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“So are you asking the Democrats to nominate you, too?” asked O’Reilly.
“I’m asking people to leave me out of all the hatred and bitterness, all the lies and all the spin. I accepted the office I hold now in order to end the impasse in Congress and help return this country to some kind of normality. I expect to step down when my successor is sworn in in January. After that, I’ll see if some university will take me onto the faculty.”
O’Reilly smiled and said, “The gauntlet is down, Democrats. It happened before, back in 1952, when nobody was sure whether Eisenhower was a Democrat or a Republican. Both parties wanted to nominate him. H
e picked one of them. But Vice President Torrent refuses to choose between them. The Democrats have the first convention. Will they stay with their current front-runner, who just happens to have the highest negatives of any candidate who ran this year? Divisiveness? Or healing? But I give you the last word, Mr. Vice President.”
Torrent smiled gravely. “I miss the classroom. I look forward to teaching again.”
“In other words, you think there’s no chance you’ll be nominated.”
Torrent only laughed and shook his head, as if the idea was ridiculous.
But he didn’t say no.
And despite the front-runner’s most desperate efforts, she couldn’t block Averell Torrent’s name from being presented at the Democratic convention. Too many delegates were announcing that they would switch to him on the first ballot, regardless of what they had pledged back in the primaries.
As one of the delegates said on camera, “A lot has happened since the primaries. If we didn’t have a responsibility to think for ourselves, there’d be no reason to have living delegates come to a convention, they could just tally the primary votes and make the announcement.”
Leading Republicans fell all over themselves to announce that if the Democrats nominated Torrent, they’d nominate him, too.
It’s really going to happen, thought Cecily.
And . . . I have to talk to somebody or I’ll go crazy.
So she went to look for Cole’s number, and realized: She didn’t know it. She had only the numbers of cellphones that he had long since discarded. And of course his office number at the Pentagon, where his assignment had evaporated when Reuben was killed.
Finally she called Sandy in the White House.
“If you want your job back,” said Sandy, “the answer is hell yes what took you so long.”
“I don’t,” said Cecily, “but it’s nice to know I’ve been missed.”
“I don’t miss you, I just have jobs for you to do,” said Sandy. “So what do you want? Because I’m so busy I don’t have time to scratch my butt.”
“Bartholomew Coleman’s phone number.”
“You call me to get a phone number?”
“Captain Coleman,” said Cecily. “The soldier who was with Reuben when . . .”
“I know who he is, I see him every day,” said Sandy. “Home phone? Cell? Office?”
“You see him every day?”
“He’s assigned to the Vice President as his top aide on military affairs. He’s at all the briefings.”
“I didn’t know.” Cecily was dismayed. Had Cole climbed into bed with Torrent? Then she couldn’t talk to him.
“So don’t you want the numbers now?”
“Sure, of course,” she said. “I just didn’t know—yes, all the numbers.”
She could write them down. She just wouldn’t use them.
And she didn’t.
But that night, he showed up at her door at nine o’clock.
