The Washington Decree

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Rosalie looked at her little wristwatch. It was only 2:00 P.M.; she could be at Doggie’s office by six, at the latest.

  The cries of the jubilant crowd faded in the background as she stumped past the FEMA vans towards the control post at Penn Station. When I get to Washington I’ll have the guard call her out in front of the White House, she thought. I’m sure she’s at work today. I know she’ll be glad to see me. Yes. I’ll borrow two thousand—no, maybe four—and I’ll be home before midnight. Then, if I call the duty officer at the Barkley Avenue station, he’ll be able to tell me what to do—whether I can just come there and fetch my boys. Maybe they can also tell me what to do with Frank’s body. Keeping her eyes fixed on the soldiers as they searched bags and briefcases at the checkpoint, she attempted momentarily to banish the image of her boy, lying stiff and alone in an ice-cold room. She tried to concentrate on the soldiers and their hard, vigilant expressions—anything to keep her from screaming.

  She headed straight for the train station’s closest entrance and held out her bag to the two soldiers who were to lead her through the control post. “Your seat reservation, ma’am, may we see it?” said one of them.

  The spell was broken, and thoughts of Frank engulfed her once more. The cold body, the dead stare, but also the soft laugh that long ago had been capable of stopping her bastard of a husband from becoming violent. Seat reservation, they’d said. Back to real life—just like that. She’d seen the roadblocks and knew they meant trouble. She’d also heard some awful stories about things that had been happening, and she’d been able to smell burning tires from the barricade at Brinsmade and Huntington. So how could she let herself be taken so unawares? How had she ever imagined she could take off for Washington and beg Doggie for money, just like that? She, who hadn’t even sent Doggie a word of consolation when her father was arrested? What in the world had made her think she was so special?

  It was then that she felt a choking grip on her heart. She managed to take a deep breath and raise one arm to her breast while she tried to grab one of the soldiers with the other. They yelled something at her; she didn’t hear what, only that she should let go. A couple of passersby tried to steady her as she began toppling over, but they couldn’t keep her upright. Nor did Rosalie care any longer. All she could see was her Frank, lying there in Weir Creek Park, dying slowly.

  “Ohh, my little boy!” she wailed. “Oh, my beloved son, what have we done to you?”

  CHAPTER 22

  She’d been completely certain that T. Perkins would contact her. Now almost two days had gone by and her hopes were beginning to fade. But for a few hours, the period she’d been waiting was exactly the amount of time her father had left to live, and each minute felt like an inevitable tug towards eternity.

  Yet Doggie still waited.

  Even though it was Saturday, Chief of Staff Lance Burton had called in all the West Wing’s personnel. Two days ago there’d been an attempt on Jansen’s life, and everyone had to go through a deluge of questioning until every detail and eventuality was laid bare. Yesterday they’d sat in their offices for most of the day, waiting to be called in, but answering the Secret Service’s questions to their satisfaction took time. This was a fundamental, serious breach of security, and it was not going to happen again. There was no talk of who had staged the attack, probably because no one knew.

  A couple of Ben Kane’s men and an interrogation expert from Homeland Security who looked like a fat accountant in a knit sleeveless vest questioned the staff according to rank. First the personnel around the Oval Office, then Burton and Sunderland’s staff, then Donald Beglaubter’s and Wesley’s. Thus did they work their way slowly through all offices and workplaces. It was going to be a long day, and Doggie was way at the end of the list. She absolutely had to get hold of Perkins in the meantime. If they didn’t get a stay of execution, it would all be over in sixty hours.

  * * *

  —

  By the time she reached the gatekeeper at 5:55 Saturday morning, she could sense that Jansen was already in the White House. It was something one just knew, as though his presence was nothing less than the White House’s heartbeat. Okay, at least he apparently hadn’t been seriously injured, because the day before there’d been a surge of rumors to the contrary, including one indicating that the perpetrator who’d thrown the hand grenade had been killed on the spot, together with two other men, possibly security.

  A couple of Kane’s men were waiting out in the lobby for the personnel and asked them to sit down and wait in their offices until someone came to interview them. Exactly like the day before.

  Never before had it been so still in the White House. No one could ignore the deadly atmosphere, and people simply couldn’t bring themselves to do any work. It would have to wait until the threat of being accused of something had passed.

  Doggie had thoughts of her own on the matter. Now maybe her colleagues were beginning to understand what it was like to be her.

  She considered dialing Wesley’s extension, then dropped the idea. She didn’t want to do him any unintentional harm. Not that anyone was thinking much about their careers these days, but still she knew it wouldn’t be good for him to have anything to do with her. So, if she wanted his help in this overmonitored mausoleum, she’d have to be discreet.

  She got up from her seat, tucked a protocol file under her arm, and strode resolutely and rapidly past the paralyzed offices in the direction of Wesley’s domain. There were a hundred feet at the most from his office to the Oval Office where President Jansen probably was sitting now. She would have to face a barricade of gray and black suits and sets of vigilant eyes, and everyone would regard her as toxic waste. But Doggie hugged the file close to her body and looked straight ahead. When it came down to it, the press secretary’s office was the main focus of her sphere of activity, and who could know what important information she might have for Wesley Barefoot? She simply had to appear to have the definitive answer to any and all questions—that was what mattered. That, and Wesley being in his office.

  A pair of men with heavy jaws and eyebrows stopped her in front of Wesley’s door, pawed her body routinely, opened her file, studied it, and asked why she hadn’t stayed in her office as she’d been ordered. Then they looked her straight in the face, noting her defiant lips as she answered. Okay, she’d go back and sit in her office, but in the meantime they’d better let her do her work so that Wesley Barefoot and the president received the material they were waiting for. Then she waited twenty minutes outside his door with the file under her arm, enveloped in vigilant gazes that would have no problem discovering if, against all odds, she’d managed to conceal a deadly weapon in some flap or corner of her diabolical womanliness.

  Wesley didn’t come out himself; two men left his office, and she was shown in. He was sitting behind his desk, hands wrapped around his morning coffee. He didn’t seem himself. He attempted a smile when he saw her, but it didn’t work.

  “This sure is a heck of a workplace today,” she said.

  He nodded. “Then you’ve heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  His head fell a bit. “Then you haven’t.” He took a deep breath. “Well, you’ll be told in a while anyway, so fuck procedure. Donald Beglaubter is dead.” His look was almost apologetic as she fumbled after the armrest of his extra chair and sat down.

  “Oh, no, say it’s not true, Wesley!”

  He was studying the top of his desk. “Unfortunately, yes. Donald was killed instantly during the assassination attempt yesterday.”

  “Oh, God.” She felt her neck and chest getting clammy. One of her best friends in recent years was dead and there was Wesley, acting as though he’d only just received the news himself. How could he do this? He was the White House press secretary, for Christ’s sake, so if the acting chief of communications were dead, he would have been the first to know. Who else but Wesley could take over Do
nald’s tasks, now that Lance Burton had his hands full as acting chief of staff?

  “No, that doesn’t make sense,” she said slowly. “We were all here all day yesterday, dammit. How can something like that be kept secret for so long? There’s something wrong here. You must have known this since yesterday, so why the hell haven’t you told me?”

  “Believe me, Doggie, I know far from everything.” He came over and crouched before her, trying to catch her eye. “I didn’t know,” he said, but she wasn’t ready to look at anyone just now.

  “Why’d you come here, Doggie?”

  She had to swallow a couple of times before words would come. “Oh, Wesley, I’ve got to get in to see Jansen. Can’t you help me?” She held her head in her hands. “Jansen must have my father’s execution stayed. It’s possible that Dad isn’t guilty, Wesley. I’m believing this more and more, but I don’t have the time to prove it. T. Perkins is working on it, but we need to have more time.” She grabbed his hands. “Wesley, listen: You’ve got to help me.”

  He looked at her with sad eyes. It wasn’t a good sign.

  “I can’t, Doggie,” he said.

  The words had her in a stranglehold; the room felt like a straitjacket. The clamminess on her chest had turned to drops of sweat. That was some way to have a death sentence flung in your face.

  “Try!” she said.

  He stood up and leaned against the bookcase with his hands behind his back, trying to get the situation under control. “I have to warn you, Doggie. I don’t think it would be wise to bring up your father’s case.”

  He put his hand firmly over his ID badge and motioned for her to do the same. “Don’t you know how dangerous it is to be in this building right now?” he whispered. “Donald is dead, and others are dead or missing. There’s so much I’d like to understand, that Jansen could probably help me with, but I don’t get to be alone with the president anymore. I was with him in the Oval Office yesterday, trying to explain why we had to change course, but he stopped me. He wouldn’t hear of it and said that, according to his information, the situation wasn’t so bad, that it would soon improve. Then he asked me to leave.” Wesley licked his lips. “He asked me to go, and only come back when I was sent for. I’ve written two speeches for him since then, but we never discussed them at all. It’s like he’s sealed himself off in that damn office; even Lance Burton practically can’t get an audience with him. I think the incident the day before yesterday shocked the hell out of him. He definitely doesn’t seem okay.” She nodded. Three times had Jansen been a hair’s breadth from death, and each time people who meant a lot to him were murdered in his place. Of course he wasn’t okay.

  She stood up slowly. “I’m going in there,” she said, loud enough so that those who were listening in couldn’t miss hearing her.

  Wesley tried in vain to stop her before she closed the door behind her. The two guards, each with a finger pressed against his earpiece, stopped her in her tracks. “Yes, sir,” muttered one of them into his lapel and turned to Doggie. “You are to return to your office. Now!”

  Wesley opened his door, wanting to speak to her, but was ordered back into his office like some underling. Everyone was under orders to stay in his or her office until the investigation was finished, they said, himself included. This had to be hard to swallow for a man who’d had such a brilliant career. Even her dear Wesley hadn’t the slightest chance of helping her. Unfortunately she was beginning to understand this all too well.

  * * *

  —

  When she made it back to her shoebox of an office, she called the Highland County Sheriff’s Office and was told that a serious situation had just come up, but that they’d convey her message. Then she called T. Perkins’s cell phone five times and got a voice mail message each time. It was enough to drive a person crazy.

  “Please, T!” she begged. “Call me as soon as you can, okay? Call my cell. You have my number.”

  She ran her hand over her face and suddenly felt ill. The despair and impotence had solidified like a lump of lead in her stomach. If she tried to stand, she’d throw up.

  What in the world was she to do? Why had she read so much about how they executed people? It was all so terrible. How could she let them strap her father’s body to the gurney and tacitly watch it happen? Watch her diaper-clad father lying there, waiting for the Pentothal to glide through the tube and thirty seconds later render him unconscious as it reached his brain? See the next poison wave of Pavulon collapse his diaphragm and lungs, and finally, the calcium chloride as it paralyzed his heart and killed him? She momentarily lost her balance and staggered backward against a low set of shelves where she normally stored her half-neglected work cases in tall piles. One pile began to topple, taking the next one with it. Her hand shot out instinctively to inhibit the avalanche and hit the Buddha figurine that had been functioning as a paperweight atop a stack of documents. She took it in her hand to look at it. It felt cold and strange and somehow also fragile, like a relic from the past that could not stand being worshiped or touched.

  She looked deep into the figurine’s lifeless eyes and called back to mind a busy merchant street in a distant place, from a distant time. A time when Jansen had been close by, where she had been with people who wished her well. Then she hugged the figurine and felt her determination return. If getting through to Jansen was completely impossible, maybe she could go see Thomas Sunderland instead and show him the Buddha. He would doubtlessly despise her for it, but he knew what it meant. Sunderland could let her in to see Jansen if he wanted—he, and no one else. Maybe she could bargain with him, promise to quit her job if he’d arrange an audience with the president. Yes, that’s how it had to be. Donald Beglaubter was dead, and no one she liked in this place was persuading her to stay. So why not quit?

  She passed several offices with closed doors through which she could just make out fragments of conversation. The interrogations were well under way.

  The two security guards in front of Wesley Barefoot’s door spotted the little Buddha as she approached the West Wing’s inner sanctum and passed a signal to a well-built guard standing before Thomas Sunderland’s office. There was a world of difference between the two of them as he towered over her and stuck out his hand. The guard was Ben Kane, a man she hated with a passion, the security guard who had testified against her father. How could they allow him to serve in the White House when his miserable job of searching Toby O’Neill was the indirect cause of Mimi Jansen being shot? She didn’t understand it.

  “Let me see that thing,” he said, with a special agent’s many years’ professional suspiciousness. And, with approximately the same number of years’ defiance of authority that her work on the edge of politics had given her, she answered: “It’s a Buddha. It weighs about two pounds and is made of some shitty, cheap material, so be careful with pressing it too hard. It’s hollow and empty inside and in no way represents a threat to society or the length of your career. It may be ugly, but it was a present from President Jansen, and now I’m on my way to him to give it back. Understand, Mr. Kane?”

  She’d been hoping he’d step aside so she could continue towards the last security guard who stood in front of the Oval Office, but Kane’s hand flew so surprisingly fast to the figurine that all she noticed before he grabbed it was the clinking of his gold bracelets.

  “Let go!” she shouted, immediately increasing the other guards’ level of preparedness from standby to alert. Some of them reached for their shoulder holsters, but Doggie didn’t care. It was her little souvenir, and it symbolized something very important in her life. “Come to me if you need help” was what Jansen had said at the time. “This figurine stands for a bond of eternal friendship.”

  How in the world was she going to make it through to Jansen if she were attacked by these mountainous testosterone meat loaves?

  She made as if to force her way through, but Ben Kane took her
shoulder in a hard grip and shoved her towards the door of Sunderland’s office. She could see in his eyes that he was considering how to handle the situation, and she feared that he’d do her harm. Then she suddenly slipped backward as the door opened inward and there was Vice President Sunderland standing in the doorway with a cold expression. He said nothing, merely eyed the security people racing to the scene, until everyone had settled down. Then he took the little icon and indicated with a nod of his head that she should follow him into his office.

  Doggie hadn’t been in there since Sunderland had been named vice president. She looked around the room and felt the creases lining up on her forehead. No matter where one looked, the room bore witness to Sunderland’s might and self-exaltation. If she counted closely, she’d be able to find at least twenty framed photos of Thomas Sunderland in the process of shaking the hand of famous Americans. There were also at least ten pictures from his youthful prime where he stood in uniform, gazing out over unknown landscapes. The room was so brightly lit, it could be a movie studio or a third-degree interrogation cell. All the walls were lined with large bulletin boards, studded with press clippings and photographs that reflected how the outside world viewed what was happening in the United States. In spite of her high IQ, Doggie was not equipped with a knowledge of languages that enabled her to evaluate the overall picture, but the headlines in the English-language newspapers like The Times, The Montreal Gazette, and The Australian left no doubt. The world was appalled by what was happening in the United States.

  Sunderland positioned himself before her, blocking her view. “What’s going on? Make it quick!” he barked. He seemed harried, as though the foundation of his pillar of stoicism was about to crumble. She’d seen him in many situations before, but only a few times with this ominous glint in his eye that she knew meant one had to be ready for anything.