The lawyer flipped open his laptop and began to compose an email to Ritchie. He wanted to bounce a few ideas off the admiral before the conference call in the afternoon.

‘Hey Ritch,’ he began, very deliberately using the informal style of address he’d cultivated in his dealings with the navy man.

You asked for my thoughts on the line of succession before I wrote them up for the reference group. Well, I’m thinking the only way to punch through all this is to go back to first principles. We’ve got us a constitutional boondoggle. We need us a constitutional convention to stamp it flat. A short, sharp, butt-kicking convention.

Normally you’d require a vote of two-thirds of the state legislatures just to get everyone together. It’s the only amendatory process available in the absence of a functioning Congress and Senate. The intent of the relevant section of the Constitution, Article 5, is that the ‘two-thirds’ would be ‘two-thirds’ of all of the states, but that is impossible under present circumstances.

The only available option would be for the three surviving states to declare themselves the only three states and to then call a convention or, more likely, to declare themselves trustees for the ‘missing’ forty-seven states, and vote those states’ interests at a convention called to address the current emergency. The result is the same, and it is the only mechanism available in my estimation to reconstitute a federal government within the letter of the Constitution.

Jed stopped tapping the keys and stared out of the window at the passing scenery for a moment. They had turned onto the freeway, which was largely deserted, save for a few Hummers heading downtown from Pearl, and the National Memorial Cemetery was slipping by on the right. He had a great-uncle buried up there. Uncle Lou, on his mom’s side. He’d meant to visit the grave sometime during his vacation but had never made it. He was sure his forebear would understand. Lou Stafford had been killed on Wake Island, the same day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He’d fought when all seemed hopeless, given his life so that Jed and his kids could live free. You had to wonder what the old guy would have made of all this, thought Culver – before reminding himself that Lou Stafford was only nineteen when he died. Not much of an old guy, really. The lawyer nodded a quick greeting, which would have to do for now.

He went back to his screen, wondering about the difficulties of assembling a convention along the lines he was proposing. The very nature of the three surviving states might pose problems. Hawaii and Washington, particularly the western half of the state, were very liberal, Democratic leaning, and in the case of the latter, not particularly pro-military. Seattle he found notoriously smug and self-righteous, although that may have changed now. The eastern, agricultural portion of Washington, right up to the event horizon, was heavily Republican, although many of those people had already relocated into temporary shelters in Seattle. Hawaii had no oil, no real agriculture and no industry, but it did have a strong military presence. The maritime power alone concentrated here was still greater than that of any other country in the world. Washington had agriculture, industry and refining capacity, but no oil. Alaska had no agriculture, plenty of oil and decent refining capacity, but very little else, particularly people; and what people it did have tended to be very conservative, libertarian Republicans. He just didn’t know whether they could all get together.

With Massachusetts and Mississippi gone, you could award a blue ribbon to Alaska and Washington for taking out the Polar Opposites prize. Jed figured that Washington, with its much larger population and resource base, would resist Alaska having a virtual veto over any measures necessary to act within a constitutional framework. And Alaska, for its part, might well see itself as the last bastion of rugged individualism, and so would have limited interest in submitting to a drastically revised federal system highly tilted toward nanny-statism.

It was going to be worse than the First and Second Continental Congress, that was for certain. It was going to make the argument over issues like the Article of Confederation and how much of a person a slave represented look like a middle-school debate class. There wasn’t any George Washington around to hold the delegates together or come up with the various compromises they’d need. Any constitutional convention with the three remaining players was going to be a first-class WWE smackdown cage match.

Culver sighed, already exhausted at the prospect of tying all this together into a neat package with a bright bow that everyone would want to own. He returned to his keyboard for one last sentence for Ritchie’s benefit.

The trick to making this work will be to cram all the wild cats into the bag before they know what’s happening.

The key, he thought to himself, is George Washington. If a modern George Dubya didn’t exist, Jed Culver was going to have to invent him.

He was an operator, possibly a crook, and definitely not to be left alone with the small-change jar. But Admiral James Ritchie couldn’t help but warm to Culver the more time he spent with him. There was no reason they should get on, a patrician New Englander from old money with a long family history of noblesse oblige, and a scheming carpetbagger from the bad end of the bayou. Certainly, naпvetй didn’t come into it. Thanks to Colonel Maccomb of the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, Ritchie was well aware of what kind of a creature Jed Culver was. A fixer.

He was the operator your troubled multi-billion-dollar company called in to quickly and quietly clean up the mess left behind by your recently departed and grotesquely incompetent CEO. He was the man who procured the difficult export licence in the hopelessly corrupt, but fabulously oil-rich, third-world shithole. Or the development approval for your six-star resort on the ecologically fragile tropical island. Or the seemingly impossible negotiated truce between the warring Stone Age tribes that was interfering with the profit margins of your hardwood logging operations in the New Guinea highlands. If that didn’t work, he hired the heavy hitters who protected your oil-drilling operations in Africa without cutting too deep into your budget.

Jed Culver was a rolled-gold son of a bitch.

That said, Ritchie had a gut feeling that when the big questions were asked, this gladhanding sack of shit would actually give you a straight answer, especially if that answer was something you didn’t want to hear. Perhaps he was a bit like old Joe Kennedy in that way. Ritchie, an avid reader of historical biographies, thought he recognised something in Culver that FDR might have seen in the old bootlegger when appointing him to head up the SEC way back in the Depression – a thief you could trust.

The admiral kept all these thoughts to himself, of course, as Culver walked around his office speaking from notes, with his expensive jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up and tie raffishly askew. Was the ruffled, big-doofus thing just part of his routine? Probably. With a guy like Culver you had to figure that everything was part of the routine. But still, he seemed blessed, if that was the right word, with a frightening appreciation for the worst aspects of human nature, and how they might still be turned to everyone’s advantage.