Bob might have been aggravating her with his words but she knew he was right. She was easily duped. Naïve, trusting, gullible. She’d been a coddled little princess, skipping through life while the rest of the world was crumbling. Caroline would have never, ever expected her own government to turn on her, and yet it had. Her idealism had failed her. All the trust and innocence in the world meant shit when it came time to face the demons of reality. She remained ill-equipped to handle this sort of treatment, and her captors damn well knew it.
She closed her eyes, trying to remember Bob the way he used to be. Robust, fully alive. Practically buoyant. She hesitated to call him jolly, for that conjured up images of men with white beards ringing bells at Christmas and posing for cute pictures with children. But he’d been that kind of man. Even his years as Speaker of the House hadn’t robbed him of his convivial nature. And this place had stripped it all away.
Fuck them.
She spent most of her free time cursing the guards, in her head. Cursing their parents too, for allowing them to be born. Wondering what they used to be, before they became turncoats. Were they all tenured government agents or employees? Or had they been recruited specifically for this purpose under new standards? Caroline hated to think that they had been civil servants for much longer than Santos had been in office; if they were long serving members of government, they’d turned on a dime the instant he ascended to power. A terrifying thought for anyone – that large numbers of people would start engaging in antisocial behavior just because they had license to do it, with no recourse if they went too far. She knew it was easy to become complacent, to take orders without reflecting upon them, but damn it. They should know better. They should all fucking know better.
Fuck them, indeed.
Chapter Thirteen
The Past
Caroline looked smashing if she said so herself, decked out in a plum skirt suit and lilac blouse. She sprinted as gracefully as possible down the hall from Jack’s office. The Republican Party of Pennsylvania must have planned ahead because he was in the space right next to Christine’s, with both offices jointly serving as the main GOP Headquarters in suburban Philadelphia.
Surprisingly, Marguerite and Sophie expressed a strong interest in doing all sorts of campaign activities that morning, which they hadn’t really been all that eager to do when Caroline was in election mode. But things had changed, they wanted to spend time with Jack, he wanted to spend time with them, and Caroline wasn’t going to argue about it. She left them to poke around with Jack and his campaign staffers while she checked out Christine’s digs.
Christine’s suite was slightly larger than Jack’s. Two doors in the back led to what Caroline assumed were smaller offices. The front room was empty except for Christine’s campaign manager Jeanine and two interns.
“If it isn’t America’s Political Sweetheart.” Jeanine strolled over as soon as she caught sight of Caroline. “I thought you might show up today.”
Some article writer at Time had referred to Caroline as America’s Political Sweetheart in a cover story shortly after the incident at the Capitol. A strange title, but hack journalists were always keen to reduce powerful and prominent women to cutesy phrases. Caroline had become something of a media darling and it was reflected in the recent puffy coverage she’d received. The magazine, willing to go to great lengths in their effort to drool all over her, obtained some pretty compelling pictures of Christine, Jack, and Caroline at the Visitors’ Center. They shelled out some cash to the tourist who’d taken them and ran them with the article. Caroline couldn’t bring herself to look at the images and probably never would. She thought the fawning and the fake flattery were all a bit much, but the name from the story had stuck.
A few bloggers had taken to calling Christine the Iron Lady. Christine acted upset by this but had always been a huge Maggie Thatcher devotee, and Caroline suspected her snippy response was mostly for show. She would have very much preferred something more whimsical for the two of them, like Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, since it came with a built-in theme song. But with the political wind at her back, Caroline wasn’t going to complain, even if the moniker was a bit cumbersome.
“My new nickname doesn’t exactly roll