Power Play. Gavin Esler
are elected every four years, but Congressional elections take place every two years, and in the ‘mid-terms’ all of the House and a third of the Senate is up for re-election.
‘Arlo Luntz says the polls look bad and that Bobby Black is to blame. Vice is very unpopular, Arlo says. A vote-loser. And the Democrats are claiming he was at the heart of the corruption in the Iraq contracts. They say there were kickbacks from Goldcrest and Warburton to the Carr campaign. But even under a flaky liberal like Speaker Betty Furedi, no Democrat will ever impeach President Carr, no matter what he does wrong, if they know he will be succeeded by President Black.’
I must have looked stunned at this impeachment talk. ‘Theo Carr hasn’t done something really bad, has he?’
‘It’s a joke, Alex,’ Kristina laughed, and I felt her hand gently on my arm. She paused for a moment and scowled. ‘Kind of.’
I laughed too, as much at my own inadequacies as at her humour. She poured me a fresh black coffee. I always had gossip to trade, and Kristina usually listened more than she spoke, but that morning it was like some kind of therapy for her to get it all out.
‘Luntz told me he advised the President to make sure Bobby Black goes to Scotland on your shooting trip in the run-up to the mid-terms,’ Kristina told me. ‘Says the further Vice is away from the campaign, the better. I even think Arlo wants the President to drop Bobby Black from his own re-election ticket, but that’s real tricky.’
For me this was all heady stuff. Knowing who was up and who was down at the White House was a key part of my job. I had some gossip of my own to trade.
‘Vice enjoys being thought of as the President’s Dark Side,’ I said. ‘Did you know that?’ Kristina looked at me, stunned. ‘What do you mean, enjoys?’
‘Johnny Lee Ironside told me. We have a few beers from time to time. We talk.’
I had mentioned the Congressional hearings into the Iraq contracts to Johnny Lee. The Vice-President had been described in all kinds of ways, usually beginning with the prefix ‘Un-’–uncooperative, unforthcoming, unreliable, unwilling to appear before the Joint House and Senate Investigative Committee, and then–when he was subpoenaed and had no choice but to appear, he pleaded executive privilege, refusing to say on what basis the contracts had been awarded to Warburton, except that it was a ‘national security matter’. He was declared uncommunicative and unhelpful.
‘That shit makes his goddamn day,’ Johnny Lee laughed. He told me the Vice-President routinely asked his staff to search out any negative comments in newspapers that suggested he represented President Carr’s ‘Dark Side’, so he could have the best ones framed for his Ego Wall. An ‘Ego Wall’ is the wall in the private office of any Washington politician dedicated to the qualifications and citations that mean the most to the Big Political Beast–military honours, photographs showing the Big Beast shaking hands with a past president, a world leader or Hollywood movie star, plus university degrees and military citations.
‘You want to put the Boss in a good mood,’ Johnny Lee Ironside had told me, ‘tell him some pinko Democrat bedwetter like Hurd or Furedi called him a mean SOB: that’ll do it. The sun comes out all over Planet Black.’ Johnny Lee giggled like a schoolboy. ‘Ma-aaan, he Baaa-aaaad!’
Kristina looked at me, fascinated, as if I was reporting on a new species of ape from the African jungle or an alien civilization discovered on a distant planet.
‘Un-fucking-believable,’ was all she said. Then she traded one further important piece of insider gossip. She handed me a draft speech that Vice-President Black was about to deliver at the US Naval College at Annapolis, Maryland, to a class of midshipmen. I pushed my scrambled egg to one side and started to read.
‘The next stage in Spartacus,’ Kristina suggested.
‘All options remain open’, the Vice-President was scheduled to say, ‘when dealing with Iran.’ In case journalists were too stupid to get the point, he added, ‘Including military options. Neutrality on Iran’s nuclear programme is immoral. The programme itself is immoral. It has to be stopped. It is a threat to Israel, to other countries in the region, and to world peace. An Iranian regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons is a nightmare for the entire world. The administration of President Theo Carr will end the nightmare. We will do so by all necessary means.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. ‘All necessary means’ is the phrase diplomats use when they want to threaten a war. ‘We need to tone this down.’
Kristina nodded.
‘He’s getting ahead of where the President is,’ she said. ‘Vice says that unless we are prepared to at least threaten an attack, the Iranians will not take us seriously, and the Israelis will go ahead anyway, with extreme prejudice.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘The Israelis would need to fly through Jordanian and Iraqi airspace. If you didn’t want them to do so, they couldn’t.’
Kristina shook her head impatiently. ‘That’s not my point. Once Vice makes public any kind of threat against Iran, we will end up going to war. I know how he operates. He will argue that our credibility is at stake and we have to follow through. It’s like World War One–you have train timetables and you start mobilizing your soldiers and in the end you can’t stop the war even if you want to. But that’s not the worst. The Israelis are letting it be known that the bunker-busters that we supplied them cannot get the job done.’
Bunker-busters are bombs or missiles capable of causing an explosion a long way underground.
‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘which is why negotiations are the only way …’
She interrupted again, very impatiently. ‘Which is why there are those within the Israeli government who are talking about Canned Sunshine.’ My jaw dropped. ‘Canned Sunshine’ is a military expression for a nuclear bomb. ‘They are calling for nuclear pre-emption.’
‘Nuclear pre-emption?’ I blurted out. ‘That’s … that’s like committing suicide because you fear dying. They couldn’t possibly drop a nuke …’ She waved me quiet.
‘Vice says Spartacus applies to states as well as to individuals, and if ever a regime needed to be crucified, it’s the Iranians. He wants to hit them after the mid-terms. Or to get the Israelis to do it.’
‘Oh, fuck,’ I said.
‘And if we do go in, we will call on all possible support from all our allies. Which means you, Alex.’
I didn’t feel like eating breakfast any more. I drank my coffee and left to return to the embassy, where I called Downing Street immediately on the secure line.
‘How do we feel about being sucked into war with Iran?’ I said to Andy Carnwath.
‘What the fuck do you mean, Alex?’
I explained about Canned Sunshine. For once Andy Carnwath could not think of any expletives appropriate to the information.
Later that night, around midnight, I was lying on my bed reading a book, sipping whisky and water and listening to a CD of Charlie Parker. Kristina called me on my private cellphone.
‘You’re up late,’ I said.
‘You got time to talk?’
‘Of course.’
I pushed the book I was reading to one side. It was called Sleepwalking to Hell, a recently published history of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, written by Kristina’s former lover, the University of California history professor Stephen Haddon. A liberal, I guessed, with a strong libertarian streak. Haddon argued that the transition from a sophisticated and prosperous Weimar democracy to a Nazi dictatorship was not one catastrophic leap. It was a series of little steps.
Any one of these steps might seem sensible by itself because the German people wanted to escape Bolshevism, anarchy, and economic collapse, but taken