Huang padded quickly down the hall, past the family photos of him and Laurie and their little girl. Barefoot, he wore khaki shorts and a loose white T-shirt — what Laurie preferred him to wear at home. At a hundred and ninety pounds, he was a trim six-foot-two, well muscled from many hours in the gym. He was only thirty-eight, but silver already encroached on his dark hair — surely a product of the stress brought on by so many lies. At least he wasn’t going bald. Better to turn gray than turn loose — a quaint Virginia saying, but true enough.
Huang reached the dining room to find his wife on the other side of the sliding glass door, holding Claire on her hip. She brandished a gardening trowel in her free hand, as if to ward off an attacker. No matter how often he told her to the contrary, she could never shake the notion that spiders could fly.
His first choice would have been to relocate it, but Laurie wanted to kill every spider she met with fire. They settled on something in the middle and used a rolled magazine he’d brought with him for that purpose to swat the hapless creature.
Three-year-old Claire hugged his neck and, having not inherited her mother’s phobia, said they should go bug hunting.
“Daddy has to change for work,” he said.
He put the little girl down to play in the grass and leaned in to kiss his wife, avoiding looking directly into her eyes. It didn’t matter. Her face fell into a sullen pout.
“I love you,” she said. “But I hate what you do.”
“Someone has to take care of the spiders,” he said, and got ready to go ruin Michelle Chadwick’s life.
Senator Chadwick could feel David Huang’s eyes on her neck as she cleared the security checkpoint at the Northwest Appointment Gate. As a senator, she could have driven onto the White House campus, rather than clear security like a common citizen. Still, the Secret Service Uniformed Division did their officious best to make her feel small. Apparently, working for the President snuffed out any awe they might have otherwise felt for a ranking member of Congress. The same was true of the Marine posted at the door, though he didn’t say a word. There was no love lost between her and the military. The rosy-cheeked Marine could not have been more than twenty-five years old — but Chadwick could tell from the look in his eyes that he was well aware of her thumbs-down voting record when it came to wars and rumors of wars. These war-fighters worshiped their President, and would follow him blindly into any conflict. Poor bastards.
Arnie van Damm met her in the lobby, just inside the door, looking stodgy in his rumpled suit jacket and loose tie. He’d obviously just come off the treadmill or exercise bike and was still flushed and sweating. He gave her a wary glance as they padded down the carpeted hall past more Uniformed Division guards, toward the Oval Office and the secretaries’ suite. Betty Martin gave her a courteous nod, though it was clear she, too, didn’t trust her boss’s avowed enemy as far as she could throw her. Van Damm peered through the peephole in the door to the Oval Office and turned to give Chadwick a halfhearted shrug of apology.
“He’s on an important call,” the chief of staff said.
Chadwick eyed his wrinkled jacket, his flushed brow, and fought the urge to call him Rumpled Sweatskin.
“No worries,” she said. “I appreciate him working me in like this.” She dropped her cell phone into a basket at the corner of the secretary’s desk. Chadwick had been here before and knew the drill, though she hadn’t told Huang that when he’d fiddled with her cell and turned it into an active mic.
Van Damm gave a shake of his head, as if to clear his vision. “Don’t be nice,” he said. “It creeps me out.”
The door to the Oval opened before she could think of a snarky answer, and the man himself waved her inside.
Van Damm followed her in, as if he were afraid she might try something. That was a joke, considering the circumstances.
A steward brought in a coffee service and, to Chadwick’s surprise, Ryan poured her a cup as if they were old friends. He held up the small silver cream pitcher, brow raised.
“Black,” she said.
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Ryan said. “Me, too.” He air-toasted with his cup. “So, what can I do for you, Madame Senator?”
Chadwick took a deep breath. “An olive branch,” she said. “As it were. I’ll just get right to it.”
“That’s best,” Ryan said.
“I’m planning to sponsor a bill that I believe you could get behind.”
Ryan raised an eyebrow.
“I know how you feel about welfare,” Chadwick said. “What I’m proposing is a literacy program for Indian Country. A virtual bookmobile to benefit children and youth.”
Arnie asked, “You have a draft?”
Chadwick nodded. She didn’t, of course, not yet. But that wouldn’t take long for her staff to do. There was a Navajo girl from Window Rock who’d been champing at the bit to get something exactly like this into committee.
