Shoot Him If He Runs

27

Kate Lee arrived back at the White House, shed her Secret Service detail and went up to the family quarters. Her husband was sitting in front of the big flatscreen TV he had had installed, watching Katie Couric deliver the news. A commercial came on.

She kissed him. “You gave up the guys for a girl?” she asked, mixing them a drink at the bar concealed in the bookcases.

“I alternate,” he said. “If you were home in time to watch the news more often, you’d know that.”

“If I were home in time to watch the news, you wouldn’t talk to me until the news was over, anyway.”

“You have a point, as usual.” They touched glasses and drank.

“What are we doing for dinner?”

“I ordered a pizza.”

“What, we’re having dinner alone together twice in one week?”

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

The commercials ended, and Katie returned. Kate knew better than to talk before the news was over. Couric wrapped up simultaneously with the arrival of the pizza.

Will opened the box and looked at the pizza. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“Green peppers. I ordered the Extravaganza with no green peppers.”

Kate began picking out the green slivers and putting them aside. “I hope the voters that depend on green pepper growing for their livelihood don’t hear about this,” she said. “You’d never be reelected.”

“You could be right,” he said, picking up a green-pepper-free slice of pizza. “George Bush the elder said publicly that he hated broccoli, and look what happened to him.”

Kate went to the bar, opened a bottle of wine and returned with two glasses. “Maybe Teddy Fay is like the green peppers,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t order him, either.”

“I mean, maybe we should just ignore him.”

Will’s mouth was too full of pizza to respond immediately. He chewed for a minute, then swallowed. “You really think that? I thought your people were close to nailing him.”

“We’re just guessing.”

“Kate, the man has murdered a dozen people, among them a speaker of the house and a supreme court justice. We shouldn’t catch him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew before. What’s changed?”

“I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling about this.”

“You want to call off Lance Cabot and his people?”

“It might be the best thing.”

“Look at it this way: you’re testifying before a committee of Congress: you can testify, truthfully, that you did everything you could to catch him and failed. That’s not a great thing, but it’s not terrible, either.”

“It’s not terrible, if I testify to that after the election.”

Will ignored that remark. “But if you’re asked if you gave an order to stop pursuing him, and you answer truthfully, then we’re both in what I believe the most eminent political scientists refer to as deep shit.”

“Not if I answer that I became convinced, after a thorough search, that Teddy is dead.”

“If you thought he was dead, why were you conducting yet another search? That’s what Congress would ask.”

“You mean, now that we’ve started, we’re stuck with it?”

“I think we are, unless he turns up verifiably deceased.” He spat out a piece of green pepper. “You missed one. Why don’t you instruct your Technical Services Department to put together a device that detects green peppers on your pizza before you bite into them?”

Kate took a big bite of pizza to keep from talking, and they both ate quietly for a while.

“What happened today to make you feel bad about this?” Will asked.

“Teddy is creating internal problems for us. I’ve about decided to appoint Lance Cabot as DDO, but he’s had to go around Hugh English to deal with the Teddy thing, and Hugh doesn’t like being gone around.”

“Has he found out about it?”

“No, but Lance is using one of Hugh’s people on St. Marks, and it could get back to him.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and appoint Lance, retire Hugh English and get him out of there?”

“Because people like Hugh English don’t just dematerialize when they retire. If they find out they were unknowingly slighted when they were still at work, they end up giving television interviews and testifying to Congress about what a snake pit the Agency is and what a bitch I am, and it doesn’t do anybody any good.”

“Welcome to Washington,” Will said. “Look, all we can do with this or with anything else is to do what we think is right and let the chips fall where they may.”

She smiled, then leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s what I love about you,” she said. “Your childlike belief that if you do what you think is right, everything will be okay.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m president of the United States,” he replied, taking another huge bite of pizza.

“There’s something else.”

“Oh, God, not something else,” Will muttered through his pizza.

“The Teddy thing is overlapping with a British thing.”

“How so?”

“We have a suspect for Teddy on St. Marks, but our man down there thinks he could just as easily be one of the four men who robbed a currency transfer company at Heathrow Airport a few months ago. I expect you remember that.”

“I remember getting a phone call from my very good friend the British prime minister, asking me to instruct the entire U.S. law enforcement community to help catch them, as if I could do that, and I remember telling him that I would do anything I could to help him.”

“Yes, well…”

“So what I should be doing right now is picking up the phone and calling London to report our suspicions.”

“Technically speaking, yes.”

“Technically?”

“Sort of. I mean, we’re working on a firm identification of the guy, and if he turns out to be the British robber, then you can call your limey buddy.”

“Are we talking minutes, days, weeks or longer?”

“Maybe days. If we’re lucky.”

“So now I have another slice of green pepper on my metaphorical pizza.”

“For only a short time, I hope.”

Will spat out another sliver of green. “Kate-and this is a direct order from your president-fix this.”

“The green peppers?”

“The metaphorical green peppers.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied.