Sedition (A Political Conspiracy Book 1) Page 13

  The EEOB, as it was known, was initially built after the Civil War to house the Departments of State, War, and Navy. Unlike most of the more conservative architecture that dotted the district, the EEOB was a flamboyant example of French Second Empire design. It took seventeen years to build.

  The room was in the Navy Department’s wing of the massive structure and carried a nautical theme. Carved within the railing that the Speaker so admired were dolphins and shells. Stars on the ceiling represented navigation. On those Minton tiles was a compass at the center of the room. The light hanging from the ceiling of the Indian Treaty Room was the only original fixture remaining in the entirety of the EEOB.

  The space had originally been a library and reception area, but in 1955 Dwight Eisenhower held the first ever televised presidential press conference from that very room.

  For decades it served as an extension of the White House, housing the Office of the Vice President among other key administration officials. It was refurbished in the mid-1980s and had since served as a room for meetings and receptions. Given its size, the Foreman administration felt it was the most appropriate location to discuss the details of the president’s procession, memorial, and burial.

  Attending the meeting with Foreman’s senior staff was the entire cabinet, the First Lady’s senior staff, and members of the Congressional Leadership. That group included Speaker Jackson, the House Majority Leader, the House Whip, the Senate Majority Leader, and the minority leaders for both houses of congress.

  Also present were several representatives of the Ceremonials division of the Office of the Chief of Protocol. The Ceremonials employees worked under the authority of the State Department. They were in charge of special events: inaugurations, joint sessions of Congress, and funerals.

  The large table would accommodate twenty-five people. The rest would have to stand. The room was filling quickly, and Felicia decided it was time to find her seat.

  She nodded at colleagues, shook some hands, and expressed condolences to those closest to President Foreman. The Speaker was doing her best to appear genuine. In reality, Felicia had no interest in attending this meeting.

  Her mood was still sour from learning that the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the merits of Blackmon’s case. Despite her attorneys’ repeated forewarning of that eventuality, she wasn’t emotionally prepared for the reality of it when they broke the official news.

  The Speaker was just leaving her office when her legal team found her in Statuary Hall. She didn’t lambaste them as she had on the terrace earlier in the day, but neither was she friendly. They assured her that they were preparing an outstanding case for the high court and that they knew they could win.

  She asked the young, follicle-challenged lawyer what he thought about the case. He was surprisingly positive. It was encouraging to the Speaker, but not mood-salvaging as she climbed into the back of her black Chevy Tahoe and rode to the EEOB.

  Trying her best not to sulk outwardly, she found a seat at the table and slid into the chair. To her left was Foreman’s Chief of Staff and to her right was an empty seat that she noticed was reserved for John Blackmon.

  “That man is the bane of my existence,” she mumbled under her breath. She caught the eye of the Secretary of Defense and forced a quick nod and smile. She looked around the room for Blackmon and didn’t notice him at first. After a group of men parted on the other side of the room, she saw him. His head and shoulder were bent to his left as he listened to a trailing aide. He wore a dark suit and white shirt that essentially matched the attire of every other man in the room.

  Brooks Brothers must have had a sale.

  On the table in front of each seat was a glass goblet. Each was filled with ice water and was sweating. Felicia used a small cloth napkin wrapped around the goblet’s stem to wipe it dry before taking a sip. As she did, she heard the clanging of a spoon.

  Across the table, a mile away it seemed, a man the Speaker didn’t recognize was holding a teaspoon in one hand and his goblet in the other. He was attempting to gain everyone’s attention. It worked; the loud rumbling of voices softened.

  “Everyone, please take your seats. We are ready to begin.” He clanged the glass again. “I know every soul here has a tight schedule, so let’s get on with the meeting, please. Take your seats.”

  Felicia watched Blackmon move toward his seat. As he neared, she turned away so as not to let him notice her gaze. She felt his left hand on her right shoulder.

  “Felicia,” he said cordially, “how are you?”

  “Fine, John. And you?”

  “Okay, considering the circumstances.” He pulled his hand from her shoulder and took his seat. “I know we’re all still in shock over Dexter’s death. This whole thing is just surreal.” He spoke softly enough for only her to hear him, smiling and waving at others across the table. “And this whole ordeal in court,” he continued as he pulled in his chair, “it’s so draining.”

  She said nothing.

  “I’m sure it’s been tough for you,” he said, baiting her. He adjusted his red satin power tie against his waist. “I know it’s been tough on me, so I can only imagine…” He let his false empathy hang.

  “You probably can’t imagine,” Felicia said. She leaned to the right from her hips, close enough to Blackmon so that she could whisper, “That would require the use of the right side of your brain, Mr. Secretary.”

  John Blackmon laughed without looking to his left. Instead he pulled his own sweating water glass to his lips and toasted the Speaker before taking a drink.

  “Good for you, Felicia,” he offered as he put his drink back on the table. “You still have some fight left in you.”

  Felicia rapped on the table with the knuckles on her right hand. It was balled into a fist. She said nothing, knowing that to engage Blackmon any further would only lead to an embarrassing scene. He was pushing her; she couldn’t allow herself to fall for it. She was saved by the man at the opposite end of the table, who still held the spoon in his hand.

  “Hello, all, my name is Phillip Taylor. I’m with the First Lady’s staff. I’ve been asked to be the timekeeper for this meeting. We’ve got two hours, so let’s get started.”

  Taylor was a tall, thin man who stood six and a half feet tall. He had a boyish face that belied his beltway experience. He held a clipboard and a stopwatch.

  The Speaker was relieved to know that the misery of the meeting was time limited. There were a million places she’d rather be. All of them were a long distance from Secretary Blackmon.

  The first part of the discussion dealt with security and road closures. The main disruption to traditional traffic would occur on Constitution Avenue. It would close the next evening to prepare for the following morning’s procession to the Capitol Rotunda.

  The route was relatively simple, in which Foreman’s coffin traveled the length of the National Mall. It would ride in a hearse from Thirty-Third and Constitution, just north of the Lincoln Memorial, to Sixteenth Street. There, the hearse would stop and the coffin would continue its trip to the other end of the Mall aboard a horse-drawn caisson. The caisson would consist of six horses, all of the same color, and three riders. A separate horse would carry the section from the Old Guard Caisson Platoon. One additional riderless horse would follow the casket. As the procession passed Fourth Street, twenty-one F-22 fighters would fly over in tribute to the commander in chief.

  Once in the Capitol Rotunda, hundreds would attend the televised memorial service. After the service, the flag-draped casket would remain for public viewing until the following morning, at which time it would leave for burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

  It was an extraordinarily short time for a president to lie in state. Reagan’s casket was available for viewing for thirty-four hours; President Ford’s casket was in the Capitol Rotunda for forty-eight hours. He also lay in repose outside of the House side of the Capitol as a tribute to his time in Congress. Of the roughly dozen presidents to lie in sta
te, Foreman was to be there for the shortest amount of time. Additionally, there was a break with tradition in that the president would not lie in repose at the White House.

  Typically, presidents who died while in office lay in repose in the East Room of the White House. That was not to happen. Foreman, a sitting president, was essentially receiving the procession of a former president. There was no explanation as to why, other than that the wishes of the Foreman family precluded it. Nobody in the meeting questioned the departure from protocol.

  A severe-looking woman from the Ceremonials division announced the various members of the cabinet who had speaking roles at the memorial service. The woman was dressed in black with a small red brooch at her collar. She had her yellow hair pulled tight in a bun against the back of her head. She appeared to Felicia as though she were plucked straight from the beaverboard of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The Speaker had seen the work in person at the Art Institute of Chicago during a campaign fundraising event for an Illinois senator several years earlier. She’d long wondered whether the artist intended to honor hardworking Midwesterners or poke fun at their stereotypically rigid morality.

  Felicia had spent time researching Wood after seeing the work in person, trying to find out his real intentions. She had no McCarthy-esque motive, but rather a real desire to understand Wood’s sense of things. Felicia, for all of her many faults and judgments of others, was one who loved loyalty. She considered patriotism the highest form of it and hoped Wood’s Gothic intended a conveyance of love of country and not a subtle mocking of it. She never figured it out definitively, though she long remembered what Wood said about the sum of his work, just before his death in 1942.

  “In making these paintings,” he admitted, “I had in mind something which I hope to convey to a fairly wide audience in America—the picture of a country rich in the arts of peace; a homely, lovable nation, infinitely worth any sacrifice necessary to its preservation.”

  “A homely, lovable nation worth any sacrifice necessary to its preservation,” she’d often repeated to herself while compromising and cajoling legislation into law.

  She sat in the Indian Treaty room, learning the details of the memorial, recalling that Wood once earned money by sketching promotional flyers for a mortuary. It was ironic that he should come to mind as she passively listened to presidential funeral arrangements.

  The gothic administrator told the room that Felicia was to begin the service with a short welcome address. She was also to end the ceremony with a brief thanks. Foreman’s speechwriters would provide her with a script from which she was told not to deviate.

  She felt good about the assignment. Upon hearing of it, Felicia subconsciously found herself liking the dour Ceremonial worker. She noticed the flattering, natural color in the woman’s cheeks and the pale blue of her eyes. But the brief affair was over when the woman revealed Senator Blackmon’s role. It was inconceivable and it incensed the Speaker. She felt slighted and snubbed.

  John Blackmon was the designated successor. Meaning, he would not attend the memorial service in the event that the unthinkable happened. His absence was to ensure governmental continuity. He was told to expect presidential-level security and that he would be taken to an undisclosed location until the end of the funeral service at Arlington. At the point that the majority of successors were no longer in the same location, his life would return to normal.

  It was a tactical decision without any political gamesmanship brought to bear. But Felicia took it as such. She viewed it as a message to the public, and to the Supreme Court, that he was the one worth keeping alive. He was the one needed to carry on in the event of mass casualties.

  It was difficult for Felicia to sit still. She was biting the inside of her lip, internalizing the perception that everyone in the room was staring at her.

  Blackmon, she learned, would be one of only two cabinet members not in attendance. The other was the Secretary of Energy. His absence irked her too. He’d already agreed to appear as a political analyst for one television network’s coverage of the service. Despite his reluctance, Foreman’s widow asked him to do it so as to help control the message. He was low on the list of succession, but Felicia was still irritated. She was beginning to believe there was some sort of conspiracy to stop her from becoming president.

  She tried not to look over at Blackmon; she could feel that he was looking at her. But she couldn’t help herself and slowly turned to look at him. His head was already turned in her direction, as she’d suspected. Blackmon leaned into her and spoke softly, so that nobody else could hear him.

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  He was such an ass.

  Chapter 26

  It was dusk when Matti slinked out of her cab in front of the Washington Post building on L Street between Fifteenth and Sixteenth. She’d taken the Red Line from Maryland to the Metro Center stop and then hitched a ride.

  Matti didn’t like driving into the District. She usually parked at a Metro station, rode mass transit into the city, and then walked everywhere she went. Tonight, in her three-inch heels and new dress, a cab was the better choice.

  She carefully stepped from the taxi onto the sidewalk. Her inexperience with uncomfortable shoes made her look comically similar to a newborn giraffe taking its first steps. Once she was standing, Matti gripped each side of her dress at the hips and gently inched the bunched fabric downward toward her knees. She unsnapped her black sequined clutch, pulled out a folded ten-dollar bill, and handed it to the driver.

  The Post was a half block from the reception hall where George Edwards’s new collection was featured. She walked to the entrance of the two-story concrete façade, noticing the red-vested valet assisting the chattering class out of Town Cars and Cadillac limousines. She was glad to have exited the cab out of their sight. This was not her crowd. She expected odd looks and judgments.

  She’d gotten a lot of those looks after her mother’s death. Cocaine. It was the red herring that had left her father and her alone.

  As a child, Matti never asked her father about the whispers she’d heard. She was too afraid to bring it up. Years later, however, the detective assigned to the case told her that there was cocaine in her mother’s bloodstream and in her nasal membranes. She also learned that the autopsy indicated her mother had used the drug multiple times. It was a piece to the puzzle for which Matti did not want to find a place.

  Was the drug related to her death? Did a dealer run her down? Did she owe someone money? Did her father know about the problem and keep it from his young daughter?

  Following her father’s rules of compliance and solitude had done nobody any good, except that it had instilled in Matti a drive to find answers, a need to separate the black from the white.

  Rules are there for a reason.

  Maybe she’d be better off obeying her supervisor’s order not to mingle. Maybe the rules were there for a reason. Matti struggled against her nature, ultimately pushing through it.

  Damn the rules.

  This was as good a time as any to take the leap and blur the lines.

  Matti let out a breath, turned back around, and walked past the doorman into the building. She remembered the clothing store pixie’s advice to hold her shoulders back and her neck up to elongate her body. Matti moved into the gathering crowd and worked it. She could feel the men and women watching her as she walked past them. It felt surprisingly good. The apprehension she’d felt just minutes before had evaporated. It wasn’t that she hadn’t come to realize how attractive others thought her to be; she’d just never felt comfortable embracing it.

  Strutting with uncharacteristic confidence, she walked to the bar at the far left end of the large open room. The floor was a black and white veined marble, the walls white plaster lined with Edwards’s digital sculptures.

  At the portable bar she ordered a ginger ale with ice and then turned to survey the room with more acuity. Most of the men were in what she imagined were their business suits
minus neckties. The women wore cocktail attire in muted tones or black. Matti estimated there were already about one hundred to one hundred twenty-five people in attendance. She looked for familiar faces and saw none.

  She scanned the room, observing the small groups gathered around various pieces on the walls. Some waved their arms and pointed with their wineglasses as they discussed the genius of the work. Others stood near the art but didn’t seem interested.

  From Matti’s position in the room, she couldn’t see any of the pieces clearly. Absent the conspirators, she decided to take a look at some of the art for herself. Hanging on the wall opposite the bar, at the far end of the room, was a piece that resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

  The Vitruvian Man was among the most recognizable drawings in the modern world. Drawn in 1487, it was da Vinci’s attempt to illustrate the relationship between man and nature, between science and religion. It depicted a nude male with his arms and legs extended at two different angles, superimposed upon one another. The man was within a circle within a square.

  From a distance, Matti couldn’t see the modifications Edwards chose to make, but as she approached the canvas, she saw the differences clearly. Where the man’s left legs should have been, there were none. They were amputated at the knees, wrapped in cloth. The man’s right arms, instead of being fully extended, were bent at the elbows. At two different angles, the arms and hands were placed in salute. On the man’s head, instead of a Renaissance mop of hair, there sat a helmet. On the helmet’s front there was the drawing of an American flag. The chin strap was undone and hung from the ears.

  The canvas was yellowed to mimic da Vinci’s work. Above and below the circle there was script, as there was adorning the original. But instead of the “mirror writing” that da Vinci employed to explain the mathematical proportion of man and architecture, Edwards wrote in Arabic. It appeared to Matti that the text was repeated multiple times: