“Where have you been?” the NYU grad asks. “You’ve been gone almost an hour.”
“Mr. Hall asked me to stay after I’d distributed the briefing binders,” Hayley tells her matter-of-factly.
“You stood in at the cabinet meeting,” Luke asks incredulously, “for, like, the whole time?”
“It was a pretty short meeting,” Hayley offers as modest comfort to the other interns.
Before Becca, Luke, and Sophia have had the time to regain equilibrium, the door is pushed open, and for only the second time in his tenure as White House chief of staff, Peter Hall pokes his head inside the repurposed janitorial closet. “Nice recovery, Miss Chill.” Hall then turns to address the other interns. “Can’t have any more screwups like that.”
“Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again,” Hayley assures the chief of staff.
Hall disappears again, as abruptly as he’d materialized. Hayley sits down at her desk to resume work, seemingly ignoring Becca, Sophia, and Luke as they gape at her. Only after a loaded pause does the West Virginia native slide a quick glance in Becca’s direction, just to let her know she’s fooling no one. As an accomplished boxer, the West Virginian recognizes a well-delivered body blow. Hayley’s opponent is still standing, but the fight has been knocked out of her.
Dejected and defeated, Becca requests to leave work early, soon after lunch. She cites an upset stomach as the reason. Karen Rey is displeased, but Becca is her favorite intern in the complex, and so she reluctantly acquiesces. With the coast clear, Luke and Sophia take turns revealing to Hayley not only Becca’s sabotaging of the briefing binders, but also her numerous other transgressions and general abusiveness. Hayley expresses no interest in the gossip, working quietly as the others talk. Failing to make an alliance with the new queen of the CoS Support office, Luke and Sophia turn to making their dinner plans. They depart at four thirty p.m. and, as is their custom, leave Hayley to complete their half-finished tasks.
* * *
NOT LONG BEFORE seven p.m., Hayley finishes all CoS work and leaves the office, turning off the lights as she does so. A short walk up the corridor of less than thirty seconds takes her to the ground-floor exit and out onto the exterior grounds. Dusk has fallen, and the air temperature is below freezing. Hayley has neglected to retrieve her coat from a hook on the back of the office door and is considering returning for it when she hears a voice.
“Cabinet-level save. Pretty heady stuff for a hillbilly from West Virginia.”
Scott Billings has just finished his shift and was about to head over to the garage to retrieve his vehicle when he caught sight of Hayley exiting the building. In order to intercept her with his quip, he had to backtrack nearly twenty-five yards. Despite her many physical attributes and obvious intelligence, Scott is surprised by the intensity of his attraction for Hayley. Seducing women has always been a trivial matter for the handsome Secret Service agent, with the real problem being choosing one or two from the several.
Hayley stops and turns toward the approaching Secret Service agent. “Kind of ironic, coming from a Division Three quarterback who bombed his combine.”
Scott is momentarily thrown for acceptable comeback. The sensation of being one-upped by a female is neither familiar nor pleasant. Intelligence and wit is one thing, but how the hell did she learn about his disappointing performance in Indianapolis? Clocking his distress, Hayley simply grins.
“Interns know shit, too, Mr. Billings.”
Her smile has its intended effect. Whatever hurt feelings Scott may have suffered are vanquished by the glow of Hayley’s countenance. The collision of emotions she engenders in him is a new experience. Scott struggles to regain footing and deploys a tried-and-true bit of charm.
“I’m armed, you know. Call me Mr. Billings again and I might have to shoot you.”
Again that smile and a nod of her head in agreement, but Scott is no longer looking toward Hayley but intently off, over her shoulder and beyond. She pivots to see what has distracted him, when Scott starts running in that direction.
Two figures—too distant to ascertain race, gender, or age—are running across the North Lawn, toward the White House. Video surveillance tapes reviewed after the fact will reveal the “jumpers” scaled a fence in the northwest corner of the Treasury Building, immediately adjacent to the White House, and activated a sensor alarm in the Treasury moat. But the Park Police officer in charge of monitoring that particular alarm, among others, had stepped away from his station to use the restroom without securing a replacement. Consequently, the two intruders were able to trespass on White House grounds without being noticed.
Numerous individuals have illegally entered the White House grounds by scaling the fence in recent decades. They rarely venture far, although there have been significant exceptions. In November 1975, Gerald Gainous roamed the grounds for more than two hours and approached President Ford’s daughter outside her car. The year of 1991 saw the highest number of jumpers, with a total of seven intruders. Between 1995 and 2005, there were none. In 2017, Curtis Combs jumped a concrete barrier on the outer perimeter of the south grounds and was arrested. He was dressed in a Pikachu suit. It’s easy to forget that until the Second World War anyone could enter the premises and knock on the front door.
As Scott Billings races to intercept the two intruders, he shouts so there’s no question of his voice being picked up by a Motorola handset in his suit jacket pocket. “Unauthorized entry! North Lawn, east side! Seventy-five meters from residence! Closing fast!”
The two jumpers apparently realize Scott has seen them and immediately split up, one of them veering east. With no other agents currently in sight, Scott makes the spot decision to stop the intruder nearest him, doubtlessly leaving the other jumper to reach the building unhindered. Only then does Scott glance to his right and see Hayley also running, moving to intercept the second intruder. Without slowing, he waves emphatically at the intern. “Stay back! Stop!”
Hayley Chill, one of only eighteen females to successfully gender-integrate infantry training, does not stop running. Maintaining a strong, steady pace, she tracks the intruder’s course perfectly and brings the six-foot-three, twenty-seven-year-old male to the ground. A Schrade SCHF10 Survival knife, with 5.3-inch black blade, pops from the intruder’s hand and he reaches to retrieve it. Hayley scrambles behind the big man’s back, shooting a forearm across his neck, her left hand gripping her right wrist, and executes a sneak choke from armbar position with shocking efficiency. The intruder’s grip on his knife falters as Hayley applies steady pressure against his windpipe, critically reducing oxygen and blood to his entire system.
Hayley’s subduing of the second intruder has taken approximately twenty seconds, enough time for Secret Service agents to converge on the scene from every direction, weapons drawn. Two of the agents drop to their knees and assume control of the intruder’s arms as Hayley eases off the armbar and then slides out from underneath the man. She gets to her feet, putting one hand on her White House credentials for emphasis. The nervous, hyperventilating Secret Service agents aren’t entirely certain who the hell Hayley is and what she’s doing here. One agent keeps his submachine gun trained on her as he quickly scans her ID.