Hail to the Chef

Home > Other > Hail to the Chef > Page 16
Hail to the Chef Page 16

by Julie Hyzy


  A man dressed all in black and wearing body armor rapped at the window. Gavin got out.

  “You stay here,” he said to me before slamming the door.

  I turned to the other two. “Did I do something wrong?”

  They were both about thirty years old. The shorter one had dark hair and a pale complexion. The taller one was broad-shouldered, with sandy hair. Since he was in the passenger seat and I was directly behind him, I could only see his face in profile when he turned to me. The two men exchanged another look.

  “You guys are making me nervous,” I said. “Can’t you tell me what’s happening?”

  The driver stared out his side window. The passenger said, “No, ma’am,” and shifted his attention away.

  I watched buses pull up and I could imagine Bucky complaining about the fact that I sat in a warm black sedan while he and the others were relegated to school bus-quality accommodations.

  Silence in the car dragged me down. Gavin had gone off with the black-clad man and I attempted to put the time to good use. I began prioritizing tasks, working backward from our next target: the reception after the White House official ceremonies. Although I’d pressed Marguerite for an answer, she still didn’t know whether the Campbells would participate this year or not. Sean’s death had changed everything. The White House would still open on Tuesday to the public; but in the meantime, everything else was up for grabs.

  “How much longer, do you think?” I asked my escorts.

  The bigger guy replied. “Don’t know, ma’am.”

  I watched minutes tick by on the dashboard clock. More than forty-five minutes later, Gavin finally returned. He opened the door and gestured me out. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said to the two men up front. “You may return.”

  He didn’t say where they were returning to, and they apparently didn’t need to ask. As soon as I alighted and Gavin closed the door, they took off.

  I felt like those little dogs who hustle their tiny paws to keep pace with their masters. Gavin didn’t watch to make sure I was keeping up, he just made his way across the south lawn to the doors we’d exited from. “Special Agent Gavin,” I called to his back.

  He didn’t stop moving, but his head tilted.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, a bit breathless from the wind and the running.

  He didn’t answer, but it looked as though he shook his head.

  As we reentered the White House, I stole a look backward to see what was going on with the rest of the staff. The buses were filled, but stationary. I hoped everyone had warmed up. Reporters were everywhere. They surrounded the grounds like a pack of eager hyenas waiting to pounce. News vans, with high-perched satellite dishes and camera crews, were everywhere. Pointing their lenses at us.

  Inside, I wiped away tears that had formed from the wind beating against my face. Gavin caught me and something in his expression softened. “Everything will be all right, Ollie. This is just procedure.”

  Ollie? That was the first time he called me by my given name.

  I was about to explain that I wasn’t crying, but he started off again, expecting me to follow. His shiny black shoes made snappy clicks against the floor and I followed him back into the corridor, past all the now-quiet shops, to the storage area where I’d found the box.

  CHAPTER 15

  GAVIN MADE ME GO OVER MY STEPS, AS PRECISELY as I could recall them. Very slowly. As I remembered and recited-again-another black-clad man took notes. Wearing body armor, a sniper rifle slung around his back and, a heated expression, he neither spoke nor made eye contact with me. I was sure everyone involved in this fracas was furious with me for having caused a major evacuation over nothing. Agents, snipers, and other assorted military folk were everywhere-the halls were filled with people speaking to one another and into radios.

  The press would have a field day with this one, I was sure, and I only hoped I wouldn’t be served up like a holiday turkey for them all to feast on.

  After ten minutes of tracing my movements, we were still only about five feet inside the storage room. Gavin was insistent on stopping at each step so that the intense note-taker could get down every detail. Problem was, there was not much to tell. And I couldn’t imagine why anyone cared about any of this. Unless they had reason to doubt my story.

  I caught a quiver in my voice. God, I hated that. “This is where I noticed that the Johnson china had been moved.”

  Gavin nodded.

  I took that as encouragement to continue. “So I pushed the bin aside, and found the”-I hesitated-“the box.” I described it, even though I knew they both must have seen it.

  “What then?”

  “Well,” I said, trying to be as precise as possible, “I knew it didn’t belong here, so I decided to see what was inside.” Shrugging, I added, “I planned to return it to whatever department had left it here.”

  “You said it was sealed.”

  Nodding, I remembered the clip from the dolly, still in my pocket. I pulled it out. “I used this to slice through the tape.”

  Gavin grimaced.

  “Better than using my teeth,” I said, in an effort to lighten the mood. Neither man smiled.

  “It opened easily?”

  I considered that. “Not really. I had to pull hard a few times in order to rip past the tape.”

  This time Gavin winced. “Dear God, Ollie. You ripped it open?”

  “Yeah,” I said, a little defensively. “It’s not like I suspected anything when I first saw it. And it was sealed pretty tightly.” I glanced at the two of them. Even the note-taker had looked up, and they were staring at me as though I’d done the stupidest thing in the world. “Geez, I understand we’re supposed to be careful when we see things out of place, but you have to admit it really did look like normal storage stuff. There was no way I knew it was a fake bomb.”

  Gavin’s eyes snapped to mine. “Fake bomb?” he asked. “What are you telling me? You found something else?”

  “No…” Again I hesitated. “I’m talking about the thing I believed was an IED. The reason I called for help.” My hands spread as though to encompass the entire White House grounds. “The reason I started screaming for everyone to evacuate. It was a fake, right?”

  Gavin licked his lips and I could tell it was taking every measure of patience he had to slow himself down. “Ollie,” he began, surprising me again with familiarity, “the thing you found was live.”

  My knees trembled. “It was?”

  “Yes,” he said, with high-strung tolerance. “You found a bomb. A real one.” He ran a hand over his face. “Let’s get through the rest of this and I’ll tell you what I can.”

  We finished the how-I-found-a-bomb-and-learned-to-start-worrying exercise and the tall man with the notepad finally left us. The minute he was gone, I sat on the floor. It was cold.

  “You okay?” Gavin asked.

  “I suppose it would be a stupid question to ask if the bomb has been safely removed.”

  He took a seat on the floor next to me. “It’s been defused and it’s gone. We’ve done a sweep of the area and it looks clean.”

  Looks?

  I rested my forehead against my upturned knees. “Why me?” I asked. “Why am I always the one who gets involved in this stuff?”

  Gavin took a deep breath and I lifted my head to watch him. For the first time since I’d met him, he didn’t seem furious with me. He seemed to be contemplating.

  Commotion in the hallways continued, but no one poked a head in. All things considered, it was pretty quiet.

  “I’ve been around these sorts of situations a lot, Ollie,” he said, staring away. “Been on the job for over twenty-five years.”

  I waited.

  “There are people who things happen to. And whether you consider it a blessing or a curse, you appear to be one of them.” He turned to face me. “I read your dossier.”

  I winced.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “It’s not that you have a bla
ck cloud over your head-it’s that you have the ability to see and to sense things better than most.” He wagged his head from side to side. “I’m not talking about ESP or clairvoyance, although maybe describing it as a sixth sense is apt. You have a great deal of intelligence and an acute awareness-more than most people-which allows you to notice things out of place. And you have the curiosity to find out why.”

  “It’s a curse, all right.”

  “I disagree. We hire people with your talents every day.”

  I realized he was giving me a compliment. Fear, adrenaline, and now self-consciousness combined to render me speechless. I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”

  Back to staring away, he said, “With that in mind, I’m going to tell you something that isn’t for public knowledge. But I want you to know so that we have another set of eyes out there.” Gavin worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “The bomb was on a timer.”

  “When was it supposed to go off?”

  Squinting, he said, “Sunday, during the White House opening ceremony.”

  My stomach lurched as I tried to digest that. At the same time, I was thinking how odd it was to be sitting here on the floor with Special Agent-in-Charge Gavin discussing bombs.

  “If there’s any consolation,” Gavin went on, “and it isn’t much, the IED was small. Personal size, if you want to call it that.” He was so calm, it gave me a measure of comfort. “We get the impression this was meant to target one person.”

  “Me?”

  He shrugged. “I doubt it, but after your altercation on the street, we’re not overlooking the possibility.”

  “If it wasn’t intended for me,” I said, glancing around the storeroom, and hoping to God it hadn’t been meant for me, “why put it here? If the intention is to do damage, there are much better places. This area is usually empty.”

  Gavin smiled. “You’re right. We suspect the would-be terrorist wanted to get the IED inside first. He probably intended to move it later, to somewhere closer to the action.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, still thrown by the relaxed attitude of our conversation. “I take it you’re looking at everyone, right? Staff included.”

  “Every single person who’s been inside the White House over the past twenty-four hours, cross-checked against everyone who was here the day the original prank bomb was found.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone on staff being guilty.”

  “Remember what I told you at the introductory safety meeting,” he said, looking at me again. “Don’t see safety around you. Don’t trust anyone.”

  “Aren’t you trusting me by telling me all this?”

  “I told you, I’ve been on the job for a long time.” He stood and offered me a hand up. “I can see and sense things, too. You’re okay, Ollie. You did the right thing.”

  “HE’S GOT THE HOTS FOR YOU,” TOM SAID that night, back at my apartment.

  “Give me a break,” I said, “Gav is probably fifteen years older than I am…”

  “Gav?”

  Putting dinner leftovers away in the refrigerator while Tom rinsed the dishes, I gave a half shrug and turned away. “Yeah, he told me to call him that when we weren’t around other staff members.” All of a sudden I realized how that sounded. I spun. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “He definitely has the hots for you.”

  Laughing now, I shut the fridge door. “Hardly. But I did catch something today that I didn’t ever see before. I think he’s actually beginning to respect me.”

  Tom wiped his hands on a dish towel. “He should. You single-handedly saved his backside.”

  “How so?”

  “Gavin’s the agent-in-charge, right?”

  I nodded.

  “You prevented a bombing. How would it look if it had gone off under his watch? If it weren’t for you-”

  “Just dumb luck,” I said, waving away the accolades.

  “Not just luck, Ollie. Gavin was right when he said you’re one of those observant ones. Which is why I decided on the subject for tonight’s lesson.”

  Over the past year and a half, Tom had taught me much-self-defense, gun handling, and target shooting, to name a few things. Many of these lessons had come in handy in the past and I was always eager for him to let me in on things that most people neither ever learn nor care about.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Explosives?”

  “Right.”

  I interrupted him before he could begin. “You do know that we’ve all had to take a class on this already, right?”

  “Gavin taught it?”

  “Yeah.”

  He made an unpleasant noise. “How is it that the executive chef can uncover an explosive device that the security forces missed?”

  “Like I said, just dumb luck.”

  “No, Ollie. They should have found this one. And I hope to God they kept searching.”

  “They said they swept the place.”

  The look on Tom’s face let me know what he thought of the team’s competence. “Now they’re pulling out all the stops. Now they’re interviewing staff members. They should have done that when the prank bomb was found. They should have found the guy who planted that and found out why. The fact that they’re taking so long to move on this is ludicrous.”

  “But how could anyone have known? Gav said-”

  Tom silenced me with a look, and I realized I’d risen to Gavin’s defense. “I’m not going to feel comfortable with the president-or you-in the White House until we get to the bottom of this bombing threat.”

  “Where is the president now?”

  He frowned. “With family,” he said. “I’ll be headed to meet him in the morning. Then he’s heading to Berlin. This is my only night off until Wednesday.”

  “Gotcha.”

  For the next hour, Tom walked me through Explosives 101. He was certainly more detailed than Gavin had been in class, but Tom suffered from not having examples on hand to share. He’d printed photos from declassified files and diagrams from Internet searches. By the time he finished, my head was chock-full of device strategies and configurations, all for methods of mass demolition. Fun stuff.

  “The one thing you have to remember is this,” he said, as he wound up. “There is almost always a secondary device.”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “It bears repeating. People in the business of destruction don’t want to fall short. They set up fail-safes to ensure their plans move forward. To ensure their target is destroyed. Do you understand?”

  A prickly feeling had come over me. “I do.”

  CHAPTER 16

  SUNDAY MORNING, I RETURNED TO THE White House kitchen, knowing I wouldn’t hear from Tom again until Wednesday at the earliest. My mind was still reeling from all the bomb stuff he’d tried to teach me last night. I worked hard to assimilate information I hoped to never actually need.

  To say I was jittery was an understatement. We’d gotten word that today’s decorator tour at the White House was still on. Although Mrs. Campbell would forgo the Kennedy celebration, she would be here to greet guests afterward. With President Campbell out of the residence until Wednesday, the First Lady would be required to handle the event solo.

  I still wore the splint on my right hand, which kept me relegated to working at the computer rather than putting meals together. Angry at the two men who’d put me in this position, I knew I needed to push through my harsh disappointment. Working on food was so much more fun than tapping away on a keyboard. Still, I forced myself to focus. While not as much fun as creating an entrée, updating files was a necessary chore, and I’d fallen way behind.

  I took my seat in front of the monitor and glanced around the kitchen. My crew was preparing hors d’oeuvres for the afternoon’s event-and they were doing so with terrific efficiency. Although I’d designed today’s menu months ago-prepared samples and overseen the First Lady’s tasting tests-today I felt utterly left out. My body still ached from the assault two nights ago, and m
y ego smarted from having to keep the bomb information secret. Not only could I not tell anyone else that yesterday’s bomb had been real, I couldn’t warn them that it had been scheduled to go off this very afternoon.

  Bucky opened one of the cabinets. “Oh, my God!” We all turned to see him staring into the shelves with exaggerated, wide-eyed panic. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of cooking sherry. “Call security,” he said, lifting the bottle over his head. “It might be a bomb.”

  I couldn’t blame the kitchen crew for laughing. I pretended to, but I felt the heated rush of embarrassment fly from my chest to my face. Pointedly, I turned away to study the file open on my monitor. Nothing about it looked familiar, and yet it had been listed as one of my recent documents-which is why I’d opened it in the first place.

  Bucky was now pretending the bottle of sherry was a machine gun. I ignored him for a long moment because we’d always bantered among ourselves and I didn’t want to shut down our team’s lighthearted teasing. But this time, mortification pounded in my ears. Suddenly too warm, I wiped the back of my hand across my brow. At least the rest of the kitchen staff was no longer laughing.

  Changing tactics again, Bucky pranced around the center island, saying, “Get out before the cooking sherry explodes!”

  I turned. “Enough.”

  “Can’t take a little ribbing?” he asked.

  If he only knew. “What I can’t take is being behind schedule.” I directed a look at the clock on the wall, then pointed to the eyesore Senator Blanchard had given us. “We’ve had plenty of interruptions this past week. Don’t you think it’s time we focused on our work instead of goofing around?”

  Total silence in the kitchen while Cyan, Rafe, and Agda waited, wide-eyed, to see what would happen next.

  Bucky strode over to the cabinet where he put the cooking sherry back and slammed the door.

 

‹ Prev