by Chris Hauty
The van drops her off in front of a snug cabin nestled among the trees in an isolated section of the compound. A quarter mile distant from the president’s retreat, Aspen Lodge, and the administrative center, Laurel Lodge, the single-room Linden Cabin is exactly what a mountain cottage should be, with its bare furnishings, knotty pine walls, and twin single beds. Hayley responds instantly to her quarters, feeling secure the moment she crosses the threshold, and experiences a surge of purpose and optimism. Despite setbacks and her current isolation, Hayley is convinced she can accomplish her goals. A presidential weekend at Camp David is the very best situation in which to communicate her message to Monroe.
Leaving her cabin and walking along the wooded path toward Laurel Lodge, however, a new anxiety begins to take grip. Immersed in the silent woods that engulf the retreat and its horror-movie seclusion, she realizes the naval installation is also the logistical ideal for a presidential assassination. If she were the commander of Odom’s hit team, she would choose this place and time to execute the mission plan. Though the naval compound is thoroughly guarded by well-armed Marines, Camp David is no White House complex in the middle of a busy urban center. With planning and, most important, collaboration from select Secret Service personnel, Hayley estimates six men with special-operations military training could kill Monroe and escape with only medium-level risk.
This whipsaw of moods, from secure to unsettled, does not undercut her ability to perform. Infantry training has given her a deep reservoir of adaptability while dealing with unstable operational environments. She controls her breathing and, consequentially, her heart rate. The large, squat wood-and-stone facade of Laurel Lodge appears through the trees. As she approaches the unguarded building, she observes that not a single Secret Service agent stands outside the door. Hayley can’t help but worry about the lack of security. The vibe is stunningly relaxed, nothing like the siege mentality of the White House.
She enters Laurel Lodge, which immediately impresses her as a woodsy West Wing, a perfect transfer of the signature frenetic bustle from its urban edition. Though fewer in number, the handful of aides present in the lodge go about every task, however mundane, with a sense that history is being made by their hands. Self-importance at every level of the administration, no matter how low, is in the West Wing’s DNA. Consequently, when Hayley encounters Karen Rey soon after entering, the president’s aide greets her with annoyed impatience before the intern has said a word.
“You’re late. Did you take a nap or something?” Apparently, Rey’s strategic resolution to be more ingratiating toward the star intern has withered under the greater pressure of an unquenchable antipathy toward Hayley.
“No, ma’am. Dropped my bag and came right over,” Hayley assures her supervisor.
Rey wears a perplexed frown, as if suffering intestinal cramp, and heads off to whatever momentous duty she is undertaking on the president’s behalf.
“Are these new Secret Service agents, ma’am?” Hayley asks after her, gesturing toward the security detail inside the lodge.
Rey stops and turns back toward the intern, irked. “What? I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”
In the few minutes she spent walking up the path to Laurel Lodge, Hayley had brooded on how she might sound an alarm and to whom. No matter what, the president’s life must be protected. There was no time to wait until she might be afforded the opportunity to deliver her message directly to Monroe. But she had to be careful, lest she be deemed a security risk herself. Hayley had surmised it’d be best to speak generally, withholding details of what she knows. “I’m concerned for the president’s safety, ma’am,” Hayley tells Karen Rey with a level of seriousness people in the West Wing have come to expect from her.
The senior White House aide regards Hayley with a mix of exasperation and contempt. “What?”
“I know it sounds crazy coming from an intern, ma’am, but I really have to question President Monroe’s safety here at Camp David.”
A long moment passes as Rey studies the intern with brow well furrowed, a frown carving her lower face to an almost comical degree. “Stand in a corner somewhere. And be quiet. Someone will find a use for you.”
As Rey walks away from the vile West Virginian, that snake in the grass, she struggles to re-center her thinking on tasks requiring her immediate attention. But Hayley’s words and her absurd mind-fuckery remain with her, inescapable and galling, like a too-loud car radio one lane over. Saddled with the intern by the president’s farcical affinity for her, Rey curses her own fate. No matter what Rey does to push forward and keep focused, she hears the young woman’s twanging assessment of a possible danger to the president, as if she knows anything about anything. Lord, what will deliver her from the loathsome creature that is Hayley Chill?
* * *
INTERSTATE 95 COVERS a distance of approximately twenty-three miles in length across Delaware. The interstate’s first off-ramp in the state is, logically, Exit 1, DE 896, that, if taken in the northerly direction, leads to the University of Delaware and its host college town, Newark. Traveler motels crouch close to the four-lane State Route 896 just north of the interstate’s cloverleaf on- and off-ramps, offering modest respite from the highway travel as well as beds for trysting college professors and their ambitious students. One of these motels is the Red Roof Inn & Suites, erected on the bones of that travel franchise of decades ago: an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s restaurant.
Asher Danes’s Prius is parked in the lot, just outside the ground-floor room with a 112 stenciled on its door. Inside, Asher emerges from the shower and looks at his watch. It is 1:14 p.m. He had crawled out of his Red Roof bed thirty minutes earlier and taken a shower using Red Roof soaps and is just finishing rubbing his body dry with a Red Roof not-quite-plush white towel. He had exited the interstate yesterday evening, a little more than two hours after departing DC and still more than three hours from his parents’ home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
What had prompted him to interrupt his trip? Fatigue, both emotional and physical, was a factor. In addition to general weariness, Asher dreaded seeing his parents and conveying to them the news of quitting his job at the White House. How to explain his reasons? While it’s true his father had contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the party’s preferred PAC and thereby secured Asher’s position in the new administration, that amount of money meant very little to a household that enjoys a ten-figure annual income. No, it wasn’t the money blown on Asher’s aborted “Washington experience” that caused him a sense of paralyzing dread, but rather the awareness his parents would be deeply concerned about him and might once again lobby for his voluntary commitment to psychiatric hospitalization.
Indeed, it was a secret from everyone in Asher’s life except his parents he had suffered what he likes to call his “pre–nervous breakdown” after the junior-year breakup with Mr. Lacrosse, an ugly night in which he cracked up on his parents’ kitchen floor. Alarmed by the emotional disintegration of their only son, normally such a jovial young man, Asher’s parents hustled him off for a two-week stay at New Canaan’s Silver Hill Hospital. Equal doses of talking therapy and Lexapro were just the thing to get the boy on a better emotional track and back to Cambridge. Regardless of his apparent recovery, however, Asher’s mom and dad have been vigilant of his every mood swing and “bad day.” Fleeing from DC and his job there could easily trigger a second, more prolonged stay at Silver Hill.
Ten hours of uninterrupted sleep and some Red Roof complimentary coffee have failed to ease Asher’s anxiety. In addition to dreading his parents’ reaction to this latest muck-up is a renewed sense of guilt for abandoning Hayley Chill to professional assassins back in DC. Though he had initially had his doubts regarding the intern’s warnings of a vast intrigue originating from the Deep State, this despite his own complicity in that conspiracy, Asher cannot ignore the evidence that has piled up in quick succession. Inescapable was the harsh self-assessment that he had taken a most cowardly way out.
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br /> Checking out of room 112 and stopping at the Boston Market directly across the street for a truly abject take-out rotisserie chicken breast sandwich, Asher is torn with indecision. Should he continue north or return south? Facing him are two distinct choices that will result in two completely opposite destinies. He climbs back inside the Prius and points it toward Interstate 95, less than a half mile distant. Saturday-afternoon traffic is moderate. The on-ramp for north is beyond the overpass and south just before it. As Asher draws ever closer to choosing which direction and thereby deciding his fate, he has to chuckle. How ludicrous is life anyway?
* * *
JAMES ODOM GETS up on Saturday morning at six a.m., expending that extra hour out of a small kindness extended to his loyal wife. After decades of marriage, they are neither lovers nor much loved by the other. But what they do share is a level of grudging respect. They have provided for each other, nurtured one another in countless ways, and grimly persevered. As a result of that dedication to the marital bonds, anything but generous deference to the other’s basic needs would be abhorrent. James Odom reveres his wife and therefore remains motionless as a corpse on his side of the bed for those sixty minutes after his own awakening.
After a black coffee and dry toast, he goes to the office for a few hours to catch up with the previous week’s incomplete tasks. Odom relishes these quiet hours at Langley. Younger employees avoid the place like Chernobyl on the weekend, but old-timers like him can often be found shuffling down its corridors on a Saturday or Sunday morning, swapping small grins of recognition if not hellos. But this, of course, is no ordinary Saturday. James Odom is an old warrior with the battle scars to show for it, but even he suffers a mild case of the butterflies in these few hours before Operation Damocles changes the course of American history.
He craves to speak to his team leader before jump-off, aware the call is as pointless as a wish list left for Santa Claus. The team has its orders and has developed its plan. A call from Odom would only happen if the operation was being terminated. Rummaging through file folders and fretfully reviewing analyst reports from the depths of the agency’s intranet Odom finds his gaze repeatedly falling on his modified BlackBerry KEY2. Like chieftains of drug cartels south of the border, he carries five such devices, and one is used exclusively for communicating with Sinatra. The operative answers after the fourth ring.
“I’m kind of busy here. Are you terminating the operation?”
“Certainly not,” Odom assures him. “We’re go.”
“You’ve commissioned me to assassinate the president of the United States and you’re checking up on me?” Sinatra asks with understandable incredulity.
“Christ, you’re an asshole. Has anyone ever told you that?”
There’s a long pause from Sinatra, and Odom fears he has unduly insulted the man. He hasn’t met a trained killer who wasn’t somewhat mentally unbalanced, thinking particularly of a murderous pederast he once had the unpleasant experience of hiring, but this one really seems to have more than several screws loose.
“Would you kindly refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain when speaking to me?” Sinatra’s voice has the timbre and modulation of a psychopath on the verge of a bloody homicidal frenzy.
“Of course. My apologies.”
“What do you want?”
“Are there any problems? Do you need anything?”
Sinatra expels a long-suffering sigh. “If I needed anything or if there was a problem, I would’ve called you.”
Odom doesn’t say anything, and he really doesn’t know why. What’s wrong with him? What’s going on? He’s run covert operations practically in his sleep or, at least, after a long nap. Why is he deviating from standard operating procedure here?
“What’s wrong?” Sinatra asks with as much compassion as he can muster, which is very, very little. “You sound weird.”
God, Odom thinks, even this murderous basket case can perceive he’s cracking under the pressure. It isn’t every day you kill a president, right? Think fast. Focus. Show some fucking backbone here! Whipping himself into a semblance of psychological shape, the CIA deputy director grasps the first straw that comes into sight. “Whose idea was the whole Rat Pack business? Yours?”
“I’m going to hang up now, if that’s all right with you. My guys are going through their kits for the third time, as I demanded, and in two hours and forty-four minutes we’re getting on with it.”
Sinatra’s recitation is every bit the therapy Odom requires in the moment. The terror that threatened to consume him subsides, draining back into whatever emotional swamp it flowed from. “Good, good, good. Okay. We’ll talk after it’s finished.”
The operative says, “You won’t hear from me again. Never call me again. Once he’s dead, I’m breaking this phone into a thousand pieces and dumping them into the Chesapeake. If the money isn’t where it’s supposed to be six hours after the new president announces three days of national mourning, you know what happens.”
In the moment, Odom can’t fathom how the dynamic has changed between them. Perhaps he is getting too old for this business. “Needless to say, the money will be where you expect to find it and in the agreed-to amount.”
“Excellent,” Sinatra mutters, adding, “praise be to God.”
He included this glorification like a final twist of the knife. Nonbelievers have such issues with displays of genuine faith, it gives Sinatra enormous pleasure to rub their faces in it. Indeed, Odom gives a little shudder hearing it. While there is no denying the man’s capabilities as killer, the CIA deputy director cannot imagine anyone eerier.
“Goodbye, then,” James Odom politely tells his operative, getting only the dead air of the call’s disconnection in response.
* * *
HAYLEY SPENT MOST of Saturday afternoon in a small windowless room (again, most likely a converted janitorial closet) compiling briefing books and coaxing a recalcitrant Ricoh MP C2550 copier to comply with an acceptable efficiency. POTUS is holed up in the Laurel Lodge conference room with senior aides, teleconferencing with leaders around the world regarding the situation in Estonia. The scuttlebutt that Hayley is able to glean from those staffers coming in and out is that the blowback was extreme from long-standing European allies in reaction to US tolerance of Russia’s aggressions. The leadership expected from America is MIA. To all of these detractors, the president expressed again his conviction the true danger was in the Far East, with China.
She walks back to Linden Cabin in the dark without seeing Monroe once the entire day. If Hayley wants to eat dinner, she needs to be at the small dining room at Main Lodge no later than 7:30 p.m., but it’s been over thirty-six hours since she’s bathed. A hot shower is more important than food, given how she currently feels. Turning on the water as soon as she arrives back at her quarters and stripping off her clothes in seconds, she sits on the closed toilet lid for several minutes and lets the billowing steam from the shower envelop her, coating her in a sheen of damp warmth. Emerging forty minutes later from the cottage, Hayley feels refreshed and optimistic.
The menacing woods that had earlier seemed to portend violence now recall the forests in which she cavorted as a child and teenager back in West Virginia. Throughout her childhood, the woodlands served as refuge from a dysfunctional adult world. Hayley and her friends inhabited those forested, rolling hills whenever released from confines of school and home, spirited forest goblins and fairies fueled by cheap booze and cannabis smoke.
Those were carefree times, and memories of them carry Hayley on her ten-minute walk to the Main Lodge and the dining room there. Most of the other staffers have finished their meals and retired to their cottages for the night. Apart from a couple of senior aides who would have nothing to do with the likes of an intern apart from barked requests for coffee or copying, Hayley has the dining room to herself. Through the open door leading into the kitchen, she sees Leon Washington, the chef from the West Wing’s Navy Mess on Camp David duty.
The cook personally delivers her grilled cheese and split pea soup. “You just had to try one for yourself, didn’t ya?”
“Leon, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on one of these bad boys since I first laid eyes on it.”
“Well, dig in, girl. Don’t mind me.” He sits down across the table from her, dish towel thrown over his shoulder, the workday more or less done. “How you been?”
Dipping the corner of the sandwich into the steaming bowl of soup and savoring each bite, Hayley beams at Leon with primal gratitude. “Amazing.”
“Your life or that sandwich?”
“Definitely sandwich,” she assures Leon. “Only sandwich.”
“Bad, huh?”
“Not what I expected exactly.”
“Care to share? I’m told I’m a pretty good listener. Comes with having six kids and twice that many grandkids.”
“Wish I could, believe me. It’s complicated. Think I just need to keep it to myself for now.”
“Okay. I can understand that. Know that you’ve got at least one friend in the joint, ya hear?”
Hayley’s heart fairly bursts. “I really appreciate you saying that, Leon. I do.”
“It’s more than talk. Leon Washington is an old man you can count on in a jam, that’s right.”
Hayley smiles her thanks. She feels like she could almost cry. The battling welterweight champ of the entire Sixth Army has been brought to her knees by the gentle kindness of a sixty-two-year-old cook with yellowy eyes. With a life in which her elders have always disappointed her, in one way or another, Leon Washington has connected with Hayley and come through when she needs emotional support most. She has no words.
He pats her hand with his own, scarred by a thousand knife cuts and kitchen burns. “You hang in there, girl. God loves perseverance, because it sure ain’t easy.”
She walks back to Linden Cabin with spirits more buoyant than she had felt in weeks. Whereas her friendship with Asher was somewhat coerced, bowing to the sheer dint of Hayley’s will, these five minutes of fellowship she’s had with the cook nourish her to a profound degree. Actual human beings do inhabit this corrupted world. It had been too easy to forget that fact with her stay in Washington and in the hothouse of the West Wing. The shrouded woods that line the gravel path back to her little cabin seem like something out of a benevolent fairy tale. Night song of a female eastern whip-poor-will ricochets off the surrounding poplar and ash trees. A quarter moon shimmers in the black sky, casting shards of light on her trail home. God loves perseverance, indeed.
