“If I was the target, Alex, I’d be dead. Augie himself could have killed me. And the sniper shot Nina first. I imagine that the second target was Augie, not me.”
“Mr. President, my job is to assume that you were the target.”
“Fine. Cuff him if you want to,” I say. “Put him in a goddamn straitjacket. But he’s riding with me.”
“He’s already cuffed, sir. He’s very…upset.” Alex thinks for a moment. “Sir, it might be best if I follow in the other car. I need to stay close to what’s going on at the stadium. DC Metro wants answers.”
And only he can massage that situation. Only he would know what to say and what not to say.
“Jacobson will ride with you, sir.”
“Fine,” I say. “Just get Augie in here.”
He speaks into the radio clipped to his jacket. A moment later, he opens the side door of the SUV with some effort as the violent wind hisses into the car, blowing in the rain that spares no one.
The agents rearrange themselves. Jacobson, Alex’s second in command, bounds into the car a moment later. Jacobson is smaller than Alex, hard and lean with an unrelenting intensity. He is soaked, droplets of rain flinging off his windbreaker as he takes the seat next to me.
“Mr. President,” he says in his just-the-facts way, but with a sense of urgency, as he looks out the door, ready to pounce.
A moment later, he does just that, coming forward to take the handoff from another agent. Augie’s head comes through the door, then the rest of him, as Jacobson pushes him violently into one of the seats across from me in the rear compartment. Augie’s hands are cuffed in front. His ropy hair hangs wet over his face.
“You sit there and don’t move, understand?” Jacobson barks at him. “Understand?”
Augie thrashes about, pushing against the seat belt Jacobson has clipped over him.
“He understands,” I say. Jacobson sits next to me, leaning forward on the balls of his feet.
Augie’s eyes, as best I can see them through the hair hanging down to his cheeks, finally make contact with mine. He has probably been crying, though it’s impossible to see on his rain-slicked face. His eyes widen with fury.
“You killed her!” he spits. “You killed her!”
“Augie,” I say matter-of-factly, trying to calm him with my tone, “that doesn’t make any sense. This was your plan, not mine.”
His face contorts into a snarl, tears streaming, blubbering and sobbing. He could be an actor portraying an inmate in an asylum, thrashing about while restrained, moaning and cursing and crying out, except that his pain is real, not the product of a broken mind.
There’s no point in my saying anything to him yet. He needs to get this out first.
The car starts moving again, back toward the highway, to our destination. It will be a long trip before we get there.
We ride in silence for some time, as Augie, shackled, mumbles in words that alternate between English and his native tongue, as he hiccups loud bellows of pain, as he struggles for breath through his sobs.
I use the next few minutes to think things over, to sort out what just happened. Asking myself questions. Why am I alive? Why was the girl killed first? And who sent these people?
Lost in these thoughts, I suddenly become aware of the silence in the car. Augie is watching me, waiting for me to notice.
“You expect me…” he says, his voice breaking, “you expect me to help you after this?”
Chapter
31
Bach quietly leaves through the rear exit of the building, her trench coat buttoned to her chin, a bag over her shoulder, an umbrella concealing her face, taking on the rat-a-tat-tat of the pelting rain. She moves onto the street as police sirens blare, as law-enforcement vehicles race down the next street over, Capitol Street, toward the stadium.
Ranko, her first mentor, the red-haired scarecrow—the Serbian soldier who took pity on her after what his men did to her father, who took her under his wing (and under his body)—may have taught her how to shoot, but he never taught her extractions. A Serbian sniper had no need for one, never had to leave Trebevic Mountain, where he fired at will upon citizens and opposition military targets alike during the war as his army strangled Sarajevo like a python.
No, she taught herself about extractions, planned escape routes and stealth movements when foraging for food in back alleys or in garbage cans at the market, dodging land mines, scanning for snipers and ambushes, listening for the ever-present threat of mortar fire or, at night, the drunken chatter of off-duty soldiers who respected no rules regarding young civilian Bosnian girls they found on the street.
Sometimes, as she hunted for bread or rice or firewood, Bach was fast enough to get away from the soldiers. Sometimes she wasn’t.
“We have two extra tickets,” comes a man’s voice through her earbud.
Two tickets—two men wounded.
“Can you bring them home?” she asks.
“We do not have time,” he says. Their medical conditions are urgent, he means.
“It will be fine at home,” she says. “Meet you at home.”
They should already know that the only option is the extraction point. They are panicking, losing focus. It was probably the arrival of the Secret Service that did it. Or maybe the blackout, which she must admit was an impressive tactical maneuver. She was ready, of course, to switch her scope to night-vision mode, but it clearly affected the ground teams.
She removes her earbud and stuffs it into the right-hand pocket of her trench coat.
She reaches into the left-hand pocket and places a different earbud into her ear.
“The game is not over,” she says. “They went north.”
Chapter
32
It was…your people,” Augie says, his chest heaving, his eyes so puffy and red from crying that he looks like a different person. He looks like a boy, which is exactly what he is.
“My people didn’t shoot your friend, Augie,” I say, trying to convey compassion but also, more than anything, calm and reason. “Whoever shot her was shooting at us, too. My people are the reason we’re safe and sound in this SUV.”
It does nothing to stop his tears. I don’t know his specific relationship with Nina, but it’s clear that his distress is more than just fear. Whoever she was, he cared deeply for her.
I’m sorry for his loss, but I don’t have time to be sorry. I have to keep my eye on the prize. I have three hundred million people to protect. So my only question is how I can use his emotions to my advantage.
Because this could go south on me quickly. If I believe what Nina told me in the Oval Office, she and Augie held different pieces of information, different parts of the puzzle. And now she is dead. If I lose Augie now, too—if he clams up on me—I have nothing.
The driver, Agent Davis, is quiet as he focuses on the road in the treacherous weather. The front-seat passenger, Agent Ontiveros, pulls the radio from the dashboard and speaks softly into it. Jacobson, next to me in the rear compartment, has a finger up to his earpiece, listening intently as he receives updates from Alex Trimble in the other car.
“Mr. President,” says Jacobson. “We’ve impounded the van she was driving. So she and the van are both cleared of the scene. All that’s left is a chopped-up sidewalk and a DC Metro squad car shot to hell. And a bunch of pissed-off cops,” he adds.
I lean over to Jacobson, so only he can hear me. “Keep the woman’s body and the van under guard. Do we know how to hold a corpse?”
He nods briskly. “We’ll figure it out, sir.”
“This stays with Secret Service.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Now give me the key to Augie’s handcuffs.”
Jacobson draws back. “Sir?”
I don’t repeat myself. A president doesn’t have to. I just meet his eyes.