* * *
JAMES ODOM GETS up on Saturday morning at six a.m., expending that extra hour out of a small kindness extended to his loyal wife. After decades of marriage, they are neither lovers nor much loved by the other. But what they do share is a level of grudging respect. They have provided for each other, nurtured one another in countless ways, and grimly persevered. As a result of that dedication to the marital bonds, anything but generous deference to the other’s basic needs would be abhorrent. James Odom reveres his wife and therefore remains motionless as a corpse on his side of the bed for those sixty minutes after his own awakening.
After a black coffee and dry toast, he goes to the office for a few hours to catch up with the previous week’s incomplete tasks. Odom relishes these quiet hours at Langley. Younger employees avoid the place like Chernobyl on the weekend, but old-timers like him can often be found shuffling down its corridors on a Saturday or Sunday morning, swapping small grins of recognition if not hellos. But this, of course, is no ordinary Saturday. James Odom is an old warrior with the battle scars to show for it, but even he suffers a mild case of the butterflies in these few hours before Operation Damocles changes the course of American history.
He craves to speak to his team leader before jump-off, aware the call is as pointless as a wish list left for Santa Claus. The team has its orders and has developed its plan. A call from Odom would only happen if the operation was being terminated. Rummaging through file folders and fretfully reviewing analyst reports from the depths of the agency’s intranet Odom finds his gaze repeatedly falling on his modified BlackBerry KEY2. Like chieftains of drug cartels south of the border, he carries five such devices, and one is used exclusively for communicating with Sinatra. The operative answers after the fourth ring.
“I’m kind of busy here. Are you terminating the operation?”
“Certainly not,” Odom assures him. “We’re go.”
“You’ve commissioned me to assassinate the president of the United States and you’re checking up on me?” Sinatra asks with understandable incredulity.
“Christ, you’re an asshole. Has anyone ever told you that?”
There’s a long pause from Sinatra, and Odom fears he has unduly insulted the man. He hasn’t met a trained killer who wasn’t somewhat mentally unbalanced, thinking particularly of a murderous pederast he once had the unpleasant experience of hiring, but this one really seems to have more than several screws loose.
“Would you kindly refrain from taking the Lord’s name in vain when speaking to me?” Sinatra’s voice has the timbre and modulation of a psychopath on the verge of a bloody homicidal frenzy.
“Of course. My apologies.”
“What do you want?”
“Are there any problems? Do you need anything?”
Sinatra expels a long-suffering sigh. “If I needed anything or if there was a problem, I would’ve called you.”
Odom doesn’t say anything, and he really doesn’t know why. What’s wrong with him? What’s going on? He’s run covert operations practically in his sleep or, at least, after a long nap. Why is he deviating from standard operating procedure here?
“What’s wrong?” Sinatra asks with as much compassion as he can muster, which is very, very little. “You sound weird.”
God, Odom thinks, even this murderous basket case can perceive he’s cracking under the pressure. It isn’t every day you kill a president, right? Think fast. Focus. Show some fucking backbone here! Whipping himself into a semblance of psychological shape, the CIA deputy director grasps the first straw that comes into sight. “Whose idea was the whole Rat Pack business? Yours?”
“I’m going to hang up now, if that’s all right with you. My guys are going through their kits for the third time, as I demanded, and in two hours and forty-four minutes we’re getting on with it.”
Sinatra’s recitation is every bit the therapy Odom requires in the moment. The terror that threatened to consume him subsides, draining back into whatever emotional swamp it flowed from. “Good, good, good. Okay. We’ll talk after it’s finished.”
The operative says, “You won’t hear from me again. Never call me again. Once he’s dead, I’m breaking this phone into a thousand pieces and dumping them into the Chesapeake. If the money isn’t where it’s supposed to be six hours after the new president announces three days of national mourning, you know what happens.”
In the moment, Odom can’t fathom how the dynamic has changed between them. Perhaps he is getting too old for this business. “Needless to say, the money will be where you expect to find it and in the agreed-to amount.”
“Excellent,” Sinatra mutters, adding, “praise be to God.”
He included this glorification like a final twist of the knife. Nonbelievers have such issues with displays of genuine faith, it gives Sinatra enormous pleasure to rub their faces in it. Indeed, Odom gives a little shudder hearing it. While there is no denying the man’s capabilities as killer, the CIA deputy director cannot imagine anyone eerier.
“Goodbye, then,” James Odom politely tells his operative, getting only the dead air of the call’s disconnection in response.
* * *
HAYLEY SPENT MOST of Saturday afternoon in a small windowless room (again, most likely a converted janitorial closet) compiling briefing books and coaxing a recalcitrant Ricoh MP C2550 copier to comply with an acceptable efficiency. POTUS is holed up in the Laurel Lodge conference room with senior aides, teleconferencing with leaders around the world regarding the situation in Estonia. The scuttlebutt that Hayley is able to glean from those staffers coming in and out is that the blowback was extreme from long-standing European allies in reaction to US tolerance of Russia’s aggressions. The leadership expected from America is MIA. To all of these detractors, the president expressed again his conviction the true danger was in the Far East, with China.
She walks back to Linden Cabin in the dark without seeing Monroe once the entire day. If Hayley wants to eat dinner, she needs to be at the small dining room at Main Lodge no later than 7:30 p.m., but it’s been over thirty-six hours since she’s bathed. A hot shower is more important than food, given how she currently feels. Turning on the water as soon as she arrives back at her quarters and stripping off her clothes in seconds, she sits on the closed toilet lid for several minutes and lets the billowing steam from the shower envelop her, coating her in a sheen of damp warmth. Emerging forty minutes later from the cottage, Hayley feels refreshed and optimistic.
The menacing woods that had earlier seemed to portend violence now recall the forests in which she cavorted as a child and teenager back in West Virginia. Throughout her childhood, the woodlands served as refuge from a dysfunctional adult world. Hayley and her friends inhabited those forested, rolling hills whenever released from confines of school and home, spirited forest goblins and fairies fueled by cheap booze and cannabis smoke.
Those were carefree times, and memories of them carry Hayley on her ten-minute walk to the Main Lodge and the dining room there. Most of the other staffers have finished their meals and retired to their cottages for the night. Apart from a couple of senior aides who would have nothing to do with the likes of an intern apart from barked requests for coffee or copying, Hayley has the dining room to herself. Through the open door leading into the kitchen, she sees Leon Washington, the chef from the West Wing’s Navy Mess on Camp David duty.