The Sentinel

by Gerald Petievich

  "I came here to talk."

  "We can talk after I search you."

  The stogie was clenched in his teeth. Garrison figured he wasn't bluffing.

  "Put the piece down," Garrison said. "Relax."

  "Turn around, Goddamn it!"

  Garrison reluctantly turned away and raised his hands. Sensing the man moving closer, he considered how to disarm him. He could drive his right elbow backward to catch him in the solar plexus....

  Garrison felt a powerful blow at the back of his head. And all at once, he was overwhelmed by a black wave of pain, heat, and cold.

  Garrison heard thunder and rain pattering on something near him, sounds from his childhood. He was lying in bed, dizzy and feverish with pneumonia. There was no money for a doctor and Garrison wondered if the illness, like the recent death of his father, was part of some horrible curse being visited on him - a punishment.

  "I'm sick, Mom, " Garrison said to his mother, standing at his bedside.

  She knelt and placed her hands on his chest, palms down. She looked up to the ceiling with that look on her face.

  "Lord, please heal this boy!" she prayed. "Send down your healing angels and set him free of this affliction. Glory be to the King of Kings and the Savior of mankind, healer of the sick. You took his father, but please don't take him. He is an innocent boy and he doesn't deserve this punishment. Forgive him, Lord, and rid him of this fever and sickness."

  "Mom, did God make me sick?"

  "The Lord is putting you through a trial, son. Like the trial of Daniel in the lions' den. Close your eyes and pray. The Lord will cleanse you."

  As his mother continued to pray for him, Garrison lay there weak and dazed. But rather than hope or resignation, he felt only anger. If God had killed his father, then the hell with God. Garrison didn't care any more. He had no fear because all God could do was kill him too.

  Garrison had recovered, and his mother witnessed to the divine largesse in front of the congregation of the Bisbee, Arizona, Foursquare Tabernacle Church with the boy Garrison standing at her side. But when other parishioners asked Garrison to testify about his healing, Garrison said nothing. He didn't believe God cured him. He didn't trust a God who would kill his father. And he no longer trusted his mother. Money or not, she should have gotten him to a doctor.

  "You're a man now, Pete," she said a few months later as she prepared to leave town in an Airstream trailer with a man she met at church. "There is no way you can go with us. I love you, son, but you're a man now. You can live with Uncle Travis until you graduate. You'll do just fine."

  After she'd left, Garrison took a long walk along the train track at the edge of town. With tears streaming down his face he pondered how his mother could have done this to him.

  "Are you okay, mister?"

  Garrison opened his eyes. It was raining. He was lying on the parking garage roof.

  A uniformed parking lot attendant, a young man wearing a baseball hat, was kneeling next to him.

  Garrison saw double and tried to focus his concentration. Had someone fired a bullet into his skull? He struggled to sit up. He touched the back of his head. There was a painful bump, but no blood. He tried to focus on the attendant.

  "Did you see what happened?"

  "Some guy in a beige Jaguar. He raced out of here like a bat out of hell after he hit you. I got the license number. YFD 927. The ambulance is coming."

  "No ambulance. I'm okay."

  "You're sure? You're hurt, mister."

  "I have to get out of here."

  "You ain't thinking right, mister. You got knocked out."

  With the attendant's help, Garrison unsteadily came to his feet.

  "Thanks."

  Garrison reached inside his suit jacket. His gun and wallet were still there. He took out a pen and wrote the license number on a business card in his wallet.

  "Where you going?" the man said as Garrison hurried down the ramp. "You gotta wait for the police!"

  Garrison's head throbbed, and he broke into a full run. He'd been conducting an unofficial investigation for the First Lady and there was nothing else to do but get the hell away. Rounding the corner onto Connecticut Avenue, he heard a distant siren. Seeing that no one was following him, he slowed down to a jog and pondered the situation. The cigar-smoker's use of countersurveillance techniques indicated an unusual degree of sophistication. Changing locations like he'd done wasn't the work of an amateur. But why hadn't the blackmailer wanted to talk to him about money?

  A block away, Garrison took out his cellular telephone and reached the White House Secret Service command post. He asked for the duty agent. The line beeped.

  "Duty agent speaking."

  "This is Garrison. I need you to run a license plate for me."

  "Shoot."

  "Yankee Foxtrot Delta 927, a Virginia tag."

  The agent repeated the license number, then said: "Hold the line." After a silence, he came back. "YFD 927 is a Jaguar registered to someone named Lydell Catering, that's L-Y-D-E-L-L, 1402 Tynan Place, Apartment 133, Northwest."

  Garrison wrote the address on the palm of his hand.

  "I hear you had some trouble on the lie-detector, Pete."

  "You know the lie box."

  "Very well. When I was on the Bush detail, they sat us on the lie box to find out who wasn't turning in their airline mileage points. We all got ten-day suspensions."

  "Too bad. I gotta run. Thanks."

  "You bet."

  Garrison pressed the OFF button, and then clipped the phone back onto his belt. He had an unsettled feeling as he walked a few blocks to his apartment. He picked up his car, a ten-year-old Ford Taurus he'd purchased after the divorce.

  Garrison turned left on Tynan Place and parked his car across the street from 1402, a three-story apartment house with a blue canvas awning over the front entrance. The Northwest D.C. neighborhood just off Wisconsin Avenue was a onetime slum that had been reconditioned by yuppies a few years earlier. Now, fed up with having their bicycles and Volvos stolen by D.C. street people, the yuppies were packing up their replica antique doorknobs and returning to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs where they'd come from.

  He got out of his car, locked it, and walked down a sloping driveway to the gated entrance of an underground parking area. He craned his neck to see inside. There was no Jaguar. He walked to the front door, lifted a telephone receiver, and following printed directions, dialed the manager's apartment code. The phone rang.

  "Who's there?" a woman said in a shrill voice.

  "Federal officer. May I come in?"

  "What's it about?"

  "Someone who lives here."

  A minute later, the door was opened by a middle-aged woman wearing a white dress, white-frame eyeglasses, and a matching scarf wrapped tightly around her skull. Garrison held out his badge.

  "Who lives in apartment one-thirty-three?"

  "There is no one-thirty-three in this building. In fact, there is no apartment with a thirty-three in it."

  "Does Lydell Catering ring a bell with you?"

  "No. And I've been manager here for fifteen years."

  "How about a white man, about forty years old, with an olive complexion. He smokes cigars. Today he was wearing a green T-shirt with the word Nashville on it. He may drive a late-model, beige Jaguar."

  "There are no white men living here and never have been. And no Jaguars. What did that badge of yours say?"

  "U.S. Secret Service."

  "That boy must have really done something nasty to have the CIA after him."

  "Sorry to have bothered you, ma'am."

  Stopping at the command post, Garrison sat and tapped computer keys trying to trace Lydell Catering and the beige Jaguar. He checked the multi-agency index, the FBI trace file, and a dozen other indices. Nothing. The Jaguar license plate was phony and Lydell Catering was probably a figment of the blackmailer's imagination.

  Garrison felt that he was struggling to swim with an anchor tied to
his foot.

  ****

  CHAPTER 12

  ON MARINE ONE, the Presidential helicopter, Garrison sipped coffee from a mug emblazoned with a Presidential seal. As the craft descended slowly toward Camp David, Garrison looked out a window. The sky was clear. Below, Camp David, nestled high in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains, was barely visible from the wooded environment surrounding it, a mixture of bright greens and reddish browns. As protection against airborne attack, giant camouflage tarps covered the roofs of the six cabins, the Secret Service Command Post, and the helicopter-landing pad when they weren't in use. During the flight he'd been trying to make sense of what had happened earlier. He had a dull ache at the back of his head.

  "Check your seat belts," Marine pilot Captain Thad Delgarian said.

  The passengers were seated against the fuselage, facing in. There were three White House communications technicians and two State Department protocol aides. When the President was at Camp David, the helicopters of the Presidential fleet shuttled back and forth carrying aides and Secret Service personnel. The helicopter bounced slightly as it touched down. After the chopper blades stopped turning, the copilot opened the door and lowered the boarding ramp.

  Garrison descended the stairs. Walter Sebastian was waiting with an electric golf cart, the usual mode of transportation around the camp.

  "The First Lady wants to see you," Sebastian said. "What do you think it is?"

  Garrison dropped his overnight bag on the rack behind the golf-cart seat.

  "She asked me to get her some information about travel in - uh - Africa. A possible State Department trip."

  "The Man is in the conference cabin with some of the State Department pinheads."

  "He's here?"

  "He and Wintergreen hopped on the chopper at the last minute. Something about wanting to go over something with the State Department people. The Russian President is in his cabin with his pinheads. The Russian agents are playing cards with our guys who are on break. The Russkies are winning."

  Secret Service protection protocol called for each head of state to bring his own bodyguards when traveling. But the responsibility for protection was on the host country's agents. In this case, the Secret Service was in charge of protecting not only the U.S. President, but also the Russian President.

  "What's Wintergreen doing here?"

  "He made a quick run-through of the posts, then took a staff car and headed back to the house. He said he just wanted to make sure everything was going okay with the Russians."

  Garrison nodded.

  "Pete, this is the job I want. Camp David resident agent. Think of it. Hunting and fishing every day except when the Man comes up. It's the only job better than the First Lady Detail."

  "You'd go stir-crazy.

  Leaving Sebastian at the helipad, Garrison drove the golf cart along a narrow macadam road that led past the Command Post and two guest cabins, one that served as a military communications unit. Camp David, a U.S. Navy facility, was used solely for Presidential recreation. Its security system included a camouflaged electrified fence that ringed its uneven perimeter and a platoon of highly trained U.S. Marine sentries manning hidden bunkers equipped with night-vision devices. In more than thirty trees, remote-operated cameras in all-weather boxes scanned the countryside, transmitting continuous images to the state-of-the-art Secret Service Command Post inside an innocuous-looking ranch-style house near the front gate,

  After passing through some shadowy spots, Garrison swerved left into a dense forest. Passing three cabins with wide front porches cluttered with lounge chairs and tables, he stopped at the Presidential cabin, a rustic, one-story, three-thousand-square-foot notched-wood structure with a porch overlooking sloping woodland.

  Garrison knew that though the cabin looked like a rugged shanty found at ski lodges and other mountain areas, it was different in many ways. The half-log exterior was only a facade covering an inner wall of solid cement reinforced with bomb-and-weapon-resistant Kevlar plugs. An emergency generator and a generous stock of supplies could be found in its basement, which had been reinforced to ground-zero specifications in case of nuclear attack. Garrison was aware that, per the Camp David Manual of Operations, no agent was allowed to venture near the cabin without first obtaining permission from the Detail Leader. Due to the multiple layers of security, there were no fixed guard posts near the cabin.

  Inside, Eleanor was sitting on the sofa reading. Garrison shoved the door closed, pushing the dead bolt closed. She got up.

  "What happened?"

  Garrison briefed her on the phone call he'd received at the Mayflower Hotel, his wait in the Sperling Finance Building coffee shop, the cat-and-mouse with the man in the Nashville T-shirt, copying the license plate, getting hit over the head, and determining that the license plate was fictitious.

  "My God. Are you okay?" she said with a look of concern.

  "I'll be all right."

  Framed cowboy art, landscape photographs, and Western-motif tapestries covered the walls. On a burnished wood dining table was an extravagant arrangement of fresh roses and a large, overflowing fruit basket. Two large overstuffed sofas were burdened with a dozen textured pillows. To Garrison, it was a dream house. The kind of place he would like to build in New Mexico after he retired.

  "But the phone call-could you determine anything?"

  "He was using an electronic voice-changer. And he had opera music playing during the call - probably to cover some identifiable background noise. Either that or he likes mood music."

  From her expression, it became obvious that she saw no humor in the remark.

  "I don't understand why he followed you from the hotel."

  "He probably wanted to determine if I'd set a trap for him. That's par for the course in extortion cases."

  She walked to a bullet-proof window that overlooked a sea of pine trees.

  "What now?" she said after a moment.

  "It's just a matter of waiting for him to work up the courage to make a second contact. This is about money, and he believes we're ready to pay. He'll call back."

  "I'm not so confident," she said wistfully.

  "Try not to worry."

  "This whole thing makes me sick," she whispered. "It's the not knowing ... waiting for the press office to call and tell me that the photograph has appeared in one of the tabloids. Sometimes I wish I could live here. Away from everything."

  The sound of static came from his Secret Service radio.

  "Command Post to Valentine Supervisor."

  It was Sebastian. Garrison picked up the radio and pressed the transmit button.

  "Go. CP."

  "Victory en route to three."

  "That's a Roger."

  "What is it, Pete?"

  "The President is on his way here."

  Garrison stood on the front porch as the President drove up in a golf cart with the Presidential seal on the right fender. The President stepped out of the cart. He wore a blue double-breasted sport jacket and Levi's. Garrison thought he looked like a gray-haired model in a men's clothing catalogue.

  "Good evening, Mr. President."

  "Mrs. Jordan tells me you're doing a fine job, Pete."

  "Doing my best, sir."

  The President climbed the three steps to the porch.

  "She deserves a high-quality agent like you. Of course, no disrespect intended to the other agents who have been assigned to protect her. None whatsoever. Wintergreen did a fine job years ago, and so did Roland Prefontaine. The stewards are bringing dinner over. Will you to join us?"

  "I really shouldn't."

  The last thing in the world Garrison wanted to do was sit through a dinner with the Man. But how could he decline a Presidential invitation. What the hell did the Man want?

  The President swept an arm toward the door. "I insist."

  Eleanor came to the door.

  "Yes, please join us," she said.

  Garrison heard tension in her voice.

  "Pete,
I have a bone to pick with you," the President said after they were all seated in the dining room and the Navy stewards were serving a meal that had been prepared in the Navy mess and brought over in three golf carts.

  "Yes, sir?" Garrison said, and felt his eyebrows elevate. There was a buzzing in his ears. He assumed it was blood rushing toward his brain at a hundred miles an hour. Survival-adrenaline blood. High-stress blood. The President conspiratorially leaned forward.

  "Early in the Administration, you tackled a man with a knife - at the UN Plaza. The man you saved, the Iranian Prime Minister, is the one who later double-crossed me in the Turkish accords. You moved too fast."

  Garrison smiled. "If I would have known, I could have looked the other way."

  The President threw his head back in an open-mouth, Bohemian Club laugh. "Thataboy! Let him get the gaffe. Let that pipsqueak get what's coming to him!"

  "Russell, " Eleanor said reprovingly. "Agent Garrison might think you're serious."

  "Pete knows I'm joking, dear. A man has to have a sense of humor in this place, right, Pete?"

  "No doubt about that," Garrison said with a glance at Eleanor.

  The dining room had oak-paneled walls and was filled with antique American furniture: a mahogany serving cart with marble top, a polished rosewood dining table with legs of exaggerated rounded shapes. An enormous bouquet of flowers in the middle of the dining table matched the yellows and greens of a French Beauvais tapestry on the wall. The silverware and the gold-rimmed china bore the Presidential seal.

  A coffee-skinned Filipino steward of singular presence and bearing served prime rib from food trays.

  "The President seldom gets a chance to tell a joke," Jordan said. "The damn press distorts everything."

  Garrison had been avoiding eye contact with Eleanor. He considered Jordan nothing more than a political hack who would still be begging for contributions to his Senate campaign if it weren't for his wife's money.

  After a while, as if he could sense that Garrison wasn't impressed, Jordan began dropping the names of the Secret Service Directors he'd known over the years. To politicians, men who spent their lives unashamedly gauging reaction, anticipating behavior, and making connections, name-dropping was both language and religion. Garrison felt a pang of jealousy, and wondered if Eleanor had told him the truth when she'd mentioned she didn't sleep with him.