There’s no question of telling Scott what she saw beneath Hall’s pantry window, no matter how good he is in bed. Ideas, not circumstances, right? By every measure, Scott Billings is pure circumstance. A man with a penis and the skill with which to use it is not a man whom she should automatically trust. That he’s a Secret Service agent doesn’t necessarily instill confidence, either. Plenty of conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination suggest involvement by members of his Secret Service detail. “Trust no one,” Mr. Hall had cautioned. If there’s one thing Hayley has been trained to do, it’s to follow orders.
Eating her peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the Mall and studying the nation’s obelisk in the thin mid-Atlantic sunlight, Hayley recalls reading somewhere that between the years 1884, when it was completed, and 1889, the Washington Monument was the tallest man-made structure on Earth. It astounds her that such a world, where 555 feet was the pinnacle of man-made achievement, could have existed. Nothing lasts forever. People die and for all kinds of reasons. But what cannot change is her primary assignment, no matter the danger or risk involved. Service to country is a privilege, one that must be based on impeccable moral foundations. She will keep her own counsel for now. Only when she knows more will it be safe to approach the authorities. Hayley finishes her sandwich and decides against the bus, walking home instead.
That evening, after a long run, Hayley makes a pot of spaghetti and meat sauce, a meal she had prepared for her siblings hundreds of times. After cleaning up the kitchen, she sits down at the dinner table and opens her laptop. A television across the room is tuned to CNN, which reports heightened tensions over Russia’s buildup of forces on its border with Estonia. She accesses her phone and brings to its screen the photo she had snapped that morning of the boot print. The particular details of its sole—linear x’s and dashes above an array of squares—are extensively visible in the dusting of snow on brick pavers.
Placing the phone on the table next to the laptop, Hayley begins cruising the web, entering search requests until she arrives at a page she desires. It strikes her as faintly ridiculous to be engaged in this futile Internet search, but to do something—anything—feels good all the same. An army surplus website favored by ex-military types and survivalists offers dozens and dozens of special tactic boots, listed with photographic renderings of their soles. Hayley carefully scans each selection, page after page, in meditative search of a match of the boot print in her cell phone photograph. What she would do with a match, she really has no idea, but in this way she slows her racing thoughts and begins to think of sleep as a real possibility.
* * *
ON THE FOLLOWING morning, Hayley arrives at the White House complex at her regular time of exactly 7:45 a.m. Typically, the other interns in the CoS Support office report later, drifting in sometime between nine and ten a.m. Sophia didn’t come in until after lunch twice in the last month, citing doctor appointments. Hayley finds these hours before her coworkers arrive to be her most productive. Within fifteen minutes of settling down at her desk, a little more than twenty-four hours after Peter Hall’s shocking death, Karen Rey appears in the doorway.
“Minute of your time?” the White House aide inquires flatly. Rey doesn’t seem happy about whatever business is at hand. As Hayley gets up to follow her supervisor out the door, she wonders who she has managed to piss off. Maybe in some outrageously unfair way, she is being blamed for Peter Hall’s death. If only Hayley had arrived a few minutes earlier, Hall would have risen from the kitchen chair and answered the doorbell. He may have collapsed in front of her, allowing for possible medical intervention. Has the FBI already determined Hayley had spent the night before at Scott’s house? Outlandish speculation might suggest that had Hayley not had sex with the Secret Service agent, the White House chief of staff would be alive today, recuperating in a hospital bed at Walter Reed hospital.
“Is there a problem, ma’am?” she inquires, following Rey up the corridor. But the intern wrangler is mute, pointing for Hayley to enter the cafeteria.
Though the Navy Mess and CoS Support office share the same floor in the White House’s West Wing, interns are not supposed to eat at that exceedingly convenient location. Instead, they and other low-ranking support staff are directed to use the much larger and more utilitarian cafeteria in the Executive Office Building. Until this moment, Hayley had never set foot inside the cozy, well-appointed Navy Mess, reminiscent of a country club dining room. Rey gestures to Hayley, indicating a table across the room where a bespectacled black man in his late thirties sits. Kyle Rodgers, the deputy chief of staff, has just started eating a breakfast of fruit salad, Denver omelet, and coffee infused with sugar-free Red Bull.
He gestures to a chair. “Have a seat, Hayley.”
“Thank you, sir,” she says, sitting. Rey also takes a seat.
“Hungry? Can I order you something?”
“No, thank you, sir.”
“Coffee? Red Bull?” Rodgers motions to a passing waitperson for more coffee in his own cup.
“I’m good, sir. Thank you.”
Rodgers doesn’t ask Karen Rey if she wants anything. Gunning for Rodgers’s job as deputy chief of staff, Rey has engaged in guerrilla warfare to further that goal. Rodgers is well aware of her pedestrian machinations—floating rumors, talking to the press, critiquing Rodgers to his boss—but doesn’t really consider her much of a threat. A gladiatorial in-fighter with a dozen scalps hanging from his blood-soaked shield, the deputy chief of staff can handle Karen Rey.
“Do you know who I am, Hayley?”
“You’re Kyle Rodgers, deputy chief of staff. You worked in Mr. Hall’s congressional office before following him here to the West Wing. Your White House telephone extension is seven-four-four-three.”
Rodgers exchanges a look with Karen Rey, then turns his focus back on Hayley. “I get it now.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Why POTUS knows you exist,” Rodgers explains, spearing a fat mushroom with his fork and popping it into his mouth.
A modest Hayley says nothing.
Karen Rey finally speaks, abruptly. “Given these unfortunate events, it’s been decided that CoS internships will be terminated for this quarter. The new chief wants only paid staff in his office.”
Kyle Rodgers clears his throat like cocking a shotgun, dissuading further interruption. He looks to the intern again, privately relieved Hayley isn’t the one gunning for his job. “The president is keen to keep you on, Ms. Chill.”
“Apparently, helping save his life is a way of getting on his good side,” Rey adds snidely.
Hayley looks to her supervisor with a mild expression, utterly unnerving. “Thank you, ma’am, but the only life I saved that day was the intruder’s.”
Rodgers cannot fathom why Karen Rey is making this more complicated than it needs to be. He gestures with his fork in Hayley’s direction. “White House Operations. How does that suit you?”
Hayley nods. “Thank you, sir. It would be an honor.”
White House Operations is easily the best posting inside the West Wing an intern can possibly obtain. Adjacent to the Outer Oval Office, where the president’s personal secretary controls access into the inner sanctum, it is at the epicenter of West Wing activity. The primary role of WHO is serving the clerical needs of POTUS and his personal assistant. Typically, low-paid, junior aides are assigned White House Operations, not interns.