Page 3 of The Night Of
I was the senior agent on scene. Fuck, it was all on me.
“Is he breathing?” I bellowed at Garcia, skidding to my knees beside Baker’s limp and motionless form. More agents were pouring in behind me and filling the room.
Garcia’s mouth moved like a dead fish. I could see the whites of his eyes all the way around his irises.
“Roll him over! Now!” Together, we tried to minimize how much we moved Baker’s neck and spine. Save the man but paralyze him? Not good. I’d take living over dead at this point, though. My fingers slid through the blood soaking Baker’s throat as I searched for a pulse. They skated off his skin once, twice, before I managed to find the carotid. Nothing. I laced my hands together and started pumping his chest. Ribs snapped beneath my palms, breaking off from his sternum. Keep the heart pumping. Go deep.
It had been forty seconds since the gunshot. Maybe less. Too many bodies were filling the room, Secret Service agents running into each other and staring, all about as useful as a crocheted condom. “Four inside, stay!” I roared over my shoulder. “Everyone else, secure the perimeter!”
Voices were still screaming over the radio. A full lockdown was slamming over Camp David: sentries were on the move, helicopters were inbound, the motorcade was roaring up from Thurmont. A dozen people wanted a status update. “Start a search!” I bellowed. “Comb the camp!”
I didn’t need to say what we were looking for. There’d been a gunshot. Somewhere, there was a man who’d pulled the trigger.
We had a thousand eyeballs watching this place. What the fuck had happened?
I kept pumping. Kept counting.
“Medevac inbound, landing on the pad in one minute.” The helicopter pad was two-thirds of a mile away, down a meandering concrete path through the woods. It was a pretty drive. It also would pass in front of a hundred pairs of eyeballs and take far longer than five seconds.
We didn’t have five seconds.
Garcia was pulling the remnants of Baker’s jaw down, trying to make an airway in the soup at the back of his mouth. I kept the compressions going as I swept my gaze over and around and down Baker’s limp form. His rumpled, bloodied dress shirt, the top two buttons undone. His suit pants, crotch stained with urine. Fuck. His left hand was draped over his hip, something dark smudged all up the side of his index finger. His right was underneath him, trapped when we’d rolled him. “Garcia,” I barked. “Get his hand.” Garcia reached for his right hand, pulled it free—
A black revolver lay in President Baker’s palm, his thumb violently twisted through the trigger guard. Dislocated. As if it had been caught inside, his hand wrenched sideways after he fired—
Garcia and I stared at each other. “Sean…” Garcia’s voice trembled. He was up to his wrists in Baker’s blood as he tried to find an airway and hold the president’s head straight. Our knees were soaked in Baker’s blood, the hot liquid seeping into my pants and crawling up my skin like spiders skittering along their webs. I kept pumping Baker’s heart. My shoulders burned.Don’t think.
“Land the bird on the green,” I spat into the radio.
“What POTUS’s status?”
Like hell I was going to say it over the air. “Land the fucking bird on the green!”
“Avery!” It was the director, breaking into the radio net from DC to yell at me personally. “What is POTUS’s status?”
I ignored him. Instead, I turned to the four agents I’d ordered stay to behind, jerking my chin to Baker’s bed. “Strip the sheets. We lay him in one and use it as a stretcher to run him out. Put the second over him. We’re covering him up.” No way was I letting someone snap a cell phone photo of this.
“Won’t that look—” Garcia asked.
Yeah, it would. But we didn’t have an alternative.
“Where’s FLOTUS?” I barked into the radio. “Someone get eyes on FLOTUS!” I needed to know if she was safe. And more than that, I needed her to stay the fuck away from here and from this, whatever this was. She couldn’t see this, my God.
“FLOTUS secure,” a female voice replied in my ear. “She was taking a walk to Hickory when it happened.”
Hickory, the large lodge near the center of the camp. Over half a mile from where we were. She had to have left the cabin ten minutes ago, at least, to get there. Good. “Hold her there,” I said, motioning to Garcia as the others laid out the sheet beside us. I counted off, and then we moved, two agents grabbing Baker’s legs while the other two grabbed his shoulders and repositioned him on the fabric. Garcia and I moved with Baker, Garcia leaning over to attempt a rescue breath in the half second I stopped pumping.
Garcia’s face came away blood-covered. I started pounding on Baker’s chest again.
“She wants to know what’s going on. She wants to fly with POTUS to Bethesda.”
“No fucking way.”
“Agent Avery—”
“Send her on a second chopper!”
We heard the rotors overhead, felt the roar of the helo as it came into the clearing above the backyard like a fighter at Mach5. The pilot wasn’t fucking around. This was a combat landing. In less than a second, he had the bird on the ground, the skids making a hollow, heavy sound on the lawn.
