Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright 2007 by Christopher Taylor Buckley

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: April 2007

ISBN: 0-446-19493-X

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About TWELVE

also by CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY

Florence of Arabia

No Way to Treat a First Lady

Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nations Capital

Little Green Men

God Is My Broker

Wry Martinis

Thank You for Smoking

Wet Work

Campion

The White House Mess

Steaming to Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter

For Monie Begley

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

HERBERT HOOVER

Prologue

T hank you, Wendy Wong in Washington, for that report on the deteriorating economic situation.

In Florida today, another attack on a gated community by youths protesting the recent hike in the Social Security payroll tax.

Several hundred people in their twenties stormed the gates of a retirement community in the early hours this morning. Residents were assaulted as they played golf. Demonstrators seized carts and drove them into water hazards and bunkers. Others used spray paint and garden implements to write slogans on the greens.

One such message, gouged into the eighteenth green, read: Boomsday Now! The word refers to the term economists use for the date this year when the first of the nations seventy-seven million so-called Baby Boomers began to retire with full Social Security benefits. The development has put a tremendous strain on the system that in turn has sent shock waves through the entire U.S. economy.

A maintenance worker at the golf course said it might be, quote, weeks before residents were able to play golf.

In other news today, the vice president has shot yet another lawyer, this time, he says, in self-defense....

Chapter 1

C assandra Devine was not yet thirty, but she was already tired.

Media training, they called it. Shed been doing it for years, but it still had the ring of potty training.

Todays media trainee was the chief executive officer of a company that administered hospitals, twenty-eight of them throughout the southeastern United States. In the previous year, it had lost $285 million and one-third of its stock market value. During that same period, the client had been paid $3.8 million in salary, plus a $1.4 million performance bonus.

Corporate Crime Scene, the prime-time investigative television program, was doing an expos and had requested an interview. In her negotiations with the shows producers, Cass had learned that they had footage of him boarding the company jet ($35 mil) wearing a spectacularly loud Hawaiian shirt and clenching a torpedo-shapedindeed, torpedo-sizecigar in his teeth while hefting a bag of expensively gleaming golf clubs. Unfortunate as it was, this footage was only the appetizer. The main cinematic course was video of the companys recent annual executive retreat at a Bahamas resort of dubious taste. It showed the client, todays trainee, along with his fellow executive retreatantsdoubtless exhausted after a hard day of budget cutting and crunching numbersdrinking rum punch dispensed from the breasts of anatomically correct female ice sculptures, to the accompaniment of a steel drum band, a limbo bar, and scantily clad waitresses dressed asoh dearmermaids. It would all make for a spirited discussion on the upcoming episode of CCS, especially when juxtaposed against the footage they were also running of patients parked like cars in an L.A. traffic jam in litter-strewn corridors, moaning for attention, some of them duct-taped to the wheelchairs.

So they dont fall out, the client explained.

Cass took a sip from her seventh or eighth Red Bull of the day and suppressed a sigh, along with the urge to plunge her ballpoint pen into the clients heart. Assuming he had one.

That last one was a lot better, she said. Theyd done four practice interviews so far, with Cass pretending to be the interviewer from the television program. If you have the energy, Id like to do just one more. This time, Id like you to concentrate on smiling and looking straight into the camera. Also, could you please not do that sideways thing with your eyes? It makes you look... Like a sleazebag. It works against the overall tone of you know...transparency. The man was as transparent as a bucket of tar.

I really dont know why were even agreeing to the interview. He sounded peeved, as though hed been frivolously talked into attending a performance of The Marriage of Figaro when hed much rather be at the office, helping humanity, devising new and more cost-effective methods of duct-taping terminal patients to their wheelchairs so they could be parked in corridors all day.

Terry feels that this is the way to go. In cases like this... The client shot her an I dare you to call me a criminal glance of defiance. That is, where the other side has a strong, uh, visual presentation, that its best to meet them in the center of the ring, so to speak. Were looking to project an image of total...up-frontness.

The client snorted.

That no one is more upset at theshe glanced at her notes to see what artful term of mendacity they were using at the momentrevenue downtick. And that you and management areshe looked down at her notes again, this time just to avoid eye contactworking around the clock to make the, uh, difficult decisions. Like where to hold next years executive retreat. Vegas? Macao? Sodom?

The client generously consented to one final practice interview. He left muttering about persecution and complaining of the indignity of having to fly back to Memphis via commercial aircraft. Terry had sternly forbade him the company jet. Tomorrow, the client would spend an hour in a soup kitchen ladling out faux humanity to Memphiss wretched, an act of conspicuous compassion that would be inconspicuously video-recorded by one of his aides. If Corporate Crime Scene