BLACK PRESIDENT, Chapter 72 (2nd half).

CHAPTER EVENTY-TWO (2nd half)

The dinner of roast lamb was exceptional. Cissy could hear the sound of her teeth as they cut the tender meat for swallowing. Jackson sat silent as well, enjoying his meal. Both, it seemed, wanted to eat quickly and efficiently and return to the privacy of the upstairs apartment. Perhaps both parties wanted to bring an end to the “secret” matter. Would Cissy be able to speak about the identity switch without expressing anger and frustration? The whole thing – the need to even examine such a crazy scheme – made her ill. Why should someone – her husband in particular – need to protect himself from an army of assassins? If the world was such an ugly and dangerous place, especially in the grand seat of government, how could she expect life to continue on as normal? And what chances did their children have in that kind of a world? Maybe it would have been better if things had ended in 2012, like the shamans had predicted. Maybe they just had the date a little off because their life, what was fun and good about it, seemed to be ending anyway.

Cissy forked another piece of lamb into her mouth, just to buy a little more time before heading up for what would surely be a knock- down, drag-out confrontation. As she folded her napkin, pushed her chair back and rose from the table, she knew she’d have to ask her husband to quit the one job he’d worked his entire life to secure.

***

Attorney General of the United States, John Little, eased himself into bed after a long shower. Fran had beat him to the covers minutes before and held a book in her hands. It almost seemed like a movie prop since, to John, it didn’t appear like she was actually reading. He suspected that she just moved her eyes back and forth on the pages, turning to the next every so often to keep up appearances. Also, the light from the side table seemed unusually bright, but he said nothing about that. He doubted she had switched bulbs in the last half-hour.

John followed his usual procedure before sleeping, which was to read whatever newspapers he’d missed from that morning’s pile. This time it was the Washington Post. The headlines were mostly about his brother’s close call. There was a large photo of the White House exterior wall where the explosion had taken place, with several smaller images documenting interior wreckage, overturned furniture, scattered papers. An historical photograph of the Resolute desk was also included, taken back when the antique was given by Queen Victoria to then-President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880.

President Ruther – ford. The name reminded John of his stepfather Rudy. President Rudeworth. Both names seemed old, outdated, more nineteenth century than new millennium. For him, the names conjured up old steam locomotives coughing their way down the tracks, black smoke belching out from large, funneled stacks. He could imagine the onlookers, dressed in their heavy wool suits, stovepipe hats, women in corsets, horses tied to posts nearby, proper citizens avoiding the mud, keeping to the boardwalks with their high-laced shoes and spit-shined boots. Some thought those times were simpler, but John wasn’t all that sure about it.

Rudeworth. He’d been like a father to him and Jackson since Chicago. They’d been through a lot together. Rudy always there for their mother and them. Rudy and the twins do this, Rudy and the twins do that. Their makeshift family had stuck together. And they’d had some real fun too, as kids and adults! A lot of highs – the inauguration, fancy parlors, cute grandkids, good jobs in government, basically all members of the family experiencing prosperity. But it was apparent that Rudy had been really shaken up at the basement meeting. John had seen it in his eyes. He could tell that Rudy had instantly analyzed the problem, all edges of it, just as he had. And that’s when he’d become scared, and more then he’d expected. Both he and Rudy had realized almost simultaneously that there was no good answer. All the possible scenarios were either too risky or fatal.

If Jackson was killed in some future assassination attempt, and John didn’t fill in, play the Presidential part perfectly, the bad guys would grab power and change America for generations. But if he did follow Jackson’s plan, act the role, he’d be separated from his wife and kids, possibly forever. Everyone’s lives were set for change, and no amount of wealth or power, it seemed, could stop it.

The old newspaper photo had made him think how much easier such a switch of identity would have been back then, with few photographers roaming around. In the middle of his musings John became suddenly aware of his wife’s broad face glaring at him from atop her feather pillow.

“What?” exclaimed John, already finding himself on the defensive. Fran had a look crossed between anger and frustration.

“You know what,” said Fran, tears dripping from her eyelids each time she blinked. “This situation is impossible. I hardly know where to start talking about it. So preposterous. So horrible!”

“You’re so mad, though, that...” John couldn’t defend himself at all. He had suddenly lost all ability to communicate, instantly reverting back to his non-verbal self.

“Wouldn’t you be?” Fran glanced back down at her closed book. She hadn’t been able to concentrate for even a page. John said nothing. Could their bedroom be bugged? How dangerous were their lives, even before a switch? Seconds later, compressing a thick pillow as she swiveled toward him, she confronted her husband again, her face filled with determination.

“I’m going to lose you, my kids are going to lose their father, and the world is going to lose two men who tried to make America a better place. And that’s just too much to bear.” With a gulp of air, she finished up:

“I’m ready to throw in the towel. You both should immediately quit your jobs and save yourselves and your families.

“There. I’ve said it!”

John shouldn’t have been surprised by his wife’s fury, but he was. Women could always cut through the crap, and that had always been a characteristic he respected. In fact, that was why he had initially been attracted to Fran, and a big reason why he’d finally proposed marriage. He’d recognized that she was special; a no-bullshit person, lovely and smart and kind. How could he fight that now?

“I’m so sorry, honey,” said John, finally responding properly. “If I could change anything I would. You know that. But for now, please talk softer. Actually could we whisper? OK? We need to keep this more private.”

He could see that Fran was still extremely agitated. What he mainly wanted to do, had to do, was say the right word or combination of words to soften the face of the woman he loved. The woman he had married had temporarily vanished.

***

Jackson Little was the most powerful man on planet Earth, leader of the free world. But he was frightened of his wife. Cissy had remained so completely still during their dinner together that he had become unnerved. Yes, she ate her food and took an occasional drink of beverage, but she wasn’t really there. And he hadn’t spoken either. What could he say that wouldn’t have encouraged an outburst? Back in the bedroom, at almost the second he flipped open the covers, she attacked.

“You know I’ll never agree to the switch.”

In an instant she had cut right through all the plans and thoughts he had made. She wasn’t going to sugar-coat her opinion about the brothers changing identity, pulling some sort of hyper-Hollywood movie trick in their real life. If the threat of assassination was that high then she figured he needed to quit immediately, the next day, and remove the threat from their family.

As she waited for Jackson’s response, she wondered how the Robert Kennedy assassination had affected his ten children. Nine or ten. In any case, a lot of children. She promised herself that she’d do a Google search under ‘Robert Kennedy; damaged kids’ if the bedroom discussion didn’t succeed. The plan was preposterous.

Jackson remained silent as long as he could manage, giving a faint-hearted tug to the cover blanket, moving it up a little toward the headboard to stall for time. He knew he had a real problem. Given her druthers, his wife would strip him of the creative solution he and his brother had agreed on. Regardless of the fact that Cissy was right – the plan was preposterous – he knew it might have to be implemented, regardless of what was said that evening. He knew he’d lie to his wife to insure that certain bad men were kept out of power in American government.

Three weeks earlier his deep-cover contact, Jim Caradine, as much a knowledgeable source as “Deep Throat,” had set him straight when they’d met clandestinely.

“Jackson, you need to know that they’ve gotten to your Vice- President,” had been the first words out of Caradine’s mouth. Jim was an old-school spook, a CIA man close to retirement age, who had somehow survived the internal politics of his agency. As he’d told Jackson at earlier meetings, a faction of CIA had been against the Jackson Little Presidency from Day-One. And he stressed that to survive, Jackson needed to be very aware of that ever-growing dissatisfaction.

The CIA, Caradine had explained stone-faced, had put JFK out of business. And Jackson had not asked for further clarification. But he needed to hear the truth regarding himself, and took his shot.

“Is the CIA behind the attempts on my life?” The elephant was in the room.

“Jim?”

“I don’t answer questions,” said Caradine, “when someone already knows the answer.”

Jackson could only nod. He couldn’t help seeing the irony of it all. Were conspiracy theorists actually correct about much of their country’s secret history? Was the public, and himself, so gullible as to gloss over undisputed proof? Why did some people still buy the media’s version of JFK’s “single gunman” and all the rest? Didn’t anyone care that it was virtually impossible to cock and fire three accurate shots from an antique, WWII, bolt-action Italian rifle, hitting anything, much less twice striking a moving target the size of a grapefruit 120 feet away, in under six seconds? It was well documented that the FBI and army tests showed that the particular rifle Oswald supposedly fired could not possibly have delivered that level of accuracy, from any known sharpshooter on the planet.

The room remained silent until Jackson added his two cents.

“And they’re a pretty good shot, aren’t they?”

“Yep. Afraid so, old friend. Luckily for you, they’ve been pretty sloppy so far.”
The pause was short. Then Caradine added, “But you’ll find that they’re quick learners and will get whatever job done they need to, especially if it’s kept on the ‘high-priority’ shelf. So please consider how short your time is, to make a switch in something!”

Caradine had spelled it out, just as Feldman’s Deep Throat would have done. Jackson Little was a dead man walking. ‘Switch something‘ had been the key phrase for his survival. That’s when the twin-switch idea had hit.

“Nothing to say?” said Cissy, further aggravated by her husband’s prolonged silence. She took a sip of water from her bedside glass and trained her gaze back on her husband.

“I don’t want to quit and I certainly don’t want to die either,” said Jackson. It felt like a noose was tightening.

For some reason, Cissy was reminded of a day in class back at Brown in the mid-1980s, just before she and Jackson had became lovers. Professor Sansome had given a lecture on legal decisions that fell in the category of “between a rock and hard place.” He had used as example the 1962 dispute between Pakistan and India two decades earlier, when the countries had argued over the exact demarcation of their border. India was unhappy with Pakistan’s desire to run the division through the mountain peaks of Pir Panjal, north of Jammu. “Jammu” had been a wonderful word for Sansome to roll off his tongue and it was obvious he’d repeated it several more times than was warranted by the discussion. But the real kicker to Sansome’s showboat lecture, beyond his delight in pronouncing in precise dialect the names of India’s Riasi districts – Mirpur and Punch – which had opposed the demarcation, had been his exclamation of how the negotiations had collapsed into armed conflict six months later over a single strand of hair. The theft of a single strand from a shrine in Hazratbal, supposedly from the head of the prophet Muhammad, had turned the entire proceeding upside down.

Cissy and fellow students, Jackson Little included, had been encouraged to memorize all the foreign names and pertinent dates, after Sansome announced an upcoming quiz on the subject. But what she and Jackson had joked about afterwards, after making love that weekend, was that a single strand of hair could cause so much disturbance. One of them had wisecracked about “a hair trigger!” She had remembered jerking a strand out of Jackson’s head and waving it teasingly before his eyes. And she even remembered her prophetic words, roughly something like, “When you’re famous, I’ll donate this to the Little shrine!”

Cissy embraced the memory and then got an idea. Maybe it could jog her husband back to his senses.

“Hair of Hazratbal!”

“What? Why you – ”

Cissy grinned mischievously.

“Hey! That’s unfair! Jackson smiled broadly. “You’re playing dirty!” He broke out in a big laugh as the memory grabbed hold. Suddenly all the tension of the discussion, and the last few days leading up it, was blown away. The delight on his wife’s face – a sexy look at that – had brought him back to college days, falling in love and bedding down with the prettiest girl in class.

“Unfair!” repeated Jackson, as he grabbed Cissy, kissed her hard, and removed her undergarments as quickly as possible.

***

Rudy sat helpless as his wife continued to sob. He searched his mind for the right word to plug the leak, halt the torrent of emotion, but could only come up short. The situation made him hungry for a direct solution, like the kind he’d experienced in Vietnam. Firepower. He wanted to blow the villains away. But who were they? Where were they? And how could he track them down? What if they were right there, right in the building? Hadn’t he heard rumors that JFK was killed by his own CIA? Was this any different?

Every so often Sarah would stop crying and release a word or two, then start again.

“No!
“I just can’t –

“Can't – take it. “My sons –
“Blame me!
“Don’t deserve to – Please God!”

“We have to stop this!

Rudy knew better than to speak. Stop the twins from switching? He wasn’t sure what Sarah meant exactly. Stop the assassins? Pretty high order. Stop her boys being in public service? Sure. Get them to both quit their jobs and walk away. Highly unlikely. He doubted whether either one was ready to turn the government over to Tea Parties or worse. All the funding for the underprivileged masses would be shut off immediately, black neighborhoods turned into free-for-all slums, children of color, other poor destined to be uneducated and unsafe. The America they knew and loved was hanging by a thread. If the brothers left their posts it would be the end of any hope for positive change. He knew it, and they knew it.

“I want my sons back!” Sarah’s full-sentence declaration suddenly shocked Rudy out of daydream. “Please Rudy. Please! THEY’RE NOT KENNEDY!”

Her loud plea snapped Rudy into full alert. He realized his wife was again connecting the dots back to her rape by JFK. He’d heard it all before – her guilt that she hadn’t fought him off, her anger that she’d been so passive, her vow to never again stand helplessly by. She was now re-circulating her rage at the new and difficult situation.

“RUDEWORTH!”

My god, thought Rudy, she just used my formal name! Not since their wedding day had she bothered to call him anything but his nickname!

“We have to do something!” exclaimed Sarah, a cold look coming off her tear-smeared face. “And I don’t care if some people have to die, to protect my kids.”

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