Protect and Defend (63 page)

“If I decide that my presidency requires a bargain with the devil, I’ll make it on my own.
I’ve
earned that right, goddammit—
I
won this job, not you. No matter what you think.” Kerry’s voice turned chill. “You’ll resign when it serves my interests. But right now that would draw too much attention, and I’ve got some serious business to attend to. I am, as you say, the President. So you’ll play the loyal soldier until
I
tell you to go.”

Still sitting, Clayton stared up at him. Though a wounded resentment flashed in his eyes, he did not protest. “Will you tell her what you suspect?” he asked.

Kerry crossed his arms. “No,” he said softly. “As you point out, that wouldn’t be terribly helpful, would it. After all, I’ve got a nomination to save.”

“How did it go?” the President asked.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Caroline groped for words. “Hard,” she said at last. “Inexpressibly hard.”

“Will she be all right?”

“In what sense?”

There was silence. “I’m sorry this happened,” the President said at last. “But I hope you’ll stand with me. If this didn’t disqualify you before, it can’t now. I want you on the Court, and it’s time to draw a line.”

Silent, Caroline reflected on Brett’s final words. “I’ll probably lose,” she said at last. “But that’s all they can do to me, isn’t it. I’ve written my opinion, and they’ve exposed my daughter. There’s nothing left to fear.”

Again, the President was quiet. “You’ll need to put out a
statement,” he told her. “Brief, and dignified. I’ll get Clayton on the line.”

“M
ASTERS
A
DMITS
to Secret Daughter,” the
Times
headlined the next day. But such was the speed of events that, by mid-morning, two cable news networks were conducting instant polls, Macdonald Gage’s office had been flooded with faxes and e-mails, and Gage himself was struggling to craft a response between incessant calls from senators, reporters, and supporters across the country. In self-defense, he was letting his phone ring through, though its constant jangling made him feel more harried.

“It’s blown the dome off the Capitol,” Gage complained to Mace Taylor. “My people are scrambling for solid ground, and that sonofabitch Palmer has known from the beginning.”

Taylor looked up from Gage’s draft statement, riddled with handwritten deletions and corrections. “So now it’s time.”

Gage did not respond. Instead he asked, “Where did this come from?”

Gage watched the calculation flicker in Taylor’s eyes; knowledge was power and, even with Gage, Taylor did not care to divulge the breadth of his clients’ activities or, conversely, that their machinations had any limits. At length, the lobbyist answered, “Not from us, I don’t believe. Not from anyone on Palmer’s committee, either. Our friend utilized the greenhouse technique—keep us all in the dark, and feed us shit. Him and Kilcannon, a cozy little conspiracy.”

There was enough bitterness in Taylor’s denial of complicity to carry the ring of truth. “Chad sure wouldn’t leak this,” Gage said flatly. “Now that it’s out, some of our party
colleagues want to cut his nuts off. Not to mention our supporters.”

The telephone rang again. Thoughtful, Taylor squinted at Gage’s favorite photograph—a much younger Gage as a freshman congressman, looking awestruck in the presence of Ronald Reagan. “What about Kilcannon?” he asked. “One of his people leaks it to the
Times
, which has to keep their sources confidential. Then Kilcannon attacks ‘the forces of intolerance.’”

Gage smiled in sour amusement. “That,” he said, “would be the act of a true professional, and a total prick. Float this, then blame us by implication—Palmer, too. And no one can ever prove it.”

“
That
,” Taylor echoed, “is why it’s the perfect play. He’s reserving time on all four networks—nine o’clock tonight.” Glancing toward the pile of faxes and e-mails stacked on Gage’s desk, Taylor asked, “What are you hearing?”

“It’s all over the map. Some say she’s the apotheosis of the sixties—self-indulgence, illegitimacy, moral flexibility. Some others say she did what unwed mothers are supposed to do.” Once more, a bilious humor tugged at one corner of Gage’s mouth. “A couple of folks reminded me that Masters did the same as
my
birth mother, God rest her anonymous soul. Of course, that was back before
Roe v. Wade
, when she couldn’t just go to an abortion clinic and have me sucked out with a vacuum hose …”

“Or,” Taylor interrupted, “tear you to pieces if you got too big to murder so efficiently. I know for a fact the Christian Commitment isn’t confused, and the other committed pro-life groups won’t be either. Same with the NRA, and everyone who hates her on campaign finance reform …”

“I know all that,” Gage said with impatience. “So here’s what we have to say. Masters did the decent thing
after
she got pregnant—which, of course, we acknowledge. But pregnancy outside marriage is the total opposite of the message we want to send our young people. We can’t turn around and
reward
her for it by making her Chief Justice.”

Gage picked up the draft statement, brandishing it like a weapon. “But,” he continued, “we have to find the right way to say something more: she’s a woman with secrets, who swapped a child for her career—then
lied
about it. She
lied
,
and Kilcannon—and Palmer, if he doesn’t get out of the fucking way—covered up for her. This isn’t about human frailty, or personal privacy. It’s about judicial
integrity
.”

“That’s all fine,” Taylor said. “But you need more hearings, time to build the case. You need a parade of law professors saying what she did was perjury. That way we’re not just some right-wing moralists.

“We get some editorials going, sway opinion. And we keep looking into who she really is. There’s nothing about getting pregnant thirty years ago that proves she doesn’t like girls better. I mean, why do women like her and Dash flock to San Francisco? For the weather?”

“For the sisterhood,” Gage said with sarcasm. “You’re right about hearings. It’s time to continue my little chat with Senator Palmer …”

“It’s time,” Taylor said trenchantly, “to drop the daughter on him.”

At once Gage’s thoughts slowed. “That’s radioactive,” he cautioned. “I can’t get within five miles of it.”

“You don’t need to. All you need is to be prepared.” Taylor’s voice was emotionless. “His own kid’s abortion turns Palmer from the protector of privacy into a pious hypocrite. At least Masters didn’t abort
her
baby—as soon as
his
daughter gets pregnant, all his alleged pro-life beliefs mean nothing.

“He’d be done for, Mac—through in presidential politics, and a eunuch on the committee. Completely out of your way.” His tone took on an unwonted softness, the lilt of pleasure. “A shell, reduced to begging the good folks of Ohio to keep his job.”

Silent, Gage stared past him. He despised Chad Palmer, but Taylor relished this too much—the cycle of destruction, once commenced, was not easily controlled.

Taylor’s voice broke his thoughts. “
Look
at him,” he said. “Just look at him.”

Glancing up, Gage saw Chad Palmer on CNN, facing a cluster of reporters in the Capitol rotunda. Taylor turned up the volume.

Palmer’s clear blue eyes conveyed candor and sincerity. “Throughout the morning,” he began, “I’ve been asked a single question: ‘Did you know?’”

The reporters fell silent. Pausing, Palmer looked into the camera. “Yes,” he said simply. “I knew.

“Twenty-seven years ago, Caroline Masters made a private decision: to have a child. Well before the hearings, she acknowledged that in confidence. I admired her honesty, and the decision itself—a commitment to life. And part of that commitment was to protect a daughter who grew up in a secure two-parent family, unaware of the circumstances of her birth.

“In Judge Masters’s place, I might have decided otherwise. But Judge Masters was wholly candid with me. And what she wrote on the disclosure form was not only intended to spare her daughter needless hurt, but was, quite literally, true: as a matter of law, this young woman is who she was raised to be—her niece …”

“I’d love to see
that
genealogy,” Taylor interjected mordantly. “Not a tree, but a circle …”

“There are good reasons to oppose Judge Masters,” Palmer continued. “On the basis of the Tierney decision,
I
oppose her.” Pausing, Palmer raised his head, speaking slowly and emphatically. “But for any who believe she should have risked wounding her own daughter, do not blame her. Blame
me
.”

“Mac,” Taylor said in a low voice, “I’m tired of his heroics. This piece of phony candor makes me vomit. He held out on you, and now the press will drool all over him, like always— America’s last honest man. And we know his entire act is bogus.

“We’ve known for years—we’ve got the form; we’ve got the daughter’s drugged-out boyfriend. It’s time to pull the trigger.”

Gage felt temptation course through him: the vision of a swift and startling end to all of these unflattering comparisons—Mac Gage, the soulless pragmatist; Chad Palmer, the hero of matchless character. How pleasant it would be to escape the cringing feeling that, whatever his own talents, he had never been tested as Chad Palmer had. But Gage’s own self-knowledge went deep, and he paused at another queasy sensation, remembering the morning he had awakened to find the
last
Majority Leader linked to a sixteen-year-old prostitute, the path to leadership open before him. And knew at once—though Taylor had never acknowledged this
directly—that he owed his rival’s ruin to Mace Taylor.
Knew
that, and then had accepted Taylor’s support, a tacit bargain Taylor never mentioned, and would never forget.

“Mace,” Gage said coldly, “I’ll handle Palmer in my own way, in my own time. He can be as self-righteous as he wants on CNN, but he cannot—and I mean flat cannot—oppose new hearings now.”

Frustrated, Taylor jabbed his finger at the television. “
Look
at that, goddammit. He’s hanging out a mile …”

“So leave him there.” Gage’s voice brooked little argument. “You can always get him later. For
now
, he can front for us. A much-needed lesson in humility.”

As night fell, Sarah Dash looked up from the scraps of prior briefs, scattered beside her on the living room couch, which she was cobbling together for the Supreme Court.

Even by her recent standards, the last forty-eight hours were devastating. They had begun with Justice Kelly’s stay of Mary Ann’s abortion; since then, emotionally exhausted, Mary Ann had remained in her darkened bedroom, trying to avoid a premature delivery induced by stress. Now an Internet columnist named Charlie Trask had made the first of several similar inquiries, this one by e-mail: he was aware, Sarah read on her screen, that she and Caroline Masters were lovers, and hoped she would use his column to humanize their relationship. Sickened, Sarah retreated to her apartment: it was there that she learned with astonishment that Caroline’s niece—the striking young woman in the photograph— was, in fact, her daughter. Amidst all this, she had to draft the opposition to Martin Tierney’s petition for a full Supreme Court reversal of Caroline’s ruling.

She had little time to ponder the deeper mysteries of Caroline Masters, a woman whom Sarah once had flattered herself she knew, or to vent her own outrage at being used to smear Caroline for the Tierney decision. But she doubted that they would—or could—ever be friends again.

One emotion was clear to Sarah: a deep loathing of all that public life had become. Yet the unfolding spectacle of the Masters fight had a terrible fascination, combining the savagery of modern politics—in a time when multiple media fought for every titillating scrap of news—with the
inexorable corrosion of privacy. Twenty-four hours ago, Sarah surmised, some right-wing operative had decided to ruin Caroline Masters. In rapid succession the merciless spotlight had moved from Caroline to Palmer to Macdonald Gage—who, moments before, had declared Caroline Masters unfit to be Chief Justice—to President Kilcannon, who now must answer.

Reaching for her remote, Sarah turned up the volume.

Minutes later, the door to the guest bedroom opened. “Did something happen?” Mary Ann Tierney asked.

Sarah looked up at her—pallid, her belly distended, her eyes bright and a little feverish. It was hard to accept that, less than two months ago, this girl had appeared at the clinic, setting in motion all that was about to take place.

“It’s the President,” Sarah said, and then Kerry Kilcannon materialized on her screen.

M
OMENTS FROM
commencing his speech, Kerry Kilcannon gazed into the lens of the camera.

He disliked this sense of isolation; he was at his best when he could see faces, feed off the reactions of a crowd. Even from the Oval Office, speaking to a piece of glass felt artificial.

But then, so did he. His passion to defend Caroline Masters—while genuine—was eroded by his knowledge that the latest damage to her had originated in the White House, and his cynicism in letting others take the blame. Still, the damage to his sense of self went deeper yet. For seventeen years, he had taken for granted Clayton’s absolute loyalty; even amidst the maneuvering of politics, the self-serving and slippery alliances, this had been a constant, the standard by which he had always defined friendship. For all that people
were drawn to him, the essential Kerry Kilcannon was a solitary man—his love and trust, when given, were profound, but they were given to few. That was what hurt.

Weeks ago, he remembered, Lara had asked if he felt the loneliness of power. Then, he had answered lightly. Now the Masters nomination—the stakes, the risks, the self-doubt, the playing God with others’ lives, the breach with Clayton— would have made his response far different.

But there was little time for self-reflection. He had wanted this job, and now there were millions who relied on him to do it. That he was right—about Caroline Masters, about the Tierney case, about the politics of scandal—he believed to his core. He was equally convinced that he, not Macdonald Gage, spoke to the better nature of his countrymen. So, as seconds passed, he called on the trick of imagination which always served when he could not see his audience: to envision a face, or faces, to whom—or for whom—he spoke.