There was a startled oath in Spanish whose general import he understood, followed by a drowsy but rapidly clearing response; then, in impatient English, “Yess? What ees it?”

  “Jaime,” Able said quickly, “this is Able. Sorry to wake you up, but …”

  “I was dreaming of Dolly’s party,” Jaime said, accent lessening as he came fully awake. “What a blast!”

  “Very nice,” Able said.

  “I was thinking,” the national security adviser said, “what if an atomic bomb had fallen on us all. How would America continue? How would the world function without us? How would—”

  “That’s very interesting, Jaime,” Able Montague interrupted, “but I’m calling about a serious matter—”

  “That would not be serious?” Jaime Serrano inquired blandly. “Quite much so, I would say.”

  “—about which you may be able to give me some clarification,” Able continued, refusing to be diverted. “How about it?”

  “At this hour?” Jaime exclaimed indignantly. “It is past one AM, Able! What do you take me for?”

  “A smart man,” Able said. “So am I. Now, Jaime, what I want to know is—”

  “No!” Jaime said, beginning to sound as though he was really enjoying it. “You know I can’t say anything about that!”

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to say,” Able protested.

  Jaime laughed. “I can guess.”

  “So guess.”

  “Well, I have already told you I won’t talk about it,” Jaime said cheerfully. “So good night!”

  “Jaime,” Able said patiently; and decided on a sudden change of tactic. Jaime could be shrewdly obfuscating when he wanted to be, but no point in letting him get away with it without a good tussle. “Is the President going to give Sidi an ultimatum?”

  “For heaven’s sake!” Jaime exclaimed. “Why?”

  “You know why,” Able said comfortably.

  Jaime laughed. “Sure I do. But you don’t.”

  “So what’s Sidi doing, threatening us with atomic bombs?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Threatening Lesser Lolómé with atomic bombs?”

  “Oh, come!” Jaime said. “Stop the fishing expedition, please. And go back to bed. You need your beauty sleep.”

  “You are suspiciously cagey.”

  “You are suspicious, period.” Jaime’s tone became earnest. “Able, if there was anything I could tell you, I would. But when there isn’t nothing—”

  “Oh, sure,” Able said. “Oh, sure. How’s the boss taking all this?”

  “I don’t know about ‘all this,’” Jaime said. His tone did change a bit, however, becoming more confidential. “I do know, jus’ between you and me, that he is a complicated man.”

  “That’s news,” Able said dryly. “There’s a big headline in that. You find him hard to pin down, do you?”

  “Yes,” Jaime said. He sighed and became more accented. “He ees won puzzle, sometimes. I don’ know what he thinks!” His tone became suddenly, disturbingly, bleak. “I never know whether he will stand firm or give way. It makes it very hard. It is very difficult. It gives me concern for our policies.”

  “In other words,” Able Montague said, “he is like all Presidents nowadays. He hasn’t given Sidi an ultimatum. He’s waffling, like they all do.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Jaime objected.

  Able laughed triumphantly.

  “Then he has given him an ultimatum!”

  “Don’ say it,” Jaime advised. “We would have to deny it, if you do. Anyway, it isn’t true. Exactly.”

  “He’s given him one and Sidi has refused to back down.”

  “Not exactly that, either.”

  “Well, damn it!” Able exclaimed. “There’s got to be some pattern of sense, here.”

  “He has and he hasn’t.”

  “Who has and who hasn’t?” Able demanded, exasperated. “Which one is ‘he’? Or are they both ‘he’? Or—”

  “Now,” Jaime said severely, “you do not make sense at all, amigo. Now you are driveling on. That is not like Able Montague, keen master of television and world events …” He paused; his tone became more confidential. “Actually, I do not think he really knows himself how he is going to handle Sidi this time.”

  “No threats of armed response, I hope,” Able said with equal severity. “The media wouldn’t stand for it. The country wouldn’t stand for it.”

  “Are they different?” Jaime inquired dryly. “If the media tells the country that it is not to support the President, you know the country will not support the President. Is that not so?”

  “Not quite,” Able conceded, more amicably. “But we can raise a hell of a stink.”

  “Absolutely,” Jaime agreed. “Absolutely. Anyway, he is soundly sleeping at this very moment, I believe. And hope. He will be ready for you tomorrow, whatever happens.”

  “How is he sleeping these days?” Able inquired. “Sound as a baby?”

  “A good conscience means good dreams,” Jaime observed.

  “Is that an old Cuban saying?”

  “It is old Cuban from me,” Jaime said with a laugh. “I jus’ made it up.” He sighed and once again lapsed into complete and disturbed confidence. “He is difficult to deal with. I wish I knew where he really stands on things. Life would be simpler for a national security adviser.”

  “Simpler for all of us,” Able remarked. “Well, if that’s all you can tell me—”

  “You have enough for hours of television talk,” Jaime said. “Do not complain.”

  “But I won’t know what I’m talking about!” Able protested, and joined Jaime in his cheerful laughter.

  “Would that be any different from what you and your colleagues do every day?” Jaime inquired. “What else is new?”

  “You have me, Jaime,” Able Montague said. “Go back to sleep and have good dreams like your boss.”

  But after he hung up Able stood in thoughtful silence in the silent house. He wondered how good the boss’s dreams were. And he wondered how far he should go in reporting and commenting upon the crisis that was obviously beginning to swirl up around the President for Life of Greater Lolómé. Sidi was a tricky character, but so was the President. Jaime had signaled plainly that the White House considered the matter serious. Something atomic, obviously … something involving a threat to the peace of the region, and perhaps beyond … involving powers in the region … or perhaps beyond.

  Something the President was obviously going to try to solve with words.

  Something that would test just how strong and effective American words were, in the jungle world of the closing millennium.

  Something that would disclose how justified was the faith of America’s leaders in the power of American words, which in recent decades had sounded so fierce … on so many occasions … and, when not backed by force and the will to use it if necessary, had been able to achieve so little.

  * * *

  He rather fancied Shakespeare, though his was not a mind to quote anyone at any length except when his speechwriters provided the text. He did not have a student’s mind. He had a very quick mind, a very astute and clever mind, excellent at understanding human aims and foibles and how to play upon them successfully; but not a student’s mind, unless it be a student of human nature, which for his purposes was quite sufficient for his time.

  So he did not quote Shakespeare often, for he did not really know a great deal about him, save for scraps of schoolboy memory; and the things he liked best, those that he felt applied to his own situation, he did not dare quote to anyone for fear of ridicule.

  “Upon the king,” for instance … upon the king, “who hath a heavy reckoning to make … all those arms and legs and heads chopped off in a battle.” Upon the king, nowadays, rests caution.

  Exactly so, he thought now as he came awake suddenly in the king-sized bed he occupied alone, listening moodily for a moment to the stately old house creaking and settling from time to time around him. It had been gutted and rebuilt internally in Harry Truman’s time, but still it creaked and settled now and then, as if it had a memory of its own of times long past and Presidents all too often as troubled and uneasy as he.

  Not, of course, that he was ever going to indicate to anyone that he was uneasy and troubled; and essentially, of course, he was not. The facade of self-confident ease and sardonic parrying that he always displayed in public was more than skin deep. It really represented how he felt at heart, even though there were times, such as this night after his hostile exchange with Seedy Sidi, when he did feel, temporarily, a little uncertain of his course. But he knew from lifelong experience that it would sort itself out. It always had for him, and he was confident that it would this time, too.

  It had been easy for him, therefore, to turn aside Helen’s characteristically shrewd and perceptive probings when they had met in the great hallway of the second-floor family quarters on their separate ways to bed. It had been four years since they had shared the same room at night, except when on the road campaigning, or on state visits at home or abroad. This was something the public did not know, though of course the Secret Service did. Sooner or later he expected it would leak to the media. Everything always leaked to the media, and the more venal and titillating, the better. No oaths of secrecy, no pledges of fealty, were ever enough; the possibility of publication and the lure of the talk shows always proved too strong. Not that he gave a damn, really, except that there were always some votes out there that could be affected by such a silly thing—silly to him, anyway, though not, perhaps, quite so silly to Helen. But she was used to it, he thought complacently now. She had accepted, with characteristic practicality, the increasing boredom of physical custom and the occasional, carefully concealed outside contacts he successfully sought to alleviate it. As long as they always appeared in the public gaze hand in hand, and as long as she always draped herself dutifully around his shoulders whenever possible at photo opportunities, it didn’t really matter. The show of substance was there. He had learned from a lifetime in politics that the show was all.

  For Helen, however, who still knew him better than anybody, and in addition had a really first-class instinct for world affairs, the show as it concerned Sidi was not enough.

  “You’re worried about something,” she said, still tall, svelte, and striking at almost fifty, even in her slightly too frilly Armani bathrobe and the usual protective nighttime swaddlings that encased her normally free-swinging blond hair. “I hope it’s not too serious.”

  “Enough,” he said, and told her, as he usually did, the basics of it.

  She pursed her lips and looked genuinely concerned.

  “He’s such a flake,” she said. “What will you do if he continues to defy you?”

  “He won’t,” he said. “Not when I get the UN and the allies lined up and he realizes the weight of world opinion opposing him.”

  “You think ‘the weight of world opinion’ will be enough to stop him this time? It wasn’t last time.”

  “And he found out about that, didn’t he?” he inquired. “He didn’t get away with it.”

  “He wasn’t ready, then. He’s much better prepared now. And if he really does have the bombs—”

  “He wouldn’t dare,” he said calmly.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. If I were you I would proceed on the assumption that he might. And then what?”

  “At the moment,” he said frankly, “I don’t quite know. But it will work out all right. It always seems to, for me.”

  “Yes,” she said dryly. “Golden boy. Well, I hope you’re right. It would be a little unsettling to suddenly find an actual atomic war breaking out. You may have to bluff pretty hard to get him to back down.”

  “You think so?”

  She nodded. “This time I do. I hope I’m wrong, but—”

  “You are,” he said confidently. “Trust me.”

  “We all have to, don’t we?” she said, reached over, and kissed him lightly on the cheek, and without waiting for response turned away toward her own room.

  “You’ll see,” he called after her, but she made no reply, just tossed a knowing and skeptical look back at him over her shoulder as she disappeared, closing the door behind her.

  He stood for a moment almost irresolute, although even when alone as he was now in the empty upper hall he did not like to appear irresolute; and after a moment went to his own bed and fell into a deep sleep from which he presently awakened with a start in the midst of a dream in which Sidi, riding a large flying camel, appeared to be hovering over the White House. This was so ridiculous that it brought him awake laughing. Quickly this stopped. Whatever else it was, it was not a laughing matter, even though he was, as he had told Helen earlier, quite confident that everything would go well for him as it had on so many occasions, about so many things, before.

  This was why he sometimes became a little irritated with his team at State. Eulie Montgomery was always consistent, always predictable; no President in recent years had ever been strong enough in his dealings with other nations to satisfy Eulie. They were always, in her mind, ducking their responsibilities, dodging their challenges, attempting to finesse their various challenges without ever really committing themselves or the full weight of their country’s power. In her mind they shared the same basic, very simple motivation: they didn’t want to risk their own precious political necks. By so much, Eulie felt—and was notorious for expressing it in no uncertain terms within the department—was the United States weakened and diminished in its foreign policy.

  And the Secretary, the President thought with some annoyance now, could be equally challenging to his employer’s strength with his own conviction, deeply held if more diplomatically expressed, that recent Presidents had used the UN to conceal their own indecisiveness and uncertainty about what to do when challenged. Ray Stanley had rarely expressed this to him in so many words, but indirectly he was inclined to keep up a quiet but nagging barrage. He had recently forwarded to the President’s desk a Sunday piece by Tim Bates which had appeared in Anna Hastings’s Washington Inquirer—“The UN: American Necessity or Presidents’ Excuse?” Ray had offered no accompanying comment except to scrawl across it a single handwritten question mark. It had been, the President recalled wryly, a very large, black, and definite question mark.

  Well: given all the things he had to worry about in this world, all the endless clamor of nations, causes, and peoples that beat in upon him virtually nonstop around the clock, he was not going to be deflected by this kind of indirect but persistent nibbling at his morale from below. That he thought of Ray as “below,” and indeed, in some curious but deep-seated fashion considered everything and everyone “below” him, perhaps said something about the presidential frame of mind. It seemed to go with the office. It certainly indicated that he was possessed of a certainty of power that was not going to be deflected from the pursuit of what he felt to be his responsibility in any given situation.

  But what, he wondered now as the mansion gave another slight but definite creak and groan, was his responsibility in the situation now before him? Should he be as tough as Eulie wanted, as cavalier with the UN as would presumably satisfy Ray? Or should he find—as, he had to admit, all recent Presidents liked to do—some middle ground that would put a sufficient gloss on things to ease him past the crisis and at the same time leave him looking as decisive and commanding as he liked to be seen at the end of the day?

  So far he had been strong, and he hoped Eulie was satisfied. And he intended to have Ray start tackling the UN first thing in the morning and use it, as he saw it, to strengthen his hand. Meantime, retracing the course of his conversation with Sidi, he was satisfied that he had been more than emphatic in staking out a clear-cut and unequivocal position. It was true that he had concluded with an offer to talk further if Sidi so desired, which Sidi had instantly seized upon as one more example of the weakness of American Presidents; but that, he was confident, was just Sidi being crafty and trying to make debating points. Thus he could rationalize comfortably what at first blush had seemed to be an unnerving contempt in Sidi’s tone.

  The President did not think for a moment that Sidi would really dare to defy him. Sidi did not have the power or the means to do so for any period of time, even a brief one. Even if he did have atomic bombs and the missiles to deliver them, who was he going to use them on? Lesser Lolómé was certainly not a target worthy of such enormous expenditure of military capital—the heart had seemed to go out of the Destroy-Israel group, the idea no longer seemed a worthwhile objective to those who had clutched it to their bosoms over the years—there would be no point in an attack on anyone in Europe—and an attack on America was simply out of the question, so all-obliterating was the annihilation America could unleash in return.

  What the President looked for now was the usual chronology of events. First the story would appear in the media—Ray had called him shortly before midnight to report his conversation with Sally, Able, and Jimmy Van—which would get the clamor going so loudly that by nightfall it would be on every show from MacNeil/Lehrer to Larry King and C-Span. Next morning it would be in the Times, the Post, and everywhere around the globe that print and picture could reach.

  Then would come the escalation of statements from himself and Sidi. He was certain he would be backed by Britain, France, and most of the Security Council (Russia and China perhaps being less dependable, but since nothing was going to come of it anyway, what did it matter?). And then would come the swift and inevitable back-down by Sidi, who, confronted by overwhelming world outcry, would see that his latest gamble on American weakness wasn’t going to work. He would retreat accordingly, growling and spitting like a cat in a corner, but speedily giving in. After all, he had nothing to support him but bluster.

  The President had great faith in his own powers to cajole, convince, and, if necessary, bribe the allies and the UN at large to support the American position. Dutifully, helpful resolutions would come tumbling out of the Security Council (carefully worded to get around Russian and Chinese objections: he would count on his own cleverness, and Ray’s, for that). Even at the end of the millennium, the United States was still able to dispense financial and military favors, though it was increasingly unclear how much longer it would be able to do so in an economy that had never really recovered from the recessions and the desperate downsizing of the early nineties.