by Chris Hauty
“You stop! You stop!” Cox shouts somewhat childishly at the hard-charging FBI agents, who comply. All draw their service weapons and train them on their august suspect.
“Stop! Just stop!” Clearly, the senator has lost his senses, a complete disassociation from the great man he was only minutes earlier. His brain has mostly stopped functioning in a rational sense. Reality is fractured. The noise and thundering inside his head has made him utterly deaf to the shouted exhortations and demands of the FBI agents and Port Authority police officer. He spins in every direction, pointing the gun at whoever threatens to approach.
“Safety’s engaged! Safety is engaged!” The Port Authority police officer is shouting, but in the chaos and screams of passengers in the terminal, it’s doubtful the FBI agents hear him. The cop edges closer and closer to Senator Cox, reaching for the gun. More shouting. More screams. The FBI agents are almost within arm’s reach of Cox, who has been pulling on the trigger all the while, to no effect. He hasn’t fired a gun in more than thirty years, having been taken to a DC firing range by a lobbyist for his thirty-fifth birthday, but he realizes the problem with firing must be the safety latch and blindly disengages it, turning the gun on the man closest at hand, the Port Authority cop.
Before Cox gets off his shot, first one and then all of the FBI agents fire their weapons, killing the senator instantly with two shots to the head and five to the upper torso. The force of the fusillade throws Cox on his back, his arms and legs spread-eagled. He will be buried in six days back home in North Carolina, in a family plot next to his wife’s grave. His three adult children will attend. Members of the news media, quarantined outside the cemetery gate, will outnumber the mourners. Few words will be spoken over Cox’s grave. Not even the flag at the local US post office is lowered to half-mast for the dead senator. The woman who succeeds him in Congress is an ardent supporter of President Monroe and will be put on the short list of vice president contenders for the second term.
* * *
JAMES ODOM RECEIVES word of the mission’s implosion approximately seven minutes after Sinatra was shot dead by Hayley Chill. Intelligence has been his entire professional career, and he takes pride in his ability to gather it. He even knows it was Hayley Chill who not only killed his operative but also had inspired Asher Danes to expose the conspiracy to the FBI. Recalling his first impressions of the intern and his decision not to recruit her, Odom’s biggest regret is that he did not have her eliminated. Instinct is everything in the espionage business. His gravest error, then, was in this instance failing to act on his intuition.
He does not bother contacting the other conspirators. No doubt they will learn the truth on their own and in due time. Unlike Taylor Cox, the CIA deputy director has no intention of running. Attempting to assassinate the president was, of course, a calculated risk. The only honorable recourse is to accept the consequences with dignity. Naturally, Odom is aware of the senator’s attempt to evade arrest even before the authorities undertake pursuit of him. Odom isn’t surprised. The senator, like most politicians, is a weak man whose narcissism makes him far too predictable. His flaws outweigh his good qualities by too large a percentage. If only Odom’s fellow conspirators were made of the right stuff, perhaps the outcome would have been different.
Long after midnight, Odom walks through his stately old house in Falls Church, where he has lived for the past thirty years, pausing several times to examine the mundane personal objects that have defined his adult life. His wife sleeps, blessedly unaware of the tectonic shifts their lives will undergo in just a few, short hours. Framed pictures on the walls testify to an adventurous life filled with professional and personal achievements. All of these material objects will be scattered to the winds, but memory of this expansive life will remain foundational and intact.
He stops in the kitchen and spontaneously decides to make an omelet for himself. Pulling the ingredients from the refrigerator—eggs, mushrooms, green onions, cheese, peppers—the CIA deputy director gets to the pleasant work of preparing a delicious, simple meal. Halfway through the task, just when it all really comes together and timing is particularly critical, his wife appears in the doorway.
“Honey, what are you doing?”
“As you can see.” He is just sautéing the onions, peppers, and mushrooms, and they are at that perfect degree of doneness that requires addition of the eggs.
“It’s almost four a.m.,” she needlessly tells him.
“Are you hungry? This will be a spectacularly scrumptious creation.”
Odom’s wife laughs lightly, enjoying her husband’s rare carefree demeanor. “I am, actually. It smells delicious.”
Without pausing from the intricate operation at the stove, Odom gestures with his spatula. “Grab a bottle of chardonnay, the Mâcon-Villages should work nicely, and take a seat.”
She does as she’s told. Sitting informally at the kitchen island, perched on stools they’ve owned for almost four decades, Odom and his wife enjoy the aromatic dish he’s prepared and the wine while chatting pleasantly about this and that. They discuss banal items of household business, nieces and nephews, the weather and sports scores. They chatter about incidents from their past, health issues, and the flavor of mushrooms encased in lumps of fried egg. They talk about everything except the future. Artfully, the CIA deputy director steers their conversation away from anything having to do with the hours, days, and years to come. His wife’s heart brims with happiness. It has been years since they’ve felt anything more than a gratifying fondness for each other, and for many that is plenty enough. True intimacy had ended ages ago. With affairs of the heart, really could it not be so much worse?
When they have finished their meal, Odom clears the counter of their dishes, dumping them in the sink with the fry pan and cutting board. He wordlessly takes his wife by the hand and leads her back to their bedroom. While she lies back down and falls immediately halfway back to sleep, he goes into the bathroom and takes a pill from a barely touched prescription bottle purchased four years earlier. Returning to bed and lying beside his wife, Odom gently caresses her shoulders, neck, and back. She floats in that wonderful state of half-wakefulness. Before too long, Odom feels his cock stir and fill with lifeblood. His wife feels it, too, and surprised, turns to face her husband.
They fuck like they haven’t fucked in decades. Odom’s wife is sixty-five but that doesn’t stop her from wrapping her legs around her sixty-eight-year-old husband, pulling his thrusts toward her with ecstatic strength even she didn’t know she still possessed. She can’t remember the last time she experienced a real orgasm, but when it comes, Odom’s wife screams a cry of pure delight and gratitude. The Bearded Man grins on hearing her joyful howl, hoping any insomniac neighbors might also be a witness to their ardent lovemaking, and gives release to his own pleasure. Coated with a sheen of sweat and out of breath, Odom and his wife clutch one another out of divine exhaustion. It takes many minutes for their heart rates and breathing to diminish to normal rates. They kiss then, tenderly, and make love again.
Odom wakes up just after dawn and gets out of bed. His wife, he knows, will sleep for hours more. One of his oldest contacts at the bureau had texted overnight. Odom knows precisely how many minutes of freedom he has left. He shaves, showers, and gets dressed. It’s Sunday morning and most of his top people will be home. He calls each of them. All are aware of the attempted assassination at Camp David, of course. Whether Twitter, MSNBC, the New York Times, or your run-of-the-mill political blog, the discussion is 100 percent assassination-attempt coverage. The earliest theories hold that the conspiracy, given the ease with which the hit team was able to infiltrate the installation, involved what has come to be known as the Deep State, but none of Odom’s lieutenants suggest their boss might be involved, at least not to his face.
Odom eases the potential awkwardness of these phone conversations by casually admitting to his complicity. In response, his lieutenants are speechless. What can possibly be said in r
esponse? Odom explains to them all the motivations behind his actions, laying out the danger Monroe represents to the nation. Lest they worry, Odom assures each of the men and women working under him they will in no way be implicated in the conspiracy. The paper trail he has artfully left behind in the event of his unmasking will lead investigators only to those persons who were actually involved. The phone calls end haltingly, with Odom’s people unsure how to respond or say goodbye. The CIA deputy director makes these farewells as succinct and painless as possible, quickly signing off with a chipper “best of luck” and encouragement to “keep up the fight.”
The not entirely anonymous phone call comes just before eight a.m., coincidentally only moments before the shootout at JFK. His male caller informs Odom the FBI will be knocking on his door in less than five minutes. With little time to spare now, Odom performs a “fatal” hard drive delete on his one computer that matters and then stands up from his home office desk for the last time. He walks briskly to the master bedroom and wakes up his wife. As kindly as possible, he informs her of the broad strokes of what has transpired and what is to come. She says nothing in response and later, to friends, she will confess to having been surprised by none of it. In the years to come, she will remember their last night together with heartfelt nostalgia, and those memories will prompt her to visit her husband once a week, every week, until she dies from a heart attack fifteen years to the hour of her last orgasm, when she came with the glorious ecstasy of a college girl.
Odom kisses his wife on the forehead, stands, and turns when the knock downstairs reverberates through the house like the chains of Jacob Marley’s ghost. He walks down the stairs and straight to the door, pulling it open to reveal the FBI agents who have come for him on the other side.
“Deputy Director James Odom?” an agent asks him.
“I am James Odom,” he confirms.
“You need to come with us, sir.”
Odom nods and takes a step out of the foyer of his house, outside and under a crystalline blue sky. The air is cold but without wind, not uncomfortably so. “Yes, I do,” he tells no one in particular.
Before proceeding down the steps, he looks out over his yard, crowded with FBI agents. Fortunately, there are no news reporters yet. The intelligence community takes care of its own, even in its disgrace. Odom’s gaze does find the intern, standing off to the side next to a middle-aged black woman who couldn’t give off more of an FBI vibe if she tried, and locks on her. As he is led down steps to the walkway, the CIA deputy director gestures toward the young woman from West Virginia, whom he has come to respect more than anyone else in a very long time. “A word with Ms. Chill, if you please? Just a moment,” he assures the agents escorting him.
The FBI agents look toward Udall, who gives her assent with a subtle nod. Up above, Odom’s wife stands in the window of their bedroom and bears witness to her husband’s arrest by federal agents. So handsome, her husband, she thinks. He has always carried himself as a man. She wishes he had bothered to wear a coat or that ridiculous Russian hat. Odom’s wife starts to cry now. The scene below is like a painting she has seen someplace but can’t remember where. The first neighbors have appeared in their doorways. A dog begins to bark down the block.
Odom stops in front of Hayley and Udall. The intern stares at him with nothing but keen curiosity. Udall has apprehended all manner of criminals, from mob bosses to gunrunners, but this is her first federal official. Odom’s arrest is bigger than Petraeus’s, Jesse Jackson Jr.’s, or Oliver North’s. Hell, this is bigger than Aldrich Ames.
Operation Damocles will be plenty enough on which to make her bones and retire, of this she has no doubt. In fact, Helen Udall will put in her papers three months after the Sunday morning they take down Odom and accept a position of head of security for China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, the largest corporation in the world, receiving a multimillion-dollar annual salary. It will be an adventure relocating to Beijing and even more so as a black woman. Her newfound wealth and power will afford her a lavish lifestyle, a genial Irish boyfriend, and a measure of happiness she never enjoyed under vastly different circumstances in Washington, and all due to a certain White House intern.
“I really wish I hadn’t waited to recruit you, Ms. Chill,” Odom admits with a look of chagrin.
“Or you could’ve not tried to assassinate a president, sir,” Hayley suggests.
Udall mistakenly thinks she needs to protect the intern from the CIA man. “Don’t even begin to suggest you did it for God and country.”
Odom ignores the FBI agent, in his snap appraisal a working stiff possessing only modest intelligence and investigative skills. Gaze remaining locked on Hayley’s, he stares deeply into those blue eyes, trying in vain to unlock the secrets that lie behind them and decides they don’t exist.
“Tread lightly, Ms. Chill. Know your enemies better than you know yourself.” With that wisdom imparted to a young woman with whom he has fallen a little bit in love, he looks to the FBI agents holding him by either arm.
“Let’s get going, then.”
* * *
HAYLEY DID NOT return to the West Wing for the entire week after the incident at Camp David. Her days were filled with interviews in windowless rooms at the FBI headquarters and in the down-market motel where she had been sequestered. The federal authorities from various agencies exerted enormous influence to protect Hayley’s identity out of fear for her safety. Her story was vetted and rigorously corroborated, at every level and from every direction. No detail went unexamined by the top investigators of the land. Everyone associated with her was thoroughly interviewed, from her first-grade teacher to the young female congressional interns who lived down the hall from Hayley at Henry House. Not a single aspect of her story failed to check out. At a time when the trustworthiness of nearly every federal appointment, contract player, or elected official was under suspicion, Hayley Chill rang as genuine as her soft West Virginia twang.
In these early days, Hayley was reduced to a more passive role than she was accustomed. Her astonishing ability for recall was a subject of wonder by many of her interrogators. But the long, laborious interviews were more exhausting than any physical or mental exercise she had undergone in the past. The agents allowed her to venture out for her morning runs, accompanied by a minder, of course. Just before dawn, the cold air sharp in her lungs and nostrils, running with a feeling of release and celebration of her physical body, these were the minutes of that time in which she actually experienced something akin to contentment.
She wasn’t distraught over killing the as-of-yet unidentified man who threatened the president with a Sig Sauer. The assassin’s death was the unavoidable consequence of saving Monroe’s life. What else was there to consider? An army psychologist had told Hayley she exhibited a form of mental rigidity, arising from her earliest childhood traumas. The suggestion was that her low tolerance for uncertainty pushed Hayley to find a quick answer without bothering to look for the right answer. At the risk of only confirming the shrink’s analysis of her, Hayley terminated the session early and never went back.
Whether or not Hayley was “closed off” emotionally had little bearing on the FBI’s investigation. After seven days of nonstop interviews, she is cleared to return to the White House. Much of the federal government remains in the thrall of rumor and innuendo. The FBI itself is unscathed. Not a single agent or director of that investigative agency is found to be sympathetic to the Shady Side conspirators. Among the five thousand agents in the Secret Service, exactly twenty-three agents are revealed to be complicit to varying degrees, and suffer consequences commensurate with their levels of involvement. More than a hundred conspirators are ferreted out from the ranks in the intelligence community and in Congress. Other agencies undergo vicious purges as well. Old scores are revived and at times settled with the slightest suggestion an adversary was party to the conspiracy. Lives and livelihoods are ruined overnight. Hayley’s morning bus ride seems a fractured reality. T
he city has been altered, irrevocably thrown askew, though the other passengers on the Metrobus can’t possibly know of Hayley’s role in the explosive events that have convulsed the United States of America.
Even Ned, the Park Police officer at the Seventeenth Street White House complex gate, doesn’t seem to be the same person. As Hayley approaches, he appears tense and on edge. Half of his fellow Park Police officials are unfamiliar and obviously new to their positions. Where had the previous officers gone? Hayley had heard rumors that the social media accounts of federal employees at every level of the government were analyzed for evidence of disloyalty to the administration. Personal cell phones were apparently scrutinized as well. For the sake of thoroughness, the purge was more widespread than the conspiracy could have ever been.
Hayley smiles at her friend as she has on dozens of previous mornings. “Morning, Ned.”
He takes her ID card and scrutinizes it as if today were her first occasion to enter there. Hayley watches him, repressing a glib comment. Ned returns her ID and gestures.
“Proceed, thank you.”
Hayley is slightly taken aback by Ned’s formality and is momentarily flustered. Unable to make eye contact with her friend, she inputs her code and receives the green light to proceed to security scanning. As she moves forward, Hayley hears him quietly speak after her.
“I’m sorry, Hayley. It’s … different now.”
She turns back toward him and nods, sympathetic. “I know.”
Hayley perceives a changed West Wing within moments of entering its ground floor, initially by clocking the sheer reduction of people inside the building. Those staffers who survived the purge remain on edge, paranoia and distrust the underlying dynamic of all interactions either within or outside the West Wing. Like the entire federal government, the Monroe administration staggers forward but under a siege mentality.
