Choppy Water

31

The path was steep, and Bess judged the top of the hill to be somewhere between 100 and 150 feet above the level where the compound was located.

At the top, she sat on a boulder and panted until her breathing returned to normal, then, with trepidation, she got out the cell phone. What if there was no reception up here? She turned it on and got two bars, sometimes one, sometimes none. Dicey.

She direct-dialed Tom Blake’s cell phone.

“Blake.”

“It’s me. Can you record this? It’s important.”

“Just a minute.” There were sounds of fumbling, then the line went dead.

She redialed.

“Blake.”

“I’ve got a weak signal here, so I may have to repeat myself to get it all recorded.”

“It’s recording now.”

“The man in charge has rented an apartment on the same side of the big house. The shooter will establish a firing position on the roof of that building. They’re planning the shoot for tomorrow morning when the subject often works at a desk. Got that?”

“Repeat it, just in case.”

She did so. “To continue, the weapon fires two rounds with each pull of the trigger. He will wait until the subject settles at the desk, then fire once to break or weaken the window, then once more.

“The shooter will drop his case off the back of the building, into a garden, where it will be immediately recovered and removed. He will go back to his apartment, dress in pajamas and a robe, where he will be found by searchers, reading the morning papers. He will not leave the building for a couple of days, then he’ll walk away with only a briefcase and not return. Rent is paid for two months. Got all that?”

“Hang on while I replay.” The line went dead again, and when she redialed, the signal was weaker, and the call didn’t go through. She continued to try for a couple of minutes, then stopped, not wanting to run down the battery.

She ate her sandwich and enjoyed the sun for an hour, then tried the call again. No good. She looked up and, in the distance, saw dust rising from a car on the dirt road approaching the compound. She paced off ten feet, then hid the burner phone under a rock and went back to her seat on the boulder. The car pulled into the parking area at the compound, and the colonel got out. He seemed to be looking at her, so she waved and got a wave back. He beckoned to her, and she started down the trail.

The colonel was at his desk in his study when she entered. “You wanted me?”

“What were you doing on the hilltop?” he asked.

“Enjoying the view. It’s quite a climb up there.”

“Yes, it is. Do you have a cell phone, other than the one you turned in?”

“No,” she said.

“Grab the desk and spread ’em,” he said.

She assumed the position and tried to be patient while he patted down every inch of her, spending extra time at her breasts and crotch.

“Well, there’s no cell reception out here, anyway,” he said. “Except at the hilltop.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she said.

He opened a desk drawer. “Which phone is yours?”

“The white iPhone,” she replied, and he handed it to her.

“There’s no Wi-Fi here, unless I turn it on, which I do a couple of times a day to check e-mail.”

“Mostly, I get spam anyway,” she said, tucking the phone in a pocket.

“Don’t we all?”

“If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take a nap,” she said.

“No lunch?”

“Elroy made me a sandwich for my hike.”

“See you at dinner then.”

She went back to her room and turned on her iPhone. She found an e-mail from a box with her dead father’s name on it.

Bill Wright and Tom Blake sat in an empty cubicle in the Secret Service’s small office space, on a lower level in the White House.

Tom replayed his recording from Elizabeth.

“Jesus, that’s terrible,” Bill said. “Is that all you got?”

“I’ve got some tech people working to see if they can improve it,” Tom said, “but I’m doubtful. If it had been an e-mail, we might have a shot at putting it together, but I don’t see how they could do that with a voice message.”

“Well, I heard something about an apartment and a roof and a garden,” Bill said.

“Yeah, I got that, too. Maybe they’re going to shoot from a rooftop?”

Bill went to a cabinet and got out a large, rolled-up sheet of paper. “What if, as we suspected, the rifle at the Hay-Adams was a kind of decoy, designed to waste our time?” He unrolled the paper and pinned it to a message board in the office. It was a satellite shot of the White House and the surrounding area. He pinned a sheet of clear plastic over it and found a grease pencil. “Here’s the Hay-Adams,” he said, drawing a circle around it. “But I don’t see an apartment building in either direction from it.”

“No, there’s the Chamber of Commerce building and a lot of courts and other government buildings,” Tom replied, “but there’s no building that would house apartments.”

“This just doesn’t make any sense,” Bill said. “God, I wish she’d had better cell service.”

“Maybe we’d do better looking out the window we were worried about,” Tom said.

Bill picked up a phone. “This is Agent Wright. Are the family quarters occupied at the moment?” He listened. “Please ring up there and say that Assistant Director Blake of the FBI and I are coming up, and let the agent on duty know, too.” He unpinned the map and rolled it up. “Come on,” he said.

The two men walked up to the main floor of the White House and found the elevator to the family quarters. They walked out of the elevator into a broad hallway with a seating area at one end. A Secret Service agent stood at the front door of the quarters.

The agent was unknown to Bill, so both men handed him their identification before being admitted to the quarters. “Is the president in the residence?” Bill asked the agent.

“No, sir. She’s making a speech somewhere. There’s just the president-elect and a Mr. Barrington. Last time I checked she was in her temporary office, next to the president’s study.”

“Right,” Bill said. “This way, Tom.”