The President's Henchman

by Joseph Flynn

Monday

  For the next four weeks, with Sweetie stationed in the outer office like a desk sergeant, not a single lobbyist pestered McGill. Neither did anyone else. Word had gotten around official Washington: The president’s henchman was not a back door to the Oval Office. And the Metro Police seemed to have a mortal lock on all local criminal investigations.

  It was beginning to look like McGill would have plenty of time for ribbon cuttings. Galia Mindel had sent him a request to provide a recipe for his favorite dish — to be included in a new edition of The First Ladies’ Cookbook.

  Things were so slow that first Monday in June that Deke and Sweetie, who’d received her own concealed weapon permit, had gone to a firing range at lunchtime to shoot it out for the office deadeye championship. Leo, parked out front, had been left to hold down the fort.

  Apparently, Leo let Chana Lochlan slip past him. More likely, he decided she wasn’t a threat and got her autograph.

  McGill was eating a turkey sandwich at his desk and reading the Chicago Tribune’s sports section online when “the most fabulous face on television,” as judged by People magazine, knocked on his open door. “Mr. McGill, may I come in?”

  The first thing that struck McGill was her size. With only moderate heels on her shoes, she had to be six feet tall. She was whipcord lean and even in her business suit gave the impression she was ready to compete in a triathlon. Then there was that fabulous face — a proud nose, a generous mouth, a defiant chin, and shoulder-length black hair framing big hazel eyes.

  McGill swallowed the food he’d been chewing and gestured her to a guest chair. He knew who she was, of course. He’d even glimpsed her in person a time or two. Chana Lochlan was the White House reporter for the World Wide News (W2N) cable network. Her job was to cover McGill’s wife. In an honest and forthright way, if you believed in ad slogans.

  To stick a knife in at every opportunity, as McGill saw it.

  “Would you mind if we closed the door?” Ms. Lochlan asked.

  McGill studied her as though she were a painting. It was a pretty darn nice face. All the more so for the first few faint lines that TV makeup usually covered. Still, it wasn’t quite in Patti’s league. But then the president had prepared for a career in politics by working as a model and acting in Hollywood movies. That and graduating from Yale with honors, building houses with Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity, and doing innumerable other hands-on good works.

  Chana Lochlan probably had a long list of virtuous deeds on her résumé, too, but McGill knew that wasn’t what people would talk about if they learned she’d been in his office with the door closed.

  “We’re the only ones here, Ms. Lochlan. No need to close the door. If you’ve come to ask about an interview, there’s someone at the White House who handles those requests for me … I think.”

  “I didn’t come for an interview.”

  McGill blinked. Chana Lochlan was going to be his first client?

  “You know, it’s true what they say about you,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You do look a little like Harrison Ford before he went gray.”

  “I used to say more like Rory Calhoun, but nobody seems to remember him anymore. Ms. Lochlan, are you here to talk about hiring me as an investigator?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the entrance to the office suite.

  McGill glanced at the time on his computer monitor. “We’ll have fifteen minutes to ourselves if you have something to say.”

  “You’re not going to close the door?”

  McGill shook his head.

  “You’re a very careful man.”

  McGill waited. She’d talk or she’d leave.

  “A question or two first,” she said. “Does what I tell you stay with you? Or does it reach the president? I cover her, as I’m sure you know. I ask her hard questions. Maybe you even think some of them are politically motivated.”

  McGill kept himself from nodding.

  “But doing my job would be very difficult if the president knew what I had to tell you.”

  McGill hadn’t considered the question before, but he thought it fair.

  He said, “The president and I don’t keep secrets from one another — about our personal lives. But she doesn’t tell me if she’s going to have the Marines seize Lichtenstein. So it seems reasonable I should keep the details of my investigations from her.”

  “Then I can expect confidentiality?”

  “Yes.” A thought occurred to McGill. “I might, however, consult with my colleague in the firm.” Might. As if Sweetie would stand for his keeping secrets. “She’d be bound by the same obligation to confidentiality I would.”

  That was agreeable to Chana Lochlan, though she took one more look over her shoulder.

  “Two days ago, at my home in Georgetown, I was awakened by a phone call at 4:00 a.m. I picked up the phone and mumbled hello. The caller was a man. His voice sounded white, educated, Midwestern American. At a guess, he was thirty to fifty. He began by asking me a question. He said, ‘Do you remember the last time we made love?’”

  McGill picked up a pen, opened a notepad. “Is your home phone number unlisted?”

  Chana nodded.

  “Is it on your business card?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you ever given it to a source?”

  “I made that mistake once, early in my career. But that was in New York.”

  “And this man didn’t sound like that one?”

  “Not at all. If I hadn’t been uncertain I’d heard the question right, I’d have hung up before the caller could go on. As it was, I heard him say, ‘Come on, Gracie, you remember.’”

  McGill understood the significance of the remark.

  “Chana is a Hebrew name meaning graceful. Graceful. Gracie.”

  The newswoman raised her perfect eyebrows.

  “My first wife and I have two daughters and a son,” McGill said.

  “I know. I read your bio before coming here. But your girls are named Abigail and Caitlin. Your son is named Kenneth.”

  “Abigail is also a Hebrew name. Meaning: gives joy. When Carolyn was pregnant with Abbie, we bought the best naming book we could find. Three kids later, names and their meanings got to be a hobby of mine. Anyway, your caller knew a nickname of yours. A private one?”

  “Only my dad and my ex used it. I can’t remember anyone else calling me that.”

  Some questions could be asked and answered without a word being spoken. Had the caller been her father? Chana Lochlan’s look said don’t even think about it.

  “And it wasn’t your former husband on the phone?” McGill inquired.

  She shook her head. “Michael died on his honeymoon with his second wife. Hang-gliding in Hawaii.”

  “So some unknown male knows your unlisted phone number, calls you at home, also knows a private nickname, and intimates he was once your lover.”

  “Intimates authoritatively,” Chana said. She took yet another look over her shoulder. They were still alone, but when she resumed speaking, her voice dropped to a whisper. “He took me through a reminiscence of lovemaking. He knows what I like. Knows in such detail that mere guesswork can be ruled out. He also knows …”

  She stopped to look at the notes McGill was making. He tried to alleviate her discomfort. “Tell me only what you need to. If I have questions … I’ll try to be delicate.”

  Chana Lochlan steeled herself and continued. “He knows my body: moles, freckles, birthmarks. Things I need two mirrors to see.”

  “Did you get the feeling he was working himself up?”

  “No. His voice was very gentle. Loving, even. When he finished, he made this little kissing sound and told me to go back to sleep. Amazingly enough, I did … and I dreamed of the lovemaking he’d just described. I could see his body but not his face.”

  McGill thought in silence for a moment. He looked at Chana Lochlan’s eyes. Fear made flecks of yellow burn bright in the ha
zel irises.

  “You think he’s coming for you, whoever he is,” McGill said.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I do investigative work not protection.”

  “And I work in the public eye, Mr. McGill. The minute I hire a bodyguard, I become a story, and that’s not what I want. I hope you can find this man and stop him from doing …”

  “Whatever he has in mind.”

  “Yes.”

  McGill took the case. Chana Lochlan was gone before Sweetie and Deke came back. It was only when Sweetie asked if he’d had any calls while they were out that McGill remembered he was now a businessman and no longer a cop. He’d completely forgotten to discuss money with his first client.

  Somehow, it had slipped her mind, too.

  Chapter 3

  Tuesday

  The president’s day began at 4:30 a.m. She leaned over and kissed McGill, who enjoyed the privilege of sleeping in till six o’clock. Her husband also enjoyed his morning kiss, not simply lying there and accepting it but putting his arms around her and kissing back. Sometimes, when McGill held on, and the affairs of state allowed, the president didn’t get out of bed until 4:45.

  Patti Grant was used to getting up at hours most people would consider ungodly. She’d done it as both a model and an actress. Rising for sunrise shoots on tropical beaches. Appearing on sets for early calls. Even when she’d been married to Andy Grant and could have slept as late as she liked, she was unable to linger in bed. If the weather was fair, she loved to watch the sun rise out of Lake Michigan. If things were gloomy outside, she’d get up early anyway, relishing the feeling that she was getting a jump on everyone else.

  Not a bad attitude for a woman in her position to have.

  McGill was asleep again by the time she stepped into her bathroom. She examined herself nude in a full-length mirror. The presidency was yet another of her jobs where appearance mattered. Her dark brown hair had yet to show any gray, but it was no longer shoulder length. It had been cut to a bob, short enough to require minimal care, not so short that anyone could accuse her of trying to appear mannish.

  Now there was an idea that would make McGill laugh.

  She was still slender and well toned, but she was twenty pounds heavier than when she’d made her living appearing before cameras. Back then she thought she’d looked like a pencil with an expensive hairdo. She figured she could add another ten to fifteen pounds over a two-term presidency and still look good.

  When she finally left the public eye, she could imagine letting her hair grow long as it turned white. She’d cherish her smile lines and crow’s-feet. And she’d kiss her husband’s bald spot if he had the grace to have one by then. Life would be good.

  She was looking forward to growing old with McGill.

  She pulled on a tank-style swimsuit and a terry-cloth robe and walked barefoot to the White House swimming pool. She swam laps for twenty minutes, doing neat kick turns, maintaining an aerobic pace, not going so fast she couldn’t review the events of the previous day.

  Next came twenty minutes of strength training: dumbbells and exercise machines. During her workout, she listened to intelligence briefings from the CIA and FBI through the earbuds of her iPod. The highlights provided by the spooks and G-men were supplemented by briefing books if she thought any item demanded her in-depth attention.

  Finally, she did twenty minutes of tai chi to align her energy along the proper paths and give herself flexibility and peace of mind. This was the time when she often had insights about how to address the dangers that the government’s watchdogs had alerted her to moments earlier.

  For political problems, she had her own shrewd instincts.

  And Galia Mindel.

  Galia was fifty-six years old. As the president had been, she was a widow. Unlike the president, her husband had been taken by illness not murder. A New Yorker to her roots, Galia had a PhD from Columbia in Modern Political Thought. She was handsome in the fashion of a headmistress at a no-nonsense girls’ school. Only five-foot-four, she wore her hennaed hair up and her heels high to give an impression of height. Her girth was all her own. Image-conscious, she worked hard to keep her weight in check; the struggle was ongoing and intense.

  Galia looked up from a note she was making on the pad resting on her lap. Her eyes were drawn to the picture of McGill that sat in a silver frame on the president’s credenza in the Oval Office. Rory Calhoun, she thought. McGill was right about that. She was old enough to remember the actor. Handsome, smiling, manly … nothing but trouble when reincarnated as James J. McGill.

  The president’s henchman, indeed. That was her job.

  “Galia,” the president said, addressing her a second time.

  The chief of staff snapped to. “Yes, Madam President.”

  “The note I received from you at breakfast asked if I could be at my desk ten minutes early.” The president gestured: Here I am.

  Galia wondered if McGill had informed the president that he’d acquired his first client. Or who that client was. To the president, she said, “You’ll remember, ma’am, we agreed that you, more than any previous president, could expect a series of challenges early in your administration.”

  “I remember,” the president said evenly. “And now one has come up?”

  “It has.”

  “Foreign or domestic?”

  “Domestic. The Pentagon.”

  The president waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “The Pentagon,” Galia repeated, “and Senator Michaelson.”

  The election of Patricia Darden Grant to the presidency had done more than end over two hundred years of the exclusively male hold on the office; it had caused a tectonic shift in American politics. The new president was a Republican, but a moderate Republican. Some went so far as to say a RINO. Republican in name only.

  She was fiscally conservative, but socially … hard to pin down.

  She believed that the Second Amendment provided for the right to bear arms, but not the right to bear arms secretly. As she saw it, the government had a legitimate interest in seeing to it that all firearms were registered, their owners were identified, and a federal database of the distinct markings each weapon left on its projectiles was established.

  She believed that every American came with a full menu of legal rights, irrespective of sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians, she said, should be allowed to serve openly in the military. However, every American also had the right to be free from unwanted sexual attention. So gays and lesbians would have to serve in capacities that didn’t require them to live in communal settings.

  She believed in reproductive choice, but insisted that in the absence of a medical emergency or other extraordinary circumstance, a woman who carried a pregnancy past the first trimester had made her choice and no termination past that point should be allowed.

  The conventional wisdom had it that such political heterodoxy should have made it impossible for Patti Grant to win the Republican primaries in which conservative activists were said to hold all the cards. But then the conventional wisdom also held that a woman never could win because a woman never had won.

  Patti trumped the traditional thinkers on three counts.

  The first was an outpouring of sympathy and admiration for her. Her first husband, Andy Grant, had been killed by radical antiabortionists who had tried to coerce Patti into voting their way on the Support of Motherhood Act, a piece of legislation that would have provided government-paid medical care and a guaranteed adoption for the children of those victims of rape and incest who chose to carry their pregnancies to term.

  Patti’s position was that any woman who’d suffered a trauma as horrifying and invasive as rape or incest should not be pressured by anybody, especially not the government, to perpetuate her pain for nine months. Beyond that, the adoption guarantor noted in the bill was the Salvation’s Path Church of Richmond, Virginia. The separation of church and state would have to be thrown out the window for the bill to stand.r />
  Even so, Congresswoman Grant suggested that the Salvation’s Path Church and other like-minded organizations had conceived a worthwhile alternative to abortion, if it was offered privately and in a spirit of compassion to those victims of crime who would find it a comfort rather than a second assault.

  That wasn’t nearly good enough for the forces pushing the bill. They wanted the Support of Motherhood Act to be challenged. Given the cast of characters sitting on the Supreme Court, they thought they could persuade or bully five votes for their side. Demolishing the separation between church and state was exactly what they had in mind. Then they could really start in on making their agenda the law of the land.

  And they identified Congresswoman Patricia Darden Grant as the linchpin vote they had to have. A Republican, but a moderate, she’d worked closely with legislators on both sides of the aisle in the House and in the Senate. A politician and a former movie star, who’d never known scandal in either Washington or Hollywood, the two great cesspools of American public life, she was both well-known and widely admired. Put her pretty face at the front of a crowd supporting the bill, and it couldn’t lose.

  Only Patti wouldn’t play ball. So Andy got a threatening message. Get your wife to vote the right way. Do it, or she’ll know what it’s like to see the taking of an innocent life. And in the end that was just what happened.

  But Patti hadn’t given in, and McGill had caught Andy’s killers.

  As a profile in courage, nobody else in the Republican primary field came close. Voters who might have had questions on the issues gave Patti the benefit of the doubt because of her strength of character.

  Then there was the strength of her presentation. In the primary debates, she was just plain smarter than anyone else on the stage, and it showed. A trained actor, she delivered her lines with an eloquence, a sense of timing, and a range of emotions that left the other candidates looking like cardboard cutouts.

  Finally, a large part of the electorate, male and female, simply fell in love with Patti. It wasn’t the kind of thing most voters would ever admit to pollsters, but it warmed their hearts to cast a ballot for her. Here and there, however, an occasional woman would confess that it was wonderfully romantic that the congresswoman had married McGill. You looked at that, they said, and you could believe that good could still triumph over evil.