by Jason Letts
For a city boy, the sounds of the forest were unsettling, but he had no refuge left from which to plan his come-from-behind, upset victory against the president.
The cabin belonged to a man named Eric Hanlahan. He was someone Oliver Ip had come across on Facebook who stood out for his unvarnished views and willingness to say anything, no matter how outlandish or offensive. He was perfect, conjuring controversial statements at ease that Oliver himself never would’ve thought of for his various pseudonyms.
It took some time to finally gain the man’s trust enough to convince him to grant an interview, but when Oliver ventured along to the end of the dirt path that first time he discovered the old man dead in his bed after peering in through a window. So he did what any sensible person would do, dragged the body deeper into the woods to a crevasse where it could rot, set up a direct deposit for the electricity and internet bills from the man’s bank account, started posting using Hanlahan’s Facebook profile so no one would think anything was wrong, and began generally propping up a life that could prove useful in any number of ways.
The interview was a hit, and the only downside was that Oliver had to come back a couple of times since to handle the tax bills, which needed to be taken care of with forged checks. But based on the nest egg good ole’ Eric had in his bank account, there was no reason his afterlife couldn’t last another six or seven years.
Little did Oliver know how handy this would become, and opportunities to advance his interests were everywhere. A GMC pickup truck, newer than one might think and possibly the last thing the owner had bought, was nestled in a crook along one side of the building with an extended roof that formed a rudimentary garage.
Oliver nudged open the fraying, unpainted wooden door and flicked on a light that illuminated a simple but comfortable rustic abode. The smell of rodent feces had gotten worse since the last time he was here, but considering who was after him that was the least of his worries. Going to the pantry, he started pulling canned food off the shelf. There was enough of it to last him a year, and the propane stove worked like a charm.
Other than refusing to get into the bed where the death had occurred, Oliver was ready to become Eric Hanlahan for as long as it took to figure out a new plan. By now he assumed the Post had ratted him out and that Heath had been released by the FBI, who no doubt had put together that they’d missed the target by a fraction. He knew enough about how they worked to know they’d be scouring everything. Until the key moment when he made his big stand, Oliver Ip had to no longer exist.
Moving past the hearth to a corner of the structure, Oliver came to a large cabinet with a glass door revealing a number of rifles inside. He pulled open a drawer underneath with a handful of pistols, picking one up and holding it in his hands. The brand and model were unknown to him, and he put his index finger over the trigger while thinking about what a crude implement this was.
The gunshot startled him, sending a bullet ripping through the ceiling as he jumped nearly as high out of surprise and fright. Maybe he should figure out which part was the safety and how to tell whether or not the guns were loaded before he attempted to use one on anybody.
As he ate his creamed corn and Spam right out of the cans, Oliver felt ready to turn his attention to the task at hand. The pistol in his hand would feel more natural after a few more tests, but he’d never get to use it on his target unless he developed a genius plan. Luckily, being a genius was his specialty, but even then getting into the White House and getting within eyesight of the president was going to be the epitome of difficult.
The only thing driving him more than saving the people who were being tortured and experimented on was the thought of being hailed as a hero and taking the job of the one who’d betrayed the nation. It was still possible if he pulled it off in the right way.
But after entering the White House a thousand times he knew full well that sneaking in there was next to impossible. He’d seen with his own eyes what happened to people who showed up at the gate demanding to get in. Jumping the fence was a recipe for getting tackled or shot on sight.
He spent some time considering how he could impersonate someone else in the press pool. Was there someone from another news agency that remotely looked like him? It was getting late, and the fire in the hearth wasn’t doing much to keep him warm. Even if he could pass himself off as someone else, steal their credentials, and make sure that person was in no position to talk, he didn’t believe for a second that he could smuggle a gun inside the building. Getting to the president was just as unlikely.
Growing angry and desperate, regretful that he’d blown his best chance, he tried to think about how he could create an attack when the president was exposed. He had no way of knowing when Morrin came and went from the White House. Live speeches with rope lines for shaking hands wasn’t something the president was doing anymore since the campaign had ended.
It wasn’t long before he grew despondent, knowing a fool’s errand when he saw one. There was no way he’d make it close to the president with a gun in or outside the White House, much less get out alive. It would take a highly trained team with inside knowledge of the president’s plans to perform an attack with any chance of success, and that was something he simply didn’t have.
Hunkering down with a musty blanket on an old couch that was about a foot shorter than it needed to be for Oliver to get comfortable, he started to think the whole thing was a lost cause. He had no means to feasibly do anything about the grotesque procedures and mass graves they talked about on the Internet. The president had no weaknesses or vulnerabilities he could exploit. When he woke up, he expected that he would be Eric Hanlahan, living off disgusting canned food and water straight from the stream as long as he could.
But as he dozed, a thought came to him. Often his best ideas arrived moments before falling asleep, and this one startled him into being fully awake. He sat up with alertness that couldn’t be exceeded if a bear were pawing at the door.
What if the best way to attack the president wasn’t by attacking the president? What if on that trip to Dayton he’d had the wrong target in mind the entire time? All of the impenetrable security Alex Morrin had that left Oliver beating his head was only focused on one client. His ex-wife, Bethany Morrin, wouldn’t have any of that, but there was no way the knight in shining armor would stand by and let anything happen to her if she were suddenly at risk.
Oliver was fully conscious of the irony that if he had an ex-wife and someone threatened her, he’d shrug his shoulders and leave her for dead, but there was no way President Morrin would do that. He was a sucker.
Grabbing a poker and stoking the coals before tossing another log onto the burning embers, Oliver felt a new plan take shape in his mind, one arguably better than any he’d had before. He could hold Bethany Morrin at gunpoint and demand that the president reveal the details of the Human Enhancement Program and resign from office. The best part was he could broadcast the message with her own phone, since he no longer had one.
More perks of this new scheme came readily to mind. He wouldn’t have to kill anyone to get what he wanted, and he could still deny that he was ever involved in the Air Force One bombing once he was swept into office with the will of the people at his back. Everything would be so much easier to justify as necessary once the dismaying news of the experiments came to light. He was never going to actually hurt anyone, and these insignificant acts were a small price to pay for knowledge the public deserved to know.
Leaving the warmth of the hearth, Oliver flicked on the light and turned on the computer, a Hewlett Packard that had to be a decade old and came to life at an agonizingly slow pace. There were still gaps that he needed to solve, mainly where to locate Bethany Morrin and the best way to apprehend her so that they could record their performance. Surely she’d beg Alex Morrin to do what he asked. Once she knew what it was about, what her ex-husband was doing, she’d probably be a willing participant.
The computer took nearly ten mi
nutes to fully boot up, and the slow Internet service, NetZero, made loading every single page its own kind of torture. The only benefit was that it gave him time to figure out exactly what he needed to do. It took forever to get to the city of Dayton’s website to find public tax documents related to their home, which was listed under A. Morrin and B. Morrin.
With her address obtained, things were falling into place in a way Oliver never could’ve imagined. Too excited to sleep, he knew that hitting the road and driving through the night was the optimum use of his time anyway. But before he could drive for seven hours to Dayton, he had to cover his tracks and prepare as he always did.
That meant burying the license plates to his car in case he had to come back. His clothes ended up in the dirt too once he’d found something of Hanlahan’s to wear, dark brown work overalls and a ragged flannel jacket. A wide-brimmed hat would make him less recognizable. Antsy to go, everything seemed to take longer than necessary. The truck’s keys weren’t in plain sight, requiring an extensive search, but eventually he opened the truck door and stowed the pistol in the glove box. The search had turned up a little bit of cash as well. The last thing he did before climbing in and taking off was filling a bag with canned food as another precaution.
The truck didn’t do much better on the bumpy dirt road than his Fiesta did, but once he made it out onto the highways he felt like there was nothing else standing in his way. Interstate 68 was a breeze, and I-70 West would take him clear through Columbus all the way to his destination. Other than being forced to stop for gas halfway there, he did nothing for seven hours besides hold the wheel and listen to the wind whip through the slightly opened window.
The sun was coming up by the time he pulled into town, following directions to a section of the city called Huber Heights that looked regal in a way he found offensive. After cruising around the neighborhood a few times, he made it onto Moorfield Drive and noticed a car pulling out halfway down the street. He scanned the building numbers and had a hunch that it might be Bethany Morrin leaving for work, another lucky stroke.
When he rolled by the home the car had just left, he could scarcely notice the house number for the grandeur of the place. It was like the mansion in Home Alone, a two-story brick building with light posts at the end of the drive and little dog statues at the edge of the front walk.
But he couldn’t gawk for long, deciding instead to try to catch up to the car, which had turned onto Rosebury St. and was heading toward the city’s center. It took some heavy acceleration, but Oliver managed to catch up enough to be able to keep his eye on it. Once the car parked by the side of the road, he pulled over a few spaces behind, getting himself into perfect position to watch Bethany Morrin in a purple jacket walk across the street all alone and enter a building.
The sign on the building wasn’t legible from where he was, but it was some kind of office. Taking a deep breath, Oliver realized he’d made it. He took the pistol from the glove box and began to consider his plans. Go into the building and see if he could find her? Wait for her to leave for lunch? Follow her home?
Any of the above seemed perfectly suitable, and it began to feel like no matter what he did there was no way he could fail. All he had to do was find a good way to put the gun to her head and start giving the president orders.
He had it in his lap, loaded, and now he even knew where the safety was.
14
Secret Service Headquarters
950 H St. NW
Washington, DC
Boxes and boxes. Her certificates from the training academy were in a box. Her middle school racing trophies that she’d kept on a shelf were in a box. The pictures of her parents and her extended family were deep at the bottom of a box so that they couldn’t see her packing the rest of her things up and leaving her job in shame.
Chief Vale poked his head in. He had a somber look on his face and was stooping a little as he did when he had something weighing on his mind.
“I got wind that the OIG is putting the finishing touches on their report. We should have it soon,” he said.
Jane put her hand on her desk and sighed.
“I figured. It’s funny how quickly that can get churned out now that the writing is on the wall,” she said.
“I’m still hoping for the best,” he said, though not even he could say it with any real conviction. Vale took one look at the boxes, didn’t say anything, and then slipped away. When his wispy blond hair was gone, Jane hung her head. She’d promised herself she would make it easy on him, saving him from having to fire her by resigning. He’d taken a chance on her, and she wouldn’t kick up a fuss or cause problems when it was time to go.
Her apartment looked about the same as her office. In fact, pretty much all she’d done since the crash was pack up her belongings, even though she still didn’t know where she would go or what she would do. Flopping back home in Colorado with her parents was an unpalatable but likely result. Maybe she was destined for trucking logistics after all.
As for kissing Alex Morrin, Jane wasn’t sure what kind of consolation prize that was, but it wouldn’t pay her rent or keep her fridge full. She hadn’t heard anything from him since the incident, maybe because he was the president and had better things to do than chase the Secret Service’s most glaring embarrassment.
When she heard footsteps in the hall outside her door, she figured it was Vale coming back to tell her he’d gotten the Inspector General’s report and that it was everything they expected, but instead it was Nathan Carr with a funny look on his face.
“Hey, come on upstairs. There’s something you should see,” he said.
It was nice to hear him speaking to her without pity in his voice, like it was just another day at the office doing the work they always do. He didn’t even seem to notice the boxes.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, instead slipping away and starting down the hall. Jane dropped one of her books into the box on her desk and moved to catch up to him. Considering she’d already dumped her entire workload on Diwecki and the other logistics & staffing agents, she had nothing else to do. It was impossible not to be intrigued by something going on at the Live Monitoring Station, and setting foot in it one last time would be a treat she’d need to find a way to relish.
“It’s looking like a busy day. We had another threat come through that seems very concerning, but there’s no way I could miss this,” he said with his hands in his pockets.
“What’s going on?” she asked, but he seemed content to leave her in the dark. “What’s the new threat?”
Nathan didn’t answer that question either, and they got into the elevator and hit the button for the top floor. Jane spent the ride wondering if he wasn’t telling her because he was already mentally coming to terms with how she wouldn’t be privileged enough to have access to any of this information very soon. But the smug look on his bearded face made her think he may well have had something up his sleeve instead.
People were coming and going from the Joint Operations Command Center frequently enough that the doors never stayed still. When the activity here picked up, that meant something was going on and quite often one of their protectees was in trouble. Did Nathan bring her up here so she could see someone trying to get to President Morrin? As best she knew it was another quiet day in the White House for him.
They made it inside and found a perch near the back of the room, where they could see Watch Commander Winger and the other agents inside busily handle another situation. From the looks of their faces, this was serious and not at all with the hint of frivolity the evening at the nightclub carried.
Jane peered at the maps and images on the big screens against the wall, trying to get a sense of what the streetscapes were showing her. Everything looked calm as best she could tell, but they clearly weren’t looking at the White House.
“Where is this? What are we looking at?” she asked, finally glancing over the shoulder of an agent at one of the compute
r terminals who was in contact with the Dayton, Ohio police department. “Dayton? Is somebody visiting there? I thought the only protectee in Dayton was…Bethany Morrin.”
“Yup,” Nathan said, rolling from his heels to his toes with his hands still in his pockets.
“But who would ever want to want to give her a problem?” Jane wondered aloud. Bethany hadn’t gotten so much as a dirty look since she returned home. Nathan was tight-lipped again, and Jane had had enough of his withholding, but fortunately Winger called out to the floor in a way that put the issue to rest.
“Can we match the on-the-ground photos with the I.D.?” he asked, and a moment later the screen changed from the map to a pair of images, one a man in a pickup truck wearing a flannel woodman jacket and the other the driver’s license picture of Oliver Ip. Jane gasped so exuberantly that she had to cover her mouth before she distracted the people working around them.
“You’re kidding me. What is he doing there?” she asked, turning fully to Nathan. He was wise to take her focus as a sign that further obfuscation would not be tolerated.
“Looks like he ran for it but could only keep a low profile for so long. Best we can tell he’s switched targets, perhaps to someone who seems like an easier victim. I believe I recall someone around here saying a jackal might do that. Oh, yeah, it was you.”
Jane turned to the screen, her eyes widening. Had she actually predicted this would happen? Bethany’s detail had its own management team out of the Columbus office, and as Jane watched a live feed of the parked red pickup truck she hoped they had done an adequate job protecting the ex-First Lady.
“How did they find him?” Jane asked. Nathan’s grin was a mile wide.
“For all of his computer tricks, he doesn’t seem to have much experience tailing a mark. It was pretty obvious when he started following her to work and just sat in his truck without getting out right behind where she parked. She’s been alerted to the threat and has an agent on her inside her workplace. Now we’re just getting our pieces in place, because if he knows how to make bombs he could have anything on him.”