Tintagel Read Online Free PDF Page B

a queen, you know. I don't need someone to wipe my ass when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself."
    Rita and Beverly glanced at each other, surprised, as Katie Babcock blinked before the wide mirror.
    "It's just not worth it," she finished, not looking at either of them.
    She rose and walked into the wardrobe closet, leaving her two astonished aides behind.
    She closed the door silently. A professional, she thought , shaking her head. Just what I'd need to keep me alive. Make things easier. As if a makeup woman would solve all my problems .
    She knew that everyone in the country—everyone with some kind of political muscle—was gunning for her, either literally or politically. She had two more years of her first term to go, and that would provide enough shooting space, enough space for something to go wrong. It would be time enough for some typical female weakness to appear. Which, she knew, everyone expected. After all, the first woman President in the history of the Republic had more than just an image of the presidency to maintain. She was still a woman, and sometimes the burden of her success or failure occasionally seemed to overwhelm her. It was enough of a task to simply get the work of the office done, and get Congress on her side when, daily, it seemed to be slipping from her grasp.
    She had enough to worry about.
    In these first two years of her administration, she had scored three near-assassinations, the most recent one occurring last month during a reception in New York, where she had served initially as a senator. She had barely swung the presidential election without the official blessing of organized labor in the country, a feat no one thought realistically possible, particularly for a headstrong woman. Then there had been two corporate oil scandals that under normal circumstances wouldn't have reached all the way to the White House if her ex-husband hadn't had a finger in the pie. There were rumors. And the country had been getting progressively more dispirited ever since the African War ended a number of years ago, right at a time when everyone was eager to forget the lessons of history and just as eager to taste imperialism's seductive nectar again. Her studies in law and geopolitics—coupled with prudent common sense—showed her just how much of a con game government policy had always been. It was a game, she soon found, for which she had a remarkable skill.
    Then came the personal touches to her administration. A divorcée was in the White House. That was scandal enough. In her late forties, Katie Babcock—née Katie Shull—had become one of the youngest Presidents to take office. She still retained her thin figure and much of that stern facial beauty that made her former marriage the modern fairy tale into which it had degenerated. Politics had always contained a certain amount of myth making, and charisma was something that the White House hadn't seen the previous century.
    Still, she was honest, and never truly lost her devotees. Her workers, her coterie of like-minded progressives were determined, this time, to make the System work.
    Like all the others … Katie thought to herself bitterly. You start out wanting to do so much good, then the Lady of the Lake withdraws her offer and things quickly become real : a four-year term of shit-catching and shit-flinging. She was the woman in the middle. And she often thought that whoever was on top—for it never seemed to be her—had a very peculiar sense of humor.
    Yet she survived her spell in the Senate and her first two years as President with only a small ulcer to show for it. She was tough, the Iron Lady, the warlord of the White House: at press conferences, or any public appearance, she smiled when she chose and spoke to whom she pleased. She never did see the office of the President as a master of ceremonies. She had no jokes to tell; only work to do. And she made enemies very easily.
    The Iron Lady bore her stature well her first year, a