by Jason Letts
“Ms. Morrin,” Jane said, and a swift and cutting look told her she hadn’t gotten it quite right.
“For now,” the First Lady said with a sigh and an impatient look down at Jane.
“I’m hoping to talk to you about your future security needs after the transition. I’m with the Secret Service. My name’s Jane Roe,” she said with a friendly smile that didn’t seem to have much of an impact.
Bethany stepped down off the chair and turned to Jane, giving her a better look at the First Lady. She was beautiful with the kind of wholesome mid-Western appeal that could’ve just as easily worked with cutoff jean shorts and a plaid button-up shirt, but she looked bone-tired and irritable too. Her eyes had quite a bit of redness to them and dark circles underneath.
“I’m not going to be issuing any kind of statement that this is an amicable breakup or that I still fully support the president,” she said. Taken aback, Jane quickly shook her head.
“My apologies, but you are misunderstanding me. I’m not concerned at all about anything of a political nature. The only thing that matters to me is your safety, and there are a few things to go over to ensure that going forward,” Jane said, and Bethany gave her a begrudging look.
“Sure, you say that now, but I’ve been around here long enough to know where it always ends up,” she said, brushing past Jane to walk across the room and forcing her to follow. “Everything eventually revolves around his approval ratings, his optics, his needs. Wait, that’s not mine. Don’t put that in there.”
A person bobbled a small vase he was clearing off a shelf and nearly dropped it as they swept by. It should be noted that the FLOTUS’s office had none of the grandeur of the Oval Office. The table, the armchairs, couch, and desk were nice enough, but they also looked quite ordinary.
How come the American people didn’t elect a first-couple as equals rather just one person to be the executive with the other ending up in a purely ceremonial role? Jane supposed the answer was in case one member of the couple decided to leave. Considering how much stuff Bethany needed to pack up around the room after being in it for two months, it occurred to Jane that this may not have been what she’d intended to do going into it.
“I can assure you that I’m not concerned with any of those things,” Jane said, stepping over a stack of folders piled up on the floor. “But there are practical realities of your security that need to be addressed. I’m sure we can count on the president intending to extend protection to you at least throughout his time in office, even though your marriage has ended.”
Bethany stopped and turned to Jane with a hard look, but there was a trace of her distraught interiority behind it. In a way, Jane couldn’t help but sympathize. No matter how she came to this decision it had to be brutal on her, and Jane couldn’t imagine what she was really going through.
“How magnanimous of him to spare me some protection, but you can let him know that I don’t want it and none of that will be necessary,” she said.
“What?” Jane asked, taken by surprise.
Bethany winced like she didn’t know what to do and sat back on the couch, rubbing her eyes before breathing deeply.
“The whole point of this is to get away from you people. No offense, but I don’t want people watching over me every second of the day. I don’t want people listening right outside the door when I’m alone with…the man who was my husband. I can’t stand having people know where I am every second, not having enough privacy to fill a thimble. This isn’t what I signed up for,” she said, getting more emotional.
“Bethany,” Jane said, taking a seat, but before she could say anything more the First Lady kept right on going.
“I don’t think anyone really understands what this has been like for me. When we got married, Alex was a 10th-grade history teacher. Then all of a sudden he decides to run for Congress. I hate to say it, but deep down I never thought he’d win. It was uncomfortable with him being in Washington all the time, but I lived with only seeing my husband two days a week, sometimes less, for three terms.
“Then one morning we woke up in bed and he says he’s going to run for president. I said, oh, great, but deep down I was like, yeah, sure, that’ll never work out. Little did I know that he would be the first person in one hundred and thirty years, since James Garfield, to win the presidency as a Congressman. I didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t want it. What I want is my life back. We should be back at home in Dayton trying to sneak time to make love while our grade schoolers destroy the house, but his work has taken over our lives and prevented me from having the family I was supposed to have. It’s never going to happen with Alex.”
Jane listened quietly, at once trying to weigh this woman’s discomfort and anguish against the security needs of the people in these positions and the threats constantly looming over them. She never envied the protectees and the microscope they lived under at all, but this was the first time she’d run into someone who hadn’t at least in some way wanted it. Perhaps Bethany Morrin wasn’t able to think through her decision because she had no one to talk to among all these staffers.
“You know, sometimes I think about how I’m living a life I never expected to. What are any of us doing here, right? It might seem strange, but somebody has to do it,” she said with a grin.
As far as keeping her safe went, that would be most easily done if Jane could convince her to stick around the White House. But her attempts to be friendly and sympathetic didn’t seem to go very far.
“Well, I’m sure you applied for your job, or for something with the Secret Service, and then this was offered to you. And you accepted. Nobody asks to be First Lady. There’s no application process. We didn’t get hired. Just forty-six women and one man who’ve been dragged into a position with no responsibilities, no power, huge expectations, and a completely inappropriate level of attention,” Bethany said, her eyes frequently drawn to the people moving around the room.
Jane picked at the fabric of her pants over her knee, feeling like she was running out of arguments to employ.
“But that’s just it though. You have complete freedom to make it your own. People are listening to you. Advocate for what you care about. Be empowering and make a difference. I know it’s easy for me to tell someone to live in a stale marriage, but I hope you realize what kind of a chance you have,” she said, but the words had no sooner left her lips than she could see that the First Lady was unmoved.
“No, it’s done. I’ve filed my papers and I’m not going to wait around for the inevitable when it comes to Alex getting what he wants. If he’s not in love with me then he’s not with me. Nobody here knows what he was like in college before my friends started telling me I tamed him. He has a mind of his own.”
“Oh, I see,” Jane said meekly, her mind turning to the hard part of what she would have to say.
“I mean, we’ll see what he does at the hearing in Dayton, but I fully expect that one way or another it’ll work itself out and we’ll go our separate ways.”
Jane cleared her throat, reminding herself that she needed to start planning for the president’s trip home to Ohio. Leaning closer to the woman on the couch, Jane gently but firmly took her hand, demanding her attention.
“Just know what you are saying. The president gets death threats on a daily basis. Some of them are serious. If they think you are unprotected, they will go after you, using you to get to him, whether you’re married or not. You are taking a big risk. We’ll no longer legally be able to force you to accept our protection, but there are parts of being here that you will never actually be able to leave behind.”
Even though Jane had retained eye contact the entire time that she spoke, Bethany still managed to shake her head, growing defensive and angry.
“I don’t think you understand that I’m really nobody,” she said, and at this Jane had to laugh.
“Try having a name that’s one letter away from being synonymous with a complete lack of identity.”
Beth
any stood up and Jane followed suit. The feelings of resentfulness weren’t good and were bordering on unprofessional, but seeing someone knowingly put herself in danger was as close as Jane had come to failing to protect someone.
“I think you’ll see that I can take care of myself,” Bethany said when she’d escorted Jane around the boxes to the door, but she couldn’t turn away without making one more unexpected, perplexing comment. “I almost don’t talk to Alex at all anymore, but I can’t figure out why the one time I did he ended up mentioning you.”
5
Secret Service Headquarters
950 H St. NW
Washington, DC
At her desk a couple of weeks later, Jane still found herself chewing over what exactly she’d done that had been memorable to the president during their brief meeting in the Oval Office. The conversation had been routine, mundane, and for most of it he’d been talking to the vice president about personal matters. She was exhausted from the bike training even though she’d been growing stronger, but fortunately the final preparations for the president’s security itinerary for the rapidly upcoming divorce hearing in Dayton were coming together easily. She was getting too good at this.
The downside was the ease of her work left too much time for speculation about what had caught Alex Morrin’s attention and why he felt the need to say something to the First Lady about her. Perhaps out of all the people he crossed paths with on a daily basis, she had managed to comport herself with restrained dignity when inside she was having a fangirl freakout moment.
No, it probably wasn’t that.
Once she felt good enough about her security plan, it was time for her to take it up to the office of the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, another one of the repositories for the Secret Service’s brainpower. Here, they would review and integrate the plans into their database, as well as crosscheck the destination with any persons who had a threat risk profile in the area. They identify any Class III threats in the area—those being the most serious group with both the intent and the capability of carrying out an attack—and place people on them for the duration of the president’s visit to the area, even going into prisons if the person is incarcerated. Nothing is left to chance.
Jane handed over her folder to an agent in the division before turning to find Nathan Carr talking to someone at another desk.
“Make sure you realize I’m accounting for courthouse security in addition to local PD,” she said to the agent receiving the documents, but she found herself lingering and trying to listen in to what Nathan was working on rather than returning straight to her desk downstairs. As much as the space around the president was her job, she always wanted to hear about how they were simultaneously taking down threats to him all around the world.
It sounded like the White House had received a threatening phone call—the second most common method used to issue a threat behind sending letters in the mail—and they needed to compare samples of the audio against the database of sound recordings they had. Just when Jane thought she was about to hear something juicy, Nathan abruptly thanked the guy at the desk for checking over it and then turned to walk straight up to Jane.
She hadn’t imagined he’d even known she was standing there beside a computer terminal, but the way he looked at her with his big brown eyes was like he’d come up here for the explicit purpose of meeting with her. For all she knew, maybe he had.
Crossing her arms over her stomach, she looked at him without any particular regard, while he seemed to study her carefully as if she were a subject of one of his investigations.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you up here before,” he said, which struck Jane as a little invasive. She glanced at him coolly.
“That must be because we don’t cross paths very often. I’ve heard things are very busy with the Investigative Division,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows.
“They are. The White House is a magnet for the mentally unstable, people who feel resentful about positions of power. They show up at the gate, sometimes crashing into it with their cars, when making calls or writing letters isn’t enough. I thought I’d have a good grip on what I was facing when I came here, but the volume and the frequency are more than anything I could’ve imagined. No wonder they needed more people,” he said, shaking his head.
“I know,” Jane replied.
He scratched his neatly trimmed beard, perhaps realizing that he hadn’t gotten the conversation off on the right foot to engage her.
“But I heard you’re going to be riding with the president. No wonder I haven’t seen you if you’ve been spending all your time on a bike,” he said.
Jane smiled, finding it hard not to revel in the prospect of being by the president’s side to personally protect him for a little while, possibly a very little while depending on how quickly he gapped her.
“We’ll see how long I can keep up with him. I did run Cross Country in college and have done a few half marathons, but even with this training I’ve been doing I doubt it’ll be enough. At least he’ll be on a loop we can secure all the way around,” she said, but Nathan scoffed and shrugged his broad shoulders.
“But he hasn’t been out all winter, right? I think you’ll do better than you think. It’s not like Morrin was a pro. Late thirties after a winter full of sitting through meetings…he’s going to be out of shape.”
Tilting her head to the side, Jane wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know about that. He does keep a treadmill and stationary bike in the residence, and we can tell you exactly how many minutes he uses them. He spends quite a bit of time working out,” she said.
“So do I,” Nathan said, and Jane narrowed her eyes at him a little, wondering what he was really getting at. She decided she didn’t want to find out.
“But it hasn’t taken up all of my time. Not long ago I’d met with the First Lady. She’s already left town, but before she did she told me she wants to decline all protection as soon as possible,” Jane said, quickly adding, “I made it plain as day she is taking a serious risk. Chief Vale and I are trying to figure out what to do for her. I refuse to allow her to be completely unwatched.”
Nathan curled his lip as he breathed deeply through his nose.
“I’ll talk to my team about it. Even if she wants to avoid the personal protective detail, I bet we can still handle the perimeter work and even keep an eye on her without her really being aware of it.”
Jane blinked, actually delighted by the sound of it.
“Thank you,” she said, surprised by how much of a relief it felt that Bethany Morrin wouldn’t be fully exposed. If they could keep tabs on nearby threat profiles and be ready to respond, that could go a long way for her. The offer made Jane regret giving Nathan the cold shoulder. “But it’s not just the mentally sick who go after our protectees. There are all kinds of motivation. A lot of it is attention-seeking, glory, misguided beliefs, or a sense of opportunism.”
Nathan nodded.
“Oh, you’re right. No doubt about it. Every once in a while you get someone who thinks they’ve figured out how to change the world, and somehow only the president’s life is standing in the way. Those are the really dangerous ones, the ones who keep at it and make meticulous plans. That’s why the Investigative Division and the Uniformed Division are two sides of the same coin. Without the total package, assassination attempts would happen more frequently and succeed more often,” he said.
And even then sometimes it felt like they could never do enough, and keeping a few people alive only happened by pure luck, she thought.
“This is why I keep thinking back to that one Facebook threat. Even though it wasn’t long and caused a little stir in the media, too much went into it for it to just fade away into nothing,” she said. “Did you ever find out any more about that?”
Nathan sighed.
“That folder is still only a few pages thick. Olly Ip at the Post gave me the details on the tip, and the referrer said she sends
things she sees on Facebook to him about ten times a day. Constantly on Facebook. I went to the ends of the Earth and back and there was just nothing there. That Kevin Neilson doesn’t exist. I’ve got to conclude that, yeah, someone created a throwaway account to say something crazy and then just ditched it all.”
Jane’s eyes drifted to the floor, where their feet were a short distance apart. She’d learned well enough that nice and neat conclusions were often more than they could get, but there was still something about this that irked her.
“I’m sure I’ll let it go soon enough,” she mumbled. Nathan cleared his throat to draw her attention back up.
“Look, I know it’s not optimal that someone might be out there but it’s something we have to be able to live with, especially when the president is holed up tight in the White House with no reason to go anywhere,” he said with a comforting smile.
Jane was about to reluctantly agree when her radio buzzed in her pocket.
“This is Evans. I’d better take this,” she said, getting a nod from Nathan. When she got on the line and received the report, her jaw dropped. Her eyes shot to the clock on the wall. It was nearly 5 PM. There was no time. She wanted to ask Evans if he was sure, if he wasn’t in some way mistaken, but she knew he wouldn’t have told her if it hadn’t been the truth. All she could do was thank him.
“What is it?” Nathan asked, his eyes widening in increasing concern.
For some reason Jane had trouble getting the words out, and her mind got stuck on something Bethany Morrin had said about how wild her husband had been.
“Evidently the president is on his way out to meet with a woman.”
Jane and Nathan raced out of the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division office and took the stairs up two flights to the top floor, dashing past a pair of agents with quizzical looks on their faces as they approached the Joint Operations Command Center.