Black Fall Page 5

  In interviews, President Kent loves to tell the story about a night they spent near an air force base in Europe, when a pilot did a low-altitude flyby while they were asleep. Miriam heard the roar of the plane, shoved the commander in chief out of bed, and covered his body with hers in order to protect him. The first lady still blushes whenever the story is told, embarrassed because she thinks it makes her look foolish. But to her husband, to me, and to everyone else, it’s the act of a devoted wife who was willing to put her life on the line to protect the man she loves—and to protect her country. One of her Secret Service code names is Tigress.

  Ailes’s urgency about this meeting has me concerned. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say. I don’t know what she wants. I frequently encounter younger agents at the bureau who sheepishly tell me how much I mean to them and ask me for advice, as if I’m a female Eliot Ness who has all the answers. Women especially are often stuck looking for role models in a world filled with statues of men. It’s not that we don’t admire them, but I noticed in Neil Armstrong and Winston Churchill biographies, the chapters on trying to find balance by thirty, and the pressures of trying to succeed, lack a certain female perspective.

  The first lady has a warm, natural smile. Her brunette hair is bobbed to accentuate her strong cheekbones, and although she’s in her late forties she looks years younger. Not because of vanity, but because of healthy living, good genes, and avoiding radical cosmetic procedures that tend to call attention to themselves.

  I glance down at my navy-blue pantsuit, suddenly conscious that the first lady, in dark slacks and a yellow blouse, has managed to dress slightly more casually and yet more fashionably than I have. I bought this outfit three years ago, and I’m sure I didn’t see a single person with the same lapel style in the entire FBI building in the last twelve months. It’s stupid stuff like this that drives me nuts. I’m hung up on it because I think other women may be hung up on it. It’s a vicious cycle.

  Thankfully, the first lady isn’t looking at my work clothes, my shoes, or my purse. She clasps both my hands and her assistant departs, leaving us alone. I take my seat, absentmindedly pulling my jacket over my hips as I sit down.

  “Thank you again for coming to visit, Agent Blackwood.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Mrs. Kent,” I reply, trying to sound genuine. She’s a likable woman. I just have no patience for politics or politicking. Grandfather would already be pulling a flower out from behind her ear.

  “Miriam, please. May I call you Jessica?” Her voice is melodic. I would listen to her narrate audiobooks.

  “Certainly.” We’re equals, right? Last night she had dinner at the Chinese embassy. I ate leftover Panda Express. Same thing.

  The contrast between public and private personas is fascinating to me, especially because the private ones rarely measure up. In the security waiting room I saw a television feed of her handing out water bottles and meals in a neighborhood that’s still without power. It was a photo op for sure, but she seemed sincere. I think I’m sitting with the same woman right now.

  Her smile wavers for a split second. She’s nervous about something. “I . . . I’ve wanted to meet you since the whole Warlock thing. And then the assassination attempt. All of it is so very impressive. You’re quite a woman.”

  “I, um, have a very interesting job.”

  “Yes, you do. And an interesting family.” Her eyes light up as she takes a photo album from the table. “I had our historian pull these from the archive.” She turns the album toward me and opens it to a photograph of a group of children in their Sunday best sitting on a rug in a room of the White House, smiling together at the camera. One rather serious-looking brunette girl with a missing tooth looks very familiar. I’m off to the side of the image, but unmistakable. “This was taken at the Easter egg roll. Your grandfather was invited to perform. You were what? Six or seven?”

  “Six,” I nod. “I think I lost that tooth that day out on the lawn when I fell chasing after an egg.” Actually, I’m pretty certain I was tripped by the French ambassador’s nephew, but I didn’t want to start an international incident.

  “Oh, my! That’s not a pleasant memory.”

  “I was fine.” I remember it as a happy day. Grandfather and father were both there, although I’m pretty sure we couldn’t get Uncle Darius anywhere near the White House due to his criminal record. Holidays weren’t exactly a nonevent in my house, but they were never celebrated around so many other children.

  We make more small talk for a little while. The first lady’s very good at it, but after a few minutes she delicately changes the topic. This is how politicians work. I wonder if there’s a timer in her head that tells her when she’s spent a sufficient amount of time loosening up her subject, or if she just tries to read my visual cues.

  “I thought about becoming an FBI agent, too,” she says. “I even majored in criminal justice. I chose another path, obviously. But sometimes I wonder what it would be like.”

  “I have great coworkers, which makes up for the time I spend digging through mud up to my arms for clues that aren’t there, without a change of clothes.”

  This is my stock answer. The real one involves me sitting in the bathtub while the shower rains down and spills into my glass of red wine, pretty sure I’m not crying because, you know, it’s a shower.

  I used to think this was a “girl” thing, but I’ve spotted Ailes in his car in the parking garage, not talking on the phone or listening to music, just sitting there staring at the concrete wall as if he could look through it at the home he has to return to and the problems he has to cope with. Once or twice, after Gerald has bid us a smiling good-bye, I’ve seen his face right before the elevator closes. It’s blank, as if he can’t bear being the happy-go-lucky one anymore. Even Jennifer, as emotionally unyielding as the Nebraska granite she was carved from, has her moments. She can drop twenty pounds faster than I can sink a Starbucks Flat White. Her stress relief comes from running marathons. Not the half ones I occasionally do, but full-on solo weekend marathons, where she just keeps going until her feet start to bleed and whatever she’s running from has died from exhaustion.

  “You’re very modest,” Miriam replies. “I have to know something. With all you’ve seen, do you ever get scared?”

  “Scared?” I raise an eyebrow. “Are you kidding? All the time. Frankly, I’m a little terrified right now.” Not so much because I’m talking to the first lady, but because I have no idea where this conversation is going.

  She smiles and gives her head a small shake. “I mean about the kind of cases you’re involved with. It all seems so . . . dark.”

  If I reply fast enough, I don’t have to think about it. “Bad people are how I make my living.”

  “Sure, sure, but it just seems lately that people are acting so much more strangely. There was the Warlock, and now this earthquake and the Peter Devon prediction. Don’t you worry about all of this?”

  My mind flashes back to what happened the day before at the stakeout loft. I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about that baby. I’m not sure when I will be able to sleep properly again. I don’t think this is what she means, though, so I try to grasp what she’s asking. “I think there have always been horrible people and horrible things.”

  “And these evil people coming out of nowhere?”

  I try to channel my inner Ailes. “There have always been bad people. Now they all get their own miniseries and nonstop news coverage. People think they’re in the last generation before it all goes to hell.” I remember something I recently read in an article. “The fact is homicide rates keep dropping and life expectancy keeps increasing. I think we’re just built to be pessimistic.”

  “And Peter Devon’s prediction?” she asks again.

  From the concern on her face, I can tell she’s taking this video very seriously. The first lady wants answers, and evidently she’s decided they should come from me. I’m here because I’m one of the government’s experts on weir
dos. I provide my rehearsed reply. “We only heard about it after the earthquake. He could have spent the last year of his life filling up tapes with predictions that never came true. He had to be right at least once.” I don’t tell her I’m hoping the earthquake prediction is the last time we hear anything from the departed professor.

  “So these things don’t keep you up at night?”

  “No,” I lie. I don’t tell her about the new nightmare about the woman at my door, or the one I still have about falling from an airplane. Or how I go to bed earlier most nights now, knowing I’ll spend several hours at the very least staring at the ceiling.

  “Would you tell me if they did?” There’s a vulnerability in her voice as she puts her hand over mine and clasps it. Just like when Sophie Gunnerson and I snuck into The Blair Witch Project at the ArcLight theater and she grasped my right hand in the middle of the movie. At first I thought she was being a little weird. Then I realized she was scared. John Carpenter once watched Grandfather cut my head off with a guillotine in our living room, so my sense of fear and Sophie’s were calibrated differently. I just let her hold my right hand as I used my left one to feed myself Skittles.

  Her question catches me off guard. “Sure. I mean, I don’t worry about the supernatural things. I have no reason to believe in them.” The real stuff is scary enough. I think about the woman who tried to kill the child. “What worries me are the people who believe in these things. They’re what keep me up at night.”

  She nods reflectively as she thinks about this. “Do you attend church regularly?”

  I think she’s asking me politely if I believe in God. The answer used to be so much easier. “Not as often as I should.”

  “Well, if you get the chance, you’re welcome to come with us sometime.”

  What? Did the first lady just ask me to pray with her? I’m taken aback. I’m not sure if this is some kind of token offer, or something else. I know Ailes is on friendly terms with the Kents, but he never speaks about their relationship. It’s more of a golf game here and there, and an occasional phone call about policy when the president wants an outside voice who won’t go running to the press. I begin to realize the first lady is a very lonely woman. Lonely and frightened. Is she a grown-up version of Sophie, who just wants a hand to hold? Then why mine? I’m just a worker bee. She could talk to anyone.

  “That’s very kind,” I say, responding to the church offer. “I might enjoy it.”

  She smiles. “I’ll have my assistant give you my personal number. Would I be imposing if I gave you a call sometime?”

  “Not at all.” To talk about what? If I had answers to any of her questions, I’d be getting more sleep and drinking wine that wasn’t watered down.

  We finish our conversation and I leave, not quite sure what just happened. She’s obviously worried about the earthquake and the prediction. But there’s something more to her anxiety. I wonder why she can’t just talk to her husband about all this. Is she afraid of appearing scared after all the times he’s told the story of her bravery? But that seems odd. They are obviously very close. The two of them are simpatico. I can’t see them hiding anything from each other.

  Maybe they don’t.

  It hits me. She has talked to her husband about this. She’s not speaking with me discreetly about her fears. These are their fears. She’s reaching out to me because they want someone outside their inner circle to put things in perspective.

  While my case history may make it look as if I’m an expert on these kinds of things, I’m grasping for answers like everyone else.

  Walking back east toward the FBI headquarters where I parked my car, I try to figure out what I’m going to tell Ailes about this conversation. It’s clear he thought it would be a good idea for the first lady to speak with me. I just wish he’d told me beforehand what she really wanted.

  The crowds along Pennsylvania Avenue are thicker than usual. Not all of them are tourists. Clusters of protesters are holding up signs, many of them complaining that power still isn’t on in much of the city. The fact that the White House was brightly lit last night while the surrounding blocks were in darkness didn’t endear the mayor to the people dealing with the ongoing blackout.

  As I cross Thirteenth Street, my phone rings. The number on the screen has a local 202 area code. “Hello?”

  “Agent Blackwood?” a woman asks.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, this is Detective Lewis with DC metro police. The Prince William County Sheriff’s Office may have found the woman who kidnapped the baby and threatened you. Are you available to do an ID? It’ll take an hour or so.”

  A thousand questions I want to ask that woman race through my mind. “Yes. Of course. Where?”

  “I can pick you up at the FBI building. I’ll drive us to the morgue.”

  The morgue?

  Chapter Eight

  Troubled

  A line of police cars races down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Mall as I wait outside FBI headquarters. Two crowd-control vans follow behind. I catch a glimpse of cops with riot gear through the passenger window. That’s not going to be fun. I don’t envy them.

  Shortly after they pass, an unmarked police car with a blue light on the dashboard pulls up in front of me. “Blackwood?” asks the compact black woman in the driver’s seat. Her piercing hazel eyes match those in the photo I had Ailes send over to me. I can never be too careful.

  “Detective Lewis?”

  “Aileen to my friends.” She gives me a quick inspection. “I guess that includes the FBI. Hop in.”

  “Jessica,” I say, offering my hand after climbing inside.

  “I know all about you,” she replies. Her tone is friendly.

  She’s stating an obvious fact. After the Warlock case, keeping a low profile within the law enforcement community became impossible for me. Even though the extent of my involvement in thwarting the terrorist attack on the Pope was largely kept out of the news, it’s a poorly kept secret within law enforcement.

  “So, you get a lot of nut jobs?” Aileen asks as we head toward Interstate 395, a trace of sarcasm in her voice. Almost like I’ve been asking for this trouble.

  With cops you can tell pretty quickly if you’re going to click or not. I get along best with the ones who say what they’re thinking. Lewis is to the point. She’s probably trying to figure me out. Am I some kind of showboating opportunist who happens to be in the right places at the right times? Or am I just another flatfoot trying to do my job? It’s pointless trying to set people straight on what I consider being in the right place. Still, I can tell Lewis hasn’t yet made up her mind.

  “In my dating life, or professionally?”

  She smiles at my joke. “I get the impression trouble follows you.”

  “I’m beginning to get suspicious myself.”

  I’ve dealt with creeps all my life. I’m just thankful my time as a teenage magician was over before the invention of Twitter and YouTube. I was uneasy with my stage attire of fishnets and sequined leotards even at seventeen. Other than when a classmate caught my appearance on some variety show, there was a solid disconnect between the girl who wore jeans and hoodies in trigonometry and the scantily clad girl escaping a straitjacket onscreen. My current social media footprint is effectively nil. I don’t even spend a lot of time googling my name to see what comes up, other than to make sure whatever undercover disguise I’m using hasn’t been blown. Not that the FBI would put me on an actual undercover case at this point, but in the field I still try to look different from the few photos of me you can find online. My least favorite, besides my teenage magician magazine cover, is the one taken on a windy Fort Lauderdale beach, where I was investigating the reappearance of a missing World War II plane. That one got me labeled as the FBI’s “Witch.”

  Occasionally someone discovers my FBI e-mail address and I get unwanted messages. Thankfully I can send them over to a unit that handles this kind of thing, and contact tends to stop after the pervert gets a
visit from a couple of agents who look like linebackers. Every girl should be so fortunate.

  Lewis takes the on-ramp heading south, then shrugs as she looks at the city retreating in the rearview mirror. “Glad to be out of that mess.”

  “Is it getting better or worse?”

  “Officially? The city is getting back online. They got those people out of the metro car. There’s still no word on when we’ll have full service.”

  “And unofficially?” I’m curious to know if what she’s heard is different from what we know in Quantico. I don’t spend as much time on the street as she does, and I can only imagine what she’s thinking.

  “Everyone is working double shifts,” she explains.

  “I guess that’s to be expected.”

  “Yes, but we’re not all doing disaster relief. Some are undercover. People are flooding into the city to protest.”

  “I imagine they’re upset.”

  “But that’s the thing. Many of them are out-of-town folks. This thing is barely twenty-four hours old and the street in front of the White House is already looking like Occupy Wall Street.”

  I sense her agitation. I would ask if there’s something else, but I suspect at this point it’s just her cop’s intuition that’s telling her things aren’t looking good.

  “Anyway. Back to our little case. A dog walker found the body near a culvert in The Plains a few hours ago. It looks like the killer tried to cover the body with some plastic bags and branches.”

  “So they didn’t want the body to be found for a while.”

  “Bad luck for them. Good for us.”

  “How’d they connect the body to my case?” I ask.

  “They didn’t. I’ve been scanning arrests since I got assigned to it. This woman sounds a little more than unstable. Babynappers are usually in the middle of a downward spiral. I figured it was only a matter of time before she got popped for something minor, like shoplifting or throwing a tantrum at Starbucks. The signs are all there. Then this body came across the bulletins. It seemed like a potential fit.”