by Chris Hauty
Staffers are aware of Hayley’s heroic actions at Camp David, in spite of the news blackout. As she walks the hallway and climbs the stairs to the first floor, White House personnel regard her with a mixture of awe and fear. Her public persona is almost mythical and superheroic, a mixture of Joan of Arc and the X-Men’s Rogue. Before Camp David, Hayley had been something of an outlier. Now she is utterly unapproachable. No one says a word to her in the entire journey from the West Wing’s entrance to the White House Operations office on the first floor.
Asher is gone, of course. He has been charged but released on bail, confined to his luxurious condo on Water Street. His mother has moved temporarily from Connecticut to be with her son. Asher’s father has hired the same lawyer who defended Bill Clinton when he was impeached. The case will crawl through federal courts over the next four years. With Asher’s full cooperation, federal prosecutors ultimately offer the disgraced White House aide a deal in which he will plead guilty to an assault charge under US Code Title 18, Section 111, that prohibits “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” officers and employees of the United States while engaged in or on account of the performance of official duties and be sentenced to time served. As a convicted felon, Asher will no longer be able to vote, let alone run as one of the nation’s first openly gay presidential candidates. To his father’s immense pleasure, he will obtain an MBA from Harvard and join the hedge fund soon thereafter. It will take years, but Asher eventually will find true love with a wildly successful television celebrity chef and marry. Though he’ll never speak again with the intern who altered his life’s path so dramatically, Asher and his husband will name their first and only daughter Hayley.
Her first order of business once arriving back in the West Wing is to venture down to the Navy Mess takeout window. In the early-morning hours after the attempted assassination, Hayley had been kept apart from Leon Washington as FBI agents interviewed them separately. From Camp David, Hayley was driven to the Hoover Building and placed in what was termed “protective custody” for the following week. Consequently, she had no opportunity to communicate with Leon, or anyone else for that matter. Hayley repeatedly asked after the one individual who had been of incalculable assistance in saving the president’s life but was told only the cook’s situation was still a subject of FBI investigation. It was an absolute imperative for her to check in with Leon Washington before anything else.
The old man’s face lit up upon seeing his fellow presidential savior.
“You packing? Was beginning to get used to the idea of a ‘life of danger.’ ”
“No, Leon. Once was enough for me.” She pauses to shift the mood, her face reflecting a genuine concern for her friend. “You okay? The FBI … ?”
The cook interrupts her with a gesture, waving off her concern. “In the beginning, they weren’t too sure about me. I wasn’t necessarily the president’s biggest fan.” He laughs. “Maybe now that I saved his bacon, he’ll do something about my brother’s health care!”
“I’m pretty sure the president’s grateful for your help that night, Leon,” Hayley assures him before moving on.
After straightening up the office for an hour, Hayley sits at her desk and waits for further instructions. Her only communication with Karen Rey since Camp David has been in the form of emails assuring Hayley that, despite the momentous events of the past few weeks, her internship in the West Wing would continue. Rey had survived the purge and, in many ways, benefited by it. Her record and loyalty to the president were unblemished. Like most of the dozen staffers on-site at Camp David that fateful weekend, Rey had been snug in her cabin a half mile from Aspen Lodge and blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding there. Hayley would learn only after the fact that staffers were expected to remain in their accommodations after nightfall. This standard sequestering of personnel was an important element in the conspirators’ scheme, as were the military personnel’s routine orders to steer clear of the president’s cabin. The dozen Secret Service agents who had withdrawn from their assigned posts that night remain in jail for their treasonous activities, as does their supervising agent.
Karen Rey walks into the White House Operations office shortly before ten a.m. She doesn’t quite know how to interact with Hayley, who is undoubtedly the most powerful intern in Washington, DC, and, by extension, the world. Technically speaking, Rey is Hayley’s supervisor. In reality, the intern could probably have Rey booted from the complex with only a few words to the president. The senior White House staffer’s resiliency crumbles under the strain of Hayley’s newfound domination. Within weeks, Rey will leave the White House voluntarily and spend several months unsuccessfully searching for a comparable position elsewhere in the federal government. Within a year’s time, she will move away from Washington, DC, and try her luck in California. To the surprise of the few friends she keeps in Washington, several powerful digital economy companies pursue Rey for her experience with federal regulators. A job with Uber will land her a salary in the high six figures, a more West Coast–casual wardrobe, a venture capitalist boyfriend, and a disconcerting but mild addiction to Adderall. All things considered, life will seem to have taken a promising upturn for the ex–White House aide when, four years after leaving Washington, her self-driving Tesla X crashes into the back of a US mail truck at sixty miles per hour, killing Karen Rey instantly.
On this January morning, however, a life outside of the West Wing still seems unimaginable. Rey surprises herself with her willingness to capitulate in the face of Hayley’s astonishing rise. How can you not respect this remarkable young woman? The smile on the senior White House staffer’s face is almost genuine when she encounters her former nemesis in the White House Operations office.
“Hayley, my goodness! How good to see you, safe and sound. What a nightmare it must have been for you!” The White House aide lays a consoling hand on Hayley’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, ma’am. Thank you.”
Rey’s reservoir of empathy pretty much expended, she forages in her mind for something else to add. “Well, it’s just so lovely to see you back here again. We’re just so devastated by all of this, God help us.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The chasm between them will never be closed. Only the most remarkable events could have brought them even this close to near affinity. Rey slumps a little, exhausted by the effort of being nice to the intern. “POTUS has asked to see you,” Rey tells Hayley with measured excitement. “He wants to personally thank you.”
“Of course. When would the president like me to go in?” Hayley can’t mask a sense of excitement she shares with Rey. After all that has happened, she will finally be able to speak privately with the president.
“Right now. You are his very first item of business back in the Oval.”
Within seven minutes of the hit team’s neutralization, Monroe had been whisked off by helicopter to Walter Reed hospital, where the “kill machine” apparatus was removed from his neck. After three days of observation, the president’s doctors had cleared him to return to the White House but under the condition he would spend four additional days confined to the executive residence. Monroe, his own boss, had remained on the White House second floor for three days before returning prematurely, this morning, to the West Wing.
Hayley’s gut clenches with nervousness and she immediately floods her brain with positive thoughts to counter these worries. She will handle this challenge, or she will blow it. Fretting only makes matters worse. Uncertainty is a fact of life. The best way to cope with the unexpected is a calm mind and exertion of willpower. Even if she is only an intern and he is the president of the United States, what she knows to be true is what empowers her. She’s ready.
Hayley stands up without further word from Rey, following her out the door and into the Outer Oval. The president’s personal assistant, sitting at her desk, gestures to Karen Rey.
“Go ahead in. He’s waiting.”
* * *
RICHARD MONROE IS seated at the Resolute desk when Rey enters the Oval Office, with Hayley Chill following her supervisor inside. He’s intently reading a briefing report from the CIA and continues to do so for a number of seconds longer, while the women stand respectfully across the room.
Finally, the president finishes his reading and looks up from the papers on his desk, toward Rey and Hayley standing by the couches. “Ah, very good.” Monroe stands. “If you don’t mind, Karen, I’d like to have this be a private meeting with Ms. Chill.”
Rey wordlessly pivots and retreats from the office, closing the door behind her. Standing and moving out from behind his desk, Monroe indicates one of the couches that face each other by the fireplace. “Please, have a seat.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Hayley sits on the couch with her back to the Rose Garden. Monroe sits in the armchair, his back to the dark fireplace.
“Well, needless to say, I felt compelled to take a few minutes out from my first day back in this office to personally thank you, Hayley. You’ve had a remarkable internship here at the White House, I must say.”
For a moment, Hayley says nothing but instead simply looks to the president with an enigmatic expression. Despite being the most powerful man on the planet, Richard Monroe finds the experience unsettling. And, with a couple more seconds of her silence, the president becomes irritated. “Yes?”
Hayley opens her mouth and, in fluent Russian, tells the president, “It has been an honor to serve my country, sir.”
The muscles in Monroe’s face freeze, forming an expression of bewildered astonishment and, momentarily, fear. He recovers quickly and then, with anger, thunders at her, “What the devil?” He starts to stand up from his chair.
“Sit down, sir,” Hayley orders with a very firm tone, adding in Russian, “Na lovtsa I zver’ bezhit.”
The president appears to not know what Hayley has said, halfway between sitting and standing erect.
“ ‘Speak of the devil, and he appears,’ ” she translates for him. “That’s how the Russian proverb goes, does it not, sir? You’re the native speaker after all.”
Monroe slowly sits back down. For a long moment, he only stares at Hayley. Finally, in Russian, he asks, “Who are you?”
“I am an intern in the White House Operations office.” Switching to Russian, “I am a person who knows the truth.”
“Truth? What truth?” Monroe asks indignantly.
In Russian, Hayley lays it out for him. “Your parents were agents of the KGB, entering the US under false passports in 1958, the year after you were born in Moscow at the brand-new Kremlin Hospital. Your father enlisted in the US Army and continued his military career for thirty years. You were raised as a typical American boy, but in the privacy of your home, you were groomed as a Soviet mole. Your admission to West Point in 1976 was the primary mission objective and culmination of your parents’ KGB careers. The rest, as has been said, is history.”
Monroe seems shell-shocked. The ground beneath his feet has turned to quicksand but he still musters a shadow of indignation.
“Where is all this nonsense coming from?”
“The people I answer to have taught me many things, including the truth about you, Mr. President.”
Monroe is utterly defeated, his secret exposed. With resignation, he asks, “Are you Russian?”
Hayley shakes her head no. “West Virginian, born and bred.”
Monroe tries to make sense of it all. He can’t and never will. “What do you want?”
“Is that all, Mr. President? Only what I want in order to keep your secret?”
The president says nothing, calculating his getaway.
Hayley switches back to Russian. “You will never escape. Your career as an agent for Moscow ended when I entered the room.”
Monroe can only blink and stare. He realizes this game has cost him his freedom, if not his life. “Why did you not let James Odom and his cabal kill me if you knew?”
“The people who trained me and placed me here have other uses for you, sir.”
Monroe is clearly perplexed. “Odom? Senator Cox?”
Hayley dismisses the conspirators with a slight toss of her head. “The ‘Deep State’ is more interested in their own careers and positions of power than the state of this union. I represent those individuals who have served our country in the past, most of them no longer in those offices. Former presidents and directors, retired senators and Supreme Court judges, with ties still to the government and other clandestine agents like myself. A Deeper State you might call it, sir, interested only in the preservation of the best example of a democracy the planet has ever produced and its Constitution.”
Monroe takes all of this in. He now knows what will be demanded of him if he does not want to spend the rest of his life in a military prison. “You want me to be a double agent for this ‘Deeper State,’ operating against Moscow.”
“You will be working for the United States, sir,” correcting him, though her voice has lost its harder edge.
Monroe calculates his fate. Work against his mother country? Impossible. There must be a way for him to return to the land of his birth. The operation was over. It had been, by any estimation, a success. Monroe’s performance exceeded even the best-case scenarios of his KGB handlers, rising to the upper echelons of the US Army. Then, by simple good fortune, the highest office in the land became available to “Richard Monroe,” making him the most successful mole in the history of espionage.
Then Hayley dashes all such hope of escape. She reads his thoughts as if they’re printed on his forehead. “You know better than I, Yuri Sergeev, the office of president of the United States is a gilded cage, a cage that is strong and inescapable.”
The president sighs, acknowledging the veracity of her statement. “Your Russian is very good for a West Virginia girl.”
“I was recruited for the position I have today, sir.” She smiles with the memory of it. “Training was not without its rigors.”
“No one would suspect an intern, no matter how good an intern she might be.” He shakes his head in admiration of the tradecraft. “Were you sent to protect me or to turn me?”
“One and the same.” Switching back to English, she adds, “No one must know the truth, lest Moscow know the truth as well.”
Monroe gives it some thought. It seems like many long minutes when in actuality they sit in silence only for another fifteen seconds. In Russian, he tells her, “I will do what your ‘Deeper State’ wants of me.”
Hayley nods. “Once you’ve finished your term, and your work for us, life as a former president is not so bad.”
“Yes, yes, I can see that now. We are in agreement, then,” he says, the deal closed.
In that moment, the door leading from the Outer Oval is pushed open and Karen Rey reenters the room.
“Mr. President, your cabinet is ready for you, sir.” Rey is all too ready to separate POTUS from his favorite intern.
As Monroe stands to his feet, he gives Hayley the slightest nod before turning toward Karen Rey. Transforming before her eyes in an instant, he resumes the iconic countenance of military hero and popular US president. “Yes. Let’s get rolling.”
With upright stride, the president follows Rey back out the door into the Outer Oval on his way to the Cabinet Room. For just a few seconds, before being shooed out by the president’s assistant and shown back to her intern’s windowless office, Hayley sits on the couch in the silent Oval Office. Motionless and meditative, she imagines the men of history who have toiled in this exact place, from John Adams to Russian mole, Richard Monroe, and she can almost smell the sweat of their collective fears, the grunt of ego, singularly male and entrusted with the grave task of steering this majestic ship, these United States, through tempest after awful tempest.
10
THE BEAR
One year earlier
Without seeing what she is seeing, Hayley gazes out the window from her seat as the Greyhound bus passe
s through the outskirts of Killeen and enters the on-ramp of Interstate 14, heading east toward I-35. Leaving hadn’t been an easy choice, the army being the engine of her escape from a low-wattage life of underachievement, unwed pregnancy, and cascading addiction. The comfortable routine of military life, its hidebound structures and hierarchies, created the cohesive and functional family unit absent in her upbringing. And Hayley had left all of that behind, voluntarily and with relatively short deliberation.
The Man in the Blue Suit had approached her three days after her boxing match with Marcela Rivas, stopping her in the produce section of the PX. By all appearances a civilian, he inexplicably had complete access on base. Blue oxford shirt, double monk leather shoes, and deeply tan, the Man in the Blue Suit broke the ice by congratulating Hayley on her fight. It was obvious to her their encounter was no accident and consequently put herself on guard. But the Man in the Blue Suit possessed a gravitas, the words he spoke direct and having weight. “What would you say to the opportunity to pursue a higher purpose in life, Hayley, one in which service to your country is paramount?”
“I’m doing that already, sir, with the army.”
“What I’m suggesting would be of a greater commitment and even higher service than the army.”
For a number of seconds, Hayley simply stared at the Man in the Blue Suit with a perplexed expression. What was this? The two of them stood next to a bin of peaches. Across the aisle were stacks of gleaming apples and pears. Other service people pushed their carts past Hayley and the Man in the Blue Suit, going about their shopping same as always.
“I can tell you’re thinking, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ My name is Andrew Wilde. I was in the military myself, the Marines, for seventeen years. After that, I spent several years in the intelligence community. Andrew Wilde, of course, is not my given name. I was in the Marines, though; that much is true.”
