“Ah, you’re not as out of the loop as you pretend to be,” Nash said. “Excellent question. She’s even smarter than he is but doesn’t have his touch with the common man. Her element is more a private jet full of Harvard PhDs. It’s a weakness she’s conscious of and working on, though. We’ll see how it goes. What I can tell you is that she’s a full fifty percent of that team. To the point that it’s a mistake to think of the president as one person. It’s more like Anthony Cook is the right brain and Catherine’s the left.”

Rapp nodded but didn’t otherwise respond.

“Irene doesn’t like them. Did she tell you that? She thinks they come off as a little ambitious,” Nash said.

“Ambitious with their agenda for the country or with accumulating power?”

“That’s a hard question to answer. You know better than I do that there’s a fair amount of overlap between those two things.”

“Try.”

“This I can tell you: Anthony Cook feels like he’s the first president of the new era. He understands the shifts in the geopolitical landscape, in technology, and in culture. And while he’s informed by history, he tends not to look back too much. His eyes are locked on what’s next. He wants to knock two hundred and fifty years of dust off the country and put us firmly back into a leadership position.”

“They all do at first,” Rapp said. “But he’ll end up like the rest. Flailing around, putting out fires, and collecting donations. Then he’ll be gone.”

“Always the cynic. But yeah. Probably. I hope not, though. The way I see it, this country’s in worse shape than it’s been in since the Civil War. We’re bankrupting ourselves. We’re turning on each other. We’re choosing leaders who are only interested in staying in office and don’t even pretend to govern anymore. We’re losing our focus on terrorism while Islamic radicals still have the ability to bloody us. The Chinese are on their way to dominating us economically and the Russians are getting way further than they should trolling us on the Internet…” His voice faded for a moment. “Take it from a guy who spends half his life inside the beltway, man. We need some real leadership in this country. And we need it now.”

“Mitch!” Anthony Cook said, striding across the disorientingly modern Oval Office. “It’s a real honor to meet you.”