The Sentinel (17 page)

"That's a Roger."

"What is it, Pete?"

"The President is on his way here."

Garrison stood on the front porch as the President drove up in a golf cart with the Presidential seal on the right fender. The President stepped out of the cart. He wore a blue double-breasted sport jacket and Levi's. Garrison thought he looked like a gray-haired model in a men's clothing catalogue.

"Good evening, Mr. President."

"Mrs. Jordan tells me you're doing a fine job, Pete."

"Doing my best, sir."

The President climbed the three steps to the porch.

"She deserves a high-quality agent like you. Of course, no disrespect intended to the other agents who have been assigned to protect her. None whatsoever. Wintergreen did a fine job years ago, and so did Roland Prefontaine. The stewards are bringing dinner over. Will you to join us?"

"I really shouldn't."

The last thing in the world Garrison wanted to do was sit through a dinner with the Man. But how could he decline a Presidential invitation.
What the hell did the Man want?

The President swept an arm toward the door. "I insist."

Eleanor came to the door.

"Yes, please join us," she said.

Garrison heard tension in her voice.

"Pete, I have a bone to pick with you," the President said after they were all seated in the dining room and the Navy stewards were serving a meal that had been prepared in the Navy mess and brought over in three golf carts.

"Yes, sir?" Garrison said, and felt his eyebrows elevate. There was a buzzing in his ears. He assumed it was blood rushing toward his brain at a hundred miles an hour. Survival-adrenaline blood. High-stress blood. The President conspiratorially leaned forward.

"Early in the Administration, you tackled a man with a knife - at the UN Plaza. The man you saved, the Iranian Prime Minister, is the one who later double-crossed me in the Turkish accords.
You moved too fast."

Garrison smiled. "If I would have known, I could have looked the other way."

The President threw his head back in an open-mouth, Bohemian Club laugh. "Thataboy! Let him get the gaffe. Let that pipsqueak get what's coming to him!"

"Russell,
" Eleanor said reprovingly. "Agent Garrison might think you're serious."

"Pete knows I'm joking, dear. A man has to have a sense of humor in this place, right, Pete?"

"No doubt about that," Garrison said with a glance at Eleanor.

The dining room had oak-paneled walls and was filled with antique American furniture: a mahogany serving cart with marble top, a polished rosewood dining table with legs of exaggerated rounded shapes. An enormous bouquet of flowers in the middle of the dining table matched the yellows and greens of a French Beauvais tapestry on the wall. The silverware and the gold-rimmed china bore the Presidential seal.

A coffee-skinned Filipino steward of singular presence and bearing served prime rib from food trays.

"The President seldom gets a chance to tell a joke," Jordan said. "The damn press distorts everything."

Garrison had been avoiding eye contact with Eleanor. He considered Jordan nothing more than a political hack who would still be begging for contributions to his Senate campaign if it weren't for his wife's money.

After a while, as if he could sense that Garrison wasn't impressed, Jordan began dropping the names of the Secret Service Directors he'd known over the years. To politicians, men who spent their lives unashamedly gauging reaction, anticipating behavior, and making connections, name-dropping was both language and religion. Garrison felt a pang of jealousy, and wondered if Eleanor had told him the truth when she'd mentioned she didn't sleep with him.

"I've often thought the job of a Secret Service agent to be like that of a politician-a lot of split-second decisions," the President said.

More like few decisions after maximum procrastination,
thought Garrison.

"Makes sense to me," he said.

"Good decisions are based on values. That's what's been wrong in this country. Old-fashioned American values have been on a downhill slide. People don't think anything is worth standing up for any longer. American malaise is a product of television. It's degraded the thinking process of the nation. People don't know how to think for themselves any longer. That kind of brain-washing has half the people in this country wearing their baseball hat backwards because they've seen it on a sitcom."

"Never thought of it like that."

"Let's change the subject," Eleanor said coldly.

"Certainly, dear," the President said, his eyes cast downward.

Garrison mused that it was when couples were behind closed doors that the truth came out. Eleanor was dominant in the relationship.

A waiter entered the room.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Jordan. You have a priority call."

Eleanor rose to leave. Garrison and the President stood.

"Will you two please sit down," she said on her way out. "I'll just take a second."

The President picked up his wineglass and took a swig. Pursing his lips, he swallowed. "A wonderful woman, the First Lady. I'm a very lucky man."

"It's a pleasure working for her."

Garrison's words sounded absurd. But what the hell was he supposed to say?

The President offered wine. Garrison declined, though he felt like chugging down the entire bottle. The President was tipsy, but he always held his liquor like a true political professional, betrayed only by a slight rosiness high on his cheeks. The President's every action exuded that mixture of magnetism, ambition, and adroitness that people call leadership.

Garrison recalled the President's unique ability to make his voice crack when he wanted to show emotion - a trait often mimicked by Secret Service comedians. Once, when standing beside him at a St. Patrick's Day party in the Diplomatic Reception Room, Garrison had noticed a distinct Irish brogue creep into the President's voice.

Garrison and the other members of the White House Secret Service Detail judged Presidents by their manner and accessibility rather than by any political standard. They regarded President Jordan as a lightweight. Aloof and insensitive, Jordan allowed the members of his youthful, immature staff to tromp on Secret Service agents whenever they pleased. Like President Lyndon Johnson, being the most powerful man in the world still wasn't enough to satisfy his ego. Jordan relished
demonstrating
his power. Once, at an official dinner in France's Elysee Palace, Garrison had watched him stub his cigar on a gold-plated Louis XIV antique dinner plate, then smirk as his hosts squirmed silently in anger.

"When I ran for President she put me over the top," he now said. "I owe that to her. But in politics, Pete, there is always a price to pay. Little favors, little price. And the big favors? They require endless payments. Sometimes the price is too great. Eleanor has had to put up with a lot since we came to D.C. It's not easy when I'm on the road half the time. Her being alone so often when I travel ... the media pressure. It takes a toll. The White House can be a real House of Pain-a pressure cooker. The reporters have been after her since we got here. Slime merchants, digging up shit from the past. Oh, I have a hundred friends. The big operators - network anchors. I'm talking about the so-called
muckrakers.
Like that prick reporter Joe Kretchvane
."

"No one likes newsies-"

"Not even their own damn mothers." The President set his fork down on his plate, sat back, and looked Garrison in the eye. "You know, Pete, the strain the press puts on the First Family can lead to errors of judgment ... even by those who are otherwise strong and self-reliant. The First Lady and I are a team. If I found out someone was trying to take advantage of her, I'd bury him. You understand what I mean, don't you, Pete?"

Garrison forced a guileless smile. "You're saying that person would suddenly be in a world of hurt."

The President set his glass down. "How do you feel about that kind of thing? A user, a maggot who would take advantage of a woman's weakness?"

"I feel the same way."

Garrison read the President's expression as general suspicion rather than animosity. He might suspect something, but he didn't know for sure. Otherwise, even the President, with his practiced political nature, wouldn't have been able to mask his feelings so fully. The most shocking revelation Garrison had learned since entering the Secret Service was that whether Presidents were former football captains, Rhodes scholars, or business executives, the only thing that distinguished them from other men was the strength of their will to prevail. Garrison had sworn to give his life for Russell Jordan, a second-rate Rotary Club lunch orator.

"That's what I'd thought you'd say, Pete."

Eleanor returned to the room.

"Everything okay, dear?" the President asked.

"Just a minor scheduling problem."

The President left a few minutes later after mentioning something about getting back to the conference center before his aides gave away all the gold in Fort Knox. Garrison followed him outside. As the President went out of sight, Eleanor joined Garrison.

"Pete, did he say anything when I was gone?"

Garrison stared down the road. "He suspects something."

"Pardon me?"

"I told him we were having an affair."

"You
what?
"

Garrison smiled.

"Very funny.
" She paused. "I hate him."

Her tone surprised him. It was both strident and distracted, as if she were speaking to someone else.

"Eleanor, look, you can't-"

"He's sneaky. Pete, I deserve to be happy too. I've earned it. I've earned it the hard way by putting up with him. Pete, tell me we can handle this blackmail thing. We can deal with it, right? It's not going to blow up in our faces is it?"

"We can handle it."

But he didn't believe what he was saying. Getting involved with her had been a mistake, an error in judgment, and now there was no easy way out of it. The blackmailer would come back. They always did. It was the nature of the crime.

"Pete, I want to go back to the White House,"

"Tonight?"

She took a deep breath and let it out. "I can't stand being here with him."

Later, as the helicopter lifted off the Camp David pad, Garrison sat across from Eleanor as she busied herself making telephone calls. He had the feeling that he'd forgotten something, that there were last-minute errands he couldn't recall.

Arriving at the White House, Garrison led Eleanor inside to the private elevator where Agent Ronan Squires was on duty.

She looked troubled as she stepped into the elevator.

Garrison wanted to ask her if she was okay, but said nothing because of Squires. She said good night, and the elevator doors slowly closed.

"I hear you're riding some kind of a lie-detector beef." Squires said.

"It's nothing."

"Whatever it is, I wish you luck on it."

Garrison said thanks.