"Did you know Agent Meriweather?"
"Not very well. But he was well liked."
"What was his background?"
"He used to work in the Technical Security Division before being assigned to the White House Detail."
"What do they do?"
"Electronic eavesdropping."
She nodded. "Do you miss the Presidential detail?"
He got up and walked to the sliding-glass door.
After a moment, she joined him. The sea was calm and dark gray. Close to shore, a swell curved into a frosty wave, roaring from right to left, then bursting onto the beach, an arm of surf reaching out, only to disappear forever in thirsty, moonlit sand.
"The answer to your question is yes. I miss the action."
She kissed him. "I'm not trying to toy with you, Pete. I trust you. I could feel it the first day we met. I don't feel that way with everyone, but there was something about you. I don't know why, but there is an electricity between us." She nuzzled her head to his shoulder. "You feel good."
"Feelings aren't the problem. It's reality that gets people in trouble."
He knew that if the word ever got out, he would be fired. Both he and she would end up as voodoo dolls for the world press to stick pins in.
"No one will ever know," she said.
Garrison's experience, his common sense, and the discipline inculcated by his training told him that even the thought of being with her was crazy and dangerous. But he could smell her hair and her perfume. He wanted her. He wanted her and nothing else mattered. The thought flashed through his mind that he would like to stay with her all night, but that it was impossible.
She tenderly kissed his cheek. "It's my fault."
"It's nobody's fault."
"I don't care about him anymore. You don't believe me."
"Then why don't you leave him?"
"And be the only First Lady to walk out on her husband? The price is too high. No, I'm stuck in the White House for another few months. After the new Administration comes in, it's over between him and me once and for all. In the meantime, I'll put up with the charade. Pete, when you were married, were you happy?"
"For a while."
"What happened?"
"Being on the detail, I traveled with the President constantly, and my wife wanted a husband who could be home with her. It just didn't work."
"She wanted more from the relationship than you were willing to give?"
"That's probably the way she would describe it."
Garrison hated talking about himself. He considered it a sign of weakness. Gabbing about one's feelings was for TV gurus, totem worshipers, and alfalfa-sprout eaters.
"Do you keep in touch with her?"
"We exchange Christmas cards. I don't blame her for leaving. She's better off without me."
"Do you miss her?"
"It's been five years."
On the wall was a framed photograph of a well-groomed, gray-haired matron.
"Who is the lady in the photo?" he asked.
"My mom. My father turned her into an alcoholic. He was a cold man - aloof. She worshipped him. She sat in our wonderful old house in Pacific Heights and secretly drank her bottle of brandy every day-after she'd gotten her charity work out of the way, of course. She was an intelligent, talented person who never recovered from my father abandoning her. He spent my mother's last Christmas in Aruba with a twenty-two-year-old stripper. Good old Dad. He pushed me into marrying my first husband, who turned out to be a lot like him - a user. He was killed sailing drunk off Cabo San Lucas. When my father died, I took stock of my life. I'd been raised rich. I'd attended the right schools, dated the right men. What did I have to show for it? Nothing. Then a friend introduced me to Senator Russell Jordan. He had White House written all over him. I decided to make my own man. I set out to take him to the top. My inheritance money put Russell Jordan into the White House. Not his staff, not his advisors. Me. And to return the favor, he hung me on his political tree like a cheap ornament. I guess it's true that women seek out men like their father. Crazy, isn't it?"
He kissed her.
"What are your secrets, Pete?"
"I don't have any."
"You're angry about being transferred from the Presidential detail, aren't you?"
"You could say that."
"What happened?"
"I screwed up. It doesn't matter."
"Talk to me, Pete. Please."
"It happened at the State Department picnic on the South Lawn. We'd been briefed about how a radio talk-show host had hired someone to throw a pie in the President's face. I spotted the suspect. He was dressed as a waiter. When I confronted him, he spit at me. I slammed the pie into his face and it knocked him unconscious. The Director charged me with 'conduct unbecoming an agent.' I was transferred to your detail because the position was open and no one else wanted the job."
"You feel like you failed yourself."
"I got the shaft."
She kissed him. "You're not a failure in my book."
Garrison returned to the security room later, dazed and exhausted. He studied himself in a gold-framed mirror over the sofa.
"You really know how to complicate your life, don't you?" he said out loud.
He was six feet tall. He had clean features, short, sandy hair, and blue eyes. His shoulders fit his suit neatly. He'd been having an affair with the First Lady of the United States and he felt like some stupid, gawky teenager. He knew well what untoward familiarity with a Secret Service protectee could lead to. It was bad enough for an agent to allow himself to be used to perform servile chores like carrying suitcases and golf clubs for a protectee, much less getting involved sexually. He'd broken the first commandment of Secret Service protection. Though he wanted to believe otherwise, he knew, deep down that it was possible Eleanor might be using him. She was on the rocks with the President. Would she shout out his name during an argument?
He paced the security room, then plopped into a recliner and turned on the television. An anchorman droned on about the President's plans to hold a private Camp David foreign policy conference with the President of Russia. Changing channels, Pete watched a Dan Duryea movie, thinking about Eleanor: the look in her eyes when they had sex, the curve of her neck, her hair. He told himself he should have never gotten involved. But he'd wanted her. He'd wanted the closeness. Admittedly, he was infatuated with Eleanor Jordan. He felt for her a sublimated possessiveness that one could feel for a woman who could never be his. And it was clear to him that she was his impulsive counterpart, his partner in the thrill, the buzz that came from the most dangerous of illicit relationships. But Garrison wasn't unaccustomed to danger. He'd spent his life seeking it out.
As a teenager, he'd raced motorcycles and had once nearly been killed in a crash. In the Army, he'd volunteered for paratrooper school and later for training as an Army Explosive Ordnance technician. Before his promotion to the White House Detail, he'd worked in a special Secret Service bomb detail, and had volunteered for a tour of duty on a risky terrorism task force that had required him to work undercover among killers and ex-convicts for over a year. But he hadn't allowed himself to become involved with Eleanor for a simple thrill. There was something about her....
Shortly before eight A.M., Garrison stood at the glass door, staring outside, thinking about the night before. Outside, the first morning light had illuminated a grayish, endless panorama of waves and the kelpy foam lining the shore. He heard three radio transmitter clicks, the daily code for Agent approaching.
Walter Sebastian walked into the room carrying a box of doughnuts and a large container of coffee.
"You look like a sack full of doorknobs, Pete."
"I'll be doing better after I catch some rack time."
Using one of the field office cars parked outside, Garrison drove to the nearby Ramada Inn and went to his room. He showered and crawled into bed, exhausted and feeling discomfited about what had happened. He closed his eyes and recalled the f
irst day he'd reported for duty at the First Lady Detail. He and Eleanor had chatted casually between her appointments and they'd had a few discussions about her schedule. He'd found her distracted, but not aloof. She was a woman under stress.
The first time he'd accompanied her jogging they'd gotten to know one another....
Arriving in Rock Creek Park, Garrison climbed out of the limousine and looked about quickly, scanning the high ground. Seeing nothing unusual, he opened the rear passenger door for the First Lady. She wore a blue Nike warm-up suit, running shoes, a baseball hat, and sunglasses - an appropriate but unassuming outfit. Garrison could see how the President had fallen for her. She was attractive no matter what she wore-healthy and athletic, without the pampered, made-up look that many women had.
Under shadows cast by tall oak trees, Garrison and the First Lady jogged along the bank of a meandering stream.
"You seem familiar with the trail, Pete."
"This is the path President Clinton liked.
Garrison had chosen the route after reviewing Secret Service reports on the First Lady Detail's previous jogging activities. The Park had last been chosen six weeks earlier. He knew that, while a previously announced trip presented great danger to a protectee, an unannounced activity negated the possibility of an assassin lying in wait.
"I see, " she replied.
At a clearing that had been washed by a stream tributary, they began walking to avoid jagged rocks.
"Where are you from, Pete?"
"I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona.
"Bisbee..."
"A onetime mining area near the Mexican border. My father liked the quiet. It was that, all right. Quiet. My dad ran the only service station in town, and my mother was a clerk at the Foursquare church. She dragged me to church every Sunday."
"So you left the small town to find adventure?"
"Actually I saw some soldiers on a desert training mission. They were from Fort Huachuca. That's an Army post near Bisbee. I struck up a conversation. One of them told me he'd been to twenty different countries. I joined when I was eighteen. The Army put me through college."
"Are you married?"
"Not anymore."
He remembered a postcard he'd received a year earlier from his ex-wife - a color photograph of her and her new beau, a stable, stay-at-home accountant, posing in front of an Aspen ski lodge.
"Are you seeing anyone?"
"Not at present."
The trail turned to the right, leading them across a small meadow, then closer to the stream. Garrison detected the smell of wildflowers.
"Free and unencumbered," she said. "That's the way I was before I met Russell. I loved the single life the parties. The White House is the opposite of that kind of freedom. It's like being stuck at a health resort where the scenery is beautiful but there is nothing to do at night. It's a four-star hotel where the other guests are waiting for you to fall flat on your face."
"Does the President feel that way too?"
He knew the question was inappropriate. But he wanted to find out if she genuinely wanted to communicate, or whether she was just toying with him in that way powerful women sometimes do with their bodyguards.
"He relishes power and is willing to do anything to remain in control. It's part of his psyche. For me, it's like being a moving target. Maybe that's why there is nothing between us any longer. My marriage is over. Dead"
Garrison was amazed that she'd revealed such intimacies to him. On the other hand, she probably had no one else to confide in. Most of her friends were tied to the media in one way or another, and nearly everyone on the White House staff leaked stories to selected journalists.
The trail veered left, and they crossed a gravel-covered strip before jogging under a low-hanging branch and through the shade of some tall elms. In the distance, to his right, the motorcade slowly followed the street, the drivers keeping the First Lady in sight. When they reached a small plateau overlooking the District, the First Lady stopped at a public drinking fountain.
She drank water, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then considered him for a moment.
"What are you going to do tonight when you get off duty?"
There was an intangible, beguiling quality about her. Admittedly, the First Lady was a woman who, under other circumstances, in another world, he would ask out.
"I'll probably stop for a drink somewhere. "
"I'd love to be able to do that - to go somewhere without the paparazzi - and without a motorcade," she said wistfully looking toward the Capitol. "It's been seven and a half years and I miss the freedom."
"You've forgotten having to find a parking spot, fighting to get a table. It's not that great."
Her eyes were on his, and he felt his face flush.
"Pete, I've noticed you looking at me. Women see such things."
"I'm not going to deny it," he said without hesitation, surprising himself.
"I've admired you too."
Returning to the limousine, he opened the door for her. Climbing in, she grasped his forearm briefly. Garrison considered the gesture to be neither a sign of clumsiness nor indecorous vivacity. It was the thing women sometimes do after they decide they trust a man - not a sexual signal necessarily, but rather, a non-verbal communication defining the first step in a friendship. Her touch sent a tingle up his arm. Eleanor Jordan was a very different First Lady.
His mind flashed over everything she'd said to him from the first moment they'd met. He'd seen loneliness in her eyes. He'd felt the vibes coming from her.
The following weekend, when the President was in New York, they'd made love for the first time in the White House, in the upstairs private quarters.
"We're going to have to be careful, aren't we, Pete?" she said as he was putting on his clothes.
"I'm glad to hear it wasn't just a fling. "
"I'm not in the habit of doing things like that, " she said testily.
"I didn't mean-"
"If it was just sex you were looking for, I'd say you really grabbed the brass ring."
"It was a stupid joke. Sorry."
She blinked a few times as if she was thinking about saying something. Then she shook her head.
"We'll need a way to communicate, Eleanor. The White House phones can't be trusted. "
"I'll give you the number to my private cell phone. This is so strange."
"Strange isn't the word for it.
She moved close to him. "Pete, I want us to be close. Please don't interpret that as some boundary I am setting. I understand the reality of this as well as you do. No one must ever know."
"You didn't have to say that."
She hugged him.
"Please promise me," she whispered.
He cupped her face with his hands."
"I promise."
Garrison returned to the security room before midnight.
Early Monday morning, as he was sitting in the right front seat of the limousine on the way back to D.C. from Rehoboth Beach, Garrison's cell phone vibrated. He unclipped it from his belt and said hello.
"This is White House Operator 13. I have a Mr. Frank Hightower on the line. He says he has to talk to you - that it's an emergency."
"Put him on."
The phone clicked.
"Agent Garrison. How are things at the Secret Service?"
"About the same, Frank. Where have you been?"
"Just knocking around. Are you still looking for terrorists?"
"I'm not assigned to PRD any longer."
"Why?"
"After you disappeared, I had no more information." Hightower laughed. "And I just saw a flying pig."
Frank Hightower was an informant Garrison had used when assigned to temporary duty at the Secret Service Protective Research Division. Hightower had provided reliable information concerning white supremacist groups involved in terrorism.
"What's up?" Garrison said cautiously.
"I have information on an Aryan Disciples plot to
kill the President. Are you interested?"
"I'll put you in touch with an agent from PRD."
"No chance."
"Pardon me?"
"I'm not talking to anyone but you."
"Why?"
"I don't like talking over the phone. How about coming down to our old meeting place?"
"Okay," Garrison said after a moment.
"If I see anyone else but you, I walk."
The phone clicked twice.
Garrison wondered what Hightower was up to.
****
CHAPTER 3
"LONG TIME NO see, Garrison."
"Carrying any weapons today?"
"No way. Hey, it's me. I ain't changed any."
Garrison ran his hands around Hightower's waist. His clothing smelled faintly of marijuana and motor oil. It was uncomfortably muggy in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum gift shop, even with air-conditioning. Hightower had been standing near the door, like before, when Garrison would meet with him to gather information on terrorist activities. Garrison had chosen the location because it was always crowded and the windows and glass doors made it easy to detect possible countersurveillance.
"I thought you dropped off the face of the earth," said Garrison.
"I figured I would just lay low for a while. I met a broad and moved to Texas. Shit like that. Just kicking back. Then one thing led to another. I sort of just happened back into some of the old places and faces. Then bingo."
"Let's go upstairs."
Garrison led him up an escalator to a high-ceilinged lobby where a crowd of tourists was gathered around a full-size reproduction of an African bush elephant. The museum smell was overpowering: a post-organic odor that leaked from glass display cases that were inhabited by old bones and musty cloth. They sat on a bench, their backs to the wall.
"Okay, Frank. What is this about a plot?"
"This ain't no small case. I'm going to have to have some cash to put it all together for you-"
"Cut to the chase, Frank."
"The Aryan Disciples killed that Secret Service agent the other day in the parking garage downtown. It was done as a challenge to the government."
Garrison nodded. "That's it?"
Garrison thought Hightower looked nervous, which was unlike him.
The Sentinel Page 3
