He turned and faced the Garage Cabinet.

‘We have to stop thinking of Blackstone as a reasonable man. Outwardly he appears to be reasonable – but rest assured, he is not. He’s a power-seeking loon who probably would have talked his way straight into a quiet retirement if not for the Disappearance. He will overreach himself. The trick is for us not to be caught off balance at the same time.’

Jed took a wander around the Oval Office. Barbara Kipper had placed about the room framed photos and other relics from her husband’s college days. Pictures from mountain walks; a few knick-knacks picked up while scuba diving. The Secret Service would not let him anywhere near an open body of water with scuba gear on his back. The best they’d grant him was some time in a pool ringed with agents. Kip understandably thought it wasn’t worth the trouble.

‘The last thing we need to do, Mr President, is give this asshole the opportunity to say, “I’m laughing in the face of the Supreme Court.” I can already see him hee-hawing through a performance on fucking Fox, slandering each of the justices as some pissant backwoods lawyer who tripped over his dick to fall onto the bench. Again, apologies Sarah.’

Secretary Humboldt smiled. ‘Quite all right, Mr Culver.’

‘Fucking Fox,’ muttered Kipper. ‘Three hundred million people turned into jelly by the Wave, and Rupert Murdoch wasn’t one of them. There is no God.’

McAuley lifted his briefing note. ‘If I might, Mr President?’

‘Sure, Paul, knock yourself out.’

McAuley began quoting from reams of figures contained in a table that summarised federal government income and outlays for the next six months. Culver was all too familiar with the math. Even with the reduced need for federal spending, the fact was they weren’t generating enough revenue to meet that reduced need and service the debt at the same time. The line of credit would mask the shortfall in their receipts, but while they’d be able to meet their obligations in the short term, the underlying deficit would continue to grow. A population of twenty million simply could not handle the tab left by three hundred million. Land sales, speculation, trading away this for that, had only slowed the slide.

It simply wasn’t sustainable. Nor was it James Kipper’s fault, nor Paul McAuley’s. The Secretary of the Treasury was obliged to prepare the government’s financials according to law. But as long as Blackstone wilfully ignored the law as it required him to remit monies to Seattle, there would always be a black hole in the middle of the accounts, sucking everything into it like the fucking maelstrom in that Edgar Allen Poe story.