by Chris Hauty
Hayley comes to the surface underneath the bridge, choking and gasping for breath. The current carries her south, away from where the car entered the water and on the opposite side of the bridge from where people have gathered to observe the aftermath of the accident. No witnesses interviewed later by the authorities recall seeing anyone surface from the submerged vehicle.
She swims the few dozen yards to the river’s edge and clambers onto the bank, water dripping from her clothes, face, and hair. Both shoes are missing, but otherwise she is completely unhurt. There isn’t a bruise or cut on her. Checking the inside pocket of her jacket, Hayley retrieves her phone. Miraculously, it remains fully operational.
* * *
THE RECENTLY BUILT condos at 3303 Water Street, in the words of its promotional materials, are “modern to a T.” They’re also extremely expensive, on the highest end of condo valuations in the District of Columbia. Prices hover between two and three million dollars, with $3,000 a month HOA dues, for 2,200 square feet of above-average construction and “ultra-luxury” fixtures with a panoramic view of the Potomac River. The majority of residents are lawyers and lobbyists. There is only one low-level White House aide residing at 3303 Water Street, Asher Danes, whose father purchased the condo as an investment. Sparing his only son the indignities of lesser accommodations was the primary consideration, however.
Asher eats his takeout dinner from Tono Sushi delivered to his door by Uber Eats and watches the emergency vehicle lights flashing on the Key Bridge, prominently visible through floor-to-ceiling windows that define the living space. A television nearby is tuned to MSNBC at a low volume. Getting home from another grinding workday, Asher prefers to tune out. Eat, a little reality TV, then sleep. It’s the same routine every day. On weekends, if he isn’t at the White House, Asher is sleeping, recharging for the week coming up.
He has become disillusioned working in the West Wing, his unhappiness so acute he’s considered quitting. Sure, Asher would like to be the first (openly) gay president. He loves politics as much as ever, motivated by a keen desire to help people and change the world for the better. His problem with the White House is its current occupant. Asher was an early supporter of Monroe but has become disenchanted with the administration’s agenda as it evolved into actual policy. In his time since working there, Asher has exchanged exactly zero words with the president. He suspects Monroe is homophobic.
Asher isn’t sure what he would do if he quit and moved back to Greenwich. No doubt his parents would love to have him home. Eventually, he will get hired by some random political candidate to help with his or her campaign for some random congressional seat or another. But Asher really would prefer not to take that easy way out. He craves a more dynamic and directed confrontation of his dissatisfaction. Gifted with a prodigious intellect, good looks, and an effortless wit, Asher Danes perceives he has coasted through life without breaking a sweat.
In this moment, while idly picking at the remnants of his sushi dinner and watching the hectic activity on the distant Key Bridge, Asher decides to run for political office himself. He doesn’t know where exactly. New York, where his father is a high-powered lawyer? Or Connecticut, where he grew up? Either place provides possibilities for a state senate or congressional seat in the next two years. In this way emotionally reinvigorated, Asher calculates a timetable for declaring his political intentions.
All of it will require considerable research, of course, a time-consuming endeavor that would be impossible while also working in the West Wing. If he’s serious about any of these ideas, Asher must quit his job at the White House. He muses on the potential of making a declaration of his resignation. Can it be spun as a protest of Monroe’s policies? All of this speculation gets Asher’s blood moving, passionate again for the first time in weeks. He doesn’t worry about upsetting his parents. Prone to bragging about their son, the White House aide, they’ll be undoubtedly even happier to boast of their son, US representative from New York’s Seventeenth District.
The condo’s landline phone buzzes, snapping Asher from his reveries. He goes to the phone mounted on the wall between sleek, open kitchen and the entryway.
“Miss Chill in the lobby to see you, Mr. Danes,” the doorman informs him over the phone.
“Thank you, Hector. Please send her up.”
Asher is surprised by Hayley’s unexpected visit. In the few days they’ve worked together, he has come to enjoy her company and assistance immensely. Asher has found the West Virginian to be a refreshing change from the previous interns sent to help him out in White House Operations. Intelligent and hardworking, she has proven to be decent company as well. But Hayley comes from a vastly different world than Asher. Her values seem extraordinarily traditional, which might explain a rather odd otherworldliness. All things considered, Asher isn’t displeased she has chosen to stop by. He had given Hayley his personal contact information because she seemed so excruciatingly trustworthy. Asher is curious, however, why the intern has come to his residence at this time of night. He guesses it must be something very important as he goes to answer her knock at the door.
On the small video screen of his entryway console, Asher sees Hayley is clearly in both physical and emotional duress. “Holy shit!” he exclaims. He yanks the door open wide, revealing Hayley soaking wet and bedraggled on the other side. “Oh my God, what happened?”
A shivering Hayley steps inside, checking over her shoulder as she does so. Her skin is blue tinged and eyes wide with shock. “Car accident,” is all she can manage to get out.
Asher looks over his own shoulder, through the condo’s windows, at the accident scene still unfolding on the bridge. “On Key Bridge?” he asks incredulously.
Hayley nods.
“You went over the side? Into the Potomac?!” Asher presses, not entirely registering what has happened.
“I didn’t get caught in a rainstorm.” No smile accompanies her small joke, betraying slight irritation with Asher and his prattling.
“But how? How did it happen?! Oh my God! Are you okay? Are you hurt?” His questions come in rapid fire, his dismay and anxiety goading the other on.
“I’m fine,” she assures him, adding with genuine concern, “Lost my backpack and house keys.”
“But you’re okay? That’s what’s important.” Asher finally clicks into action mode, taking Hayley by the shoulders and steering her toward another part of the expansive condo. “C’mon, let’s get you in a hot shower and dry clothes.”
Hayley allows herself to be guided down the hallway by Asher. Never in her life has she felt so vulnerable and frightened as in these earliest hours after the accident. When Scott attacked her, Hayley’s training kicked into gear. The same could be said about her escape from the submerged car and swim to safety, within sight of Asher’s condo building at 3303 Water Street. But once safely on shore, with the realization she had escaped uninjured, the impact of what had just transpired landed hard. With every minute that followed, the implications of those events—Hall’s death, seeing the boot prints, Scott’s shocking attempt on her life—exploded in a mushroom cloud, expanding far beyond her ability to rationally process them. Paranoid fear took grip. It was a small miracle that Asher’s residence was within a three-minute walk from where she crawled out of the cold, dark Potomac. If there was ever a time in Hayley’s life she needed a friend, however tenuous, it was in these hours after the incident on Key Bridge.
“What about the police, Hayley?” Asher asks her as they reach the second-bedroom bath. “Who’s car was it? A ride share?”
Hayley shakes her head no. “One of the Secret Service agents. He was driving.” She pauses, then continues, “I don’t think he made it out.”
For her sake, Asher masks his shock. “Hot shower,” he responds, pushing her into the bathroom. “I’ll get you something to wear, then we’ll sort all of this out.” After she has closed the door, Asher wallows in the anxiety he’d hidden from Hayley. This shit is insane! What the fuck has
he just invited into his house? Hearing the shower, he goes back into the front area of the condo and picks up his cell phone. He dials 911 and listens for one ring and then another. An operator comes on the line and asks what emergency is being reported. Hearing her voice, Asher changes his mind, mumbles an apology for accidentally calling, and disconnects. Despite only knowing Hayley a very short time, she has become a friend. Asher won’t call the police, at least not just yet.
* * *
HAYLEY SITS ON the couch, skin red from a near-scalding shower, wearing Asher’s sweatpants and I SOUTH BEACH T-shirt. The sound of her clothes tumbling in a dryer behind a discreet utility room door drifts from across the large open-space living room. Asher sits in a Jean Prouvé chair opposite the off-white Edward Wormley couch, where Hayley is perched. If this political business doesn’t pan out, Asher demonstrably has a future in interior design. Hayley takes a sip of tea from a cobalt-blue Limoges bone china demitasse cup with encrusted rim in twenty-four-karat gold, serenely unaware of its multi-hundred-dollar cost.
“Better,” she pronounces in regard to her general well-being.
“All right. So. You guys were seeing each other, I take it?”
“Something like that,” she tells him. Then adds, more definitely, “Yes.”
“The cowboy? Dark hair, heart-melting, Elijah Wood–blue eyes?”
Hayley nods. “Scott Billings.”
Asher marks a box in his mental checklist. Emphatically, he tells her she needs to call the police. She shakes her head no.
“Seriously. The man is dead. You were in the car.” He pauses and then asks, “It was an accident, right?”
Hayley ducks the question. “You know what my high school girl friends are doing now? They’re mothers on some form of public assistance, strung out on opioids, or both. Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked to escape all of that? How do you think a messy scandal involving a dead, married Secret Service agent plays out for me?”
“This thing with you and Scott, it was a secret?”
Hayley nods. “And no one needs to know. What would it accomplish?”
Asher broods on it for a moment and decides Hayley is right. “It’s not like you’ve committed any crime.”
“Not one I know of.”
He has an awful thought. “Your backpack!”
Hayley had already calculated these odds. “With any luck, it’s been swept clear of the site by the river’s current,” she says. “If not, well, then I’m screwed.”
“Is that a plan?” he asks skeptically.
Hayley says nothing, staring into the blue teacup. She hasn’t exactly enjoyed the beverage. Back home, folks drank Dr Pepper, Tab, and coffee. Drinking bottled water, hot tea, or Pepsi was considered suspect. In the years since she left home, Hayley has endeavored to broaden her culinary horizons but still can’t abide the taste of Pepsi. Sometimes, you really just have to draw the line.
“Not the plan,” she tells Asher, who becomes anxious all over again.
* * *
SCOTT BILLINGS’S RANCH-STYLE home is shrouded in shadow, not a single light glowing from within. The street and surrounding houses are quiet. Moderately strong winds cause trees in the neighborhood to swirl and gyrate in a frantic, unsyncopated dance. Asher’s Prius is parked across the street, lights and engine off. Hayley sits beside Asher, behind the wheel. They both stare at the Secret Service agent’s house in silence, neither one of them wishing to speak but for different reasons. Finally, Hayley breaks the loaded silence.
“Five minutes. Just a few things I left inside,” she assures Asher.
“Be a hero and make it three.”
Hayley ignores the crack. Swaddled in Asher’s gray long coat, she grips the door handle and exits the vehicle, striding across the street and up Scott’s walkway.
Asher watches her disappear around the far corner of the house and grips the steering wheel with white-knuckle anxiety. Maybe Hayley hadn’t broken the law before, but what would you call this latest activity? Only now he is her accomplice.
Hayley must trust Asher Danes out of sheer necessity. On the surface, at least, he seems utterly without guile. But she can’t predict how her coworker would react if he was made aware of the suspicious evidence surrounding Peter Hall’s death or the very concrete fact that Scott tried to kill her. Hayley can’t afford Asher freaking out completely and running to tell whichever authority he can find first. What she knows as truth is the existence of a conspiracy directed at the Monroe presidency, if not the president himself. Until she knows more, Hayley is determined to protect that information as if it were the crown jewels.
Judging by Scott’s reaction when he realized she had an inkling of the conspiracy, Hayley can deduce certain reliable assumptions. First, Hall’s death was the result of foul play, most likely at the hands of special-operation-trained individuals. Second, with the exception of Scott, no one suspects she knows anything about Hall’s murder. And because Billings now lies at the bottom of the Potomac River, her secret remains safe. Will the FBI be suspicious of Hall’s death or merely go through the motions of an investigation? Was Scott a genuine Secret Service agent? How trustworthy is that organization? The identity of players and their agendas remain unknown, but Hayley, though only a lowly intern, is determined to influence the game’s conclusion.
Having entered through a rear kitchen door where she knew Scott kept a key under the mat, Hayley creeps through the darkened house and searches for items that would suggest her existence to his coconspirators. She doesn’t expect to find much unless the Secret Service agent had notated her contact information somewhere besides his phone, which is with him in the river and hopefully inoperable. What she’s really looking for is evidence pertaining to the bigger conspiracy against the president. She finds nothing of interest in the living room or the kitchen, only the clutter of a single man who apparently cared little for cleanliness or domestic order. The mess appalls Hayley, and she wonders how she even spent two nights in this place. Searching methodically, she moves toward the bedrooms.
Waiting in the car, Asher becomes increasingly nervous the longer Hayley is inside the residence. Scott’s house remains dark and tomb-like from his vantage point, no sign of Hayley inside. The thought strikes him that being accomplice to the break-in of a dead Secret Service agent’s house in Falls Church is an inauspicious start to his future political career. How has he fallen under the intern’s spell? Or is he simply sabotaging his grand ambitions before they even have the chance to congeal? Not always completely trusting in himself, how can he put so much of his own well-being in the hands of this redneck military vet? Asher wishes he’d never quit smoking.
An SUV with blacked-out windows rounds the corner at the opposite end of the block and slowly approaches. His stress levels spike as the SUV stops and parks in front of Scott’s house. Asher watches all four of the SUV’s doors open and men exit the vehicle, moving en masse toward the house. He has the unavoidable sense his life has become a movie, while simultaneously acknowledging a perverse pleasure in that realization.
“Oh, fuck,” is what he says.
Inside the house, Hayley gives Scott’s bedroom an efficient toss. It’s impossible to discern where she has scattered items or not, the natural state of all things inside Scott’s bedroom being upside down and disorderly. Hayley has yet to find anything of informational value in her search, but then hits pay dirt. Nestled in a pile of dirty laundry on the bedroom floor, just inside a shallow closet, Hayley finds Scott’s tablet. In this same moment she hears the front door open.
Sinatra leads other members of his team into the house. Lewis hits the lights, illuminating the entryway and living room.
“What a fucking slob, this guy,” Martin observes after brief inspection of the home’s interior.
Sinatra is in no mood for casual conversation. Scott’s death is like an iceberg adrift. There’s no telling of the impact and ramifications hidden beneath the superficial fact of his demise. Was it rea
lly an accident? Who drives off a bridge? Could a mere tire blowout cause such calamity? Certainly there is more to the story and probably none of it is good. Sinatra wishes like hell he’d refused the job. Operations overseas, while perilous for other reasons, are always preferable. This business is far too close to home, practically in his backyard. But the money was beyond tempting, an even million for a maximum three months’ work with the guys under him collecting $250,000 each. A man would have to be a fool to turn down that kind of money, no matter how distasteful or risky the job. After losing his house in Alexandria in a truly gothic divorce, Sinatra hopes to remake his life with the money from this gig.
“Bag the personal belongings. Leave the rest,” he instructs his team. They don’t exactly snap to the housekeeping task at hand. “Let’s go!” Sinatra barks. As they begin to work, he checks his phone for emails from a real estate agent who is hot on the trail of a new-construction five-bedroom on King James Place. He is determined to buy a home larger than the one his ex-wife has moved into with her new husband, never mind the fact there is no one in his life to fill those extra four bedrooms.
Martin leaves the ugly mess in the kitchen and living room to the others, hoping the master bedroom is in better shape. He carries two black plastic contractor bags with a forty-two-gallon capacity, figuring they ought to be sufficient for the job. When he enters the bedroom and flips on the lights, Martin can see he had underestimated Scott’s ability to amass clutter. Muttering a curse, he staggers through the piles of clothes and empty bags and boxes on the floor, moving toward the closet with accordion-style, louvered doors.
Hiding inside, Hayley can see Martin approach through the louvered slats. The operator is clearly going to inspect the closet’s interior, the only uncertainty being how she plans to react when he does. If she is taken hostage by these men, they will kill her and dispose of her body before the new day dawns. Searching for an accomplice, they will undoubtedly find Asher and kill him, too. Doing nothing is not an option. In this case, the best defense is offense. The moment the man opens the closet door, revealing her admittedly unimaginative hiding place, Hayley decides she will attempt to kill him by punching him in his trachea and then defend herself from the others in the house, however many there might be, by arming herself with whatever weapon the dead man might be carrying. In the few seconds it takes the man to reach the closet, Hayley calculates her odds of survival at 25 percent, give or take three percentage points.