High Treason

by John Gilstrap

  JoeDog headed for her favorite club chair and settled in for the night.

  An open stairway midway down the right-hand wall was the only architectural detail that remained of the old fire station—along with the brass pole that extended from the second-floor landing to the ground floor. Having spent so many hours polishing it as a boy, Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to take it out when he remodeled the place.

  The door at the top of the stairs led to a vestibule that to the right opened to the second floor, the sleeping floor, and to the left through a reinforced steel door that joined the stairway that led from the street to the office spaces on the third floor.

  Jonathan opened the stairway door and let Boxers go first onto the landing. The night guard—a youngish former Air Force PJ named Sam Franco, who’d left a leg behind in Afghanistan—stood at the third floor landing.

  “What’s up, Sam?” Jonathan asked.

  “We’ve got a special surprise for you inside,” Franco said. “But Ms. Alexander made me promise not to tell you.”

  “You know I don’t like surprises, right, Sam?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. But the worst you can do is fire me. Ms. Alexander can make my life hell forever.”

  “Kid’s got a point,” Boxers said. “He’s already earned his combat badge.”

  Jonathan scanned his thumbprint, punched the code into the cipher lock, and entered what he figured was going to be an entertaining night.

  If Jonathan’s living room was the hotel lobby, then his office was the lounge. Huge by any reasonable standard for offices, the themes of oriental carpeting and comfy leather continued, but in here, the addition of carved walnut paneling gave the space a feeling of warmth that Jonathan loved. His tastes were the polar opposite of Venice’s chrome-and-glass aesthetic.

  His visitors sat in the expansive and expensive conversation group in front of the fireplace that dominated the right-hand wall. Jonathan’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the source of the mystery.

  First Lady of the United States Anna Darmond, née Yelena Poltanov, sat with perfect posture in the Hitchcock armchair on the far side of the hearth. In the frenetic light of the well-stoked fireplace, she somehow looked regal in stretch pants and a bulky sweater that would have made a perfect fashion statement in Telluride.

  “Mrs. Darmond,” Jonathan said. “How nice to see that you’re not dead.”

  Irene shifted in her seat. “Jesus, Scorpion.”

  Jonathan’s preferred seat in this section of his office was a wooden rocking chair marked with his name and the Seal of the College of William and Mary. After too many back injuries to count over the years, it was the only chair that reliably gave him the support he needed. No one else ever sat in his rocker.

  “Okay, Yelena, let’s have it,” he said, settling in and crossing his legs. “How come your Secret Service detail is dead and you’re not?” He used her old name in a deliberate effort to get a rise, but no one in the room flinched. If anything, the First Lady merely looked bored.

  Behind him, he heard the rattle of glasses from the bar as Boxers helped himself.

  “I know what you think of me, Mr. Grave,” Yelena said. “Director Rivers has told me everything. I understand your anger, but I assure you that it is misplaced. I am not a murderer, and I am not plotting any terrorist schemes.”

  “Yet here you are hiding, when you could be lounging in the middle of the most secure cocoon in the universe.”

  The squeak of a cork told him that Boxers was going for the good stuff, and then the faintest aroma of peat confirmed that he’d selected scotch.

  “Security cuts both ways, Mr. Grave,” Yelena said.

  “Digger.”

  “As you wish. But great fortresses make great prisons.”

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Promise me you’re not going to whine about the loneliness of the bubble.”

  A glass bearing two fingers of Lagavulin arrived from over his right shoulder. In Boxers’ hands, the tulip glass looked more like a shot.

  “You need to hear her out, Dig,” Irene said and the Big Guy helped himself to the remaining club chair. “Open that big mind of yours.”

  Jonathan recognized her words as a rebuke and he dialed it back. “Okay, Yelena, the floor is yours.”

  “I prefer to be called Mrs. Darmond.”

  “And I prefer to be in bed at this hour.” Jonathan took a sip of scotch. Liquid contentment. He knew he was being a shit, but it was calculated shittiness. He wanted her to be off balance. Enough people sucked up to her every whim. She needed to know that he was not among them.

  Yelena looked to Irene. “Is it important that I be humiliated?”

  “My office, my rules,” Jonathan said.

  Irene narrowed one eye, clearly annoyed. “If you think Digger’s annoying, wait till you get to know Big Guy.”

  Boxers threw Irene a kiss and took a sip from his glass.

  Yelena drew a deep breath, settled herself. “I am not planning terrorism,” she said. “However, my husband is.”

  Jonathan recoiled. “You mean the president of the United States?”

  “He is the only husband I have.”

  “Now, anyway,” Boxers said. He responded to the angry glare with a shrug. “Hey, I’m just keeping it honest.”

  “And honesty is important, Mrs. Darmond,” Jonathan said. “Irene wouldn’t have brought you here if you didn’t need my help. I’m not putting my life on the line for anyone who doesn’t tell me the complete truth. I don’t care who they are, or what their husbands do for a living.”

  “I’m not asking you to risk anything,” Yelena objected.

  “Uh-huh,” Jonathan said. “Now, who is President Darmond planning to terrorize?”

  “I understand that you’ve already seen the drawings.”

  Jesus, was there anything Irene hadn’t told her?

  “I’ve seen a lot of drawings,” Jonathan acknowledged. “Bridges, tunnels, a building here and there.”

  “The airliner that was shot down at O’Hare,” Yelena said. “That was him.”

  “Bullshit,” Jonathan said. The word was out before he could stop it. He conceded that Darmond was a disaster as a president, but come on. “Why would he do that?”

  Her answer came with a shrug that indicated it was the most obvious answer in the world. “Because his numbers are down.” The sibilant s got special emphasis with her accent.

  “You mean poll numbers?” Venice asked, clearly aghast.

  “Yes, poll numbers,” Yelena said. “His popularity. We are coming up on an election year, no?”

  “Interesting strategy,” Boxers said with a laugh. “Vote for me or I’ll bomb your neighborhood. Has that ever worked? Outside of Chicago, I mean?”

  Yelena continued. “Every president profits from crisis. Every president wishes he could have been in office for Pearl Harbor or 9/11, to be the subject of such unity and patriotism. Every president wants a Grand Moment.” She leaned on those last words.

  Jonathan had occasionally thought that presidents thought such things, but hearing them verbalized by a president’s wife took him to a dark place. “Ma’am, attacking your own countrymen is hardly—”

  “It is not about the attack,” Yelena interrupted. “It is about the response. It is about victory over an enemy.”

  That was exactly the rationale he would have expected. And given the president’s track record for scandal, maybe it made some degree of sense, but good God. Jonathan decided on a different tack. “How do you know this?” he asked. “How does he plan to make it work?”

  “I don’t know the workings,” she said. “But I know he is desperate about his poll numbers. America has stopped liking him.”

  “All respect, you’re not helping much,” Boxers said.

  “I stopped liking him years ago. Everybody knows that. We hardly make it a secret. But I am not responsible for the bad economy or the big debt or the scandals in the administration. Tony—the president—is respon
sible for all that, and the people are angry.”

  Jonathan understood that anger all too well. In fact he’d been up close and personal with more of the scandals than he cared to think about.

  “With a big national emergency, people will stop thinking about those things. They will start thinking about the emergency.”

  Jonathan asked, “So, what makes you think he’s planning an attack on his own country?”

  Yelena’s response came quickly: “You thought I was going to do that—attack my own country. Why is it so difficult to think that the president might do the same thing?”

  Boxers answered without dropping a beat. “Because he’s the president of the United States and you’re a dissident imposter who’s been living a lie for decades.”

  Jonathan shot him an angry glare.

  “What, like you’re not thinking the same thing?”

  Yelena’s features reddened.

  Irene said, “Come on, guys. A little civility here.”

  Jonathan got it. “Sorry, Mrs. Darmond, but we’ve dedicated a lot of energy to the proposition that you’re the bad guy. That’s only after we were told by Douglas Winters and Ramsey Miller that you had been kidnapped. Now you’re telling us that the president is planning a terrorist attack. That’s a lot of whiplash.”

  He gave her a few seconds to let it sink in.

  “You mentioned Douglas Winters,” Yelena said. “It was through him that I found out about Tony’s plot.”

  “The White House chief of staff,” Jonathan said. He just needed to be sure.

  “Gettin’ better and better,” Boxers said.

  “I overheard him talking with a man about the lack of security around bridges and tunnels and other infrastructure around the country. At first, I thought it might be some kind of security briefing, but the tone was wrong. There was excitement in his voice. Enthusiasm. It struck me as odd so I listened more, and it continued the same way.”

  “Was he on the phone or in person?” Jonathan asked.

  “In person. Someone in a meeting.”

  “Who?” Irene asked.

  “I don’t know. The door was closed, but not all the way.” As those words left her mouth, her eyes shifted, ringing a warning bell for Jonathan.

  “Where did this happen?” he asked.

  Hesitation. “That does not matter.”

  “Yeah, actually it does,” Jonathan said. “Let the record show that my job was to find you, and here you are. You’re free to leave and let me go to bed right now if you’d like. But if there’s more, mine are the only rules that count. Either come off all the details or go home. I don’t care which.”

  Yelena looked to Irene for help.

  “Officially, I’m not even here,” Irene said. “None of us are. If we go official, I need to arrest you for the murder of a lot of people at the Wild Times.”

  “But I didn’t do those things.”

  Irene shrugged a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t make the rules, I merely enforce them. You say you’re innocent, and I happen to believe you. We’re here in the first place because I happen to believe you. But that doesn’t matter.”

  “So, you would put me in jail?”

  “I’d have to, because I’m paid to believe in the system. If you’re innocent, then either the prosecutors would not be able to prove their case, or your defense team would be able to uncover the truth.”

  Yelena looked pained, deep creases appearing over her eyes. “But if the government is involved . . .” She let the words trail away.

  “This isn’t your first trip to the dance,” Irene said. The deference had suddenly disappeared from her tone. “Scorpion and his team are the best at what they do, and what they do is all done under the radar. If you want help from me, you have to sit in jail. You want help from him, you stay free. The choice is yours.”

  Yelena shifted her gaze to Jonathan. “That is not much choice,” she said.

  He smiled. “The details, Yelena. All of them.”

  “Please stop calling me by that name.”

  The room waited for her answer.

  The First Lady folded her hands on her lap and rocked ever so slightly back and forth in her chair. Finally, she blurted, “We were at a hotel.”

  Boxers reflexively coughed out something like a laugh. “Uh-oh.”

  That pretty much said it all.

  “You and Winters?” Jonathan asked, just to be sure.

  “Together?”

  Yelena started to answer, then shrugged. “What can I say? The rumors are true.”

  Jonathan looked to Venice. “There were rumors?”

  She nodded.

  “Why didn’t we talk about this?”

  “There are a lot of rumors about Mrs. Darmond that we didn’t talk about,” Venice said. “Actually, the rumors say that you and Douglas Winters have been having an affair off and on for many years.”

  “But no one could find enough evidence to make the accusations stick,” Yelena said. “We have long been friends. That does not mean that we have long been lovers.”

  “But have you?”

  She sat straighter in the chair. “We were that night, yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” Irene said. Clearly, she was hearing details for the first time as well. “How can you be in the same hotel room and not know who Winters was talking to?”

  “It was a big room,” Yelena said. “Several rooms, actually. A suite at the Apex. And because of, well, propriety, we arrived at different times. I showed up earlier than expected, and they were in one of the bedrooms. I listened from the living room. When it sounded like the meeting was breaking up, I ran to the other bedroom and closed the door.”

  “Why?” Jonathan asked. “Why wouldn’t you want to confront a credible suspicion of terrorism? You’re the First Lady of the United States.”

  “I was concerned for my safety.”

  “Bullshit,” Boxers said. “You travel with an army of bodyguards.”

  Yelena shook her head. “Not that day. I had shaken them all off. I’ve gotten pretty good at that.”

  Jonathan wanted something to make sense. “So, this guy you’re having an affair with. You thought he was going to kill you?”

  “I didn’t know what to think. The subject matter was so startling. It was the last thing I expected to hear. At a moment like that, everything changes. Suddenly, you begin to question if what you’d always assumed to be black was in fact white. I didn’t know what to think. So, yes, in that moment, I was frightened. If not of Douglas, then of whoever he was talking with.”

  “After you darted back to the other room,” Irene said, “did you peek out of the door to see who was leaving?”

  “Ultimately, yes. But not at first. Not until I was certain that they would not see me at the door. By the time I looked, the man was nearly at the door. All I saw was the back of his head. He had gray hair, that’s all I can tell you. Same height as Douglas and maybe a little heavier, but not much.”

  “He didn’t look familiar at all?”

  “It was the back of his head. Backs of heads are backs of heads.”

  “So then what?” Jonathan asked. “How do you go from hiding to stepping out to greet Douglas?”

  “I took a shower,” she said. “When I came out of the shower, I told him that I had arrived early and that when I heard he was in the middle of a meeting, I decided to leave him alone.”

  “How did he handle that?”

  Yelena thought before answering. “He seemed . . . nervous. He didn’t ask me outright if I had overheard his conversation, but he went all around it. When I asked him who he was talking to, he said it was a work matter. Those were his words. A work matter.”

  “How long ago was this?” Jonathan asked.

  She pondered. “About six weeks. When I asked him who he was meeting with, he told me that it would be inappropriate to say. He implied that it was a national security matter. But that was bullshit, of course.” It came out bool sheet, causing J
onathan to smile. “We were meeting for a tryst. Who would invite official business for that?”

  “Who would invite a terrorist?” Jonathan countered.

  “He didn’t expect me for a half hour. This was a good off-the-record place to meet. In official offices, records are kept of who comes and who goes. Records are kept of phone calls. In hotels, especially in hotels like the Apex, people make a point of not noticing who comes and goes.”

  “But how do you do that?” Venice asked. “Your face has been on every magazine cover in the world.”

  Finally, a smile from the First Lady. “Thanks to the Marshals Service, I have become very accomplished with disguises over the years. You’d be surprised what a wig and different eyebrows will do. Throw in a pair of glasses and maybe some prosthetic teeth, and you can be a whole different person in less than fifteen minutes.”

  “Let’s get back to the original track,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go back to the night before last at the Wild Times Bar. What was that about?”

  “I have to go back even further,” Yelena said. “That night when I heard the conversation, I tried a couple more times to get Douglas to expand on what he was talking about, but the harder I pushed, the more uncomfortable he became. To the point of being angry. So I stopped pushing. But in what I heard, it sounded to me like Douglas was pointing to something, as if he had documents or even diagrams. Referring to something as he spoke. The next morning, I woke up early and I sneaked over to that other room.”

  She looked up at Boxers. “Yes, we slept in the same bed, not in separate rooms.”

  Big Guy showed no emotion at all.

  “I looked all around, but I didn’t see anything. I tried to be quiet, but you have to make some noise just to sift through things. I found his briefcase, but it was locked. I was trying to get into it when I heard Douglas moving around. I quickly put everything down and went back out to the living room. I was back out there before Douglas came out of the room, but I think he suspected I was up to something. He asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was just restless.

  “ ‘Why are you acting so strangely?’ he asked me. I told him that I don’t know what he is talking about. I made some excuse why I needed to be back at the White House, and then we get dressed and leave.