Read The President Is Missing: A Novel Online

Authors: James Patterson,Bill Clinton

The President Is Missing: A Novel (16 page)

N
ext house down, sir.”
Jacobson’s voice squawks through my dashboard, as if I didn’t already recognize the house.

I pull the Suburban up to the curb, relieved that I made it this far. These Secret Service vehicles are battleships, but I wasn’t sure how long I could drive with the rear-end damage.

Jacobson’s vehicle pulls up behind me. He caught up to me on the highway and used GPS to guide me here. I’ve been to the house many times but never paid much attention to the various roads that got me here.

I put the car in Park and kill the ignition. When I do so, I feel the tidal-wave rush, as I knew I would—the shakes, the post-adrenaline, post-traumatic physical reaction. Until this moment, I had to keep control to get Augie and myself out of harm’s way. My work is far from over—more complicated than ever, in fact—but I allow myself this brief respite, taking a few deep breaths, trying to get past the life-or-death crises, trying to empty out all the panic and anger bottled up inside me.

“You have to keep it together,” I whisper to myself, trembling. “If you don’t, nobody else will, either.” I treat it like any other decision, like it’s something I can completely control, willing myself to stop shaking.

Jacobson jogs over and opens my car door. I don’t need help getting out of the vehicle, but he helps me anyway. Some cuts and dirt on his face aside, he looks generally intact.

Standing, I feel momentary wooziness, unsure of my legs. Dr. Lane would not be happy with me right now.

“You okay?” I ask Jacobson.

“Am
I
okay? I’m fine. How are you, sir?”

“Fine. You saved my life,” I say to him.

“Davis saved your life, sir.”

That’s also true. The evasive-driving maneuver, the J-turn that spun our vehicle perpendicular to the oncoming truck, was Davis’s way of taking the brunt of the impact so I wouldn’t, in the rear. It was a brilliant bit of driving by a well-trained agent. And Jacobson was no slouch, either, firing on the cab of the truck before the two intertwined vehicles had even stopped. Augie and I couldn’t have escaped without that cover.

Secret Service agents never get the credit they deserve for what they do every day to keep me safe, to trade their own lives for mine, to do what no sane person would ever willingly do—step in front of a bullet, not away from it. Every now and then, an agent does something stupid on the taxpayer’s dime, and that’s all anybody remembers. The ninety-nine times out of a hundred they perform their jobs perfectly never get mentioned.

“Davis had a wife and little boy, didn’t he?” I ask. Had I known the Secret Service was going to track me tonight, I would have done what I always do when I visit one of the hot spots around the world, one of the places where the Service is most insecure about my safety—Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan: I would have insisted that nobody with young children accompany me.

“Comes with the job,” says Jacobson.

Tell that to his wife and son. “And Ontiveros?”

“Sir,” he says, shaking his head curtly.

He’s right. It will matter down the road. I will make sure that we don’t forget Davis’s family and whatever family Ontiveros left behind. That is my personal vow. But I can’t deal with it right now, not tonight.

Mourn your losses later, after the fight’s over,
Sergeant Melton used to say.
When you’re in the fight, fight.

Augie gets out of the Suburban on shaky legs, too, planting his foot in a puddle on the road. It’s stopped raining, leaving an earthy, fresh smell in its wake on this sleepy, dark residential street, as if Mother Nature is telling us,
You made it to the other side, a fresh start.
I hope that’s true, but it doesn’t feel that way.

Augie looks at me like a lost puppy, in a foreign place with no partner anymore, nothing to call his own except his smartphone.

The house before us is a stucco-and-brick Victorian with a manicured lawn, a driveway leading up to a two-car garage, and a lamp that lights the walkway to the front porch—the only light that appears to be on past ten o’clock in the evening. The stucco is painted a soft blue, the origin of the nickname the Blue House.

Augie and Jacobson follow me up the driveway.

The door opens before we reach it. Carolyn Brock’s husband was expecting us.

G
reg Morton, Carolyn Brock’s husband, is wearing an oxford-cloth shirt and blue jeans with sandals on his feet, waving us in.

“Sorry to come here, Morty,” I say.

“Not at all, not at all.”

Morty and Carolyn celebrated fifteen years of marriage this year—though given her role as chief of staff to the president, the celebration, as I recall, was just a long weekend on Martha’s Vineyard. Morty, age fifty-two, retired after a lucrative career as a trial lawyer that ended with a heart attack in a Cuyahoga County courtroom as he stood before a jury. His second child, James, was less than a year old at the time. He wanted to see his children grow up, and he couldn’t spend all the money he’d already made, so he hung up the boxing gloves. These days, he makes documentary short films and stays home with the two kids.

He looks us over, me and my ragtag crew. I had forgotten that I’d gone to such lengths to disguise my appearance—the beard nobody’s ever seen, my casual, rain-soaked clothes, my hair still dripping rainwater into my face. Then there’s Augie, already shaggy before the rain did its work on him. At least Jacobson looks the part of the Secret Service agent.

“It sounds like you have quite a story to tell,” says Morty in the baritone voice that swayed many a juror over the years. “But I’ll never hear a word of it.”

We step inside. Halfway down the winding staircase that ends in the foyer, the two kids sit and stare at us through the balusters—six-year-old James, in Batman pajamas, hair standing on end, and ten-year-old Jennifer, her mother’s face staring back at me. I’m nothing new to them at this point, but I don’t usually look like something the cat dragged in from the garbage.

“If I had any ability to control the minions,” says Morty, “they’d be in bed right now.”

“You have a red beard,” says Jennifer, wrinkling her nose. “You don’t look like a president.”

“Grant had a beard. Coolidge had red hair.”

“Who?” asks James.

“They were presidents, genius,” his sister tells him with a swat in his direction. “Like, a really long time ago. Like, when Mom and Dad were little.”

“Whoa—how old do you think I am?” says Morty.

“You’re fifty-two,” says Jennifer. “But we’re aging you prematurely.”

“You got
that
right.” Morty turns to me. “Carrie said the basement office, Mr. President. Is that what you want?”

“That’s great.”

“You know the way. I’ll get you some towels. And my kids are going to bed, aren’t you, children?”

“Awwww…”

“Enough with the sound effects. Bed!”

Carolyn had the basement finished as an elaborate office, complete with secure lines of telecommunication, allowing her to work in the late evenings from home.

Jacobson goes first, taking the stairs down and clearing the area before giving me a thumbs-up.

Augie and I head down. The basement is neat and well-appointed, as one would expect in Carolyn’s home. There is a large open playroom furnished with beanbag chairs as well as a desk and chair and couch; there is also a TV mounted on the wall, a wine cellar, a movie room with a projection screen and deep, lush seats, a full bathroom in the hallway, a bedroom, and Carolyn’s office in the back. Her office contains a horseshoe-shaped desk topped with multiple computers, a large corkboard on the wall, several file cabinets, and a large flat-screen TV.

“Here you guys go.” Morty hands each of us a towel. “Are you ready for Carrie, Mr. President? Just tap this button right here.” He points at a mouse by the computer.

“One second. Is there someplace my friend could go?” I ask, meaning Augie. I haven’t introduced him to Morty, and Morty hasn’t asked for an introduction. He knows better.

“The rec room,” says Morty. “The large open space by the stairs.”

“Great. Go with him,” I say to Jacobson.

The two of them leave the room. Morty nods to me. “Carrie said you’d want a change of clothes.”

“That would be great.” The bag I’d carried with me, including clothes for Saturday, was left behind in the car I’d parked in the baseball stadium lot.

“Will do. Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be praying for you, Mr. President.”

I look at him questioningly. Those are strong words. This has been unorthodox, no doubt, my showing up incognito this way. He’s a bright guy, but I know Carolyn doesn’t share classified information with him.

He leans into me. “I’ve known Carrie for eighteen years,” he says. “I’ve seen her lose a congressional election. I’ve seen her when she miscarried, when I nearly died from a myocardial infarction, and when we lost Jenny in a shopping mall in Alexandria for two hours. I’ve seen her with her back against the wall; I’ve seen her concerned; I’ve seen her worried. But before tonight, I’ve never seen her terrified.”

I don’t say anything to that. I can’t. He knows that.

He extends his hand. “Whatever it is, I’m betting on the two of you.”

I shake his hand. “All the same,” I say, “go ahead and say those prayers.”

I
close the door to Carolyn’s basement office, enclosing myself in soundproofed walls, and sit at the desk. I pick up the computer mouse. When I do, the computer changes from a black screen to fuzz, then a somewhat clear screen split in two.

“Hello, Mr. President,”
says Carolyn Brock, speaking from the White House.

“Hello, Mr. President,”
says Elizabeth Greenfield, acting FBI director, on the second half of the split screen. Liz became the acting director after her predecessor died in office ten days ago from an aneurysm. I’ve nominated her for the permanent position, too. By every measure, she’s the best person for the job—former agent, federal prosecutor, head of the criminal division at Justice, respected by everyone as nonpartisan and a straight arrow.

The strike against her, which I don’t consider a strike at all, is that more than a decade ago, she joined protests against the invasion of Iraq, so some of the hawks in the Senate have suggested she lacks patriotism, presumably forgetting that peaceful protest is one of the most admirable forms of patriotism.

They also said I just wanted to be the first president to appoint an African American woman to run the FBI.

“Tell me about the bridge,” I say, “and Nationals Park.”

“We have very, very little from the ballpark. It’s early, of course, but the blackout erased any visuals, and the rain has washed away most of the forensics. If men were killed
outside the stadium, we have no trace of it. If they left behind any forensic evidence of their existence, it might be days before we find it. And the likelihood is low.”

“And the sniper?”

“The sniper. The vehicle was removed by Secret Service, but we have the bullets fired into the sidewalk and the stadium wall, so we can make out a decent angle. From what we can gather, it looks like the sniper was shooting from the roof of an apartment building across the street from the stadium, a building called the Camden South Capitol. We didn’t find anyone up there, of course, but the problem is we didn’t find anything, period. So the sniper did a good job of cleaning up. And of course there’s the rain.”

“Right.”

“Mr. President, if they set up in that building, we will figure out who they are. It would have required advance planning. Access. Stolen uniforms, probably. Internal cameras. Facial recognition. We have ways. But you’re telling me there’s no time.”

“Not much, no.”

“We’re working as quickly as we can, sir. I just can’t promise you we’ll have answers within hours.”

“Try. And the woman?” I ask, referring to Augie’s partner.

“Nina, yes. The Secret Service just turned over the vehicle and the body. We’ll have her fingerprints and DNA within minutes, and we’ll run them. We’ll trace the car, everything.”

“Good.”

“What about the bridge?”
asks Carolyn.

“The bridge is still a work in progress,”
says Liz.
“The fire is out. We’ve removed the four dead subjects from the pedestrian path and are running their vitals through the
database. The ones inside the truck will be harder, but we’re working on it. But Mr. President, even if we can learn their identities, whoever hired these people wouldn’t leave a trail behind. There will be cutouts. Intermediaries. We can probably trace it back eventually, but not, I don’t think—”

“Not within a matter of hours. I understand. It’s still worth the effort. And do it discreetly.”

“You want me to keep Secretary Haber in the dark about this?”

Liz is still new to the job, so she doesn’t consider herself on a first-name basis with the other members of my national security team, including Sam Haber, from Homeland Security.

“Sam can know that you’re tracking these people. He’d expect that, at any rate. But don’t report your findings to anybody but me or Carolyn. If he asks—if anyone else asks—your answer is, ‘We don’t have anything yet.’ Okay?”

“Mr. President, may I speak freely?”

“Always, Liz. I’d be upset with you if you didn’t.” There is nothing I value more in subordinates than their willingness to tell me I’m wrong, to challenge me, to sharpen my decision making. Surrounding yourself with sycophants and bootlickers is the surest route to failure.

“Why, sir? Why wouldn’t we coordinate this as openly as possible? We’re more effective if one hand talks to the other. If 9/11 taught us anything, it’s that.”

I look at Carolyn’s face on the split screen. She shrugs in response, agreeing with me that it’s worth telling the acting director.

“The code word ‘Dark Ages,’ Liz. Only eight people in the world know that code word besides me. It’s never been written down, on my order. It’s never been repeated, outside our circle, on my order. Right?”

“Yes, of course, sir.”

“Even the task force of technicians trying to locate and neutralize the virus, the Imminent Threat Response Team—not even they know ‘Dark Ages,’ right?”

“Correct, sir. Only the eight of us and you.”

“One of those eight people leaked it to the Sons of Jihad,” I say.

A pause as the acting director takes that in.

“Which means,” I say, “that the person did more than leak.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Four days ago,” I say, “Monday, a woman whispered those words into my daughter’s ear in Paris, to relay to me. That woman is Nina—the one shot at the stadium by the sniper.”

“My God.”

“She approached my daughter and told her to say ‘Dark Ages’ to me and to tell me that I was running out of time and that she’d meet me Friday night.”

The acting director’s chin rises slightly as she processes the information.

“Mr. President…I’m one of those eight,”
she says.
“How do you rule me out?”

Good for her. “Before I tapped you as acting director, ten days ago, you weren’t in the loop. Whatever outside actor is doing this to us, whoever among our eight is helping them—this would have taken time to develop. It wouldn’t happen overnight.”

“So I’m not the traitor,”
she says,
“because I wouldn’t have had time.”

“The timing rules you out, yes. So besides you, Carolyn, and me, that leaves six people, Liz. Six people who could be our Benedict Arnold.”

“Have you considered that one of those six might have told a spouse or friend who sold the information? They’d be violating your directive of confidentiality, but still…”

“I have considered that, yes. But whoever’s betraying us did more than leak a code word. They’re a part of this. Nobody’s spouse or friend would have the kind of access and resources to do that. They’d need the government official.”

“So it’s one of our six.”

“It’s one of our six,” I say in agreement. “So you understand, Liz, that you’re the only one we can fully trust.”

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