Red, White, page 31
Alex launches himself at her, engulfing her in a hug that lifts her feet off the ground, and she yelps and pulls his hair, and they topple sideways into a shrub, as Alex was always destined to do.
Their mother is in a decathlon of meetings, so they sneak out onto the Truman Balcony and catch each other up over hot chocolates and a plate of donuts. Pez has been trying to play telephone between the respective camps, but it’s only so effective. June cries first when she hears about the phone call on the plane, then again at Henry standing up to Philip, and a third time at the crowd outside Buckingham Palace. Alex watches her text Henry about a hundred heart emojis, and he sends her back a short video of himself and Catherine drinking champagne while Bea plays “God Save the Queen” on electric guitar.
“Okay, here’s the thing,” June says afterward. “Nobody has seen Nora in two days.”
Alex stares at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve called her, Zahra’s called her, Mike and her parents have all called her, she’s not answering anyone. The guard at her apartment says she hasn’t left this whole time. Apparently, she’s ‘fine but busy.’ I tried just showing up, but she’d told the doorman not to let me in.”
“That’s . . . concerning. And also, uh, kind of shitty.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Alex turns away, pacing over to the railing. He really could have used Nora’s nonplussed approach in this situation, or, really, just his best friend’s company. He feels somewhat betrayed she’s abandoned him when he needs her most—when he and June both need her most. She has a tendency to bury herself in complex calculations on purpose when especially bad things happen around her.
“Oh, hey,” June says. “And here’s the favor you asked for.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jeans and hands him a folded-up piece of paper.
He skims the first few lines.
“Oh my God, Bug,” he says. “I—Oh my God.”
“Do you like it?” She looks a little nervous. “I was trying to capture, like, who you are, and your place in history, and what your role means to you, and—”
She’s cut off because he’s scooped her up in another bear hug, teary-eyed. “It’s perfect, June.”
“Hey, First Offspring,” says a voice suddenly, and when Alex puts June down, Amy is waiting in the doorway connecting the balcony to the Oval Room. “Madam President wants to see you in her office.” Her attention shifts, listening to her earpiece. “She says to bring the donuts.”
“How does she always know?” June mutters, scooping up the plate.
“I have Bluebonnet and Barracuda, on the move,” Amy says, touching her earpiece.
“I still can’t believe you picked that for your stupid codename,” June says to him. Alex trips her on the way through the door.
The donuts have been gone for two hours.
One, on the couch: June, tying and untying and retying the laces on her Keds, for lack of anything else to do with her hands. Two, against a far wall: Zahra, rapidly typing out an email on her phone, then another. Three, at the Resolute Desk: Ellen, buried in probability projections. Four, on the other couch: Alex, counting.
The doors to the Oval Office fly open and Nora comes careening in.
She’s wearing a bleach-stained HOLLERAN FOR CONGRESS ’72 sweatshirt and the frenzied, sun-blinded expression of someone who has emerged from a doomsday bunker for the first time in a decade. She nearly crashes into the bust of Abraham Lincoln in her rush to Ellen’s desk.
Alex is already on his feet. “Where the fuck have you been?”
She slaps a thick folder down on the desk and turns halfway to face Alex and June, out of breath. “Okay, I know you’re pissed, and you have every right to be, but”—she braces herself against the desk with both hands, gesturing toward the folder with her chin—“I have been holed up in my apartment for two days doing this, and you are super not gonna be mad anymore when you see what it is.”
Alex’s mother blinks at her, perturbed. “Nora, honey, we’re trying to figure out—”
“Ellen,” Nora practically yells. The room goes silent, and Nora freezes, realizing. “Uh. Ma’am. Mom-in-law. Please, just. You need to read this.”
Alex watches her sigh and put down her pen before pulling the folder toward her. Nora looks like she’s about to pass out on top of the desk. He looks across to June on the opposite couch, who appears as clueless as he feels, and—
“Holy . . . fucking shit,” his mother says, a dawning mix of fury and bemusement. “Is this—?”
“Yup,” Nora says.
“And the—?”
“Uh-huh.”
Ellen covers her mouth with one hand. “How the hell did you get this? Wait, let me rephrase—how the hell did you get this?”
“Okay, so.” Nora withdraws herself from the desk and steps backward. Alex has no idea what the fuck is happening, but it’s something, something big. Nora is pacing now, both hands clutched to her forehead. “The day of the leaks, I get an anonymous email. Obvious sockpuppet account, but untraceable. I tried. They sent me a link to a fucking massive file dump and told me they were a hacker and had obtained the contents of the Richards campaign’s private email server in their entirety.”
Alex stares at her. “What?”
Nora looks back at him. “I know.”
Zahra, who has been standing behind Ellen’s desk with her arms folded, cuts in to ask, “And you didn’t report this to any of the proper channels because?”
“Because I wasn’t sure it was anything at first. And when it was, I didn’t trust anybody else to handle it. They said they sent it specifically to me because they knew I was personally invested in Alex’s situation and would work as fast as possible to find what they didn’t have time to.”
“Which is?” Alex can’t believe he still has to ask.
“Proof,” Nora says. And her voice is shaking now. “That Richards fucking set you up.”
He hears, distantly, the sound of June swearing under her breath and getting up from the couch, walking off to a far corner of the room. His knees give out, so he sits back down.
“We . . . we suspected that maybe the RNC had somehow been involved with some of what happened,” his mother says. She’s coming around the desk now, kneeling on the floor in front of him in her starched gray dress, the folder held against her chest. “I had people looking into it. I never imagined . . . the whole thing, straight from Richards campaign.”
She takes the folder and spreads it open on the coffee table in the middle of the room.
“There were—I mean, just, hundreds of thousands of emails,” Nora is saying as Alex climbs down onto the rug and starts staring at the pages, “and I swear a third of them were from dummy accounts, but I wrote a code that narrowed it down to about three thousand. I went through the rest manually. This is everything about Alex and Henry.”
Alex notices his own face first. It’s a photo: blurry, out of focus, caught on a long-range lens, only barely recognizable. It’s hard to place where he is, until he sees the elegant ivory curtains at the edge of the frame. Henry’s bedroom.
He looks above the photo and sees it’s attached to an email between two people. Negative. Nilsen says that’s not nearly clear enough. You need to tell the P we’re not paying for Bigfoot sightings. Nilsen. Nilsen, as in Richards’s campaign manager.
“Richards outed you, Alex,” Nora says. “As soon as you left the campaign, it started. He hired a firm that hired the hackers who got the surveillance tapes from the Beekman.”
His mother is next to him with a highlighter cap already between her teeth, slashing bright yellow lines across pages. There’s movement to his right: Zahra is there too, pulling a stack of papers toward her and starting in with a red pen.
“I—I don’t have any bank account numbers or anything but, if you look, there are pay stubs and invoices and requests of service,” Nora says. “Everything, guys. It’s all through back channels and go-between firms and fake names but it’s—there’s a digital paper trail for everything. Enough for a federal investigation, which could subpoena the financial stuff, I think. Basically, Richards hired a firm that hired the photographers who followed Alex and the hackers who breached your server, and then he hired another third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. I mean, we’re talking about having private contractors surveil a member of the First Family and infiltrate White House security to try to induce a sex scandal to win a presidential race, that is some fucked-up shi—”
“Nora, can you—?” June says suddenly, having returned to one of the couches. “Just, please.”
“Sorry,” Nora says. She sits down heavily. “I drank like nine Red Bulls to get through all of those and ate a weed gummy to level back out, so I’m flying at fasten-seat-belts right now.”
Alex closes his eyes.
There’s so fucking much in front of him, and it’s impossible to process it all right now, and he’s pissed, furious, but he can also put a name on it. He can do something about it. He can go outside. He can walk out of this office and call Henry and tell him: “We’re safe. The worst is over.”
He opens his eyes again, looks down at the pages on the table.
“What do we do with this now?” June asks.
“What if we just leaked it?” Alex offers. “WikiLeaks—”
“I’m not giving them shit,” Ellen cuts him off immediately, not even looking up, “especially not after what they did to you. This is real shit. I’m taking this motherfucker down. It has to stick.” She finally puts her highlighter down. “We’re leaking it to the press.”
“No major publication is going to run this without verification from someone on the Richards campaign that these emails are real,” June points out, “and that kind of thing takes months.”
“Nora,” Ellen says, fixing her with a steely gaze, “is there anything you can do at all to trace the person who sent this to you?”
“I tried,” Nora says. “They did everything to obscure their identity.” She reaches down into her shirt and produces her phone. “I can show you the email they sent.”
She swipes through a few screens and places her phone face up on the table. The email is exactly as she described, with a signature at the bottom that’s apparently a random combination of numbers and letters: 2021 SCB. BAC CHZ GR ON A1.
2021 SCB.
Alex’s eyes stop on the last line. He picks up the phone. Stares at it.
“Goddammit.”
He keeps staring at the stupid letters. 2021 SCB.
2021 South Colorado Boulevard.
The closest Five Guys to the office where he worked that summer in Denver. He still remembers the order he was sent out to pick up at least once a week. Bacon cheeseburger, grilled onions, A1 Sauce. Alex memorized the goddamn Five Guys order. He feels himself start to laugh.
It’s code, for Alex and Alex only: You’re the only one I trust.
“This isn’t a hacker,” Alex says. “Rafael Luna sent this to you. That’s your verification.” He looks at his mother. “If you can protect him, he’ll confirm it for you.”
[MUSICAL INTRODUCTION: 15 SECOND INSTRUMENTAL FROM DESTINY’S CHILD’S 1999 SINGLE, “BILLS, BILLS, BILLS”]
VOICEOVER: This is a Range Audio podcast.
You’re listening to “Bills, Bills, Bills,” hosted by Oliver Westbrook, Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU.
[END MUSICAL INTRODUCTION]
WESTBROOK: Hi. I’m Oliver Westbrook, and with me, as always, is my exceedingly patient, talented, merciful, and lovely producer, Sufia, without whom I would be lost, bereft, floating on a sea of bad thoughts and drinking my own piss. We love her. Say hi, Sufia.
SUFIA JARWAR, PRODUCER, RANGE AUDIO: Hello, please send help.
WESTBROOK: And this is Bills, Bills, Bills, the podcast where I attempt every week to break down for you, in layman’s terms, what’s happening in Congress, why you should care, and what you can do about it.
Well. I gotta tell you, guys, I had a very different show planned out a few days ago, but I don’t really see the point in getting into any of it.
Let’s just, ah. Take a minute to review the story the Washington Post broke this morning. We’ve got emails, anonymously leaked, confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign, that clearly show Jeffrey Richards—or at least high-ranking staffers at his campaign—orchestrated this fucking diabolical plan to have Alex Claremont-Diaz stalked, surveilled, hacked, and outed by the Daily Mail as part of an effort to take down Ellen Claremont in the general. And then, about—uh, what is it, Suf? Forty minutes?—forty minutes before we started recording this, Senator Rafael Luna tweeted he was parting ways with the Richards campaign.
So. Wow.
I don’t think there’s any need to discuss a leak from that campaign other than Luna. It’s obviously him. From where I sit, this looks like the case of a man who—maybe he didn’t really want to be there in the first place, maybe he was already having second thoughts. Maybe he even infiltrated the campaign to do something exactly like this—Sufia, am I allowed to say that?
JARWAR: Literally, when has that ever stopped you?
WESTBROOK: Point. Anyway, Casper Mattresses is paying me the big sponsorship bucks to give you a Washington analysis podcast, so I’m gonna attempt to do that here, even though what has happened to Alex Claremont-Diaz—and Prince Henry too—over the past few days has been obscene, and it feels cheap and gross to even talk about it like this. But in my opinion, here are the three big things to take away from the news we’ve gotten today.
First, the First Son of the United States didn’t actually do anything wrong.
Second, Jeffrey Richards committed a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president, and I am eagerly awaiting the federal investigation that is coming to him once he loses this election.
Third, Rafael Luna is perhaps the unlikeliest hero of the 2020 presidential race.
A speech has to be made.
Not just a statement. A speech.
“You wrote this?” their mother says, holding the folded-up page June handed Alex on the balcony. “Alex told you to scrap the statement our press secretary drafted and write this whole thing?” June bites her lip and nods. “This is—this is good, June. Why the hell aren’t you writing all our speeches?”
The press briefing room in the West Wing is ruled too impersonal, so they’ve called the press pool to the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor. It’s the room where FDR once recorded his fireside chats, and Alex is going to walk in there and make a speech and hope the country doesn’t hate him for the truth.
They’ve flown Henry in from London for the telecast. He’ll be positioned right at Alex’s shoulder, steady and sure, the emblematic politician’s spouse. Alex’s brain can’t stop sprinting laps around it. He keeps picturing it: an hour from now, millions and millions of TVs across America simulcasting his face, his voice, June’s words, Henry at his side. Everyone will know. Everyone already knows now, but they don’t know, not the right way.
In an hour, every person in America will be able to look at a screen and see their First Son and his boyfriend.
And, across the Atlantic, almost as many will look up over a beer at a pub or dinner with their family or a quiet night in and see their youngest prince, the most beautiful one, Prince Charming.
This is it. October 2, 2020, and the whole world watched, and history remembered.
Alex waits on the South Lawn, within view of the linden trees of the Kennedy Garden, where they first kissed. Marine One touches down in a cacophony of noise and wind and rotors, and Henry emerges in head-to-toe Burberry looking dramatic and windswept, like a dashing hero here to rip bodices and mend war-torn countries, and Alex has to laugh.
“What?” Henry shouts over the noise when he sees the look on Alex’s face.
“My life is cosmic joke and you’re not a real person,” Alex says, wheezing.
“What?” Henry yells again.
“I said, you look great, baby!”
They sneak off to make out in a stairwell until Zahra finds them and drags Henry off to get camera-ready, and soon they’re being shuffled to the Diplomatic Reception Room, and it’s time.
It’s time.
It’s been one long, long year of learning Henry inside and out, learning himself, learning how much he still had to learn, and just like that, it’s time to walk out there and stand at a podium and confidently declare it all as fact.
He’s not afraid of anything he feels. He’s not afraid of saying it. He’s only afraid of what happens when he does.
Henry touches his hand, gently, two fingertips against his palm.
“Five minutes for the rest of our lives,” he says, laughing a grim little laugh.
Alex reaches for him in return, presses one thumb into the hollow of his collarbone, slipping right under the knot of his tie. The tie is purple silk, and Alex is counting his breaths.
“You are,” he says, “the absolute worst idea I’ve ever had.”
Henry’s mouth spreads into a slow smile, and Alex kisses it.
FIRST SON ALEXANDER CLAREMONT-DIAZ’S ADDRESS FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, OCTOBER 2, 2020
Good morning.
I am, and always have been—first, last, and always—a child of America.
You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand.
I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House.
