They fuck like they haven’t fucked in decades. Odom’s wife is sixty-five but that doesn’t stop her from wrapping her legs around her sixty-eight-year-old husband, pulling his thrusts toward her with ecstatic strength even she didn’t know she still possessed. She can’t remember the last time she experienced a real orgasm, but when it comes, Odom’s wife screams a cry of pure delight and gratitude. The Bearded Man grins on hearing her joyful howl, hoping any insomniac neighbors might also be a witness to their ardent lovemaking, and gives release to his own pleasure. Coated with a sheen of sweat and out of breath, Odom and his wife clutch one another out of divine exhaustion. It takes many minutes for their heart rates and breathing to diminish to normal rates. They kiss then, tenderly, and make love again.
Odom wakes up just after dawn and gets out of bed. His wife, he knows, will sleep for hours more. One of his oldest contacts at the bureau had texted overnight. Odom knows precisely how many minutes of freedom he has left. He shaves, showers, and gets dressed. It’s Sunday morning and most of his top people will be home. He calls each of them. All are aware of the attempted assassination at Camp David, of course. Whether Twitter, MSNBC, the New York Times, or your run-of-the-mill political blog, the discussion is 100 percent assassination-attempt coverage. The earliest theories hold that the conspiracy, given the ease with which the hit team was able to infiltrate the installation, involved what has come to be known as the Deep State, but none of Odom’s lieutenants suggest their boss might be involved, at least not to his face.
Odom eases the potential awkwardness of these phone conversations by casually admitting to his complicity. In response, his lieutenants are speechless. What can possibly be said in response? Odom explains to them all the motivations behind his actions, laying out the danger Monroe represents to the nation. Lest they worry, Odom assures each of the men and women working under him they will in no way be implicated in the conspiracy. The paper trail he has artfully left behind in the event of his unmasking will lead investigators only to those persons who were actually involved. The phone calls end haltingly, with Odom’s people unsure how to respond or say goodbye. The CIA deputy director makes these farewells as succinct and painless as possible, quickly signing off with a chipper “best of luck” and encouragement to “keep up the fight.”
The not entirely anonymous phone call comes just before eight a.m., coincidentally only moments before the shootout at JFK. His male caller informs Odom the FBI will be knocking on his door in less than five minutes. With little time to spare now, Odom performs a “fatal” hard drive delete on his one computer that matters and then stands up from his home office desk for the last time. He walks briskly to the master bedroom and wakes up his wife. As kindly as possible, he informs her of the broad strokes of what has transpired and what is to come. She says nothing in response and later, to friends, she will confess to having been surprised by none of it. In the years to come, she will remember their last night together with heartfelt nostalgia, and those memories will prompt her to visit her husband once a week, every week, until she dies from a heart attack fifteen years to the hour of her last orgasm, when she came with the glorious ecstasy of a college girl.
Odom kisses his wife on the forehead, stands, and turns when the knock downstairs reverberates through the house like the chains of Jacob Marley’s ghost. He walks down the stairs and straight to the door, pulling it open to reveal the FBI agents who have come for him on the other side.
“Deputy Director James Odom?” an agent asks him.
“I am James Odom,” he confirms.
“You need to come with us, sir.”
Odom nods and takes a step out of the foyer of his house, outside and under a crystalline blue sky. The air is cold but without wind, not uncomfortably so. “Yes, I do,” he tells no one in particular.
Before proceeding down the steps, he looks out over his yard, crowded with FBI agents. Fortunately, there are no news reporters yet. The intelligence community takes care of its own, even in its disgrace. Odom’s gaze does find the intern, standing off to the side next to a middle-aged black woman who couldn’t give off more of an FBI vibe if she tried, and locks on her. As he is led down steps to the walkway, the CIA deputy director gestures toward the young woman from West Virginia, whom he has come to respect more than anyone else in a very long time. “A word with Ms. Chill, if you please? Just a moment,” he assures the agents escorting him.
The FBI agents look toward Udall, who gives her assent with a subtle nod. Up above, Odom’s wife stands in the window of their bedroom and bears witness to her husband’s arrest by federal agents. So handsome, her husband, she thinks. He has always carried himself as a man. She wishes he had bothered to wear a coat or that ridiculous Russian hat. Odom’s wife starts to cry now. The scene below is like a painting she has seen someplace but can’t remember where. The first neighbors have appeared in their doorways. A dog begins to bark down the block.
Odom stops in front of Hayley and Udall. The intern stares at him with nothing but keen curiosity. Udall has apprehended all manner of criminals, from mob bosses to gunrunners, but this is her first federal official. Odom’s arrest is bigger than Petraeus’s, Jesse Jackson Jr.’s, or Oliver North’s. Hell, this is bigger than Aldrich Ames.
Operation Damocles will be plenty enough on which to make her bones and retire, of this she has no doubt. In fact, Helen Udall will put in her papers three months after the Sunday morning they take down Odom and accept a position of head of security for China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, the largest corporation in the world, receiving a multimillion-dollar annual salary. It will be an adventure relocating to Beijing and even more so as a black woman. Her newfound wealth and power will afford her a lavish lifestyle, a genial Irish boyfriend, and a measure of happiness she never enjoyed under vastly different circumstances in Washington, and all due to a certain White House intern.
“I really wish I hadn’t waited to recruit you, Ms. Chill,” Odom admits with a look of chagrin.
“Or you could’ve not tried to assassinate a president, sir,” Hayley suggests.
Udall mistakenly thinks she needs to protect the intern from the CIA man. “Don’t even begin to suggest you did it for God and country.”
Odom ignores the FBI agent, in his snap appraisal a working stiff possessing only modest intelligence and investigative skills. Gaze remaining locked on Hayley’s, he stares deeply into those blue eyes, trying in vain to unlock the secrets that lie behind them and decides they don’t exist.
“Tread lightly, Ms. Chill. Know your enemies better than you know yourself.” With that wisdom imparted to a young woman with whom he has fallen a little bit in love, he looks to the FBI agents holding him by either arm.
“Let’s get going, then.”
* * *
HAYLEY DID NOT return to the West Wing for the entire week after the incident at Camp David. Her days were filled with interviews in windowless rooms at the FBI headquarters and in the down-market motel where she had been sequestered. The federal authorities from various agencies exerted enormous influence to protect Hayley’s identity out of fear for her safety. Her story was vetted and rigorously corroborated, at every level and from every direction. No detail went unexamined by the top investigators of the land. Everyone associated with her was thoroughly interviewed, from her first-grade teacher to the young female congressional interns who lived down the hall from Hayley at Henry House. Not a single aspect of her story failed to check out. At a time when the trustworthiness of nearly every federal appointment, contract player, or elected official was under suspicion, Hayley Chill rang as genuine as her soft West Virginia twang.