To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Not unless you tell me to.’ Maggie smiled. ‘Look, Mary. I know something happened that night and I need to build up a picture of what it was. I don’t need to say who told me. That’s how this works. White House staff are allowed to talk to me and I’m allowed to keep what they say confidential.’

  Rajak stood up, went to the refrigerator, brought out a bottle of 7-UP and a couple of glasses and put them on the table. Suddenly, Maggie was struck by how young this woman was. Without even meaning to, Maggie put her hand on hers. ‘You take your time.’

  Rajak proceeded to describe what had been a turbulent, terrifying hour. The President had suddenly appeared in the Situation Room shortly after three am, ranting and raving about North Korea and Option B and ‘teaching those motherfuckers a lesson’. Trailing after him was his military aide, clutching the briefcase that contained the black book and the nuclear codes. The nuclear football. ‘I’ve never seen a man look so frightened in my entire life,’ Mary said.

  The President had been flushed and irate and instantly demanded to be put through to the Pentagon War Room. It all happened so fast, the duty team could barely take in what was going on. ‘We had been monitoring events all night, as always. There’d been no attack on the United States, no missile launch, no test, no report of any incoming threat. We didn’t understand it.’

  Maggie could barely believe what she was hearing. She attempted to control the expression on her face, to look unfazed. She had learned that people in Mary Rajak’s situation found it much easier if they could persuade themselves that they were merely confirming information that was already known. Signal that they were in fact making a stunning revelation and they could get spooked – and clam up. But while she could at least try to arrange her features, she had no control over her pallor – and Maggie could feel the blood draining from her face. She suspected she had gone ghostly white.

  Rajak went on. ‘The senior officer was trying to get the President to calm down. “Please explain exactly what you want us to do, sir”, that kind of thing. He just wanted him to take a breath. But it was no good. “What the fuck has it got to do with you?” he said.’

  Maggie nodded.

  ‘He just wanted to be put through to the War Room. We all knew what that meant. I mean, he had the football right there.’

  ‘The aide was holding it?’

  ‘Yes, he’s got the briefcase and I can see his hands are trembling.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ Maggie could guess the answer.

  ‘It’s strange. Even without talking about it, without even needing to say it, we all kind of understood that we had to buy ourselves some time. The duty officer turned to us, and just with his eyes – he sort of opened them wide, like this – he was telling us, you know, “Do something, anything, to stall.”’

  Maggie knew what was coming. ‘And you’re the comms officer. So you start making calls.’

  ‘Yes. I called the Defense Secretary.’

  ‘Is that what you’re trained to do?’

  ‘No. That’s just it. The rules say that if the President wants to order a nuclear strike, then he can do it. Just like that. Doesn’t need to consult anyone.’

  ‘So why did you call the Defense Secretary?’

  ‘Don’t you get it? We were desperate. This guy was going to blow up the whole fucking planet.’

  Only then did Maggie notice the ends of Rajak’s fingers: they were red raw, the skin picked around the nails, down to the quick. ‘Of course. I completely understand. Calling General Bruton was smart. Did he help?’

  ‘I don’t know what he did. I just wanted them to get down there.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Him and Mr Kassian.’

  So that was it, thought Maggie. ‘Did either of them manage to speak to the President?’

  At that, Maggie noticed, Rajak seemed to bristle, her back stiffening. She got up, taking her glass to the sink and began to wash it.

  ‘Mary?’

  She said nothing. She just stood there, her back to Maggie.

  ‘Did something else happen, Mary?’

  Maggie got to her feet, walked over to Rajak and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’

  Slowly, Rajak turned around until she was facing Maggie. Her eyes were glittering. She reached for a tissue and blew her nose. ‘Actually, that’s what I thought you were here for. I thought you’d heard. Or maybe there was a recording or something, though I don’t think they have it there, I’m not sure.’

  This poor woman sounded so confused. Maggie gestured toward the table. ‘Why don’t you tell me in your own words?’

  ‘I’d got Secretary Bruton on the line. I told the President. I said he could pick up the call in one of the conference rooms. And he said, “Why don’t you show me where that is?” So I go out and he’s behind me, and he asks me to fog the windows. You know that’s—’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ It was a feature in the small breakout rooms that were part of the Situation Room complex: at the flick of a switch, you could render the windows opaque, allowing the President to talk to a foreign counterpart or one of his generals in complete privacy.

  ‘So I do what he says and I lean over to the phone, to put Secretary Bruton through, and before I can get to it, the President reaches for my hand and grabs my wrist. I thought he was just stopping me from putting the call through.’

  Maggie nodded. She hoped her eyes were transmitting all the sympathy and empathy she was feeling. She was thinking not only of the woman in front of her but also of Liz, her sister, and Liz’s seventeen-year-old student, Mia, the young, frightened girl who had taken her own life. And of the cleaner in the White House Residence. And all the countless others.

  Mary blew her nose again. ‘And then he … he—’

  ‘It’s OK, Mary.’

  ‘He lunged at me. Not with his face, with his hand. He just grabbed me. There. And hard too, he squeezed hard.’ She looked at the floor. ‘He said something to me too.’

  Maggie paused and waited until she was sure that Mary wanted to be asked. ‘What did he say, Mary?’

  ‘He said, “Don’t say anything. Don’t think anything. I don’t need any of you to think. I’m the brains round here. You’re just …”’ Mary dipped her head. Without even seeing her face, Maggie knew she was blushing: she could feel the heat radiating from Mary’s face. Her shame seemed to throb.

  ‘You’re just what, Mary?’

  ‘He said, “You’re just … cunt. That’s what you are.”’

  ‘And he said this as he grabbed you there?’

  ‘It was so angry, you know what I mean? Like it had nothing to do with sex at all. Just like that part of me was an object that he wanted to press hard in his hands, as if he was getting all this frustration out.’

  ‘I understand – and I’m so sorry. What happened then?’

  ‘He stormed back into the main room and I don’t know what happened after that. I just sat in that conference room trembling. I couldn’t go back in. Not right away. I stayed in that room – and then I vomited into the trash.’

  Maggie gave Rajak’s hand a squeeze. ‘You’re very brave to have told me about this, Mary. I’m guessing you’ve told no one else.’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’ She looked at Maggie, her eyes rimmed in red. ‘I was worried it might compromise national security. Maybe information like that could be used against the United States?’

  Maggie wanted to hug this woman, just a few years younger than her, but so full of idealism and innocence. Wanting to see the best in her country, wanting even to see the best in a President who had abused her trust – who had abused her.

  She stayed there a while longer, holding Mary Rajak’s hand, repeating several times the obvious, but necessary, truth – that this was not her fault – and urging her to see that she had done everything right. Her decision to call Kassian and Bruton may well have averted a global catastrophe.

  ‘You know what I like t
o think?’ Rajak sniffed, just before Maggie left. ‘Well, we were trying to buy time, weren’t we? So maybe, even though it was so horrible, maybe those few seconds in that side room made a difference.’

  At the front door, Maggie gave the woman her cellphone number then walked back to her car, imagining those crazed few minutes just three nights ago. She imagined the calls to Kassian and Bruton, scrambling those men awake in the dead of night. She imagined the conversations each of them had had with Rajak – and then with each other. Now she began to see how the next few hours had unfolded, until Dr Jeffrey Frankel lay dead with his brains among the twigs and stones and mud of Rock Creek Park.

  And once she could picture that, she could see what was coming next.

  20

  Washington, DC, Wednesday, 2.42pm

  At school his teacher had told him that he lied so well he could be a writer one day. He had laughed at her, loudly, so that the other boys would hear him. He wanted them to know that, like them, he considered the idea too soft – ‘too gay’ were the exact words – even to entertain. He was Julian Garcia, the strongest kid on the block. He was going to be a soldier.

  He thought of her now, that teacher – Miss Green was her name – and here, silent and alone, decided to give her some credit. She had seen something in him and she wasn’t wrong. He did lie well. And he did like making up stories. But he had been right too. He had grown up to be a soldier.

  He had become a sergeant in the Rangers, engaged in covert operations. At first, most of his work had relied on his physical strength, the fitness he had developed once he was recruited away from the Rangers to train at Fort Bragg with the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta: Delta Force. The selection process alone had involved a timed eighteen-mile ‘ruck-march’ through the night, carrying thirty-five pounds in his rucksack. Once that was done, it was forty miles – again, timed – with a forty-five-pound rucksack on his back and across rough, steep terrain. Eventually, he was clearing distances of a hundred miles or more, learning to ignore the weight on his back even as it cut deep welts in his shoulders, and navigating himself across vast distances with no equipment – no phones back then – except his weapon. A compass was a rare luxury.

  In time, he had developed a specialism. He did well in the language classes, taking Arabic and Russian, but was especially adept with a computer keyboard. From the earliest days of the internet, he knew his way around its byways and backstreets. He had done a couple of secondments with Cyber Command, deepening his understanding of counter-intelligence. As the technology had developed, so had he: through a combination of encryption and imagination he steadily became expert in crisscrossing the online world in disguise, sometimes trailing a false identity behind him, but always leaving no trace of his own.

  It was the perfect preparation for the task he now faced. But as he immersed himself deeper in it, he understood that technical prowess would only take him so far. This was about more than algorithms and hacking skills. This was a project of the imagination. He was in the process of inventing a fictional character, just as Miss Green had had them do in class in one of those assignments he had to pretend he did not enjoy. Except this character would live not on a page in his exercise book, but in the real world. He was creating a man.

  He looked around at the other people here, in the middle of the afternoon. The usual crowd for a public library: a group of schoolchildren, supervised by three or four teachers, all female. An older man, typing with one finger, alternating his gaze between keyboard and screen with each stroke, a pen and paper at his side. Another methodically studying that day’s newspaper, reading each page in turn, as if it were a book. One more asleep in his chair, his snoring just quiet enough that no one had the heart to shake him awake. Needless to say, this being Anacostia, almost all of them, youngest to oldest, were black. He looked around, to check if he was the only Latino man here. If he was, and if someone remembered that, it was no disaster.

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out a new USB stick, a flash drive with plenty of memory. He found the slot on the machine, a fairly wheezy old PC, and pushed the stick in.

  Next he went on the PC’s internet browser and typed in five letters. T-A-I-L-S. There was a string of entries, but he clicked on the second one. Up came a page, so basic it might have been set up as a school project. In purple and white, with just one logo and no photos or video, it described itself as ‘the amnesiac incognito live system’ and promised ‘Privacy for anyone anywhere’. Garcia clicked on ‘Install’ and waited for the software to download onto the USB stick.

  Once it had, he removed the stick and reached into his shoulder bag for his laptop. It was a basic machine bought an hour ago with the cash he’d been given – though he had taken care to scuff it up a bit, for appearances’ sake. He popped in the USB drive and fired up the computer, booting it from Tails rather than the laptop’s own operating system. That way, he would be able to wander around the internet with total anonymity, leaving no trace on this or any other machine. If he wanted to send a message, it would be encrypted. He now had a one-way on-ramp online: he would have access to everyone, but they would have no access to him.

  He gazed at the blank screen, an artist’s empty canvas. He began with that primary layer of modern identity, a Facebook profile. He left the photograph blank; he would take care of that later. For now, it was the words that mattered.

  In Spanish he wrote:

  Jorge Hernandez. Patriot, Militant, Fighter!

  He liked the exclamation mark. Now he wondered about italics.

  Jorge Hernandez. Patriot, Militant, Fighter!

  That looked better. Perhaps capital letters on the word FIGHTER! Yes, that was good.

  He hesitated, a twinge of guilt passing through him once more. He knew his old friend was about to die, that Hernandez believed he only had a few more weeks at most, but here Garcia was killing him a second time – destroying his good name. They had talked about that, Jorge and him, at length. But Hernandez had been adamant.

  He’d always been a smart man but, if anything, illness seemed to have sharpened him. With a few, well-aimed questions – and the honest answers Garcia had given in reply – he had worked out the mission Garcia had been given. The sudden summons to Washington, DC, coupled with the fact that their former commanding officer now served as the Secretary of Defense, could not be explained away that easily. ‘That man has the entire American army at his command,’ Hernandez had smiled. ‘Why the fuck would he call for a washed-up old spic like you?’

  Julian tried to resist, to say that Jorge had no reason to get drawn into this. ‘Live out your final days in peace.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I don’t want to do. Just sitting here, wasting away, watching the TV and eating babyfood I can’t taste. I’m a soldier. Only thing I was ever good at.’

  As for the mission itself, he needed little persuasion. For one thing, he felt the same debt of loyalty to Jim Bruton that Garcia did – that they all did. ‘I’d have been in a box long ago if it hadn’t been for that man.’ But the target made sense to him too. As Hernandez put it: ‘All the family I have in the world is my nephew. And that asshole kicked him out of the country.’

  Garcia had explained what was at stake: that this process would mean the destruction of Jorge’s reputation. ‘After you’re dead, a lot of people will hate you.’

  ‘But I won’t care. I’ll be dead.’

  Garcia warned him: this would trash the Hernandez name.

  ‘Listen, my friend. My mother is dead. I have no wife and no sons and no daughters.’

  ‘There’s still your nephew.’

  ‘Something tells me the boy will understand.’

  In the end, Garcia had surrendered to his old comrade’s determination. The man would not back down. ‘I’m dying, Julian. If you let me do this with you, you’ll be giving me a lifeline. You’ll be letting me believe my life actually means something.’

  ‘It could be very messy, Jorge. The way
this—’

  ‘Don’t say any more. This is what I want. It is my last request.’

  So Garcia had nodded. They had shaken hands and then hugged, sealing their agreement.

  And now he was here, in front of this computer. The immediate requirement was to assemble the posts which, with a few keystrokes, he could dupe the machine into thinking Jorge Hernandez had made not today but over the last two years. This would be time-consuming but not dull. He had sought out a half dozen individuals on Facebook who, he had decided, shared this new Hernandez’s politics. He looked at the articles or videos they had posted and, when the fit was right, he had Hernandez post them too.

  The choices made themselves. Condemnations of the President’s rhetoric against immigration from eighteen months ago; condemnations of his action against undocumented migrants since taking office. Videos from Univision, op-eds from the Miami Herald and La Opinion, and memes and GIFs galore. He took particular liking to a GIF of the then candidate eating a taco, which he had Hernandez mock directly.

  You wanna know where you can shove that taco, asshole?

  Most of the articles or posts he shared without comment, but occasionally he appended a little note of his own. For those, he thought back to the handful of letters and emails Jorge had showed him, to give Garcia a sense of the way he wrote. (Naturally, and helpfully, Hernandez, like Garcia – like all of them – had no social media profile of his own: this was virgin territory.) Accordingly, he was sure to include at least one spelling mistake in each post he created. Introducing an ABC News report on the Deportation Force, he wrote:

  You cant deport a whole comunity.

  Garcia scrolled through what he had so far. He had not yet pressed the button that would make the page go live. That too could wait. Jorge Hernandez was not yet ready to be launched into the world. Garcia imagined the context in which this would be read, and by whom. How they would search for clues, how they would need a stand-out line or two, one that would appear to make sense of the madness they had just witnessed. Judged like that, he could tell something was still missing.