No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) (22 page)

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CHAPTER 55
I

suppose we need to talk,” said Max suddenly.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“I know you’re not used to protecting someone like me.” Armstrong smiled, revealing dimples that grew into creases. He

didn’t smile much, and the effect was disarming. “Mr. President, I believe that observation will go down in history as the biggest understatement in the history of the English language.”

“I know, I’m trying to be good, but it’s hard. I don’t think like those bobble-heads in this town, and I’m kind of a rebel when it comes to doing things the usual way.”

Max stood and walked to the far side of the Oval Office. He was aware that every word spoken in the White House was monitored. Advances in technology had snuffed out the concept of the private conversation. To speak to anyone in confidence in Washington D.C., a person needed to go find a cave somewhere.

“I cannot, and will not, be sequestered in some bunker while the whole nation is under attack. I need to be out there with people. I need to know what they are thinking, and I can’t do that by being tucked away and safe. If you make me into some fish in an aquarium, I’ll quit. We need to work out something that makes both of us happy.” Max paced as he talked, and Armstrong was immediately caught up in his intensity.

“Sir, I have done a lot of tossing and turning about that.” “Well, what do you think? I respect your opinion, and you should never bite your tongue around me. If you feel strongly about something, I want you to tell me.”
Armstrong hesitated, longer than he would in most intense situations. His training required immediate, unequivocal action. Recalcitrance was acceptable, but not with an ally.
“Dammit, when we’re alone, can I call you Max?” He was perspiring, wondering whether he had crossed the line of authority. He was familiar with the anxious. He thrived on it, but this was new territory.
“Justin, when we’re alone, we can use first names. It’s more comfortable that way. The only difference between you and me is that I’m the President of the United States, and you’re not.” It was Max’s turn to smile.
“Max, if you don’t quit doing all of this crazy-assed stuff, I’m going to end up scraping your bloody corpse off the sidewalk, and after I get done being a pallbearer, I’ll be out of a job.”Max appreciated the candor. He was tired of the ass-kissers, the people who had the right words for the occasion, but feared the truth and had no ideas.
“Justin, you guys have been trained to whisk me away at the first hint of trouble, like a rabbit who smells danger. You think that if you hide me away, you’re doing your job. If you build this invisible barrier between me and all of the possible ways I can die, I’ll live to politic another day. That’s not how I choose to live. I’ll die someday, but not before my time. I intend to make my mark on this world in my own way, and nobody, not you, not anyone, is going to take my mojo away.”
“Max, that’s what keeps me awake. I have to take all that I have been trained to do, and adapt.”

MARK E. BECKER

“Now you’re talking.” Max tapped a hidden latch on the wall, that opened his access to the wet bar. He helped himself to a cold Perrier, and poured three fingers of scotch into a crystal glass.

“Want some?”
“Well, now that you’re asking, I’d take a triple shot of Jack, neat.” “Get it yourself.”

Armstrong smiled. He knew he was pushing it, and he had reached the limit of the president’s effort at being a regular guy. He stood, towering over Max, and helped himself as the president took a long sip and made his way back to his desk.

“Justin, how did you end up guarding me instead of sitting in a trench in some God-forsaken desert somewhere?”
“Well Sir, we Seals prefer water to deserts, and I got a chance to take down a bad guy a few years ago in Pakistan.” He took a long sip, draining the glass. “… so they kicked me up the ladder. I kept getting kicked up that ladder until my ass ended up here.” He relaxed a bit, but his back remained ramrod straight, poised to move. It was rare when he settled back into the comfort of a chair.
“Look, if we’re going to do this my way, and we are going to do it my way whether you or anyone else like it or not, you need to follow a few guiding principles,” said Max in a commanding tone. First, I will not give anyone my agenda. Those press secretaries and schedulers are going to hate me for this, but I want to keep everyone guessing about where I will be next. If we deem it necessary, this will involve the use of misinformation, delivered from official and reliable sources, but anytime I go anywhere, we will be vague or outright deceptive. I have no faith that the press can keep a secret, and they will do anything to get an exclusive, so I amuse myself from time to time by messing with their heads. Over the years I have become an expert at doing just that. ” Max drained his ever-present glass of sparkling mineral water that appeared on his desk anytime he was in the Oval Office.
“Roger that,” replied Armstrong.
He doesn’t realize that I have spent all of my free time and some of my duty time researching this president, and the more I know about his methods, the more I admire the genius of his Maxims. It’s not reality. It’s the appearance of reality… He’s got me sold on that one already.
“Speeches will be pre-recorded and short, and any questions about my words will be explained by my vice-president, my press secretary, and my chief of staff. I will not waste my time answering questions about the message. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Now, we need to talk about security. Mine. You will not coop me up. I intend to spend more time at Fairlane than I do in this museum, and when I travel in public, we will pull a Max.” Armstrong stood, a surprised expression overcame his face.
“How did you know we call it that?”
“I eavesdrop. I know you refer to me as Wizard, and when we entered the tunnel, you radioed ahead and said that Wizard was pulling a Max.” He stood from behind his desk and stepped toward the door, signifying that their conversation was about to come to an end. “You were very careful not to broadcast your position, and you earned my respect. We will resume my self-defense class in one hour, and I expect you to teach me how to take down an opponent and disable him like a Seal. I hear that you can do it in four seconds.” Max grinned.
“I can do it in three, but I can kill in two, Mr. President.”
“You could kill a man in two seconds. How?”

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CHAPTER 56

M

ax and Armstrong traded hand blocks in the basement of the White House, and they had been at it for the past 45 minutes, aggressive and athletic. They sweated and sparred, and they developed a mutual respect for each other.

“Mr. President…Max…” He hesitated long enough for Max to sweep his feet out from under him, and he was lying on his back looking at the lights in the ceiling.

“Well, up until now you didn’t earn it, but now maybe you have. I haven’t been pinned since high school,” he quipped. Max helped him up off the mat, and they chose the opportunity to call it a day. “Max, you will never need to know, because me and my crew will never put you in a situation where that can happen. But I’ll tell you,” He took a long sip on his water bottle and continued.

“First, you lunge in like you’re gonna hit. That’s what they expect. But you don’t hit, see, you take your hand, and you go past him like you missed. Then you grab the hair on the back of his head, and you pull it forward. Then you drive his nose into his brain with the palm of your other hand. If you don’t see his eyes roll back in his head, ya got one hand on the front and one on the back and ya give his head a quick twist. I guarantee he’ll be dead.”

“Whoa…I don’t suppose you practiced that much in Seal training.”
“No, we got plenty of practice in the real world. It’s guns and explosions that I worry about the most.”

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CHAPTER 57

T

he call came in the middle of the night. Only immediate family had that ringtone, Neil Young’s
Old Man.
Andrew has chosen it as a reminder of how much Dad hated it. He never knew why, but Dad would turn it off whenever it played on

Oldies Radio. “Sings like a girl,” he would mutter, and change the station on the satellite radio in his truck. Still, the song was a link to his childhood, and it was only reserved for family.

This time it was Mom, and he answered immediately. A call from Leila Fox from Michigan meant that something was seriously wrong. Most times, she dealt with it herself, whatever crisis arose. By the time Andrew became aware that Mom had resolved a problem without his help, she would always shrug it off and say, “Don’t worry about me.”

“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“It’s your Dad. His sugar spiked and he went into a coma. I put him in the wheelbarrow and got him into the truck, and I drove to Battle Creek like a bat out of hell, and you know how he hates hospitals, but he was in no condition to argue with me, and the doctors said…”
Andrew interrupted. If he hadn’t, he would have to listen to the story until the bitter end to determine whether his father was dead or alive.
“Is Dad dead?”
“No, Sweetie. He’s been in the hospital since last Sunday, and he has been going in and out of that coma, and the doctors are sending him home to die. It’s his Alzheimer’s. They say that there’s nothing they can do for him.” She sobbed, and he realized that Mom had finally encountered a problem she couldn’t fix.
“When are they bringing him home?” Andrew had already begun the mental process of notifying the president and re-assigning his duties to other members of the White House staff, catching a flight to Detroit Metro, and driving the hundred miles to Marshall.
“He should be here by Noon. They are delivering a special bed, because he has bedsores, and I can’t care for him like I used to, so hospice will be coming Monday through Friday, but not on the weekends, and I…”
He interrupted again. He didn’t wait for his mother to admit that she needed his help. He already heard it in her tone of voice. It was already Thursday, and he needed to be there immediately.
“Mom, I’ll get the first flight out of Reagan and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

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CHAPTER 58

I

’m glad you’re here.” Sandra Fox hugged her brother, and reached for his carry-on bag. Andrew pulled back, and clutched it tighter. He was particular that way.
“Sandy, how’s Mom?”

“Fine as can be expected. She grieved for awhile, and then she put her big girl pants back on and went out and roto-tilled the garden. She says it’s better when the ground is still partly frozen, but I know it’s because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. She needed to go outside and get her hands dirty.”

Andrew ran the image through his head. His mother, Leila, wielding the growling machine in her coveralls. When she wasn’t tilling, she was planting, and then it was the growing and nurturing. Much later, after the sweat and toil had produced, came the harvesting of the fruits of her efforts. During that time she smiled, but until then, her face took on a fierce determination. She focused on the task at hand. It had to be that way, or it didn’t get done. She had no patience for waiting until someone else to accomplish those tasks, and she bristled at the suggestion that she was too old or too weak to do it herself.

Andrew had inherited those qualities, and he had acquired a similar sense of invincibility. Nobody was going to convince him that he was too anything…not too young, too short, too inexperienced, too stupid or any of the negative excesses that began with “too”.

“He was sick for a long time, and I wasn’t here to help out. I feel like I dumped on you and Mom, having to tend to him and the farm. I feel awful about it,” Andrew said solemnly.

“Well, get over it. You had other things to attend to, like taking care of that cute president of ours,” She placed her hand on his neck and squeezed his trapezius muscle, as she had done hundreds of times before when they were kids.

“Ouch!”

She increased the pressure before letting go.
You would think that after all of this time, I would have seen it coming.
Andrew’s sister was bigger than him, with broad shoulders and a disdain for makeup. He had always wondered about her sexuality, but it had never been high on his list of wonderables. He was too tied up in the Washington gig, that firestorm of self-centered thinking. He had a president to pay attention to, and from the start, his job was more like cat-herding while blindfolded than anything else he could imagine. There was no instruction manual that came with the job; he had to rely upon instinct and intuition to get through each day. He was frustrated, and he was adrift.

Andrew was relieved to be outside of the beltway for a few days. Without hesitation, Max had summoned him to the Oval Office, and Andrew had been the one to inform him of his father’s imminent passing. They had shared the grief, and they shed a few tears. He had been embarrassed by his reaction to the news. When Max came around the desk and hugged him, the dam broke, and his eyes poured. Even in this time of national emergency, Max had demonstrated what it was to be human, and he knew that this private moment would not be shared with anyone. His grief would be shared with private dignity.

Max had an ulterior motive in sending Andrew home to Michigan, and Andrew was up to the task. Leila Fox had become an un-official cabinet member to the president. He could trust her to speak her mind. Without realizing it, she had her finger on the pulse of the nation, and her observations had been correct since the first day they met during the campaign. She was the old lady who kissed him on the cheek at the end of his sound bites and campaign ads, making him blush in front of the cameras. It was a tactic that endeared Max Masterson to the voters, and she took silent pride in her contribution to his surprising landslide victory

Leila had the ability to cut to the core of an issue, and if she saw that Max was messing up, she would inform him of that fact in her unvarnished Midwestern way. Andrew was assigned the task of gathering the thoughts and observations that Americans had about the president; to identify what he was doing wrong, and what he was doing right.