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  “Look, I know it’s a lot more and it’s more intense, but it will be easier when you get out there if you let you be you.”

  “I don’t get it. How am I not being me?” This is getting annoying. Tom would rather be talking Arab-Israeli relations with a policy wonk. He’s not interested in Darren’s psychology revelations.

  “You’re all guts and fire. Normally. Like the way you reacted to that glitter bomb. Get out there and do that, be that guy. If you do that, these events will feed you energy rather than sap it from you. You’ll be hungry for more of them. Besides, we’re a few points behind. We need some Pauley fire to shake things up.” An in-flight crew member hands them each a bottle of water and a glass of red wine which is what Tom has on almost every flight. “What do you think, Tom?”

  “I think you’re spending too much time on the toilet.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Try more fiber.”

  Darren laughs. “Fuck you.” He drinks the wine. “Sir,” he adds. Darren knows he’s there to be a comfortable place for Tom but he also thinks he knows best in certain matters, as do most people around politics and cable TV.

  “I’m sure there’s something to it. Let me think about it.” Tom extends his legs, pressing his shoulders hard into the seat back, and he closes his eyes.

  Peter Brand had been listening to the conversation and decides this is a good time. He comes from the seat behind Darren. “Governor, we need to do a bit of debate review.” The first debate with Mitchell Mason is in four days. They’ll spend the next three days in Tampa so Tom can prepare with no travel. It’ll give the staff and reporters time to do laundry. “Darren, do you mind switching?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Peter,” says Tom. “Would you give me an hour?”

  Darren smiles and doesn’t move. He’s actually not such a jerk but people can’t help but jockey for Tom’s wing.

  “Okay, get some rest, sir.” Peter sits down and closes his eyes. Both he and Tom sleep for almost two hours while Darren plays Pac-Man on his iPhone.

  The announcement of the plane’s descent wakes them both. There’s only twenty minutes left in the flight and Peter curses for having slept so much. “Darren, hop up, please.”

  Tom is still asleep and Darren moves without argument. Peter nudges Tom awake then doesn’t speak for a few minutes while Tom gets ready to engage. Tom presses his palms to his face then runs his fingers through his hair and drinks half the bottle of water. Someone will be by to fix his hair again before he gets off the plane. “Okay, Peter. I’m yours.”

  “Okay. We have three solid days in Tampa to prepare. There’s a morning rally tomorrow, then you go off-line. There are eight policy areas and we’re going to do forty-five-minute review sessions on each. Every day. That’s six hours of review and we’re going to have a different team assigned to each policy area. We’re also going to do two full ninety-minute mock debates each day. We’ll break them up, one at noon and one at nine p.m., which is the time of the actual debate on Thursday. We’ll fill in the time around the mock debates with the policy review modules. We’ll also block out time for exercise and casual reading.”

  “Good. And how about a siesta?”

  “You have one scheduled for November seventh.”

  “Right.”

  “The key to the next few days is two things. One, to know the information cold so you never have to worry about searching your brain for it, and two, to role-play all scenarios Mason will throw at you so you’re ready and relaxed. You know I think Darren’s full of shit”—he turns his head to the side and says this louder so Darren knows he’s at least half kidding—“but he’s onto something in that you need to be as relaxed as you can be. It’s a big night and no one can think on his feet when he’s stressed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Chuck Knoll said it best. Pressure is something that you feel only when you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Alright. I feel good. I’m pretty far up the curve on the issues already. We’ll put the work in and get there.”

  “Good.” Peter holds up eight manila envelopes. “This is the review material for tomorrow’s policy sessions. I’ll get this to you for the drive from Palm Beach to Tampa tonight.”

  “Wonderful.”

  There’s about two minutes before landing. Peter stands and turns around. “Darren, you want to switch back?” Peter looks up to the back of the plane and sees a bearded kid standing against the lavatory door holding a plastic serving tray and facing forward. He’s the sort of young person who grows a beard because his features are too round and boyish for people to see him the way he wants to be seen. Aisle surfing has gotten popular on this campaign. When the landing gear touches and the plane rapidly decelerates the kid will run a few steps then drop the tray in the aisle and jump on as though skimboarding the slick sand at the edge of an ocean wave.

  “Sure,” says Darren.

  “Hang on. I want to see this.”

  Darren stands too and they hold the same seat back while watching the bearded kid at the back of the plane. Tom twists in his seat to look.

  The gear hits and the plane lurches then rises into the air again. The kid starts his run to time the next contact of wheel to ground. He takes four long steps then crouches and flips the tray in front of him. He makes an unafraid hop and sticks both feet to the tray while looking forward but with shoulders squared to the port windows and toes pointed in the same direction. Everyone is watching, including Secret Service.

  His feet touch the tray a micro second after the wheels touch the ground which is perfect. In two seconds the plane has decelerated by forty miles per hour and there’s a near-complete lack of friction between the tray and the short carpet in the aisle. The look on the kid’s face shows that his precision was more than he’d hoped for. He stays true to the middle of the aisle, clearing the coach seating a second later.

  Rather than bailing out to one side, he decides to brace for frontal impact with the wet bar. He rises a few inches from his crouch with open hands in front. His palms catch the countertop of the bar and vault his body up and forward over the fulcrum of his wrists so that he leads with his chin and chest, like a sprinter crossing the finish tape, and passes toward the rows of the Secret Service.

  An agent made of muscle and bone stands to prevent the incoming. The agent’s body has had a lifetime of contact and knows by instinct how to gauge a physical action and prepare the reaction. He braces his feet and leans all his body weight behind his raised forearm that catches the kid in the sternum. There is a sickening reversal to the movement of the kid’s torso and his head snaps forward and back like a crash test dummy’s. The agent’s body is unmoving and unforgiving.

  The boy’s body collapses on the coach side of the wet bar. The landing gear maintains contact with the ground and the plane slows to taxi speed. The engines ease and stop drowning out the smaller noises in time for people nearby to hear the plastic tray rattle and come to rest on a metal beam of the floor, reminding everyone that this violence started with a little horsing around.

  “Jesus,” says Tom. “That boy’s seriously hurt.” He moves out of his row and starts back to check on the boy.

  Peter puts a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “It was an accident.”

  “I know that. I’m not angry with anyone. He’s goofing around and the Secret Service has a job to do.”

  Dan Cullen stands with his hand on his own chest. It looks like the boy is breathing fine and starting to move a bit. Dan says to Peter, “These kids come into campaigns. It’s a crazy place. They’re not kids very long.”

  44

  “Sir, I understand where Ron wants to spend money in this last month, but I need to highlight to you that we’re running low. If we do everything Ron says, we’re going to dip below a zero balance.” Derek Hamilton is budget director for Mitchell Mason’s campaign. He’s in the b
ack of the Suburban with Mason and Ron Stark for a private conversation. For Mason to have an audience this small at this stage of the campaign that includes the budget director is rare. The only others in the car are Secret Service, who for the purposes of the content of the meeting are deaf and mute.

  “Then pull in some money.” Mason says this in the tone of telling a thirsty child to pour himself some water from the enormous pitcher in front of his face.

  “We’re trying.” The funding for Mason’s campaign is down from four years ago, in part because he hasn’t put in the time for as many fund-­raisers and in part because the enthusiasm is down a bit as well. He now finds himself in a race that’s a few points closer than he expected it to be with only one month to go and he wants money.

  “You’re not looking in the right places.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Where do you mean?” Derek is a thirty-six-year-old investment banker from Goldman Sachs on leave to help the campaign in the hopes of making enough contacts to return to Goldman as a rainmaker of new business. He looks like a Goldman banker. Perfect haircut, perfect shave, nice suit, precision to his movements and mind. He never makes wild gestures. His hands never go beyond the span of his shoulders and when he talks his forehead tips out over his nose and he talks in a clear, quiet voice.

  “Ron, I’m going to read the paper for a moment while you and Derek talk privately.” This is mostly a joke since they are all three just inches away from each other but Mason actually picks up the Wall Street ­Journal.

  “From the PAC, you jackass,” says Ron Stark.

  Derek sits with his hands in his lap, realizing in stages that are each separated by a few seconds that he’s been told to do something illegal and the president is in the car but he’s reading the paper and this is a private conversation with Ron Stark. “How should I go about that? I’m not supposed to have even a conversation with them.”

  “You find a way,” says Ron. “Your job is to find a way. That’s why we hired you. Has this campaign hired a person who can’t do his job?”

  “I can do my job,” says Derek. He finds some haughtiness for his voice, remembering he’s a Goldman man. “I’m a banker so I know how to manage your finances. I don’t know the outer edges of campaign fund-raising law.”

  Ron pulls out his iPhone. “Skadden Arps has a good Federal Election Commission practice. I’m emailing you the contact information for an attorney there. Call him, get to know the important parts of the law. I’m also going to put you in touch with a couple campaign veterans who are creative thinkers.”

  “Okay.”

  Ron hits send on the email. “From there you figure it out, Derek. The next thing the president and I want to hear on this is that there’s plenty of gas in the tank. Nothing from you before then, and I want to hear it soon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mitchell crumples the paper in his lap. “You boys finished?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Ron. Derek nods.

  “Derek, let me tell you a little story,” says the president. He doesn’t look at Derek. He looks out the window. “A couple decades ago I was an active surrogate for a candidate in a tight race. At that time, there was a one-point-three-million spending cap in Iowa. We needed Iowa. We needed it for momentum and we viewed it as key and we were going to be goddamned if we weren’t going to spend a hell of a lot more than one-point-three million on Iowa. So you know what we did?”

  It’s rhetorical but Derek is so rapt that he says no and Mitchell had left enough time for the response.

  “We booked all campaign flights into Illinois, then rented cars in Illinois and drove into Iowa. That was all billed against Illinois, where we knew we’d never spend near the cap. We set up our phone banks in Missouri and that was billed against Missouri, not Iowa. We did that every turn we could. We spent more than ten million dollars on Iowa and exactly one-point-three million was billed against Iowa.”

  Derek smiles.

  Mitchell continues. “Now this was all legal to the letter of the law. I hope you’ll be as fortunate. The following year, campaign finance law caught up to these tricks and shut them down, but my point is that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Or should I say, where there’s greater determination, there’s a way.”

  “I’ll find a way, sir.”

  The president is enjoying his talk too much to stop. “A smart campaign is always ahead of the campaign finance law. It’s the same as with steroids in sports. Think of all the hundreds of billions of dollars to be had through success in sports. Add up all the prize money and endorsements for all the sports from humans to horses. Globally, it could be trillions. And how much money is spent policing the cheating? Maybe a few tens of millions? There’s much more will, read will as money, on the side of cheating than on the side of policing. Barry Bonds was getting his steroids from a few guys in a lab that was basically a garage, and they managed to design something undetectable. The only reason Bonds got caught was a whistle-blower.”

  Derek nods again.

  “You are determined and you have resources, Derek. You stay one step ahead.” The president is smiling as he says this, then he stops smiling and points a finger at Derek. “Get me that money.”

  The Suburban is driving south on the Florida Turnpike to Miami. The president is going underground for two days of preparation before the debate in Tampa. He travels in greater style and with greater security than Pauley. He also has a full-time job but his focus for the next month is to keep the job.

  The ride is smooth and safe behind the bullet- and soundproof glass. The sun through the window is on Mason’s lap and it makes him hot. “I’m looking forward to November when all this crap is behind us. Four years isn’t much time when you factor in all the hell you have to endure to get and then keep the damned job.”

  The Suburban passes exits for Fort Lauderdale and Mason thinks of all the people living different lives and wonders if those are happier lives or if that’s just the kind of pitiful thinking a person has in a weak moment.

  45

  The campaign to reelect Mitchell Mason pulls into the Tampa Intercontinental Hotel at three p.m. The convoy is bigger and more glamorous than Pauley’s but has all the same building blocks. The notion of checking into the hotel is absurd. The Secret Service advance team has been at the location for more than a week.

  There is enough daylight between Mason and his entourage for only a tight photograph. Otherwise he moves at the center of a mass of bodies that provide the propulsion so Mason doesn’t have to. He feels his feet don’t touch the ground.

  Once inside, security fans out, knowing where to go and staying in touch wirelessly. The president’s agenda is known by security and aides so Mason follows the lead man but the pace is set by Mason.

  Hotel employees keep their distance and stare at their elected leader. Everyone is frozen except for the eyeballs moving across the white space of their eyes as he moves by.

  The first meeting is an emergency core staff meeting called by Ron Stark. The meeting will include only the president and Stark along with Jack Boothe, chief strategist, and Ted Knowles, press secretary. Others are excluded, which has offended them.

  The president follows the lead agent to the lobby-level conference room of the hotel. The entire hotel has only campaign staff, Secret Service, and hotel employees screened by Secret Service.

  “What’s this all about, Ron?”

  “I’ll make it quick. Problem, solution.” The four men sit around a table too big so there are unusual distances between them and an awkward moment as they select chairs. Stark sits next to Mason who sat first. Jack Boothe sits across the narrow side of the rectangular table from Mason and Ted Knowles sits a couple chairs down from Boothe. “The problem is that the Standard is going to run a story in two days outlining your extramarital activity.”

  “All this crap was vetted by the media four years ago!”


  “I’m hearing they have new stuff.”

  “Susan?”

  “I don’t think she’s the source, but she’s the topic.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if she’s not the source, they don’t have crap.” Mitchell wonders how Susan’s conversation with her husband went. It would have been a few years ago. She never mentioned it again and he never followed up. Hammermill crosses his mind too. That son of a bitch.

  “I’m hearing they will claim sources inside the administration.”

  “Unnamed, of course,” says Mitchell. The entire conversation is between Mason and Stark. Knowles and Boothe seem uncertain if it’s safe to speak.

  “Yes.”

  “Cowards.” Mitchell picks up a bottle of water that has been placed at his seat. “Fuck.” He twists the cap and drinks. “You said something about a solution.”

  “There’s only one play,” says Stark. He looks at Press Secretary Knowles. “We get out in front of the story. We anticipate that it’s coming out and we shape it before it even gets there.”

  “Absolutely,” says Ted.

  “We need a friendly,” Stark says back to him, still looking right at Knowles. “Who have you got?”

  Knowles leans back, trying to think of a person at a credible outlet he could hit up for a big favor. Someone who would let him craft the writing. “I don’t know,” he says. “There are certainly some people favorable to the campaign, but I don’t think you’re going to get the level of control you’re looking for. Not from anyone with a good reputation.” Knowles comes from the media and values journalistic standards. He has never been on the campaign side of things before.

  Jack Boothe leans forward with determination. The other three notice his physical entry to the conversation and look at him before he speaks. “I have an idea.”

  “Out with it, Jack,” says Mason.

  “It’s tricky and I’ll have to think of the best way to present it to him, but it may work the best. It’s actually karmicly correct.”