We rode for what seemed like a very long time, because I had no idea where we were going. The little shops and the big shopping centers flew by as the limousine sped past the slower traffic. There was definitely an air of power in this car. It must have not been a very long ride in actuality, however, for we made virtually no turns and there had been no conversation. We turned into a long green drive, with the obligatory mossy trees on either side of the gravel road. Even more obligatorily was the massive house standing at the end of the drive, filling up the space between the lines of trees.
I leant back in my seat. I was beginning to get used to my role in this high stakes game: the unexpected chauffeurs showing up to take me to clandestine meetings with high-level Players to decide the fate of the Nation was seeming less and less intimidating, every time it happened. I had been vaulted most unexpectedly into the upper rings of the distribution of Power in America. I was now a sort of insider.
I suddenly realized that this was very unusual for a campaign manager. I was, after all, only running a campaign. My guy hadn't even won the necessary primaries, let alone have any sort of a lock on the nomination and certainly not the Office. Who was he, this tall, smooth candidate, to be sending me to these discussions on policy that I had no prior knowledge of? How was it possible that I didn't know? I had spent very many of my days in the last several months by his side. He was my Captain; that was how I had seen every candidate I had worked for, with one or two possible exceptions. I had trusted him from the beginning, but there was obviously some force at work here that I was not comprehending. Is this what all managers new to the big leagues went through? Did all their candidates have some sort of connections to the Machine that they didn't know about?
I was still brooding on this when we walked into the mansion, and I almost blurted some of it out when I saw Hayworth sitting there at the long wooden conference table, flanked by my friends the oilmen, big fellows who looked small and meek in his prescence.