“They’re damn right it’s about to get violent!” said Secretary of Defense Nugent. “Just give the word, boss, and it’s boomtown at Buckingham Place.”
“This is not an emergency, folks,” said Trump. “What have any of those people actually done lately? Nada, except for that Walking Dead guy, and nobody knows he’s British. I didn’t find out until my first security briefing. These guys think this gives them leverage on us? They got nothing. They’re running scared.”
Now Chris Christie piped in. “You let me know what airports these guys are flying out of. I can make sure it’s a looong time before they actually make it across the pond.”
“LAX, most likely. Hartsfield for Andrew Lincoln,” said Eastwood.
Christie was already speed-dialing a number on his cell. “LAX and ATL. The full Fort Lee,” he said, then hung up. He looked at Trump. “It’s done.”
For no reason that Jimmie could figure, Christie then stared right at him with a look that said, You’re next.
“Let’s get the word out that these guys think they’re too good for us,” Trump said to Lewandowski. “Get into the next news cycle before the queen gets a chance to give her own reason. Let me know if it looks like they’re actually getting their message out, and I’ll call Michelle Obama an ugg-o or something, drown them out.”
“Done,” said Lewandowski.
“Hey, can we do something really nice for the French?” asked Trump. “That’ll really get under their pale English skin.”
“I’ll get my staff on it,” said Omarosa.
“All right, enough of those guys. Is that it?”
“The governor of Kansas has finally called, looking for disaster funding to clean up after last week’s tornados,” Emma said.
“Does he want the standard relief package or the Trump Premium Plan?” asked Trump.
“What’s the premium plan?” Jimmie whispered to the assistant next to him.
“Standard, we help them rebuild. Premium, they get a Trump office complex on the demolished site of their choice,” she whispered back.
Emma checked her iPad and replied, “He’s leaning Premium. But I think we can talk him up to the Trump Executive Level.”
“Let’s do it,” said Trump. “Remind him if they license a second casino, we throw in a free school. Other business, or are we done?”
“Iran has turned away the UN’s nuclear inspectors again,” said Omarosa.
“Iran’s a nobody,” said Trump. “Do they honestly think they can get a nuke? They can’t have a nuke. Nuge, where are we at over there?”
“I got seventy-five drones within two hundred miles of Tehran,” said the secretary of defense. “We got guys in the satellite room sitting there, waiting, watching. Tracking their habits. We know where they hide their glow sticks, all right. Just say the word, and that place will be glowing so bright, Egypt won’t be able to sleep.”
Note to self, Jimmie thought. Stay on Ted Nugent’s good side.
“All right, let’s do that thing where we talk to the guy who talks to the guy who talks to the guy who tells Ayatollah what’s-his-name that he lets the inspectors back in or we’re gonna light up the sky like the Fourth of July. No—wait. Like Christmas. That’ll piss those Kardashians off even more,” Trump said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Oh, that is beautiful. I love that plan. You know what else? I love having drones. I see why Obama used them so much now.”
“Death from above,” intoned Ted Nugent.
“And I want to keep on top of the England thing,” Trump said. “Let’s find one British guy who’s an American citizen—maybe that Craig Ferguson guy—and get him to stay here. He says he picks us over them, I give him an exclusive interview or something.”
“I think he’s Scottish,” said Emma.
“Same difference, right? Or do they have more problems than we thought? Hang on a second.” Trump pulled out his phone and typed a tweet as he spoke it aloud: “If England’s so great, why is Scotland trying to break up with them all the time? England has nothing to offer! Hashtag LOSERS!”
“Good one, boss,” said Chris Christie.
“All right, good meeting. Let’s get somebody on some T-shirt designs for the party when the British surrender,” Trump said. What followed next was an unholy, jarring noise like a macaw choking—a noise that, Jimmie realized, was Trump laughing.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twelve Angry Men
As the meeting slowly dispersed, Jimmie picked up the Washington Post off the pile of newspapers on the meeting-room table. The front-page stories were all about Vice President Tom Brady’s trip to the new American moon base. He’d been shot into space the previous week. His mission was scheduled to last through the week of the midterm elections. (The jokes about whether he could keep his space suit inflated had started months earlier and hadn’t let up.) It was almost as if somebody wanted the VP out of the country. Way out of the country.
Jimmie glanced at the Post’s review of the all-female remake of Twelve Angry Men, which was still called Twelve Angry Men. He read the score of the Nationals game. They were on a roll. Probably headed to the World Series.
He turned to the Metro section. The top local headline read, “You’ll Never Guess Which Georgetown Rowing Star Was Killed in a Military Training Exercise Gone Wrong.”
Jimmie was about to skip to the next headline when the photo caught his eye.
Jimmie did a double take, and then a triple take. The blond hair . . . the high cheekbones . . . the Millennial smirk . . . There was no mistaking it: The photo of the Georgetown student identified as David Connor Brent was the same Connor Brent he’d met in the park two nights ago.
Brent had been rowing solo on the Potomac last night when he rowed straight into a naval training exercise. A Navy SEAL platoon was in the middle of a simulated attack using live rounds. Buoys labeled CAUTION had apparently been floating nearby to warn boats away. It wasn’t known why David Connor Brent had rowed past them, but he had been reduced to chum in a matter of seconds.
Strangest damn “accident” Jimmie had ever heard of.
Jimmie tried to keep his reaction in check, but it was impossible. It felt like he’d just been slugged in the wedding tackle.
“Everything okay?” Emma asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jimmie folded the paper and slid it back to the middle of the table. He looked her straight in the eye. “Harper left yesterday’s game with a sprained ankle. Even if he stays off the DL, I’m looking at three to five games without his bat in the lineup on my fantasy team.”
Emma rolled her eyes at him. For a second there, Jimmie had thought she’d been on to him. It seemed apparent to him that if she’d had any involvement in Brent’s death, it would have shown on her face.
Hers weren’t the only eyes on him, though—there were others lingering in the room, watching his reaction. Corey Lewandowski had been foaming at the mouth as Jimmie read the article. It was possible the press secretary had rabies. Had there been any bite marks on Lester’s body? Jimmie didn’t know. All he knew was that the game had just gotten deadlier.
Twice as deadly, to be precise.
Chapter Thirty
Biebs
Dorset: You’ve had some issues with women in the past.
Trump: No one’s a greater supporter of women than me. I love women. My mother was a woman—a great woman.
Dorset: I’m thinking, specifically, of your Twitter war with Helen Mirren. You retweeted somebody calling her a “bimbo.”
Trump: I never called her that. I would never call a woman a “bimbo.” Never. Who calls women names like that? It’s juvenile.
Dorset: Okay. You have called her “crazy,” though.
Trump: Well, yeah. If she’s acting like some kind of crazy bimbo, I’m going to call her crazy.
Dorset: Did . . . you just call her a bimbo?
Trump: Don’t twist my words. Do not twist my words. I never said she was a crazy bimbo. I sa
id she was acting like a crazy bimbo. Take your dick out of your ear and listen to what I’m saying.
Jimmie reached the end of the recordings. He’d spent the past five hours holed up in his office listening to Lester’s interviews . . . all for nothing.
Jimmie could see why Lester Dorset thought there were some “game-changing” admissions on the hard drive. Trump spoke candidly with Lester Dorset about buying favor in the media. He called the Mighty Mississippi a “river of slime” running through the United States. At one point, he even referred to the Second Amendment as one of the Ten Commandments. Lester, the golden boy for the country’s most liberal rag, had to have shit himself at that one!
The problem was that Lester Dorset had always been an idealist. A fool who believed in the essential goodness of the American people. Lester probably thought that if he could expose the man behind the orange mask, the people would come to their senses and storm the gates.
Unfortunately, Jimmie knew better. Trump was what those on the celebrity-gossip beat called a “Biebs.” No matter what you wrote about Justin Bieber in the dirt sheets, he still managed to top the iTunes charts. Trump was the same way. He could do wheelies on a motorbike over Ronald Reagan’s grave, and half the country would still vote for him in 2020.
While many of Trump’s admissions were indeed eye raising, none of them were “game changing.”
Still, whoever had killed Lester had thought they were. The killer also had to have known Lester was attempting to smuggle the recorder out of the White House. The motive couldn’t be clearer. They just hadn’t counted on Lester hiding the recorder so well. If the killer ever learned that Jimmie had the recordings in his possession now, they would come after him.
This was a most unwelcome realization.
The dots that had seemed rather random were beginning to connect. A web was forming, with Jimmie smack-dab in the middle of it. Regardless of the fact that Lester didn’t have anything on Trump, he’d told people he had—and someone had killed him for it.
Jimmie thought back to the list of people who had had access to the White House roof: Christie, Lewandowski, Putin. Each had a motive to protect Trump. It had to be one of them. A political scandal was brewing, the likes of which nobody had seen since Watergate. He knew next to nothing about that scandal, of course, and hoped to keep it that way. In his high school civics class, they’d watched All the President’s Men. He’d fallen asleep fifteen minutes into it and woke up during the end credits and was assured by a classmate he hadn’t missed a damn thing.
But he wasn’t going to fall asleep now. At least not before three o’clock (one of his three naptimes, back when he was a freelancer). He could smell something fishy, and it wasn’t the tuna sandwich he’d forgotten about in his desk drawer.
He hid the recorder back in the ceiling; he’d figure out how to get rid of it later, if necessary.
This wasn’t Jimmie Bernwood being paranoid.
This was Jimmie Bernwood being smart.
In order to investigate this thing, though, he was going to have to do something stupid: He was going to have to enlist the help of his ex-lover.
One of them, that was. He had many, just so you know.
More than he could count.
(Seven.)
Only one, however, worked in the White House.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Birds and the Bees
Jimmie watched from the sidelines as the president fielded questions from the pool of reporters.
“So what if England was our friend? Think how boring it would be if the Yankees and Red Sox were friends. Snoozefest. People like a healthy rivalry. Though I wouldn’t call England the Red Sox. Maybe more like the Twins.”
That got a surprisingly large laugh from the press corps. Jimmie surveyed the journalists, all of whom were fenced inside a wire pen. He recognized a couple. Keith Olbermann, who was on his sixth time around with ESPN. Joe Buck, from Fox Sports. Vin Scully, the former Dodgers play-by-play announcer. In fact, more than half of the journalists appeared to be from the world of sports. This was, apparently, standard practice for days when the Donald took the podium. They didn’t want questions from anyone who’d done too much research.
Jimmie smiled as a feeling of superiority swelled in his chest. Not because he was better than them, but because he was probably making twice what they were making. Maybe that was the same thing—it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that amongst the fifty or so reporters of varying degrees of triviality was Cat Diaz, whose hand was held high.
Trump called on her.
“Mr. President, do you plan to respond to Prince Charles’s latest comments?” Cat asked. She had her clear thick-rimmed glasses on today, the ones that did funny things to Jimmie.
“I assume you mean that clown’s speech before Parliament, where he called me an embarrassment to swine,” Trump said. “We’re meeting to determine a really primo insult to send back across the pond.”
“Could you give us a preview of some of the names being discussed?” Cat asked.
“That’s classified, sorry,” Trump said. “You gotta keep an eye on my Twitter feed. I will say this, though. He’s a very ugly man—I mean, I’ve seen elephants with smaller ears. He’s an ugly man who married way, way above his station in the looks department, married a total fox, and then he cheated on her. So the man’s clearly an idiot. I would never have cheated on Lady Di. Never. And I cheat on everybody.”
There was more laughter from the sports reporters as Trump ended the session and left the room.
Jimmie hopped into the press corps pen and waded through the sea of journalists, who were packing their notebooks away. He made a beeline for Cat. Come to think of it, though, he’d never seen a bee fly in a straight line. Usually they zigzagged around, looking for the right flower to bang.
Cat took one look at Jimmie and turned the other way.
She had no interest in being his flower.
Or maybe—just maybe—she was playing hard to get.
“Wait up,” he said, reaching out for her. His hand landed on her shoulder. Immediately, he realized this was a poor decision on his part. She dropped her notebook and gripped his wrist with both hands. She gave his arm a twist, which he felt all the way up to his shoulder. He spun down to the ground and found himself pinned to the floor with his arm bent unnaturally back in a kimura lock.
“You’ve been working out,” he said through the pain.
“You haven’t been,” she said.
That much was true. He wasn’t going to turn the tables on her. None of the other journalists seemed to even take notice that she had him writhing in pain on the carpet. Working in the Trump White House, they’d probably seen violent outbursts before. Rumor was, on Wednesday nights, the Bush Room transformed into a fight club.
Jimmie had no choice but to say his safeword: “E. L. James.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hello Kitty
Cat released Jimmie. While the press corps had pretty much cleared out except for a few stragglers, prying eyes and ears could be anywhere. In the potted plants. In the luxury umbrella stand. In Cat’s phone.
“Can we talk?” he said. “Somewhere private.”
“You cost me my job, you idiot,” she said. “And just how drunk were you last night at the State Dinner?”
Her job? Following the Ted Cruz sex tape lawsuit, she’d been the one who’d fired him. He eyed the logo on her badge. “You’re still with the Daily Blabber, though.”
“I was demoted to the presidential beat,” she said. “You think I enjoy being penned up in here with these losers?”
Michael Strahan gave her a little wave, and Cat fake-smiled back. When he passed, the warmth once again drained from Cat’s face.
She said, “You want to talk, Jimmie? I’ve got about five minutes until I have to be on the South Lawn golf course for Trump’s big foreign policy speech.”
“I’m headed there too,” Jimmie said, although this was the
first he’d heard about it. He really needed to start reading the daily e-mail with the president’s schedule.
He followed her through the winding maze of hallways that he assumed would become second nature to him. If he stayed at the White House long enough.
“What are you doing tonight?” Jimmie said, opening the door for her to the back lawn. Two dozen rows of chairs were quickly filling for the soon-to-be-historic speech. “Let me take you out to dinner. As an apology for all the trouble I caused you.”
“There’s not a restaurant in this city expensive enough to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused me,” she said.
Likewise, he thought.
“Do you have your phone on you?” he asked.
“What’s this really about?”
“Just answer the question.”
“It’s at my desk.”
“Good,” he said, lowering his voice. “Because I need to talk to you about Lester.”
“Are you still angry about that? If I remember correctly, you were the one who proposed that we ‘take a break.’”
“So that means you go sleeping around on me?”
“That’s exactly what that means.”
Okay, so maybe she had a point. Things had been moving kind of fast between them at the time. They’d gone from sleeping together to living together in under a month. That, coupled with working together, had spooked Jimmie. So, yeah, he’d suggested they take a break from each other. He thought he’d move back into his own apartment. Maybe go to a movie on a Friday night by himself. He hadn’t expected to be replaced by Lester fucking Dorset.
Jimmie asked, “When’s the last time you spoke to Lester?”
She ignored him and picked up her pace.
“He was working as Trump’s ghostwriter,” Jimmie said, jogging after her. “A job that I’ve been hired for, as of Monday.”
The Day of the Donald Page 9