“A helipad, yes,” I say. “A rooftop landing for helicopters.”
“This, yes. The helicopter landed on the roof of this hotel. I remember thinking that if people could fly, they could do…anything.”
I’m not sure why she’s telling me about Dubai hotels or helicopters. Maybe it’s nothing more than nervous chatter.
I approach her. She turns, puts down the photo, and steels herself.
“If I do not leave here,” she says, “you will never see my partner. You will have no way to stop this.”
I lift the envelope from the table. It is nearly weightless, flimsy. I can see a trace of color through the paper. The Secret Service would have inspected it, checked it for any suspicious residue and the like.
She steps back, still wary, still waiting for government agents to burst through the door and whisk her away to some Guantánamo Bay–style interrogation room. If I thought that would work, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But she has set this up so that it wouldn’t. This young woman has managed to do something that very few people could pull off.
She has forced me to play this game on her terms.
“What do you want?” I ask. “Why are you doing this?”
For the first time, her stoic expression breaks, her lips curve, but it’s not an expression of mirth. “Only the president of this country would ask such a question.” She shakes her head, then her face once again becomes a poker-face wall.
“You will find out why,” she says, nodding toward the envelope in my hand. “Tonight.”
“So I have to trust you,” I say.
This draws a look from her, a raised eyebrow, her eyes glistening. “I have not convinced you?”
“You’ve gotten this far,” I say. “But no, you haven’t entirely convinced me.”
She eyeballs me, a confident, daring look, like I’d be a fool to call her bluff. “Then you must decide,” she says.
“Wait,” I say as she heads for the door, reaches for the knob.
She bristles, freezes in place. Still looking at the door, not me, she says, “If I am not allowed to leave, you will never see my partner. If I am followed, you will never see my part—”
“No one’s going to stop you,” I say. “No one’s going to follow you.”
She holds still, her hand poised over the knob. Thinking. Debating. About what, I don’t know. I could fill a room with what I don’t know.
“If anything happens to my partner,” she says, “your country will burn.”
She turns the knob and leaves. Just like that, she’s gone.
And then I’m alone with the envelope. I have to let her go. I have no choice. I can’t risk alienating the one chance I have.
Assuming I believe her. Assuming that everything she’s saying is true. I’m nearly 100 percent there, but in my line of work, it’s hard to get closer than that.
I open the envelope, which tells me where the next meeting will take place, tonight. I replay everything that just happened. So very little did. She had almost nothing of substance to say.
She accomplished two things, I realize. One, she needed to hand me this envelope. And two, she wanted to know if she could trust me, if I would let her leave.
I walk over and sit on my couch, staring at the envelope, trying to glean any hints from what she said. Trying to think ahead on the chessboard.
A knock on the door, and Carolyn enters.
“I passed her test,” I say.
“That’s all this was,” she agrees. “And that,” she adds, nodding at the envelope in my hand.
“But did she pass mine?” I ask. “How do I know this is real?”
“I think it is, sir.”
“Why?”
Overhead, the lights flicker again, a momentary strobe effect. Carolyn looks up and curses under her breath. Another thing she’ll have to address sometime down the road.
“Why do you believe her?” I ask.
“The reason it took me a few minutes to come in, sir.” She points at her phone. “We just got word out of Dubai. There was an incident.”
An incident in Dubai. “With a helicopter?”
She nods. “A helicopter exploded while landing on the helipad of the Mari-Poseidon Hotel.”
I bring a hand to my face.
“I checked the timing, sir. It happened after she’d walked into the Oval Office. There’s no other way she could have known about it.”
I fall back against the couch. So she accomplished a third goal. She showed me she was the real deal.
“All right,” I whisper. “I’m convinced.”
Chapter
14
Up in the private residence, I open one of the dresser drawers, which contains only a single item: a picture of Rachel. I have plenty of those around here, photos of her vibrant and happy, mugging for the camera or hugging or laughing. This one is for me only. It was taken less than a week before she died. Her face is blotchy from treatments; she has only wisps of hair on her head. Her face is almost skeletal. To most people, this would be hard to look at—Rachel Carson Duncan at her absolute worst, finally succumbing to a ravaging disease. But to me, it’s Rachel at her best, her strongest, her most beautiful—the smile in her eyes, her peace and resolve.
The fight was over at that point. It was just a matter of time, they told us—could be months, but more likely weeks. It turned out to be six days. It was six days I wouldn’t trade for any others in my life. All that mattered was us, our love. We talked about our fears. We talked about Lilly. We talked about God. We read from the Bible and prayed and laughed and cried until our wells of tears had run dry. I’d never known intimacy so raw and cathartic. I’d never felt so inseparable from another human being.
“Let me take a picture of you,” I whispered to her.
She started to object, but she understood: I wanted to remember this time because, at that moment, I’d never loved her more.
“Sir,” says Carolyn Brock, lightly rapping her knuckles on the door.
“Yeah, I know.”
I put my fingers to my lips, then touch Rachel’s photo. I close the drawer and look up.
“Let’s go,” I say, dressed in my civvies and holding a small bag over my shoulder.
Alex Trimble’s head drops, his jaw clenched with disapproval. When the head of a Secret Service detail dreams his worst nightmare, it is this. He can always console himself with the fact that I gave him an order, that he had no choice but to let me go.
“Just a loose perimeter?” he says. “You’ll never see us.”
I give him a smile that says no.
Alex has been with me since I was first assigned security protection during the primaries, when I was a governor viewed as a long shot for the nomination. It wasn’t until the first major debate that my poll numbers surged, placing me in the top tier of candidates behind the front-runner, Kathy Brandt. I didn’t know how the Secret Service doled out its assignments, but I had assumed, as a dark-horse candidate, that I did not receive their best and brightest. But Alex always said to me, “Governor, as far as I’m concerned, you are the president,” and he was disciplined and organized. His team feared him the same way cadets fear their drill sergeants. And as I told him when I made him the head of the White House detail, nobody killed me, so he must have done something right.
You don’t get too close to your security, and they don’t get too close to you. Each side of the arrangement understands the need for emotional separation. But I’ve always seen the goodness in Alex. He married his college sweetheart, Gwen; he reads the Bible every day and sends money to his mother back home every month. He’s the first to tell you he wasn’t book smart, but he was a hell of a left tackle and got a football scholarship to Iowa State, where he studied criminal justice and dreamed of joining the Secret Service so he could do in life what he did on the gridiron—protect the blind side of his client.
When I asked him to head up my detail at the White House, he kept his standard stoic expression and ramrod posture, but I caught a brief sheen of emotion across his eyes. “It would be the greatest honor of my life, sir,” he whispered.
“We’ll use GPS,” he says to me now. “Just so we’ll know where you are.”