The man turned, flashing a white porcelain smile. Newton Towns. The actor who played the President in the movies. The one that popularized Mack’s narrative before he first ran for office, dramatizing his escape from the North Koreans after his fighter jet went down in the DMZ. Then the sequel, a miniseries about the Panamanian crisis of his first term. They were working on a third one now, about the retaking of New Orleans.

“He’s fucking glowing,” said Odile, and Tania laughed with her.

He wasn’t, really, but he had that aura. Opposite of what Tania expected, he was even better-looking in person. Beautiful, in an unreal way, yet there he was, magazine cover model of a good-looking, friendly white man, the archetype they wanted you to believe in. He wore a suit, but no tie. One of those suits built to your scan, that draped elegantly and suggested superhero bulges all at the same time.

One of the cameras came in close for the star, then moved toward the crowd. Not that you could tell what it was filming. There was more than one eye behind the black glass of those rotored orbs.

As she thought of it scanning them, Tania got anxious for a second, then remembered how that inspector sucked up to Odile. If they were watching them, it was probably to protect her.

Two women walked out. The girlfriends. Newton’s date, the country singer Ashley Lionel, and the presidential companion, triathlete Patricia Wood. They looked rich, unnaturally young, and happy.

Then He emerged.

The Commander in Chief, wearing an old-school bomber jacket with flight patches and the left sleeve pinned up over his stump. He didn’t look back. All business, the busy boss headed back to the office. His hair was going white. It looked like some of his skin was, too, scar tissue you could see on the back of his neck. He was shorter than they made him look on TV. And something about seeing him in the flesh, feeling him that close, made all your deep down feelings about him come right up to the surface.

Tania wished she could see his eyes.

“Yo, Tommy!” she yelled, insanely, uncontrollably, as if momentarily possessed by the rabble-rousing spirit of her mom. “Look at your people, tyrant!”

Odile gasped.

And as soon as the words left her mouth, Tania could feel she had breached the terms of their unofficial permission to be here.

Shit.

Tania was right at the fence now, fingers through the chain link, eyes on, like some crazy starfucker. Or assassin. She suddenly realized how very close they were to the most protected man in the world.

She glanced at Odile’s freaked-out face, and the uniformed dudes gaping behind her, all staring at Tania.

But she got what she wanted.