Mark Costello - Big If

Gretchen passed the VP’s schedule to Vi. “Run this by the planners. I’ll meet you on the quad when the Director’s done with me.”

Gretchen got out, walked around the hood, saying not a thing to Levi Harris. The doors of the Town Car were opening. Legs were coming out, followed by the bodies of three people: Boone Saxon, the threat investigator, wearing a stiff raincoat and one of his plaid vests which always made Vi think of TV Christmas specials; Debbie Escobedo-Waas, the Director’s new gal Friday, so perky and gung-ho; and finally, slowly, like a bureaucratic Elvis, the Director himself, emerging from the car, pulling on his suit to straighten it.

They started down the road on foot. The Director walked in front, letting Debbie make his points, Gretchen on the other side of Debbie, Boone Saxon a step or two behind them. The driver in the Town Car swung out and followed them, pausing to let Levi Harris hop in the shotgun seat. The bosses walked slowly, talking more than walking, Levi and the driver following discreetly in the big car. Vi, uncertain of the etiquette in such situations, followed the Lincoln down the road and around the quad, Debbie talking, the Director interjecting here and there, Gretchen nodding as she walked, Boone Saxon listening in case his name was called.

The quad was a grass oval, big enough for soccer, browned over for the winter. The buildings on the quad — Threats, Plans, Movements, Psych Services, the Weapo School, and Technical Support — were of a set, if not a mind-set, red brick and cream steel, sculptural, abstract, like if you pushed them all together, they would fit and make a giant checkered cube.

Vi parked outside the Plans Pavilion, a building with a wingspan if such a thing is possible, and carried the VP’s schedule upstairs to the cubicles and glass-walled conference areas. The president was flying out of Andrews in the morning and the planners were in air-raid mode, scurrying around, trying to assemble a halfway decent security assessment for a weekend in New York.

“Okay,” said one planner. “We got a fund-raiser at the Waldorf followed by coffee with opinion-makers at a mansion in Bedminster. What’s the safest covered route from Manhattan to New Jersey?”

“Limo,” said another planner.

“Limo in Manhattan means a tunnel to New Jersey,” said a third. “I don’t like a tunnel.”

“Limo to the helo then. Helo to New Jersey.”

“I don’t like a helo in Manhattan. Some guy in a building with a missile while you hover. Bingo on the helo.”

“Nix the helo, do the limo. Lock the tunnel down.”

“I get a Stinger missile. Bingo on your limo.”

“Limo can survive a missile,” the first planner said. “Cadillac assures us.”

“Unless it hits the glass,” someone pointed out.

“Get two limos, real and decoy. Which one do you hit?”

“Get two missiles.”

“Get three limos.”

“Limos just attract attention anyway. You’re better off in the back of a taxicab. It’s a sea of yellow in New York. Which one do you hit?”

“We can’t put the president of the United States in the back of a New York City taxi cab. How would it look?”

“Or smell.”

“I think we all know how it would smell.”

“I’ll tell you how it would look: like a taxicab. Remember Felker’s Twelfth Certainty: traffic equals camouflage. I don’t mean an actual taxicab, of course. I mean a special vehicle, armored like the limos, special gear, special tires, special pursuit engine, full chaff capability, the works. Surround it with other special vehicles driven by our guys, fake FedEx trucks, fake UPS, additional fake taxis, even fake messengers on special fake bicycles, whole blocks of invented traffic designed to look like ordinary New York City shit. They could even honk and call each other asshole.”

Vi waited her turn, leafing through the VP’s schedule, Manchester tonight, Manchester tomorrow, Rumsey on to Portsmouth tomorrow afternoon, Portsmouth Tuesday morning for a rally in the square. It would be like any other trip: three days of hotel food and hotel beds and van rides with no legroom, the dreary repetition broken only by the scattered, rattled moments of sharp focus on the ropes. Vi was jittery — a little — as she always was before a jumping-off. Her nerves had gotten worse since Hinman, and now she had to work to clear the trash out of her mind, fear and doubt and queasiness, to focus on the job of scanning hands. It was just another trip, but different too for Vi. They were going to New Hampshire; she was going home. The VP had made fifty trips to New Hampshire in Vi’s time as a bodyguard, crash visits to the cities inland, Nashua, Concord, and Manchester. They had been to Portsmouth several times, once to Rye, once to Eatontown, though never to C.E. itself. Vi hated the idea of going home a bodyguard, part of the armored jamboree. In a place she didn’t know, Miami or Atlanta, the faces on the ropes were bar code, miles of it, and she scanned. It was hard and getting harder to stay vacant, even in a place she didn’t know, but she could do it still, cram out every other thought. New Hampshire felt different to her, riskier somehow. She knew the place, her memories were there — it was more to cram out of your mind.

She said, “Hey guys — I’ve got a plane to catch. You want to vet the VP’s schedule or what?”

The planners went to work on New Hampshire, analyzing each event as a series of submoves, from the limo to the hotel, through the hotel by steam tunnels, from the tunnels to the stairwell to the ballroom to the crowd. They went through the days and pages in this way.

Vi got the analyst’s approval for New Hampshire and went out to her car. She waited with the motor running, watching the Director on the quad with Gretchen Williams. The Director was explaining, even pleading, making an excuse, or so it looked to Vi. Gretchen, nodding, listened for a long time, then abruptly turned away and stalked across the grass. Gretchen got in the front seat. Boone Saxon got in back.

Vi said, “Hello Boone.”

Boone said, “Hello Vi.”

“Questioned any agents in your sweatbox lately?”

Gretchen said, “Shut up, Vi.”

The Director’s limo passed them on the right and sped up the hill, heading for the parkway into Washington.

Vi’s hands were on the steering wheel. She said, “Okay — where to?”

Boone looked at Gretchen, who was staring stone-faced through the windshield.

“Andrews,” Gretchen said.

Vi threw it into drive and they set off.

When they arrived at Andrews,Tashmo’s sporty pickup truck was blocking the no-standing zone outside the terminal and Vi had to stand the Taurus farther up the curb. Andrews was a busy place that night, the media streaming from the buses through the double doors where the base police would check their creds, sniff and search each piece of carry-on. Gretchen fetched her luggage from the trunk, following Boone into the lobby.

Vi found a parking space by the dumpsters and the storm drains at the far end of the lot. She saw Herc Mercado zipping through on his yellow motorcycle. They crossed the lot together, Herc carrying his duffel on his shoulder and his suit bag on his arm, still wearing his motorcycle helmet, which was black and speckled silver like a bowling ball. He was describing his workout of that afternoon, twenty reps of twenty each of something very heavy. They saw Tashmo in the cab of the red pickup, fighting with his wife. Herc drummed on the hood just to be a dick, startling the Tashmos as he passed.

A lone custodian ran a power waxer on the gleaming lobby floors, a scalloped pattern from the corner out. There were several stands of bolted seats, beige pillars, and tan walls. Most of the agents were already there, killing time, waiting for the VP to come out from Washington. O’Teen was standing with his bags, reading the thin parts of the Sunday Post . The comm techs were sitting in the chair area, working through a tricky signal-shielding problem. Gretchen was standing by the runway doors, talking on her cell phone, popping an antacid, one foot on her duffel bag, as if she had shot it in a hunt and was posing for a photograph.