Hostile Intent

by Michael Walsh

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

It starts with the unthinkable--the most horrific act of violence ever committed on American soil. Only one man can stop them. Hostile Intent Code named Devlin, he exists in the blackest shadows of the United States government--operating off the grid as the NSA's top agent. He's their most lethal weapon. . .and their most secret. But someone is trying to draw him out into the open by putting America's citizens in the crosshairs--and they will continue the slaughter until they get what they want. "Six pages into Hostile Intent and I began to feel uneasy. By page nine I'd been punched in the gut. And it just doesn't stop." --Bill Whittle, author of Silent America "The Vince Flynn for the 21st Century is here!" --John Fasano, producer of Another 48 Hours and Darkness Falls "Hostile Intent kept me up most of the night. Hold on, is all I can tell you." --Jay Nordlinger, National Review "Compelling, fast, honest and dangerous" --Robert Ferrigno "Walsh knows what he's up to." -- USA Today "Six pages into Hostile Intent and I began to feel uneasy. By page nine I'd been punched in the gut. And it just doesn't stop." --Bill Whittle, author of Silent America "Hostile Intent is audacious in the extreme, and a lot of fun." -- FrontPageMag.com

Release date: August 7, 2009

Publisher: Citadel Press

Print pages: 417

Sample

EDWARDSVILLE, ILLINOIS

The morning school bell was clattering in the distance as Hope Gardner sandwiched her Volvo station wagon between Mrs. Moscone’s Escalade and Janey Eagleton’s Prius. She only nicked the Prius’s bumper, or rather the plastic piece of junk that passed for a bumper these days, and the gentle thump went unnoticed by her two children in the backseat of her car. She wished she had the guts to ding the Escalade a little, just to make it fair, but the Cadillac belonged to Mrs. Moscone, and nobody wanted Mrs. Moscone mad at them. Her husband was from The Hill in St. Louis, the kind of neighborhood where The Sopranos was considered a documentary.

She wondered briefly whether she should leave a note, but that notion flew out of her head as the back door rocketed open.

“Bye, Mom!” shouted Emma, her twelve-year-old. Emma was blond, green-eyed, and filling out with a rapidity that surprised Hope, even though she had gone through the same transformation herself when she was her daughter’s age. One moment a skinny kid, the next…And if she noticed, how much more quickly the boys noticed too.

More than anything, Emma wanted to grow up to be Gwyneth Paltrow, win an Oscar, and marry a rock star, more or less in that order. Hope didn’t have the heart to tell her that the odds were several million to one against any of those things happening. But childhood was for dreaming; Emma would learn about the harsh realities of life soon enough.

Emma was halfway across the schoolyard as Hope turned to Rory. Rory was different. Small for his age, he was skittish, unsure, easily alarmed, especially for a ten-year-old. And right now his nose was running too. “Come on, honey,” said Hope, wiping his face with a clean handkerchief and pulling his zipper up tight. “You don’t want to be late.”

The first snarl of winter had come early to southern Illinois, and there was a stiff, chill breeze blowing into Edwardsville from the Mississippi, just a few miles to the west. Edwardsville was an exurb of St. Louis, but the big city across the river might as well be in a different country, not just another state. Edwardsville still had an old-fashioned, midwestern small-town feel to it, and that’s the way folks liked it.

Nothing ever happened in Edwardsville.

Rory snuffled again and wiped his nose on his sleeve; she could never get him to stop doing that. In the distance, they could both hear the school bell ringing, this time longer and louder.

Hope got out of the car and held out her arms to her son. “Okay, big guy,” she said. “Time to go.”

“I don’t want to go, Mama,” Rory said plaintively, not budging.

At times like this, Hope wondered if her son needed some kind of special-ed program. She had talked about it with her husband, Jack, but Jack was a no-nonsense, no-excuses kind of guy, dead set against it. His tech-consulting business did a lot of work with the military all over the Midwest, some of it highly classified, and as far as he was concerned, special-ed programs were for sissies and slackers, and his son was neither. The same went for “conditions” like attention deficit disorder and “diseases” with no physiological symptoms. “Nothing that can’t be cured by self-control or a good whack on the ass,” Jack would say.

Hope wasn’t sure she agreed with him, but there it was. And so Rory sat through class after class, his mind wandering, his grades mediocre, his teachers frustrated.

Oh well, not much could be done about that at the moment. And anyway, Jack was supposed to leave on a business trip to Minneapolis today, so further discussion would have to wait until he got back.

Hope reached in and took her son’s hand. It was cold to the touch, clammy, sweaty despite the weather.

Reluctantly, Rory let himself be hoisted up and out of the car. “Can’t I stay home today, Mom?” he asked.

In the distance, by the schoolhouse door, Hope could see a man waving at them, telling them to hurry. Later, she would recall that the man was unfamiliar, someone she had never seen before. Ever since Columbine and the other shootings, schools had become much more concerned with security, and strange adults were not allowed to roam the halls. But this man—white, blond, strongly built—was well turned-out in a coat and tie.

Must be a new teacher, Hope thought. Strange, in the middle of the term. She herself was a substitute teacher at the school, and she thought she knew everybody. In fact, she had a class to teach at noon; well, she’d ask the principal when she saw him.

The bell rang sharply, one last time. No other kids in sight—everyone was in the building. Except Rory, who was still holding on to her hand.

Before she could answer, his hand slipped from hers and he suddenly broke away. “It’s okay,” he said. “I can handle it.”

Hope watched him dash across the dead grass and the new teacher waved him home, like an airplane coming in for a landing. She waved once at Rory’s back, but he didn’t see her, ducking under the man’s arm and through the door just as the bell struck 8:00 A.M.

A brisk gust of wind blew through her, giving her the chills, and it was starting to snow a little. She shook herself to get warm, then walked back toward the car. She made a short detour around the Prius, to see if its bumper was perhaps worse than she’d thought and was surprised to see that it wasn’t Janey Eagleton’s all, but one with Missouri plates. Now she didn’t feel so guilty.

It was not until she was halfway home that she remembered thinking it was odd they were lowering the iron bars on the school windows just as instruction was starting.

EDWARDSVILLE—JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL

Mrs. Braverman’s fourth grade arithmetic class opened each school day with a moment of silence. It wasn’t exactly a prayer, which the children all knew would be illegal, but neither was it a chance to sneak in a few more winks of sleep before the day began in earnest. Mrs. Braverman saw to that as she patrolled the aisles between the desks.

Rory offered up some quick thoughts in favor of his parents, his dad going away on business, his mom always rushing around in the Volvo, which she treated more like a ferryboat than a car, locked in an eternal game of Cannibals and Missionaries.

Which was, in fact, one of Rory’s favorite pastimes: trying to figure out how to get various odd numbers of cannibals and missionaries across a river without ever leaving more man-eaters than men of the cloth on either side. It was a frequent subject of his doodles, but on this morning he tried very hard to visualize the scene: scary dark men with bones in their noses looking hungrily upon pale-faced creatures wearing what seemed to him to be full-length black dresses. You didn’t see many holy men around Edwardsville these days, and even though the Gardners were more or less Lutherans, their minister usually wore jeans.

Rory had gotten several moves into his game of mental gymnastics when Mrs. Braverman’s midwestern caw brought him out of his reverie and back to attention. He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that, as usual, only two minutes had passed. Rory didn’t like math, and of course wasn’t very good at it, but he already had a firm grip on Einstein’s theory of relativity: the forty-five minutes between 8:05 and 8:50 A.M. were the Methuselahs of minutes.

Rory knew the drill, and so he flipped his book open to the homework page even before Mrs. Braverman got the words out of her mouth. Except that, on this morning, the words never came out of her mouth. Most of the other kids had done the same thing, but Mrs. Braverman had left her desk and gone over to the classroom door, a wooden one with a large pane of glass in it, the better for the principal, Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, to be able to glance in and give the class one of those looks he was famous for. Which is why, behind his back, the kids all called him Mr. Nasty-Nosy.

Some said Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was from Lebanon, others that he was really from Cleveland, and still others whispered ominously that they knew for a fact that he was a long-lost brother of Osama bin Laden. The funny part was that Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was actually pretty nice, even if he did remind Rory of one of his imaginary cannibals. It was always a disappointment when he opened his mouth and sounded like everybody else in Edwardsville: normal.

It wasn’t the principal at the door, however. Rory didn’t have a very good view of the door, but from the look on Mrs. Braverman’s face, the visitor was somebody she didn’t recognize. He could tell, because whenever she was unexpectedly interrupted, unless it was by Nasty-Nosy, she got this how-dare-you look, because as far as Mrs. Braverman was concerned, teaching was the most important thing in the world, and not to be lightly distracted.

She opened the door a crack and stuck her face in the opening. Rory could see only the back of her head. She spoke lowly, inaudibly, then took two steps back and opened the door wide.

A man came in—a man Rory recognized at once. It was the same man who had ushered him through the door as he scooted in. The blond man.

“Children,” said Mrs. Braverman. “This is Mr.—what was your name again?”

“Charles,” the man replied. He had an accent. He didn’t sound like he was normal, or like he was from Edwardsville.

“Charles. He’s one of our new substitute teachers, and he’s going to be helping out in class today. So let’s all give him a big Mississippi River welcome on his first day with us.”

The children applauded politely. “I’m just going to run down to the principal’s office for a moment,” said Mrs. Braverman. “Won’t be a minute.”

Mrs. Braverman took a step or two out the door, then staggered back inside the classroom as if profoundly puzzled by something that had just happened. There was an extraordinary look on her face as she turned to the class, and then she fell to the floor—sat down, heavily, as if bearing an intolerably heavy burden. She tried to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, blood suddenly poured from her mouth, her head rolled back, and her skull hit the floor with an egg-cracking report that Rory would never forget.

The new teacher, Charles, jumped into action. He leaped over Mrs. Braverman and slammed the door, locking it. Then he turned to the children.

“Everybody down,” he said. “Get under your desks and don’t look up, no matter what.”

Everybody did what he or she was told. Everybody was too shocked to scream. Everybody was real scared.

From under his desk, Rory could hear Mrs. Braverman’s labored breathing, growing slower. He knew she’d been shot, but had no idea who shot her. He wondered whether Charles knew first aid or CPR and, if so, when he was going to start helping her.

From outside the door came the sound of screaming and gunfire. Of running feet and the thud of bodies falling. It went on for only a couple of minutes, but childhood minutes are long, and these minutes were as close as youth gets to eternity.

Mrs. Braverman had stopped breathing. From his spot near the back, on the floor, Rory could see a widening puddle of red that had stained her pantsuit and was now spreading across the floor, toward where Annie Applegate and Ehud Aaronson were crouching. He wondered how long it would take for the blood puddle to move through the Bs and Cs and get to the Gs, and whether there would be time for him to find out.

Now it was quiet. Charles’s feet moved across the room, stepped over Mrs. Braverman, and stopped in front of the door. The rest of Charles was obviously listening.

“Boys and girls,” said Charles after a few long moments. His voice was calm. Rory thought that was cool—that Charles kept it together despite what had just happened. Rory’s own heart was pounding like mad. He hoped that when he grew up, he could be cool, like Charles.

“I want you all to stand up, leave your things behind and—very quietly—follow me. Everything is going to be all right. Okay?”

Nobody moved.

“You have to trust me. Stand up, keep silent, and we’ll all get out of here.”

This time, everybody moved and nobody made a sound. All that fire drill practice was finally paying off. As the children began Indian-filing out of the classroom, Rory noticed that none of the girls looked at Mrs. Braverman’s body through their tears, but the boys each sneaked a peek as they shuffled by. Nobody spoke a word.

“There’s a good girl…good lad,” murmured the man. As Rory approached, the man’s free hand reached out and stopped him. “Hold it.”

The line stopped; the children froze. It crossed Rory’s mind that the man was somehow going to blame him for what happened to Mrs. Braverman. “You were almost late for school,” the man said. “What’s your name?”

“Rory Gardner.”

“Was that your mother dropping you off?”

“Yes, sir.” He was close enough to Mrs. Braverman’s body that he could have touched her with his foot. He closed his eyes in prayer. He didn’t care whether it was illegal. He didn’t care if they came to arrest him later. He had a good excuse.

When he opened his eyes, Charles was still looking at him. “It’s good to have you on the team, Rory.” Charles held out his hand to Rory. “You know what our team’s motto is?”

“No, sir.”

“Who Dares, Wins.”

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

KXQQ billed itself as “the St. Louis Metro Area’s Number One Source for News,” but everyone knew that was bullshit. Most of the reporters were fresh out of Penney-Missouri or BU, young kids in their first jobs, ambitious but lazy, fluent in contemporary psychobabble and absolute masters of the jailhouse-jive hand gestures now de rigueur for all TV reporters, but otherwise illiterate, innumerate, and ahistorical. Deep down inside, they really wanted to be cable news anchors or Hollywood screenwriters. By the time any reporters at KXQQ found out about a story, the story was usually over.

Rhonda Gaines-Solomon stared dully at CNN with one ear cocked at the police scanner and the new issue of Entertainment Weekly in her hand. She was twenty-four years old, from San Bernardino, California. She hated the Midwest, hated the widebodies who inhabited this part of the country, hated the awful weather, and pretended she was really from Los Angeles, if anybody asked.

“What’s hot today, Ms. Solomon?” Mr. Dunkirk always said that, especially when it was she who was hot, which was most days. Like all female on-air talent these days, Rhonda Gaines-Solomon was good looking in that tramp-next-door sort of way that everyone seemed to want lately, and she did the best she could with what God, her parents, and a discreet visit to a plastic surgeon had given her.

Still, she thought, one day she could bust Mr. Dunkirk for sexual harassment if she really set her mind to it. She noticed the way he looked her, had seen his fat wife, and figured him for a possible play if the going got tough, or she wasn’t out of this burg in six months, or both.

“All quiet on the midwestern front, chief,” she replied, checking out the photo spread on Brad Pitt. It was her standard answer. Nine o’clock in the morning was far too early for St. Louis’s usual repertoire of shootings, stabbings, and miscellaneous mayhem to have gotten underway yet. The perps were all still sleeping off their depredations from the previous night.

Casting a quick glance at the bank of TV screens on the newsroom wall, Mr. Dunkirk tacked toward her. “I want something juicy for the four o’clock today,” he said, checking out her legs as discreetly as possible.

“I’ll see what I can do, chief.”

He hated it when she called him “chief.” “Who else’ve we got in the field today?”

“John and Sandy.”

That would be Mr. Kelleher and Ms. Gomez. Mr. Dunkirk started to say something, but held his tongue. Young people these days were on a first-name basis with the whole world, as if last names didn’t matter, or didn’t exist at all. That’s why he insisted upon the use of the honorific for himself, and called all his young charges by their last names, just to remind them that they had one.

“See if one of you can get me something better than a weather story, will you?” said Mr. Dunkirk. He looked around the shabby newsroom—the only part of it that shone was the plastic set—and sighed. This was not where he had envisioned himself twenty-five years ago, when he got his first job at a small television station in upstate New York, with dreams of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite dancing in his head.

And yet here he was, stuck in the dead-end job of news director at the lowest-rated local station in one of the worst television markets in the country. Nothing good was ever going to happen to him again. His life was over.

He wondered if he should make a play for Solomon at some point, just to see what would happen, then decided to table the notion and start thinking about Christmas shopping for his wife.

“How about a cat up a tree? A homeless guy in a cardboard box?” Rhonda shouted after him as he disappeared into his office and closed the door. Every now and then she almost felt sorry for him, if it was possible to feel sorry for somebody that old and hopeless. She would never turn out that way, she promised herself; she’d kill herself long before things came to that.

A crackle on the police scanner seemed promising for a moment but it turned out to be only a hit-and-run with no fatalities.

Then the phone rang. “Newsroom.”

A pause, then a voice. Low, modulated, cultivated: a grownup’s voice.

“To whom am I speaking?” There was a hint of an English accent, although truth to tell Rhonda probably couldn’t distinguish among English, Australian, New Zealand, or South African if she had a gun at her head. Foreign, in any case.

“Rhonda Gaines-Solomon.”

“You will do.” A pause. “Do you know what’s going on at the school?”

This might be promising. She grabbed a pen, knocked some junk on her desk out of the way, and found a scrap of paper. “What school?”

“Edwardsville Middle School. Jefferson. Do you know what’s going on there?”

She glanced at the monitors to see if any of their rivals had anything about Edwardsville: nothing. A glance at the local AP wire on her laptop screen: nothing. “Far as I know, there’s nothing going on at the Jefferson Middle School.”

A short pause, then a challenge—“What do you know?”

Suddenly, she realized that she’d misunderstood the question. The tipster wasn’t asking her for information. He was giving her information. Rhonda’s mind kicked into high gear as the import of what he was saying sank in. Frantically, she waved at Mr. Dunkirk behind the glass, but he was sipping his coffee and reading the paper.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice rising “A school shooting? What is it you’re telling me?”

“How fast can you get over here?”

She was out the door so fast that Mr. Dunkirk never even saw her leave. One moment she was there—

And the next moment she was gone.

EDWARDSVILLE—JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL

The hallway was silent. Unless you looked carefully, you couldn’t really tell there was anything wrong, except that the lights were out.

Charles led the children as noiselessly as possible. Rory thought they’d be heading for the front door, but when he pointed in its direction, Charles just shook his head and gestured toward the gym. Rory understood immediately—the gym lay at the rear of the main hallway, and behind it was the loading dock. They’d be able to sneak out that way.

They were about halfway down when a man stepped out of one of the classrooms. He was carrying a gun. Rory didn’t know exactly what kind of gun, but it was one of those that you gripped with both hands and shot tons of bullets really fast.

Charles went right after him. They struggled for a bit, but then the man hit Charles with the butt—at least, that’s what it looked like—and Charles went down hard.

This man was quite different. He was funny looking and foreign looking and he was wearing mostly black clothes, like he was some kind of ninja without the sashes and pointed stars. He looked at the children, still standing dutifully in line, and said, “Okay, we go now.”

As they walked toward the gym, several other men came out of the shadows. These men were also semi-ninjas, except their faces were covered by ski masks. The man with the rifle barked at them in some strange language—Rory could tell he was the Top Dog, because his face was uncovered and he was holding a cell phone in one hand, and had a pistol stuffed down the front of his pants—and they picked up Charles by the armpits and dragged him along.

The first person Rory spotted upon entering the gym, because he was looking for her, was his sister. Emma was with the other eighth graders, sitting on the bottom bench of the stands. There were tears running down her face. But she was all right; she was alive.

Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was not all right. He was hogtied, lying in the middle of the basketball court, right on the school logo. He was bleeding from his nose and one of his legs was bent back at an impossible angle. He was trying to scream, but there was a dirty, bloody rag stuffed in his mouth.

Rory’s eyes drifted from the prone figure of the principal to the nets at either side of the gym. There was something weird hanging from each of them, something heavy and ominous with wires running out of it.

He followed the wires and saw that they ran to one man, another stranger, who was off to the side, near the double fire doors. The wires ran into a doohickey connected to a laptop that was balancing on one of the footstools the cheerleaders used to practice with.

It looked like the whole school was in the gym. Teachers, students, the custodial staff, even Mr. Hebert, the cook, whose family had been in the St. Louis area since it was a French Jesuit trading post and once had owned most of Creve Coeur, or so the story went.

And then there were the strangers, about a dozen, all men, wearing ski masks, all of them armed.

The teachers had already been tied up; the only teacher who wasn’t tied up was Charles, but he was still knocked out, and so he lay on one of the benches, unconscious.

But that wasn’t the worst part. Several teachers had shotguns wired to their hands, which were bound in front of them, and both their index fingers taped to the triggers. Rory didn’t know much about physics yet, but he knew enough to realize that they had to hold their elbows up, the guns pointing directly at their faces. If they got tired, and the guns slipped a bit, the pressure on the triggers would blow their heads off.

Nurse Haskell, he noticed, was having an especially hard time holding her gun up.

Rory submitted without a fuss as one of the bad men—he had already begun to think of them as “cannibals”—roughly bound his hands behind his back with some of that white wire stuff the cops were using now instead of handcuffs and shoved him toward one of the rigged nets.

The Top Dog stepped forward. “Listen to me!” he shouted. He also had a funny accent, but this one was more like what Mr. Nasir-Nassaad should have had but didn’t, weird and guttural and scary. “You are all prisoners of war.”

Rory expected one of the teachers, maybe Mr. Treadway, who was widely regarded as the meanest man in the school, to say something back. Mr. Treadway was always going on about how America was the worst country in history, which made most people in Edwardsville plenty mad, and how the white man was the worst man in history, but since he taught social studies it was more or less okay. Indeed, Rory had wanted to go find some black people to apologize to, but there weren’t all that many of them in Edwardsville, and his parents wouldn’t let him go to East St. Louis, where apparently they were pretty easy to find.

With a shotgun taped beneath his chin, though, Mr. Treadway wasn’t quite as brave as his reputation.

Rory tried to catch his sister’s eye, but as he turned to look her way a blow to the side of his head got his full attention. When the stars stopped shooting, he could see that it was the Top Dog, who had just hit him a glancing blow with the butt of his rifle.

“You don’t move! You don’t move unless I say so! You hear me?”—he was addressing his remarks to the assembly now. “None of you sons of bitches moves unless I say so. Eyes straight ahead! Eyes straight ahead! Or else!”

Everybody froze. The Top Dog turned away from Rory.

Now an unusual emotion began to well up inside him. Practically from birth, Rory had been taught to hide his emotions, to conceal them, suppress them, be afraid of them. It wasn’t nice to feel bad things, and it was even less nice to express them. Boys, his teachers told him, were different now: they didn’t yell, they didn’t fight, even when they wanted to, they got along, even when they didn’t want to. Not to conform was to risk a trip to Mr. Nasty-Nosy’s office or, worse, to the Infirmary, where Nurse Haskell gave you a couple of those pills that supposedly settled you down.

Be nice, they told you. But he didn’t want to be nice any more. He didn’t want to be afraid any more. He wanted to fight, the way Charles had fought.

“Please, please.” It was Nurse Haskell. She was crying, which was making it difficult for her to keep her arms in the right position.

The Top Dog saw her struggles, heard her entreaties. He came over. He took her by the arm and led her toward the center of the gym floor, where Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was lying. He slipped his arms around her waist, propping up her elbows, and waltzed her around a bit.

Then he laughed in her face and released her.

Unsupported, her elbows dropped. She twisted her head just in time—so instead of blowing off the top of her skull, the force of the blast took off the lower half of Nurse Haskell’s jaw, sending her teeth showering over those unlucky enough to be close by.

She fell across Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, writhing. Several of the female teachers screamed. But the children were stock-still, as they had been ordered.

The terrorists just laughed. And nobody laughed louder or longer than the Top Dog.

“Okay, okay,” he shouted. “Now you see. You see what happens when you fuck with me. Nothing good. But, still—I can be merciful.”

Nurse Haskell was still alive, trying to move, trying to moan, even without a mouth. It was hideous. The Top Dog watched her agony for a few moments, then shot her in what remained of her head.

Rory looked across the gym at Emma, who was staring back at him with fear in her eyes. He wanted to rush to her, to protect her. He couldn’t do that. But he did know one thing: there was no fear in the glance he shot back at her. Just anger.

The Top Dog put away his gun and looked at his watch. “Okay, something to do now,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE

“Mr. President, I think you’d better look at this.”

Augie Willson, the head of President Jeb Tyler’s Secret Service detail, was standing in the doorway of the command section with a concerned look on his face. Even at the best of times, Augie had a concerned look on his face, but this look was different. It was even more concerned.

“What is it, Augie?” Tyler and a few other men in suits were sitting around a table, obviously in the middle of an unpleasant conference. “Senator Hartley is trying to explain to me how I could lose the next election, and I’m telling them that’s just not going to be possible. You know what a popular guy I am.”

President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler smiled that dazzling smile of his, the one that had narrowly won him the presidency the last time out over an older and more experienced opponent, the sitting vice president. A fabulously wealthy trial lawyer, Tyler’s political genius was to maintain his image as the champion of the little guy by putting doctors out of business in his home state of Louisiana. Women, especially prochoice women, loved him for his ready wit, his fabulous hair, and the way he could look into their eyes and, as he put it, see their souls. Prolife women, on the other hand, did not exactly appreciate the dearth of ob-gyns that had followed in his meteoric wake.

Men assumed he got laid a lot; there hadn’t been a bachelor in the White House since James Buchanan.

Tyler shot a glance at Hartley to see how he was taking the gibe. Despite their many differences, over the years they had bonded over a shared fondness for Maker’s Mark bourbon, the novels of John Gregory Dunne and James Ellroy, and the paramount importance of absolute discretion in their personal lives. Often, they got drunk together, swapped stories together, confided in each other. They had few secrets from each other; Bob Hartley was the only man Jeb Tyler could really trust. Even if, given the nature of his office, he couldn’t really trust him.

Hartley returned the glance. “I’m just trying to help, Mr. President,” he said, but his tone let Tyler know the barb stung a little. “If you don’t want to continue to occupy the Oval Office after the next election, there are plenty of people in Washington who would happily take over for you.”

Tyler gave Hartley a shot of the famous teeth. “Starting with you, Bob, I imagine,” he said, then turned to Augie Willson. Willson didn’t much like Hartley, and even with a Secret Service poker face, he was somehow always able to let his personal disdain for the man shine through. “Go ahead, Augie,” he said.

“It all started a few minutes ago,” the Secret Service man explained, switching on the video screen. The big type at the bottom of the screen was all too familiar:

SCHOOL HOSTAGE SITUATION.
Illinois middle school crisis.

Senator Robert Hartley glanced briefly at the screen, then returned his attention to notes. He was trying to explain to Tyler that his poll numbers were dropping precisely because he was seen as a weak leader by a majority of Americans. The liberal social agenda he had campaigned on—universal health care, hate-crimes legislation, state-sponsored day care for all working mothers—had been largely enacted, and so a fickle country had become restless, which is why it was so difficult to be a two-term president these days: the country craved change, even when it didn’t need it. America was an entire nation suffering from attention deficit disorder.

As far as Hartley was concerned, President Tyler was the one who really needed a change: a . . .