The Candidate (40 page)

MIKE UPLOADED the video onto his laptop and emailed it to Lauren who posted it on the
Horse Race
twenty minutes later. The footage spread over the web like a virus. Within three hours it was on the cable news shows and the front page of the
New York Times.

Mike sat in a dingy motel room and watched it all unfold. He took no pleasure in the squawking commentators and talking heads who shouted at each other over the faux protestations of the news anchors. He gained nothing from the now endlessly updated blog posts and news stories. Eventually, and with no ceremony, he switched off the TV and closed his laptop. A sense of peace invaded the room and he lay back on the bed. He stared at the ceiling with his hands folded behind his head. His phone was by his side. He waited for the call. He knew it was coming. But to his surprise she did not sound angry.

“
Feet pue tan
, Mike. You did it,” Dee said.

She actually sounded impressed. A little stunned, but calm. “You’ve killed the campaign. You’ve brought down the candidate. You know that, right?”

“I know, Dee. I’m sorry. But you told me once this was the only way that I could end it.”

“What?” Dee said.

“A sex scandal, Dee,” Mike said. “You said it was always sex scandals that brought down people. You can kill the innocent for your country. You can torture someone and call it your patriotic duty. But when you father a daughter out of wedlock, that’s when we’ve had enough.”

Dee gave a sharp laugh. Then another longer one. There was genuine mirth there.

“Jesus, Mike. I taught you too well.”

“Where are you, Dee?”

“I’m in my car, driving over to Stanton’s headquarters. Things exploded with Hodges. It’s all over. Christine has gone bat shit crazy. She’s the reason they can’t have kids and she sure didn’t take kindly to her husband fathering one elsewhere. I thought she was going to kill Jack for a moment. Maybe chop his balls off. She’s talking divorce now and Hodges completely lost it. He knows this kills us. We can’t run a presidential campaign with an illegitimate daughter in the wings. Jesus, even the rumor of one killed McCain in 2000.”

“Hodges didn’t even try and deny it?”

“No. He’ll give a speech in a few hours bowing out of the race. Congratulations, Mike. You’ve triggered our campaign apocalypse. Hodges is going down in history as the biggest campaign flame out in American politics.”

“Are you all right, Dee?” Mike was amazed to find he genuinely cared. Even though she used the dirtiest tricks to destroy his reputation he was not angry at her. He only felt concern. There was no sense of revenge or satisfaction.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, the twang in her accent suddenly loud and strong. “That son-of-a-bitch Carver is playing coy about giving me a place in Stanton’s campaign. But I expected as much. I’m going to have to persuade him to make space for me, but he knows I won’t beg.”

Her voice faded a little but then perked up. “I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Something will come up once time has healed a few of the wounds I gave them.”

Mike was glad. She was, after everything they did to each other, still his friend. He cared for her. “I’m pleased you’re going to be okay, Dee,” he said.

Dee laughed again. She seemed surprised at the idea that he would doubt it. “Mike,” she said. “Folks like me and Carver are always going to be okay. We’re not like Hodges. Or Stanton. We’re not the players in this sport. We run it. It’s
our
game.”

EPILOGUE

A YEAR LATER

THE MESSAGE LIGHT flickered on the phone in the gloom of the back office room. It glowed dull orange, off and on, off and on, like a little lighthouse. Mike felt tired as he flopped down in the chair with his face covered in the grime of Guatemala City, the product of an uncountable number of cooking fires that left a brown smoke hovering over the city like a frown. His brow was covered with sweat and he wiped it off with a sleeve.

He sighed exhaustedly. It was a happy sound though. Tired was good on days like this. Days spent out in the community around San Gabriel. Days of labor and toil, of battering away at corruption and vice and all that plagued the slums. But days that seemed to matter even if the few victories were small. He spent the morning at a local clinic run by nuns that fed and treated the orphans and the homeless. He used the opportunity as a kind of outreach to gang members. There was a vicious turf war going on and he needed to know the details so he could try and calm down things. He did not have much influence. But after nine months here in Guatemala, he had some. He did what he could.

He pressed play.

He recognized the familiar lilting accent immediately.

“Miiike,” the voice crooned. “You are a hard man to find these days. I guess I should have known you would be down there. But somehow it never occurred to me until now.”

Mike froze like a statue and his finger hovered over the button. He did not move a muscle. Suddenly he felt a cold chill on his skin, the frost of a thousand miles driven on frozen Iowa roads or among New Hampshire’s snowy forests. He thought, just for a second, that he heard the roar of a crowd; the magical moment when a candidate made that elusive connection; when, for a fleeting time, a room filled with such electricity that you believed it might set the whole world on fire.

“You’re wasted down there,” Dee’s message went on. “I’d like you to come back and help me out with something. Somehow working out of President Stanton’s office ain’t all it’s cooked up to be. Turns out I hate being behind a desk even if it
is
in the West Wing. Who would have believed it? I actually just love the fight, not the reward.”

He laughed at the image of Dee in an office. She would be like a caged tiger, pacing up and down in a zoo, longing for freedom, not wanting to be safe and well-fed. She could not fight her instinctual desire to hunt and catch her own food.

“I got my eye on a nice little governor’s race down in Arkansas,” she went on. “This time the candidate’s a real special one. Reminds me a lot of Hodges when he was at his peak. I could do with someone who…”

Mike jabbed a finger down and pressed erase. The spell was broken. It was not real to him anymore. That world of the campaign. It was a ghost world. He got up and walked out of the office. He passed through the church where the glowering black Christ looked down from his high cross and then Mike paused in the open doorway that led outside.

In the courtyard vegetable garden a figure crouched and planted an upturned furrow of earth with seeds. She moved slowly and deliberately down the rows seeming to take exaggerated care as she placed each seed in a carefully dug hole. It was Mayan corn. In a few months, nourished by the frequent rains, even in this slum earth, it would grow tall and strong. The young woman looked up, her face shielded by the flat hat she wore to help shade skin that was paler than that of her countrymen.

Gabriela smiled at Mike. He waved back. She was doing well, he thought. It had been a long struggle to help, but she was clean of drugs for three months now and off the streets for twice that. Perhaps she would yet fall back into the gangs. But perhaps she would not. It was impossible to tell. You just did what you could to help. To try and fulfill a promise made far away.

This world was the real one, he said to himself. Right here. Right now. He watched Gabriela from the shadows of the church doorway. He was suddenly full of hope that she would make it. He stepped forward out of the darkness and the thought warmed him even more than the sudden light of the bright, shining sun.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I WOULD like to thank my agent, Laney Becker at Markson Thoma, for working so hard to make sure The Candidate made it. I owe you one, Laney. I also want to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to my editor Joseph Pittman at Vantage Point Books, both for taking a chance with the book and for his careful work in making it as good as it can be. Mike Luongo brilliantly copy-edited the final manuscript and made sure my British English prose was thoroughly and correctly Americanized. I would also like to thank the many people who have helped me write about the bewildering but fascinating and inspiring world of American politics. They include Julian Coman, Paul Webster, John Mulholland, Matt Seaton, Shaun Bowler, Larry Haas, Tracy McVeigh, Janine Gibson, Stuart Millar and many others. Thanks also to my parents, Sandra and David Harris, for all their love and support and my brother, Mark. A final word of gratitude to many friends over the years who have engaged in endless political debates with me that have still, somehow, failed to solve the world’s problems. They include but are far from limited to Simon English, Lee Bailey, Burhan Wazir, Vicky Graham, Helen Jones, David Teather, Imogen Wall, Dave Stoller, Lawrence Siegel, Adi Leshko, Andrew Clark, Peter Alexander, Robin McKie, Mark Townsend, Peter Beaumont, Glen Owen, Francesca Gessner, Mike Green, Gary Shannon, Ian King, Hugh Chow, Tom Campbell, Tim, Sheila and Ellen Herbst and all of the Friday night poker guys in New York.