by Radclyffe
Cam said, “Upon disembarking, you and Blair will join the president and proceed directly to the entrance.”
“Lars Anderson from RBN news will do a thirty-second on-air interview at the entrance to the hotel,” Ari said.
“Of course,” Cam said. “Agents will be waiting to accompany you.”
What she meant was that Secret Service agents, Oakes among them, would be waiting to stand between them and any threat from the public, who waited just feet away beyond the rope line to catch a glimpse of President Andrew Powell. Today, Matthew Ford would almost certainly be among them.
Eagle’s ETA three minutes
Evyn, driving the lead car, alerted the agents on the ground the president was about to arrive at the hotel.
Oakes, waiting at the entrance to the semicircular drive fronting the Hyatt, scanned the crowds surrounding her. Agents to her left and right, interspersed with the crowd, were doing the same. Hundreds of faces, young and old, of every race and nationality, jostling, pressing forward, jockeying for a place against the metal barricades bordering the deep blue carpet extending from the point where the president’s limo would stop to the hotel entrance.
Ford could be among them, possibly close enough to fire a shot or toss a grenade, or even launch himself in a suicide vest into the president’s path. She and every law enforcement agent for a hundred miles had his picture, but he could’ve disguised his appearance or donned a uniform that at first glance would be bypassed, or any number of a dozen things. Oakes was trained to look for the odd detail or a traditional terrorist tool—the backpack containing explosives, the out-of-place coat on a hot summer day covering a suicide vest, the one person moving against the crowd in an unwavering path toward the principal or displaying some sign of agitation or excitement.
Ford was out there, Oakes knew it. They all knew it. None of the cell members they’d apprehended claimed to know of Ford’s plan. They were probably telling the truth. According to Commander Roberts, the CIA was interrogating Ford’s Russian contact—his presumed handler with the ties to a congressman—but he was a professional and would be a lot harder to break than the untrained fanatics they’d arrested the night before. She had no hard intelligence. All she had to go on was instinct. And her instinct said he was out there.
ETA one minute, Evyn announced.
And she was out of time.
Sandy worked her way through the crowd, moving from one end of the street in front of the Hyatt to the other, back and forth, searching for him. He wouldn’t wait. He couldn’t wait, not now that whatever he’d planned had failed. He must know they were looking for him, and unless he abandoned the plan entirely, it would have to be now. Somewhere in those thirty feet between the time the president stepped out of the armored vehicle and when he entered the hotel lobby, when he was most exposed, Ford would have to act.
Suicide vest like he’d planned with the others? The June morning was on their side, clear and bright and already close to seventy degrees. Hardly anyone wore a jacket.
Something else, then. A handgun was most likely. Small, easy to conceal under a T-shirt or inside a waistband until the last second. All it took was one well-placed shot or even a wild spray of automatic fire. But she didn’t think so—not showy enough somehow, too simple. Too ordinary.
Matthew Ford wanted to be remembered—that’s what Trish had said. He wanted his face to be known. Something bigger, something unforgettable. The sound of the motorcycle escort, sirens blaring, announced the president’s imminent arrival. Sandy pushed closer toward the entrance. He would need to be close. He was close. She could feel it.
He’d known since five a.m. he would be alone in this. None of his contacts had checked in with him. There would be no diversions along the outer perimeters to draw police and FBI and Secret Service agents away at the last moment. He still held an advantage. They wouldn’t know where he was. They wouldn’t know what he looked like now. He’d been in position for hours, sitting in a Starbucks among a crowd of people waiting to see the motorcade. He’d watched the bursts of color across the sky at sunrise. His last sunrise.
When the emergency vehicles and news vans had arrived at six, and scores of people filled the cordoned-off area reserved for them, he’d left the Starbucks where he’d been waiting and tossed the light nylon windbreaker he’d used to cover the navy blue shirt with the paramedic emblem on the sleeve into a trash can. Mingling with the dozens of first responders wasn’t difficult. Paramedics, EMTs, firefighters all too busy with their own preparations to notice someone from a different rig.
Secret Service agents and police were heavy on the ground, but so far his shaved head, camouflaged like his face with tanner, had been enough of an alteration to let him go unnoticed. He worked his way behind the press of reporters closest to the rope line. When he slipped the long, slim canister from his equipment belt and held it aloft, he wanted them to focus on him. He’d have just enough time to be captured on film for the world to see his face before he depressed the plunger on the aerosol canister and, along with the president and anyone standing within a hundred feet of him, died.
The motorcade pulled up in front of the hotel and Oakes took one last look through the crowd. Sandy Sullivan, fifteen feet away, did the same, and their eyes met for an instant.
Oakes’s call now. She took a breath and radioed the agents inside the cars.
“All clear.”
The lead car stopped, Evyn came around the front and stood opposite the agent who opened the rear door for President Powell and Lucinda Washburn. Ari stepped out of the second vehicle with Blair and Cam Roberts. Cameras flashed. The two groups converged and started up the blue carpet. Secret Service agents kept pace at points around them.
Evyn’s job was to protect them now. Oakes forced her gaze away from Ari and tracked back to Sandy.
The detective, blond hair a beacon in the sea of shifting humanity, suddenly surged forward against the crowd. A man forged a line directly toward the entrance, leaving people stumbling in his wake, his hand aloft, glinting silver.
Sandy, closing in on the man, shouted, “Matthew! Is that you?”
Oakes surged into the breach.
Chapter Thirty
National Convention, Day 4
“You look great, babe,” Dell said as Sandy pulled off her top and grabbed another one out of the closet.
“That color’s not quite right,” she said distractedly.
Dell leaned back on the bed on her elbows and crossed her legs, enjoying the show. She’d been dressed for half an hour. Pulling on a pair of good pants, a pressed white shirt, belt, and loafers didn’t take a lot of time. Making sure her hair was lying right, which it was, took longer than that. Sandy, on the other hand, had been through four outfits and counting.
“You’re always the best-looking woman in the room,” Dell commented.
Sandy looked over her shoulder with an eye roll. “You already got yours today. So enough with the compliments.” She set her hands on her hips, pulled the last shirt from the closet, and slipped it on. “Besides, it isn’t every day you get to meet the president, you know.”
“It isn’t every day a crazy-ass cop saves the president’s life.”
“It wasn’t me who jumped on him,” Sandy said. The image of Oakes sailing through the air, clamping a hand around Matthew’s wrist, and taking him down with that silver canister clutched between them still woke her at night. If that had been an explosive, Oakes would be dead. If Ford had managed to depress the release valve on the aerosol container, hundreds might have died. All she did was distract him for that extra second it took for Oakes to make contact. She shivered.
Dell was at her side in an instant, cupping her face. “Hey. It’s over, you got him.”
“We all got him,” Sandy said.
“If you hadn’t picked him up cutting through the crowd, if you hadn’t drawn Oakes’s attention, if you hadn’t called his name…” Dell shook her head.
None of the agents
or police could have discharged a weapon in that crowd. The only choice had been to physically intercept him or block his weapon with their bodies. If they hadn’t had that one second of hesitation, long enough for Oakes and then half a dozen other Secret Service agents to pile onto him, the body count would have been inestimable. The president could have been killed. Sandy could be gone.
Dell rested her forehead against Sandy’s and closed her eyes. “You’re a hero, babe. And the best cop I know.”
“Everything I know about being a cop, you and the rest of the team taught me.” Sandy threaded her arms around Dell’s waist and kissed her. “And you’re the best teachers I know. Just remember that when you start worrying.”
“I love you.” Dell kissed her. “Just don’t try to be a hero too often.”
“Oh, I’m so done with that.” Sandy laughed and took Dell’s hand. “Come on, Rookie, let’s go see the president.”
“You know,” Cam said, slipping her arms around Blair’s waist as she stood before the mirror putting in her earrings, “even when Lucinda is First Lady, it will always be you the public will remember at his side. You’re a big reason he’s where he is today.”
Blair turned and circled Cam’s shoulders. She smiled a bit ruefully. “As hard as it’s been—and as much as I fought it sometimes—I don’t regret any of it…except for the reason it’s been me and not my mom.”
Cam kissed her. “You’ve made both your parents proud.”
Blair’s eyes filled. “I love you for that. I love you for being here with me.”
“Wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Ever.”
“Well, then,” Blair said, “it’s time to jump back on the merry-go-round.”
Cam shrugged into her suit jacket and smiled as Blair straightened her collar. “Should be a fun ride.”
Blair snorted. “I would rather a nice, long, quiet stroll for the next four years.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s likely to happen. But”—Cam slid her hand inside her jacket and pulled out two airline tickets—“in three days, we’ll be on a plane, and I’m not telling anyone where we’re going.” She kissed her. “Even you.”
Blair’s eyes lit up. “Oh my God. Yes, please.”
Laughing, Cam kissed her again. “Anytime you say.”
“Every day, for all time.”
“I’ll be there.” Cam took her hand, and together they walked out to join her father for his acceptance speech.
Oakes walked over to the staging area in the huge convention hall where Ari stood directing her staffers. The doors would open in less than five minutes, and thousands of delegates would pour in for the last day of political jostling, dealmaking, speech making, and celebration.
“We’re going to need to move the podium to the other side of the stage,” Oakes said.
Ari looked up from her tablet where she’d been checking off last-minute details. “We can’t do that. The cameramen are all set up in the broadcast booth—”
“Have to do it,” Oakes said. “It’s in direct line with the exit path to the backstage exit.”
“We’re just now figuring that out?” Ari never got frazzled, but she sounded close. No, actually, she sounded very, very annoyed.
Oakes shrugged. “Water main broke on Eleventh. We had to remap our emergency extraction routes.” Ari blew out a breath and a lock of hair floated up from her forehead. Oakes smoothed it down with a finger. “The media people will adjust. They always get the shot.”
Ari caught her breath. Dozens of cameras had caught Oakes for the world to watch over and over in endless loops, her body in flight as she intercepted Matthew Ford the instant before he released sarin into the crowd, fifty feet from the president. She’d seen the image hundreds of times, until she should have been numb, but she wasn’t. In some deep place inside her, she was still terrified. And incredibly proud.
When Oakes and a handful of agents tackled Ford, the Secret Service agents surrounding her and the others with the president closed in on them and herded them inside the lobby, everyone moving like a wave spreading outward from the seismic center of a tsunami. Oakes and the other law enforcement agents had done their jobs without thought to themselves, and the thousands of onlookers out of sight of the brief disturbance barely sensed the ripple. What could have been mass panic with hundreds of injuries dissolved into little more than transitory confusion.
Ari poked Oakes in the chest. “I love you, but you’re going to drive me crazy with these last-minutes changes for the next four years, aren’t you?”
Oaks laughed and, not caring that two dozen cameras were focused in their direction, kissed her. “I plan on making you crazy in a lot of ways, a hell of a lot longer than that. That’s the price you pay for falling for a Secret Service agent.”
Ari kissed her back. “Believe me when I say the cost is worth it.”
About the Author
Radclyffe has written over sixty romance and romantic intrigue novels as well as a paranormal romance series, The Midnight Hunters, as L.L. Raand.
She is a three-time Lambda Literary Award winner in romance and erotica and received the Dr. James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Award by the Lambda Literary Foundation. A member of the Saints and Sinners Literary Hall of Fame, she is also an RWA/FF&P Prism Award winner for Secrets in the Stone, an RWA FTHRW Lories and RWA HODRW winner for Firestorm, an RWA Bean Pot winner for Crossroads, an RWA Laurel Wreath winner for Blood Hunt, and a Book Buyers Best award winner for Price of Honor and Secret Hearts. She is also a featured author in the 2015 documentary film Love Between the Covers, from Blueberry Hill Productions. In 2019 she was recognized as a “Trailblazer of Romance” by the Romance Writers of America.
In 2004 she founded Bold Strokes Books, one of the world’s largest independent LGBTQ publishing companies, and is the current president and publisher.
Find her at facebook.com/Radclyffe.BSB, follow her on Twitter@RadclyffeBSB, and visit her website at Radfic.com.
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
A Moment in Time by Lisa Moreau. A longstanding family feud separates two women who unexpectedly fall in love at an antique clock shop in a small Louisiana town. (978-1-63555-419-9)
Aspen in Moonlight by Kelly Wacker. When art historian Melissa Warren meets Sula Johansen, director of a local bear conservancy, she discovers that love can come in unexpected and unusual forms. (978-1-63555-470-0)
Back to September by Melissa Brayden. Small bookshop owner Hannah Shepard and famous romance novelist Parker Bristow maneuver the landscape of their two very different worlds to find out if love can win out in the end. (978-1-63555-576-9)
Changing Course by Brey Willows. When the woman of her dreams falls from the sky, intergalactic space captain Jessa Arbelle had better be ready to catch her. (978-1-63555-335-2)
Cost of Honor by Radclyffe. First Daughter Blair Powell and Homeland Security Director Cameron Roberts face adversity when their enemies stop at nothing to prevent President Andrew Powell’s reelection. Book 11 in the Honor series. (978-1-63555-582-0)
Fearless by Tina Michele. Determined to overcome her debilitating fear through exposure therapy, Laura Carter all but fails before she’s even begun until dolphin trainer Jillian Marshall dedicates herself to helping Laura defeat the nightmares of her past. (978-1-63555-495-3)
Not Dead Enough by J.M. Redmann. In the tenth book of the Mickey Knight mystery series, a woman who may or may not be dead drags Micky into a messy con game. (978-1-63555-543-1)
Not Since You by Fiona Riley. When Charlotte boards her honeymoon cruise single and comes face-to-face with Lexi, the high school love she left behind, she questions every decision she has ever made. (978-1-63555-474-8)
Not Your Average Love Spell by Barbara Ann Wright. In this romantic fantasy, four women struggle with who to love and who to hate while fighting to rid a kingdom of an evil invading force. (978-1-63555-327-7)
Tennessee Whiskey by Donna K. Ford. After losing her job, Dane Foste
r starts spiraling out of control. She wants to put her life on pause and ask for a redo, a chance for something that matters. Emma Reynolds is that chance. (978-1-63555-556-1)
30 Dates in 30 Days by Elle Spencer. In this sophisticated contemporary romance, Veronica Welch is a busy lawyer who tries to find love the fast way—thirty dates in thirty days. (978-1-63555-498-4)
Finding Sky by Cass Sellars. Skylar Addison’s search for a career intersects with her new boss’s search for butterflies, but Skylar can’t forgive Jess’s intrusion into her life. Romance is the last thing they expect. (978-1-63555-521-9)
Hammers, Strings, and Beautiful Things by Morgan Lee Miller. While on tour with the biggest pop star in the world, rising musician Blair Bennett falls in love for the first time while coping with loss and depression. (978-1-63555-538-7)
Heart of a Killer by Yolanda Wallace. Contract killer Santana Masters’s only interest is her next assignment—until a chance meeting with a beautiful stranger tempts her to change her ways. (978-1-63555-547-9)
Leading the Witness by Carsen Taite. When defense attorney Catherine Landauer reluctantly becomes the key witness in prosecutor Starr Rio’s latest criminal trial, their hearts, careers, and lives may be at risk. (978-1-63555-512-7)
No Experience Required by Kimberly Cooper Griffin. Izzy Treadway has resigned herself to a life without romance because of her bipolar illness but wonders what she’s gotten herself into when she agrees to write a book about love. (978-1-63555-561-5)