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“Stand in for me, Michael,” pleaded Cormack.
The Vice President nodded. “Sure,” he said gloomily. It was the tenth canceled appointment in a week. The paperwork could be handled in-house; there was a good team at the White House nowadays. Cormack had chosen well. But the American people invest a lot of power in that one man who is President, Head of State, Chief Executive, Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the man with his finger on the nuclear button. Under certain conditions. One is that they have the right to see him in action—often. It was the Attorney General who articulated Odell’s worries an hour later in the Situation Room.
“He can’t just sit there forever,” said Walters.
Odell had reported to them all on the state in which he had found the President. There were just the inner six of them present—Odell, Stannard, Walters, Donaldson, Reed, and Johnson—plus Dr. Armitage, who had been asked to join them as an adviser.
“The man’s a husk, a shadow of what he once was. Dammit, only five weeks ago,” said Odell. His listeners were gloomy and depressed.
Dr. Armitage explained that President Cormack was suffering from deep postshock trauma, from which he seemed unable to recover.
“What does that mean, minus the jargon?” snapped Odell.
What it meant, said Armitage patiently, was that the Chief Executive was stricken by a personal grief so profound that it was depriving him of the will to continue.
In the aftermath of the kidnapping, the psychiatrist reported, there had been a similar trauma, but not so profound. Then the problem had been the stress and anxiety stemming from ignorance and worry—not knowing what was happening to his son, whether the boy was alive or dead, in good shape or maltreated, or when or if he would be freed.
During the kidnap the load had lightened slightly. He had learned indirectly from Quinn that at least his son was alive. As the exchange neared, he had recovered somewhat.
But the death of his only son, and the savagely brutal manner of it, had been like a body blow. Too introverted a man to share easily, too inhibited to express his grief, he had settled into an abiding melancholy that was sapping his mental and moral strength, those qualities humans call the will.
The committee listened morosely. They relied on the psychiatrist to tell them what was in their President’s mind. On the few occasions when they saw him, they needed no doctor to tell them what they were seeing. A man lackluster and distraught; tired to the point of deep exhaustion, old before his time, devoid of energy or interest. There had been Presidents before who had been ill in office; the machinery of state could cope. But nothing like this. Even without the growing media questioning, several present were also beginning to ask themselves whether John Cormack could, or should, continue much longer in office.
Bill Walters listened to the psychiatrist with an expressionless face. At forty-four he was the youngest man in the Cabinet, a tough and brilliant corporate lawyer from California. John Cormack had brought him to Washington as Attorney General to use his talents against organized crime, much of it now hiding behind corporate façades. Those who admired him admitted he could be ruthless, albeit in pursuit of the supremacy of the law; those who were his enemies, and he had made a few, feared his relentlessness.
He was personable to look at, sometimes almost boyish, with his youthful clothes and blow-dried, carefully barbered hair. But behind the charm there could be a coldness, an impassivity that hid the inner man. Those who had negotiated with him noticed that the only sign he was homing in was that he ceased to blink. Then his stare could be unnerving. When Dr. Armitage had left the room Walters broke the grim silence.
“It may be, gentlemen, we will have to look seriously at the Twenty-fifth.”
They all knew about it, but he had been the first to invoke its availability. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet may together, in writing, communicate to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their view that the President is no longer able to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, to be precise.
&
nbsp; “No doubt you’ve memorized it, Bill,” snapped Odell.
“Easy, Michael,” said Jim Donaldson. “Bill just mentioned it.”
“He would resign before that,” said Odell.
“Yes,” said Walters soothingly. “On health grounds, with absolute justification, and with the sympathy and gratitude of the nation. We just might have to put it to him. That’s all.”
“Not yet, surely,” protested Stannard.
“Hear, hear. There is time,” said Reed. “The grief will pass, surely. He will recover. Become his old self.”
“And if not?” asked Walters. His unblinking stare went across the face of every man in the room. Michael Odell rose abruptly. He had been in some political fights in his time, but there was a coldness about Walters he had never liked. The man did not drink, and by the look of his wife he probably made love by the book.
“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on it,” he said. “Now, however, we’ll defer decision on that. Right, gentlemen?”
Everyone else nodded and rose. They would defer consideration of the Twenty-fifth. For now.
It was a combination of the rich wheat and barley lands of Lower Saxony and Westphalia to the north and east, plus the crystal-clear water trickling out of the nearby hills, that first made Dortmund a beer town. That was in 1293, when King Adolf of Nassau gave the citizens of the small town in the southern tip of Westphalia the right to brew.
Steel, insurance, banking, and trade came later, much later. Beer was the foundation, and for centuries the Dortmunders drank most of it themselves. The industrial revolution of the middle and late nineteenth century provided the third ingredient for the grain and the water—the thirsty workers of the factories that mushroomed along the valley of the Ruhr. At the head of the valley, with views southwest as far as the towering chimneys of Essen, Duisburg, and Düsseldorf, the city stood between the grain prairies and the customers. The city fathers took advantage; Dortmund became the beer capital of Europe.
Seven giant breweries ruled the trade: Brinkhoff, Kronen, DAB, Stifts, Ritter, Thier, and Moritz. Hans Moritz was head of the second-smallest brewery and head of the dynasty that went back eight generations. But he was the last individual to own and control his empire personally, and that made him very seriously rich. It was partly his wealth and partly the fame of his name that had caused the savages of the Baader-Meinhof gang to snatch his daughter Renata ten years before.
Quinn and Sam checked into the Roemischer Kaiser Hotel in the center of the city and Quinn tried the telephone directory with little hope. The home number, of course, was not listed. He wrote a personal letter on the hotel stationery, called a cab, and had it delivered to the brewery’s head office.
