by Jason Letts
Morrin released an exasperated sigh, glanced over some papers on his desk, and fell back into his chair, leaning back as he gave Jane another long appraisal.
“The first thing is that it’s not biking. It’s cycling. And I’d much rather be riding for four or even five hours like I normally would, but I think two is the most I’ll be able to get away with,” he said.
Blinking rapidly, Jane leaped back into the mindset of getting the details she needed in the least amount of time possible.
“I’m not making any kind of argument about what you should or shouldn’t do. That’s for you to decide,” she said, wondering if she was talking a little too fast. “I’m just working on what kind of contingent is going to be most appropriate for this activity. Maybe you can start by telling me how fast you go,” she said.
“As fast as my Trek can carry me.”
His affecting smirk was more distracting than it should’ve been, but his answer wasn’t exactly that helpful.
“Thank you. And how long do you expect your route to be for a two-hour ride?” she asked. Seeing him leaning back, it was hard not to imagine him climbing onto a bike and pumping the pedals down the road, helmet on and in one of those tight jerseys.
“If it’s not at least fifty miles it’s not worth even getting out there,” he said, and Jane smiled.
At least that was a firm answer she could work with, but it presented some immediate problems. Were there any Secret Service agents who’d be able to sustain a speed of twenty-five miles per hour for two hours? Probably not, meaning some of the guys had some training in store for them, but that wasn’t even close to being all that would be necessary to ensure the president’s protection.
“Right. That’s very helpful,” Jane said. “With that kind of speed, in addition to any agents riding with you, we’re going to need a motorcade escort with vehicles in front, behind, and to the side at all times.”
The grimace on the president’s face couldn’t have been worse if she’d told him he had to ride a tricycle.
“I can’t have a car in front of me spewing exhaust fumes into my lungs the entire time. What are you trying to do, kill me?”
Jane winced, her teeth clenched, and she found herself slightly aggravated at the suggestion.
“No, that’s the opposite of what I’m trying to do,” she said, looking into his eyes and meaning every word of it. “But we will need at least one vehicle with a medical team on standby in case you fall or crash, preferably the presidential limo, which has an array of medical supplies and a refrigerator full of blood that can be used for a transfusion. That’s non-negotiable. Now did you have your heart set on riding anywhere in particular?”
She braced herself for an answer that involved the city. Even with months of prep work, there was real risk that blocking off fifty miles of city streets would be an impossibility, not to mention one where the chance of exposure could never be eliminated.
“Somewhere in the woods. It’s fine if I have to get up early to get out of town and start riding at first light. That’s all part of a cyclist’s gig.”
Jane smiled as the feeling of relief washed over her.
“Perfect. Let’s stick with Camp David then. Plenty of miles of road in a beautiful setting not too far away,” she said, wondering if she was selling it enough. It didn’t hurt that they could also ensure that there would be no other traffic in the area and that no matter where the president was on the loop they’d be a short distance from as much help as could ever be needed.
“Thank you, Ms. Roe,” President Morrin said, dismissing her with a dimply grin that was going to make it hard to leave. It felt like she was standing in cement.
“Mr. President,” Jane said, nodding and savoring one last look at him before turning to force herself to briskly exit the room.
By the time she and Singh made it back to the secretary’s room, Jane felt as stunned as if she’d just had a near-death experience. Despite attempts to keep herself calm, Singh seemed to notice that her cheeks seemed to be burning.
“Now you see what kind of an effect he can have on people,” she said with a hand on her hip. “That’s a face a lot of people have fallen in love with.”
Jane looked at the Indian woman in her forties smirking at her and kept herself in check.
“His appearance is irrelevant to the mission,” she said, and Singh laughed.
“Maybe so, but it’s definitely not irrelevant in a popularity contest, and that’s what all this is. If you ask me, he’s being much too dim about his prospects. The president’s suddenly single with that face after a divorce that’s no fault of his own. There are a lot of ways people could get drawn in with the world’s most eligible bachelor.”
“Perhaps,” Jane said, keeping her cards close to her chest as she always did. The last thing she needed to do was give an opinion that influenced anything they did, because her only job was to keep the president safe.
A gasp from the secretary got their attention though, and they turned to see Ally Wilde staring at her computer screen.
“What is it?” Singh asked. When Ally turned to face them, some of the color seemed to drain out of her face.
“There’s a report about a death threat against the president.”
Jane felt her entire body tensing up as the pressure on her just tripled.
“You might be right that people will get drawn in all kinds of ways.”
2
The Roosevelt Room
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC
Sitting alone at the long mahogany table, Jane had her phone out and was tapping messages back to the office and the leadership team about the disturbing development. This was an unusual death threat against the president, and she was going to make sure they mustered the full force of the Secret Service against it so that it didn’t start a pattern.
Through the windows in the walls and doors, she could see people going about their business in the West Wing, but her business was evaluating how to deal with this new threat. When someone threatened a Secret Service protectee, it launched a massive undertaking that investigated every aspect of the statement as well as the person who made it in order to determine their credibility.
Once they found out who did this, they would interview family members, neighbors, employers, friends. Searches would be performed. Every record imaginable would be pulled for signs of violent behavior. And then the investigative division would make one of three responses. They could let the person off with a stern warning, commit him or her for a psychiatric evaluation, or move forward with Class E felony charges that carried up to five years in jail.
But as Jane dug deeper into the details of the threat, she had no idea to which of those three ends this would lead. The threat was made in a comment replying to one of the posts from the president’s official page on Facebook, where a user named Kevin Neilson wrote, “Enough is enough. I’m going to do the world a favor and blow this man up.”
Other than the sense of aggravation she felt at the threat, the line didn’t give her much to go on in terms of specificity that she could act against. What was more, the actual post and the account used to make it had already been deleted, although Facebook would preserve those records for their review, but it meant she couldn’t immediately start digging into who Kevin Neilson was.
The investigative division would have to brief her on their findings later, but for now Jane needed to review the security protocols for the president’s Secret Service detail to make sure they adequately addressed the possibility of this new threat. That became hard to do when the sound of the door latch opening got her attention and a small someone came into the room.
It was Dollmaker, the vice president’s ten-year-old granddaughter, who was wearing a floral dress with stockings and a ribbon in her blonde hair. Everyone in the vice president’s family had code names starting with the letter D. The girl’s real name escaped Jane’s memory at the moment, but she and her family
must’ve been visiting, and entering rooms unannounced didn’t seem to trouble the girl one bit.
“What are you doing?” the girl asked, as though Jane was the one not where she was supposed to be. Right on cue, a man in a black suit and glasses appeared in the hallway behind her, standing guard since the vice president had extended Secret Service protection to his family. At least there was no real risk of her getting lost.
“I’m working,” Jane said with a smile, expecting that to be all for their conversation, but the little girl didn’t go anywhere.
“What’s your job?”
Jane put down her phone and turned to face her inquisitive visitor. She had a lot to do, but the security in place for the president while he was in his office would hold up for a little while longer.
“I manage staffing and logistics for the Secret Service’s Presidential Protection Division,” she said, wondering if that answer would fly over her head. “I work with your friends who are following you around.”
The girl, Reina was her name, glanced over her shoulder at the agent before looking back at Jane with pursed lips.
“They’re not very friendly,” Reina said in a way that was too cute, like Anna from Frozen who was wandering about the castle without anyone to play with.
Jane put her hands on her knees and leaned closer.
“They are, but they’ve got a very important job to do that takes up all of their attention, and that’s to keep you safe,” she said.
Bouncing on her heels, Reina shrugged with her entire body.
“I’m going to be fine though.”
Taking a deep breath, Jane imagined some of the ways she might not be fine. There were people out there who would have some pretty bad ideas about how the vice president’s granddaughter could be useful.
“You are, and part of that’s going to be because we’re going to work very hard to keep it that way. But we never know what’s going to happen to us, so it’s better to be safe than sorry,” she said.
Reina peered deeply at Jane, who for the life of her couldn’t figure out what the girl might’ve found so interesting.
“Did you always know you were going to grow up to watch the president?” she asked, and Jane had to laugh.
“The quick answer is that no, I didn’t. The better answer is that we don’t actually watch the president. We watch everything but the president. We watch all of the people he meets with. We watch people in the crowds. We watch the chefs make every bite of food that goes between his teeth. We watch his doctor and his staff. We are the lens through which the president experiences the world.”
Eyes widening, the girl stepped a little bit closer. Jane didn’t know the girl was so chatty, making her wonder how long it would be until another member of the family came to find her.
“Then what did you want to do when you were a kid?” she asked, and Jane grinned as she surmised the girl may have really only caught the quick answer, and everything she said in her better answer may have gone in one ear and out the other.
Jane swept her shoulder-length brown hair behind her ear.
“I always thought I’d be doing pretty much the same thing for my dad’s trucking business back outside of Denver. But instead of sorting out how many men and trucks it would take to carry product from one place to another, I need to figure out the number of agents and where they need to go to keep the president safe. It all started when I was volunteering for the police department in high school. By the end of the year I was doing their scheduling, and after that life brought me here.”
The girl nodded, though her attention had drifted about the room. When she finally circled around to Jane again, she had a bright smile on.
“I want to be a pop star,” she said, and Jane chuckled. Maybe she had been talking to herself this entire time.
“You’re going to be a great one. Now run along to your next audition…or rehearsal…or whatever it is they have to do during the day,” she said, breathing deeply when she was once again alone. Jane couldn’t blame the girl too much though. At ten years old for her life revolved around riding horses and running the trails behind her house.
The Secret Service Headquarters on H Street always reminded Jane of the Ghostbusters headquarters, with a two-story gray base nestled under several floors of brighter orange brick. The metaphor seemed apt as well, because often their targets were just as ephemeral.
Thankfully the president didn’t have any appearances or departures planned for the day, allowing Jane to quickly certify the detail’s protocols while they waited for more information. A meeting was scheduled late in the afternoon to review the findings, and Jane walked into the top floor conference room with the tinted glass and large monitors hoping for the best possible result: an unthreatening idiot who thought he was making a joke and could be easily dissuaded.
But something in her heart told her that this one wouldn’t be so easy. That cryptic public comment buried among hundreds wasn’t at all an attempt to posture for friends.
Setting a folder down on the jet black table, Jane looked up at her boss, the Uniformed Division’s Chief Harold Vale, who was joined by the even-more-senior Deputy Director Rodney Salidas. Having the deputy director in the room was another sign that the concern over what was happening stretched to the very top of the organization.
Behind her three suits came in from the investigative division, led by a chiseled man with a neatly trimmed beard who could’ve passed for a Navy SEAL. Jane was sure she’d met everyone in that wing before, but he was someone she certainly wouldn’t have forgotten. Either way, once again she’d be the only woman in the room.
“Have you all had a chance to meet Nathan Carr? He’s recently transferred in from the Atlanta office to join our local investigative team and will be taking charge on this one,” Salidas said, eliciting a bemused smirk from the man whose thick arms were resting on the table in front of him as though he’d been here for years.
“You could’ve helped me get my feet wet with something a little easier,” he said, relaxed yet reserved. “But let’s take a look at what we’ve come up with so far.”
Carr doled out packets to everyone, the papers sliding across the table like he was dealing cards. Jane took a look at the printouts of the threatening comment, the president’s post it was made on, the profile behind the comment, some metadata, the news article…
“Doesn’t look like much,” Jane couldn’t help but say. This was more or less everything she’d already seen. The burly man across the table narrowed his eyes at her momentarily before shrugging to the others in the room.
“You’re not wrong, Ms…”
“Roe,” Jane said with an easy half-smile. She loved what she was doing, and if this new guy Nathan Carr hadn’t gotten to the heart of it that just meant more of an opportunity for her to see what she could find.
“Although we’ve recovered everything we can from Facebook about the comment, posted under the name Kevin Neilson, it’s immediately apparent how inadequate their system is for identifying its users. This user joined Facebook yesterday, has no friends, and has made no other comments other than this one. The photo associated with the account comes from a stock photo site. The email address is a dummy that has already been self-deleted. All of the metadata and the ISP address point to South America through a known virtual private network portal, obscuring the user’s true location. Absolutely nothing about this gives us a firm lead on any aspect of the poster.”
Another ghost.
The deputy director and the chief exchanged grim glances. Jane was sure neither of them wanted to be the one who had to tell the president how mysterious the threat against his life was to them. Chief Vale wiped his hooked nose and shook his head at the papers in front of him.
“This seems like too much effort to put into an innocuous threat,” he said in a drawling voice. Nathan Carr nodded.
“The deliberate nature these techniques require strikes a chord with me too. Someone less serious wouldn’t be do
ing all this to cover his tracks.”
Salidas tilted his chin up as he interlaced his fingers and set them on his stomach.
“Any inference of a connection to the news of the president’s divorce?” he asked. Carr tilted his head to the side. Jane thought he had an interesting way of speaking and certainly knew what he was talking about. It made her glad he was carrying the conversation on behalf of the investigative agents.
“If you’re asking if this guy was so enraged by the president getting a divorce that he vowed to kill him, I don’t think there’s any evidence of that. But the timing strikes me as both opportunistic and misguided. Yes, it coincided with a notable moment for the president, but the comment was immediately buried by more people chiming in on the First Lady leaving him. If it hadn’t been seen by someone who recorded it before the comment was reported and deleted by Facebook, there’s a risk we wouldn’t even know it happened.”
Jane pursed her lips. In her mind she was three steps ahead to the implications of where the onus would be to defend against a threat no one would find the source of, but she did have a thought about how the story had migrated off of Facebook to begin with. She shuffled to another one of her papers, the one with the news story.
“This journalist for the Post, Olly Ip, he gets a lot of his material from trawling through comments on social media. Might be worth checking in with him to see if he spotted this one himself or if someone tipped him off about it. There’s a fair chance Neilson, or whatever his real name may be, saw that his comment was sinking without trace, didn’t want to further expose himself on Facebook by making another one, and reported his own comment to the Post to make sure that it got some air,” she said.
She spotted Nathan Carr making a subtle yet gratifying grin in her direction.
“I’ll do that,” he said. A grumble came from the chief to her right, and she knew what would follow.
