by Jason Letts
“But I am!” Heath shouted. They were the only ones in the room, but some people at their cubicles out on the floor turned their heads at the eruption.
“Heath, I’m so disappointed in you,” he said, but Heath was so distracted that he hardly appeared to be listening anymore.
“I…I need to call a lawyer or something. I don’t even know who.” It looked like Heath was about to stumble out of the doorway when he suddenly glanced back at Oliver, who suddenly worried that the technician had figured it out. “What are you doing with that microphone?”
“Oh, this? I was just checking it out while you were gone,” Oliver said, dropping it back onto the desk.
Heath shuffled out of the room, and Oliver slipped out of the doorway behind to watch from beside the wall as he went to his desk and began haphazardly clicking on his computer and making calls.
Barely two minutes later the doors to the floor opened and a trio of FBI agents with dark blue jackets and gold lettering entered, heading directly for Heath. He made a few awkward protestations but didn’t put up any kind of meaningful resistance. As soon as it became clear that Heath would be taken away right then and there, Oliver began creeping closer.
As two of the agents escorted Heath out, Oliver’s technical assistant glanced back at him with a final plea for help. Oliver turned away to the remaining agent who was preparing to take Heath’s computer. Putting his hand this close to the fire was risky, but he needed to take advantage of this mistake for as long as he could.
“I have some information about him you might be interested in hearing,” Oliver said, and the man straightened up to face him incredibly fast.
“Mr. Ip, I’m Agent Tanner. My apologies about the disruption here and if this causes any difficulties for your work, but we need to take all of this into evidence,” said the burly man with a small nose and some veins visible through his pale cheeks.
“Oh, that’s no problem at all,” Oliver said. “I never would’ve guessed Heath was the one to do it. Frankly I’m disturbed that I might have been close to such a terrible thing going on, but now that we know it was him there are some things I could say that seem to make a little more sense.”
The agent nodded and Oliver escorted him back to the screening room. Agent Tanner pulled out a small pad of paper and a pen.
“We’re in a bit of a hurry, so this had better be good,” he said. Oliver took a deep breath.
“Well, I wish someone had asked me about Heath last week. It might’ve saved a lot of time. I never would’ve expected him to do something like this, but I can’t say it’s completely out of the blue. You see, he’s a bit of an oddball, a loner. Most of the time he doesn’t talk much, but a few times things have slipped out of his mouth that really disturbed me.”
“Uh-huh,” Tanner said, eyes down as he jotted on the pad. It saved Oliver the trouble of having to do too much facial acting.
“He seemed to have an interest in all kinds of weapons, including explosives. Sometimes he’d say things like this person had better watch out, or I bet this kind of explosive could blow that car clear above the power lines. References to mobster movies were always on the tip of his tongue. I always thought they were jokes because he said them in good humor, but it’s going to haunt me that there was something behind them.”
Agent Tanner looked up at him, a pair of blue eyes scanning Oliver that could’ve had anything going on behind them. This man could ruin everything Oliver had left with just one word.
“Anything else?”
Oliver kept himself in check, fighting off a sense of relief but suddenly feeling like he may have been too obvious.
“Just stuff like that really, odd comments a handful of times over years. Most of it seemed so subtle I never would’ve thought of it until you guys came in here.”
“Alright, thanks,” the FBI agent said, and Oliver took a deep breath once he’d fully returned to unhooking the computer.
Going to the break room, Oliver watched through a window until the agent had taken everything he needed and exited the floor via the elevator. Then he went to the windows looking down at the street to see when the van they’d come in had driven off. It was only when it had turned a corner in the distance and disappeared from sight that Oliver felt that he was left to himself again, possibly for the last time unless he took advantage of this opportunity.
He wasn’t foolish enough to think that the FBI’s pursuit of Heath would put the matter to rest. Sooner or later they’d realize that they had the wrong guy, that Heath couldn’t hurt a fly, and that he’d only been carrying an explosive in the boom mic case because Oliver had put it there. How long it would take them to figure this out was unknowable. Four hours? Twelve? Twenty-four?
No matter how long it was, Oliver needed to be long gone by then. His plans had been dashed, and the only thing left was a flight for survival to someplace where they could never find him.
Knocking against the editor’s door, he pushed it open before he got a response. The newsroom editor, Gary Cronin, was on the phone but immediately rushed to end the call once Oliver walked in. Middle-aged with glasses and a gold tooth, he looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“Good. Glad you’re here. I just got off the phone with legal. They’re going to try to figure out if we have any liability in this. I’m just blown away. Can you believe it?” Cronin said in astonishment.
Oliver widened his eyes and nodded vigorously.
“Tell me about it. You think you know people. I always knew that nice guy routine was an act. Listen, the timing is inconvenient, but I’d been planning to tell you anyway that I need to take a trip up to Maine for a couple of days. There’s a researcher there with an interesting method for detecting falsehoods in written statements that could really add some heft to dissecting the president’s social media posts,” he said.
Cronin had a sour look on his face like he’d just spotted a fly in his soup.
“Inconvenient is when your articles come in after the deadline. This isn’t inconvenient. It’s a mind-blowing abdication of duty. We’re having an all-hands-on-deck moment here. We need everyone to figure out how we’re going to respond to this,” he said.
“But that’s not going to require anything from the White House beat though, right? We’ve still got to cover the president.”
Cronin gave him a deadpan look.
“The White House holding a lot of press briefings up in Maine?”
Oliver’s frustrations startled to bubble up inside.
“Obviously not, but we don’t cover those live anyway. I’ll be able to work with the transcripts for a couple of days. This is going to pay off big time. Trust me.”
But the news editor wasn’t moved in the slightest.
“I just can’t. I don’t care if your guy has invented an X-ray machine that can read people’s thoughts. No one’s going anywhere until we’ve weathered this storm. Everyone is going to think we were involved. They’re going to be curious how we respond. Honestly, there are a lot of opportunities here to convert people into new subscribers and draw more attention to our work. That’s what the upper management on the business end is going to want to hear about.”
Oliver pursed his lips. None of this stuff mattered anymore, his job, the paper, the irritating demands of someone beneath him that he’d previously had to live by.
“You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. Having the FBI in here dragging away my tech has thrown me off. Can I ask for one tiny thing? I’ve just got to go out for a walk to clear my head, and then I’ll be back in here to tackle this. We’ll be fine, and like you said we’ll be looking better than ever by the end of it.”
Gary Cronin leaned to the side in his seat, his head in his hands.
“I hope you’re right. We’ll be getting everyone together for a staff-wide meeting and then we’ll coordinate with the reporting pool afterward to get everyone on the same page. If we don’t get out in front of this, it’s going to look bad. That means we ne
ed to have articles going live today, and heaven help anyone who submits something after the deadline this time,” he said, glaring at Oliver.
“Right. We’ve all got our deadlines,” Oliver said, wishing he’d been able to say something ten times as snide for one final sendoff, but raising suspicions by dunking on the editor to his face wasn’t going to help Oliver keep his freedom.
Ducking out of the office, Oliver swung by his desk one last time to grab a half-empty bag of pretzels and a hard drive that went along with his laptop. Once he had everything the FBI would be taking anyway packed in his case, he was out the door and back in his Kia Forte.
The car came to a halt at a red light, giving Oliver a precious chance to think about what he needed to do next. He was used to covering his tracks, being impossible to follow, but the FBI had tools that went beyond what amateur internet sleuths and competing journalists had access to.
He started to put together a plan in his mind that involved taking public transportation down to the southern border and finding a way across into Mexico. He had a faint interest in the Yucatan Peninsula, and the jungles there struck him as the perfect getaway. No one would ever find him once he had a new name and started learning some Spanish, which he figured he could master in a couple of weeks.
The trip home couldn’t go fast enough, and he’d barely gotten out of the car near his building when his phone started to ring. Worried it was the FBI, Oliver glanced at the screen to see that it was his editor. The meeting was starting and he was irate, but Oliver couldn’t care less. His mind was already on the implications of carrying around a phone that could be used to track his location.
He had to get rid of all of this stuff and fast. The door to his apartment opened with an annoying creak, one he really wouldn’t ever have to listen to again this time. Crossing the room, Oliver pulled open the window against the far wall that looked over a narrow alley. While living here, he’d perfected tossing apple cores and other garbage into the dumpster of the building next door. Shutting off his phone, he chucked it across the gap and straight into the dumpster. His bag flew next and landed with an audible thump.
Heading into his bedroom, Oliver grabbed the bottom of the rusty steel frame and yanked it away from the wall. That exposed a hole in the wall about the size of a baseball. Leaning beside it, Oliver reached in almost to the elbow and withdrew a bulky sock tied up with rubber bands. He peeled the bands away one after another until he was able to unroll the sock and shake out the contents, a wad of cash with nearly a thousand dollars in it and little white Percocet pills in a plastic bag that could be sold for some additional money.
He was breathing heavily at this point as he tried to envision what running for it would look like. Riding a bus most of the way across the country brought the fear of it being boarded by the authorities at some point, leaving him nowhere to run. On the other hand, even if he changed the plates on his car he had no clue how far he’d be able to get until they found him.
Crossing the actual border into Mexico seemed like the easiest part, simply because there had to be a regular smuggling operation he could partake of. Sighing, he tried to come to grips with how much of his trip would have to come together on the fly, and his penchant for planning and covering his tracks might not hold up against the lack of time.
But it would all be better once he reached his destination, a small town to call his own where he would use his ingenuity to build a thriving business and impress the local women, who would be vying for his attention. All he had to do was move himself there.
Once he’d exited the bedroom with a pack containing some extra clothes, the last thing he had to do was unplug his home laptop and send that one sailing out the window as well. Brushing his finger against the trackpad to wake it up, he was about to turn it off when out of habit he noticed that a message had come through to the email account he’d created for tips.
Unable to resist seeing what it was, especially when it had a tantalizing subject line that read “This is what you’ve been waiting for,” Oliver clicked to open the message from one of his most trusted informants, an old retiree and keyboard warrior steeped in the net’s most eccentric theories.
He glanced over the message with the expectation that it would be something irrelevant and he’d be shutting the machine down, but instead he found himself drawn to the attachments that consisted of three pictures. Oliver was usually sent screenshots of offensive social media posts, but the pictures were something else and required a little more scrutiny. The attachment thumbnails showed that it had to do with some papers on a desk that were photographed surreptitiously, but it wasn’t clear what they were about.
The document in one of the photos was too blurry, one was at a bad angle making it too tough to read at first look, and the last had someone’s arm partially obscuring the shot, but at least on that one there was a legible header printed. When Oliver saw it, a nearly orgasmic flush swept through his body. The header read “Human Enhancement Program (HEP),” and the date was mid-February, less than a month after President Alex Morrin took office. The paper appeared to be some kind of operational report, but most of it was covered up.
In an instant, all of the fury and rage that had fueled him for months returned. The rumors were true, and he’d seen the first evidence of it with his own eyes. Morrin had directed the government to begin carrying out experiments on people likely as soon as he reached office and of course without any Congressional approval or public disclosure.
This seemed to be under the pretense of “enhancement,” but what that really meant was unclear. And regardless, what methods they were using to achieve that? What people were they using to further this research, and how many of them had died? If the dark web rumors about the program were authentic, any of the other speculation swirling about it could be as well. Some of the more outlandish theories involved secret government labs and unknowing participants. Anything was suddenly possible.
What the revelation really did was reaffirm Oliver Ip’s belief that the president needed to be held personally responsible for this devastating breach of public trust. A desperate run across the country was the last thing the situation called for in the face of egregious conduct beyond what anyone had ever known. Even if he had nothing but his last gasp of life, fighting against this was what he knew he was meant to do. Give up? Now? He saw his rightful place in the White House more easily now than ever, and for the first time he’d been gifted powerful and irrefutable armaments for the fight.
All he needed to do was find a new way to get to the president to finish the job and take the credit. And it needed to be done quickly before the FBI found him.
Ripping the laptop off the desk so hard that it tore the cord from the socket, Oliver strode out the door without looking back.
11
Office of the Inspector General
330 Independence Avenue, SW
Washington, D.C.
Four undecorated white walls. Two rigid, austere chairs. One black table without anything on it.
Sitting across from Jane was a woman, seemingly in her mid-forties, wearing a gray skirt suit and with short but curly platinum blonde hair, Agent Trice. Seeing another woman in these positions always pleased Jane and gave her a sense of optimism, but after walking through the dreary halls of the Office of the Inspector General’s building and being in a room that seemed designed as a sensory deprivation tank, the face she was looking at appeared just as lifeless and intimidating.
This was the cheerless, implacable face of the person who, when bad people did things, was responsible for investigating the good people.
“Can you tell me about some of the standard protocols for protecting the president on excursions?” Trice asked.
The first time she’d been here, Jane had gone backward and forward with Trice through everything that had been in place for the trip to Dayton, and that meant she didn’t even know what she was supposed to be talking about when she was called back for a second inte
rrogation. For the moment at least, she was pleased that it was a question she could easily answer.
“Of course. As we all know, leaving the White House poses the greatest risks to the president. That time in transit while getting to and from wherever he’s going requires meticulous preparation and employing a number of measures in the event that an adversary, which we often refer to as a jackal, makes an attempt on the president’s life.
“In addition to the standard Secret Service detail that guard’s the president’s person, we make use of counter-sniper units at rooftop locations near key entrances and exits. An entire counterassault team travels nearby with the president to immediately engage enemy combatants with return fire in order to provide cover for the detail and drivers to withdraw the president to safety.
“If you’re referring to an excursion such as a hotel stay, the Secret Service will ensure that the entire floor the president stays on is vacant, as well as the rooms above and below his. All hotel employees have their backgrounds checked, and finding anyone with a criminal history will lead to us requesting that the employee be placed on leave. In addition to that, we set up a command post within the hotel for the duration of the stay. I could go on and on. Is there a specific circumstance you’d like to hear about?”
Jane smiled as she articulated her question, though as much as she enjoyed talking about her work she found herself irked by what this conversation seemed to be focused on.
“That will do,” Trice said. “Please tell me more about how you see your role in enacting those procedures for the Presidential Protective Division.”
Clearing her throat to cover her discomfort, Jane smiled again.
“As a staffing and logistics agent for the PPD, it’s my job to help make the advance preparations and arrangements necessary for the Secret Service to carry out its mission of protecting the president. How I see my role is a little bit like a chess player, matching the pieces I have to an ever-changing board state full of variables known and unknown. I do this based on the guidelines we have in place and my best judgment about what will ensure the greatest degree of safety for the president.”
