“I suspected as much.” In fact, Hayley has been shocked by how many people inside the West Wing seem to be soft in their support of the man for whom they all worked.
“Is that a problem?”
“No. But wouldn’t it make more sense to work for one of his political opponents? Why work for him if you oppose his agenda?” Hayley asks the obvious question.
“Exactly.”
“You’re thinking of leaving?” Hayley asks Asher.
“Almost since my first day,” he admits to her. “What he said he stood for during the campaign and what he’s actually trying to do while in office are completely different. Monroe’s rolling back every progressive initiative made in the past seventy-five years!”
“Apparently, the majority of the voters support those rollbacks.”
“Electoral majority,” Asher corrects her.
“This is the democratic system our country has espoused since its founding. Regardless of personal beliefs, my priority is the service and protection of that political system, not the man,” Hayley says.
“Did you have that written on an index card or something?”
She ignores his remark, prompting Asher to ratchet up the cynicism.
“Don’t forget, Hitler was democratically elected.”
“Richard Monroe isn’t Adolf Hitler,” she reminds him calmly.
“Correct. No mustache.” Asher places two fingers under his nose, clownishly mimicking the German fascist. “The man’s a danger to the nation, and I’m beginning to wonder if removing him from office isn’t the only way to save it.”
“A little shrill, don’t you think?”
“No. Not really.”
Hayley sighs, striving for patience. After all, she needs his help. “What if the shoe was on the other foot, Asher? What if forces were arrayed, behind the scenes and from within our own government, to undermine or remove a president whose agenda you supported? What would you call a movement like that? A coup d’état?”
Asher can think of no easy response to Hayley’s hypothetical. Without much effort, she has boxed him into his own hypocrisy. Brooding as he steers the Prius into the parking garage two blocks from the White House, he says nothing and thereby concedes the point. It’s five minutes past seven in the morning. The state of the union, by all appearances, is sound.
* * *
THE TOWN OF Shady Side, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, is famous for nothing. Prior to the nineteenth century, the area was known as the Great Swamp, if that says anything. Today, something slightly more than five thousand souls live within the town’s borders, and few inhabitants want anything other than to be left alone. It is an insular and clannish town on the western Chesapeake Bay as unpretentious as a trim from Supercuts and about as attractive. Steamy and dank in the summer and frigid cold and dank in winter, the town is mostly ignored by day-trippers and tourists. An F-150 Ford pickup is the preferred chariot in Shady Side, and if there’s any reason at all for a brief visit, it’s Andy’s Crab House.
The Bearded Man eases his 2016 Buick Regal TourX into the gravel lot that serves as Andy’s parking lot. He could afford a more expensive car and one that carried with it more status, but the Buick suits the Bearded Man just fine. He is frugal, and the amount of money his fellow citizens spend on their automobiles has always struck him as juvenile, a surrender of common sense to marketing and peer pressure. The other vehicles crowded into the lot are uniformly black and evenly divided between expensive European sedans and gargantuan luxury SUVs. A few of these other vehicles come with drivers, middle-aged men in cheap dark suits who stand in a tight cluster behind a looming Escalade, smoking cigarettes and gazing into their smartphones.
The Bearded Man parks and exits the Buick, heading across the grass lawn toward the low-slung restaurant. Comprised mainly of a wraparound, screened-in porch, Andy’s Crab House has a fine view of the bay, the gentle shoreline not thirty yards away. Everyone must already be here, the Bearded Man thinks as he draws nearer to the screen-door entrance. There’s no overestimating the significance of today’s meeting, as evidenced by the perfect attendance.
The Bearded Man grew up seventy miles as the crow flies from where he stands, and twice that far by automobile. Crisfield, Maryland, on the Chesapeake’s eastern shore, is a crabbing town, and he is, appropriately, the son of a crabber. The crab man’s life wasn’t easy, the hours brutal when crabs were in season and the drinking even more brutal when they were not. The Bearded Man’s father beat him close to every day of his life, until the age of thirteen, when the beatings stopped and were replaced with verbal abuse. The Bearded Man, in hindsight, preferred the physical stuff. His father, especially when inspired by the twin muses of vodka and beer, wielded a lancing wit.
Salvation came in the guise of the sweetly named Belle, a churlish hurricane that thrashed the Delmarva Peninsula on August 9, 1976, and overturned the thirty-two-foot boat the Bearded Man’s father had taken out, against his own better sense and advice of all his peers, to run his traps despite storm warnings. Whether his father had been simply drunk, pressed by mounting unpaid bills, driven by dumb bullheadedness, or some combination of all three, the Bearded Man was liberated from his tormentor at the age of fifteen.
As he pauses before entering the crab shack, the Bearded Man glances at the flat light bouncing off the slate-gray bay that swallowed up his father. He can almost believe he loves the Chesapeake and that he yearns to return for a life here, to build the home he has designed to the last dormer in his imagination. His grandkids will visit him and his wife at this house. The Bearded Man imagines how he will teach them how to crab by hand, with string and raw chicken leg, and how to break apart their shells after steaming and extract all of the succulent meat from inside. He will grow old in a rocking chair on the porch of the fantasy house, watching the sunrise across the bay.
He smiles to himself and shakes his head. He wonders why he’s been succumbing to these absurd musings of late. Sit on the porch and watch the sunrise? Good God, he’d rather blow his brains out. And crabs? He hasn’t been able to stomach the meat of those vile, spindly creatures in decades. Memory of countless hours spent teasing out the meat from cracked-open, razor-sharp shells and stuffing it into plastic containers for the tourist trade are almost too painful to recall. Washington is where he belongs, he reminds himself. That’s where he can be useful.
He enters the crab shack. Its proprietor, Andy, knew the Bearded Man’s father back in the old days. His discretion is guaranteed. With the end of the season, the crab shack never opens before five p.m., if at all. The Bearded Man and the six men seated at one of the long picnic-style tables on the screened-in porch have the place to themselves.
He greets the proprietor with warm embrace. “Hello, Andy. How are you?”
Responding to the pleasantry seems a cross too heavy to bear. Andy pours his newest guest a cup of awful coffee, refills other cups, and then retreats back into his beloved kitchen, his sanctuary. As the Bearded Man takes a seat by pulling up a cheap plastic chair to the end of the picnic table, the others look at him expectantly. All of the men are white, except for one who is black. All of the men are in their fifties or sixties. One of the men we recognize as the senator who was interviewed by CNN outside his office, Taylor Cox. They are all conspirators.