Page 4 of The Night Of
“Go, go, go!” I shouted. Each agent grabbed a corner of Baker’s sheet. Garcia and I threw the spare over Baker and grabbed the middle, our hands soaking the fabric crimson. We ran him out of the cabin like we were carrying a stretcher, meeting the medevac team on the lawn and transferring our package to the gurney in the belly of the helo. Everyone fell back as I pulled the cargo door shut and gave a thumbs-up to the pilot. He didn’t waste time looking at me. He was already climbing.
I stumbled back, bumping into Garcia and falling on my ass. Sirens roared in every direction, and somewhere, someone was screaming. A woman. The radio was still bellowing, a hundred people wanting answers. The search of Camp David was taking place. I heard shouts, orders to clear cabins. Saw flashlights in the woods. Choppers were overhead, searchlights painting the woods, the trails, the night sky.
I stared up at Garcia. His mouth was open, slack and loose as he stared at his blood-soaked hands, his blood-soaked clothes. We both looked like we’d taken a bath in Baker’s blood.
Garcia fell to his knees beside me. Another agent hit the lawn, his forehead in the grass as he screamed into the dirt.
“Avery!” the director shouted over the radio. “Avery, respond! What the fuck happened up there?”
I pulled my earpiece out and buried my face in my wet, red palms.
Two
Like the restof the nation, I watched Vice President Jonathan Sharp’s press conference at eight in the morning. I was huddled over a cup of burned coffee in the Secret Service bunker beneath the Oval Office. Called Horsepower, it was our iron fortress of solitude. Especially now. The place was dim, lit by computer monitors and TV sets turned to mumble volume. Static hummed in the background. Radio chatter and white noise lived in my blood and crawled through my brain.
I and what seemed like every other agent who had been on duty the night before were crammed in there. Hiding. Licking our wounds. Leaning on each other. Staring blankly as our eyes asked,What the fuck?What the actual fuck?
I’d tried to scrub the blood off my hands. It had dried into my flesh, and I still had violent maroon stains crawling over my hands and up my forearms. I’d caught my own weary gaze in the mirror, the deer-in-the-headlights shock that shifted into a thousand-yard stare as I leaned against the sink. I’d always been told my hazel eyes were warm. Now they looked dead. My dark hair, cut to regulation length, stuck up in all directions. At least I’d managed to wipe off the president’s blood that had been smeared across my forehead and down my temple.
The rest of our guys were either up at Camp David on a speck-of-dust-by-speck-of-dust search of the grounds or were playing second fiddle to the State Department as their Diplomatic Security agents herded each of the dwarfs and their staff members out of the country. We’d nearly instigated an international incident by requiring everyone, including the heads of state, to be thoroughly searched. That included sweeping everyone’s hands for gunpowder residue. No swipe of the palms, no leaving the country.
The grumbles I’d heard through the grapevine were that most of the delegations were upset not at the waste of time—they were supposed to be parked at Camp David for the week, c’mon, what else did they have on their calendars?—but at the insult.
Just what were we looking for anyway?Wasn’t it obvious what had happened?
When the speech was about to start, I made my way to the back of the room, as far from the TV screen as I could get. I looked beyond the frame, my peripheral vision tracing the vice president’s long, lean lines as he made his way down the Cross Hall to the podium set up in the East Room.
Jonathan Sharp was six feet and change, without an ounce of fat on his body. He had lean muscle sculpted from his years in the army and a clean, classically handsome look. His hair was thick and dark, silver at his temples highlighting his razor-sharp intelligence rather than making him seem old. His cracked-ice eyes were nova bright, his gaze hardened.
His stare was as flinty as his personality. He’d been a colonel until his best friend, then-Senator Steven Baker, tapped him to be his running mate, bucking his party’s recommendations to name one of the political elite. Sharp had resigned his commission that day and joined the campaign as a civilian, bringing his expertise on the command staff at NATO and the military’s European Command to Baker’s ticket. In a world of ever-shifting alliances, global military actions, and coalition partnerships, Sharp’s experience and insight were solid gold.
As effusive, warm, and congenial as Baker was, Sharp was his exact opposite. How the two had become best friends over their twenty-plus-year careers, I didn’t have a fucking clue. Neither did the rest of the nation. Vice President Sharp had had six confirmed smiles captured on camera, each one pulled out of him by President Baker.
Sharp was a hard, serious, somber man on the best of days. This was not one of those. I could see the tension pulsing off of him like heat lines in a desert, the strain pulling on his shoulders and legs. Sharp carried his confidence and his authority around him like a shield, a wall that kept others back. While the same came off as unbridled arrogance in so many others, it worked for Sharp, because he really was that good.
Today, he looked beaten.
Sharp had no notes, no teleprompter. He hated them. His whole army career, he’d never used a teleprompter, and why should putting on a civilian suit change that, he’d said once. I watched his shoulders rise and fall. Something cold and crushing grabbed my heart in its fist.
“My fellow Americans,” Sharp began, the low growl in his voice going all the way down my spine. I pressed back against the wall, trying to get farther away. “It is my sad, solemn duty to inform you this morning that President Steven Baker has…”
For probably the first time in Sharp’s life, he faltered. He looked down. His jaw clenched. When he looked up again, his eyes were brighter than I’d ever seen them. A million watts of television lamps were burning on him, capturing the shine of tears coming from a man who’d never publicly shown emotion. “President Steven Baker, my closest and dearest friend,” Sharp continued, his voice hard, “has died.”
He took a long, slow breath as the cameras flashed, lenses snapping and whirring over the live feed. “This is one of the most difficult moments of my life, standing here and saying these words. Steven is—was—one of the best men I have ever known. When he asked me to join him in serving this nation as his right hand, I never thought twice about my answer. I trusted Steven with my life, and with my country, and I would have followed him anywhere he led me. I would have gone any distance, supported him in any, every way—”
Again, Sharp faltered. His lips were set in a thin, grim line. He didn’t look down this time but shifted his gaze off camera, staring at the shadows of the East Room behind the television cameras. He seemed to freeze, as if something were tearing inside his soul.Whyseemed to roar from him.Why did you do this?
Everything inside me screamed. I wanted to turn away. Bury my face in the wall and hide. Shame scraped my bones. I crushed my coffee cup, cold liquid sloshing over the back of my hand.
“No matter how much we may seek,” Sharp said, bullying through the clench of his throat and forcing the words out, “there are questions that will never be answered after a death such as this. Reason and logic fail us in these moments. The human mind can be a beautiful but terrible thing, capable of isolating any one of us in a prison of hopelessness and despair. And after, we are left not with answers, but with emptiness, a void where our loved one has removed themselves from our lives. Try as we might, we can never understand the private pain our loved ones may have locked away, or understand the rationalizations that narrowed their world until the only way forward seemed to be this one, final, heartbreaking choice.”
He wasn’t going to say the word. I’d been waiting for it, guarding against it. But he wasn’t going to say it. I nodded, as if I was nodding to him from across the room, from that shadowed corner he had turned his gaze to. My vision fractured, blurred, went watery. Anger surged inside me, and I rubbed my fist over my face. My hands smelled like stale coffee and burnt sugar, and beneath that, iron and death.
Sharp had paused again. “Later today, Chief Justice Park will swear me in as the president of the United States. As provided by the auspices of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and after consultation with the cabinet and with the leaders of Congress, I assumed the duties of the president this morning, just past zero one hundred eastern standard time. I want to assure the American public, and the world, that our government is both stable and secure.” He hesitated. “We are also grieving.” His voice broke on the last word. His head bowed for a long moment.
Sharp squared his shoulders, looked dead at the center of the press pool in front of him, and raised his chin. “I will take a few questions now.”
The press pool exploded. Voices rang out over each other, questions shouted at Sharp in a frantic din. A vertical line creased the center of his forehead. I could see the pulse at his neck pounding. He hated this part, always had. I couldn’t imagine how much he hated it now, the press like sharks smelling blood in the water, churning for more.
