Page 55 of The Night Of
My gut wanted to say no, Nguyen wasn’t involved. But I couldn’t deny he was all over this, like stink on shit, from top to bottom. He’d walked Rose in and out of the White House. He’d driven Jonathan to the safe house and back. What had he been thinking, taking Jonathan to a clandestine rendezvous in Anacostia? Sad to say, it was far from the first time the Secret Service had played chauffeur to a protectee up to no good. We’d seen more affairs and drug meets and prostitute hookups than a DC cop does in their entire career. He probably wouldn’t have blinked.
Why Nguyen? Why had the president’s detail lead driven the VP out to Anacostia?
The day before the G8, or the day before any event like that, details and schedules and rotations were fucked. Half the team would have been plucked to run the advance, and the rest would be trying to fill the holes left behind with half the staff. Nguyen would have been playing whack-a-mole, filling in where he could, as much as he could, to keep everything going.
But there were still so many unanswered questions, and if I guessed wrong about anything or made a wrong assumption, I’d put Jonathan’s life at risk.
Baker hadn’t felt safe enough to reach out to Nguyen, so for now, I wasn’t going to either.
Anacostia. A safe house and a secret drop. Rose had left the gun for Jonathan to pick up and deliver—and weren’t we going to have to fucking discuss that at a later date, how Jonathan just smuggled a gun into the White House?
If Jonathan had picked up the gun, why was Rose going back to Anacostia? Why was he there the night of Steven’s murder?
Checking that Jonathan had picked up the gun? He could have called either man, Jonathan or the president, to confirm that. So why go back, so far out of his way? Another drop? For who?
It’s either someone you’re fucking or something you’re working on.
Hardacre’s disappearance. It was the thread tying Rose and Baker together.
I pulled up everything on the Hardacre case, devouring the news reports and the classified cables. Paul Hardacre, the CIA’s chief of station in Rome, had disappeared one night after meeting some friends at a pizzeria near the Piazza Barberini. He’d waved, turned down an alley to walk back to his apartment, and vanished.
It was like he’d fallen off the planet. No signs, no sightings, no hints. No rumors. No blurry cell phone photos or grainy footage or even coded hashtags on Twitter. Nothing on Reddit or the seedier message boards of the internet. Nothing even on the dark web.
No forensics, either. No blood in the alley or on the walk back to his apartment. No burned-rubber tire tracks. No CCTV. He’d simply walked out of the frame on one camera and never appeared on the next. His apartment was untouched, no fingerprints inside that couldn’t be explained, no evidence of intrusion or disturbance.
Hardacre had made a name for himself on the Russian desk, playingSpy vs. Spyacross half of Europe as he worked his way up the ranks. I double-checked his postings in his official file. No Brussels, or anywhere in Belgium. He’d spent two years in Moscow on denied area operations before taking over as deputy chief of station in Helsinki. Then, in Rome, in addition to running the station, he’d personally managed a handful of Russian agents he’d built over the years. None of the Russian agents’ names were in the file. They were so high level, only Hardacre and the director of the CIA himself knew their identities.
The lack of forensics, the lack of any sign of struggle, the lack of any hint of the man had led the CIA, the FBI, and everyone else to the terrible conclusion that Hardacre had defected to Russia. He had the contacts, the connections, and the skills to make his own disappearance happen. He could become a ghost to the West and reappear as a new man inside Russia.
What would the price of such a defection be? What had Hardacre given up for that new life?
Five dead CIA officers, apparently. Five corpses littered across the globe.
Jonathan’s notes, on the laptop he’d given me, told me more than had been reported in the media. Hardacre had met with each of the five officers in the previous six months, flying out to their stations on quick, twenty-four-hour turnarounds. There weren’t any expenses on his CIA account, so he’d paid cash in each city. No notes filed at Langley, either. Whatever he’d done, there was no record of it in the CIA’s system. And no one to reveal his secrets, since all five officers had been slain.
What had Carl Rose uncovered about Hardacre? What had he shared with President Baker?
I was going in circles. I had to change focus before I burned out. I pushed Jonathan’s laptop away and pulled up the movement logs from Camp David. Who had been where at Camp David, and when? The movement logs were voluminous, and even though I’d only taken pictures of the pages from the night of, I was still looking at a hefty stack.
By ten p.m., Camp David had been buttoned up tight. The seven dwarfs had all been escorted back to their cabins by the Secret Service after the disastrous dinner with Baker at Aspen. They were confirmed secure at twenty-two hundred. After that, it was radio check-ins and reports of Secret Service handovers, and the position movements of our patrols and the marine guard patrols. There was my name, checking in at twenty-three hundred as I rounded the back of the green on the far end of Aspen’s yard.
Then there was some static about the First Lady and President Baker’s fight. The records showed the three agents on the overnight shift at Aspen had moved outside the cabin to provide privacy, which was our code for when someone was screaming or fucking. Garcia, Pitt, and White took up positions at the front, side, and rear doors.
The First Lady left Aspen at 11:41p.m. She’d wandered, she’d said, trying to clear her head. I saw the patrols call out her position as she made her way down the main drive, heading west.
But then she turned into the parking lot behind Witch Hazel and came around on the wooded path that led to the number one golf tee. Why was she heading there, when she said she was going to get a drink at Hickory?
Two people embracing on the pool deck.
I’d never seen where the first person had come from. I’d been in the trees, distracted by the hang-up call and then my own wandering thoughts. I’d only seen the second, larger figure, a man, emerging from around the back side of the pool…
Coming from the direction of Witch Hazel.
Witch Hazel. Where the Secret Service was bunking. I’d wondered, then, if an agent was rendezvousing with a staffer, taking a scandalous moment to sneak a kiss on the president’s pool deck.
Now, looking at the logs, I could almost trace the path the First Lady took on her walk. Leaving Aspen and President Baker and heading off in the opposite direction of the pool before, inexplicably, doubling back and coming around from the number one tee.
I’d thought she’d been at Hickory. Isn’t that what I’d heard that night? Another agent had recovered the First Lady at Hickory? I flipped through the logs, checking.FLOTUS intercepted at marker nine. Zero-zero-thirteen.She’d been on the way to Hickory but hadn’t even made it past Dogwood. I closed my eyes, imagined the distances between Aspen, Hickory, and Dogwood, from the pool deck to the main lodge.
