Deep Silence (Joe Ledger) by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry [Maberry, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250098467
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-30T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

THE WHITE HOUSE

Jennifer VanOwen checked in with her staff, with the senior advisors, with the chief of staff, and with the president himself. They were all in various degrees of stress, ranging from moderate freak-out to complete panic. That was fine. That was exactly right.

She was the voice of reason, and people throughout the West Wing would remember that. History would remember that Jennifer VanOwen kept her cool. That would play well when she made her move out of the shadows and onto the radar of the power players who were looking for the next face of the party. It was time for a woman to ascend to the American throne.

Such as it was.

For as long as it lasted.

Her contact assured her that there would be six or eight good years before the red, white, and blue lost its value as the currency of global economic power. That was good. She only wanted four years. Not the last four, but the ones coming up. Let someone else sit behind the big desk when it all turned to shit. People would be tripping over themselves to say that it wouldn’t have happened on her watch.

VanOwen told her secretary that she was going to go out to see how things were being handled in the streets. The president hadn’t budged from the bunker, and frankly everyone seemed okay with that. This wasn’t something he was equipped for or capable of handling. The less he got involved and the more he allowed actual experts to make decisions, the better he would look in tomorrow’s news cycle. At least that’s what VanOwen told him.

For her part, VanOwen needed to be visible. Very visible. She picked the right places to be seen huddled in earnest conversation with firefighters, police officials, doctors, aid workers, and ordinary citizens who had come out of the woodwork to lend willing hands and strong backs. Picking those spots had required a few hours of careful monitoring of reports, and some tips from her spies. Her employer’s people had given her some leads, too.

VanOwen spent hours in the field, and she contrived to get smudges of dirt and blood on her expensive suit, her hands, and even her pretty face. Her hair was carefully mussed and she knew that she would look amazing on Fox, CNN, and the BBC news. Her actions were orchestrated to emphasize the power of “us,” but it would drive iron rivets into her campaign once it launched. News reporters would make career jumps off their coverage of her, and that was good. When one cable news show ran different pictures of her—holding an IV bag of blood, working with a black teen to pull a Latina from beneath a collapsed storefront, handing coffee to weary EMTs, standing with a hand to her shocked mouth and tears in her eyes as she viewed a long row of sheet-covered corpses, yelling fiercely to direct an impromptu rescue crew to make a human ladder to pull a child from a sinkhole—the anchor dubbed her Hurricane VanOwen.

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