To Kill the President

by Sam Bourne

  ‘He’s taking his mic off.’

  ‘Gene, please. Gene, don’t – please come back. Eugene. I’m sorry, folks, we seem to have lost him. He’s left the studio. We’ll be right back.’

  27

  The White House, Washington, DC, Thursday, 8.04am

  It wasn’t easy to get facetime with the White House Chief of Staff, not this one, nor any of his predecessors. He was the conductor of the orchestra, the station master, the top traffic cop as well as the CEO and team leader of the White House. He made the trains run on time, he was everyone’s line manager, but he was also and often the lead strategist, most trusted counsellor and right hand to the President. He was the President’s representative on earth, but also his guiding star.

  Perhaps the worst kept secret in Washington was that Bob Kassian fulfilled only half of those duties for this President. He was certainly the Chief Operations Officer, the man who made the machine work. For that he was admired, regarded as that rare creature in DC: a highly capable administrator. But no one could pretend that he was a presidential confidant. Everyone knew that he had only been hired as a sop to the party establishment, someone who could bridge the divide between the President – so wholly alien to the ways and means of Washington – and everyone else in the capital. He had been appointed as security, a way for the new occupant of the White House to reassure a nervous governing class that he would not go wild. Bob Kassian was a comfort blanket in human form.

  Still, even if everyone knew he sat outside the President’s inner circle – at whose centre lay Crawford McNamara – his diary was nevertheless packed. Maggie would have to deploy every ounce of charm and skill to get five minutes alone with him not next week or next month but today. Right now.

  And she didn’t feel either charming or skilful. She felt dirty, not only used by McNamara and his – what was the right word for Richard: rent-boy, whore? – but also comprehensively outplayed. She had been led into a honeytrap, lured there by her own lust for a stupidly attractive, apparently empathetic man. She was no better than those dumb men who were again and again seduced into revealing secret or sensitive information by some clever, pretty spy. She remembered mocking that general who lost his job – and paid a hefty court fine – for handing over classified info to his mistress. ‘He should learn to keep it zipped,’ she had said, along with every other woman in Washington. Well, she was no better.

  She picked up coffee on the way. After a night like that, she needed a double espresso just to stay conscious. While she was there, she saw a missed call from Nick, her contact at the Pentagon.

  She had rounded off their call yesterday by pushing her luck, asking for some detail on the résumé of a former veteran. Specifically, the military service record of one Robert Kassian.

  If he felt discomfort at that, Nick’s voice did not reveal it. But she had assumed that he would resort to the bureaucratic stonewall, not refusing her request exactly but simply delaying it into the Washington eternity.

  ‘Hi there, Maggie.’ The voice as reliable as a speaking clock. She braced herself to hear that, ‘We are not able to share that information at this time’ or, if he was feeling expansive, ‘I suggest you ask Mr Kassian about those two missing years yourself.’

  ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Listen, are you at work? At Sixteen Hundred?’

  ‘Not yet, but I will be in about five minutes.’

  ‘OK. Call me when you get there. Use Signal.’

  Maggie did as she was told, using Signal – the app that promised maximum encryption – from her cellphone. Her door was closed.

  ‘OK, obviously you didn’t get this information from me personally. Protocol is that the Department never speaks about this category of veteran, for reasons that will become obvious. Also, I need to be sure that this information is for your use only.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And that you will not be putting it in writing or any form of documentation for circulation, distribution or duplication.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Sorry, Maggie. Them’s the rules!’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Probably best not to write this down at all. Anywhere. Even in a note for yourself.’

  ‘OK. The suspense is killing me!’

  ‘All right. So Robert G Kassian served in the Army Rangers between 1989 and 1990, as you know. From 1992 to 1995, he was attached to DIA.’

  ‘Defense Intelligence Agency.’

  ‘Exactly. Now, the period you asked about spans March 1990 to August 1992. In that time, Sergeant Kassian served with the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta.’

  ‘Delta Force.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that would have been during the first Gulf War.’

  ‘Yes, between August 1990 and June 1991, Sergeant Kassian was stationed in and around the Persian Gulf.’

  ‘I see. So that means he would have been in Delta Force at the same time as—’

  ‘Correct. This is highly classified information, Maggie.’

  ‘Of course.’ Maggie could feel the debt between them growing.

  ‘In the Persian Gulf Sergeant Kassian’s commanding officer in special operations was Major James Bruton. They were members of an elite unit, the cream of the cream.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Maggie, I must stress again: this is for your use only.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘The unit was small. Functioned like a cell. Initially, undertaking search and destroy operations – looking for and taking out Saddam’s Scud launchers.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘After the first phase of hostilities, the unit moved on to different work. Its prime area of specialism was targeted assassinations.’

  28

  Falls Church, Thursday, 8.44am

  Dear Mr President

  I keep trying to think of reasons why you deserve to live. Maybe your going to change. Maybe your going to allow people to keep living the way we were living before. Maybe your going to stop saying people like me are not reel Americans even when I fought in a war and nearly had my leg blown off and you were so chicken shit you got out of fighting and even boasted about it like it showed you were smart.

  But why would you change, why. Youv made so much money, your like one of the richest people in the world and now youv got power too. So why would you change. What you do, all this shit you do its made you rich and powerfull.

  My mom loved America do you know that. She really loved this country she told us when we were kids that we had to be greatfull that we were in the best country in the world and we all believed her. Thats why i became a soldier because I believed all that shit.

  And now you come along and at first everyone says dont worry hes just making up all that shit he’s saying it to get votes he’s never gonna actually do any of that shit theyd never let him do it there are laws and courts and he cant. Like this is America you cant just round people up and kick them out, like thats not how it works.

  I reely believed it and now I see that i just WANTED to believe it which is different. Not the same thing. Deep inside I think I knew that you were serious, you were actually serious. You were going to take people like my mom and you were gonna put them on a bus – like a fucking bus man – and drive them to the border and dump them on the other side. Even when that woman had a son in the army who was ready to die for America even then you would dump her like she was some bag of shit that you didnt want like you were taking out the garbage.

  This is not right and if you gave any sign that one day you woud change I woud maybe feel different. But your making it worse every day saying all these things about Latino people and also making Muslims be on a list like there an enemy and saying black people live shit lives and we should be greatfull that so many of them dont vote its all wrong man its wrong.

  And i sometimes think you want everyone in america to hate each other and then they wont hate you or maybe its like you feel so bad
about yourself you want everyone to feel bad about thereselves but some people are good like my mom was good but now shes dead and you killed her because she couldnt cope being on her own without me and so far away and she needed me to look after her and just because shes Latina doesnt means she from Mexico she was from El Salvador but you dumped her in Mexico but she know no one there and thats why she got sick and died and i hate you and the only way to stop you is if I could find another way to stop you that would be better but i cant and i know that theyll kill me when i do it but im doing it for my mom and all the other moms and children who cant fight back and i still love this country but you wouldnt understand that god bless America.

  Sitting in a café on West Broad Street, Julian Garcia read it over one more time and wondered whether it was too much. Less is more, that was always the best policy. He wondered if this had crossed that all-important line. No use if it seemed over the top. And yet, it had to fit the deed that it would apparently explain. Not much room for nuance there.

  Besides, the key audience was the one after the event. It had to make sense to them. It needed to feel plausible. He submitted it to the same test he had applied to the art installation he had mounted on the wall of Hernandez’s living room. Imagine a screengrab or a quote on the news or on Facebook. Would it do the job?

  He checked the grammar and spelling. Too much? Too little? Garcia had stuck to the rule he’d learned in those secondments at the Defense Intelligence Agency: make your cover as close to reality as possible. Based on the samples of Hernandez’s writing that he’d seen, this was about right. His friend was an outstanding soldier, but the two of them had taken different routes within special ops. The written word had become a crucial tool for Garcia; not so for Jorge.

  But if this document rang true, Garcia knew it was not because of the spelling or punctuation. It was because it was telling a story, conveying a fury, that was real. And that fury, that story, belonged to Garcia himself.

  When they met, Jim Bruton had only made the most glancing nod to it. Garcia had mentioned that he had been visiting his sister, dealing with family stuff, and Bruton had said, ‘Yes. I know about that. And I’m sorry.’

  At the time, Garcia had thought nothing of it: his commander was being polite. But not long afterwards, and especially as he began to work with Hernandez, he became convinced that the particular circumstances of his mother’s death had played a part in Bruton’s selection of him. The general was not just relying on the blood loyalty they shared as soldiers – though, as it happens, he could have. He was trusting that Garcia felt a rage of his own for the man he was being asked to … remove.

  Not that that was relevant. Indeed, it was completely irrelevant. This was a mission, to be carried out with calm, neutral professionalism. It was vital to remember that. Ask any military assassin and they’ll tell you the same thing. You must never hate your target. Begin to hate and you will fail.

  So, he decided, the content was OK. The look worried him more. Ideally, he would have had Jorge write this out himself. But the early start this morning, when Hernandez had opened up his home and let Garcia construct the collage on the wall, had left him tired. Besides, Julian wanted to get out early, rather than linger at the house too long and risk getting spotted. So he had asked his friend to write out a few lines, watched him do it and left it that.

  Afterwards, away from the house, Garcia had practised the handwriting again and again, until he was happy it was a match for Jorge’s. He had seen that, even apart from the illness, handwriting had been an effort for Jorge, each word laboured over. Punctuation seemed to be a luxury beyond reach, as it was for many of the men they had both served with all those years ago. So, as Garcia wrote, he visualized the men in his unit and their very occasional cards or letters home. And then he had filled pages with handwriting until it looked right.

  He would post the letter later today. Not from this neighbourhood. Jorge was angry but he was not stupid. Besides, Garcia thought, his Jorge was a determined man. He did not want the Secret Service knocking on his door too early, before his mission had been accomplished. Jorge would do nothing that could be traced too easily. He would send his emails to the White House from the Anacostia public library: they would be backdated, but no one would know that had been done artificially. (And they would appear to come from a regular computer: clearly the Tails system was beyond a man like Jorge.) There could be no recklessness.

  He was, Garcia understood, walking a very thin line here. He needed to do just enough that, afterwards, the police and the press would agree that the warning signs had been there all along, but not so much that they would stop Jorge too soon.

  Garcia had a job to do. He had to create a presidential assassin. Not a potential one, not a suspected one. But a real one. And that meant there was one more task ahead.

  29

  The White House, Thursday, 9.38am

  ‘Good to see you, Maggie. You thriving?’

  Kassian had moved out from behind his desk, so that the two of them were seated at the round table where, Maggie suspected, most of the work here was done.

  She had not had to barge in physically, though she had been ready for that. She simply told Kassian’s PA-cum-gatekeeper that she had urgent questions to ask regarding the Frankel death and that she would need only a few minutes. The PA asked her to wait and Maggie did as she was told, watching as the woman typed a one-line email that she suspected was a distilled version of her request. A moment later, the PA suggested Maggie should go back to her office and the PA would let her know the instant Bob was free.

  ‘In that case,’ Maggie said, ‘could you rephrase my request? Could you tell Mr Kassian – Bob – that I want to discuss not the Frankel death but the Frankel killing and that I’m keen we talk about this before I have to give a scheduled briefing to Mr McNamara later today?’ The woman said nothing, though Maggie swore she saw her pale at the word ‘killing’. Thirty seconds later, Maggie was ushered in.

  Maggie had only ever had brief dealings with Kassian. Just because they were both outside the inner circle did not mean they coincided often: there were rather too many residents of White House Siberia for that. But she had always found him courteous and polite, capable if a little unexciting. She was struggling to square that, and indeed the man in front of her now, with what she had learned less than an hour earlier from Nick at the Pentagon.

  That Jim ‘the Brute’ Bruton had killed with his bare hands would surprise nobody. But Kassian seemed meeker, more cerebral. She would have had him down as one of those ‘defense analyst’ types, perhaps an aide to the general staff, the military equivalent of a clerk to a Supreme Court justice. She’d have assumed that Kassian had been on a graduate fast track into the military, catapulted to the upper echelons from the start, rather than a hands-on, boots-on-the-ground soldier.

  But if that had upended her expectations, what Nick had revealed reinforced her working hypothesis in one key particular. He had told her that Bruton and Kassian had served together in a tiny elite unite. Maggie had seen enough of warfare to know that few bonds tied any two men closer together. These two shared a bond of blood. The trust between them would be total and unbreakable.

  What was more, and so rare in Washington, was that their connection was secret. It appeared in no press profiles and had never once been mentioned on television – which meant it was all but certain the President himself had no idea of it.

  ‘I’m well, thank you.’ As it had several times already today, a thought of last night, and this morning – the messages on the phone, the look on Richard’s face as he warned her to be careful – pulsed through her cerebral cortex. It occurred to her that she almost certainly looked like shit.

  With an act of will that verged on the physical, she shoved that thought aside. She would focus – like a laserbeam, as her old boss Stuart Goldstein always put it – on the matter at hand. ‘I need to talk to you about Dr Frankel.’

  He nodded, unfazed. If he felt a smidge
on of guilt, he did not show it. So maybe that’s what they taught in special ops: guiltless murder.

  She explained what she had found so far: a personal history and family life wholly at odds with suicide, unexplained forensic discrepancies at the scene – the mud-free shoes and the wrongly positioned driver’s seat – and, earlier today, phone records including an unexplained call apparently summoning Dr Frankel to leave home at a time out of sync with his usual routine. ‘Above all,’ she concluded, ‘Dr Frankel’s widow said that something highly out of the ordinary took place the evening before his death.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Kassian asked. Pro move: see what your interlocutor knows, because she might know nothing.

  ‘I thought you might tell me, Bob.’

  ‘I’d rather hear it from you, Maggie.’

  They paused for a while, a professionals’ stalemate. Eventually Maggie smiled and said, ‘You and the Secretary of Defense made an unscheduled social call. At the home of Dr Frankel.’

  ‘That’s right. We did.’

  ‘It would help my inquiries if you were able to tell me what that meeting was about.’

  ‘I don’t think “meeting” is quite the right word.’

  ‘What would be the right word, Bob?’

  ‘I’d say it was a conversation.’

  ‘OK. It would help my inquiries if you were able to tell me what that conversation was about.’ She smiled, a smile that had once worked miracles for her, disarming warlords in Darfur and settler leaders on the West Bank alike. Now, after what she had read on Richard’s phone, she wondered if that power was beginning to fade. Involuntarily, she pictured the President’s daughter.

  Kassian got up and walked back to his desk. Was he about to produce a key document that would explain everything? Was he going to call his PA and ask for Maggie to be removed? Was he about to open a top drawer and reach for a revolver …

  Instead, he did a few keystrokes on his computer, which then proceeded to broadcast classical music, at a high volume.