President Elect. Jack Mars
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hill and tore open their knees, it had his name on it.
The son of Irish immigrants, he had come up on the streets of Woodside, Queens. His father was a prison guard. His mother was a maid. Hard people, and they raised him to be hard. You wanted to grow up in Woodside, you had to fight. Okay? He didn’t mind. He’d go toe to toe with anybody. He was so fierce, so remorseless, that kids in the neighborhood called him the Shark.
He was the first person in his family to go to college, and then – uncharted territory – law school. He made his first million before he was thirty, chasing ambulances – personal injury law.
He’d gotten a photo taken of himself looking very angry (and few people had the ability to look as angry as he could) and paid for small poster advertisements placed throughout the subway system.
Injured? You need somebody tough to stand up for your rights. A real lawyer. A real New Yorker. You need Gerry O’Brien. You need the Shark.
Almost instantly, he became Gerry the Shark. Everyone who rode the trains in the five boroughs knew the name. He used to ride the subways himself just to look at his own ads – and he hated the subways.
The more he made, the more ads he could afford. And the more ads he ran, the more he made. Soon he was running ads on late-night TV, then mid-afternoon TV. It was a jackpot. He had three lawyers working for him, then five, then ten. Then twenty. By the time he sold the business ten years ago, he had thirty-three lawyers and more than a hundred support staff.
He retired for a few years. Wandered. Drifted. Traveled the world. Did too many drugs. Drank too much. Did too much… of everything. Getting into radical right-wing politics probably saved his life. He had swapped out all the bad stuff for personal discipline and a vision of America that he discovered he shared with a lot of people – a return to an earlier, simpler time.
A time when the supremacy of white people wasn’t questioned. A time when marriage was between a man and a woman. A time when a young guy could walk out of high school at eighteen, walk into a factory job, and spend the rest of his working life there, making all the money he needed to support his family.
There was more to it, of course, a lot more. Darker things, things you needed a strong stomach for, things that were not for wider consumption. He had big plans. They were going to clean this country up, once and for all. But that wasn’t something you put right out there in public, was it? Not yet.
Gerry the Shark got up from his desk and moved through the suite of rooms. A few secretaries were here, but mostly people worked out of other places. Gerry was here not only because he was the head strategist, but also because he was the body man to the chief – he didn’t like to let the old man out of his sight.
They had flown up here from Louisville this afternoon. His boss owned this… what would you call it? An apartment? Sure, an apartment with ten bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, and half a dozen offices with a conference room and a staff dining area. It took up an entire floor in one of the most storied and most expensive hotels in the world. This hotel was where American history happened. This was where John F. Kennedy took his many afternoon trysts. This was the place.
They would spend the night here. They had important business here in DC early tomorrow morning.
Gerry breezed down a hallway, slapped his key card against a sensor, and passed into the living quarters. The front sitting room was furnished in opulent old-world style, like the drawing room in a Victorian mansion.
A man with white hair stood at a tall window, the curtains pulled aside. He stared out at the night. The man wore a three-piece suit despite the fact that he was home and had no intention of going out. The open-throated dress shirts were a shuck, of course. The man liked to play dress-up as much as anyone.
He held a martini in his hand. The martini glass looked tiny. The hands were the thing – despite the man’s elegant dress, and his obvious wealth, he had the big gnarled hands of someone who had grown up doing manual labor, and lots of it. The hands said: What’s wrong with this picture?
It was a raw night in the nation’s capital, and the wind howled outside the window, just a little bit. The old man stared out at the backdrop of the great urban sprawl and the lights of the city. Gerry knew that even after all these decades the country boy inside the old man was dazzled by city lights.
“How goes the war?” Jefferson Monroe, President-elect of the United States, said in his soft Southern lilt.
“Beautiful,” Gerry said, and he meant it. “She’s on the ropes and she doesn’t know what to do. Her statement today makes that clear. She’s not going to vacate the Presidency? It plays right into our hands. She’s isolating herself – public opinion is going to go our way. If we play it right, we might be able to get her out of there sooner rather than later. I think we want to ramp up the pressure – get her to hand over the Presidency early, long before any voter fraud investigation concludes. Then we cancel the investigation ourselves.”
The old man turned from the tall window. “Is there any precedent for a President handing over power early?”
Gerry the Shark shook his head. “No.”
“Then how do we do it?”
Now Gerry smiled. “I have a few ideas.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
6:47 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Oval Office
The White House, Washington DC
She was alone when they showed Luke into the room.
For a moment, he thought she might be asleep. She sat in the sitting area, slumped in one of the armchairs. She looked like a broken rag doll, or a high school kid showing contempt for the teacher by slouching.
The new Resolute Desk loomed behind her. The heavy drapes were pulled, blocking the tall windows. On the floor, around the edge of the oval carpet, there was an inscription printed:
The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
The words went all the way around the carpet, finishing right where they began.
She wore blue slacks and a white dress shirt. Her jacket was hung on the back of one of the chairs. Her shoes were off and lying askew on the carpet.
Despite her posture, her eyes were sharp and alive. They watched him.
“Hi, Susan,” he said.
“Did you watch my press conference?” she said.
He shook his head. “I stopped watching TV over a year ago. I feel a lot better since I did. You should try it.”
“I told the American people I’m not going to step down.”
Luke nearly laughed. “I bet that’s going over well. What happened? You like the job so much you don’t want to give it up? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.”
A small smile appeared on her face. The smile, barely there, reminded him of why she had once been a supermodel. She was beautiful. Her smile could light up a room. It could light up the sky.
“They stole the election.”
“Of course they did,” he said. “Now you’re going to steal it back. That sounds like a plan.” He paused. Then he told her what he honestly thought. “Listen, I think you’re better off without this job. Now they won’t have Susan Hopkins to kick around anymore. Let them find out how bad it is without you. They’ll beg you to come back.”
She shook her head, the smile growing brighter. “I don’t think it works like that.”
“I don’t think so either,” he said.
She shook her head. A long exhale escaped from her.
“Where have you been, Luke Stone? You should have stuck around. We had a lot of fun in here, once the chaos died down a little. We did a lot of good. And you were going to teach me to shoot guns once upon a time. Remember?”
He shrugged.