Hail to the Chef

CHAPTER 15

GAVIN MADE ME GO OVER MY STEPS, AS PRECISELY as I could recall them. Very slowly. As I remembered and recited-again-another black-clad man took notes. Wearing body armor, a sniper rifle slung around his back and, a heated expression, he neither spoke nor made eye contact with me. I was sure everyone involved in this fracas was furious with me for having caused a major evacuation over nothing. Agents, snipers, and other assorted military folk were everywhere-the halls were filled with people speaking to one another and into radios.

The press would have a field day with this one, I was sure, and I only hoped I wouldn’t be served up like a holiday turkey for them all to feast on.

After ten minutes of tracing my movements, we were still only about five feet inside the storage room. Gavin was insistent on stopping at each step so that the intense note-taker could get down every detail. Problem was, there was not much to tell. And I couldn’t imagine why anyone cared about any of this. Unless they had reason to doubt my story.

I caught a quiver in my voice. God, I hated that. “This is where I noticed that the Johnson china had been moved.”

Gavin nodded.

I took that as encouragement to continue. “So I pushed the bin aside, and found the”-I hesitated-“the box.” I described it, even though I knew they both must have seen it.

“What then?”

“Well,” I said, trying to be as precise as possible, “I knew it didn’t belong here, so I decided to see what was inside.” Shrugging, I added, “I planned to return it to whatever department had left it here.”

“You said it was sealed.”

Nodding, I remembered the clip from the dolly, still in my pocket. I pulled it out. “I used this to slice through the tape.”

Gavin grimaced.

“Better than using my teeth,” I said, in an effort to lighten the mood. Neither man smiled.

“It opened easily?”

I considered that. “Not really. I had to pull hard a few times in order to rip past the tape.”

This time Gavin winced. “Dear God, Ollie. You ripped it open?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little defensively. “It’s not like I suspected anything when I first saw it. And it was sealed pretty tightly.” I glanced at the two of them. Even the note-taker had looked up, and they were staring at me as though I’d done the stupidest thing in the world. “Geez, I understand we’re supposed to be careful when we see things out of place, but you have to admit it really did look like normal storage stuff. There was no way I knew it was a fake bomb.”

Gavin’s eyes snapped to mine. “Fake bomb?” he asked. “What are you telling me? You found something else?”

“No…” Again I hesitated. “I’m talking about the thing I believed was an IED. The reason I called for help.” My hands spread as though to encompass the entire White House grounds. “The reason I started screaming for everyone to evacuate. It was a fake, right?”

Gavin licked his lips and I could tell it was taking every measure of patience he had to slow himself down. “Ollie,” he began, surprising me again with familiarity, “the thing you found was live.”

My knees trembled. “It was?”

“Yes,” he said, with high-strung tolerance. “You found a bomb. A real one.” He ran a hand over his face. “Let’s get through the rest of this and I’ll tell you what I can.”

We finished the how-I-found-a-bomb-and-learned-to-start-worrying exercise and the tall man with the notepad finally left us. The minute he was gone, I sat on the floor. It was cold.

“You okay?” Gavin asked.

“I suppose it would be a stupid question to ask if the bomb has been safely removed.”

He took a seat on the floor next to me. “It’s been defused and it’s gone. We’ve done a sweep of the area and it looks clean.”

Looks?

I rested my forehead against my upturned knees. “Why me?” I asked. “Why am I always the one who gets involved in this stuff?”

Gavin took a deep breath and I lifted my head to watch him. For the first time since I’d met him, he didn’t seem furious with me. He seemed to be contemplating.

Commotion in the hallways continued, but no one poked a head in. All things considered, it was pretty quiet.

“I’ve been around these sorts of situations a lot, Ollie,” he said, staring away. “Been on the job for over twenty-five years.”

I waited.

“There are people who things happen to. And whether you consider it a blessing or a curse, you appear to be one of them.” He turned to face me. “I read your dossier.”

I winced.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “It’s not that you have a black cloud over your head-it’s that you have the ability to see and to sense things better than most.” He wagged his head from side to side. “I’m not talking about ESP or clairvoyance, although maybe describing it as a sixth sense is apt. You have a great deal of intelligence and an acute awareness-more than most people-which allows you to notice things out of place. And you have the curiosity to find out why.”

“It’s a curse, all right.”

“I disagree. We hire people with your talents every day.”

I realized he was giving me a compliment. Fear, adrenaline, and now self-consciousness combined to render me speechless. I cleared my throat. “Thanks.”

Back to staring away, he said, “With that in mind, I’m going to tell you something that isn’t for public knowledge. But I want you to know so that we have another set of eyes out there.” Gavin worked his tongue around the inside of his mouth. “The bomb was on a timer.”

“When was it supposed to go off?”

Squinting, he said, “Sunday, during the White House opening ceremony.”

My stomach lurched as I tried to digest that. At the same time, I was thinking how odd it was to be sitting here on the floor with Special Agent-in-Charge Gavin discussing bombs.

“If there’s any consolation,” Gavin went on, “and it isn’t much, the IED was small. Personal size, if you want to call it that.” He was so calm, it gave me a measure of comfort. “We get the impression this was meant to target one person.”

“Me?”

He shrugged. “I doubt it, but after your altercation on the street, we’re not overlooking the possibility.”

“If it wasn’t intended for me,” I said, glancing around the storeroom, and hoping to God it hadn’t been meant for me, “why put it here? If the intention is to do damage, there are much better places. This area is usually empty.”

Gavin smiled. “You’re right. We suspect the would-be terrorist wanted to get the IED inside first. He probably intended to move it later, to somewhere closer to the action.”

“Makes sense,” I said, still thrown by the relaxed attitude of our conversation. “I take it you’re looking at everyone, right? Staff included.”

“Every single person who’s been inside the White House over the past twenty-four hours, cross-checked against everyone who was here the day the original prank bomb was found.”

“I can’t imagine anyone on staff being guilty.”

“Remember what I told you at the introductory safety meeting,” he said, looking at me again. “Don’t see safety around you. Don’t trust anyone.”

“Aren’t you trusting me by telling me all this?”

“I told you, I’ve been on the job for a long time.” He stood and offered me a hand up. “I can see and sense things, too. You’re okay, Ollie. You did the right thing.”

“HE’S GOT THE HOTS FOR YOU,” TOM SAID that night, back at my apartment.

“Give me a break,” I said, “Gav is probably fifteen years older than I am…”

“Gav?”

Putting dinner leftovers away in the refrigerator while Tom rinsed the dishes, I gave a half shrug and turned away. “Yeah, he told me to call him that when we weren’t around other staff members.” All of a sudden I realized how that sounded. I spun. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“He definitely has the hots for you.”

Laughing now, I shut the fridge door. “Hardly. But I did catch something today that I didn’t ever see before. I think he’s actually beginning to respect me.”

Tom wiped his hands on a dish towel. “He should. You single-handedly saved his backside.”

“How so?”

“Gavin’s the agent-in-charge, right?”

I nodded.

“You prevented a bombing. How would it look if it had gone off under his watch? If it weren’t for you-”

“Just dumb luck,” I said, waving away the accolades.

“Not just luck, Ollie. Gavin was right when he said you’re one of those observant ones. Which is why I decided on the subject for tonight’s lesson.”

Over the past year and a half, Tom had taught me much-self-defense, gun handling, and target shooting, to name a few things. Many of these lessons had come in handy in the past and I was always eager for him to let me in on things that most people neither ever learn nor care about.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Explosives?”

“Right.”

I interrupted him before he could begin. “You do know that we’ve all had to take a class on this already, right?”

“Gavin taught it?”

“Yeah.”

He made an unpleasant noise. “How is it that the executive chef can uncover an explosive device that the security forces missed?”

“Like I said, just dumb luck.”

“No, Ollie. They should have found this one. And I hope to God they kept searching.”

“They said they swept the place.”

The look on Tom’s face let me know what he thought of the team’s competence. “Now they’re pulling out all the stops. Now they’re interviewing staff members. They should have done that when the prank bomb was found. They should have found the guy who planted that and found out why. The fact that they’re taking so long to move on this is ludicrous.”

“But how could anyone have known? Gav said-”

Tom silenced me with a look, and I realized I’d risen to Gavin’s defense. “I’m not going to feel comfortable with the president-or you-in the White House until we get to the bottom of this bombing threat.”

“Where is the president now?”

He frowned. “With family,” he said. “I’ll be headed to meet him in the morning. Then he’s heading to Berlin. This is my only night off until Wednesday.”

“Gotcha.”

For the next hour, Tom walked me through Explosives 101. He was certainly more detailed than Gavin had been in class, but Tom suffered from not having examples on hand to share. He’d printed photos from declassified files and diagrams from Internet searches. By the time he finished, my head was chock-full of device strategies and configurations, all for methods of mass demolition. Fun stuff.

“The one thing you have to remember is this,” he said, as he wound up. “There is almost always a secondary device.”

“I’d heard that.”

“It bears repeating. People in the business of destruction don’t want to fall short. They set up fail-safes to ensure their plans move forward. To ensure their target is destroyed. Do you understand?”

A prickly feeling had come over me. “I do.”