by Jason Letts
“Let me start by saying violence is never the answer. But just as important is that I was elected to address these problems, and saying that I’m responsible for them after only two months is unrealistic. Every day we’re working tirelessly to implement our plan to get people back on their feet, grow the economy, and make sure all across America a reasonable standard of living can be achieved. It’s not going to happen overnight.”
“I think you overestimate the patience of the American people at your peril, Mr. President,” Oliver said, staring straight into his eyes.
When the interview was over and the president and his posse had cleared out, Oliver sat alone in the library trying to analyze everything that had occurred in his mind’s eye. On the whole he was satisfied that this was going according to plan, but as he advised the president he was worried that he himself also wasn’t moving fast enough.
Heath was already back at the truck but would wait for him as long as necessary before they headed back to the Washington Post’s office, and by the time Oliver felt ready to get up and go his mindset was that he could’ve just as easily been going home to the residence right in this very building. It was galling that the president had no sense of responsibility for what was going on in the world. Soon enough everyone would know better.
But before he could leave the room, his phone buzzed and he reached into his pocket to get it. After answering, he learned it was someone named Nathan Carr from the Secret Service’s investigative division, asking him about how he learned about the threat against the president.
Looked like they were predictably floundering, desperate for answers only he could provide, and he’d cooked up a good one.
“I wish I could say I’d spotted it myself, but fortunately I’ve got a number of scouts surfing these pages looking for juicy comments. Not every day you spot one claiming they’re going to blow up the president, so I can understand why you’re so concerned. I can’t remember which one pointed me to the comment, but if you shoot a message to my email I can get you everything related to that. I hope it helps.”
Oliver ended the call feeling like he’d just found a hundred-dollar bill on the ground. He’d fooled the Secret Service, and now he was going to send them down a rabbit hole they’d never climb out of.
Only a noob wouldn’t have thought to cement a tip from an innocent third party, and Oliver had more of them than he could count. There were the fake accounts he controlled, but that was just the beginning. He’d convinced more than a few older people to give him their passwords under the pretense of official investigative reporting. Not only would they lack any information at all for this Nathan Carr, they wouldn’t even be able to remember sending him the message about the threat, because they never had.
And all of it was done with disguised ISP addresses or straight from the user’s own machine using programs like TeamViewer. Everything was perfectly untraceable, and the threat was gaining a higher profile after being aired in a web video interview and a call from the Secret Service.
After checking off another box on his mental to-do list, he was getting closer to the moment when he pulled the trigger.
4
Catocin Mountain Park
Hauvers, MD
The wind coming through the open window tousled Jane’s hair as the car cruised around the roughly ten-mile loop at Camp David at exactly twenty-five miles per hour. Snow still crept against the edges of the road and the first buds had yet to appear on the trees, but they needed to prepare for the president’s Saturday morning rides, and that meant a handful of agents were on road bikes attempting to keep up with the car and avoid small patches of ice after a frosty night.
“They’re falling behind,” said Agent Diwecki from the other end of the back seat. He had the same job Jane did organizing and preparing for the president’s upcoming security needs.
In Jane’s humble opinion, Diwecki was one of the few people she’d come across at the Secret Service who took the clandestine nature of their work too far. Thin to the point where the suits he wore seemed like they were still on the rack, he never once let slip anything resembling a personal comment. She didn’t know where he lived, where he was from, what he liked, or even what his first name was. Sometimes being impersonal could be taken to a fault.
“Give them a chance,” she said, but she had to twist herself pretty far around to catch a glimpse of even the leading rider, who was standing on the bike in a desperate sprint he wouldn’t be able to maintain for long. Some of the others had already disappeared out of sight behind the last turn. She only needed two to be able to ride with the president in addition to any accompanying vehicles.
At least they were miles away from public roads and President Morrin’s rides would be kept off his public schedule, meaning there’d be no chance of encountering other people.
“Looks like we’ll be hiring from the U.S. Olympic team for this,” Diwecki said. Jane refused to look at him and cringed at his quick dismissal of the other agents.
“We’ve got a couple more weeks to get ready,” she said, though it was fairly possible they’d be paying a pair of them almost exclusively to train to be cyclists.
Some static came through on the radio, followed by a gasping, huffing voice.
“Are you sure you’re only going twenty-five?” Agent Dedan groaned, and Jane turned around in her seat to see him about twenty meters behind the car now. They were coming up to a big hill that could very well require him to get off the bike and walk to the top.
“It’s on cruise control,” she said, though surely Morrin didn’t mean that he rode at this pace even up the hills. It struck her that he then had to be riding even faster on the flats than they were modeling.
“The trick is to take your mind off of it. Talk about something else,” said Agent Evans, who they’d left behind almost immediately. He sounded relaxed and calm enough that for all Jane knew he’d given up and was sitting by the road while he waited for them to come around again.
“Like what?” asked Dedan, whose heavy wheezing was constantly clouding up the radio line.
“The First Lady made her initial divorce filing in Dayton. Turned out it was a no-fault claim under the pretense of incompatibility. The president has an opportunity to disagree if he so chooses,” Evans said.
“That’ll never happen,” Dedan said, slowly creeping up the hill with overwrought strokes on the pedals. Jane reached out to touch their driver on the shoulder. There was no point maintaining their pace when no one could keep up.
“Could you imagine what it would be like if he did though and she had to come back with a fault claim saying he had abandoned her by becoming president or had treated her badly?”
“A messy divorce is the last thing he wants. I’ve heard him say it a dozen times,” Dedan said. He’d reached the top of the hill and was letting gravity pull him down the other side.
“Sometimes we don’t get what we want. I’ve never heard of a couple going through this without experiencing a little turbulence.”
Jane sat forward with her arms crossed in front of her, glancing at Diwecki out of the corner of her eye. The secret part of the Secret Service was that they weren’t supposed to discuss the details of their protectees’ personal lives with anyone, but try stopping them from talking about it with each other. Maybe it was a gray area, but some of the stories agents told about things previous presidents did while in office made her head spin.
If it seemed like it was going to be a stretch getting these guys into shape enough where they could keep up with the road racer in chief, there was only one thing for her to do about it. She was a runner, and getting on a bike couldn’t be too different.
“Pull over when we get to the interior road where we started from,” she said. After another couple of miles of winding road, they returned to the intersection of the loop road and the one leading down to the main cabin. When Jane popped the door open, Diwecki jerked his head in her direction.
“What are you doin
g?”
“I’ll give it a shot. I keep myself in pretty good shape, though it’s always been running,” she said with a smile. She wasn’t nearly dressed properly for endurance exercise, but at least on a bike she figured she wouldn’t have to contend with so much bounce for wearing the wrong bra.
“You’re not qualified…” he said, and Jane shot him a hard look, cutting him off.
“I completed the Criminal Investigator Training Program and 18-week Special Agent Training Course just like you did. I can probably brush up on the required 10-minute medicine and emergency first aid faster than they can whip themselves into shape. Unless you want to get on a bike yourself it seems worth a shot,” she said, adding under her breath as she closed the door, “as long as I can ride fast enough.”
It took a little while for the riders to finish making it around the loop. Evans had in fact decided to turn around partway through. When he coasted back to where they had gathered, Jane told him to get off. Dedan and another guy had recovered enough to do another lap, and Jane wondered if she’d only end up embarrassing herself in front of them. But it was a new challenge and she wasn’t going to back down.
But for this kind of riding, getting going wasn’t as easy as simply sitting on the seat and pushing against the pedals. The task seemed a little more daunting when Evans took off his clipless pedal shoes that would lock her feet onto the bike.
“If you’ve never used these before,” Dedan said, “they allow you to generate force with both feet all the way through your strides, not just when you’re pushing the pedal down. Lock in with one foot, push off and start rolling, then click in the other foot.”
Jane nodded. The flashy yellow and blue shoes were too big, so she tied them extra tight and still wondered if they’d stay on. Helmet on, she adjusted the height of the seat, looked out at the open roadway in front of her, and took a deep breath. It wasn’t like she’d never ridden a bike before, but doing it well enough hadn’t ever meant she’d be on the front lines protecting the president of the United States for a change.
As instructed, she swung one leg over the bike and secured one shoe into the clip, practicing splaying her heel to disengage the shoe. Once she got the hang of it, she felt ready to get going.
“Last one around the loop is a rotten egg,” she said, snapping her right foot into place and preparing to push off with her left.
As she got up on the bike and began balancing, she struggled to get her left shoe snapped onto the clip as her momentum slowed. Just as she’d gotten it the bike teetered over sideways, sending her flat against the hard blacktop.
“Oof!”
Some of the other guys chuckled, but this only made Jane want to get it right and beat them more. She had a scrape around her left ankle and would probably end up with a bruise along her left arm, but she’d had worse. Once she’d gotten back up, she took another sharp look at the clips before making another attempt.
With one foot locked in and then the other, she was able to get going with only a little bit of wobbling, then she immediately had to contend with finding the right gear and keeping herself moving forward. The pace car was on the move and so were the other agents riding with her, but she focused on getting into a comfortable position bent over the frame of the bike with her arms forward and pumping her thighs.
Within a mile she felt like she was able to ride comfortably, and even though she wasn’t going particularly faster than anyone else she got into a rhythm taking the turns and listening to the wheels spin. Like when she ran, riding made it easier for her to think. Other than chuckling to herself over how some of these guys should’ve realized that there was more equipment in the gym than just the weights, as usual her mind was on her work and how she’d need to be riding and keeping the president safe at the same time.
Jane glanced out into the woods here and there, and it seemed immediately apparent how unlikely an attack would come from somebody hiding out between the trees on the minuscule chance the president rode by. No one would know. That was the advantage of not publicizing Morrin’s training rides, and it was the same reason why she figured the smartest way to attack the president would be to never mention it beforehand at all.
But there were always threats and warnings that gave the Secret Service a window to foil any attack on the president. That was because the threats were often more about attracting attention and instilling fear, and it was difficult for them to know how serious any of them were.
They were coming up to that big hill, and Jane looked at the long incline and took a deep breath as she pushed forward.
Since that threat against the president on the internet got some press, it was like people claiming they were going to kill the president started popping up like weeds. The new president’s honeymoon was over, and Nathan Carr and the investigative division were constantly identifying and responding to new threats. The warnings, the psychiatric referrals, and the criminal prosecutions, they were getting all of it in a way that as strange as it might sound was normal.
But as the incline steepened and Jane felt herself gasping for breath and struggling to climb, the real discomfort she felt came from that Facebook threat, which they had never found the source of. It kept coming up in articles and interviews with the president, perhaps because a comment on social media was still a novel way to premeditate an assassination, but it struck Jane that someone had gone through a lot of trouble to cover his tracks for it to just fade away into nothing.
At the top of the hill, Jane’s mouth was wide open as she attempted to suck as much air as possible into her lungs. Her cheeks felt red with the chilly wind constantly brushing against her, and she was going to have to take a shower and change her clothes before she did anything else that day, but the gentle decline that followed brought some life into her. Soon she was roaring down the long slope feeling steady and strong.
The pace car had left them behind, and when they came around to the finish Jane was only a couple of bike lengths ahead of Dedan. She clicked her feet out of the clips and coasted to a stop, wondering how despite feeling so good about the ride she had only done marginally better than the other agents.
“I guess I wasn’t able to tear around the loop as fast as I thought,” Jane said, catching her breath and setting the bike down. Dedan tilted his head at her like she was crazy.
“Are you kidding me? You already look like you’re ready to do a few more laps, and once you get a little more practice on the bike, actual athletic clothes, and shoes that fit you’ll be miles ahead of us. You’re obviously in better shape than we are. You just need to get used to riding and using the right gear,” he said.
Jane blinked, trying to process if he was right. Maybe she’d done better than she thought, even though she hadn’t kept up with the car and only led the other riders who’d already done one lap by a short distance. She glanced through the car’s open windows at Diwecki, who was expressionless and wearing glasses.
He nodded and a sheepish grin crept onto Jane’s face.
“Alright, Dedan. I guess we’ll find out if either of us can keep up with Alex Morrin when the time comes,” she said.
Dedan slumped against the frame of the bike and glanced in the direction of the big hill.
“We’ve only got to be able to make it around five times at a much faster pace. Good thing we’ll have the entire perimeter secured in case we get left in the dust.”
Jane wanted to tell him to speak for himself, because she had no intention of being left behind.
“You might surprise yourself with a couple of weeks of training,” she said, but Dedan looked incredulous.
“Right. You saw how fast that car was going. I don’t know how anybody could keep that up on a bike. Are we sure the president isn’t on some kind of performance-enhancing drugs?”
Jane laughed. Dedan had a build more like a linebacker, and that was a lot of meat to haul on a bike. The other guys looked like they belonged in a couch to 5k program by comparison.
&
nbsp; “Actually we do know he’s not,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “And besides, it’s not a race. You just have to keep him safe. You can pretend you’re letting him win if it makes you feel any better.”
Jane knew that being in the Secret Service meant having the flexibility to take on whatever task the organization needed. Sometimes that required adapting to having a big chunk of her mornings taken up by training to be a cyclist, but more often for her she was asked to handle other women who might be hostile, difficult, or particularly sensitive.
That’s how she ended up heading to the East Wing at the behest of the First Lady’s protective detail’s manager. Jane always thought it curious that the FLOTUS’s office was as far away from the Oval Office as possible, crammed in the south corner of the East Wing not too far from questionably vital components of the executive branch like the Calligraphy Office.
But as Jane approached her destination she could immediately tell that something was going on, and she couldn’t make it to the office door before someone came out carrying a couple of large cardboard boxes stacked up to prevent her from seeing the person’s face.
Jane dodged out of the way and then peeked inside, where a handful of people were packing things into boxes. Looked like she hadn’t arrived a moment too soon. Now that she’d filed for divorce, the First Lady was clearing herself out.
With all of the bodies moving around, it took Jane a second to spot Bethany Morrin—codename Coriander—who was hiding behind the door on a chair as she pulled items off of a high bookshelf. She was in a cute floral dress with a pink cardigan top, her bushy brown hair bunched up around her shoulders.
Clearing her throat, Jane tried to alert the woman to her presence as she dropped a pair of books into a box on the floor. For a second Jane thought twice about how to address her, considering that so many of her titles were about to go out the window.
