Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Текущая страница: 34 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

The agent’s face flushed and his jaw clenched. But Wilmot knew this kind of guy. You had to back his ass into a corner where he couldn’t maneuver. Then he’d be sweet as milk. The agent exchanged glances with the dog handler and then spoke quietly into the microphone in his sleeve.

When he was done whispering into his sleeve, he turned to the K9 handler and said, “Get the dog all over that cart. Then I will personally escort this gentleman to the X-ray machine at Bravo Checkpoint.”

Wilmot was tempted to prod the guy with an I-told-you-so remark. But he knew that now was not the time. It was a delicate thing riding herd on a guy like this. You overplayed your hand, he’d go out of his way to wreck your day. But if you didn’t stand up to him, they’d spend all day making phone calls to get clearance for the tanks.

Wilmot simply folded his hands over his chest and looked impassively into the distance while the dog sniffed at virtually every item on the cart.

Finally it was over.

“Gentlemen, come with me,” the agent said.

“Get the cart, John,” Wilmot said. Collier needed something to keep him busy right now or he was liable to pass out or throw up or do something stupid. “Come on, John, chop-chop.”

Collier scrambled to get the cart in motion, pushing it toward a doorway on the far side of the parking lot indicated by the Secret Service agent.

“I will now be taking you to the credentialing checkpoint,” the agent said. “You will be entering a highly secure perimeter. You will be issued access badges that you will need to carry with you at all times. Each and every room in the Capitol is designated as a separate zone. Your authorization will be time limited and zone specific. If you overstay your pass or attempt to enter a zone for which you are not credentialed, you will be subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment. Clear?”

“Absolutely,” Wilmot said.

They passed through a doorway into a dim concrete passageway. One of the front wheels on the cart was improperly adjusted and the cart vibrated loudly. Wilmot knew that he had done about as much as he could do to keep the agenial

“You look like shit, kid,” he said. “You eat something bad this morning or something?”

Collier made a grimacing attempt at a smile. “I don’t know . . . I—maybe I did. I feel a little under the weather.”

“Son, we got a job to do, so get out your Vagisil and get your shit squared away.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wilmot had come to a realization early in life that you were always playing a role. If you wanted to be successful, though, you had to play a role that was close to your own character. Right now he was playing a role he knew well. He was pretending to be his own father. His old man had been a paratrooper in World War II, and when he wasn’t drunk, he was one seriously tough son of a bitch. It was a role, Wilmot knew, that sucked the air out of a room, that kept attention focused on one person. And right now they couldn’t afford for even half a shred of attention to be paid to Collier. The kid was a genius, but he’d blow away in a stiff puff of wind.

Wilmot clapped his hand on the Secret Service agent’s shoulder. “Didn’t mean to be hard on you, son. But I’m here to do a job. Just like you. The reason they send me to do stuff like this is because they know the job gets done when Wilmot shows up.”

The Secret Service agent walked them through a second door into a large room. “The credentialing station is right there.”

Wilmot surveyed the room. Everything was set up the way their intel had indicated that it would be. An X-ray machine and a metal detector, both of them similar to the ones used in airports, stood between two steel traffic barriers. On each side of the barrier stood an agent in tactical garb, each one holding an FN P90 on a tactical sling. Between them stood a Capitol police officer operating the X-ray machine.

The agent turned to the officer at the X-ray machine and said, “I know it’s against regs to bring in pressurized canisters once final sweeps have been made, but I spoke to my supervisor, so you’ll need to take this up with her.”

The officer, a tall black woman, shook her head. “I am not admitting compressed gases through my checkpoint. You can forget that.”

The Secret Service agent said, “Hey, I’m just bringing them here. You do what you gotta do. I’m going back to my post.”

The Secret Service agent turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

Wilmot crossed his hands over his chest, looked at the police officer behind the X-ray machine, and said, “You want to be the one to explain to the president why it’s twenty-four degrees in the House chamber? Hm? You got those kind of balls, young lady?”

“You did not just disrespect me,” the officer said. “I know you did not.”

Wilmot met her angry gaze and said, “See, I don’t give a hoot in hell whether you feel all insulted or not. Either we’re gonna fix the heat or we ain’t. Your call.”

The two tactical officers stood motionless, waiting to see how things developed before they did anything.

The officer continued to glare at him. Finally she picked up a walkie-talkie and said, “Sergeant Grandison requesting supervisory authority at Checkpoint Bravo.”

“Do not move, sir,” one of the tactical agents said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Wilmot said truculently. But he didn’t move a single muscle.

The room seemed to vibrate with tension. Time crawled by. It might have been as few as two minutes, but it seemed to take forever. And yet, in a funny kind of way, Wilmot reflected, he was enjoying himself. He had never done anything more intense, more full of juice than this, not in his entire life. And he had lived a pretty full life. Some part of him understood why Evan had stayed in the military. Walking that line between life and death was an adrenaline rush without equal. The closer you got to dying, the more alive you felt.

Finally the far door opened and a short, wiry, coffee-skinned woman walked briskly up to the X-ray machine. She could have been African-American, Latina, or Middle Eastern. But Wilmot knew she was half-black, half-Jewish. In fact, he knew a great deal about Special Agent Shanelle Klotz. He had studied her file for nearly a year, and though he liked her on paper, he liked her even better in person. He smiled broadly. Here was somebody you could speak to like a grown-up, a rational being who could be counted on to make the right choices.

The compact woman surveyed the scene, her eyes immediately coming to rest on the two canisters in the cart.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “I’d like you to explain in clear, simple language what those canisters contain and why you need them.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” said Dale Wilmot.

39

PRIEST RIVER, IDAHO

Nancy Clement left a trail in the snow as she dragged her bad leg toward the lights of the Wilmot house. She wasn’t sure how seriously injured she was. All she could tell was that her leg threatened to buckle each time she put weight on it.

The snow was getting deep now and it would have been hard slogging even with two good legs. But now it was slow-motion agony.

Finally she reached the house. The door was locked. She pounded on the door with the flat of her hand. Nancy had cuffed Margie to the bed so she wouldn’t cause any mischief while Nancy investigated, but now she worried that Evan had fallen asleep and she would freeze to death outside on the porch. Even if he were awake, she didn’t know if he had the strength to help her.

She pounded again, and this time she heard the lock unlatching and then Evan unbolted the door.

Nancy staggered in and sank onto the nearest couch.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The car turned over,” Nancy said. “I think I broke my leg.” She pulled up her leg and examined the bruiskeddddddddInsere that had already begun to swell. When she pressed on it, the pain was like something electric.

“Did you find the body?” Evan asked. He looked terrible. His lips were cracked and his skin had a splotchy look, as if it had been sandpapered, but his eyes were bright and troubled.

Nancy nodded. “You were right. They’re making cyanide in the woods.”

“Cyanide? Why?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. Of course, she had begun to nurse some theories, but she saw no reason to trouble Evan with more worries than he already had.

“Whatever they’re doing, you’ll stop them, right?”

“I have to get in touch with my office.”

“The phone lines are down. Cable’s gone, too.”

“Is there any other way to get an outside line?”

“Couer d’Alene is nearly thirty miles away. And the roads are impassable without a snowplow.”

Nancy stood. “I’ll have to risk it.”

“You can barely walk.”

It was three o’clock Eastern. The speech was at nine. That gave her just over three hours to reach a phone.

“I don’t have a choice.”

Evan thought for a minute. “My dad has a bulldozer,” he said.

“Could I drive it with a broken leg?”

“It won’t be easy. But, yeah, I think you could.”

In the kitchen she splinted her leg as best she could with a pine plank, then Evan gave her instructions on how to start the big bulldozer.

“Good luck,” he wished her.

“Thank you.” She gave him the keys to her handcuffs. “Don’t unlock Margie until nine o’clock. After that, it won’t matter.”

He nodded. “Part of me hopes we’re wrong about all this, but the other part of me knows we’re not. The crazy thing is I know he’s doing this for me, because of me. But it’s not patriotism, just insanity. You tell him that if you find him. When you find him.”

She took his hand for a moment and was surprised by how firm it felt, no hesitation in his grip. But his face looked pained, and she turned away as the tears rolled down his cheeks.

Once Nancy got the dozer started, operating it was no big trick.

Instead of having an accelerator, the big Cat had a decelerator pedal, so that you only had to mess with it when you were stopping. Otherwise she was able to do most of the work with her hands. The steering was controlled by two handles in front of her, which controlled the relative speed of the treads. Another handle operated the blade. After a brief circuit of the area around the sheds, she felt competent enough to control the slow-moving machine.

Soon she was ons s Ahe was on her way with a full tank of diesel. The storm had abated, but the wind blew the flakes in swirling drifts, and the temperature had dropped. The cab was warm inside, and she had thrown on extra clothes. It would have been cozy if not for the searing pain in her leg and the desperate circumstances she was in.

The D8 had a blade that could be tilted to better funnel snow away from the Cat. She didn’t have to completely clear the road; she just had to clear the top layer so that snow didn’t start piling up in front of the undercarriage and force the Cat to grind to a halt. There was no great trick to it. Once she’d found the right height, she just let it sit there, and the dry, powdery snow peeled off and piled up steadily in a long mound to her right.

The first sign that the bulldozer wasn’t a completely perfect solution to her problem was when she noticed that it didn’t have a speedometer. When a motor vehicle barely goes faster than a brisk walk, she realized, it doesn’t need one.

At five miles an hour, it would take nearly six hours to reach Coeur d’Alene. She only had about three hours to make contact with somebody in DC. She had to assume that somewhere between where she was and Coeur d’Alene there was a working cell tower or someone with a working phone or Internet connection. But for the time being, all she could see in front of her was snow.

The one thing that the absurdly slow progress afforded her was time to think about who she would call and what she would tell him. If she called Ray Dahlgren, there was a solid chance he would dismiss her out of hand. He was already heavily invested in the notion that she was a loose cannon, hell-bent on ruining his career and breaking every rule in the FBI personnel handbook. He was not the kind of guy to back up on something like that without a lot of evidence to the contrary.

At this point he would have nothing but her word. She had found a hand sticking up out of a patch of frozen ground, and she had found a strange lab that made her feel ill and that smelled like burned almonds. And that was about it.

So Dahlgren was out.

That left the Secret Service and Gideon Davis.

If she called the Secret Service, they’d call Ray Dahlgren. Ray Dahlgren would tell them she was a suspended agent with a harebrained theory and a grudge. He might even try to implicate her so the Secret Service would track her down. Crazy as that sounded, she couldn’t rule it out as a possibility.

Which left Gideon.

But could Gideon and Tillman actually stop the threat by themselves? It was her only hope.

In the meantime, there was the seemingly endless expanse of snow and the monotonous growl of the big Caterpillar diesel.

40

WASHINGTON, DC

The Richard B. Russell Senate Office Building is connected to the Capitol by a subway. This not only allows senators to pass from their offices to the Capitol without mixing with the hoi polloi, but it also allows deliveries to be made without backing unsightly, noisy, smoke-belching trucks up to the Capitol. It was through this tunnel that Wilmot and Collier needed to pass in order to righhhhhhhh D‡each their target. But first they had to get past Special Agent Shanelle Klotz, senior facilities specialist, responsible for security for the HVAC and related systems.

Wilmot patiently explained the likely source of the problem in the Capitol heating system in mind-numbing detail. Finally the Secret Service agent said, “Okay, that’s far more detail than I’m capable of understanding. Officer Grandison is going to run those canisters through the X-ray machines, and we’re going to take a very close look at them.”

“Sure,” Wilmot said.

Collier had assured him that the canisters would pass muster. But he couldn’t help being apprehensive.

“Want me to load them on the—”

Special Agent Klotz shook her head. “Stay where you are, gentlemen.” She motioned to one of the agents wearing tactical gear to load one of the canisters on the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt.

Wilmot stood motionless, hands behind his back.

There was a soft whine as the conveyor fed into the central chamber of the X-ray machine. The whine stopped.

Special Agent Klotz approached and stood at Officer Grandison’s shoulder. The two women stared intently at the screen.

After a moment, the police officer shook her head. “I don’t like it,” she said.

“What do you see?” the Secret Service agent said.

“The walls don’t look right.” Officer Grandison tapped the screen. “See? Too thick.”

“If I may—” Collier said.

Wilmot cut him off. “Shut the hell up, John,” he said smiling broadly. “Let the professionals do their jobs.”

“Zoom it,” the Secret Service agent said. She stared for a long time. “I don’t like it either,” she said finally. She turned to Collier and said, “You were going to say something.”

Collier looked at Wilmot. Wilmot gave him the slightest nod. He wasn’t opposed to Collier talking. He just wanted to make sure that Agent Klotz believed she was driving the train here.

“If I may . . .” Collier cleared his throat. “If you look at a propane tank or a compressed air tank, helium, argon, welding gases, things of that nature, they’re always single-walled tanks. Refrigerant tanks used to be like that. But in recent years, now that we’ve transitioned away from Freon to R410A, the thermal characteristics of the compressed . . . well, I won’t bore you. The point is that we’ve moved to double-walled tanks. Keeps the refrigerant temperature more stable. So, yeah, it probably does look funny if you’re used to single-walled tanks.”

Klotz held up one finger at Collier, then picked up a phone off the desk next to Officer Grandison and said, “Can you get me Ron?” She smiled blandly at Wilmot for a few moments. Then, “Ron, hey, Shanelle here. R410A refrigerant. Is it stored in double-walled tanks? Sometimes? Okay, thanks.”

Collier gave her a weak smile. “I wouldn’t lie ut Q17;t lie to you.”

Wilmot did his best to project a telepathic mental message to Collier to shut his mouth. Fortunately Agent Klotz spoke before Collier had a chance to say something he shouldn’t. “Here’s what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to authorize entry with the refrigerant. But I’ll need to accompany you personally to your destination. Once you reach your work space, I’ll detail two agents to supervise you. At such time as you need to access the refrigerant, you will need clearance from me. Got it?”

“Fine,” Wilmot said.

“But before we do all that, we’re going to run one last test,” she said.

Wilmot felt his pulse quicken.

“Refrigerant’s nontoxic, isn’t it? I mean, in small doses?”

“Wilmot swallowed. “Ah, correct, ma’am.”

“Then show us. Let the gas out and take a small breath.”

Wilmot hesitated, looked at Collier, who then reached toward one of the canisters.

“Not that one,” Klotz said. “The other one.”

Wilmot considered what to do. There really wasn’t anything he could do. It would just play out however it played out. He inhaled, knowing he might not have a chance to breathe again for a while.

Then Collier turned the petcock, and the tank hissed angrily.

41

TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

Verhoven was pacing back and forth in the living room. Tillman had given Lorene another pint of saline. He checked her belly, but it still wasn’t rigid. And her breathing was okay.

So whatever was going on, she wasn’t bleeding to death. But she wasn’t doing well, either.

Tillman had brought the man and his two children downstairs. The two girls were watching a cartoon on the TV while their father sat on the couch rubbing his hands together and rocking back and forth. The older girl had stopped crying, but her face was streaked with tears, and she looked as if she might vomit at any second.

The man stopped rubbing his hands for a moment. “I’m an ER doc. This woman needs to be in a hospital.”

“Shut up,” Verhoven said.

“Maybe we should let him take a look,” Tillman said.

Verhoven sighed, then nodded his okay. The doctor fetched his bag of medical equipment before Tillman’s watchful eyes, then began a careful examination of Lorene’s wound.

“How long since she got shot?” he said.

“A few hours,” Verhoven said.

The doctor shook his head. “She’s bleeding internally. It’s not a gusher or she’d be dead. But she needs surgery.̶n aaaaaaaa T‡1;

“Her belly’s not rigid,” Tillman said, then explained, “I was a combat medic.”

The doctor pointed to Lorene’s lower abdomen. “Have you been peeing a lot?”

Lorene nodded feebly. Her eyes were dull now.

“Blood in the urine?”

“Yes.”

The doctor turned to Tillman and said, “A bullet fragment probably punctured the bladder or one of the kidneys. Might have cut the vaginal artery or the inferior suprarenal. The blood’s evacuating through the bladder. It’s not good. If the bleeding isn’t stopped—and I mean pretty soon—she’s going to die.”

Verhoven let out a groan, as though he’d been punched in the stomach. He pointed at the man with his trembling finger. “You save her! You save her, you little son of a bitch.”

The doctor looked at Tillman as though appealing for help. It was obvious he could see that Tillman was the only seemingly calm, rational voice in the room right now.

“Let’s just all calm down,” Tillman said.

Verhoven sat down next to his wife and began stroking her hair. “It’s okay, Lorene. You’re going to be okay. The doctor’s going to figure something out.”

Verhoven was looking more unstable by the moment. And talking about Lorene’s situation was not helping things. They were waiting for a phone call, presumably with further instructions. Verhoven wouldn’t say exactly, and Tillman didn’t want to press him. Instead he directed his questions to the doctor.

“Why does a normal suburban guy need so much security?” he asked.

“That’s not my bailiwick,” the man said. Then he looked as though he was sorry he’d spoken.

“Oh?” Tillman said. “Your wife’s a security nut?”

The doctor squinted at him. “Are you making fun of me?”

Tillman studied the man for a moment. “Why do you say that?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what my wife does for a living,” the doctor said. “The day of the State of the Union address?”

Tillman walked to the mantel and began picking up family photos. There were several pictures of the man with his two girls and a woman who was obviously his wife. She was a petite woman, very attractive, racially mixed. Then he saw an award certificate with a picture of the wife by herself, posed in front of a blue backdrop dominated by a large official seal.

Tillman studied the certificate. The wife wore a gun and had some kind of badge on her belt. Now the pieces were beginning to fall into place. “So this is your wife, huh?”

The doctor said nothing, but his silence answered Tillman’s question.

At the bottom of the certificate was a label, which Tillman read out loud, hoping that Gideon was close enough to pick up audio from theera a from the earpiece he had stuffed in his pocket.

“United States Secret Service,” Tillman said. “Your wife is Special Agent Shanelle Klotz.”

The cop wasn’t very talkative, but Gideon kept trying. At first Gideon had told him the truth: They were pursuing homegrown terrorists who had taken a family hostage. But when the cop pretended to believe him, and suggested they both drive down to the precinct to file a report, Gideon gave up. He could see things from the cop’s perspective: a dirty, scruffy, ragged guy with a gun insists he’s pursuing terrorists in the suburbs with his ex-con brother and needs the cop’s help. Hell, he wouldn’t help himself in that situation. So he stopped talking about Verhoven and started making small talk—if only to pass the time. But the cop was being uncooperative and grumpy.

Gideon could only hear snatches of what was going on in the house, but he gleaned that the woman who lived there was a Secret Service agent working the State of the Union detail, and her family was being held as some kind of leverage. But he still didn’t know for what purpose.

Could it be something as simple as calling the agent up and saying: Kill the president or we kill your family? He didn’t think so. Even if they could count on forcing a Secret Service agent to turn her gun on the president, the event would be over in seconds. Mixon had been very specific: This wasn’t simply an assassination attempt but a “high-value, mass casualty” terrorist attack. And the State of the Union address was definitely the perfect setting for it. But without knowing the agent’s role and assignment, without any word from Nancy, Gideon didn’t think he had enough to take it to Dahlgren. Not if he wanted to convince the man and avoid being arrested.

Much as it pained him, he was going to have to sit tight and wait.

42

WASHINGTON, DC

Wilmot waited as the tank hissed, literally holding his breath.

A pink stream shot out of the tank, vaporizing immediately in the air. Collier turned the tank back off again, leaned down, and breathed in the air near the tank. Wilmot expected him to claw at his throat and fall over, foaming at the mouth and screaming.

But he didn’t.

Instead, Collier straightened and said, “See? Harmless.” He grinned. “Doesn’t smell so great . . . but totally harmless unless you suck in huge quantities of it.”

Wilmot’s pulse slowed. He tried not to look astonished. What the hell had just happened?

The tactical guy closest to Collier nodded to Special Agent Klotz. “Yeah, that’s refrigerant. I can smell it. My brother-in-law tried to fix our heating until last year, busted the line, the stuff leaked into the basement.” He wrinkled his nose. “I had to smell that crap every time me and my buddies played cards down there for two months.”

Special Agent Klotz said, “Okay, gentlemen, I guess we’re good. Let’s go.”

Wilmot followed Collier, Klotz a couple of strides beck d‡hind him, her hand on her gun. Wilmot couldn’t help being impressed. These Secret Service people didn’t mess around.

The long concrete hallway led to the small subway station. A car stood motionless, doors open. Collier started pushing the cart toward the car. Two men immediately barred his way.

“We’re going on foot,” Agent Klotz said. “The subway was rebuilt in the 1960s on a bigger track. The old tunnel is over here. It’s used as a service entrance for the Capitol building now.”

Collier went through the entrance into the second tunnel, the front wheel on the cart wobbling and squeaking loudly. Wilmot followed.

The walk to the Capitol seemed endless. Along the way, Wilmot wondered why the gas had not killed Collier and deduced that Collier had consciously left out some critical details. Was there only gas in one of the tanks? Had Collier just held his breath and relied on the fact that cyanide gas was slightly heavier than air? If it was the latter, eventually the gas would disperse, and the people in the room would start to smell it and probably start keeling over. In which case he and Collier needed to move very fast. But Collier seemed unhurried.

Finally they reached the end of the tunnel, ending up in a small tiled room flanked by an elevator and a set of old iron stairs.

Everything was as he expected it, as laid out on the updated schematics they had reviewed when National Heat & Air got the HVAC contract for the building.

The Secret Service agent said, “Just keep moving, if you don’t mind, gentlemen. We’ll take the elevator.” She spoke softly into her sleeve. “Send the South Capitol elevator to Location L.”

Collier swallowed and started pushing the cart toward the elevator.

A few moments later, the doors opened with an ear-piercing squeak.

43

WASHINGTON, DC

Wilmot and Collier spent all morning in the HVAC Control Room, messing with the controls for the heating system. As planned, it had failed repeatedly. By noon, Wilmot told Shanelle Klotz, “Look, if you want this thing working during the State of the Union, you need us to stay here and babysit.”

“You’re not cleared to stay here.”

“Up to you. Ten to one it breaks down again before evening.”

Several phone calls later, Agent Klotz said, “Okay. You’ll stay here. The door will be guarded. You do not open the door. Knock and the guard will enter. If you need to move to another location, I will have to personally authorize it and accompany you. Clear?”

“Not a problem,” Wilmot said. He sat down and waited until the door closed. They were in a small dark closet of a room. The room had no direct access to the heating unit itself, only to the controller which ran it. There was nothing they could do from this location.

But for the first time, they were alone.

“Okay, t bbbbbbbb t‡so what the hell happened back there?” Wilmot said. “How come we didn’t all die of cyanide poisoning?”

Collier gave Wilmot one of his sour, superior little smiles. “I suspected somebody might need to bleed a tank, so I built them both with double walls. In effect, each one is two entirely separate tanks. The outer chamber contains refrigerant. Turn the cock, you get R410A.” He pointed at the tank. “See this little set screw? I tighten it three full turns and it breaks a seal between the inner and outer chambers. Then when you twist the petcock, instead of getting refrigerant . . .”

“. . . you get cyanide.”

“Exactly.”

“Might have been nice to know that ahead of time,” Wilmot said.

Collier stared at him intently. “I just want you to understand that you still need me. Right up to the end, you’ll need me.”

Wilmot put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ve never had the slightest doubt about that, son,” he said. “Not for one moment.”

Collier’s face glowed.

Wilmot sat back and put his feet up on the cart. “So you think the system’s going to make it all day without breaking down again?”

Collier smiled broadly. “I strongly suspect it will not.”

44

I-66, OUTSIDE WASHINGTON, DC

Kate Murphy finished putting on her makeup in the car, wishing she could talk to Gideon as the limo crawled through the DC traffic. In just a few hours she would be at the State of the Union address, yet all she really wanted to do was hear his voice.

She had been visited earlier in the day by a particularly unpleasant man—Ray Dahlgren, the FBI’s deputy director—who claimed to want to know Gideon’s whereabouts so he could “help” him. But Kate was no fool; she could spot a phony a mile away, and Dahlgren was as fake as a deposed Nigerian dictator with a bundle of cash. He soon dropped the pretense, and they had a nasty conversation where Dahlgren threw around words like “conspirator” and “obstruction of justice.” Kate laughed off his bullying; but she was worried about Gideon. His voice mail said he was okay, but his investigation had clearly agitated Dahlgren. Now she feared his investigation pitted him against the deputy director and placed him in more danger.

She noted the increased security presence around the Capitol, which seemed intense even by DC standards. She knew the Secret Service left nothing to chance, but she wondered if they had really planned for everything. Threats came from everywhere, at any time, and even the most vigilant security officials could not be omniscient. Now, as the limo idled at a red light, she felt a flicker of concern over whether the State of the Union address could be a target, and whether she would be safe inside.

But she told herself she couldn’t obsess about it. In the post 9/11 world, no one was entirely safe and no place entirely secure. That uncertainty was the new normal. She had to trust Gideon, aned one wd trust that if an attack were planned, he’d find a way of stopping it. The best thing for her to do was to focus on what was right in front of her.

An extremely junior member of the White House protocol staff, a young woman who looked as if she had graduated from Sweet Briar about ten minutes ago, had given Kate instructions on what to expect during the address. According to official protocol, guests were divided into three categories. There were invitees who were attending because they had given money to the president’s campaign or because they fit into some visible and demographically attractive category—a Hispanic Medal of Honor winner, or a white female cop. Next up the ladder were people like Kate, who were staffers or members (present, former, and future) of the administration. Above that were members of Congress. And above them were the House and Senate leadership, a handful of important cabinet members, the Joint Chiefs, the Supreme Court, and finally the speaker of the house, the vice president, and then the president himself.