CHAPTER TWELVE

11:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington DC

“Is it a warrant for my arrest?” Susan Hopkins said. “Is that what they’ve issued?”

Kurt Kimball turned the sound down on the video monitor. They had just watched Jefferson Monroe’s speech again – Luke had seen it three times now.

Although there were other festivities at Monroe’s rally earlier this morning, it didn’t matter what else came after that. A minor country music star had taken the stage and tried to entertain the crowd with a song about America, but within seconds people were already drifting away.

They hadn’t come for music – they had come for a public lynching, which was pretty close to what they had gotten.

Now Luke glanced around the Situation Room, watching the reactions. It was a packed house, a gathering of the tribes. People from the election campaign, Secret Service, Susan’s people, the Vice President’s people, some people from the Democratic Party. Luke didn’t see a lot of fight in the eyes of these people. Some of them were obviously monitoring the proceedings in search of a good time to jump ship before it sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Scenes like this were not Luke’s normal environment. He felt out of place, and even more than that. He recognized that a group of people were trying to make difficult decisions, but he didn’t have a lot of patience for the process. His typical response to a problem had always been to think of something, then act on it. Meanwhile, Kurt Kimball seemed confused. Kat Lopez seemed stricken. Only Susan seemed calm.

Luke watched Susan closely, looking for signs of collapse. It was a habit he had picked up in war zones, especially during downtime between battles – he would become acutely aware of how much the people around him had left in the tank. Stress took its toll, and people were worn down by it. Sometimes it happened gradually, and sometimes it happened instantly. But either way, there came a time when all but the most hardcore fighters would fold under pressure. Then they would cease to function.

But Susan didn’t seem to have reached that place yet. Her voice was steady. Her eyes were hard and unflinching. She was in a bad place, but she was still fighting. Luke was glad about that. It would make it easier to fight alongside her.

Kurt, at the front of the room near the big projection screen, shook his perfectly bald head. “No. You are a person of interest in the case, but not a suspect. The Washington, DC, Metro Police, specifically the Homicide Division, have simply made a request for an interview. They would like you to come in to their headquarters. You would have your legal counsel with you, and available at all times. That said, if you grant them the interview, you could become a suspect during the course of it. At which point, you could be arrested.”

Kurt glanced at the White House legal counsel, a straight-laced man in a three-piece suit, and a mop of sandy hair on top of his head. He had two aides with him.

“Would you say that’s right, Howard?” Kurt said.

Howard nodded. “I would not grant them an interview at this time, and certainly not an in-person interview. Not here, and under no circumstances at one of their facilities. You could go in and have a hard time getting out again, especially in the current climate. If they want to do an interview, it should be over the telephone or maybe a video conference. You’re busy, Susan. You’re President of the United States. You want to meet your responsibilities in this case, but you also have a lot of other things to do.”

“Doesn’t that make Susan look guilty?” a young guy in a blue suit and a crew cut said. He sat directly across the conference table from Luke. He looked like he was nineteen years old – in the sense that a lot of nineteen-year-olds still look like they are twelve. “I mean, we have nothing to hide here. I’m very confident of that.”

“Agent Stone,” Susan said. “Do you know my campaign manager, Tim Rutledge?”

Luke shook his head. “Haven’t had the pleasure.”

They reached across the table and shook hands. Rutledge had a firm grip, overly firm, like he had read in a book somewhere that a firm grip was important.

Rutledge looked at Luke. “And what is your role here, Agent Stone?”

Luke stared at him. He figured the best way to answer was honestly.

“I don’t know.”

“Agent Stone is a special operative. He has saved my life on more than one occasion, as well as my daughter’s life. He’s probably saved everyone in this room’s life at one point or another.”

“Who do you work for?” Rutledge said.

Luke shrugged. “I work for the President.” He didn’t see any need to go into his past, the Special Response Team, Delta Force, any of it. If this guy wanted to know that stuff, he could find it all out. The truth was, Luke felt strangely disconnected from that person, the person he had once been. He wasn’t sure what good he could do here.

“Well, I work for the President, too,” Rutledge said. “And I can tell you that these allegations, or whatever they are, are not true. Not one word of it. Susan had nothing to do with this man’s murder, nor did the campaign, nor did Pierre. There’s been no corruption. There’s been no pay to play with Pierre’s charities. I know this because we dug deep at the start of the campaign to see where the vulnerabilities were, to find any skeletons. Financially, there were basically none. I know there have been some personal issues, and it’s possible they played a role in the outcome of the election, but Pierre is about the squeakiest clean businessman I’ve ever run across.”

“Did you know the dead man at all?” Kurt said.

Rutledge shrugged. “Know him? No. I knew of him. I never met him or spoke to him. Pierre’s security director alerted the campaign to the guy’s existence probably nine months ago. There had been a number of attempted hacks into company databases, all leading back to Norman’s investigation agency. Pretty amateurish stuff. From there, Pierre’s people determined that Norman was working for Monroe, but no one worried about it too much. And we certainly weren’t going to murder him. As I indicated, there was nothing for him to find. You have to remember that all of this was in the context of last summer, when we all knew the people were never going to vote in a crazy person like Jefferson Monroe as President of the United States.”

Three people over from Rutledge, a man raised his hand. He was a weak-looking middle-aged man with thinning hair. He had a long nose and no chin to speak of. His body was thin and utterly without muscle tone. He wore an ill-fitting gray suit that he seemed to swim inside of. But he had hard, hard eyes. Here was one person in the room who was definitely not afraid.

Oddly, he wore a Hello, my name is sticker on the front of his suit. It said, in thick scribbled black magic marker, Brent Staples.

Luke knew the name. He was an old-school campaign strategist and public relations man. Luke thought he and Susan had had a falling out at one point, but they must have patched things up for the campaign. A lot of good that had done Susan.

“I hate to say this,” he said, and Luke could tell he actually relished saying it, whatever came next. “But Jefferson Monroe is looking less and less crazy, while the people in this room are looking more and more so.”

“What are you trying to say, Brent?” Susan said.

“I’m saying that you’re out on a limb again, Susan. You are all by yourself in a very awkward place. I’m telling you that you are becoming isolated from the American people. From a regular person’s perspective, you lost the election, and that hurts. There might have even been some malfeasance on your opponent’s part. But nobody knows if that’s really true, and if it is true, nobody knows what kind of impact it had on the outcome. Meanwhile, you’re saying you won’t step down. Also, a man has been murdered who was investigating you. And it seems you’re leaning toward saying you won’t give the police an interview. My question to you is: who’s starting to look like the criminal here? Who is starting to look like the crazy person?”

Kat Lopez stood in the corner of the room. She shook her head and glared at Brent Staples. “Brent, that’s out of line. You know Susan didn’t murder anyone. You know that this is a dog-and-pony show dreamed up by Monroe and his hitman Gerry O’Brien.”

“I’m telling you what it looks like,” Staples said. “Not what it is. I don’t know what it is, and that doesn’t really matter anyway. What it looks like is everything.”

He gazed around the room, hard eyes taking everyone in, daring them to tell him otherwise.

Young Tim Rutledge took up the challenge. “It looks to me like they murdered the investigator so they could pin it on Susan,” he said. “It looks to me like they stole the election through voter fraud and by tampering with the machinery. That’s what it looks like to me.”

Luke finally decided to chime in with something. Now he realized what was wrong with this entire meeting, and since he did, he might as well point it out. Maybe it could help them.

“It seems to me,” he said slowly, “that you need to take back the initiative.”

Throughout the room, all eyes slowly turned to him.

“Think of this as combat, a battle. They have you on the run. They have you in disarray. They do something, and you react. By the time you react, they’re already doing something else. They are on the attack, and you are in a disorganized retreat. You have to come up with some way to attack them, set them on their back foot, and retake the initiative.”

“Like what?” Brent Staples said.

Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t that your job?”

For several minutes, Kurt Kimball had been huddled in a corner with two of his aides. Something had clearly distracted him. Now he turned back to the room.

“I like your idea, Stone. But it’s going to be hard to retake the initiative at this moment.”

Stone raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why’s that?”

“We just learned that at least a hundred West Virginia state troopers, and Wheeling metropolitan police, are en route to Washington in a long convoy. They intend to come directly here to the White House, take Susan into custody, and bring her to the DC Metropolitan police headquarters themselves.”

“They have no jurisdiction,” the White House counsel, Howard, said. “Have they lost their minds?”

“It seems that everyone has lost their minds today,” Kurt said. “And they have a claim to jurisdiction, however slight.”

“What is it?”

“Both police forces, along with a dozen others from nearby states, are routinely deputized as auxiliary Washington, DC, cops to provide overflow security for the Presidential inauguration events every four years. They claim that renders them permanent deputies.”

Howard shook his head. “It won’t hold up in court. It’s silly.”

Kurt put his hands in the air, as if Howard had pulled a gun on him. “Whether it will hold up or not, they’re on their way here. Apparently, they think they’re going to walk in here, take Susan, and walk back out of here with her.”

There was a long pause. No one in the room spoke. The silence spun out as each face looked from one to the other.

“They’ll be here in thirty minutes,” Kurt said.