Josh met the rest of his team in the lobby. His agent in charge for the detail today was a senior DS employee named Chuck Ames. Josh had first met Ames at the DS training facility in Blackstone, Virginia, when he was a trainee. Ames had been a good instructor, and the few times they’d worked together since had run very smoothly.
Also with Ames was Pete White, a member of Josh’s training class.
The fourth DS special agent on today’s detail was introduced as Stephanie Millibrew, and after a quick introduction and a comment from her about seeing him on TV “back after that Mexico thing,” the four of them headed inside.
Duffy, Ames, Millibrew, and White collected the EU diplomat at the door to her hotel suite. Johanna Aldenburg was a tall fifty-four-year-old Dutch woman with red hair and designer eyeglasses, and Josh was pleased to see that she and the five members of her staff were ready to go. The American agents formed a diamond around Aldenburg and escorted her downstairs to a trio of armored black Chevy Suburbans while her staff trailed behind.
Josh took the left rear seat in the lead vehicle, with two other agents, but only after their protectee and the AIC were locked into the armored middle Suburban, referred to as the limo.
They took off, and in his earpiece Josh heard Ames confer with a member of the advance team of DS agents already at the Hilton. “Keith, at the drop in five.”
“Five minutes, understood.”
Five minutes later he climbed out of the SUV and took up a position behind Aldenburg, and while doing so Josh couldn’t help but flash a glance to his left. It was here, at a side door to the hotel, where Ronald Reagan had been shot by John Hinckley in 1981. The location looked different from the video footage Josh remembered watching; a portico had been built in front of the door to shield it from the street, but the rest of the scene appeared largely unchanged.
It was the Secret Service that got Reagan off the X and out of danger, not the Diplomatic Security Service, but both agencies were tasked with watching over people with targets on their backs.
The Dutch diplomat made it safely inside the hotel, and Josh trailed in the formation around her as they headed to a ballroom for their first meeting.
At two thirty p.m. he shifted his weight off his left leg. His hamstring was still giving him issues, and he leaned on his right leg to shake it out. He’d done six hours on duty already, mostly static like this, and both his legs as well as his low back made him aware of it.
He was positioned outside a small conference room with White and Millibrew, while Aldenburg was inside talking to a pair of senators. U.S. Capitol Police stood in the corridor as well, along with various aides who milled about, entering and exiting other conference rooms with such regularity that Josh had committed dozens of faces to memory.
Understanding patterns and establishing who belonged in an area where he was working security were key, plus it kept him focused and awake.
AIC Ames remained inside with the EU official, and just after Josh looked at his watch, he heard him broadcast on the net in a soft voice. “They’re wrapping up.”
A minute later, the door next to Josh opened, and Aldenburg exited with the agent in charge.
Ames tapped his radio’s talk button, addressing the agent standing outside the vehicles in front of the hotel.
“Keith, pick up in five.”
“Five minutes, roger.”
Aldenburg told Ames she needed a bathroom break before heading back to her hotel, so Duffy and Millibrew escorted her to the women’s room. As Ames updated Keith on the delay, Stephanie went into the bathroom to check it, gave the all clear, then stood on the other side of the door from Josh as the foreign minister stepped inside.
Ames waited just across the hall from them, his eyes on the exit.
When Aldenburg reemerged three minutes later, she was holding a phone to her ear, and her previously calm expression had morphed into one of concern. She pulled the phone away to address Chuck Ames. “I’m terribly sorry, but I need to ask you to make a detour on the way back to the hotel.”
Josh groaned inwardly. They’d wrapped earlier than he’d expected, so he’d allowed himself to entertain the possibility that he’d be able to make it home in time to get a stretch or a workout in before dinner.
But with an unscheduled movement, he saw that possibility quickly fading away.
Ames asked, “Where do you need to go, ma’am?”
The woman looked a little agitated, possibly annoyed. “The Turkish ambassador’s residence. Out in front of it, actually. My daughter is a senior at Georgetown, and she and some fellow students have joined a rally there. I need to go by and speak with her. It’s not the kind of publicity I need, as I’m sure you can imagine. I’ll need five, ten minutes, and then we can be on our way.”
Josh wasn’t in charge, but he didn’t like the idea of taking his protectee to some sort of a protest he knew absolutely nothing about.
Still, DS was trained to accommodate their protectees’ requests when possible, and he assumed Ames would find a way to comply.
After a moment the AIC said, “How about we send a car to pick her up, bring her right to your suite? Probably better all around, from a security—”
She shook her head. “Ria won’t leave her friends till the protest is over. I’ll have to go to her. This won’t take any time, I assure you.”
Ames thought another moment. Before he spoke, Aldenburg said, “Do you have children, Special Agent?”
“Four, actually.”
“Then you, of all people, get it. She has a mind of her own, and I need to go stress to her that she also has a responsibility to her mother.”
Ames nodded. “All right, ma’am, I just need a couple of minutes to set this up.”
“Thank you very much.”
Duffy found himself glad he wasn’t in charge today; this sounded like it was going to be a headache to organize.
They all went out to the vehicles and Aldenburg climbed into the limo, and then while Duffy stood outside in the sunny but frigid afternoon, the three Suburbans idled while Ames made some calls on his phone. He spoke with Aldenburg again and had her air drop a picture of her daughter to him so he could share it with his agents.
Finally, Ames moved back over to Duffy and the three other close-protection agents, and he conferred with his team.
“Okay, this is a movement in the blind, so eyes sharp. I just talked with DC Metro PD; everything’s stable at the rally—for now, anyway—though there are some counterprotesters arriving that they will need to keep their eyes on. We’ll adopt a lower profile for the move. We’ll keep the vics spread out a little so we don’t blow in there looking like a motorcade. We park on Massachusetts, on the other side of the circle from the residence. I sent a picture of Ria Aldenburg to DC Metro, and they are going to find her in the crowd and bring her to us.”
He added, “At no time will the high representative leave the limo.”
Duffy nodded. “Understood. You want to send the pic to us so we know who we’re looking for if Metro can’t find her?”
Ames pulled out his phone. “Doing it now.”
Special Agent Stephanie Millibrew and the other two agents nodded their assent, and soon the three vehicles left the Hilton for the short drive west to Embassy Row.
As they rolled through the heavy afternoon traffic, Josh looked at his cell phone, studying the picture of Ria Aldenburg sent over by Ames.
He tried to imagine the girl in the image, who was wearing a tank top and shorts and sitting in a sunny outdoor café, as she would now look: no doubt dressed in a big winter coat, as the outside temperature hovered in the midthirties.
Millibrew spoke to the others in the vehicle around her. “Short blond hair, twenty-one, somewhere in the middle of a rally.” She whistled softly. “This should be fun.”
Duffy said, “If the cops bring her to us, we can load her up and get some distance off the X.”
Sheridan Circle is a small grassy park with a large statue of Civil War general Philip Sheridan riding a horse in the center, surrounded on all sides by stately mansions. Tree-lined Massachusetts Avenue runs northwest to southeast, and Twenty-Third Street NW branches off to the south.
The three Suburbans of the high representative’s detail arrived there in no time, though the vehicles had to pick their way through traffic before parking behind a row of police cars and motorcycles on the north side of the circle.
The residence of the Turkish ambassador sits on the south side of the circle, next to the Latvian embassy, and as soon as Duffy’s lead vehicle stopped on Massachusetts, he scanned the area.
AIC Ames came over his earpiece at the same time. “DC Metro says the counterprotest is on 23rd Northwest, and it’s grown in size in the past five minutes. Police have them barricaded back from Sheridan Circle, but we definitely need to keep our eyes on them.”
Josh saw a large cluster of counterprotesters waving Turkish flags in the street on the other side of the circle; they were tucked tightly together and held back by barricades and several motorcycle police. Between him and them, the rally on the grass in the circle had formed on the southern edge, close to the residence and on the far side from Josh of the Civil War statue. He estimated the protest to be maybe seventy-five in number. Some held signs, one spoke into a megaphone, and many shook their fists in the air.
Josh could tell that a lot of the protesters were young, in their twenties, and he wondered which one was Ria.
The counterprotesters were harder to count, as they were farther away and bunched more closely together.
Soon Ames came over the net again. “The police are now saying they don’t have the manpower to bring her to us; they’re focusing on keeping the two groups apart. Millibrew, you’re up. Duffy, you support.”
“Got it,” Stephanie Millibrew said into her mic. “I’ll go find her, bring her back.”
Josh and Stephanie climbed out of the Suburban and walked around to the side of the protest. There was chanting and shouting, fury in the tone, and Josh realized the fury was coming from both sides.
Together they stood there a moment, just taking in the scene, until Duffy spotted someone in the crowd holding a red sign over her head. “Got her. Red sign, yellow ski jacket, black jeans, and white boots.”
Millibrew looked a moment more, then spoke into her mic. “Eyes on.”
Special Agent Millibrew began walking towards the EU official’s daughter, and Josh trailed behind her.
But they’d only taken a couple of steps before Ames came back over the net. “All hold. Stand by.”
The female agent turned and looked to Duffy with an expression of mild confusion. He began scanning the scene more carefully, not understanding the reason for Ames’s hold.
Quickly, however, the AIC came back through the agent’s earpieces. “Metro says something’s happening in front of the ambo’s residence.”
Duff didn’t have a direct line of sight on the driveway from where he stood, so he quickly moved a few feet to his right to see around the rally. Soon he could make out a few sleek black SUVs parked in the drive, and a large cluster of men in dark suits standing around them.
One man leaned into the back of a limousine, as if he were conferring with someone there.
Soon the man looked back up over the roof of the car towards the protests, then back down to the limousine.
Ames said, “Metro advises the Turkish president is in that limo.”
Josh Duffy heard the transmission, but his focus remained on the man, obviously a Turkish security agent, talking to someone in the limo. The man rose back up and began speaking into a cuff mic, and by his body language, Josh anticipated trouble.
The Turkish security officer shouted commands to the men close around him, pointing towards the protest across the little street.
And then the dark-suited individuals began to move.
Josh Duffy broadcast on the net quickly. “Got eyes on ten to twelve Turkish protective detail leaving the residence and moving across the street towards the rally.” He added, “Looks like they’re about to go hands on with the protesters.”
As soon as he said that, the men in black fanned out and broke into a run. Behind them, the police barricade holding the Turkish counterprotesters came flying down as another dozen or so men there surged forward, then ran towards the circle.
To Josh’s right, the door of the middle Suburban opened and Johanna Aldenburg began to emerge.
Duff could hear Ames calling to her from the vehicle. “Ma’am! Wait till—”
“I have to get to Ria!”
Ames made it out of the Suburban right behind her, and he took the EU official by the arm, stopping her advance. He looked up to Josh. “Duff! Get the daughter!”
Josh sprinted off past the police motorcycles, running onto the grass on the northwest side of Sheridan Circle, making a beeline towards Ria Aldenburg. His arms and legs pumped furiously, his prosthesis not slowing him down at all as he advanced on what was turning into utter chaos before his eyes.
A full-on brawl had kicked off on the south side of the circle, spilling into Massachusetts Avenue in front of the residence.
Men in black suits began ripping signs out of protesters’ hands, kicking and punching, knocking college students and others to the ground, then kicking them again.
Duffy saw other men, all in civilian attire, as they joined in. These people had not come from the counterprotest, so he determined that they must be Turkish government security or intelligence operatives who had embedded inside the rally.
There were probably two dozen DC Metro cops around, and they were doing their best to stop the rest of the counterprotesters from making it to the circle, but within seconds Josh had completed the calculus in his head. The Turks were more numerous, more aggressive, more motivated.
They were going to pulverize these protesters.
Josh wore a suit similar to what the Turkish security guys were wearing, so as he passed a pair of cops waving their nightsticks in front of them, he shouted, “DS! Move!” They stepped out of his way, turning their attention to a tall bearded security man heel-stomping a college-aged male with a ponytail, as if grinding the young man into the dirt.
Josh ran on past this scene, his focus totally on Ria, who had been pushed to the ground under another protester as people around her were mercilessly beaten by the Turks.
He was less than one hundred feet away from her, but his path was blocked by a fit twentysomething counterprotester in a white T-shirt, completely incongruous with the frigid January afternoon. The Turk threw a wild punch at an older man with a bullhorn in his hand, knocking the man down to the grass with a blow to the left side of his head. Josh’s mission didn’t include breaking up this fight, only pulling the Dutch woman out of the middle of it, but as the young counterprotester turned to him with a balled fist, Josh waylaid the man with a shoulder to the chest, sending him flying out of the way.
As he ran on, he reached under his coat to his hip, pulled a canister of pepper spray, and drew it out in front of him, and then he ducked under a burly Turkish protective agent trying to tackle him.
Rising back up, Josh spun around, aimed the spray in the man’s direction, and sent a stream across his chest and up into his face.
Josh turned away and ran on. In his earpiece he heard Millibrew.
“Duffy, I’m fifty feet behind you! Keep them off her till I get there and I’ll pull her out! You cover us back to the vic.”
“Roger!”
A muscular Turk in a brown coat fired a jab at Josh as he passed, striking the forearm the American had raised to protect his face, and instantly after, Josh closed on the man and grabbed him in a bear hug. Lifting the attacker into the air, he fell back with him, but spun around and landed hard on the man, who grunted violently as the wind was knocked out of him.
The American climbed back up and ran on.
Josh knew that certain members of the Turkish president’s detail were authorized to carry handguns, even here in the District, so he was hypervigilant, checking the hands of everyone he saw. If one of these guys pulled a weapon, he’d have no choice but to use deadly force, as his protectee was probably still outside the armored vehicle behind him and therefore in any potential line of fire.
And through all the chaos, Josh Duffy retained the presence of mind to marvel that this bullshit was going down right in the middle of Washington, D.C.