The Inner Circle

114

I try to sleep on the ride.

I don’t have a chance.

For the first few hours, my body won’t shut off. I’m too wired and rattled and awake. I keep checking my phone, annoyed I can’t get a signal. But as we pass into Maryland, I realize it’s not my phone.

“You’re blocking it, aren’t you?” I call out to the driver. “You’ve got one of those devices-for blocking my cell signal.”

He doesn’t answer. Too bad for him, I’ve seen the CIA files on interrogation. I know the game.

The longer they let the silence sink in and make this car seem like a cage, the more likely I am to calm down.

It usually works.

But after everything that’s happened-to Orlando… to Dallas… and even to Palmiotti-I don’t care how many hours I sit back here, there’s no damn way I’m just calming down…

Until.

The car makes a sharp right, bouncing and bumping its way to the security shed at the southeast gate. Of the White House.

“Emily…” the driver of our car says, miming a tip of the hat to the female uniformed guard.

“Jim…” the guard replies, nodding back.

It’s nearly ten at night. They know we’re coming.

With a click, the black metal gate swings open, and we ride up the slight incline toward the familiar giant white columns and the perfectly lit Truman Balcony. Just the sight of it unties the knots of my rage and, to my surprise, makes the world float in time, like I’m hovering in my own body.

It’s not the President that does it to me. It’s this place.

Last year, I took my sisters here to see the enormous Christmas tree they always have on the South Lawn. Like every other tourist, we took photos from the street, squeezing the camera through the bars of the metal gate and snapping shots of the world’s most famous white mansion.

Regardless of who lives inside, the White House-and the Presidency-still deserve respect.

Even if Wallace doesn’t.

The car jolts to a stop just under the awning of the South Portico.

I know this entrance. This isn’t the public entrance. Or the staff entrance.

The is the entrance that Nixon walked out when he boarded the helicopter for the last time and popped the double fingers. The entrance where Obama and his daughters played with their dog.

The private entrance.

Wallace’s entrance.

Before I can even reach for the door, two men in suits appear on my right from inside the mansion. As they approach the car, I see their earpieces. More Secret Service.

The car locks thunk. The taller one opens the door.

“He’s ready for you,” he says, motioning for me to walk ahead of them. They both fall in right behind me, making it clear that they’re the ones steering.

We don’t go far.

As we step through an oval room that I recognize as the room where FDR used to give his fireside chats, they motion me to the left, down a long pale-red-carpeted hallway.

There’s another agent on my left, who whispers into his wrist as we pass.

In the White House, every stranger is a threat.

They don’t know the half of it.

“Here you go…” one of them says as we reach the end of the hall, and he points me to the only open door on the hallway.

The sign out front tells me where we are. But even without that, as I step inside-past the unusually small reception area and unusually clean bathroom-there’s an exam table that’s covered by a sterile roll of white paper.

Even in the White House, there’s no mistaking a doctor’s office.

“Please. Have a seat,” he announces, dressed in a sharp pinstriped suit despite the late hour. As he waves me into the private office, his gray eyes look different than the last time I saw him, with the kind of dark puffiness under them that only comes from stress. “I was worried about you, Beecher,” the President of the United States adds, extending a hand. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”