Page 1 of The Night Of
One
Camp Davidat midnight reminded me of a held breath. A sharp inhale, a tightened chest. Waiting. Expectant. Always on the edge of something.
There were a thousand eyeballs in the woods around me. All the hundreds of sailors and marines who manned Camp David—technically a navy shore facility—on duty, watching over the president. And, of course, us. The Secret Service. As a whole, we were a group of overwound, arrogant pricks, and anal-retentive assholes on top of that. Best people I knew, hands down, never mind the ulcers and the high blood pressure.
I’d said it a thousand times before: life on the detail felt like you were forever on the starting line at the Olympics, waiting and waiting for a gunshot that never came, for the sprint and the race that you’d never—if you were lucky—run.
Even there, in the stillness and the silence, I was on edge. A hint of moonlight stretched like watery milk across a hammered night. The sky was a dome overhead, a shield. We were thirty-two minutes by helicopter from DC and yet it felt like a lifetime away. The churn of the capital belonged to another place and time. Five layers of hardened security would give you that sense of isolation. Especially when every one of those hundreds of protective agents, military officers, and special operations soldiers had been trained to be silent. To disappear deeper than an echo.
We were all hitting the Pepto Bismol bottles. Usually there was a little more pep in my step at Camp David, but not with eight heads of state on station. It was likeSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs, except the dwarfs were seven other heads of state as President Baker hosted the year’s G8 summit. Honestly, it was better to have the summit here, someplace we could lock down tighter than a virgin’s nervous asshole, than have it in a hotel in some god-awful city, exposed to the public and a thousand different threats.
Each of the dwarfs—each head of state—was allowed one aide, personal or political or both, we really didn’t care, and one protective agent to stay with them at Camp David. Of course, we acted like the protective agent shadowing their dwarf’s every footstep was a flint-eyed, cold-blooded intelligence agent. That would be the case if the shoe was on the other foot. Of course, we’d never accept a limit of only one protective agent for our president, but hey. Our Camp David. Our rules.
The rest of the mass of humanity supporting the visiting delegations, all the aides and advisers and special assistants, were bunked down in Thurmont and shuttled up every morning on a fleet of buses. White House staff were bunking at Hickory Lodge and in Chestnut cabin, and us Secret Service agents were hot racking it in Witch Hazel and Rosebud. Wherever we could find room for a cot and a sleeping bag to share with our designated partner on the opposite shift, our newest, closest best buddy. So close you could still feel the toe sweat at the bottom of the sleeping bag when you crawled inside. Witch Hazel cabin smelled like feet and corn chips, and I’d rather sleep in my SUV than hot rack in there. Twenty-five agents and one bathroom?Eau de toothpasteand ass? Fuck off. I’d shit in the woods, thanks.
In this, a secluded retreat for the president to get away from it all, we were all tripping over each other’s shadows and breathing in each other’s burps. Things were crowded.
I was the graveyard shift supervisor. My blood pressure didn’t need the workout of watching eight heads of state and a hundred aides try to navigate dinner on President Baker’s patio. Was that staffer reaching for the butter or for a knife? Was the prime minister only pretending to strangle the European Union president, or did I need to draw and take aim? Who was getting thrown into the pool first, and would it be a ha-ha-funny moment or a boiling-over-of-geopolitical-stresses moment?
No fucking thank you. I’d stay up and howl at the moon. Listen to which cabin snored the loudest. This dark path through the woods was exactly the right amount of socialization for me, thank you. Not that I got what I wanted. I’d been on duty for twenty hours straight, working the back end, the behind the scenes of the behind the scenes. Now, I was finally on my own.
Vibration in my pocket made me still. I fished my phone out. Number blocked. Right before I swiped to answer, the call ended. I waited in case a voicemail popped up. Nothing. I shoved the phone back in my pocket.
Maybe it had been—
I curled away from where the whispers in my mind were edging. No need to go digging around in that darkness, into the other reason I stayed on the night shift and had pulled myself off the president’s detail for the past three hundred and sixty… five days.
Jesus, it had been a year. Exactly.
My boots dragged to a stop on the dirt path, the gravel-and-ground-dust sound chewing through the black night. Images slammed through me: dark hair, ocean eyes, a slow, teasing smile. Almost no one could make him smile, but damn it, I had. I’d felt like the biggest man in the whole damn world the first time I’d teased a smile out of him. It was the first time my heart had stutter-stepped, too, the first time I’d realized I was fucked. But not as fucked asthatnight, when—
Don’t. I had shut the door on that three hundred and sixty-five days ago, and it was staying shut.
I could still remember how he felt, though, like his memory was a vapor that slipped through my touch. I flexed my hands, curled my fingers, chasing an echo of his silken hair.
But that led to the other memories.Don’t go there.
I stared at the sky again, watching a cloud shiver in front of the moon. Dark treetops scraped the night as if trying to shovel down the stars. The pinpricks above were brighter than in DC, but still muted. They weren’t anywhere close to the brilliance we had seen a year earlier on the other side of the world. On that beach, the stars had burned down on us like the whole sky was an ocean, like waves had lapped against the night and left a billion specks of glittering sand shining on him and me alone. He’d stared at the stars until I couldn’t breathe, transfixed by his profile carved from shimmer and shadow and the hint of a secret smile as his eyes slid sideways. I’d thought he was asking,Are we really doing this? Have we been moving toward this moment, this night together, every hidden glance and smile and stolen conversation building the path that led to right here—sand, starlight, and a tentative touch—right now?
Yes, I had thought.Yes, yes, yes.
I scrubbed my hands over my face and blew out a breath. Maybe it was time to request a transfer. I couldn’t outrun what had happened… or outrun him. And I’d never be on the president’s detail again. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve the badge, not anymore.
You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see what I was doing. But who was I trying to escape? Myself or him? Or was I trying to escape what I’d done?
If I let my thoughts lurch too long down that path, things turned dark, fast. The last time I’d tried to face what lay behind that shut door, I’d upended a bottle of bourbon down my throat and woken up facedown on the kitchen floor with my gun locked in my freezer. I’d zip-tied the fridge doors together. If I hadn’t, well.
Enough. I started walking again, leaving those thoughts behind me like I could physically drop them on the ground and let them fester in the woods behind Aspen, the president’s cabin. I was on the trail that ringed the golf course—one hole with three different tee-offs—and the president’s backyard. Aspen was a dark blob outlined in shadows and the hazy glow of orange sodium lights. A dull shine burned from behind the shuttered windows of President Baker’s bedroom. He and the First Lady had turned in around ten, after a near-silent dinner and an uncharacteristically tense schmoozefest on the president’s back patio.
President Baker had been acting strange ever since he’d disembarked from Marine One at Camp David. No, before that, even. I’d already arrived as part of the advance team, but I’d heard the other agents reporting it over the radio. And I’d seen it, too: the storm clouds on his normally cheery face and the thunder in his expression. President Baker was a man with a smile always at the ready, along with an open palm and an ear to listen to whoever needed his attention. He’d won the nation over with that openness, that warmth, that ability to sit down and connect with voters in small towns across the nation. I remembered the campaign. I remembered how he’d tear up his schedule so he could sit for three unscheduled hours in a Starbucks with a group of moms and dads.
But tonight, he’d been distracted. Sullen. Gloomy. His words were short and his temper hot, and he skipped delivering the welcome speech at dinner. The seven dwarfs had looked on, confused, but they were professionals at rolling with it, and they talked among themselves as President Baker chewed his salad and scowled at the wall. Not even his closest friend among them, Andrew Rees, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, could pull him out of his funk.
Not that Baker wasn’t under some extra fucking stress. It had been a long, long few months at the White House. The disappearance of Paul Hardacre, the CIA’s chief of station in Rome, was the CIA’s worst security breach in decades. Maybe ever. I didn’t know how he stacked up against Ames, but I did know his disappearance—and assumed defection—had strained the US intelligence community and President Baker almost to the breaking point.
Five CIA officers had turned up dead over the past six weeks, mysteriously shot or stabbed or suffocated or found in their car with their throat slit, in Paris, Lagos, Dubai, Berlin, and Karachi.
Hardacre had left a trail that led to Moscow, but the Russians were insisting they didn’t have anything to do with his disappearance. The Russian president had said that right to Baker’s face tonight, cigar in one hand, brandy in the other.
