27

TOM KNOWLES HAD never known an election day like it. A vote held within hours of a major crisis breaking, without enough time for anyone to sit back and ask what it really meant, how serious it really was, how bad it was going to get. An election in the grip of panic. The headlines that morning had been unbelievable. Markets were falling. The press was hysterical.

Knowles spent the day in meetings with his economic advisors and senior Republican politicians and on the phone to foreign leaders. Markets were taking a hit around the globe and the confidence laboriously reconstructed in the wake of the Chinese disturbances of 2014 was evaporating as if it had never returned. He gave the same message to all the foreign leaders he spoke to. Fidelian was an isolated instance. The system was sound. Once the markets saw that, the decline would be arrested. He needed them to give that message to their own countries. The more united they could be in rejecting the idea that this was another 2008, the sooner this crisis would start to resolve.

But that would do nothing to halt the bloodbath that was being perpetrated in voting booths across the nation that day. The polls from the last week were meaningless now. Only night would tell how bad it was.

In New York, Marion Ellman was scheduled to give her first report to the Security Council on the progress of Jungle Peace. She read the words that had emerged from the tortuous joint drafting process by the Pentagon and the State Department. Progress was steady, interdiction was solid. A number of combatants had emerged from the jungle and surrendered, and were being held in Ugandan detention camps while their cases were assessed. Depredations against the civilian population in the surrounding areas had declined markedly. She gave figures to prove it. The Security Council ambassadors listened quietly. There were few questions. It was as if everyone in the room was aware that the great events of the day were taking place outside the building, in the trading rooms on Wall Street, in voting booths in school halls and municipal buildings and community centers across the country.

Sixteen Manhattan blocks away, Ed Grey spent the day trying to staunch the hemorrhage in his funds. His traders struggled to push money out of stocks into bonds, the prices of which were rocketing as investors fled equities. He worked the phones to his major clients, one after the other, dissuading them from redeeming their investments, reminding them that Red River always took a six to twelve month view of the market, telling them they would merely realize losses they could avoid if they redeemed now instead of holding on for the market to recover. He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice. He spoke to the banks throughout the day, beseeching them to hold off on margin calls that would force him to sell even more assets into a falling market. There were amazing buying opportunities as the markets marked down good stocks along with bad in their general panic but Grey was in no position to take advantage of them. He watched them floating by in front of his eyes, as if on a river of blood, unable to touch them.

THAT NIGHT, TOM KNOWLES was due as guest of honor at a dinner for Republican Party grandees. When the event had first been arranged, in the days when the Republicans had looked to be cruising to their first sixty-plus majority in the Senate since 2004, it had been conceived as an election-night celebration. Instead, it was going to be a wake. Many of the attendees had voted in their home states that morning and were flying in to be at the dinner with the prospect of a loss that appeared likely to put the number of Republican senators down towards fifty. There was even an outside chance the party would lose its majority.

At six o’clock that evening, Tom Knowles sat down in the Oval Office with Josh Bentner, his chief speechwriter, and Ed Abrahams to look over the speech he would be giving.

Bentner had spent just about the whole day on it. The speech was meant to be only about fifteen minutes long but even for a speechwriter as talented as him it was a challenge. He had shown Abrahams five drafts during the day and each time it wasn’t right. Knowles had considered canceling his attendance, but Ed Abrahams was dead set against that. He thought it would be seen as an act of cowardice that would seriously damage him within the party. But how much responsibility should he take? How much blame should he volunteer to shoulder? The truth was, Knowles felt that his responsibility for the implosion of Fidelian and the collapse it had inflicted on the markets over the last couple of days was minimal, if there was any responsibility there at all. There was no failure of regulation, no executive dereliction. He didn’t feel there was much more he could have done. No one could control the markets, not even the president. But the people who would be sitting in the room that night wouldn’t be just any audience. Their opinions, their attitudes, the willingness to put their personal prestige, political networks, time and money behind alternative candidates would play a big part in determining the kind of challenge he would face for the nomination in two years’ time. If this night had delivered sixty Senate seats, he would likely have got the nomination unopposed, a slam dunk, as Ed Abrahams liked to say. It wasn’t going to be a slam dunk now.

They needed to see humility. It takes a lot to turn a party against an incumbent president, but perceived arrogance in the face of defeat is one of the things that will do it. They also needed to see that he envisaged a way out. If a movement wasn’t going to start right now at the highest level of the party to put forward an alternative candidate for the nomination, they needed to feel strongly that in six months’ time the turmoil on the markets was going to look like a transient blip, not the turning point that ended eleven successive quarters of economic growth. Acknowledge some level of responsibility without tainting yourself as an electoral liability. Give a strong, positive view of the future without trivializing what had had happened that very day.

He picked up the latest draft of the speech and began to work on it with Abrahams and Bentner.

At six o’clock, Marion Ellman was at the traditional Election Day cocktail party given by the American UN representative for foreign ambassadors. She mingled dutifully, feeling like she needed the task of hosting the event about as much as she needed a trip to the dentist. François Dubigny engaged her in one of his flirtatious disquisitions. She excused herself to go talk to the new Saudi Arabian ambassador. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a huddle of Latin American ambassadors. She thought a couple of them were smirking at her. The party was a trial, to say the least.

Across town, Ed Grey was still in his office, still on the phone, and would be for hours. Red-eyed, exhausted, for him, election day was a battle for survival.