged right now. But certainly people are in favour of the aim of putting an end to dangerous regimes.”
An almost owl-like turn of the head to face her directly. “Sure. But not just the aim, the method, the how as well as the why.”
She glanced back down at the grid of numbers. “Sir, this is a time for leadership. We need to explain–” She could see the intelligence man bristling “–within the confines of what we’d share publicly anyway, that this is the crucial time, that if we don’t act now, we don’t know what terrible terrorist atrocities could unfold next.”
“Right, leadership,” the President said. “Someone’ll write a speech, right? A good one.”
“I’ll draft it myself, sir.”
“But don’t make it too fancy. It still needs to sound like me. People like my down-to-earth, tell-it-like-it-is style.” He nodded down at her sheaf of fax pages. “It says that in there, right? Those sorts of numbers, I like.” He laughed at his own joke.
“We didn’t have questions on your personal communication skills in this one, sir.”
“Well, don’t let that happen again. There should always be questions like that, I thought we’d talked about that before.”
Nancy bit back her first response, the one where she would have imagined the hit pieces that would get written if any poll respondent had mentioned that they’d been asked with equal weight about the imminent war and the colour of tie the President should wear when announcing it. Sometimes that sort of thing could be effective, the President responded well to imagining being attacked when he felt confident enough himself to be combative in return. “An oversight, sir, won’t let it happen again.”
“Good, good.” He turned away. “Anyone got anything else?”
Someone who hadn’t spoken yet, representing one or other of the three-letter-acronym agencies — maybe even the EEE itself, who knew? — raised a hand as though he thought he was still in grade school. “We think there is an increased risk of domestic disorder, sir. Copycats of the Canadian group, others we have under surveillance who might accelerate their own plans, possibly even protest by, uh– non-cognitive-threat individual groups.”
“You mean normal people?” the President said. His use of the phrase on the campaign trail — or rather “normal, right-thinking people” — had been a big positive with his base. But anyone who was going to protest clearly wasn’t right-thinking. “But … Nancy. In the numbers, you said a majority–“
She very deliberately hadn’t stated the size of that majority. “As I said, sir, this is a moment for leadership. We can make people see the necessity, the urgency, of what’s happening. Then they’ll follow. There might be some radicals, in any modern conflict there have always been anti-war activists–“
“Hippie dropout peaceniks,” the President snarled, with a level of animosity that startled even Nancy. “But I take your point.” He stood up, clearly having decided that the meeting was over, and everyone in uniform scrambled to their feet and saluted.
The President turned back as he reached the door. “Just in case, we should nationalise the federal guard.”