The Innocent (50 page)

R
OBIE WAS HALFWAY
to D.C. when he finally reached Blue Man. In terse sentences he told him about his latest deductions.

Blue Man’s response was equally terse. He would meet Robie at the White House with backup. And he would alert the appropriate parties.

Twenty minutes later Robie slid his car to a stop at the curb, jumped out, and ran.

He was on Pennsylvania Avenue heading to the front gates of the White House. He looked at his watch. Nearly eleven. He imagined the party would be winding down by now. And if the attempt hadn’t occurred yet, it would have to shortly.

He spied Blue Man and a group of men huddled outside the White House front gates. Robie could see that it was a mixture of FBI, Secret Service, and DHS. He saw no uniformed Secret Service around. He assumed it had been determined that they couldn’t know how far the conspiracy had gone, so it was best to leave the uniforms out of this.

Robie ran up to them. “Do they know where Van Beuren is?” he asked.

Blue Man said, “He’s on duty. We’ve spoken to the Secret Service agents inside. They’re hunting for him now. The problem is, we don’t want to show that we’re suspicious of anything. Van Beuren may not be the only asset they have in there.”

One man in a suit stared over at Robie. He was about six-three with graying hair and a face that seemed to have a worry line for every national crisis he had endured. Robie recognized him as the
director of the Secret Service. Robie recalled that the man’s father had been a veteran agent with Reagan when he had been shot. It was said that the current director had become an agent at the urging of his old man. And he had sworn that no president would ever die on his watch.

The director said, “You’re the one who called this in?”

“I am,” said Robie.

“I sure as hell hope you’re right. Because if you’re not…”

“If I’m wrong, nothing bad happens. If I’m right…”

The director looked at Blue Man.

“We’ll move in through the visitors’ entrance. We’ll attract less notice that way. Hopefully, they’ll snag Van Beuren before we even get in the place.”

“And the president?” asked Robie.

“Ordinarily with any threat like this we would have already moved him either to his personal quarters or to the bunker underneath the White House. But if Van Beuren is involved he’ll know that’s our protocol and may have set an ambush somehow. So we decided to sequester the president in an atypical place, the Family Dining Room, along with the crown prince, some of the president’s staff, and some select VIPs who we know are not threats. No uniforms are part of the security detail. All suits. Van Beuren can’t get near him. We did it subtly. Now we just have to find Van Beuren.” He said again, “But I sure as hell hope you’re wrong about this.”

“The fact that you haven’t been able to locate Van Beuren yet tells me that I’m right,” replied Robie.

They raced to the visitors’ entrance and moved quickly through the security checkpoint there. All uniformed Secret Service had been pulled off interior guard duty and massed in a hallway. They had not been told why. Each of them had been questioned. None of them knew where Van Beuren was. He had been assigned to a security perimeter on the lower level, near the library.

He wasn’t there.

All rooms on the lower level had been checked.

Robie and the others ran down the hall and up the stairs to the main level of the White House. As they were fast-walking down
the Cross Hall toward the State Dining Room, which adjoined the Family Dining Room, one of the agents with them received a message through his earwig.

“They found Van Beuren,” he said.

“Where?” the Secret Service director asked immediately.

“A storage room in the West Wing.”

They changed direction and quickly reached the West Wing. There they were directed to the room where Van Beuren had been found.

The door was thrown open by the lead agent. Inside they saw Van Beuren. He was on the floor, unconscious and trussed up. A patch of shiny blood was mixed in with his hair.

One of the agents knelt down next to him and felt for a pulse. “He’s alive, but somebody hit him hard.”

Blue Man said, “I don’t understand this. Why knock out and tie up your assassin?”

Robie was the first to spot it. “His gun is missing.”

All eyes went to the man’s holster. The nine-millimeter that should have been there wasn’t.

Robie said, “He wasn’t the assassin. They just needed his weapon. That way they didn’t have to try and sneak one past security. He just walked in with it. Part of the plan.”

And then Robie remembered the last part of the overheard conversation from the plane hangar in Morocco.

Access to weapons.

Not a westerner.

Decades in the making.

Willing to die.

He said, “The shooter has his gun. They have to be in with the president and the crown prince.”

The director paled. “You mean part of his staff? Or one of the guests?”

Robie didn’t answer. He was already sprinting down the hall.

T
HE
F
AMILY
D
INING
R
OOM
was one of the most intimately scaled rooms on the main level of the White House. It was bracketed on one side by the chief usher’s office and could also be accessed through the much larger and adjacent State Dining Room. The president and vice president would often have one-on-one lunches there. It was not as elaborately decorated as the far larger East Room or the ornately furnished Green, Blue, and Red Rooms.

Yet if Robie and company failed tonight, it would be the room known forever as where a U.S. president had lost his life.

The group marshaled outside the door to the State Dining Room.

The director said, “We’re going to alert agents inside the room that the shooter is probably in there. They’ve already formed a hard wall around the president and are awaiting my order to get him out of the room.”

Blue Man said, “If they do that or start searching people the assassin will fire. In such close quarters and despite the wall around the president, the bullet might hit its target.”

“We can’t just wait and see if the person acts or not,” countered the director. “Protocol says to move and to move fast. I should have already given the order.”

Robie said, “How many people in that room total?”

“About fifty,” said one of the agents.

“This could turn into a bloodbath,” said Blue Man.

The director said curtly, “No one wants that. But my focus is only on the president. We plan to take him out through the chief usher’s office and from there to the Entrance Hall.”

Another agent said, “And the longer we wait, the less chance we have of getting him out of there safely.”

Blue Man said, “What if there’s more than one shooter? You could be leading him directly into an ambush.”

Robie said, “The shooter must be someone who works here.”

“That’s impossible,” said the director.

“The person was involved in a conspiracy with someone we know worked here. That’s indisputable. That could not be an outsider. And many of the people in that room with the president and the crown prince are staffers, correct?”

The director gave a start. “It could be one of the prince’s staffers. It was a major mistake to put them in the same room together. Shit!”

Robie shook his head. “Van Beuren was found in the West Wing. Did one of the prince’s staffers have access to the West Wing tonight? Because Van Beuren’s head injury was recent.”

The director looked at one of his men. “Do you have the answer to that?”

“None of the prince’s staffers were anywhere near the West Wing this evening.”

“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed the director.

Robie said, “People have been paid off up and down the line on this one, sir. The person behind this has lots of money. No one is off-limits. For all we know he might have bought off a Secret Service agent in there.”

“I can’t believe that,” said the director. “No agent has ever been a traitor.”

“The same could be said for the uniformed division,” said Blue Man. “But it obviously happened. One of the men forming the wall around the president right now could be the backup shooter, with the primary one using Van Beuren’s gun.”

“But if there is a Secret Service agent on the payroll, why bother getting Van Beuren’s gun?”

“Something like this, you have a fallback plan, sir,” said Robie. “The stakes are too high. I’m not saying there are two shooters in there. But I am saying that we can’t responsibly discount that possibility.”

“So what do we do?” asked the director.

Robie said, “Let me go in there. A staffer will know the interior security agents but they won’t know me. Let me go in dressed as a waiter. I can go in under the pretense of bringing in something, maybe coffee.”

“And then what?” demanded the director.

“I identify the shooter or shooters and take them out.”

“How will you identify the assassin from all of the people in that room?” snapped the director.

Blue Man spoke up. “Agent Robie is very adept at spotting assassins, Director.” He drew closer and whispered into the man’s ear. “He happens to be one for this country. In fact, he’s our best one. If you need a man who can make the kill shots under pressure in a room full of people, he’s it.”

The director gazed sternly at Robie. “This goes against every protocol and procedure the Service has.”

“Yes, sir, it does,” agreed Robie.

“If you fail the president dies.”

“Yes, sir. But I am prepared to die making sure he doesn’t.”

“If I can’t alert the agents in there about our plan and you pull your gun, they will shoot you.”

“It’s always in the timing, sir.”

The director and Robie locked gazes for a long moment. Then the director said, “Get him a waiter’s uniform and a cart of damn coffee.”

R
OBIE PULLED HIS
jacket more tightly around him. The waiter’s uniform they had gotten him was for a bigger man. Robie had insisted on this. He couldn’t allow a gun bump that someone could spot. He had two pistols, one in his holster, one hidden under the cloth covering the coffee cart. He was also wearing body armor, although at least some of the agents would fire into his head if they thought he was a threat to the president.

The agents inside had been told that the danger was over but to still maintain the wall around the president. The crown prince and his staff were standing in a corner diagonally across from the president, surrounded by other agents. The thirty-odd White House staffers and other guests were in the middle of the room between the prince and the president.

The door opened and Robie wheeled the cart into the room. He had no earwig. Had no means of communication with anyone. The force right outside the door was standing by to rush in after him. The director had his walkie-talkie ready to order his agents not to fire at Robie if he pulled his gun. Yet he knew that would be an impossible order to follow. As far as the director was concerned, Robie was a dead man from the moment he walked into the room.

The door was shut behind Robie and he continued to push the cart along. He gridded the room without seeming to do so.

The Family Dining Room had been established by James Madison and was where many first families ate until Jackie Kennedy created a dining room upstairs in the family quarters. The room was about twenty-eight feet by twenty feet in size. A blue-and-white
oriental rug covered much of the floor. There was a blue-and-white marble fireplace surrounded with wall candelabras on either side of the mantel. Above that was a portrait of a woman in nineteenth-century garb. The long dining table that was usually in the center of the room had been shifted to one side, the accompanying chairs lined in front of it. A cabinet blocked off one door. A mirror hung over a Chippendale-style chest. A crystal chandelier anchored the middle of the ceiling. The walls were painted yellow.