CHAPTER 2
Harrison Campaign War Room
Baxter Road, Nantucket
Senator Coleman R. Harrison of Pennsylvania took a sip of whiskey and tried to concentrate on the heat sliding down his throat. Usually by his third drink he felt warm and loose, but not today. Today he felt nothing but fear and regret.
He should have felt on top of the world.
He had a beautiful wife, a house in Bryn Mawr, and a summer place in Nantucket.
He had access to a private plane and could walk into any Michelin-rated restaurant without a reservation.
Hell, he’d been welcomed to palaces from Paris to Tokyo and had played polo with William, Harry, and even Charles himself.
And as a rising political star, he was closing in on the coup de grace, the political Stanley Cup, the absolute cherry on top: winning the next primary on the way to accepting his party’s nomination for President of the United States.
Senator Harrison’s numbers were as solid as a front-runner’s could get.
He was an easy twelve points ahead of Theresa Larson, Governor of Colorado, and favored for the party nomination this August. And the pundits were already projecting a landslide victory over Harrison’s presumed opponent, a former professional wrestler.
He was in political nirvana—and personal purgatory.
Harrison tried to focus on all the goodness in his life, yet try as he might, he could picture only the disappearing act. And he was the star of that one-man show.
He knew his wife, Elise Courville, had married him with dreams of becoming his first lady, politically and personally.
Their home life was civil enough, but it had been loveless almost from Day One.
Harrison’s fidelity had lasted a year into their five-year marriage.
They now slept in separate bedrooms, leaving him to rationalize that she had basically forced him into having affairs.
Of course, when Elise had abruptly kicked him out of the Cliff Road house they’d shared until a month ago, all his theories about her began to unravel—along with the advantages she’d provided.
The money was hers. The Gulfstream was hers. The house on the Main Line was hers. And she was taking it all away. “No more restaurants, no more polo matches, no more trips to Paris, and certainly no Time magazine cover or Washington Post headlines,” she’d told him. “At least not the ones you want.”
His wife made no mention of divorce, but she’d dropped a far worse threat: “I am going to tell my father.”
Her words stung. As did the political reality that his father-in-law, Charles Courville, French ambassador to the United States, was not someone to have as an enemy.
Thankfully, Harrison could still count on his staunchest ally: his campaign director, Walter Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald called in a favor from a loyal donor and got them set up in a house on Baxter Road, on the other side of the island.
Fitzgerald also made sure to leak the fact that this location was Harrison’s new campaign war room, a necessity for planning the grand strategy that would propel them from Pennsylvania Senator to Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Publicizing it,” Fitzgerald told Harrison, “will keep you from fucking this thing up even more.”
Tonight’s fundraising event at the house had gone smoothly, but Harrison had been acting on autopilot, barely holding it together beneath the surface as he glad-handed donors. The last ones hadn’t left until well past one in the morning.
The senator looked out the window of the Nantucket summer home into the darkness, where the Atlantic waves rolled onto the eroding beaches of Siasconset.
Just like my luck, he thought, the waves keep crashing and crashing.
Nantucket was on the western edge of a nor’easter that would leave everything from New York to Maine socked in for the rest of the night.
Coleman Harrison was close to becoming the leader of the free world, but he wasn’t in charge. What Walt Fitzgerald didn’t know was that Elise Courville was not the only woman who’d given Harrison an ultimatum.
Aimee Sullivan—Harrison’s twenty-eight-year-old redheaded press secretary/mistress, equally gifted at manipulating the media and her boss—was about to make him pay dearly for his sins.
The night before last, after staffers had vacated the campaign war room, Sullivan was scheduled to prepare Harrison for the upcoming debate.
But within minutes, they’d abandoned the office for the bedroom.
The debate prep morphed into an unusually rough session featuring some of Sullivan’s more sinister talents.
Afterward, Sullivan proceeded to explain her priorities. Despite her relative youth and her inexperience in military matters, what she wanted was a seat at the table of the National Security Council.
Harrison didn’t know if he could resist Aimee Sullivan’s unrelenting demands. Give me what I want, Coleman, or you’ll never fuck me in the Lincoln bedroom.