The Threat

The vice president was short and peppery, with gray hair brushed straight back like Spiro Agnew’s. A former Disney executive, then junior senator from Florida, Geraldo B. Edwards had cratered on Super Tuesday after a bitter nomination fight. De Bari had picked him at the convention to balance the ticket. The office of the vice president was in the Old Executive, but Dan had never seen him there. Early in the term, Edwards, appearing on The Capital Gang with Al Hunt, had challenged the president’s decision to reduce troop levels in NATO. Since the First Commandment of the vice presidency was “Do not publicly disagree with the president,” Edwards hadn’t spent much time around the Eighteen Acres since. The president kept him on the road with trade delegations, fundraising, and foreign funerals. The word was that Edwards was “out of the loop,” and there was no more scathing dismissal. The second lady was padded, powdered, and pleasant, and said absolutely nothing as she shook his hand with a slow, sweet smile that plainly conveyed Inside my head I’m far away.

The house seemed empty, though guests were still arriving. They looked down into a tented annex set up in the garden, facing a back lawn and a wooded ravine. The guests were already deep into the drinks and buffet. Most were elderly or middle-aged. Many seemed to be foreigners, judging by the dashikis and thobes and saris among the black ties and long dresses. Dan even saw one tiny woman in a kimono.

“See anyone you know?” he asked Blair. She was fiddling with her earrings, a wrinkle between her eyebrows indicating mild annoyance.

“I’m more interested in those I don’t know. Is that Milton Obote?”

Dan wasn’t sure who that was. But the intellectual-looking officer by the garden exit was certainly the new deputy CNO for training, Admiral Contardi. Dan remembered briefing him in the cramped flag officer’s quarter of USS Cochrane before a strike into the littoral of Africa.

In the foyer, shaking hands with the vice president, Mrs. Clayton sparkled like a garnet set in gold. Behind her Dan recognized Alicejames “Mokey” Revell, the secretary of state, a political general who’d served four presidents with steadily decreasing competence. So he’d be Dina White’s boss … “Big Jack” Weatherfield, the secretary of defense, the only African American in the cabinet. He was a former trial lawyer and, according to the whispering gallery, a left-handed nephew of one of the Dulles brothers, Allen or John Foster. There was an aging columnist whose picture Dan had seen in the papers since his childhood. A laughing woman surrounded by admiring men; he recognized her as a hot star.

“Halle Berry,” Blair whispered. She had a gaga smile he’d never seen before, and he realized she was starstruck. It made him grin. Who’d have thought?

She started to move, towing him behind her like an energetic tugboat with a balky barge. She introduced him to senators, floor assistants, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, the SecDef general counsel. He strained to remember names, but didn’t obsess. He remembered when he’d hated parties. This wasn’t so bad. When she excused herself to use the ladies’ room he stood absently swirling the ice-melt in his glass, watching Berry and wondering if he should go over and make pleasant.

“Why, is it Daniel V? I think it is. Is that you?”

He took a tighter grip on his OJ and tonic. He’d wondered when and where he’d run into her again. “Sandy. What a pleasant surprise.”

Sandy Cottrell had been in his postgraduate class at George Washington. There’d been something there, but not romance, despite Cottrell’s frictioning his crotch with her bare toes on the dais of the Ways and Means Committee hearing room. With her flushed cheeks — she sweated even when it was cold out — her over-the-edge manner, her spacy laugh, he’d always suspected she was on something stronger than the hand-rolled cigarettes she chain-smoked.

A decade had not been unkind. But she’d gone glossy, as if sealed over with some transparent lacquer. Her blond hair was expensively cut. Her perfume was even stronger than it had been years before. She wore a diamond-studded Rolex and was smoking, but now it was a filter tip.

He gestured at it. “What’s this? You used to smoke that ragweed stuff—”

“Douwe Egberts. But smoking hand rolls isn’t good for the image.”

“You never worried about your image before.”

“You’ve got to be the most unobservant son of a bitch I’ve ever met,” Cottrell deadpanned. He saw that, as usual, she gave the impression of being three sheets to the wind.

“Whatever happened to you and Professor F?” he asked her, trying to crack through the gloss.

“I know you thought I was fucking him for the grade. But that actually turned out okay. We even still like each other.”

“I never thought you were fucking him for a grade, Sandy.”

“What did you think I was fucking him for?”

“So, what are you doing now?”