overmatched car looked precisely how Donald felt, both on that little hill at the construction site and back at the Hill in Washington.
‘Two months behind.’
Mick smacked him on the arm with his clipboard. ‘Hey, did you hear me? Two months behind already, and they just broke ground six months ago. How is that even possible?’
Donald shrugged as they left the frowning foremen and trudged down the hill to the parking lot. ‘Maybe it’s because they have elected officials pretending to do jobs that belong to the private sector,’ he offered.
Mick laughed and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Jesus, Donny, you sound like a goddamned Republican!’
‘Yeah? Well, I feel like we’re in over our heads here.’ He waved his arm at the depression in the hills they were skirting, a deep bowl scooped out of the earth. Several mixer trucks were pouring concrete into the wide hole at its centre. More trucks waited in line behind them, their butts spinning impatiently.
‘You do realise,’ Donald said, ‘that one of these holes is going to hold the building they let me draw up? Doesn’t that scare you? All this money? All these people. It sure as hell scares me.’
Mick’s fingers dug painfully into Donald’s neck. ‘Take it easy. Don’t go getting all philosophical on me.’
‘I’m being serious,’ Donald said. ‘Billions of taxpayer dollars are gonna nestle in the dirt out there in the shape that I drew up. It seemed so . . . abstract before.’
‘Christ, this isn’t about you or your plans.’ He popped Donald with the clipboard and used it to point towards the container field. Through a fog of dust, a large man in a cowboy hat waved them over. ‘Besides,’ Mick said, as they angled away from the parking lot, ‘what’re the chances anyone even uses your little bunker? This is about energy independence. It’s about the death of coal. You know, it feels like the rest of us are building a nice big house over here, and you’re over in a corner stressing about where you’re gonna hang the fire extinguisher—’
‘Little bunker?’ Donald held his blazer up over his mouth as a cloud of dust blew across them. ‘Do you know how many floors deep this thing is gonna be? If you set it on the ground, it’d be the tallest building in the world.’
Mick laughed. ‘Not for long it wouldn’t. Not if you designed it.’
The man in the cowboy hat drew closer. He smiled widely as he kicked through the packed dirt to meet them, and Donald finally recognised him from TV: Charles Rhodes, the governor of Oklahoma.
‘You Senator Thawman’s boys?’
Governor Rhodes had the authentic drawl to go with the authentic hat, the authentic boots and the authentic buckle. He rested his hands on his wide hips, a clipboard in one of them.
Mick nodded. ‘Yessir. I’m Congressman Webb. This is Congressman Keene.’
The two men shook hands. Donald was next. ‘Governor,’ he said.
‘Got your delivery.’ He pointed the clipboard at the staging area. ‘Just shy of a hundred containers. Should have somethin’ rollin’ in about every week. Need one of you to sign right here.’
Mick reached out and took the clipboard. Donald saw an opportunity to ask something about Senator Thurman, something he figured an old war buddy would know.
‘Why do some people call him Thawman?’ he asked.
Mick flipped through the delivery report, a breeze pinning back the pages for him.
‘I’ve heard others call him that when he wasn’t around,’ Donald explained, ‘but I’ve been too scared to ask.’
Mick looked up from the report with a grin. ‘It’s because he was an ice-cold killer in the war, right?’
Donald cringed. Governor Rhodes laughed.
‘Unrelated,’ he said. ‘True, but unrelated.’
The governor glanced back and forth between them. Mick passed the clipboard to Donald, tapped a page that dealt with the emergency housing facility. Donald looked over the materials list.
‘You boys familiar with his anti-cryo bill?’ Governor Rhodes asked. He handed Donald a pen, seemed to expect him to just sign the thing and not look over it too closely.
Mick shook his head and shielded his eyes against the Georgia sun. ‘Anti-cryo?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. Aw, hell, this probably dates back before you squirts were even born. Senator Thawman penned the bill that put down that cryo fad. Made it illegal to take advantage of rich folk and turn them into ice cubes. It went to the big court, where they voted five–four, and suddenly tens of thousands of popsicles with more money than sense were thawed out and buried proper. These were people who’d