Page 4 of Secret Service

ChapterTwo

Reese

Then

This is my third inauguration, and I’ve hated each one.

Inaugurations are a nightmare from start to finish. Everyone works double, triple overtime, for months, making sure it all goes off without a hitch. The swearing-in at the Capitol. The procession to the White House. I watch everything from the command center, taking in two hundred camera feeds and monitoring six dozen radio channels.

My other major responsibility today is overseeing the changeover. At the White House, we have a five-hour turnaround between outgoing and incoming administrations, and during those five hours, the staff has to erase the former administration and install the new one.

That includes making repairs.

During this changeover, there was a serious need to upgrade the telecommunications systems in the West Wing, but that’s not as simple as pulling wires out of the walls. Beneath the Oval Office and the first floor of the West Wing, there’s a foot-and-a-half crawl space stuffed with communications equipment, miles and miles of secure cabling, and all the electronic cyberdefense sniffers and digital watchdogs you can imagine.

All morning, we were dodging movers and NSA techs while cordoning off sections of the West Wing as staffers ran pell-mell trying to get access to their offices.

No one in DC likes to be told what they can’t do. Less than an hour into the new administration, the Secret Service had already pissed off a dozen staffers. That might be a new record.

President Walker arrived at the White House this afternoon, and every minute since has been filled with meetings. A lot of the heavy lifting of learning to be the president gets done between the election and the inauguration, and most presidents walk in the doors ready to hit the ground running with a working knowledge of the nuts and bolts and the processes of government. Daily briefings set the tempo for the incoming administration.

But there’s a hell of a difference between being briefed on concepts and situations in a suite at the Hay-Adams versus taking that information in while you’re inside the Oval Office. The first moment a president sits behind the Resolute desk is a powerful one.

I’ve been running the White House, a world away from President Walker’s campaign, and until today, I’ve only seen the incoming president on television screens and through our internal intelligence assessments. It was Director Britton who briefed President Walker on our operations during the transition, but now, it’s time for me to meet the boss.

Six minutes to go. I’m alone in the locker room, a generously named closet off the Secret Service command center stuffed with battered lockers and two shower cubicles. The command team has a larger locker room in the Eisenhower Building, but we often don’t have the four minutes to rush between there and the White House, so we keep our personal belongings and spare clothes here. In this job, seconds matter.

Henry pushes open the locker room door and catches my gaze in the mirror. “Five minutes. He’s running right on time.”

“That’s a first.”

“You’re going to do great.”

Henry started in the Secret Service at the same time I did, but I moved up the ranks faster. During training, he was the wise-cracking veteran who was a pain in the ass to our instructors but who stayed up late and helped the wide-eyed newbies. He patiently tutored our classmates how to disassemble and reassemble our weapons and drilled procedures and protocols until the wee hours of the morning before tests, even shouting questions in the communal bathroom while he was taking a shit and waiting for someone to call out the right answer. He’s a phenomenal agent, but he’s never had the polish to move into command. He knew from our academy days he wasn’t ever going to be in charge.

Once, when we had an overnight pass from the academy and were out on the town, slamming beers and trying to eye up women—even though we were so exhausted that if a woman had given us the time of day, we would have fallen asleep on her before getting to second base—he told me I had that blend of “right stuff.” A mixture of guts, grit, and GQ charm, he said.

Pretty Boy, he called me, with a chuckle. “Pretty Boy will go pretty fucking far. Just you watch.”

I told him to fuck off, we drank some more, and then we slept in our car in the parking lot and missed roll call in the morning. We spent that entire Saturday running and puking on the track until our instructor finally said she was tired of watching us.

We stayed close through the churn and grind of the Service, and Henry has been my closest friend for over a decade now. When I was named the head of the presidential protective detail, Henry was the first to call to congratulate me. I made him my second-in-command on that phone call, and he’s the rock I have built my command team around.

“Four minutes, fifteen seconds. You look the part, Boss. Told ya, didn’t I?”

“Ta gueule.” Shut your mouth. I’ve got a mess of Cajun and Creole inside me, old words from an old people, mixed with the New Orleans verve that got rubbed into me during my years working for the New Orleans Police Department. Roughened Cajun patois, southern-slow French-Creole, and ragged backwoods grammar all tumble from me.

Henry winks and ducks out of the locker room, giving me thirty more seconds alone to stare into my own eyes in the mirror. “Merde,” I whisper.

We take the stairs up from the basement and come out between the Roosevelt Room and the incoming press secretary’s office. Melissa Ferraro is a tornado, juggling one cell phone between her ear and shoulder, texting someone on another, and guiding the workers where to stack her mountain of file boxes. Three televisions are on in the background, replaying President Walker’s arrival at the White House.

Walker’s face fills each screen.

He’s an easy man to want to like. He’s younger than most of the candidates either party has put forward for years, and the electorate seized on that. He comes across as a confident leader, and the American people decided he was best equipped to handle this upside-down world.

He’s not a military veteran, but he spent years overseas as a humanitarian, and he spoke about values and ethics with the gravity of someone who has felt the life and death consequences of each going awry. When he talked about holding murderous regimes accountable for their crimes, he said it with an authority none of the other candidates could come near.

He’d been the outside bet at the start of the campaign, but here he is: President Brennan Walker, the champion for change and human rights.

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