Brute Force

Chapter 10

Ran Kimura sensed the threat before she saw it, low, almost painful in her belly. Small in stature, she made up for her size with an uncanny skill from a lifetime of training. The edge of a dark tattoo showed above the low V at the open collar of her silk blouse. She’d been standing just inside the doorway to the Chief of Staff ’s office, waiting to follow McKeon toward the Oval. It was only by happenstance — and her abhorrence of being anywhere near the idiot President Drake for one second longer than she had to — that she’d waited instead of going on to meet him there.

She moved the instant the man entered the room — a place where he had no business being. She saw his hand sweep the tail of his suit jacket as he reached for his sidearm, already crouching slightly the way American law enforcement did when they prepared to shoot.

Going through a process sometimes called the OODA Loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — it took the average police officer a little over two seconds to decide to draw and fire. Something out of the ordinary might disrupt this loop and make the actor have to start the process of orientation over, slowing the time toward action. Though the man, an agent from the way he moved, had already decided to kill McKeon, he was, in his heart, one of the good guys and wanted to do so without taking an innocent life.

Ran screamed as she moved, using the most fragile and terrified voice she could muster. Stunned by the cry, the agent paused for a split second, giving her time to spring forward, slamming the point of her shoulder into his floating ribs and driving him backwards. Her own hand shot to the collar of her light wool blazer during the rebound, snatching a razor-sharp thumb dagger from inside the reinforced lapel. A flick of her hand severed his carotid artery, spraying an immediate arc of blood across the room at the same moment his pistol cleared the holster. A consummate professional, Knight could have still shot and killed McKeon before he bled to death, but Ran was still moving. She ignored the swath of spraying blood and caught the hand that held his pistol as it rose toward the intended target. Letting the thumb dagger fall to the carpet, she trapped Knight’s hand in hers, and stepped toward him, turned his wrist inward on itself in a tight circle. This kote-gaeshi, or wrist reversal, used Knight’s own weight and momentum to snap the small bones in his wrist. His trigger finger convulsed when the weapon was turned, the round impacting him just below his diaphragm. Ran wrenched the gun away after the initial stunning round, putting three rapid shots into the man’s neck to obliterate the work from her thumb dagger.

She pushed away, dropping the gun beside the dying man and falling to the floor in the process, soaking the seat of her slacks in his blood. She scooped up the thumb dagger and dropped it in the pocket of her blazer. She summoned a flood of tears — she used them just as effectively as she had the dagger and pistol.

The entire process, from Ran’s scream to the attacker’s head hitting the floor, took just under three seconds. A Secret Service agent named Harper burst into the room with pistol in hand. Legs splayed, tears streaming down a stricken face, Ran raised her open hands and turned her head away to keep from being shot.

Secret Service agents are trained to protect before they investigate. When he didn’t find anyone to shoot, Harper grabbed the Vice President by the scruff of the neck and hustled him out the door away from the blood and into the arms of a cadre of arriving agents. Claxons sounded up and down the hall, calling for a general lockdown of the West Wing. Inside the Oval Office, the President’s Secret Service detail would be surrounding him in a bristling phalanx of ballistic vests, pistols, and submachine guns and rushing him to the bunker.

Ran stopped crying immediately once she found herself alone in the room with the dead body and a pallid, trembling David Crosby. She stood to face the Chief of Staff, wiping her bloody hands on the thighs of her slacks, not because she was disgusted, but because blood was slick and she wanted to be ready if another threat presented itself.

“I want to know who this man was,” she said, turning the dead man’s ashen face toward her with the toe of her navy blue pump.

“Adam Knight,” Crosby said, rolling his lips until they turned white. “He was the agent in charge of the CIA Director’s detail. I should call the FBI.”

“I’m sure the Secret Service is doing just that,” the Japanese woman said.

Crosby’s jaw hung slack. A wisp of thinning hair hung down across a pasty forehead. “That was amazing,” he said. “That thing you did with his hand… you saved the Vice President’s life.”

“I panicked.” Ran tried to downplay the speed with which she’d dispatched the shooter. It was much better if people thought her merely McKeon’s sullen concubine rather than his protector. “And he was sloppy. Anyone could have done it.”

It took the better part of an hour for Secret Service personnel from both POTUS and VPOTUS details to confer and decide to give the all clear for the White House campus. A team of agents from the Washington Field Office of the FBI — as well as Director Bodington himself — arrived twenty-one minutes after the shooting, but were forced to sit outside until the Secret Service decided to admit them. Once inside, they had complete control over everything but the President and Vice President’s immediate security. Since the shooter was a government agent, albeit CIA and not their respective agencies, tensions regarding turf and jurisdiction ran into the stratosphere. Bureau agents milled about conducting interviews and casting looks of blame while the Secret Service personnel glared back at the interlopers who dared to invade their sacred ground.

After four hours and a heated Oval Office chat between Director Bodington and the President, all investigating agents decided they had all the evidence they needed.

President Drake demanded a meeting with McKeon and Ran in his personal study as he had the White House back to himself. The study was located off the Oval Office. It was more private, and absent the peephole in the door leading out to his personal secretary and body man’s area.

Fuming at the dictatorial summons, McKeon found himself unsteady on his feet at having been so close to death. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid of dying — he simply had too much left to do and did not want to see his father’s legacy ruined because of some madman with a vendetta.

Hartman Drake fumed and paced in the tiny office like a caged cat wearing a bow tie. He’d tossed his suit jacket over the arm of a leather couch and worked to remove gold cuff links while he was on the move. He was not a tall man, but hours in the gym — hours when he should have been doing his job — had given him an incredible physique for a politician of any age. Veins bulged on the side of his bullish neck as if he’d pulled the bow tie too snug.

McKeon sat on the far end of the couch next to the window overlooking the Rose Garden, more exhausted than he’d been in a very long time. He’d already fielded a call from his wife, who’d heard about the shooting on the news. The call had set Ran even more on edge and she moved even closer to him, sitting all the way forward on the edge of the couch, her body taut as if she planned to spring up and fend off another attack at any moment.

She had changed out of her blood-soaked business suit and into a pair of jeans and a black cotton blouse with long sleeves. It looked hot for summer in DC but it hid the tattoos that covered her body from shoulder to just above the knee. In any case, McKeon was not at all sure that Ran felt normal sensations like hot and cold weather.

“What the hell happened?” Drake demanded, falling back in a thick leather chair and throwing his feet up on his desk. “I’m not about to set foot in Seattle if we can’t even keep some crazy assassin from slipping into the White House. Best security in the world, my ass. Who was this guy?”

“The lead agent on Director Ross’s protective detail,” Ran offered, deadpan.

McKeon chose his words carefully. “We cannot cancel the trip to Seattle,” he said. “The Japanese advance team has been here for a week. Plans have been set. I don’t have to tell you how crucial this meeting is.”

Drake waved away the words, ripping off his bow tie. “I am aware of how important it is.” His eyes narrowed, glaring as if he was accusing McKeon of something.

“What is it?” McKeon asked, anger at the other man’s impudence rising in his gut. “Say what’s on your mind.”

“This guy who got in,” Drake said. “This assassin, he went after you?”

“A target of opportunity within the administration.” McKeon rolled his eyes.

“No.” Drake set his jaw like a bulldog, not buying any of it. “Everybody says this guy badged his way in here looking for an agent on your detail right from the beginning. That means you were the primary target.”

McKeon shook his head in dismay. “Are you actually angry that the assassin didn’t come to kill you?” He’d thought it impossible that Hartman Drake’s self-absorbed delusions could ever surprise him.

“What I am angry about,” Drake fumed, “is that the American people think you are the one running this show. I read the commentaries. Everyone’s saying we’re a co-presidency and calling me the Lieutenant Commander in Chief. It’s bad enough that half the Congress insists on calling me ‘Acting President.’ ”

McKeon shrugged. “Technically, you are the acting president. This is new ground constitutionally. But it doesn’t matter. You have the powers of the President so—”

“Do I?” Drake spat. “Because I tried to call a cabinet meeting last week and David told me we couldn’t because you were not available! Do you hear what I’m saying? I can’t call a meeting to run the country because the VP isn’t able to attend.”

McKeon patted Ran softly on her knee, trying to calm himself as much as her. Her entire body hummed with pent up energy but Drake was too self-absorbed to see it. Had he taken the time to really look at her, he would have seen that the gleam in her eye and the particular crook of her lips meant she was on the verge of punching him in the throat with her thumb dagger.

“What do you want me to say?” McKeon muttered. “Shall I tell you that you are the wisest man I know and say it was you who put together this entire plan to send the United States spiraling into a terrible and final Götterdämmerung? Do you—?”

“You and your fifty-dollar words.” Drake smirked, shaking his head. “What the hell is a Götterdämmerung?”

McKeon stood to his full height and doubled his fists. McKeon was normally composed to the point some would consider bland, but Drake’s idiocy caused his head to shake. “You would have starved to death as a small boy if my father had not taken you from your filthy Tajik existence and placed you in a good home…” He clenched his teeth, breathing deeply to try and regain his composure. “What is it you want from me?”

“What I want,” Drake said, lips quivering with a mixture of fear and frustration, “is for you to treat me with the respect I deserve. I am, after all, the most powerful man on the planet — something it would do you well to remember.”

He reached behind the desk and picked up a gym bag. “I have to go to the gym and work off some steam,” he said. “In the meantime, both of you get the hell out of my—”

A knock at the door cut him off.

“Mr. President.” David Crosby’s muffled voice came through the door. It was unlocked, but with Drake’s tendency to bring pert female staffers back into his office, the Chief of Staff knew better than to open it uninvited. Drake invited him in.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. President,” Crosby said, looking relieved that he didn’t have to sneak some girl out the back hallway. “You’re needed in the Situation Room. Something to do with Chinese submarines.”

“Dammit!” Drake dropped his gym bag in his desk chair.

“Do you want me in there?” McKeon smiled inside. “Or would you like me to let you handle this without me, Mr. President?” he said.

“Shut up,” Drake said, grabbing his jacket but dispensing with the bow tie. “Of course, I want you in there.”