MR. PRESIDENT: A Novel (The Smokescreen Series)
She read the document at four-seventeen in the morning. Her own initials were in the routing block. Her daughter's name was in the arrest sequence.
Dr. Elena Vega-Ortiz is fifty-four, puertorrique a, nine months a widow, and the senior career civil servant in the Republic's Office of Strategic Continuity. For twenty-five years she has drafted the classified emergency-authority documents the executive branch holds in reserve for crises it has not yet declared. The President is eighty-two, in the late afternoon of his second term, and has begun to act on documents she drafted. On a Monday in August she opens an inter-agency memo and finds her own initials on one she does not remember authoring. The effective date is fourteen days from the presidential election. The pretext, a domestic terror event the document already describes, will be staged. The post-event arrest sequence names her thirty-year-old daughter.
Across the ninety-three days that follow, Elena tries to interrupt what she helped build. She brings the document to the Inspector General, who declines to receive it. She approaches a federal judge whose docket cannot move at the speed of executive action. She calls retired colleagues who acknowledge the architecture exists and have nothing to offer. She flies to her mother's house in San Sebasti n for what may be a last visit and writes a letter she will not deliver for ninety days. Election day approaches. The clock runs at the speed of executive action.
Mr. President is the second novel of the Smokescreen Series - six books that argue American empire in the twenty-first century expands not through visible coercion but through legal absorption, and that Puerto Rico is the privileged observer because it has lived this pattern across the architecture's full century. The legal architecture rendered in the novel is real. Every statute, every Supreme Court case, every Presidential Emergency Action Document referenced is verifiable in the United States Code as of 2026. The country is fictional. The architecture is not.
For readers of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Don DeLillo's White Noise, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.
Preceded by The Inconvenience, Book 1 of the Smokescreen Series.
Also available in Spanish as Sr. Presidente.
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