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Authors: Gerald Petievich

The Sentinel (5 page)

BOOK: The Sentinel
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"I see, " she replied.

At a clearing that had been washed by a stream tributary, they began walking to avoid jagged rocks.

"Where are you from, Pete?"

"I grew up in Bisbee, Arizona.

"Bisbee..."

"A onetime mining area near the Mexican border. My father liked the quiet. It was that, all right. Quiet. My dad ran the only service station in town, and my mother was a clerk at the Foursquare church. She dragged me to church every Sunday."

"So you left the small town to find adventure?"

"Actually I saw some soldiers on a desert training mission. They were from Fort Huachuca. That's an Army post near Bisbee. I struck up a conversation. One of them told me he'd been to twenty different countries. I joined when I was eighteen. The Army put me through college."

"Are you married?"

"Not anymore."

He remembered a postcard he'd received a year earlier from his ex-wife - a color photograph of her and her new beau, a stable, stay-at-home accountant, posing in front of an Aspen ski lodge.

"Are you seeing anyone?"

"Not at present."

The trail turned to the right, leading them across a small meadow, then closer to the stream. Garrison detected the smell of wildflowers.

"Free and unencumbered," she said. "That's the way I was before I met Russell. I loved the single life the parties. The White House is the opposite of that kind of freedom. It's like being stuck at a health resort where the scenery is beautiful but there is nothing to do at night. It's a four-star hotel where the other guests are waiting for you to fall flat on your face."

"Does the President feel that way too?"

He knew the question was inappropriate. But he wanted to find out if she genuinely wanted to communicate, or whether she was just toying with him in that way powerful women sometimes do with their bodyguards.

"He relishes power and is willing to do anything to remain in control. It's part of his psyche. For me, it's like being a moving target. Maybe that's why there is nothing between us any
longer. My
marriage is over. Dead"

Garrison was amazed that she'd revealed such intimacies to him. On the other hand, she probably had no one else to confide in. Most of her friends were tied to the media in one way or another, and nearly everyone on the White House staff leaked stories to selected journalists.

The trail veered left, and they crossed a gravel-covered strip before jogging under a low-hanging branch and through the shade of some tall elms. In the distance, to his right, the motorcade slowly followed the street, the drivers keeping the First Lady in sight. When they reached a small plateau overlooking the District, the First Lady stopped at a public drinking fountain.

She drank water, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then considered him for a moment.

"What are you going to do tonight when you get off duty?"

There was an intangible, beguiling quality about her. Admittedly, the First Lady was a woman who, under other circumstances, in another world, he would ask out.

"I'll probably stop for a drink somewhere. "

"I'd love to be able to do that - to go somewhere without the paparazzi - and without a motorcade," she said wistfully looking toward the Capitol. "It's been seven and a half years and I miss the freedom."

"You've forgotten having to find a parking spot, fighting to get a table. It's not that great."

Her eyes were on his, and he felt his face flush.

"Pete, I've noticed you looking at me. Women see such things."

"I'm not going to deny it," he said without hesitation, surprising himself.

"I've admired you too."

Returning to the limousine, he opened the door for her. Climbing in, she grasped his forearm briefly. Garrison considered the gesture to be neither a sign of clumsiness nor indecorous vivacity. It was the thing women sometimes do after they decide they trust a man - not a sexual signal necessarily, but rather, a non-verbal communication defining the first step in a friendship. Her touch sent a tingle up his arm. Eleanor Jordan was a very different First Lady.

His mind flashed over everything she'd said to him from the first moment they'd met. He'd seen loneliness in her eyes. He'd felt the vibes coming from her.

The following weekend, when the President was in New York, they'd made love for the first time in the White House, in the upstairs private quarters.

"We're going to have to be careful, aren't we, Pete?" she said as he was putting on his clothes.

"I'm glad to hear it wasn't just a fling. "

"I'm not in the habit of doing things like that, " she said testily.

"I didn't mean-"

"If it was just sex you were looking for, I'd say you really grabbed the brass ring."

"It was a stupid joke. Sorry."

She blinked a few times as if she was thinking about saying something. Then she shook her head.

"We'll need a way to communicate, Eleanor. The White House phones can't be trusted. "

"I'll give you the number to my private cell phone. This is so strange."

"Strange isn't the word for it.

She moved close to him. "Pete, I want us to be close. Please don't interpret that as some boundary I am setting. I understand the reality of this as well as you do. No one must ever know."

"You didn't have to say that."

She hugged him.

"Please promise me," she whispered.

He cupped her face with his hands."

"I promise."

Garrison returned to the security room before midnight.

Early Monday morning, as he was sitting in the right front seat of the limousine on the way back to D.C. from Rehoboth Beach, Garrison's cell phone vibrated. He unclipped it from his belt and said hello.

"This is White House Operator 13. I have a Mr. Frank Hightower on the line. He says he has to talk to you - that it's an emergency."

"Put him on."

The phone clicked.

"Agent Garrison. How are things at the Secret Service?"

"About the same, Frank. Where have you been?"

"Just knocking around. Are you still looking for terrorists?"

"I'm not assigned to PRD any longer."

"Why?"

"After you disappeared, I had no more information." Hightower laughed. "And I just saw a flying pig."

Frank Hightower was an informant Garrison had used when assigned to temporary duty at the Secret Service Protective Research Division. Hightower had provided reliable information concerning white supremacist groups involved in terrorism.

"What's up?" Garrison said cautiously.

"I have information on an Aryan Disciples plot to kill the President. Are you interested?"

"I'll put you in touch with an agent from PRD."

"No chance."

"Pardon me?"

"I'm not talking to anyone but you."

"Why?"

"I don't like talking over the phone. How about coming down to our old meeting place?"

"Okay," Garrison said after a moment.

"If I see anyone else but you, I walk."

The phone clicked twice.

Garrison wondered what Hightower was up to.

****

CHAPTER 3

"LONG TIME NO see, Garrison."

"Carrying any weapons today?"

"No way. Hey, it's me. I ain't changed any."

Garrison ran his hands around Hightower's waist. His clothing smelled faintly of marijuana and motor oil. It was uncomfortably muggy in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum gift shop, even with air-conditioning. Hightower had been standing near the door, like before, when Garrison would meet with him to gather information on terrorist activities. Garrison had chosen the location because it was always crowded and the windows and glass doors made it easy to detect possible countersurveillance.

"I thought you dropped off the face of the earth," said Garrison.

"I figured I would just lay low for a while. I met a broad and moved to Texas. Shit like that. Just kicking back. Then one thing led to another. I sort of just happened back into some of the old places and faces. Then bingo."

"Let's go upstairs."

Garrison led him up an escalator to a high-ceilinged lobby where a crowd of tourists was gathered around a full-size reproduction of an African bush elephant. The museum smell was overpowering: a post-organic odor that leaked from glass display cases that were inhabited by old bones and musty cloth. They sat on a bench, their backs to the wall.

"Okay, Frank. What is this about a plot?"

"This ain't no small case. I'm going to have to have some cash to put it all together for you-"

"Cut to the chase, Frank."

"The Aryan Disciples killed that Secret Service agent the other day in the parking garage downtown. It was done as a challenge to the government."

Garrison nodded. "That's it?"

Garrison thought Hightower looked nervous, which was unlike him.

"Not really, amigo. Get this shit: They also hired a guy to kill the President. He's not a member, but was brought in from the outside. They figure that after the assassination, you people will come after them. But all their hitters will have alibis and you'll never be able to figure out how it all went down because by then, the outside man they hired will be back in Europe. He is right here in D.C. as we speak. That's all I have at the moment. But I'm working on everything you need to make some solid arrests. That is, once you tell me what's in this for me."

Hightower's appearance hadn't changed much in two years. He was about forty-five years old, tall and over-weight, with shoulder-length hair. He wore beer-bar habitué apparel: Levi's, a grayish sweatshirt with chopped sleeves, and grimy, buckle-strap motorcycle boots. He looked like a creep. In fact, he was a creep: a duplicitous ex-convict who made a living selling illegal weapons and narcotics, and ratting out his neo-Nazi pals. But Garrison knew that one had to take informants as they came. The information Hightower had given Garrison had always been reliable.

"What do you have in mind?"

"One million dollars. I ain't going to risk my sweet ass for one cent less."

BOOK: The Sentinel
11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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