“Again, I’m sorry about Vice President Davenport, Kendra,” the director said, expressing his condolences in person after doing so on the phone the morning after Davenport’s death. “A very impressive woman, and a terrible loss for this country to bear.” He studied her briefly, before resuming. “And a terrible loss for you personally, as well.”
Rendine nodded, responding with her eyes while waiting for McGrath to continue.
“I’ve never lost a protectee, to natural causes or anything else, while working a detail, so I’m not going to say something as stupid as I know what you’re going through. But I do know the pressures presidential and vice presidential details are under and the emotional blowback losing a protectee has on the psyche.”
“I wish I’d done more,” Rendine said, honestly. “I wish there’d been something more I could have done.”
“When I took this job, I personally interviewed the few Secret Service agents still alive who’d been with Kennedy in Dallas. I wanted to understand the toll it took on their careers and their lives. I wanted to better educate myself so I’d be able to better manage the worst-case scenarios of being an agent. You know the common denominator that emerged? None of them felt effective as agents anymore. They started looking for anything and everything, stopped trusting their instincts, after those instincts had so badly let them down in their own minds. Some continued to work details, others wrote books down the road, but all said the effects never wore off or even mitigated. For the rest of their lives and careers, they’d be known as the detail agents who lost a president.”
Rendine remained silent, again waiting for Director McGrath to continue. She found it strange that he’d started along these lines instead of plunging straight into her suspicions, which were the basis of this meeting Teddy Von Eck had arranged.
McGrath leaned forward, empathy widening his eyes even farther. “How would you feel about moving into a more administrative role here at headquarters, Kendra, at least for a time?”
Something scratched at Rendine’s spine. “Sir?”
“I’m not necessarily talking about anything permanent. Let’s just wait for the dust to settle and then go through the usual psychological protocols to see if the field’s still calling your name.”
“I’m not sure I know…”
McGrath nodded as if he did, picking up on Rendine’s thought after her voice drifted off. “I can make it an order, but I’d rather not have to. I want this to be your choice, you doing what’s best for yourself, above all else.”
Rendine fidgeted in her chair, her thoughts a jumble. Teddy Von Eck had called her to say he’d set the meeting after running all the numbers for Director McGrath. He assured her it would be just the two of them, as she had insisted, since the situation was so dire and her conclusions so potentially catastrophic to the country that she didn’t dare share her suspicions or evidence with anyone else.
“Teddy said you wanted to see me right away,” she told the director, searching lamely for a bridge to reach what she’d really come here to discuss.
“He insisted that I see you right away, sharing the same concerns I’ve expressed. You have a lot of friends in the service, Kendra … something to take solace in right now.”
Rendine clawed through the confusion slowly enveloping her. “Teddy didn’t raise any of my suspicions with you?”
“Suspicions?” McGrath repeated blankly.
“From our discussion last night.”
“He was concerned, Kendra, and with good reason, since Vice President Davenport is the first executive-level protectee to die on our watch in almost sixty years.”
“What about the issues I raised with Ted pertaining to her death?” Rendine asked, trying to couch her words as carefully as she could.
McGrath didn’t respond, not directly anyway. “Very few of us know what you’re feeling right now. Especially as head of a detail losing a protectee, even due to natural causes. That’s a lot of baggage, a lot of emotional weight to bear…”
McGrath kept talking, but a single phrase stuck in Rendine’s mind.
Even due to natural causes.
Hadn’t Teddy Von Eck voiced her suspicions to the director? Had he lied to her? Or had McGrath ignored his assertions?
Rendine felt suddenly disconnected from reality, the director’s voice droning on in her head without any of his words registering in her mind. She was looking at him but not really seeing him, her thoughts lost behind her intentions. This conversation was going in an entirely different direction than she’d been expecting, one that left her discomfited and her neck and shoulders stiffened enough to send throbbing pangs, akin to a migraine headache, through her skull.
“I’m sure you’d agree this is best for all concerned,” she heard McGrath say, finally registering his words again.
Since Rendine hadn’t been listening, she had no idea what “this” was, though she suspected it was a lengthened version of his original point.
How would you feel about moving into a more administrative role here at headquarters, Kendra, at least for a time?
That hadn’t been a suggestion, though, as much as an already determined intention, not so much for her own good as to get her out of the way. Had McGrath chosen to disregard what she’d shared with Teddy Von Eck the night before? Had Teddy failed to follow through on his promise to bring the director up to speed in the process of setting up this meeting?
Someone was to blame. Someone didn’t want the truth coming out.
Someone was involved in whatever had gotten the vice president of the United States murdered.
The director? Von Eck?
Had the Secret Service itself been compromised?
“I think you’re right,” Rendine heard herself say, forcing herself to play along, in full awareness that there was no sense in persisting.
McGrath rose, a clear sign it was time for her to take her leave. “We’ll get this sorted out, Kendra. Everything will be fine.”
“I know, sir.”
“Clay,” he corrected again. “Please.”
“Clay,” Rendine said, obliging him.
The director smiled, the gesture looking wholly genuine. He led Rendine toward the door. This was the time when he might have thrown a comforting arm around her shoulders, before such contact became tacitly forbidden by all the new protocols. She was glad for those protocols in that moment, which kept McGrath from feeling the tension that had swept through her. Her legs felt heavy, the office door seeming to get farther away instead of closer.
“Take a few weeks for your head to clear,” he said, opening that door when they finally reached it. “Then we’ll see about finding you a proper position to settle your thoughts and chart a new path forward.”
Whatever that meant, Rendine thought, as she nodded.
“I’d like you to see one of our counselors as well, Kendra,” McGrath told her, as she moved past him. “Someone you can share anything and everything about this with.”
Just like I did with Teddy Von Eck, and look where that got me.
* * *
Rendine was still trembling slightly when she emerged from the building. She’d set her phone to silent but could feel it vibrating inside her shoulder bag, so she plucked it out.
“I just texted you a photo from this number,” Brixton told her.
Rendine checked her phone. “Yup, here it is. Not very flattering.”
“Death tends to have that effect.”
“This is the man from the tunnel,” she realized.
“That’s right. I thought you might want to show it to Patricia Trahan, see if he looks familiar.”
“I’ll reach out to her.”
“You sound … shaken,” Brixton said to her, after a pause.
“I just met with the director of the Secret Service.”
“How’d that go?”
“Let me get back to you on that, Robert, after I figure it out for myself.”
CHAPTER
46
>
WASHINGTON, DC
Madam First Lady, I’m sure you understand our concern,” the attorney general of the United States said to Merle Talmidge. “We’re only seeking your assurance that the situation has been contained.”
She was seated on her husband’s immediate right, the president occupying the head of the conference table that dominated the White House Situation Room. “It has been contained.”
“We’ve heard that assurance before, with all due respect, when it came to Vice President Davenport.”
“And it was correct.”
“Yet now we’re faced with this matter of the head of the vice president’s security detail. Can we be certain Davenport shared nothing with her?”
“From what we’ve been able to gather, yes. All she has to go on is supposition, assumptions as to my husband’s condition, and a few holes we failed to adequately fill that are no longer an issue.”
“So we should accept your assurances at face value?”
“Assurances about what?” Corbin Talmidge asked his wife, turning toward her suddenly and freezing the breath of those seated around the table.
The president seldom commented during these meetings—less and less as his condition continued to worsen over the past few weeks. And when he did speak, it was usually to offer some off-kilter comment on the topic they were discussing, or some irrelevant non sequitur. But today he seemed more engaged, which often led to increased levels of anxiety and left the other participants in the meeting waiting for the first lady to respond.
“What we discussed yesterday,” she told her husband calmly, patting his forearm.
“We did?” he asked, his gaze bearing the look of a driver who just realized he was lost.
“Yes,” the first lady nodded. “And you agreed the steps we were about to take were necessary, mandated. That the future of the country needed to be secured and the only way to assure that was to take the kind of drastic measures that would keep you in power long enough to finish your work.”
“My work is very important,” the president agreed.
“Yes, it is.”
“I’m president of the United States.”
“Yes, you are.”
That seemed to reassure Corbin Talmidge. “Are we going out today?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“To give another speech, like the one I gave the other day.”
For a moment, the first lady thought her husband might have been caught in a moment of clarity, the once brilliant mind that faded in and out with increasing frequency sharpening for at least that moment. Then his expression faded, the emptiness returning, the brief control of his train of thought lost.
“The one where everyone was cheering and it snowed inside.”
He was talking about the speech he’d given after accepting his party’s nomination, when he was running for his first term, the “snow” in question being confetti that had dropped from the ceiling as he stood on the stage, triumphantly holding Merle Talmidge’s hand overhead, clasped in his own. In that moment, anything and everything seemed possible.
Nearly four years had passed since that glorious time. Corbin Talmidge now faced the end of his term, with no hope whatsoever for reelection, given that the rigors of the campaign trail would be sure to expose the deteriorating mental condition that had dominated the last year of his first term, with the November election just five months away. No way he could ever endure the campaign trial, of course. But in a mere two days such concerns would be the last thing on any American’s mind, the entire election rendered an afterthought.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER …
The president had wanted to step down upon receiving the initial diagnosis of his condition and had told his wife of his intentions to do just that, sharing them with no one else.
“Let’s think about it,” she’d said.
“What’s there to think about?”
“The country.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. I need to speak with the vice president and begin planning for an orderly transition.”
“Let’s take some time here,” Merle Talmidge had urged. “Let’s not rush into things.”
“Not rush? I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to string together coherent sentences. We need to make the announcement that I won’t be running for reelection, before it becomes obvious why. Do that, and I can preserve my dignity, while giving Vice President Davenport time to get her own campaign up and running.”
The first lady’s expression wrinkled in derision at the mere consideration of such a possibility. “What about preserving the country?”
* * *
It was in that moment that the first lady had conceived the basis of the plan they’d gathered in the Situation Room to discuss the final preparation for today. Merle Talmidge had managed to delay her husband’s resignation long enough for his condition to deteriorate enough to leave his intentions in her hands. She also succeeded in getting him to replace cabinet officials with individuals she knew would be sympathetic and supportive of her intentions, because she’d vetted them before feeding their names to her husband. She needed the cabinet on her side to enact her plan, and she had managed to build an inner White House circle that was convinced of the necessity of the actions to which she was committed. If her husband’s legacy couldn’t be one thing, it would be another: of being the man who presided over the greatest attack the United States had ever weathered, an attack that would change America forever under his stout leadership, which was no more than him repeating the lines that she fed to him.
Merle Talmidge could read all the cards clearly because she had stacked the deck.
“Why are all these people here?” the president asked her, as if suddenly realizing they weren’t alone.
“They’re helping us,” Merle Talmidge told her husband, as the five men and two women gathered before them remained stiff and silent.
“Helping us what?”
“Save the country.”
“Is it in danger?”
“You know it is, dear.”
“From what?”
“Itself. The country has strayed outside the lines and we need to bring it back between them,” the first lady said, as much to the group assembled before her as to her husband, lest any of them be harboring doubts about what was to take place in just two days’ time.
“What lines?” Corbin Talmidge asked her, an edge of agitation starting to creep into his voice. “I don’t know what you mean by lines.”
“To act outside the interests of what’s best for the United States.”
“Then why didn’t you just say that?” He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “I don’t know who any of these people are.”
“They want to help you make the country strong again, save it from itself.”
“I can’t do that alone.”
“That’s why they’re here.”
The president glanced across the table at those seated around it and smiled. To a man and woman, they smiled back.
Merle Talmidge elected to direct her next remarks toward her husband, even though they were meant for the seven officials before her. If the operation went bad, they would be labeled coconspirators. The press and opposition party would claim a coup had been staged. Recriminations would mount with all the congressional hearings. But they weren’t going to get that chance.
“Madam First Lady,” said the secretary of state, “we need to get back to the matter at hand, specifically these potential setbacks to our operation.”
“We must consider postponing,” interjected the secretary of defense, “until we are certain of containment.”
Merle Talmidge forced herself to remain calm, not about to reveal how roiled such comments left her. “Postponement means failure.”
“And not postponing risks recriminations.”
“You miss my point, Madam Secretary,” the first lady said to the Homeland Security secretary. “If we postpone now, we invit
e our adversaries, traitors to this nation all, to dig deeper. In this city, digging a hole is an end in itself, even where there’s nothing to be found. Proceeding as scheduled is the surest way to avoid the very recriminations you so fear and to force them to drop their shovels.”
“No one here doubts the urgency of this operation,” said the national security adviser. “But we’re only going to get one shot, and we must assure ourselves the conditions are right.”
“They will never be more right than they are right now—or more necessary. We already went over this when we discussed the threat posed by the vice president.”
“You mean the fact that she picked up the president’s deteriorating condition so easily,” said the director of the FBI. “I don’t need to remind you, Madam First Lady, that condition is only going to worsen, further complicating our task.”
“No,” Merle Talmidge said softly, gazing at her husband, “you don’t have to remind me.”
“And no potential candidate for vice president is going to sign on with reservations even approaching those,” added the president’s chief of staff.
“Unless the candidate came from inside this room.”
“Do you have someone in mind, Madam First Lady?”
“Yes. Me.”
Heads immediately hung downward, expressions suddenly reluctant to meet Merle Talmidge’s, at this announcement, which had struck her all at once a few days earlier. It was natural. It was obvious. She was the perfect person for the job—in point of fact, the only person for the job. Her husband had agreed, even excited about the possibility, in a moment that had already faded from his memory.
“The announcement would be made in the immediate aftermath of the attack, stressing that it would only be temporary, until the country is fully up and running again,” the first lady added defensively.
“Of course,” said the national security adviser, “it would also position you to take your husband’s place on the ticket, should the election go forward.”
Murder on the Metro Page 20