“Mm.”She took a slow sip.“Well, get your air fast, because here's where we are.The convention wraps tomorrow afternoon.They strike the stage Sunday night and everybody scatters back to their red states, and whatever you don't have by then you are never getting, because these people do not give interviews and they do not leave a trail.”She set her mug down, and the warmth went out of her voice, replaced by the thing underneath it that was always, finally, the realest thing about Hallie: the stakes.“My executive producer asked about you by name yesterday, Alec.By name.That's good and that's bad.It means the audition's real.It also means if you come back from Nebraska with a nice little color piece about fog machines and lanyards, it's not just your name on it.I vouched for you.I put my credibility on the line to send you to Lincoln.”
She leaned in close to the camera, and her dark eyes were steady and certain and waiting.
“So.We're running out of time.What have you got for me?”
ChapterEleven
Harrison
My suite was filled with men in expensive suits, and I wasn’t listening to a single one of them.
They were arranged around my sitting room the way power always arranges itself—the heavy hitters in the armchairs, the hopefuls on the sofa edges, the aides standing against the walls pretending not to exist.Coffee going cold in hotel china.The prairie blazing white through the window.And at the center of it, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his big hands clasped like a man about to arm-wrestle the Holy Spirit, sat Byron Judd Pembroke, who wanted my endorsement the way a drowning man wants a rope.
“The way I see it, Pastor,” Pembroke was saying, in the cornpone baritone he'd no doubt focus-grouped, “this country took a wrong turn when we let them push God out of the schoolhouse and the statehouse both.My district's done waiting.They don't want another politician.They want a warrior.Somebody who'll go up to Washington and tear the whole rotten thing down to the studs and build it back the way the Lord intended—a Christian government, for a Christian nation.”
Murmurs of approval around the room.Pembroke was a big handsome slab of a man, ex–college ball, a jaw you could land a plane on and not quite enough behind the eyes.He was anti-trans, anti-woke, anti-anything that polled.A candidate the machine adored precisely because he'd never had an original thought to get in the way of the script.He'd burn the government down on a dare.And South Carolina would send him to do it, if I laid my hand on his shoulder and told three thousand churches he was anointed.
“He tests through the roof on the base,” someone said.
“He's got the rural counties without even trying,” said someone else.
“All he needs,” said a third, and they all looked at me, “is you.”
I made the listening face.I had a listening face the way other men have a good handshake; it cost me nothing and it told them everything they wanted to believe.I nodded gravely at the right intervals.And the whole time, behind the face, I was still in a wrecked bed at dawn, with a man's terrible morning breath and a kiss I'd have traded this entire roomful of kingmakers to have again.
Tonight.I'll be here.
The words had carried me through the donor breakfast and the prayer luncheon and now this, a private litany I kept saying to myself under the public one.
Then every phone in the room went off at once.
Not one.All of them, a dozen devices buzzing and chiming in the same two-second window, the unmistakable shudder of a news alert hitting a room full of people whose business was news.Hands went to pockets.Faces dropped to screens.And the temperature of the room changed all at once, the way it does when something awful has happened.
“Good Lord,” Pembroke said, staring at his phone.“Mullins.”
“What about him?”
“Frank Mullins.Secretary of State.”Pembroke turned his screen around like he needed a witness.“Resigned.Just now.There's— there's pictures.Somebody got him coming out of a bar in D.C.A gay bar.With a—” he lowered his voice as though the word might stain the carpet, “a male prostitute.Kissing him.Out front, on the sidewalk, like he didn't care who saw.”
I had my own phone in my hand by then, and there it was.
Frank Mullins, sixty-one, married thirty-one years, a fixture of every prayer breakfast in Washington, photographed under a streetlight with his hand on a young man's jaw and his mouth on his mouth.The headline read: SECRETARY OF STATE RESIGNS AMID SCANDAL.The photo was grainy, long-lensed, stolen.The young man was beautiful.Mullins looked—and this was the thing that went into me like a blade—Mullins looked happy.In the half-second before the flash, before his political life ended, the most powerful diplomat in America looked like a man who had finally found joy.
“Decades of public service,” one of the leaders said, shaking his head with the deep satisfied sorrow of a man enjoying himself.“Threw the whole thing away.For a hustler.”
“Couldn't keep it in his pants for one more election cycle,” said another, and a few of them actually chuckled.Pembroke shook his big handsome head at the tragedy of it.
“That's what happens,” Pembroke pronounced, “when a man lets the flesh run the show.No discipline.You play with that fire, you burn the house down.Every time.”
They went on and on, but I didn't hear them.Because I was looking at the grainy photograph of a ruined man under a streetlight, and the streetlight might as well have been the one outside the Lincoln Grand.The beautiful young man might as well have had dark-blond hair and a press lanyard, and the happy doomed face might as well have been my own.
One photograph.That was all it took.One long lens, one careless streetlit moment, one person who decided to point a camera—and a successful political career, a marriage, cabinet post, a name, was gone between one breath and the next.
Alec had a camera.Alec also had the longest lens I'd ever seen.
I set my phone down very carefully on the arm of the chair, because my hand had started to shake.I made the listening face, and underneath it I was as afraid as I have ever been in my life.
* * *
