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ChapterSeventeen
Brennan
Then
President Kennedy once said, “There is no experience you can get that can possibly prepare you for the presidency.”
Truer words were never spoken.
The weight of the presidency has not simply settled on my shoulders. It’s trying to break me. I don’t feel so much like Atlas as like Sisyphus. These problems, deliberations, calamities, atrocities, and decisions facing me will echo forever in history yet to be written.
The presidency is like holding your breath as you leap from an airplane with your hands cuffed behind your back. All you can do is fall.
This is the loneliest office in the world. It doesn’t matter that I have amazing advisors, an excellent cabinet, that I’ve surrounded myself with the best and brightest people—
At the end of the day, it’s all on me.
I don’t want to be alone. I want someone I can turn to. Someone I can trust with these moments when I wrestle with now and forever and what the best choice is. Someone I can trust with my doubts and my fears, my dismays and my desires.
I want Reese.
He’s the man who fills the emptiness in my life. I crave his smiles and the sound of his voice. His understanding, and how he seems to have assembled my secrets like I was a puzzle made for him alone.
He knows me.
Not many people know about my father. I’ve kept that one at the bone.
I haven’t seen Reese since the world decided to spin off its axis. Ukraine is falling into chaos and despair, and when I’m not in the Situation Room, I’m deep in negotiations with the heads of government of NATO and from around the UN. We must act. We must. Countless people may die if the world does nothing. We cannot let vicious men dictate where our lines of human decency lie.
Reese asked me what I can live with. I cannot—will not—live with doing nothing.
Ukraine is dying, a whole nation strangled by the Russian occupation. Especially now, as Russian forces have ratcheted up their counterinsurgency operations and reports of ethnic cleansing are on the rise. The Russian president’s interests lie in keeping totalitarian chaos and suffocating entropy as his status quo.
My thoughts have taken on the sound of Reese’s voice. That low rumble, that slow roil. He’s inside me, like he’s supposed to be there. At night, I fall asleep with his name on my lips.
I’m on the phone with the prime minister of the United Kingdom when I hear Reese for real, for the first time in days, and I spin in my chair as if he’s appeared in the Oval.
His voice is coming from Matt’s desk, though, and I drag the phone with me, stretching the cord from the Resolute as far as it can until I manage to push the door open and peer out.
He’s here.
“We cannot move forward without the Germans,” the prime minister says in my ear. I’m jerked back to the office. The presidency. “And they are being stubborn. They cannot turn off the gas coming from Russia. You know what happened last time.”
Last time, the world traded part of Ukraine for Russian energy to flow into Europe again. Sanctions eased as cease-fire lines divided a country.
“Norway and the Netherlands have made huge strides in renewable energy production. Those new wind turbines are churning out far more energy than was anticipated.”
“And those turbines are extremely vulnerable to Russian attack. Are you aware of how many go down each day, Mr. President? We all know it’s Russian tampering. Cyber attacks, and physical attacks. Russian subs hunt out of the Baltic Sea, and my country has been shouldering a majority of the risk in confronting those bastards.”
“I agree, we need a more forceful presence in the Baltics. It’s past time to talk about stationing forces there. Latvia has already made the request. Poland, too.”
“Permanent forces? Are you talking about NATO forces, Mr. President, or American?You’ll send American troops back to Europe? Boots on the ground, long term?”
“I am. We must stand up to Moscow, Prime Minister. You know what’s happening in occupied Ukraine. I won’t allow it, not in this world.”
“But Moscow holds the cards. As long as they have the ability to launch nuclear—”
“See, I don’t think they do hold the cards. I think we’re giving in to a bully and we’re letting him control the conversation, which is letting him control the outcome. Meanwhile, people are being slaughtered.”
