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Saturday Evening
AXEL KENNEDY, HEAD of President Jackson’s personal security detail, addressed the Secret Service agent stationed at the elevator that led to the First Family’s Residence.
“Meeting with Stonewall,” he said, using President Jackson’s Secret Service codename, which referred to another Jackson, Civil War General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
The agent whispered into his comms, “Kennedy to the Residence,” then stepped aside and opened the gate to the elevator for Kennedy to enter. Kennedy pushed the button to take the elevator up.
He found the President in the Residence dining room staring out one of the windows toward Lafayette Park.
“Mr. President.”
“Thanks for coming, Axel.”
Kennedy closed the dining room door, grateful—and not for the first time—that the Clintons had insisted that no Secret Service agents be stationed on the Residence floors during their time in the White House. The custom had remained after they left, although agents stood post on the lower floor at the elevator and at the staircase leading up to the Residence.
“Have a seat, Axel.”
The President seated himself at the dining table, and Axel followed suit.
“What happened to Agent Bingham?”
Beth Bingham had spent two years on the White House detail and was a favorite with the President. She was regularly stationed at the elevator in the evenings—until today.
“I’m told she resigned from the Service due to a family situation. Quite sudden and unexpected.”
“And the new guy on the elevator?”
“Agent Callister.”
“He looks familiar.”
“He should. He was on Harmon’s detail.”
The President sighed. “How many does that make?”
“Four in the past two months. Four reliable agents replaced by men I wouldn’t trust to walk my dog.”
The President and Kennedy were no longer confident of their privacy in the Oval Office and had taken to meeting in the Residence after they noticed the subtle but unmistakable shifting of personnel around them—agents from the late Vice President’s personal detail being assigned to the White House detail. They had no means of knowing which or how many of Harmon’s detail had been privy to or part of his attempt to assassinate President Jackson and ascend to the Presidency. However, Kennedy and Jackson viewed each shift in the White House’s protective complement as further evidence of an ongoing conspiracy, and they eyed the replacements with distrust, listing them on the adversary’s side until proven otherwise.
“I thought you had some say in who is posted here?”
“On your personal detail, sir, but not on the White House detail. Mr. President, if I were to raise an objection against an agent from Harmon’s former detail being posted inside the White House, it would signal that we were on to them.”
“Them. The unknown them. Someone is rearranging the pieces on the board, Axel, and I confess, I’m beginning to feel outmaneuvered.”
“I understand, Mr. President. The number of agents in the White House I would rely on to protect you in a make-or-break situation is shrinking.”
“As a Washington outsider, I don’t understand how this can be happening.”
“It’s the shadow government, Mr. President, the entrenched bureaucracy composed of political appointees and career government employees engaged in coordinated attempts to undermine your authority and legitimacy—you, sir, the democratically elected President of the United States! It’s civil servants who are opposed to your political beliefs and agenda. They hide in the background, pulling strings to obstruct you through weaponized national intelligence actions, a complicit media, and the judicial overreach of like-minded allies in federal courts.
“You are the President for four or eight years, depending upon election results, but the Deep State, the bureaucrats working behind the curtains, will outlast you—making them the real power in Washington.”
Jackson’s long, dark fingers massaged his tired eyes. “It is one thing for the bureaucrats of a single department or agency to impede the executive branch. It is another thing altogether when allies with similar political objectives unite across government entities to overthrow the presidency. That is sedition and treason.”
“It is, sir—particularly when unelected officials are able to thwart the will of the voters and effectively impose their values and objectives upon the American people. Harmon attempted a ‘soft’ coup to take over the executive branch. The only casualty would have been you.”
“Only me? No, the American people who elected me would have been casualties with me. The problem remains, Axel, that Harmon could not have acted alone. We know he had a collaborator planted in the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the individual who provided him with the deadly cocktail he poured into my coffee. And based on recent personnel changes here in the White House, I’m guessing that the hierarchy of the Secret Service cannot be trusted either. And Harmon left a lengthy career at the NSA before he stood for one term in the Senate—before he so carefully courted me in order to reach the vice presidency. Who knows how many of his accomplices are embedded in the NSA? The Secret Service? FBI? Congress? The military? Or outside corporations and financial institutions, for that matter?”
Jackson rubbed his eyes a second time. “I had hopes that my man on the inside of the NSA would deliver some answers.”
“You have my sympathies about Overman, sir. I know he was a trusted friend.”
“We went to school together. Double-dated. His wife and Maddie were roommates. He was a true patriot, too. He must have gotten too close and given himself away for them to take him out.”
The President’s mood sank a little. “I hate for his wife to never know what happened to him. Do you think we’ll ever find his body?”
“I doubt it, sir. As long as there’s no body, no one can definitively say he was murdered.”
Jackson’s temper flashed. “And yet the media feels obliged to suggest that he ran off with a secret lover—with not a shred of evidence to support such a spurious claim!”
“Disinformation planted by our adversaries, sir. Nothing in Overman’s background even hints at infidelity.”
“I knew the man close to forty years. He’d never cheat on his wife. Not a chance. And I’m truly sorry I put him in harm’s way by asking him to suss out Harmon’s closest connections inside the NSA.”
“You had to ask, sir. We had no other means of trying to find out if they will make another attempt.”
“I am doing my best to govern this nation but waiting for the other shoe to drop is wearing on me.” Jackson lowered his voice. “If we didn’t have our little ace in the hole, my paranoia would be much higher. Is she in place yet?”
“Scheduled to start tomorrow, sir. I, um, realize you have a great deal of faith in this woman, sir, but to place all your confidence in her? If they found Overman out—with his seniority and the clearances he held—what chance does an entry-level contractor stand?”
“As I’ve said several times, you haven’t seen her in action, Axel. I have. She’s not defenseless by any means. Besides, the very fact that she’s a low-level employee means she won’t even show up on their radar. Trust me on this, please.”
“Yes sir. If you say so.”
Jackson had briefed Kennedy on the former Gemma Keyes, but without seeing with his own eyes what she could do, Kennedy remained skeptical.
“I’m concerned with how long it will take her to get any actionable intel, sir. Our enemies are systematically isolating you, surrounding you with potential assassins. We need additional allies. Have you . . . have you made a decision as to Harmon’s replacement?”
Jackson shook his head. “I need to know beyond any doubt that the next Vice President isn’t looking to stick a knife in my back.”
“It’s been six months, sir.”
“The twenty-fifth amendment establishes no timeline for when the President must nominate a replacement. Lyndon Johnson went a year without a VP and Harry Truman governed for four years without one.”
“Yes sir; however, I’m sure you understand my concern for your safety, your administration, and your . . . legacy. The Speaker of the House—”
“Speaker Friese is the overweening puppet of his party, a spineless, brainless shill whose only worth to them is his unquestioning obedience—and that man, that lapdog—is a single heartbeat away from the presidency!”
“Which is why moving quickly to select a Vice President—one we are confident is not in Harmon’s corner—would, at the least, lessen the likelihood of another assassination attempt.”
“Don’t think that I don’t know that, Axel. But whomever I appoint requires the confirmation of both houses of Congress, and that is proving to be a ticklish problem. The House and Senate are so evenly divided that getting my pick confirmed would be like asking America, ‘Cats or dogs?’”
The President sighed. “You cannot imagine the pressure both parties are exerting on me, Axel. I’ve met with the majority and minority leaders from both houses and listened to them pitch their preferred candidates, each party vowing to vote against the other party’s choice.”
“As you said, a ticklish problem, sir.”
Jackson tucked his chin to his chest as he pondered the dilemma before him. “I’ve listened politely to the maneuverings and machinations of both sides, all the while wondering: Which of these men and women colluded with Harmon, a man of my own party, to assassinate and replace me? Which of their nominees is the next Manchurian Candidate?”
Kennedy leaned toward the President. “Considering the seriousness of the situation, sir, I would feel better if we weren’t relying only on your plant at the NSA. Would you be open to adding a second iron to the fire?”
“I take it you have a suggestion, Axel?”
“Yes, sir. While our mole is digging in at the NSA, I thought we could go at the problem from the other end.”
“I’m listening.”
“You remember Agent Janice Trujillo, sir? She was Cushing’s de facto team leader, but she recognized that Cushing’s actions were suspect, possibly treasonous. When the chips were down, she proved her loyalty to you, not to Cushing or her handlers. We can trust her, sir. And she already knows our mole and her handler.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“I’d like to reach out to Agent Trujillo. Do you remember the first time we spoke to her? Cushing was MIA, and Trujillo said something about ‘the absence of a visible chain of command.’”
“I seem to recall her saying that.”
“She and her team are covert operators, sir. It’s likely they received their assignment to General Cushing through untraceable channels—which is why, when Harmon died and Cushing went off-grid, Trujillo had no one else to report to.”
“It’s been six months since then, Axel. She can’t have been sitting on her hands all this time.”
“No, she has not. Even though she knew Cushing was dead, she had to pretend otherwise. She and her team waited for Cushing in New Mexico until DOD issued the bulletin stating that an Air Force transport had crashed in the Atlantic with Cushing aboard. Trujillo’s default orders when an op ended were RTB—return to base—and await instructions. With her command officer officially dead, she disbanded her team and returned to her Virginia base of operations.”
“How do you know this?”
“I asked Agent Gamble to keep tabs on her—unobtrusively. I asked him to convey a request for her to keep her head down and her nose to the grindstone. Since she left New Mexico, she’s received several innocuous assignments, mostly busywork taking her out of the country and back. The thing is, I think Trujillo is the only other connection we have into Harmon’s network. Harmon himself handled Cushing and her team, but he had to have kept others in the conspiracy knowledgeable of the operation.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting that whoever ‘inherited’ Trujillo as a resource is waiting, observing and testing her to see if she’s been compromised, perhaps holding her in reserve. So far, I don’t believe they have noted any taint in her loyalty to them.
“I think I see where this is going.”
“Yes sir. I propose that we bring her under Gamble’s oversight—carefully, of course—and keep her in readiness for when she receives an actual assignment.”
“And becomes our double agent inside the enemy’s camp.”
“Yes, Mr. President. Initially, the enemy will work her ‘blind,’ without any face-to-face contact. However, when her handler does reveal himself to Trujillo, that ‘someone’ will be our ‘in’ to Harmon’s network.”
“I like it.”
Axel frowned. “You’ve told me that our, er, ‘ace’ and her partner have extraordinary abilities. We would need them and their abilities at that point to surveil Trujillo’s handler and infiltrate his or her chain of command.”
“I know you doubt them, Axel, but I assure you: They can do the job. As regards Agent Trujillo? Set it up.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
~~**~~
