by Chris Hauty
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For Pat and GT
Truth will ultimately prevail where pains is taken to bring it to light.
— GEORGE WASHINGTON, LETTER TO CHARLES M. THRUSTON
PROLOGUE
Hayley Chill exits the Oval Office through a door that opens onto the Rose Garden and must pause to admire the absurd perfection of the balmy weather outside. The bright sunshine and brilliant green of the executive mansion’s grounds are a stark contrast to the bedlam inside the West Wing on this dreadful day. The twenty-seven-year-old White House staffer—flaxen hair and powder blue eyes notwithstanding—is unnoticed by Secret Service and FBI agents driven into a frenzy by the unfolding crisis. Wait until the full story comes out, Hayley muses as she walks up West Executive Drive. America won’t know what hit her. But the pandemonium has provided Hayley with a welcome diversion. Weighing on her mind as she leaves the White House complex, most likely for the last time, is the awareness she will be on a list of those held accountable. This failure of national proportions will demand a host of sacrificial lambs.
Hayley catches up with three housekeepers—two Filipinas and a Latina—as they exit the security gate at Seventeenth Street, on the west side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The residence staff members were the first to be released by the Secret Service.
“I’m looking for Alberto Barrios, one of the president’s valets. Have you seen him today?”
The Latina housekeeper nods and points across Seventeenth, indicating a man on foot, just turning the corner at G Street and heading west.
“Alberto,” the housekeeper says.
By the time she has jogged across the bustling avenue and rounded the corner at G Street, Hayley sees Barrios has already advanced halfway up the block. The Cuban, tall and broad shouldered, walks with a brisk pace. Hayley increases her gait to narrow the distance between them. She hasn’t a coherent plan or strategy. Barrios must be apprehended, at the very least. Stopping him before he flees the country is all that matters.
What is the extent of the man’s training? Is he armed? Where does he intend to rendezvous with his compatriots? These questions stay unanswered as Hayley follows Barrios up the mostly quiet side street. The skills she developed in the US Army, as one of the first female graduates to earn the blue cord, kick into gear. Intercepting the Cuban well before he makes contact with his associates is an absolute imperative. By any means necessary, she must detain him long enough for the police to arrive. Careful to maintain a discreet distance from her target, Hayley retrieves her phone and dials 911.
“Nine one one, what’s your emergency?”
Hayley covers her mouth as she speaks into the phone. “A man and a woman are fighting on the sidewalk. Twenty-one hundred block of G Street.”
“Ma’am, do they have any weapons?” the operator asks.
“The man has a gun.” She sees Barrios crossing the street in the middle of the block. Has he detected her pursuit? Into the phone, she says, “Please send the police. Quickly!”
Hayley disconnects the call before the operator can request she stay on the line. Pausing on her side of the street, she observes her target entering the GW Delicatessen. His turn toward the store is abrupt. Not natural in the least. To prolong the hope that Barrios is unaware of her presence would be a dangerous indulgence in wishful thinking. The real chase has begun.
As Hayley crosses the street, she considers the possibility that the deli has a rear exit, one that will provide the Cuban an escape. She could continue to the end of the block with a plan of intercepting him on Twenty-Second Street. But Barrios could be watching from inside and exit through the front door once she’s around the corner. Hayley calculates that her best chance for success is to follow him inside.
She imagines how the next few minutes will unfold. Violence will come. Blood will be spilled. Hayley has been here before. The experience has always been the same. There is a flattening of sound. Colors become oversaturated. Time is elongated, certain to be followed by a sudden lurching of events into hyper speed. Instinct is a pivotal factor in these situations. Training. Muscle memory takes over, as well as the brute willpower to prevail and survive. She pauses at the threshold of the convenience store, to breathe and modulate heart rate. Her eyes take in everything. Ears detect every sound, however minuscule.
Now, Hayley tells herself. This.
Pushing the glass door open, she enters the cramped delicatessen. Occupying a narrow storefront, the owners have maximized the limited space with high shelving that runs the length of the interior. A female cashier restocks the shelves directly behind a checkout counter, to the left of the entry door. The Cuban operative is nowhere in sight. As Hayley makes her way toward the back of the store, she notes the absence of surveillance cameras. Did Barrios, familiar with the store, select this location for that reason? Hayley feels the hairs on her forearms go up.
The deli counter at the rear of the store is deserted. Looking past the refrigerated case displaying an assortment of meats, cheeses, and salads, Hayley clocks the rear emergency exit door she intuited would be there. Weighing the likelihood that Barrios has fled, Hayley considers her next move. A restroom to the right of the rear exit offers another possibility. Checking the door, she finds it unlocked.
Every instinct sounds an alarm. Hayley puts herself in Barrios’s shoes. He thinks he can take me. She pauses to look over her shoulder, to the deli counter behind her. A magnetic strip over the prep counter is easily within access, offering an array of long knives. She quickly discards the thought. Instead, Hayley retrieves her set of keys, positioning three of them between her index and middle fingers.
She pushes open the door.
The dingy restroom isn’t much larger than a broom closet, fitted only with a filthy washbasin. Her prey is not in sight. A door leading into what must be the toilet is to Hayley’s left. She sets her feet far apart for a stable foundation and pushes the inner door open, revealing Barrios crouched on the toilet seat.
The Cuban agent seizes Hayley by the left arm and hauls her toward him. Simultaneously, he steps off his perch and thrusts a knife at her with his other hand. Hayley deflects his knife thrust with her left arm and punches with her right fist, driving the spiked keys into the soft tissue of Barrios’s face. She strikes him this way repeatedly in swift succession, gouging the Cuban’s cheeks and right eye. He wobbles under her furious assault, regains traction, and comes at her again with his fist closed around the knife handle. Striking out blindly, Barrios connects with a blow to her right temple. Hayley’s knees buckle. As she starts falling, he kicks her hard in the shin with a steel-tipped boot. Pain rockets up her spine and seems to explode from the top of Hayley’s head. Constricted by the narrow confines, Barrios awkwardly flips the knife forward and stabs at his adversary. She ducks, avoiding the blade by inches. The knife’s tip pierces the cheap, hollow-core door behind her. The big Cuban expends a few precious seconds to extract the knife, providing Hayley the opportunity to regroup.
In that cramped space, the two operatives—one male in his forties and the other female, twenty-seven—trade desperate blows. Their fight is ferocious but not long in duration. Barrios cannot exploit his larger physical size. Can’t extend the full reach of his punches. Hayley brings force to bear with the understanding that she made the correct
decision in rejecting the choice of a long knife from behind the deli counter. Her spiked fist is equally devastating and much more maneuverable. Her agility overwhelms the Cuban. Hayley inflicts far more damage on him than she receives.
Barrios isn’t the first opponent to underestimate her. Being sold short has been an undercurrent in Hayley’s life. Her gender, family background, and West Virginia accent have all played into her status as an underdog and not one she encourages. But she won’t hesitate to exploit that poor judgment. They just think they’re going to win. Barrios laid his trap, miscalculating the advantages of Hayley’s smaller size in the cramped toilet. The error is a catastrophic one. He failed to foresee the sheer ferocity with which his pursuer would wage close-quarters combat. Who would? Her destructive force is freakish and, in that way, completely unpredictable.
As she slams her spiked fist repeatedly into his face, Hayley recognizes one unavoidable fact: the Cuban will not be taken alive. Barrios will fight as long as he is physically able. The longer their brawl continues, the greater his odds of success. Though Hayley has gained the upper hand, the ultimate result of their fight is not predetermined. She could die here, in this fetid toilet.
She drives her elbow into the man’s head. The blow causes him to drop his knife. Hayley retrieves the knife from the floor and, holding it close to her body, buries it in Barrios’s chest as she stands up straight with knees locked. The Cuban struggles for a few moments, as she drives the blade deeper into his thoracic cavity, and then goes limp. He falls backward, sitting comically on the closed toilet seat. The blare of a siren signals the approach of the police, summoned by Hayley’s call to 911.
Winded and delicately spritzed with her adversary’s blood, she withdraws her phone from a pocket. After snapping a photo of the dead man on the toilet, she quickly exits the bathroom. Standing again at the rear of the long, narrow storefront, Hayley can hear the cashier ringing up a sale and chatting with an unseen customer.
The past days have posed a dilemma, with rapidly unfolding events forcing her to choose between the worse of twin evils. Duty bound and genetically unable to shirk her responsibilities, she has thrown herself against the country’s inexorable creep toward the precipice. There is no time to lose. With Alberto Barrios’s death, she has given the United States a slim chance to avert a domestic catastrophe. Turning right, Hayley Chill, a covert agent for the “deeper state,” exits the delicatessen through the rear door.
1
THE LIVES WE SAVE
Ten Days Earlier
Wednesday, 8:25 a.m., Kyle Rodgers, a bespectacled black man of expanding girth, is waiting for Hayley when she walks through the office door. His coveted position as president whisperer and sounding board landed Rodgers with premium real estate on the West Wing’s main floor. Richard Monroe’s chaotic first year as president culminated with an attempt on his life. The wholesale purge that followed those tumultuous events spared the genial and eminently capable senior advisor. Among several outstanding attributes, Rodgers is notable in Washington for having gained his influential position without having made bones of anybody.
He is as good a boss as one can expect in the White House’s pressure-cooker environment. For that indisputable fact, Hayley Chill esteems and admires Kyle Rodgers. The feelings are mutual. His office is the best run in the building, and he has his young chief of staff from West Virginia to thank for it. The secret machinations of Hayley’s superiors in the deeper state—a clandestine association of former presidents and Supreme Court justices, retired directors from the intelligence community, and other discharged heavyweights of the government establishment that calls itself “Publius”—placed her in the West Wing twenty months ago as an intern. But it has been by the sheer dint of her extraordinary skills that Hayley is where she is today: fifty feet down the carpeted corridor from the Oval Office.
“Thank God you’re here,” Rodgers says without looking at her. “Today is going to be insane.” He mixes sugar-free Red Bull with coffee at his desk, his go-to breakfast.
Hayley’s meteoric rise from humble intern to the chief of staff for one of the president’s key advisors generated widespread acrimony among the other West Wing staffers. The army veteran—possessing only an associate’s degree from a two-year community college and an accent particular to people from the Appalachians—is widely considered by her peers to be undeserving of her fantastic success. Hayley Chill has dealt with this poisonous envy all her life and unfailingly turns it to her advantage. But the exertions of holding down two high-pressure jobs—as White House staffer and covert agent—has taken its toll. Twenty-hour workdays are the norm.
Wearing a Jones of New York knee-length, dark blue skirt, a tie-front silk blouse, and sensible shoes, she drops her knock-off tote on the couch. “What’s up?”
Rodgers scans his computer screen for Monroe’s daily schedule, a detailed, minute-by-minute rundown available only to West Wing staffers. “Okay. First off, we—”
“—need to get the president up to speed on the LA Times, Washington Post, and New York Times hack.” Hayley read reports on her way into work. Coordinated cyberattacks hit computer servers at printing plants across the country. The nation’s major newspapers managed to get the day’s editions out, but only after significant delays.
“Yeah, I heard about that,” Rodgers says absently, taking a sip of his energy drink concoction. Glancing toward his young chief of staff for the first time since she’d arrived, he notes Hayley’s slightly haggard countenance. “What happened to you?”
She got only a few hours of sleep the night before. Hayley spent most of her Tuesday at the Library of Congress; the president’s speechwriters required material for Monroe’s address to workers at an auto plant in Ohio on Wednesday, and the job was tasked to Kyle Rodgers’s wunderkind. A two-hour workout—six sets of a circuit of exercises that included timed pull-ups, crunches, and push-ups, followed by a twelve-mile run—followed a nine-hour stint at the library. After a quick dinner, Hayley put in several hours compiling a detailed weekly report on the president’s activities for her superiors in the deeper state. Naturally, she squeezed in another workout this morning before leaving for the White House.
She disregards her boss’s question. “Has there been any attribution yet?”
“Who do you think?”
“We can’t always blame Russia, sir. Other players out there have the same capabilities. North Korea, for instance. Tehran.”
Rodgers shrugs and turns his attention back to his computer, reading through an email to the president’s chief of staff and vice president one last time before sending. He had joined Monroe’s presidential campaign just before the start of the primary swing, proving indispensable in tailoring the candidate’s message for early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. A veteran of numerous national and state-level campaigns, Kyle Rodgers possesses the highly desirable ability to distill a politician’s incoherent and insecure ramblings into network-ready sound bites. Married to his college sweetheart and distracted dad of four-year-old twin girls, he is a pessimistic optimist. Rodgers recognizes humanity is on a collision course with its stunning idiocy. Simultaneously, he believes in the restorative powers of a competent executive branch. Bolstered by that conviction, Rodgers sets himself apart from 98 percent of the other political wonks in town mired by their jaded nihilism.
Hayley persists. “Communications working on a statement?”
“The president will continue treating these low-level, nuisance attacks on private sector institutions as a nongovernment matter,” Rodgers says by rote. He checks his watch. “I’m heading up to the residence to talk to the big guy.” He hurriedly loads files and briefing books into a large leather satchel. “Don’t forget. The Rose Garden thing has been moved to nine forty-five.”
“Shutting down the printing operations of the three national daily newspapers seems something more than a nuisance, sir.” Hayley adds, with greater emphasis, “You might even call it a direct attack
on the First Amendment by one of the nation’s historic enemies.”
Her boss doesn’t seem overly concerned. “Well, if Moscow really wants our attention, they’ll just have to turn off the lights at the Pentagon.”
“Y’all know they can do that, don’t you?” Hayley shouts after her boss as he heads out the door with his satchel. Of course, Kyle Rodgers is well aware of the capabilities of Moscow’s cyber army. They match those of the United States. Soldiers at Cyber Command could turn the lights off in the entire country of Russia with a few clicks on a computer keyboard. But having that power is a far different matter from exercising it. The consensus in Washington is a cyber Mexican standoff will continue for the foreseeable future.
With a cascade of pressing concerns requiring President Richard Monroe’s attention, Rodgers offers only a raised middle finger as he heads up the corridor. He thinks the world of his chief of staff but finds her to be galling as hell at times, too.
* * *
WEDNESDAY, 10:10 A.M. President Monroe strides down the West Colonnade accompanied by a navy chief in full dress uniform. The president’s affinity for the Rose Garden is easy to understand. The outdoor location has been an effective tool for White House communications for decades, used as a backdrop for welcoming other world leaders, staging official ceremonies, signing significant pieces of legislation, and holding non-campaign campaign events. More so than his predecessors, Richard Monroe has deployed the French-style garden adjacent to the Oval Office as his preferred venue for presidential stagecraft. With chiseled features and a hawklike profile that wouldn’t be out of place on Mount Rushmore, his looks are perfect for the iconic setting.
The president steps down from the colonnade, turns to face the one-hundred-plus invited guests—members of his cabinet, assorted dignitaries, military brass in dress uniforms—and blasts them with his trademark grin. A career soldier before winning his first and only political campaign for president of the United States, Richard Monroe led a tank charge across the sands of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm. Later, as a major general and commander of the First Armored Division, he drove the tyrant Saddam Hussein from Fortress Baghdad in Operation Iraqi Freedom. His obvious strengths, commanding presence, and unassailable integrity have been the perfect tonic for a nation torn by division and political polarization.
