True Allegiance

The Work Freedom Program.

Prescott’s Work Freedom Program.

Everyone recognized the value of freedom. But what did that mean other than the right to a job? Freedom meant nothing if you couldn’t put bread in your children’s mouths at night. And America was a country of workers. Freedom was work, and work was freedom. Work Freedom. Simple. Easy. Repeatable.

Genius.

It was the program that could save America. More than that, it was the program that could save Mark Prescott’s presidency, and put him in the pantheon of American greats.

Prescott didn’t know what the WFP would entail, but it would have to be big. He had his advisors draw it up. It looked like a cross between FDR’s Works Progress Administration and the child tax credit. The government would raise taxes on certain corporations—those were indirect taxes that wouldn’t lose Prescott votes, particularly with anticorporate sentiment at fever pitch—and then offer tax incentives to other corporations that hired more employees. Meanwhile, for those who couldn’t get a job, the government would offer direct hiring in certain key industries: the automobile industry, the banking industry. All the industries the government had either nationalized or heavily regulated in the aftermath of the stock market crash. The program could be expanded by executive fiat, too, so if the economy stagnated, he could always move to correct market failures.

It would be expensive. Massively expensive.

And now his chief of staff, Tommy Bradley, was telling him they couldn’t afford it.

“Don’t you tell me we can’t afford it!” insisted Prescott. “We can’t not afford it. Do you understand? This country rides on the ability of its people to work. And no one is hiring. No one. What am I supposed to do about it if we can’t put through this program?”

Bradley stood silent. Then, after a pause, he noted softly, “Mr. President, the Treasury is empty.”

“Don’t you see, goddamn it?” Prescott yelled. “That’s why we need it so bad. We have no money because we have no jobs. We need jobs in order to create wealth. A happy population, a working population, is a population that boosts our economy.”

Bradley nodded curtly. Then he reiterated, more slowly for the three-year-old, “We don’t have the money.”

“So we raise it.”

Bradley let that sink in. Then he responded. “From whom?” The European Union had descended into chaos several years beforehand as a result of their debt problems. They weren’t lending—not after the Greek collapse, the Spanish collapse, the Italian collapse. Russia couldn’t be trusted. Nobody else had that kind of cash. Well, almost nobody.

“China,” said Prescott.

It was the right answer, and Bradley knew it. And he knew the president wouldn’t budge on this Work Freedom Program. It was his baby. Anyway, who was Bradley to question him? Maybe Prescott wasn’t the brightest guy in politics, but he was one of the cleverest. How else had he risen to the presidency from relative obscurity in a matter of a few years? How else had he beaten a well-established military hero despite a lightweight résumé?

Prescott was Bradley’s man, and Bradley knew it.

“I’ll set up the call for later today.”

The president nodded. Then he smiled, rose from his desk, and clasped Bradley on the shoulder. “Tommy,” he said seriously, “tomorrow we’re going to make history. All we need is the money. Don’t let me down.”

Bradley took a deep breath. “I won’t, Mr. President.”

Prescott had always enjoyed this part of the process—the part where a pretty girl hovered over him with a makeup brush and her palette spread before her. He could finally relax. Everything would be on the teleprompter. And nobody knew how to read from a teleprompter like Mark Prescott.

Prescott smiled wryly as Tommy hovered around the set like a mother hen. Tommy had done yeoman’s work. This morning, he had spent two hours on the phone with the Chinese government, trying to convince them to buy more US debt. He’d achieved his purpose. And it had been surprisingly easy. Shockingly easy, actually.

All that was left was to ram through the legislation.

Which is where the camera came in. Republicans in Congress, and some Democrats from red states, were skeptical of the plan. They’d cave eventually, Prescott knew—they always did. They just needed a push. A good, hard push.

“Mr. President,” said Bradley, “you’re on in two.”

Bradley shooed away the makeup artist, a hot number in her mid-twenties, exactly the kind of girl Prescott’s wife hated. As Bradley was about to push her out the door of the Oval Office, Prescott laughed. “Tommy, just calm down. We’ve done this a thousand times,” he said. “Let the young lady stay.” Then he winked at her. She fluttered her eyelashes.