Big If Read online

  “Limo,” said another planner.

  “Limo in Manhattan means a tunnel to New Jersey,” said a third. “I don’t like a tunnel.”

  “Limo to the helo then. Helo to New Jersey.”

  “I don’t like a helo in Manhattan. Some guy in a building with a missile while you hover. Bingo on the helo.”

  “Nix the helo, do the limo. Lock the tunnel down.”

  “I get a Stinger missile. Bingo on your limo.”

  “Limo can survive a missile,” the first planner said. “Cadillac assures us.”

  “Unless it hits the glass,” someone pointed out.

  “Get two limos, real and decoy. Which one do you hit?”

  “Get two missiles.”

  “Get three limos.”

  “Limos just attract attention anyway. You’re better off in the back of a taxicab. It’s a sea of yellow in New York. Which one do you hit?”

  “We can’t put the president of the United States in the back of a New York City taxi cab. How would it look?”

  “Or smell.”

  “I think we all know how it would smell.”

  “I’ll tell you how it would look: like a taxicab. Remember Felker’s Twelfth Certainty: traffic equals camouflage. I don’t mean an actual taxicab, of course. I mean a special vehicle, armored like the limos, special gear, special tires, special pursuit engine, full chaff capability, the works. Surround it with other special vehicles driven by our guys, fake FedEx trucks, fake UPS, additional fake taxis, even fake messengers on special fake bicycles, whole blocks of invented traffic designed to look like ordinary New York City shit. They could even honk and call each other asshole.”

  Vi waited her turn, leafing through the VP’s schedule, Manchester tonight, Manchester tomorrow, Rumsey on to Portsmouth tomorrow afternoon, Portsmouth Tuesday morning for a rally in the square. It would be like any other trip: three days of hotel food and hotel beds and van rides with no legroom, the dreary repetition broken only by the scattered, rattled moments of sharp focus on the ropes. Vi was jittery—a little—as she always was before a jumping-off. Her nerves had gotten worse since Hinman, and now she had to work to clear the trash out of her mind, fear and doubt and queasiness, to focus on the job of scanning hands. It was just another trip, but different too for Vi. They were going to New Hampshire; she was going home. The VP had made fifty trips to New Hampshire in Vi’s time as a bodyguard, crash visits to the cities inland, Nashua, Concord, and Manchester. They had been to Portsmouth several times, once to Rye, once to Eatontown, though never to C.E. itself. Vi hated the idea of going home a bodyguard, part of the armored jamboree. In a place she didn’t know, Miami or Atlanta, the faces on the ropes were bar code, miles of it, and she scanned. It was hard and getting harder to stay vacant, even in a place she didn’t know, but she could do it still, cram out every other thought. New Hampshire felt different to her, riskier somehow. She knew the place, her memories were there—it was more to cram out of your mind.

  She said, “Hey guys—I’ve got a plane to catch. You want to vet the VP’s schedule or what?”

  The planners went to work on New Hampshire, analyzing each event as a series of submoves, from the limo to the hotel, through the hotel by steam tunnels, from the tunnels to the stairwell to the ballroom to the crowd. They went through the days and pages in this way.

  Vi got the analyst’s approval for New Hampshire and went out to her car. She waited with the motor running, watching the Director on the quad with Gretchen Williams. The Director was explaining, even pleading, making an excuse, or so it looked to Vi. Gretchen, nodding, listened for a long time, then abruptly turned away and stalked across the grass. Gretchen got in the front seat. Boone Saxon got in back.

  Vi said, “Hello Boone.”

  Boone said, “Hello Vi.”

  “Questioned any agents in your sweatbox lately?”

  Gretchen said, “Shut up, Vi.”

  The Director’s limo passed them on the right and sped up the hill, heading for the parkway into Washington.

  Vi’s hands were on the steering wheel. She said, “Okay—where to?”

  Boone looked at Gretchen, who was staring stone-faced through the windshield.

  “Andrews,” Gretchen said.

  Vi threw it into drive and they set off.

  When they arrived at Andrews, Tashmo’s sporty pickup truck was blocking the no-standing zone outside the terminal and Vi had to stand the Taurus farther up the curb. Andrews was a busy place that night, the media streaming from the buses through the double doors where the base police would check their creds, sniff and search each piece of carry-on. Gretchen fetched her luggage from the trunk, following Boone into the lobby.

  Vi found a parking space by the dumpsters and the storm drains at the far end of the lot. She saw Herc Mercado zipping through on his yellow motorcycle. They crossed the lot together, Herc carrying his duffel on his shoulder and his suit bag on his arm, still wearing his motorcycle helmet, which was black and speckled silver like a bowling ball. He was describing his workout of that afternoon, twenty reps of twenty each of something very heavy. They saw Tashmo in the cab of the red pickup, fighting with his wife. Herc drummed on the hood just to be a dick, startling the Tashmos as he passed.

  A lone custodian ran a power waxer on the gleaming lobby floors, a scalloped pattern from the corner out. There were several stands of bolted seats, beige pillars, and tan walls. Most of the agents were already there, killing time, waiting for the VP to come out from Washington. O’Teen was standing with his bags, reading the thin parts of the Sunday Post. The comm techs were sitting in the chair area, working through a tricky signal-shielding problem. Gretchen was standing by the runway doors, talking on her cell phone, popping an antacid, one foot on her duffel bag, as if she had shot it in a hunt and was posing for a photograph.

  Vi and Herc dropped their bags at O’Teen’s feet. O’Teen was a ratty Philadelphian, a lovelorn ex-computer-dater and ruinous sports gambler. He lived alone in Arlington, where he had full cable and his mother and his bookie on speed dial. He liked to bet the NFL and always had a few dimes down by Sunday brunch. He also bet on baseball, college and the pros, though never on the Phillies because he loved the Phillies and he said you never bet on what you love. Late winter was his fallow time, post-football and pre-baseball, and he bet on what he could, hockey, hoops, and prizefights, ice dancing and the more important dog shows. The Personnel Division was always on O’Teen for his gambling. They probably would have dumped him from the detail if they could have found anyone in Crim willing to work ropelines twenty-eight days a month.

  Vi said, “What’s happening, O’T?”

  O’Teen chewed a fingernail as he read the sports page, checking the disabled lists. He said, “I’m fucked up, that’s what. They’re saying here Prince Rupprecht has the ague.”

  “Who’s he?” asked Herc.

  “Top-rated giant schnauzer. He kills ’em in deportment, a big hound with the moves of a poodle. Sidney gave me three to five at the Westminster. This throws the field wide open.”

  Tashmo came in grumpy from the parking lot. He said, “What’s going on?”

  “Prince Ague has the clap,” reported Herc. “Otherwise not much.”

  O’Teen handed Herc the sports page, keeping Arts & Leisure for himself. He was looking at some bets on the Palmolive-Rachmaninoff piano competition in St. Petersburg. Sidney the bookie would give him three to one on a hot Korean pianist, a rookie out of Juilliard, just turning pro.

  O’Teen said, “He kills ’em with impromptus and nocturnes. He’s got speed, power, soft hands—the whole package. He plays these long, warm, flowing melodic lines, with brilliant stacatti, like the young Horowitz. I saw him trash a Polish girl at the Cliburns last year.”

  An SUV pulled up in the parking lot. Sean Elias skipped around, opening the sliding side door. Five Elias children spilled onto the curb, lining up by height, it seemed, tallest first, the baby, number six, on the end in Mommy’s arms.
Sean’s family always drove him to the jumping-offs. Early, late, during school, in every kind of weather—they never missed a jumping-off. Sean went down the line, bending to kiss each kid, whispering a sentence to his son, his son, his son, his daughter, and his son, a kiss and then a whisper, then the baby and the wife. There was nothing special about the Eliases, but Vi liked watching them just the same. What did Sean Elias tell his children? Be good. Help your mother. Help your brother help your mother. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Good luck on the test. And to his wife—what fit into a whisper? I love your body and you in it. Look at what we made. Don’t forget the insulation.

  Elias crossed the lobby, suit bag on his shoulder. The SUV pulled through an arc and disappeared.

  “‘Evening,” said Elias, as if nothing had just happened.

  O’Teen was on the cell phone. “Sidney? Yeah, it’s you know who. Two dimes on Korea at the Rach.”

  The waxer waxed, the agents waited, several minutes passed. Vi was worried about Bobbie Taylor-Niles, who was always late, but even later tonight than she usually was. Vi paged Bobbie to her cell phone. As she waited for a callback, Vi walked between the pillars and looked out at the jet on the tarmac, blue under the belly, white across the top, black letters on the white, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Base police stood guard around the landing gear. A pygmy truck maneuvered the jetway stairs against the forward door, carefully, by nudges.

  O’Teen was reading Arts & Leisure, looking for something else to bet on. He said, “Who here knows anything about the Venice Biennale?”

  Herc turned to the scoreboard page. “What league are they in?”

  “It’s not a team, you mutt. It’s an invitational art tournament, kind of like the NCAAs of art. I went long last time on quirky intimate gesso washes and these doom-laden neo-Cornell boxes, betting with my heart. Sidney gave me juicy odds.”

  “What happened?”

  “I got killed.”

  The motorcade arrived, two limos, identical, and a line of Chevy Suburbans with blacked-out windows. Agents from a transit team fanned out from the vans, the usual close-order drill. They walked the VP through the lobby, out the doors, across the runway, up the jetway stairs, and past the airmen, who hopped into shoe-click salutes.

  Gretchen joined her crew, folding her cell phone. “Anybody heard from Bobbie?”

  Vi said, “She’ll be here.”

  Gretchen nodded, shouldering her bags. The agents followed her across the tarmac to the plane, zigzag single-file, listing to their duffel sides. The cold air woke them up.

  “She looks beautiful tonight,” said O’Teen in the wind. He meant the jet.

  The airmen knew their faces, but checked their IDs anyway.

  Bobbie made the jumping-off, but only barely, boarding after the press, the food, and the political riffraff. They climbed to cruising altitude, the seat belt sign went off, and Gretchen called Bobbie to the last row of the cabin. Bobbie got a sotto voce chewing-out as the plane banked over P.G. County, the pulsing grid beneath them.

  Up front, the boys were playing poker.

  “Everybody ante up,” Sean Elias said. Chips were tossed. Elias started dealing.

  The parade of aides began, a steward bearing dinner, a colonel bearing cables, Fundeberg bearing the latest gloomy polling from New Hampshire.

  Tashmo and Elias folded after the first raise. Herc bid O’Teen up to thirty bucks, then took his money with three eights.

  They were over Delaware when Boone Saxon stood up to deliver the threat roundup, a kind of global briefing to let the agents know what they might encounter in the crowds. Boone went down a list of known, suspected, or potential threats, summarizing each, the Arab specter from Quebec, the violent splinter right-to-lifers, the neo-Nazis, the militias in the north.

  Vi listened from the fifth row of the cabin. Boone, a senior hand, supervised the grading of incoming threats, chaired or shared the chair of three sensitive committees, and helped run ThreatNet, a vast database of people who think the government is watching them. Most of these threats came not from organized enemies of the United States, terror groups or protest groups or hostile foreign powers, but rather from the Eric Englebrechts and Leticia (Gomez) Joneses of the world, the lost souls and lone wolves, the drifters on the road, the un-or undermedicated schizophrenics who might or might not suffer what are known as ideations, as Boone called them, or forced thought, or paranoid thought syndrome, who might or might not also own a rifle or a pistol, or have access to explosives. The might-or-might-not aspect of the thing (the if of it, the X factor) was the bureaucratic urge behind ThreatNet, and its full-time staff of sixty agents and ninety-two civilian employees, and its budget (classified, but sizable, Vi knew). The letters came in (the postcards and the e-mails and the voice mails and the rest), creating by their mere existence, by their coming in, a need for institutional response, if only so that later, when something happened (if it did), the nation couldn’t say that Beltsville knew ahead of time and took no action. Most of what Boone described in his briefings to the team was mania, psychosis, sad mental disarrangement, people living with their parents, people sleeping under bridges, people riding Greyhounds fleeing voices in their heads, and it was easy to write these people off as merely maniacal (psychotic and pathetic, unable to organize a hot meal, much less a public murder), but then again, were any of them plainly crazier than Hinckley, who shot four men and nearly killed a president?

  Boone finished the roundup and sat down. Herc played poker until the others quit, then prowled the cabin with his belt undone. Bobbie read a pillow catalog until she fell asleep. Tashmo, starved for reading matter, slipped the catalog from her lap. He turned the pages and was soon asleep.

  Vi sat by the window, jutting her jaw to pop the blockage in her ears. She was thinking that she ought to go and see her brother, Jens, at some point in the next two days. The team would be in Portsmouth Monday night and Tuesday morning—maybe she could slip away for an hour somewhere along the line.

  Vi hadn’t seen Jens since the weekend after Hinman when the Service gave her stress-related leave. A lousy fucking visit—Vi shuddered, thinking of it. Vi’s mother, Evelyn, had moved to Florida by then—a town outside of Tampa with Plantation in its name; everyone played tennis and the weather was better for her knees—so Vi stayed with Jens and Peta and their kid. Jens was working at his war game, turning out his monster logic. Vi had come home to belong, to join the crowd for once, but she couldn’t stop scanning hands as they walked along the streets of the downtown that weekend. Jens caught her at it. He said, “Your eyes are always moving, Vi, like REM sleep only you’re awake—it’s giving me the creeps.” Vi denied it but she couldn’t stop, which only made her feel more like an outsider. Jens insisted that they go out to Santasket Road to celebrate Walter’s birthday with a picnic in the backyard. Jens had this vision of them picnicking and telling funny stories of the Coopers and the Buckerts and the bomber dads, and Kai, Jens’ son, blowing out the candles on a dead man’s birthday cake. Vi wanted no part of it and said so. Jens was offended—because he had this whole idea, a plan, his plan. Vi hadn’t seen the old house since Walter’s death, and it looked so small and ordinary she wanted to cry. Jens told Kai about Major Wade, the arrow through the tree. Jens kept asking Vi to join in, help tell these stories they both knew. Vi did not remember how it started, something led to something, and then Jens was saying—shouting—“Why did you even come back here, Vi? I feel like I don’t even know you.”

  Vi popped her ears, in and out, riding on the jet, steeling herself to work the crowds, to forget them all, Walter, Jens and Peta, to get herself to emptiness and vacant mode. Herc dropped without warning to the deck and did twenty clapping push-ups. Vi counted the claps without wanting to, staring out the porthole at the gray brainy softness of the clouds.

  Shaking hands, shaking hands, shaking hands, the VP moved along the ropes outside the airport Marriott in Manchester, New Hampshire. Tashmo had the lead foot, pulling as Vi pus
hed, scanning as she scanned. The VP was moving at a grazing pace, reaching out, reaching in, shaking hands in bunches, reeling off a continuous greeting, “Howyadoin howyadoin goodtaseeya howyadoin—”

  The comm was clear that night, no static and no breaks. Vi heard the pieces working, Bobbie, Gretchen, Herc, the snipers and the SWATs, all around the horn.

  Shadow hands in TV lights, the VP cried in steam, “Howyadoin goodtaseeya goodtaseeya howyadoin—”

  A woman swooned, “Ooo—there he is.”

  Vi saw a man in a Celtics’ hat, two kids with air horns, a mother with a child on her shoulders, pointing. Reporters shouted questions from the darkness—

  “Sir, is it true—?”

  “Sir, have you considered—?”

  “Sir, your polls are showing—”

  Photographers snapped pictures. A cameraman walked backwards, taping as he walked. Gretchen was on the top step of the hotel entrance, watching her perimeters, talking in Vi’s ear.

  O’T—

  Checking white male, red cap, like a stocking cap. He’s about mid-crowd, ten feet to your left.

  The snipers said, We have him.

  I’m near the guy, he’s homeless—this was O’Teen, plainclothes in the crowd.

  Right, said Gretchen. Can we get some troopers on him please?

  K.

  K for copy means I hear you.

  Seeing movement, roof area. Check it please, whoever’s closer. They’re hotel guys, security.

  K, okay. Tell ’em move back.

  Let me have that female script again—Bobbie in the crowd.

  Okay, we have a vehicle on the access ramp. Blue van and two males.

  O’T, say again.

  Do you have that?

  Say again.

  Female white, white ski parka, appears to be alone. She’s on bush line now, really pushing forward, guys.

  Van is media.

  Okay.

  Vi’s feet and legs were pushing, her pelvis to the VP’s flabby trousered thigh. If she saw the muzzle of a pistol coming up, a muzzle in the blur, she was trained to shout Gun gun and pivot on her outside leg and curl across the VP’s chest, pushing him backwards as she did. Tashmo, hearing Gun gun, would be curling too, and they would shove the VP stumbling to the fast extraction team, Gretchen, Herc, and Sean Elias on the steps, who, hearing Gun gun, would be rushing up. They drilled the move in Beltsville, pivot, curl, and backward shove, until it was muscle memory, as fast and natural as flinching.