“Don’t move!” I shout, pressing down on him, keeping him flat. “We run, we die.”
Augie holds still. So do I, in our cocoon of darkness. There is noise from the stadium, general chaos from the blackout, tires screeching, horns honking—but no bullets pelting the squad car.
Or the sidewalk around us.
Or the stadium wall opposite us.
The sniper stopped firing. He stopped firing because—
I spin back to my four o’clock and see a man coming around the driver’s side of the van, illuminated by the interior dome light, a weapon up at shoulder level. I pull the trigger once, twice, three times as light explodes from his weapon, too, bullets ricocheting off the hood of the squad car in an exchange of gunfire, but I have the advantage, crouched low in the dark while he’s standing by light.
I risk another glance over the hood, my pulse like a shock wave through my body. No sign of the shooter or of the third member of the south team.
The sharp squealing of brakes, men shouting, voices I recognize, words I recognize—
“Secret Service! Secret Service!”
I lower my gun and they are on me, surrounding me with automatic weapons trained in all directions while someone grabs me under the arms and lifts me, and I’m trying to say “sniper” to them but I’m not sure if it comes out, I’m thinking it but I can’t speak, and shouts of “Go! Go! Go!” as I’m carried into a waiting vehicle, blanketed on all sides by people trained to sacrifice their lives for mine—
And then blinding light, a loud hum, everything lit up again, as bright as a spotlight in my face, electricity restored all around us.
I hear myself say “Augie” and “bring him” and then the door is shut and I’m lying in the car and “Go! Go! Go!” and we are speeding away, driving on uneven ground, the grassy median in the middle of Capitol Street.
“Are you hit? Are you hit?” Alex Trimble frantically runs his hands over me, looking for any signs of wounds.
“No,” I answer, but he’s not taking my word for it, touching my chest and torso, forcibly turning me on my side to check my back, my neck, my head, then my legs.
“He’s not hit,” Alex calls out.
“Augie,” I say. “The…kid.”
“We have him, Mr. President. He’s in the car behind us.”
“The girl who was shot…get her, too.”
He lets out a breath, looking out the window behind him, adrenaline decelerating. “DC Metro can handle—”
“No, Alex, no,” I say. “The girl…she’s dead…get custody of her…whatever…whatever you have to tell DC Metro…”
“Yes, sir.”
Alex calls out to the driver. I try to process what’s just happened. The dots are there, strewn about like stars in a galaxy, but I can’t connect them, not right now.
My phone buzzes. I find it in the footwell of the backseat. Carolyn. Can only be Carolyn.
“I need…the phone,” I tell Alex.
He reaches for it and puts it in my still-trembling hand. The number Carolyn texts me is 1. My thoughts are too scattered right now to remember the name of my first-grade teacher. I can picture her. She was tall, a big hook for a nose…
I need to remember it. I need to respond to her. If I don’t—
Richards. No, Richardson, Mrs. Richardson.
The phone pops out of my hand. I’m shaking so hard I can’t hold it, can’t text on it. I tell Alex what to type into the phone, and he does it for me.
“I want to ride…with Augie,” I say. “The…man I was with.”
“We’ll rendezvous at the White House, Mr. President, and we can—”
“No,” I say. “No.”
“No what, sir?”
“We’re not going back…to the White House,” I say.
Chapter
30
We don’t stop until we make it to the highway, then I order Alex to take an exit. The skies have finally opened, a heavy rainfall punishing the windshield, the wipers flying back and forth, an urgent cadence in sync with the pounding of my pulse.
Alex Trimble is barking at someone on the phone but keeping one eye on me, making sure I’m not in shock. Shock is the wrong word. Adrenaline crashes through my body as I replay the events, then recedes with the knowledge that I’m safe inside this armored SUV, then returns with still greater vengeance, as if my body is at high tide.
Until I’m dead, I’m alive. It was my constant refrain when I was a POW, when days blurred into nights in my windowless cell, when they’d wrap the towel around my face and dump the water on, when they’d use the dogs, when they’d blindfold me and chant a prayer and press the gun against my temple.
I’m not barely alive. I’m just alive, period, and more than ever, a euphoria that fills my body with electricity, every sense heightened, the smell of the leather seats, the taste of bile in my mouth, the feel of sweat slithering down my face.
“I can’t tell you any more than that,” Alex says into his phone to someone from the police department, pulling rank—or trying to. It won’t be easy. We have a lot of explaining to do. Capitol Street must look like a small war zone. A pockmarked sidewalk, one wall of Nationals Park battered, a DC Metro squad car riddled with bullets, shattered glass everywhere. And bodies, three of them at least—the big guy who ran toward me, the other member of his team who tried to sneak around the van to get at us, and Nina.
I grab Alex’s tree limb of an arm. He turns to me, says into the phone, “I have to call you back,” and punches out his phone.
“How many dead?” I ask, fearing the worst, that innocent people were caught in the sniper’s hail of bullets or the ground team’s follow-up.
“Just the girl in the van, sir.”
“What about the men? There were two of them.”
He shakes his head. “They’re gone, sir. Whoever was with them must have taken them away. That was a well-coordinated attack.”
No question. A sniper and at least one ground team.
Yet I’m still alive.
“We just removed the girl from the scene, sir. We told them it was a Secret Service counterfeiting investigation.”
That was smart. It’s not an easy sell—a counterfeiting investigation ending in a bloody shoot-out outside a baseball stadium—but Alex didn’t have any other cards to play.
“I guess that’s better than saying the president was sneaking out to a baseball game when someone tried to assassinate him.”
“I had the same thought, sir,” says Alex, deadpan.
I meet his eyes. He is scolding me. He is saying, without saying it, that this is the kind of complication that results when a president sheds his security.
“The blackout helped,” he says, letting me off the hook. “And the stadium noise, too. It was pandemonium. And now it’s raining like hell, so thirty, forty thousand people are rushing out of the stadium while the police are trying to figure out what the hell just happened and while the rainfall washes away most of the forensic evidence.”
He’s right. Chaos, in this case, is good. There will be media all over this, but most of it happened in the pitch-dark, and Treasury will sweep the rest under the rug as an official investigation. Will it work? It better.
“You followed me,” I say to him.
He shrugs. “Not exactly, sir. When the woman came to the White House, we had to search her.”
“You scanned the envelope.”
“As a matter of course,” he says.
Right. And it showed a ticket to tonight’s game at Nationals Park. My thoughts have been so scattered, I didn’t even think of it.
Alex looks at me, giving me the chance to reprimand him. But it’s hard to chew out the guy who just saved your life. “Thank you, Alex,” I say. “Now, don’t ever disobey me again.”
We are off the highway now, slowing into an open space, some massive parking lot empty at this time of night. I can barely see our second car through the sheets of rainfall. I can barely see anything.
“Get Augie in here with me,” I say.
“He’s a threat, sir.”
“No, he’s not.” Not in the way Alex means, at least.
“You don’t know that, sir. His job could’ve been to get you out of the stadium—”