The President Is Missing(41)

Breathe.

Relax.

Everything slows to a crawl. Slow. Easy.

It will not go perfectly as planned. It never does. A small part of her, the competitor in her, prefers it when it doesn’t, when she has to make an on-the-spot adjustment.

“Headed for the exit,” she hears through the earbud.

“Teams 1 and 2, go,” she says. “Team 3, hold ready.”

“Team 1, that’s a go,” comes the response.

“Team 2, that’s a go.”

“Team 3 holding ready.”

She moves her eye up to the scope of her rifle.

She breathes.

She relaxes.

She aims.

She curls her finger around the trigger, ready to squeeze.





Chapter

27



Augie and I move toward the exit, the left-field gate through which I entered, my smartphone in hand as instructed. A handful of people have already given up on the game with the first sprinkles of rain, but most of the thirty-some thousand are keeping the faith for the time being, so we are not leaving with a crowd. I would have preferred that. But it’s not my decision.

The composure and confidence Augie has shown are gone. As we get closer to the exit, closer to whatever is coming next, he has grown more nervous, his eyes darting about, his fingers wiggling with no purpose. He checks his phone, maybe to see the time, maybe to look for a message, but I can’t tell because his hands are cupped around it.

We pass through the stadium gate. He stops while we are still inside the alcove, outside now, looking out at Capitol Street but still protected within the stadium walls. Leaving the stadium is meaningful to him. He must feel safe in a crowd.

I look at the sky, now an endless black, a drop of rain on my cheek.

Augie takes a breath and nods. “Now,” he says.

He inches forward, passing beyond the alcove’s walls onto the sidewalk. Some people are moving about, but the number is small. To our right, the north, a large utility truck is parked by the curb. Next to it, a couple of sweaty sanitation workers are taking a cigarette break under a streetlamp.

To the south, our left, a DC Metro squad car is parked by the curb, nobody inside.

Pulling up directly behind the squad car is a van, parking by the curb about ten yards away from us.

Augie seems to be peering at it, trying to see the driver. I look, too. Hard to make out details, but the features are unmistakable—the skeletal outline of her shoulders, the sharp angles of her face. Augie’s partner, the Princeton woman, Nina.

Seemingly in response, the van blinks its high beams twice. And then turns off its lights completely.

Augie’s head drops down to his phone, lighting up in response to his fingers tapping. Then he stops, looks up, and waits.

For a moment, he is still. Everything is still.

Some kind of signal, I think to myself. Something is about to happen.

My last thought before everything goes black.





Chapter

28



I, Katherine Emerson Brandt…do solemnly swear…that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States…and will, to the best of my ability…preserve, protect, and defend…the Constitution of the United States.”

Kathy Brandt adjusts her jacket and nods at herself in the bathroom mirror inside the vice president’s private quarters.

It hasn’t been easy being vice president, though she is well aware that any number of people would trade places with her. But how many of those people came within a breath of winning the nomination only to see their dreams upended by a war hero with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor?

She vowed to herself, on the night of Super Tuesday, when Texas and Georgia came in late for Duncan, that she wouldn’t concede, that she wouldn’t endorse him, that—God help her—she wouldn’t join his ticket.

And then she did all those things.

And now she’s a parasite, living off her host. If he makes a mistake, she made the mistake. As if that’s not bad enough, she has to defend the mistake as if it were her own.

And if she doesn’t, if she separates herself and criticizes the president, she’s disloyal. The critics will lump her in with Duncan anyway, and her supporters will desert her for her failure to stand by her president.

It’s been a delicate dance.

“I, Katherine Emerson Brandt…do solemnly—”

Her phone rings. Instinctively she reaches for the phone on the vanity, her work phone, even as she recognizes that the ringtone belongs to her other phone.

Her personal phone.

She walks into the bedroom and picks up the phone by the bedside. She sees the caller ID. A flutter passes through her.

Here we go, she thinks to herself as she answers the call.





Chapter

29



Black, nothing but black.

Thirty thousand people roar in unison in the stadium behind me as everything plunges into darkness, streetlamps and buildings and traffic signals, all electricity dead for blocks. Headlights from car traffic on Capitol Street are halos of light as they pass, spotlights sweeping a stage, while smartphones are fireflies dancing about in the dark.

“Use your phone,” says Augie, his voice frantic, hitting my arm. “Come, hurry!”