The President Is Missing: A Novel Page 14

  “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—”

  “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 r
emoves 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.

  Jacobson was Special Forces, just as I was a long time ago, but that’s where our similarities end. His intensity is not born of discipline or devotion to duty so much as it is a way of life. He doesn’t seem to know another way. He’s the type who falls out of bed in the morning and bangs out a hundred push-ups and stomach crunches. He is a soldier looking for a war, a hero in search of a moment of heroism.

  He hands me the key. “Mr. President, I suggest you let me do it.”

  “No.”

  I show Augie the key, as I might extend a cautionary hand to a wounded animal to signal my approach. We have now shared a traumatic experience, but Augie is still a mystery to me. All I know is that he once was part of the Sons of Jihad and now is not. I don’t know why. I don’t know what he wants out of this. I just know that he isn’t here for nothing. Nobody does anything for nothing.

  I move across the rear chamber of the SUV to his side, the smell of wet clothes and sweat and body odor. I lean around and fit the key into the handcuffs.

  “Augie,” I say into his ear, “I know you cared about her.”

  “I loved her.”

  “Okay. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love. When I lost my wife, I had to go on without missing a beat. That’s what we have to do right now, you and me. There will be lots of time to grieve, but not now. You came to me for a reason. I don’t know what that reason is, but it must have been important if you went to all this trouble and took this much risk. You trusted me before. Trust me now.”

  “I trusted you, and now she is dead,” he whispers.

  “And if you don’t help me now, who are you helping? The people who just killed her,” I say.

  The sound of his accelerated breathing is audible as I pull back from him, returning to my seat, the handcuffs dangling from my finger.

  Jacobson pulls out my shoulder restraint for me. I take it the rest of the way and fasten the seat belt. These guys really are full-service.

  Augie rubs his wrists and looks at me with something other than hatred. Curiosity. Wonder. He knows what I’m saying makes sense. He knows how close he and I came to dying, that I could have him locked up, interrogated, even killed—but instead I’ve done his bidding from the start.

  “Where are we going?” he asks, his voice without affect.

  “Somewhere private,” I say as we take the highway onto the bridge over the Potomac, crossing into Virginia. “Somewhere we can be safe.”

  “Safe,” Augie repeats, looking away.

  “What’s that?” snaps Davis, the driver. “Bike path, two o’clock—”

  “What the—”

  Before Agent Ontiveros can finish his sentence, something hits the center of the windshield with a thunderous splat, blanketing it in darkness. The SUV fishtails as bursts of fire erupt from our right, bullets pelting the right side of our armored vehicle, thunk-thunk-thunk.

  “Get us out of here!” Jacobson shouts as I crash into him, as he fumbles for his weapon, as our vehicle spins out of control on the rain-slick 14th Street Bridge under hostile fire.

  Chapter

  33

  Bach angles the umbrella to hold off the rain, blown sideways by the relentless wind, forcing her to walk in a more plodding fashion than she would prefer.

  It rained like this the first time the soldiers came.

  She remembers the pelting of the rain on the roof. The darkness of her house, after electricity had been cut for weeks in the neighborhood. The warmth of the fire in the family room. The burst of cold air as the front door to their house flew open, her initial thought being that it was caused by the gusty wind. Then the shouts of the soldiers, the gunfire, dishes crashing in the kitchen, her father’s angry protests as they dragged him from the house. It was the last time she ever heard his voice.

  Finally she reaches the warehouse and enters through the rear door, fitting her umbrella behind her through the door and placing it open, upside down, on the concrete floor. She hears the men near the front of the open-air space, where they are tending to the wounded, shouting at one another, blaming one another in a language she doesn’t understand.

  But she understands panic in any tongue.

  She lets her heels click loudly enough for them to hear her coming. She didn’t want to preannounce her arrival lest there be an ambush awaiting her—old habits die hard—but likewise she finds no advantage in startling a group of heavily armed, violent men.

  The men turn to the sound of her heels echoing off the high ceiling of the warehouse, two of the nine instinctively reaching for their weapons before relaxing.

  “He got away,” says the team leader, the bald man, still in his powder-blue shirt and dark trousers, as she approaches.

  The men part, clearing a path for her as she finds two men leaning up against crates. One is the bodybuilder, the one she never liked, eyes squeezed shut, grimacing and moaning, his shirt removed and a makeshift gauze-and-tape bandage near his right shoulder. Probably a clean through-and-through, she imagines, plenty of muscle and tissue but no bone.

  The second one is also shirtless, breathing with difficulty, his eyes listless, his color waning, as another man presses a bloody rag against the left side of his chest.

  “Where’s the medical help?” asks another man.

  She did not select this team. She was assured it contained some of the best operatives in the world. Given that they hired her, and given what they paid her, she assumed they were sparing no expense in obtaining the best nine operatives available for this part of the mission.

  From the pocket of her trench coat she removes her handgun, the s
uppressor already attached, and fires a bullet through the temple of the bodybuilder, then another through the skull of the second one.

  Now seven of the best operatives available.

  The other men step back, stunned into silence by the rapid thwip-thwip that ended the lives of two of their partners. None of them, she notes, reaches for a weapon.

  She makes eye contact with each of them, settling the are-we-going-to-have-a-problem question with each one to her satisfaction. They can’t be surprised. The one with the chest wound was going to die anyway. The bodybuilder, absent an infection, could have made it, but he’d turned from an asset into a liability. These are zero-sum games they play. And the game isn’t over.

  The final man she seeks out is the bald man, the team leader. “You will dispose of these bodies,” she says.

  He nods.

  “You know where to relocate?”

  He nods again.

  She walks over to him. “Do you have any further questions of me?”

  He shakes his head, an emphatic no.

  Chapter

  34

  We are under attack, repeat, we are under attack…”

  Our SUV veering wildly, rapid bursts of fire coming from one side of the bridge, the sickening, helpless feeling of hydroplaning as Agent Davis furiously struggles to regain control.

  The three of us in the backseat are jerked like human pinballs, straining against our seat belts, Jacobson and I crashing into each other as we lurch from one side to the other.

  A car slams into us from behind, spinning our SUV across traffic, then another collision from the right, the headlights only inches from Jacobson’s face, the impact felt in my teeth, my neck, as I hurl to my left.

  Everything in a spin, everyone shouting, bullets pummeling the armor of our vehicle, left and right, north and south indistinguishable—

  The rear of our SUV crashes against the concrete barrier, and we are suddenly at rest, spun around in the wrong direction on the 14th Street Bridge, facing north in southbound traffic. The explosion of fire from automatic weapons comes from our left now, relentless, some of the bullets bouncing off, some of them embedding in the armor and bulletproof glass.