No Fear by Ridge King

Author:Ridge King [King, Ridge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Elsinore Press
Published: 2021-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Former President Russell Tiller stepped out of his limousine in front of the Willard Hotel and, as was his habit, waved to the passersby who had been blocked from walking along the sidewalk by his security detail.

Any President, past or present, has a substantial security detail in the form of Secret Service agents, but no ex-President had ever used as many Secret Service resources as Tiller. Because of his nonstop travel dictated by his manic speech-making schedule, Secret Service agents were often in five or six cities simultaneously performing the advance work necessary before Tiller’s arrival.

Tiller bounded up the steps into the sumptuous lobby of the famed hotel, and continued to wave to people in the lobby who stopped to gawk as he moved through a phalanx of Secret Service agents and Willard security personnel until he reached the Ballroom just off the lobby where he was attending a meeting of the Southern Political Society, a prestigious social club formed in the 1840s by South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun to encourage the fraternization of all Southern elected officials in the capital. (Later, all Southern governors were also invited to join.)

He’d been asked to join many years ago after he was elected to his first term as governor of Mississippi.

Normally, he wouldn’t have bothered to attend this year’s meeting, but after daughter Chloe chided him and told him to “get your ass down to Washington and throw your weight around, Dad,” he’d decided he’d better listen to her.

She was right. Chloe was almost always right.

Thurston had effectively sidelined him during the campaign, not wanting the charismatic former President to outshine him on any platform they were likely to share. And no one had any question that Tiller would outshine the stolid Thurston in any setting. Though the former President had bristled at being excluded from the campaign, it really had been quite fine with him because he secretly hoped that Thurston would lose to St. Clair, thus effectively setting up a match between his wife Meredith and St. Clair four years down the road.

Tiller did not want his wife to have to wait eight more years before running for President. He thought the elegant and patrician St. Clair would be easy pickings for the center-left campaign his wife would run, and that he would suffer the same fate George H.W. Bush had suffered following in office after Ronald Reagan’s two terms. After 12 years with Republicans in the White House, they were thrown out, making Bush a one-term President.

Tiller slipped into the Ballroom and, as happened when he entered any room large or small, a hush fell over the place as everyone acknowledged his arrival with a turn of the head and a lowering of the conversation level.

He greeted old friends effusively, his head of white hair bobbing among the congressmen, senators and governors assembled.

Of course, there was only one topic of conversation: the upcoming vote in the House on January third.

In time he came upon House Majority Leader Niles Overton and Speaker of the House Lamar LeGrand Perryman.

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