by Chris Hauty
Sinatra is the last man out the window, joining the others on the gravel path that serves as drainage for the structure’s exterior and foundation. The earlier flurries have stopped, but the sky has yet to lighten with sunrise. There isn’t a sound except for a city bus accelerating on Connecticut Avenue two blocks distant. The others have already stripped off their coveralls and stowed them in packs. Within seconds, Sinatra is also ready to go. He leads his team up the gravel bed, merging with the shadows beyond. Martin, at the rear, nearly stumbles into Bishop in front of him, and his left foot goes slightly wide of the gravel bed. As he regains his balance and falls in lockstep again with the others, he fails to notice the boot print he has left in the light snow coating a brick walkway adjoining the gravel path.
* * *
WHEN HAYLEY EXITS Scott’s house in Falls Church, an Uber is idling at the curb. The Secret Service agent had offered to drive her home to her apartment in Rosslyn, but she had rebuffed him, wanting to be alone. She can’t remember the last time she spent an entire night with a man. Escaping the house for the cold night air, light snow falling from the abyss above, Hayley feels a surge of renewed well-being and confidence. She has sensed Scott’s intensifying feelings for her and begins to devise a strategy to keep his emotions from outpacing hers. As long as she can remember, Hayley’s relations with men have been a management issue.
Her Uber driver is a middle-aged Egyptian man in the US for more than ten years. Hayley engages him in conversation, asking several questions about that country’s current political situation and the relative safety of an American visiting there. Egypt has always been a source of interest to her. When Hayley was seven years old, she dressed up as Cleopatra for Halloween. One of her mother’s favorite movies was the 1999 version of The Mummy, which supplanted Stargate as the family’s top flick. What any of these preoccupations had to do with the reality of present-day Egypt, of course, amounted to exactly zero. Nevertheless, in the idle moments of her ride from Falls Church to her studio apartment in Rosslyn, Hayley fantasizes about a trip to Abu Simbel temples, Karnak, and Colossi of Memnon. In the chaotic days that follow, Hayley will intermittently recall these quiet moments in the back of the two-year-old Ford Focus and the kind, sonorous voice of her Egyptian driver.
Once home, Hayley quickly showers and changes into a fresh outfit and dashes out again after hailing another Uber from her apartment. A young Salvadoran immigrant drives her in a Honda Civic to the State Department on C Street, only a few blocks from the White House. Its proximity to his office in the West Wing notwithstanding, Peter Hall likes to peruse the daily briefing binder at the earliest hours of the day in the comfort of his home.
A State Department aide one bump higher up the Washington food chain than Hayley meets the Honda Civic at the corner of Twenty-First and C Streets. Coatless and hugging himself against the cold, he passes the binder through the Civic’s rear window to Hayley. “You look different today,” the twenty-three-year-old prematurely balding young man informs Hayley. She doesn’t respond but checks the binder for all anticipated sections. “Did you get laid last night?” the guy asks, making the common joke.
Hayley looks up from the binder, satisfied her State Department counterpart has done a sufficient job. “A few times,” she answers, gesturing to the Salvadoran. “Let’s go.” The Uber driver obliges by burning a few micrograms of rubber pulling away from the curb.
The Civic stops outside Hall’s residence on Kalorama Road and Hayley steps out with briefing binder in hand. Before she closes the rear door, she bends down to address her driver. “I’ll just be a minute,” she promises.
Hayley ignores a brace of cold wind and opens the wrought iron gate leading to the brick steps and mansion’s front door. Binder in hand, she presses Hall’s doorbell and waits. In the two weeks Hayley has performed the task, returning to her apartment afterward to start her run, she has been accustomed to Hall answering the doorbell within fifteen seconds. Taking the briefing binder from her, the White House chief of staff would typically grunt and start reading before he had shut the front door again. After a half minute, she presses the doorbell again. Hall still fails to appear.
Hayley glances over her shoulder, back at the Civic waiting at the curb. She gestures to her driver to wait and steps off the porch, moving along the front of the structure toward the northeast corner. As she progresses, she looks inside each first-floor window she passes. There is no sign of Hall or any activity within the residence. Her facial expression betrays her concern. She has never known Peter Hall to be anything but precise, consistent, and predictable. His failure to appear at the door telegraphs, by her calculation, a high probability for an emergency situation. Consequently, Hayley’s attention to detail and keen observational skills increase to a high degree.
Rounding the northeast corner of the structure and looking into the formal dining room without seeing any sign of her boss, Hayley continues up the gravel drainage bed. Glancing down to her left, she sees a fresh boot print in the thin coat of melting snow covering the brick path. Hayley stops and stares at the boot print, then looks up and through a pantry window that offers a view into the kitchen. From that vantage point, Hayley can see Peter Hall’s body sprawled on the kitchen floor, his coffee cup upside down just a few inches from his outstretched hand. Breathless, Hayley looks down again at the fast-disappearing boot print in the snow. Judging by the crisp outlines and micro-ridges, the print cannot be but a few minutes old. Whoever left the print walked here less than five or ten minutes before Hayley arrived. There isn’t an explanation for its existence other than one that is highly suspicious. Hayley retrieves her cell phone from a coat pocket, selects the camera app, and quickly snaps a photo of the boot print.
* * *
WITHIN THE HOUR, the mansion on Kalorama Road is overrun with uniformed police, FBI agents, MPD detectives in suit jackets, and overly curious neighbors. TV news vans are kept at bay by yellow-tape barricades at either end of the block. Temperatures have risen to the high thirties. The dark sky overhead threatens rain.
FBI agent Helen Udall takes a sip of her Sugar Shack coffee, deliciously warm and familiar. The doughnuts at the Sugar Shack are arguably the best in town, but Udall has been following a weight loss program requiring denial of pretty much everything she loves. Udall’s motivation for losing weight is a cute accountant who works for the Commerce Department and lives in the condo just down the hall from her. Since the start of her campaign to win Carl’s heart, Udall has seen a commendable reduction of twenty pounds. But, sweet Jesus, she craved one of Sugar Shack’s signature maple bacon doughnuts on this particular morning worse than life itself. Consequently, depriving herself has spoiled Udall’s mood.
Standing with Hayley Chill in the entryway of the redbrick mansion on Kalorama Road, the FBI agent regards her witness through eyelids that are half-closed not because of a lack of sleep the night before or for intimidation value, but because Helen Udall was born with congenital ptosis. In grade school, her nickname was “Sleepy.” In high school, it was “Droopy.” At the Hoover Building just off Pennsylvania Avenue, the moniker given her by other agents is “Half-Mast,” but never to her face.
“In your time at Mr. Hall’s residence, before arrival of MPD, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?” Helen asks Hayley. “Anything irregular?”
Hayley pauses before answering the FBI agent. When she was thirteen and earning extra money babysitting for the town’s general practitioner, the good doctor’s wife had made a hearty demonstration of treating Hayley like one of the family. The care of twin toddlers was a trial, requiring Hayley’s presence from the end of a school day until long after the doctor returned home from his office late in the evening. The doctor’s wife bought birthday and Christmas gifts for Hayley and insisted she sit with the family during meals. She confided in the teenager, relating the frustrations of her marriage and disclosing details of a mostly barren sex life. To friends, and in Hayley’s presence, the doctor’s wif
e would refer to their babysitter as being like an eldest daughter.
Late one evening, when his wife had run out to the store, the doctor cornered Hayley in the entryway, pressing his six-foot frame against her and forcing his tongue into her mouth. Forcefully pushing the slightly inebriated man off her, Hayley locked herself in a downstairs bathroom until she heard the familiar sounds of a car’s return. Hayley met the doctor’s wife in the driveway and, in tears, relayed everything that had just transpired. Instead of reacting with outrage or indignation directed at her husband, as the young teen undoubtedly expected, the doctor’s wife violently shoved her babysitter to the ground with a curse. Hayley struggled to her feet, and the wife pushed her down again, accusing the thirteen-year-old of viciously slandering a virtuous husband. Threatened with increasing physical assault, Hayley scrambled to her feet and ran all the way home.
Ever since that dismal night, whether she realized it or not, Hayley has embraced a more Emersonian attitude. “Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.” The circumstances in which Hayley currently finds herself are exceedingly unreliable. Hall’s death by sudden heart attack in and of itself would not necessarily incite undue suspicion. His temper was volcanic and stress levels extreme. Leftover barbecue was his idea of the perfect breakfast, and he carried at least forty pounds of excess weight. By any medical analysis, the man was a prime candidate for myocardial infarction. But the boot print in the dusting of snow on the walkway next to Hall’s residence, long since vanished in the rising temperatures of the day, undeniably suggests a conspiracy of some magnitude. Even greater reason for caution was the chief of staff’s admonition to Hayley in the privacy of his office that continues to reverberate, “Trust no one.” What if Hall’s death was not from natural causes but the handiwork of a deep-state conspiracy? She makes her decision within moments of Udall’s most important question.
“No, ma’am. I saw nothing out of the ordinary until discovering Mr. Hall’s body,” Hayley informs the FBI agent.
Helen Udall has interviewed hundreds of witnesses and suspects. How a person says something is equally important to what is said. Hayley’s pause before speaking was noteworthy, blatant as the lipstick on her ex-husband’s collar. “Anything at all, Ms. Chill. No embarrassment in stating the obvious.” The words say one thing, but Udall’s hard expression says another. Hayley is being told in certain terms: “Stop screwing around, young lady, this is the F-for-fucking-B-I and you best tell me what you know because I am grieving here, inconsolable over the maple bacon I denied myself, so speak the fuck up!”
Hayley meets the FBI agent’s gaze, Udall’s brown eyes partially hooded and prison-yard lifeless. This isn’t the first time in her life Hayley has dealt with the law. There were at least six interactions with the sheriff’s department or state police back home in Lincoln County. Even during her honorable and lauded career in the army, Hayley had occasion to be questioned by military police, but always as witness and not possible suspect in wrongdoing. As long as she can remember, her world has been one of checkered reputation, frequently requiring police intervention or official investigation. Consequently, Hayley does not intimidate easily in contact with law enforcement personnel. In her experience, it’s no different than an exchange with the local baker.
“Ma’am, there was no answer at the door. I went to the side of the house, persisting because Mr. Hall demanded the briefing binder be hand-delivered to him every day without fail.” She pauses, waiting for Udall to catch up with her furious note taking, then proceeds. “Looking in, through the pantry room window, I could see the chief of staff on the kitchen floor, lying there motionless on his back. I called 911, returned to the front porch, and waited there for EMTs to arrive.”
Udall finishes jotting down on her notepad and then slides a look toward the scrum of investigators observing the interview from a few yards away. Her failure to gain anything of use from the witness, a mere intern, has soured her mood even further. “Enjoying the show?” she cracks to the spectating detectives, who take the hint and disperse. Udall looks back toward Hayley, unwilling to let go. “And what about before this morning?”
“Ma’am?”
“Your relationship with Mr. Hall, what was that like?” Again the FBI agent’s facial expression preloads her words with meaning beyond their dictionary definition.
“Nothing inappropriate, if that’s what you’re asking, ma’am,” Hayley calmly assures the FBI agent.
Udall releases Hayley from the interview with an emphatic slamming shut of her notepad. “Okay, well, obviously, I’ll be speaking with more people there, in the White House.”
* * *
GIRARD STREET PARK, in Washington’s diverse Columbia Heights neighborhood, has long resisted all attempts at gentrification. With shade trees, picnic tables, playground, and a full basketball court, it possesses the basic amenities of urban refuge and nothing more. The neighboring streets of Girard and Fairmont provide a reliable clientele of panhandlers, addicts, gangsters, and petty criminals in addition to a few brave, less subterranean types. “Public” in the extreme sense of the word, the park isn’t pretty.
Since a midday shootout cleared the playground a few years before, few parents allow their children to visit the area. On this chilly November morning, the sun rarely peeks through roiling, dark clouds. Even the bums and criminals have shunned the grimy square for a warmer and drier indoors. The only person in the park is a man sitting alone on a bench. Bearded and wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and astrakhan cap, the man watches a pair of sparrows tussle over a dead, desiccated beetle.
Sinatra materializes from behind the Bearded Man’s shoulder and takes a seat on the bench. The Bearded Man had been anticipating Sinatra’s stealthy arrival and doesn’t react in the slightest. The operative, dressed in jeans, wool shirt, and down jacket, smokes a cigarette and watches the birds in mild combat.
“Haven’t you heard?” the Bearded Man asks, gesturing to the cigarette dangling Jean-Paul Belmondo–style from Sinatra’s lips. “Those things will kill you.”
“Sitting with you on this bench, in broad daylight, has a higher probability of killing me than cancer,” Sinatra retorts. “Let’s talk about your hat.”
The Bearded Man doesn’t have a self-conscious bone in his body. The cap sits atop his head with aplomb. “ ‘Astrakhan’ is the Russian word for the pelt of a young Karakul lamb, a breed of sheep native to Central Asia,” he explains. “Harvesting at birth, when the wool is still black, soft, and very tightly coiled, it creates a pleasurably dense mat.” The Bearded Man gives Sinatra a wink. “Popular among Soviet Politburo members back in the day.”
Sinatra is spectacularly uninterested. Then again, he had asked about the damn thing. He flicks the cigarette a dozen yards away, where it rolls to a stop against a curbstone. “Why am I talking to you?”
“I want to hear there were no errors made on Kalorama Road. Your lips, my ears.”
Sinatra sighs, a wheeze of petulant arrogance. “Peter Hall died of a massive heart attack. Dead before he hit the floor,” Sinatra relates. “Read about it in the New York Times.”
“Your men performed to expectation, then? No mistakes.”
“I was first in and last out. The team’s execution was flawless.”
The Bearded Man nods approvingly. “Excellent.” He checks his watch.
“That’s it?” Sinatra appears both surprised and annoyed.
“Well, I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks with your safety.” The Bearded Man stands.
Sinatra also rises, eye-to-eye with him. “Our man inside 1600 requires direction.”
The Bearded Man levels an irate look toward Sinatra, disappointed with an operative who had been selected by another member of the task group less particular than himself. If it had been up to him to choose a candidate for the job, given the targets, he would have looked offshore. His fellow Americans can be such outrageous brats, spoiled children weaned on a steady diet of network
television and McDonald’s hamburgers who never really ever grow up. The Bearded Man is grateful he was raised well before the Internet age and ubiquitous handheld devices. He’s doubly grateful not to have children himself.
“He is to do what he’s been ordered to do and nothing more.”
“Damocles?” Sinatra presses.
“At the present time, there is no need for further action,” the Bearded Man reiterates.
“At the present time,” Sinatra restates pointedly.
“Should the situation change, I’ll be in touch. In the meantime, your man is to remain in ready position, and that is all.”
Sinatra nods, message received. He finds himself staring at the battling sparrows. The partially masticated beetle lies between them on the damp concrete, not three feet from where rival gang members had exchanged close-quarter gunfire.
The Bearded Man follows the other man’s gaze. “Anthus rubescens. American Pipit.”
Sinatra clearly doesn’t know what the Bearded Man is talking about. His mind is elsewhere. What if the job on Kalorama Road wasn’t error-free? What if he or one of his team had made a mistake? There would be no escape or avoidance of consequence. He and every man on his team would be the most wanted men on earth. It’s a dreadful and terrifying thought, and Sinatra can feel a thunderclap headache coming on.
“What?” he mumbles, eyes blinking.
The Bearded Man makes a dismissive gesture. “Never mind. We’ll be in touch.” And he walks off, wrapped in his duffel coat and astrakhan cap riding jauntily atop his head.
* * *
IN THEIR GROUND-FLOOR office of the West Wing, the four interns spent most of the morning in confused idleness. With Peter Hall’s death and the entire White House shell-shocked, demand for intern services is at low ebb. In the first three and a half hours of the workday, not a single call comes down to the repurposed janitorial closet. Sophia and Luke pass the time with heads pressed together in intimate conversation. Becca chats on the phone with friends who aren’t really friends but means to an end. Unlike the others, Hayley keeps silent and still, replaying in her head the sequence of events at Kalorama Road over and over again.