Tom Clancy Oath of Office

by Marc Cameron

  There was the usual worry about protecting the good name of the Secret Service. The way the lawyer saw it, this operation could go three ways: nothing happened, in which case all was rosy; Secret Service personnel saved Senator Chadwick from an assassination, and all was rosy; or something got bungled, Chadwick died, and the Service looked inept—or, even worse, responsible. Director Howe and DD Mendez had almost fifty years of experience between them. Both had cut their teeth as post-standers, criminal investigators, protective agents, supervisors, and eventually SAICs of large field offices. They knew the vagaries that an agent in the field had to deal with. The fact that this was a covert detail—Chadwick had not asked for protection, and should not even know she was being protected—added an extra level of difficulty. Without knowledge of her schedule they would lose the ability to conduct advance surveys of locations before arrival. Everything would be a seat-of-the-pants move. Doing this right—and the Secret Service prided itself in providing flawless protection—was next to impossible.

  The lawyer pointed out that while there was nothing illegal about Secret Service agents following the senator unannounced as long as they did not spy on her, they were under no statutory obligation to do so. The operation would probably violate policy on several points, and possibly some federal rules in regard to overtime pay, but he would have to research it. Montgomery groaned at that. Given enough time to look, government lawyers could find a way to make anything against the rules.

  In the end, Montgomery reminded the director that there was a fourth scenario. The Service could refuse the request, Chadwick would be murdered, and the trust and confidence of POTUS would be lost.

  Director Howe said that the phone call was only a way to get everyone on the same page, and there’d never been any question that they would do what the President asked, so long as it was not illegal, immoral, or unethical. Hiding in the shadows to safeguard a hateful woman from potential assassination was uncomfortable, but it was none of those things.

  The call ended with the lawyer urging Howe to reconsider—a perfectly safe option, since his words would be forgotten if all went well or he would be vindicated if things went sour. Montgomery found his own position more precarious. No one said it out loud, but if this operation went bad, he’d be the one to take the blame. Even President Ryan couldn’t protect him if he was fighting for his own job.

  Where virtually everyone else in law enforcement was trained to seek cover during a gun battle, men and women of the United States Secret Service trained to make themselves the larger target, to stand up and fight while others in the team hustled their protectee away from danger. Shitty position or not, Gary Montgomery knew nothing else. The President had asked him personally to stand up and fight, and that was all there was to it.

  Several members of the administration, including the chief of staff, were afforded Secret Service protection. These details were relatively small, just a handful of agents, and stealing even one could jeopardize coverage. Montgomery raided his own team first, as well as drawing from VPOTUS, the secretary of the treasury, the Washington Field Office, and USSS Headquarters. In the end he had a small group of five female and seven male agents. Most of them looked young enough to be Montgomery’s children but came with glowing recommendations from their superiors.

  Three would work night shift—a basically static post that did little but watch the condominium—while the other nine agents would work days, shadowing the senator wherever she went.

  He’d chosen agents who lived near or inside the Beltway. Some of them lived within a few miles of one another, though their schedules made it so they hardly ever crossed paths. The Secret Service was a small agency, and most knew one another, or at the very least had friends in common. There was a certain amount of “smoking and joking” as the detail came together and people caught up on one another’s lives.

  Montgomery held the first briefing at the nondescript orange brick building on H Street that was Secret Service Headquarters. He’d been honest with everyone, including the lawyer who sat at the end of the long conference table.

  “There has been no articulated threat,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Mike Ayers said. “Not to be indelicate, but have you listened to the senator? I’m sure she’s got a million people who hate her ever-lovin’ guts. Sorry boss, just saying what everyone is already thinking. It’s the ones who don’t make a loud fuss who we have to worry about.”

  The whip-smart supervisory agent from WFO was a natural choice as Montgomery’s second-in-command.

  “I hear you, Mike,” Montgomery said. “But let’s not say it outside these walls.”

  “Copy that, boss,” Ayers said.

  “One more thing,” Montgomery said before everyone deployed to their various assignments. “Normally, we protect from harm or embarrassment. I don’t give a shit about embarrassment, but the senator must not be harmed. If you see something brewing, shut it down immediately. If you can do it without her making you, so much the better—but I don’t want you to get caught up in that.”

  * * *

  —

  The evening turned out comfortably warm, considering what Elizaveta Bobkova had in mind. A low sun behind the hotels and office buildings of Arlington threw Crystal Drive and much of the fountain park across the street into shadow. Bobkova settled back in the park with a half-dozen other people sitting on benches. Most of them probably lived in one of the many nearby apartments adjacent to Reagan National Airport. Some looked like they’d just finished running on the Mount Vernon Trail, others were just out to soak up a pleasant evening. If they stayed around long enough, it would prove to be an evening they would never forget. If Chadwick stayed an hour and a half, she’d be out at about sunset, which Bobkova thought would be just about perfect.

  Morton’s was directly across the Potomac from D.C. proper via the Fourteenth Street Bridge, so she wouldn’t have been surprised to see any number of Washington glitterati. The eateries around Crystal City were favorite places to lobby, be lobbied, solicit funds, or request favors for funds that had already been solicited. It was a dirty business, politics. Dirtier even than espionage, Bobkova thought, so one might as well conduct it over a nice meal.

  She’d not been surprised when Chadwick showed up with someone other than her callow aide. Fite was there, but as a driver, not a date. He dropped the senator and her dining partner off in front of the restaurant, and then sped away in her black BMW X5, heading south, presumably to wait until he was called to pick them up again. A happy convenience. The routine would almost surely be repeated in reverse, with Fite pulling up to the curb in front of the restaurant, and Chadwick slowing for just a moment as she got in the waiting vehicle, allowing Gorev the chance to strike.

  Tonight the senator was meeting with a strapping lumberjack of a lobbyist for a large pharmaceutical company. Bobkova could not remember his name, but she recognized his bearded face from more than one of the many Washington cocktail parties that everyone loved to whine about but no one wanted to miss.

  Both Chadwick and the lobbyist had checked their watches between the BMW and the restaurant, making it a good bet that each had another commitment after dinner.

  “Any minute now,” Bobkova spoke softly into the tiny microphone clipped inside the lapel of her blouse. Chatting quietly to one’s self on a park bench did not see seem quite as bizarre as it had been before the advent of mobile phones.

  Both men acknowledged. Pugin from a bench inside the underground mall across from the small post office. His post gave him a vantage point to make certain Chadwick and the lobbyist didn’t decide to take the interior exit and go for a walk in the underground without anyone knowing it. The double glass doors gave him a clear view of the street as well and he was close enough to render assistance if Gorev needed it.

  Gorev had the trigger job. His youthful face didn’t look it, but deep down, he was much more ruthless than Pugin,
and Bobkova needed ruthless. Gorev would loiter on Crystal Drive, outside the security camera’s field of view, as if waiting for a ride. Bobkova, who could see the front door, would let him know when Chadwick made her exit. At this point, he would walk up and shoot her in the face. Pugin would exit the mall then, acting the good witness and yelling at some imagined assailant up on a rooftop. It took the human mind a few seconds to process surprises, especially violent ones. Most bystanders would follow Pugin’s gesture to the vacant rooftop, struggling to make sense of the situation; some of them would have clearly even seen Gorev pull the trigger. Some would stand with pocketed hands while they stared in shock at the broken skull and brain matter that were nothing at all like they appear on television. Overwhelmed senses would be unable to process the input of gore, and blood, and gunpowder. Oh, some Good Samaritan might try and tackle Gorev, but he was strong and quick. Pugin would move in as well, as if to grab the attacker, all the while clumsily blocking anyone else.

  This was a good plan. With any luck, it would all be over soon.

  Bobkova sat up a little straighter on her park bench, willing her leg not to bounce with nervous energy. Arlington was crawling with police and federal agents. Dozens of them were sure to emerge from the woodwork like termites at the sound of a shot. She wanted to be gone before anyone knew she’d been here.

  * * *

  —

  “CAROUSEL is still stationary,” Special Agent Soong said from inside Morton’s. Several less flattering code names for Chadwick had been suggested, but Montgomery reminded the team that these things had a way of coming to light and stuck with CAROUSEL.

  “Alpha is stationary,” said the Secret Service agent on top of the Crystal Place apartments. She lay belly-down behind her Remington 700 rifle, peering through the reticle of a Nightforce scope, cheek against the adjustable comb of the Accuracy International chassis.

  “Stay on her, Christie,” Montgomery heard Ayers say.

  Special agents Miller and Woodruff responded next.

  “Bravo still stationary.”

  “Charlie still stationary.”

  Alone in his maroon Dodge Durango two hundred meters away, Montgomery nodded to himself. He’d liked to have thought the team would have snapped to these threats simply because of their appearance, but he knew the real reason was a friendship that went back to his first days in the Service.

  The baby agent who’d sat next to him at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center during basic criminal investigator school—CI, they called it—had been convinced even in the early nineties that technical measures were the future of law enforcement. Josh Parker had carried around folders crammed full of data on what was then extremely new technology regarding cell phones, digital cameras, and the emerging Internet. He was always eager to share his ideas with anyone willing to listen. Montgomery, who even then looked like a ham-fisted Mickey Spillane character with a clothing allowance and better haircut, had a tendency to depend more on shoe leather than on binary code. But he’d sensed this agent-trainee was onto something. He and Parker became good friends throughout the weeks of CI and then the more specialized Secret Service training course in Beltsville. Special Agent Parker had eventually gone on to head the Secret Service’s Protective Intelligence Division, working behind the frosted windows on the uppermost floor of Secret Service HQ.

  Parker’s drone had provided the first lead.

  Strictly speaking, the fifteen-mile circle around Reagan Airport was a No Drone Zone. There’d already been an incident where a small commercial UAV had crashed onto the White House lawn. Few things beyond actual gunfire got the Secret Service quite as animated as remotely piloted aircraft flying up to the window of the President’s house. The Service conducted numerous tests, working on methods to stop intrusive aircraft, and coincidentally, how they might employ such aircraft themselves in furtherance of their mission.

  Josh Parker headed the research.

  He’d launched his newest drone from a park two blocks away from Chadwick’s apartment, simply to get some up-to-date aerial video of the neighborhood, possible surveillance vehicles, anything out of the ordinary. He’d suggested launching the drone every hour to look for patterns—and changes in those patterns.

  The drone went up for the third time at five minutes after six o’clock, just in time to watch a brunette woman exit the back side of the apartment building across the street from Senator Chadwick’s residence and get into a forest-green Ford Taurus. That would not have been abnormal at all, but for the fact that the woman got in the car and did not drive away. Two minutes later, a white male in his twenties came out of the same building but walked to a different sedan. He and the woman pulled away at the same time, heading in the same direction.

  Parker had taken his drone up another hundred feet and watched the two vehicles drive out of the neighborhood. They jumped on I-66 heading east. The departure would simply have been logged by the command post, but a third male, this one shorter, darker, and older—one of the agents called him “shifty”—came out the back door of the same apartment building and drove away using the same route.

  Chadwick left her residence just before six-thirty with her assistant Corey Fite behind the wheel of her Beemer. Seven U.S. Secret Service vehicles trailed, loose enough not to be seen, close enough not to lose one of the most ubiquitous types of vehicle inside the Beltway. She’d stopped and picked someone up at the Clarendon Metro Station Kiss and Ride lot, and then continued on Clarendon Boulevard, generally paralleling the route taken by the three people who’d left shortly before her.

  Parker uploaded pertinent sections of the video with the clearest images of each person and sent it to everyone on the detail. The angles weren’t ideal, but they were good enough that the “shifty” guy was identified sitting on a bench inside the Crystal City Underground almost as soon as the team arrived on scene.

  Montgomery and the others hadn’t known where Chadwick was going before she arrived at the steakhouse, so it took them a few minutes to get set up. One agent followed the senator and her male companion inside. This agent, a female who’d be able to check on the women’s restroom without being questioned, quietly displayed credentials identifying her as Secret Service Special Agent Madeline Soong, and told the maître d’ that she needed to conduct an advance for a visiting dignitary. Protective details were common in and around Washington, so the maître d’ gave her the run of the place. The lighting inside the restaurant was dim and Special Agent Soong, dressed in a smart navy-blue suit with an open-collar button-down, blended in with management. Chadwick was self-absorbed enough that she paid no attention to the intense Asian woman checking for would-be threats not twenty feet away.

  Shifty’s presence on the bench just outside Morton’s was enough for Montgomery to put shooters on top of the nearest apartment buildings to the north and south across Crystal Drive. He wanted coverage of the drop-off and pickup point with two long guns as well as two sets of eyes. Parker’s drone would have come in handy here, but the proximity to Reagan Airport made that problematic.

  Agents on the ground identified the younger man and the woman from Chadwick’s neighborhood before the snipers made it to the rooftops. They were given designators that corresponded to the order in which they’d come out of the apartment. All senses humming now, Montgomery couldn’t help but wonder if there was some unidentified Delta out there to go with his Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie.

  Soong’s voice came across the radio. “CAROUSEL is imminent departure. They’re paying the bill now.”

  “Okay, boys and girls,” Special Agent Ayers said. “On your toes.”

  43

  Montgomery clutched the steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward, fighting the urge to get involved.

  Chadwick’s BMW X5 pulled up just before she walked out.

  “Movement, Bravo,” an agent said.

  Another piped in. “Charli
e’s up, walking toward the street.”

  Then: “Gun Bravo! Gun Bravo!”

  In front of the restaurant, Delray Witherspoon, a six-foot-three rawboned special agent who’d played tight end for Mizzou before joining the Service, bounced Bravo’s head off a concrete pillar before he could bring up the pistol. Bravo collapsed on the sidewalk.

  Special Agent Soong moved to her right, body-checking subject Charlie at the moment he tried to come through the glass doors, knocking him back into the arms of the two agents who’d sprinted up behind him.

  Chadwick and her date got into the Beemer and drove away, seemingly none the wiser that she’d narrowly avoided execution.

  “Subject Alpha, running east,” one of the rooftop shooters said, calm, sniperlike. His voice held the unique buzz of someone whose face was pressed against a rifle chassis. “She’s on the paved trail, heading down toward the airport.”

  Montgomery hit the steering wheel. Ayers would follow Chadwick’s vehicle, staying with her to look out for secondary attacks. With the remaining agents either on the roof or across the street, Alpha was as good as gone.

  “Oh, hell, no,” Montgomery muttered, slamming the Durango into gear. Flooring the accelerator, he turned quickly off Crystal Drive into the parking lot to his right, cutting between the two apartment buildings. He’d gotten enough of a look at Alpha to see she had long legs and an easy stride. Probably bought her running shoes by the gross. There was no way he’d be able to outrun her. But he was a boxer, and boxers knew how to work the angles.

  The Mount Vernon Trail stretched for eighteen miles along the Potomac River between George Washington’s estate and Roosevelt Island to the north. The entry onto the trail from Crystal City ran east through the woods as it crossed the tracks and then cut almost due south to follow the George Washington Parkway before finally joining with the trail via a concrete ramp overlooking Reagan National Airport. In other words, if she wanted to run north and stay on the trail, Alpha would have to run south first. Montgomery had run it before with friends from the U.S. Marshals Service, headquartered in Crystal City, and he knew every sickening foot of it.