Chapter 28
The deaths of President Kenneth J. Darlington and tennis star Dimitri Alexandrovich Orlov—both of heart attacks, coming within three days of each other—hit Mitch and his colleagues at Langley hard, though not in the same way. Indeed, Mitch mourned only one sincerely, though he was careful not to share his feelings with Bowman and the rest of the team. The death of a president was no small matter, he told himself, even that of one as much of an asshole as Darlington. Mitch didn’t care how much he had done for the economy—he was skeptical about presidential influence on the markets and the economy anyway, preferring to think they moved in cycles. He thought the president a preening peacock who had taken money from a foreign government, which made him a traitor. What’s more, he wa
