To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  He knew precisely the weapon he wanted too. Which made this an odd exercise. He thought he should make a show of browsing, but he was more focused than that. He would pace the aisles until he had found what he was looking for.

  Forty-five minutes had passed when he finally spotted it. A man – white, mid-fifties, big gut – was looking at a range of Tasers, with a rifle over his shoulder. Even from a distance, Garcia could see it was the Savage III Long Range Hunter: long, slim, powerful. This one had its own bipod rest already attached. And from the barrel, there popped out a Post-it note, wrapped around a Popsicle stick.

  ‘Excuse me, sir? Is your gun for sale?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  The man took it off his shoulder and let Garcia get a hold of it, testing the weight. Like all the weapons here, the trigger was secured by a plastic cable-tie.

  ‘Can I ask how old it is?’

  The man was eyeing Garcia slowly. ‘Three years.’

  ‘Trigger pressure OK? No strain on the suppresser?’

  ‘It’s all good, buddy. If you want it, it’s yours for nine hundred dollars.’

  ‘I’ll give you eight hundred for it.’

  ‘Not a cent less than eight hundred and fifty.’

  Garcia made a face, as if wading deeper than he wanted to go. ‘All right, eight fifty it is.’

  He dug into his pocket and produced the cash, a thick wad of worn twenties. The seller’s expression had not changed. Garcia was not perturbed. As he handed him the money, he decided that the prickliness of the encounter only helped him. Racist white guy would remember that he had sold his cherished gun to a swarthy Hispanic man in a baseball cap. And that was all he’d remember. To be honest, officer, they all look pretty much the same to me.

  After that, it was straightforward. After two attempts, he found an ammunition dealer selling the rounds he needed. Busy stall too: too many customers for anyone to remember who bought what. (And, unlike in a gun store, no CCTV at all. These guys would rip out a camera if they saw one; no way they’d let the jackbooted Feds spy on them.) He picked up three boxes of .338 Lapua bullets, twenty per box. Not cheap at $300 but worth it for the dead-eye accuracy.

  Next was the sight. Here, Garcia had decided, was where Jorge would spend the money. The gun was a machine: as long as it worked, it worked. The sight, along with the rounds, was what mattered. Given what he knew of the job, he had decided that what he needed was an infra-red night sight and it didn’t take long to find the one he wanted: the X35 FLIR Thermal Rifle Scope. He gladly handed over the $3000 the dealer was asking; steep, but nearly $500 less than Jorge would have paid online. That, Garcia knew, was a big sum to pay in cash: memorable. He kept his cap down low.

  Last came the sound suppressor. He had wondered about this. Would Jorge use one? On one level, the answer was clearly no. But what if he needed to fire more than one shot? Silence might buy him a vital extra second or two. It would be the prudent option. Expensive, true, but still compatible with what, according to Julian at any rate, Jorge had been doing since last November: spending next to nothing, saving every cent of his veteran’s benefits for this one project. He found the AAC Titan-Ti, opened the box to check it was new, and handed over the thousand in twenties.

  As he went back to his car, the sound of survivalist rock playing over the PA system, he wondered if he had made a mark on anyone present. He had said next to nothing; he had kept negotiations to a minimum. If anyone remembered anything it would have been his use of cash and that he had been one of the very few non-white faces present. But, he hoped, those were memories that, when the time came, could be of use. Otherwise, as he passed a knot of paunchy bikers, their ponytails turned grey, and loaded his backpack – now heavy with hardware – along with his rifle into the trunk of his car, he believed he had slipped through the Chantilly Gun & Knife Show the way he slipped through the wider world: silent and unnoticed.

  34

  Washington, DC, Thursday, 4.14pm

  Perhaps it was a delayed reaction, but once she had taken a cab back into town from seeing Stuart, and found a café with a corner table, Maggie all but collapsed into the chair. Luckily, Stu had been in listening mode, sparing her his usual lecture about men and her uncanny knack in that department, though she had heard it so often she could have delivered it herself. What is it with you, Miss Costello? Seems to me that, if they’re good, they either live a million miles away or they’re involved in a war you’re meant to be ending or some other meshugge situation or, if they are available, then they’re rotten to the core. Why can’t you be as smart about all this stuff as you are about everything else?

  To which she’d have offered the standard reply. Says the guy who thinks the most important thing about Valentine’s Day is that it falls halfway between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries – your exact words, Stuart.

  The truth was, it was painful to admit what she had seen during the night – the way Richard had spoken about her, the clear implication that they had only got together because McNamara had asked him to, as part of an intelligence gathering operation focused on the rump of loyalists to the previous regime that had, like Maggie, clung on. It was humiliating to have to ask out loud, in front of another person, the obvious question: was that all it had ever been to him? All that intimacy, all that sex – was it just a performance? What was going through his mind when they were in bed together? Was he like those porn stars, skilled enough in acting that they could seem consumed by desire on the outside, while in the privacy of their own heads they were composing that week’s shopping list? Was that what sleeping with Maggie was for him, a job?

  Or did he arouse himself with thoughts of another woman? Did he imagine himself with ‘the princess’? Was that what turned him on, the proximity to power?

  It was all useless, she knew that. So she shoved those thoughts behind the wall she was constructing in her mind, where, she knew, they were building up like floodwaters behind a dam. When this was all over, who knew what havoc they would wreak?

  Compartmen‌talization: she had a doctorate in the subject. Men were supposedly the more naturally gifted in that area, but she reckoned she could take on all challengers. Her head was made up of little compartments. Today alone, she had walled off the small room where the shock, maybe even the post-traumatic shock, of the near-death experience in the car was stored. There was an adjoining room where she had neatly deposited the anguish – and inadequacy – she felt at Liz’s principled resignation. Next a cupboard – she pictured the bin room at the convent – where she hoped to dump all the toxic waste, sludge and slime still oozing from Richard. As always, there was a section for Stuart Goldstein and the state he was in these days. To say nothing of the area reserved for her angst over the man she still worked for – and her belief that the President of the United States was quite happy to bring the world to the edge of destruction; indeed, that he was happy to go right over that edge. And finally, the largest and darkest room of all, where she locked away the guilty, queasy conviction that this perilous, lethal situation was all her fault.

  Each of these rooms would have to stay locked and sealed off from each other. As any compartmentalizer could tell you, the one thing you had to avoid at all costs was a breakdown in those walls and partitions. If all the various woes were allowed to burst out of their individual silos and, worse, combine with each other, they would overwhelm you. Keep them separated, the doors bolted.

  She pulled out her phone. The first task, though the very idea of it appalled her, was to send some kind of holding message to Richard. She couldn’t be sure if he knew what she had seen during the night. He had acted strangely this morning, but that might have been a reaction to her behaving just as oddly. It was possible that he suspected nothing, and the longer it stayed that way, the better. Which meant acting normally. On a normal day, she’d text him at least a couple of times. So now she thumbed out a few words, aimed at both maintaining the illusion an
d buying herself some time.

  She laboured over them, deleting and rewriting, worried that this formulation sounded hysterically hyper-normal, while that one was too flat and distant. Eventually she settled on:

  Hi there. Sorry I was so rushed this am. This whole work thing: it’s too much! Let’s make sure we have a real weekend together xx

  She read it, reread it, pressed Send and sighed deeply.

  Next, she opened Twitter, an enterprise in which she was a silent partner. The job meant she could listen, but not speak. She was a pseudonymous egg on there with zero tweets to her (false) name, but she could see what everyone else – from Liz to McNamara, from Jake Haynes at the Times to the President himself – was saying.

  As it happened, Haynes had just linked to a story written out of London, saying that the President and his business interests had received an unexpected, if tragic, boost: the lead lawyer in an upcoming case opposing the President’s company’s proposed expansion in Europe had been found dead, so weakening the legal challenge to those plans. But the rest of her timeline was consumed by a story that would once have appalled the Washington political class but which now just induced eye-rolling and a torrent of ironic, detached one-liners from the Twitterati. She clicked on the first link that promised to supply not a witty take but the basic facts.

  Senior staff at the White House are in discussion with the Department of Defense as they seek to implement an unusual request from the President: his demand for a military uniform to reflect his role as Commander in Chief of US armed forces.

  The officials, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely on a topic that they have been barred from discussing in public, said the President has taken a close interest in every aspect of the project. He met last month with a team of fashion designers, including several stars from the long-running Project Runway TV show, as well as former and serving heads of the military to determine the right look.

  ‘He knows the risk is that it could look a bit “Third World dictator” and he’s adamant that the team avoid that,’ one senior aide said in a telephone interview. The President is said to have studied photographs of general-turned-president, Dwight D Eisenhower and sent pictures of the World War Two commander to the design team as a potential source of inspiration.

  He has also examined Hollywood depictions of former military leaders, including Douglas MacArthur and George S Patton, with particular interest in Gregory Peck’s 1977 portrayal of MacArthur. One scribbled note from the President included a photograph of Peck in costume and said, ‘Why can’t I have a hat like him?’

  Designers face one specific problem. The uniforms of the men the President admires most left space for the many medals and ribbons they had been awarded for valor and participation in past campaigns. Since the President has no record of military service, it’s not clear what would go in their place, though one aide said, ‘One option would be to put a few ribbons there that would be kind of symbolic. I’m not sure anybody besides the Times and MSNBC would object. Veterans groups are very supportive of this Commander in Chief.’

  However, presidential and military historians contacted by the New York Times poured scorn on the notion of fake medals and indeed of creating a uniform for the President. ‘It was very important to our founders that military and civilian power be kept separate and distinct,’ said Norman J Evans, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. ‘The role of Commander in Chief is a civilian post.’

  A White House spokesperson, while refusing to confirm or deny that such a uniform was under discussion, dismissed the historians’ concerns. ‘The universities are as out of touch as the lamestream media. None of these liberals wanted the President elected in the first place and I think the American people have had enough of these so-called experts.’

  Asked whether the President would consider wearing a military uniform, she said, ‘It’s no secret that the President is keen that Americans have a leader they can look up to and salute.’

  Naturally, Twitter had gone to town. First out of the blocks was one that said simply, Want a uniform Mr President? Here’s a selection, before offering a rogues’ gallery of Gaddafi, Noriega and Pinochet, each man wearing increasingly outsized peaked caps. Another, inevitably, showed a picture of Adolf Hitler, though it slightly misfired, in that the Führer was in civilian clothes. The rest had got busy with Photoshop, grafting the President’s face onto assorted historical monsters.

  Maggie put the phone away. This repeated response from the President’s critics – the wry, world-weary, humorous take – was beginning to grate. Like that woman had said on the radio the other day, We’re laughing all the way to a totalitarian state. And if all the meme-makers and cast of Saturday Night Live and the rest only knew what she knew, they’d understand that this was no joke. The man was prepared to blow up the planet, for Christ’s sake. Go ahead, make a GIF of that.

  She looked at her watch. The day was slipping away. She needed to answer the questions Stuart had put to her: the when and the where, especially. And for that, she needed to get to work.

  She approached the White House via the northwest entrance, as always, nodded to the guard, as always, and held her pass up to be scanned, as always. Except this time, instead of a satisfying green tick, the screen on the machine registered a red cross and a sound of electronic displeasure.

  ‘Try it again,’ the guard said, looking at his monitor rather than at Maggie.

  She tried it again. Same cross, same sound.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t allow you to proceed.’

  ‘But this is—’ Maggie began. ‘This card worked fine this morning. There must be something wrong with your machine.’

  ‘The machine works fine, ma’am. Your card is the problem.’

  ‘But I’ve worked here for—’

  ‘Any issues – go to the visitors’ entrance, Southeast Gate.’ His eyes remained fixed on the screen.

  She sighed. Her hand reached for her neck, to soothe the whiplash she had sustained a few hours earlier. Liz’s voice floated into her head. ‘You ought to get that looked at.’

  Liz. She hadn’t spoken to her since their call was cut off, drowned out by the air conditioning and that infernal noise in the car. Liz would be thinking, not for the first time, that Maggie was too absorbed in her own work to care, that she had just heard about her own sister losing her job and still hadn’t bothered to pick up the phone. She would call just as soon as she got to her desk.

  Maggie was now at the Southeast Gate, next to Hamilton Place. She could see a group of tourists waiting to be let in and behind them a silent protest: a dozen or so people with tape over their mouths, demonstrating against the President’s latest attempt to restrict those bits of the media that weren’t his.

  She held up the pass to the scanner and once again it was rejected. She headed straight for the glass box where several staff were on duty.

  ‘I’m Maggie Costello, Special Assistant to the President in the Counsel’s Office. My pass seems to be faulty. Can you let me in, please?’

  The guard took the pass, typed a few instructions into his computer, then called over a supervisor. They both conferred, inaudibly, while pointing at the screen. Maggie watched as colleagues swept in and out, talking on their phones, oblivious to the civilians forced to queue up to be granted access. ‘Muggles’, Richard called them.

  The more senior official came to speak to her.

  ‘The access rights on this pass have been changed, Miss Costello.’

  ‘Changed? What do you mean “changed”? Do I have to use a different entrance?’

  ‘No. Your terms of access to the facility have been changed.’

  ‘Changed to what?’

  ‘This is now a non-access pass.’

  ‘You mean, I can’t get in at all?’ Maggie was aware of two people behind her, sighing noisily.

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘But … I work here. I don’t understand. What the hell
is a “non-access pass”? This worked this morning. Did someone change it?’

  ‘It has been changed, yes.’

  ‘But when? It worked only a few—’

  ‘I cannot disclose that information at this time.’

  Amazing. She had been waved through here for so long; now they talked to her as if she were a woman who had just wandered in off the street.

  ‘All right, then. Does your little screen there’ – stupid to take it out on this guy, but she couldn’t help herself – ‘tell you who decided to change my pass and block me from coming into my place of work?’

  ‘I cannot disclose that information at this time.’

  She turned around, looking towards the street in frustration. She was aware of the people filing in and out, only a trickle given the time of day, but enough to add to her humiliation. What was worse, though, was what the visitors and Secret Service guards could not see, which was her realization that there was next to nobody inside that building she could call to come out here, have a word with security and let her in. There was a time, not that long ago, when she could have thrown out two dozen names, from the President downwards, who would have insisted she be allowed through. But who could she call now? Most of her allies and friends no longer worked here. Eleanor? She’d probably have gone home by now and would, brutally, be of too low a rank to start issuing demands. McNamara? He could well have been behind this order. Kassian? Same was true of him. Her own official boss, the White House Counsel, was never around anyway. Who did that leave, with enough juice to get her through the door? Richard? That joke wasn’t even funny.

  She was about to head home, to regroup and work from there, when two men, neither one in uniform, came towards her. One in his forties, short; the other in his twenties with longer hair – so that Maggie instantly decided he must be the geek sent to resolve the technical problem with her pass – they approached her with brisk purpose.