Sinatra shakes his head. “Sorry about your friend.” He pulls the mic closer to his mouth. “Smoke him.”
The order given, Sinatra gives the intern a look brimming with admonishment and a blessedly guilt-free conscience. A flicker of regret crosses Hayley’s face as she imagines the death of her new friend. But Sinatra hasn’t heard back from his operative with confirmation of a kill. He tilts his chin down toward the radio mic.
“Lawford?” He gets nothing back. Hayley, not privy to the radio’s network, reads the look of concern on the team leader’s face and experiences the first glimmers of hope.
“FBI! Inside the house, drop your weapons and exit with your hands in the air!” The voice, amplified by a megaphone not far outside Aspen Lodge takes root in Hayley’s consciousness. The play of flashlights across the lawn visible through the bedroom windows confirms the voice wasn’t just inside her head.
Sinatra hears and sees the same evidence of the FBI’s arrival on the scene and reacts by quick-drawing the Sig Sauer from its chest-mounted holster, pivoting toward the president. Hayley doesn’t hesitate in the slightest, shifting her aim from Martin to Sinatra and firing, the bullet entering Sinatra’s head just above his left ear and exploding out the right with unquestionable result. As the team leader drops where he stands, Hayley coolly turns her aim back on Martin, whose right hand remains poised above the machine’s switch.
“Raise those hands,” she orders with a voice that quavers ever so slightly.
Martin obediently lifts his hands over his head as bulletproof-vest-wearing FBI agents flood into the room with weapons raised, followed a moment later by Agent Helen Udall. With one look at the unconscious president, nanotube inserted into his neck, Udall lifts a radio to her mouth.
“Get a medical team immediately!” The whoop and roar of an incoming helicopter engulfs the room as FBI agents force Martin facedown on the floor and clear space for an arriving medical team to administer to President Monroe. Udall looks to Hayley, who has placed her weapon on the floor and retreated to the far side of the bedroom. The FBI agent approaches the intern.
“Are you okay?” Udall asks her, taking note of Hayley’s blood-smeared right palm.
Hayley has never killed anyone before. The shock of taking Sinatra’s life is only beginning to reverberate. She glances at her hands and sees a tremor there, surprising her. But infantry sucks it up. Infantry shows no pain. Processing it all is for back home, after the mission is done. “I’m fine, ma’am.” She has a more pressing concern than her own well-being. “The Navy Mess chef is outside …”
“He’s fine. Not a scratch.” Hayley is relieved. Udall puts the pieces together. “He worked with you by creating a diversion?”
Hayley nods. “He was very brave, ma’am.”
Udall concurs with a caveat. “If you’re calling that brave, what do we call what you just did?”
“My duty.” Hayley isn’t boasting, just stating a fact.
The FBI agent has encountered many selfless public servants in her career in law enforcement but can’t recall one who possessed Hayley’s otherworldly dedication. It’s unnerving, and Udall takes a beat to distill her own accomplishments so as not to waver in the intern’s presence. What is this vibe the young woman gives off? Udall looks back toward the unconscious president, the object of the military medical team’s frenzied attention, to avoid Hayley’s gaze.
“Ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you know to come? This morning …” Hayley lets the sentence trail off. No need to remind the FBI agent of her refusal to heed a clear alarm.
“Asher Danes,” Udall responds simply.
Hayley ponders Udall’s response, reading into it all that wasn’t spoken. Recalling that Asher had met Udall when the FBI agent had come to the White House after Hall’s murder, it takes Hayley less than ten seconds to intuit what it all might mean. For the first time, she is caught off guard.
“Asher was part of the conspiracy,” she says, mostly to herself.
Udall nods. “You seem to inspire unusual degrees of courage in people, Ms. Chill. Mr. Danes’s involvement was limited to his association with CIA Deputy Director Odom. Talking to me has put him in potentially serious legal jeopardy. No doubt, though, Asher’s cooperation today will be taken into account if charges are brought.”
Hayley is saddened by the revelation about Asher and even more upset for not having considered the possibility of his complicity before now. She wonders if she’ll ever speak with Asher again so that he might explain why he chose to help Odom’s cabal. She recalls when they first met, in the White House Operations office, and his words to her then. Our hero arrives.
Not particularly a connoisseur of irony, Hayley shoves the words into a small box and files them away in her memory, having no use for them.
* * *
VIRGIN ATLANTIC FLIGHT 4690 departed from Washington Dulles International Airport three minutes after its scheduled departure of six a.m. Sunday morning. Seated in the first-class cabin, Senator Taylor Cox breathes a measured sigh of relief as the wheels lift off the tarmac. For obvious reasons, his travel plans were made in haste. Like all the other conspirators, he had not slept a wink the night before, waiting for news from James Odom. The first inkling of disastrous failure came when Cox heard from another conspirator with contacts in the bureau. That very early warning gave several members of what will come to be dubbed the Shady Side Cabal some wiggle room to make their hasty getaways.
Taylor Cox has survived countless Senate battles and election challenges. He is a warhorse who doesn’t bolt at the first exploding shell or a superficial wound. But the inevitable exposure of his involvement in a presidential assassination attempt is a legal conflagration he has neither the desire nor the stamina to endure. The only option he saw available to him was the ignoble reality of spending the rest of his life as a fugitive from justice. Within thirty minutes of learning of the operation’s collapse, Cox had packed a bag and was in a black car headed to Dulles.
Landing around eight a.m. at JFK, his plan is to connect with an Emirates flight to Dubai. The US doesn’t have an extradition treaty with UAE, and the senator has many powerful friends, including the emir of Umm al-Qaiwain, Sheikh Saud bin Rashid al-Mu’alla. Cox is confident he will avoid prosecution if he can set foot in the Emirates. Like many of his senatorial colleagues, he has long maintained a numbered bank account in Switzerland, courtesy of friends in private industries and allied governments. With more than six million dollars in reserve, financially he ought to be fine.
His flight lands at JFK without incident, and Cox takes a tram to the Emirates airline terminal. A few passersby recognize the senator and greet him enthusiastically. As he strides down the gleaming concourse, Cox ruminates on the end of this sort of public adulation and awe. In the UAE, he will be just another pale, rich Westerner living in quiet anonymity. So be it. Such a fate certainly is better than if he had chosen to remain in Washington. The thought of even one night in jail is enough to make Cox sick to his stomach. Death would be better than incarceration.
The senator only has his one carry-on bag. Gripping it in his right hand, he hurries toward his gate. The Dubai flight is scheduled to depart in less than thirty-five minutes. Though he has seen at least a dozen airport security agents, members of the TSA, and uniformed armed National Guard soldiers in the two terminals, none have given Cox even a second glance. It would seem he has lucked out, with the FBI failing to roll up the major conspirators in the first hours since the failed assassination.