Flowerbed of State (3 page)

Why wouldn’t he let go? In a blind panic, I let loose a Xena Warrior Princess battle yell and landed a bruising kick to his shin.

“Ow!” he shouted, but his grip held firm. I kicked him again.

With a disgusted grunt, he twirled me around until my backside was pressed against his muscular legs and chest. He cinched his arm around my waist, pinning me so close to him I had no hope of using any kind of leverage against his brute strength.

“Let go,” I wheezed.

“Not until you stop attacking me.” He swore under his breath while I twisted and turned and wore myself out. “This is what I get for playing the Good Samaritan, a hellcat with claws. If you don’t stop scratching me, I swear I will—”

“Wait a minute.” He thought
I
was attacking
him
? I’m the good guy here. What would make him think I would willingly attack anyone? “Wait a minute.”

As soon as I stopped kicking and punching and, yes, scratching him, he released his crushing hold. I stumbled forward a few steps before regaining my balance. Breathing hard, I grabbed my knees and tried to sort out what had just happened. Was it possible I’d overreacted? He hadn’t actually attacked me. He’d only touched my arm. I was the one who’d—

“Let—let me get this straight,” I huffed, still unable to fully catch my breath. “You’re not trying to kill me?”

He didn’t seem to be listening. With his shoulders hunched forward, he clamped his straight white teeth tightly together. Hopping on one foot, he cursed his existence and mine. I winced. His bloodshot, unfocused eyes were watering like a faucet because of me. He was blinking wildly, clearly suffering because I’d reacted too quickly and had thoroughly doused him with the potent, red-hot pepper oil.

Despite his arsenal, he didn’t look that much like a killer, not really. His muscular yet trim physique was much more reminiscent of a heroic Roman warrior. His square jaw spoke of strength. His brows, though creased with intense pain, suggested a man of compassion and, I hoped, forgiveness. Because he wasn’t a killer. His distinctive black uniform identified him as a member of the Counter Assault Team, which was no ordinary branch of the Secret Service, but its most elite military arm.

“You—you’re Secret Service?” I asked, suddenly hoping I was hallucinating. Assaulting a Secret Service agent was most likely a felony.

“Yes,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

Even if it wasn’t a felony, I was sure blinding a Secret Service agent wasn’t something Gordon or Ambrose Jones, the White House’s chief usher, would likely forgive. I rushed to my backpack and quickly found my environmentally friendly, BPA-free water bottle. Moving as fast as possible, I unscrewed the lid and tossed the water into his face.

He gave a startled yelp when the icy water hit him.

“Give me that.” He grabbed the water bottle and dumped the remaining water on his mottled forehead and brow. The cold water caused him to shiver like the leaves on the saucer magnolia trees above us. Then he scrubbed his eyes with his coat sleeve. He still looked miserable. The skin around his eyes was puffy and turning an angry shade of red, but he didn’t seem to be blinking as furiously anymore.

“Thanks.” He dropped the water bottle and grabbed my shoulders. He squinted at me, his eyes unfocused. “Are you okay?” he demanded, his voice unnaturally calm considering the situation.

I nodded.

“Answer me. Are you okay?” he repeated. Apparently, he couldn’t yet see well enough to make out my gesture. “Do I need to call EMS?”

“No,” I croaked, and quickly cleared my throat, which burned as if I’d been shouting at the top of my lungs for hours.

“Good.” He released me and started to pace. Limp, step, limp, step. Turn. Limp, step, limp, step. He stomped with that awkward gait through the middle of my flowerbed. The helpless tulips and fragrant grape hyacinths were no match for his heavy boots.

I winced both for my plants and for him. He wouldn’t be limping if I hadn’t kicked him. He wouldn’t be growling with every step if I hadn’t blinded him with my pepper spray. He stumbled a couple of times, proving his eyesight wasn’t even close to being back to normal. But I had enough experience with men’s egos to know to keep my mouth shut. An apology right now would not be appreciated.

He stopped at the edge of the flowerbed. “Before I radio for backup . . .” he began, before turning his gaze heavenward. Muttering a curse to the heavy clouds above, he dredged his fingers through his wavy black hair. “There’s no way around it. I’m going to have to file a report about this . . . this . . .” he grumbled more to himself than to me.

In my three short months at the White House, I’d seen the Counter Assault Team, or CAT, as they liked to call themselves, only a few times. They were one of the least visible segments of the Secret Service. They traveled everywhere with the President like the Secret Service agents who dressed in neatly pressed suits. But unlike their suited counterparts, CAT agents didn’t make regular security sweeps of the President’s Park.

“And look at this.” He held up a loose wire that had been attached to his earpiece. “You’ve broken my radio.”

I’d always found the regular Secret Service agents easy to work with. They always had a smile and a polite manner. Not one of them had ever growled at me.

CAT agents, on the other hand, only ventured outside their tight protection circle when they were taking part in a training exercise or responding to a specific threat against the First Family. They were a very serious group.

I doubted I would fare well in his report. While mentally drafting my résumé, I started to move away from him to gather my backpack and gardening tools. He snagged hold of my arm. “Let’s start with you giving me some basic information, like your name.”

“Casey—Casey Calhoun.” My heart was really pounding now. I wished he’d just shoot me and put me out of my misery. His grip tightened on my arm. “I’m Gordon Sims’s new assistant.” Everyone knew Gordon. He was a fixture, a one-man institution. But the agent’s pained expression remained unchanged, which only made me more nervous. Was it possible? Did he not know Gordon? “I—I’m a gardener.”

My slightly eccentric but altogether lovable aunts, Willow and Alba, and Grandmother Faye back in Charleston, South Carolina, had instilled in me a love of gardening as well as an absurd fondness for ice cream desserts. But I suspected he didn’t care to hear about any of that.

I decided to take the initiative. “I’m kind of in a hurry. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to clear up this misunderstanding as quickly as possible. I have a meeting scheduled with the First Lady this morning to present my plans on how to transform the White House gardens into the White House
organic
gardens.”

“We’ll see about that.” His red-rimmed gaze traveled up and down my mud-caked legs. I had a sinking feeling he was plotting to make my life at the White House a living hell. I bit the inside of my cheek. He couldn’t really get me fired, could he?

He narrowed his bloodshot eyes and leaned toward me. “Now tell me, Ms. Calhoun, why did you attack me?”

I
chewed my bottom lip and wished I’d stayed in my little cubicle, letting the tick, tick, tick of the institutional clock that hung on the concrete block wall chip away at my sanity. The ticking was in my head now, counting down the minutes before my meeting with the First Lady was scheduled to start.

“Well, I’m waiting,” the unhappy agent said.

“Really, I didn’t attack anyone,” I drawled, my voice dipping a little deeper into my Southern heritage than normal.

His dark brows rose with incredulity.

Undeterred, I flashed him my winsome, slightly crooked smile I’d tempered with a healthy dose of humility. “You see, I was protecting myself from whoever hit
me
. I’m sorry for it, but I’m afraid it was you who got in my way, Agent . . . Agent . . .”

“Special Agent Turner,” he supplied, his brows furrowing. “
I
got in your way?”

“Yes.” I nodded, glad to have cleared that up. “We can talk more about it later. Right now I have to prepare for my meeting with the First Lady.” This wasn’t a presentation I could easily postpone. The White House Grounds Committee, a collection of nationally renowned nurserymen and horticultural professors, would also be present to provide their input. I needed to make a good impression. Showing up caked in mud wouldn’t be the best place to start. “I’ll need time to clean myself up.” There would be no saving my mud-stained pantyhose. And my new pencil skirt had suffered several mud splatters as well. Perhaps I could—

“Nice try, Ms. Calhoun. But you can’t just brush what happened under the rug. This is a serious—”

“I’d rather plant it in a garden. It’s good natural fertilizer, you know.”

He didn’t laugh.

“I’m going to have to report what happened to you and what you did to me. Come along.” He scooped up my backpack from the ground and headed toward the White House.

Stunned, I just stood there watching Turner’s determined stride, my backpack swinging in his hand. He wasn’t even going to discuss what we should do? He wasn’t going to let me explain why it was imperative that I make it to my meeting on time?

Filing a report and filling out reams of paperwork could wait. Certainly he understood that. Besides, paperwork had never been my strength. I liked to think of myself as a woman of action, a woman who rolled up her sleeves and got the job, any job, done—as long as that job didn’t include paperwork.

Assistant Usher Wilson Fisher, with his slicked-back hair and hawk-like nose, was constantly following me around, waving sheaves of forms that I needed to fill out for this or that. I cringed as I pictured the mountain of paperwork Mr. Fisher would find for me from his oversized filing cabinet dedicated strictly to his official forms.

“Perhaps we can work something out,” I called to Special Agent Turner. He kept walking. I gathered up the gardening gloves, bottle of pepper spray, and water bottle from the muddy ground before trotting after him. “Give me an hour—two at the most—with the First Lady. I promise you, this is a very important meeting. Members of the Grounds Committee have flown in from all around the country to listen to my report.”

He stopped in the middle of the red brick path and glanced at his watch. “What time is your meeting?”

“Nine thirty.”

“It’s seven twenty-three,” he reported with the kind of precision that, if Mr. Fisher had been listening, would have had him puffing up with pleasure. “That gives me two hours.”

“Don’t forget my clothes. I can’t go into the meeting looking like this,” I said as I caught up with him. I flapped my dirty garden gloves, hoping to emphasize my point. “I’ll need to get cleaned up, not to mention the time it’ll take to set up my presentation boards. I figure that should take at least an hour.”

Apparently the sorry state of my clothes was of no concern to him. He turned away, seemingly much more interested in the protesters gathering ahead of President Bradley’s banking summit. The crowd had more than doubled in size since I’d passed them earlier. They looked like a harmless bunch, most of them dressed in a ridiculous hodgepodge of old ripped and worn clothes and burlap sacks. And yet Turner stared at them as if he were watching a hive of assassins.

“Someone attacked you, Ms. Calhoun. And it happened on government property. That is something the Secret Service takes very seriously. For all I know, what happened to you might be connected to . . .”

I waited for him to finish.

He didn’t.

“Connected to what, exactly?” I wanted to know. I’d always felt extraordinarily safe at the White House. Being surrounded by a state-of-the-art security system and teams of highly trained agents, it was easy to forget that there were individuals and groups out there that wanted to harm the President, disrupt the governmental process, or simply make the six o’clock news.

Turner rubbed his sore eyes. “Nothing specific. We just need to be careful.”

Had he answered too quickly? “Is there something going on that I need to be worried about?”

He started toward the White House again. “Every member of the staff is a link in the chain of security. Every one of us must play our part in assuring the President’s safety. So you have to ask yourself, Ms. Calhoun, what did you do to make yourself a weak link in that chain this morning? And did you cause the chain to be broken?”

“I don’t think I—”

He turned toward me. “These are vital things we have to assess. If there has been a breach in security, wouldn’t you want us to know about it right away?”

“Yes, but—”

“Jack! There you are!” Special Agent Steve Sallis called as he lumbered across the grassy lawn. He ducked under a low-hanging branch of a nearby elm to get to us. Special Agent Janie Partners was on Pennsylvania Avenue, speaking with one of the protesters. I knew both Steve and Janie. They were members of the Secret Service’s Presidential Protection Detail, or PPD. They’d often stop and chat with the gardening staff whenever they had a free moment. Steve was a handsome man with blond hair and an easy smile. He was wearing his regular nondescript black suit. And Janie, who always tried to be a little different, was sporting black hair today and wearing a black pantsuit with a red, white, and blue silk scarf. “What brings you outside the iron fence? Thatch was beginning to wonder if you’d gone AWOL.” Steve’s tone was light, joking, and very different from Turner’s take-no-prisoners manner.