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  When Dr. Weiss retired, the president was in the first year of his second term and gunning for a Nobel Prize. They didn’t say which prize, but Gretchen, then a presidential bodyguard, had assumed it wasn’t physics. The president was traveling to every fucked-up, war-torn corner of the world, Israel and Palestine, Bosnia and Kosovo, and other places which, though not formally war-torn, were very, very tense, Ireland and Ireland, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan (one side had a bomb named Shiva, the other had a bomb named something equally scary, much scarier than Fat Man and Little Boy and look at all the damage they had done), and going to these places with a sitting president was very, very tense. Gretchen remembered the flight from Islamabad to Delhi, brown earth and the running shadow of the jet. She was looking out the portholes at the roads and villages for the flash of missile-launch and wondering, how many Pakistanis want us dead? It was perfect somehow—the depth and crispness of the hate, like a big blue sky. There were other things going on in Gretchen’s life around that time. She was a single mother and her son, a boy named Tevon, a fine boy and a good boy and a kind one, she believed, was having problems at his school, acting out and talking back, even, once or twice, hitting other kids, and once making fun of a girl in a wheelchair. Gretchen, returning from a peace trip, didn’t know the words to tell her son how wrong it was to pick on a crippled kid, and it was the only time she ever hit him hard. She hit him because she didn’t know the words. She hit him in the bedroom, in the head, and he kind of sailed across the bed, and she felt sick, watching this. Two weeks later, they went to Pakistan.

  She had the kind of life in which you could easily go three years without a checkup, and so when the Director of the Secret Service called her in and offered her promotion to lead agent/chief-of-detail to the VP’s team, she said no and flatly no—it was just too much. Gretchen knew that the VP would be running for president and that his entourage would be on the road six days out of seven for eighteen months on end, rallies, speeches, koffee klatches, nine and ten events a day. His campaign agents would be sleeping on the plane, working ropelines in their dreams. Pakistan was bad, but Iowa was worse. You walk up Main Street in a farm town, shaking every hand, people coming out of every shop and doorway. They mob your man, hug him, slap his back, and you have no idea who these people are.

  She had worked the presidential cycle when the president himself was up for reelection and it was fairly brutal for a while, but the president didn’t have to fight inside the party and they coasted through the Super Tuesday states. The travel didn’t fire up until July, and then there was a crisis in the Middle East and two ugly budget showdowns with the Senate in September, and they had a fine excuse to stay in Washington, which was excellent for Gretchen, because her son had started at the special school that fall, and she could drive him there most mornings like a normal single mom, and have a little talk along the way, good and evil and don’t forget your lunch.

  The Director tried to talk her into accepting the promotion. He said it wasn’t clear that the VP was definitely running (which was horseshit—it was clear; the guy had nine PACs by then and two different exploratory committees, and what were they exploring, outer space?) The Director sidestepped most of this and said, flatteringly, that he thought she showed great promise as a boss. There were only sixteen humans in the world under the protection of the Secret Service—the president, first lady, and first daughter, the VP and the second family, ex-presidents and ex–first family members (imagine that, the Director said, an entire agency organized around sixteen beating hearts)—and sixteen lives meant sixteen details, and, as the Director pointed out, chief-of-detail slots did not come open every week.

  “I like you,” he said. “You keep them dawgies moving, Gretch. I admire that. I see you as the sort of fine young female type minority supervisor who could pretty much write his or her own ticket in this Service, maybe be directress in her own right one day, given six or seven years and a well-hung rabbi, meaning me, I mean. I’d hate to see you make a shit career move here. Think it over, Gretch.”

  It was a remarkable speech, clever and pathetic all at once. No one called her Gretch, for one thing, and she wasn’t really all that young. She had been an L.A. cop for twelve years before she took the test for Treasury enforcement, and was actually quite old for a GS-11, her pay grade at the time, and looked even older than she was, her dreads gone lank and gray, lines around her eyes, a couple extra pounds on her butt and thighs. The business about female and minority was more on the pathetic side, and Gretchen happened to know that he had given the same speech to Debbie Escobedo-Waas when he’d offered her the job of VP’s chief-of-detail. Debbie was the only other woman of color above the rank of GS-10. Above GS-10 or so, the Service, like a mountain, grew white as snow and also very cold.

  Gretchen thought it over in the Director’s office. She was not averse to moving up. It would mean a couple pay steps, for one thing, fifteen grand a year, and she was saving nothing as an 11, but then again she had a son, a troubled son it seemed. She couldn’t travel with a candidate, not ten events a day for eighteen months. Even Debbie Escobedo-Waas couldn’t handle that and she was only thirty-one, and childless, and had that sexy little dress size that she was so proud of, and ran five miles on her lunch hour every day, six hundred laps of the Rose Garden. Gretchen said no again to the promotion.

  “You leave me no choice then,” the Director said. “I’ll send you and your son back to L.A. if you don’t take the job.”

  Gretchen learned that day just how cold it was on the white part of the mountain. She also learned that the Director was not a spineless moron as so many people thought. No, he was actually quite tough and crafty in his way, because he had somehow figured out the one thing in his power that she was afraid of: a transfer to Los Angeles. She was afraid of Los Angeles, specifically afraid, as children are afraid of basements. She was not afraid of San Diego, or anything north of maybe Oxnard or Bakersfield or something. She was a native Los Angeleno (Watts, to be exact), and growing up she had never been above Santa Monica, nor much south of Seal Beach (her mother had a nephew in the Navy there and they’d visited him once before he went to Vietnam). She had never seen the other side of the San Gabriels, the mountain bowl around her world—you couldn’t see the mountains through the smog, but everybody knew that the city was so smoggy because of the mountains, and so the smog was daily proof of what it obscured. She didn’t get around much as a kid and even now her grasp of geography was a little iffy. She wasn’t absolutely certain that she was not afraid of let’s say Chino or Simi or Snapple Valley—wasn’t that a town across the mountains or did she make it up? Going down to San Diego or up as far as Oxnard, she was doing fine, but in between, the smoggy nether, she was starting to get scared. Debbie Escobedo-Waas was a Californian too, but she was the other kind of Californian, the brainless, energetic kind, the kind who didn’t sense Armageddon on the way. This was probably because Debbie came from the Valley, another hazy concept, not the inner city, where the truth was like a bus line and it ran right past your house. Gretchen was old enough to remember the riots, the first riots of her life, 1965, which they always called the riots down in Watts, until they had another riot in the ’90s and had to start naming them for clarity’s sake. Debbie wasn’t even born in 1965, and even if she had been alive and thinking, how much could she have seen from San Fernandoland? Gretchen, at the epicenter, didn’t see that much in 1965. She was at her aunt’s house, three bedrooms and a patch of dust in back and a dog named Goblin on a chain. Gretchen always went to her aunt’s after school and in the summer to play with her cousins and the dog until her mother came back from work.

  Gretchen’s mother, Mildred Williams, worked in the cafeteria at Paramount Pictures, mostly on the pie line, sometimes on the drink line. She was never on the carving board, a station of prestige reserved for a man of chefly gravitas, and she never filled a salad bar. By the time salad bars came into vogue, Mildred Williams was a lunch cashier and too se
nior for the salad bar. There was a separate canteen for the celebrities at Paramount. Gretchen’s mother fed the grips and secretaries, took their nickels, took their dimes, slapped a roll of quarters against the edge of the cash register drawer, and all the quarters spilled into the quarter section of the drawer. Mildred Williams was a stylish cashier, a saved, believing Christian, and a fixture at the cafeteria. She knew all of the celebrities, though she never fed them—Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, even the Mills Brothers going back a ways. Mildred Williams, being the old-fashioned sort, only believed in black achievement, black success, black celebrities. To her, it was as if Henry Fonda had never happened, as if Marilyn Monroe had been a big celebrity to fish or to some other species on some distant planetoid, because the biggest star on earth was clearly Sidney Poitier, such a handsome man and so polite. Mildred Williams and her sisters and her cousins out of Houston were churchy women, all of them, and basically southern, and they got along, Gretchen thought, by ignoring everything they didn’t like, or didn’t get, or believed had not been made for them, and they didn’t covet it, or care, or really notice in their hearts, and this was the world that blew up in the riots.

  Gretchen’s father, Joseph Williams, drove an airfreight truck out of LAX (some line you never heard of and the trucks were always breaking down). He had been over the mountains many times, down to Mexico on runs, up to Alaska with the Army. He knew many words in Eskimo, including “Aleut,” their word for Eskimo, which means “people,” because, he said, they lived up there in isolation thinking they were the only people in creation until 1941 or so. Her father did not believe in celebrities, black, white, or purple polka-dot, he always said, because the Eskimos had none and got along just fine. Gretchen thought, looking back, that her father was a smart man, a scholar of the highways, and he was not a mean drunk or a loud one. The more he drank, the less he was anything at all. She never saw him drink, or drunk, because he always went away to drink, two days, three days, a week or two at most, which was how he lost the trucker job. After that he had no job and he went away. Then he had a job cutting grass at USC, watering the grass until it needed to be cut, but he drank instead of watering, and then he went away, and then he got a job at a TV and appliance store on Slauson in South Watts, starting in the stockroom, becoming a salesman on the floor because he knew a lot and could really talk.

  Gretchen was at her aunt’s house with Goblin and her cousins when the riots hit. The backyard had a slat fence and the main thing she remembered was the smoke, the smell of smoke, like charcoal at a barbecue, the smell before the sight, and the sound of sirens, cops and firefighters, far away, converging on the street from six directions, then not getting closer, as if stuck in traffic, then the smoky smell became a haze, a yellow tint, barely visible, and her eyes were hurting, and by then the sirens were getting smaller, like the white dot on TV, a zip into the distance and it’s gone. Her aunt made all the children go inside and told Gretchen that her mother couldn’t come because the buses had stopped running.

  Her mother came the next day but her father never did. Something in the riot set him off. They got a letter from him when Gretchen was in high school. He said that he’d been living in Spokane. Later, she heard that he was dead in Denver, not Spokane. She heard this separately from three different cousins on her father’s side and she figured it was true. One cousin said that he was working at a dog track when he died, another said that he was living in a shelter, a third said that he was actually cleaned up and bigamously married. Gretchen thought that all of these things were probably true at one point or another.

  Gretchen was an LAPD sergeant when she heard the news of her father’s death. She was on patrol, a night graduate of college, still living with her mother. She was dating a detective at the time, a slick and nimble figure in the station house. They dated for three years and Gretchen thought they were engaged, in word if not in ring, from the way they always talked about a future when his divorce was finally final. Then came Rodney King, the beating in slow motion, the brutality acquittal in Ventura (which they always called the verdict in L.A., until there was another verdict later in the decade), and the second riot in 1991 (after which they named the riots), and Gretchen was standing on the Harbor Freeway with a hundred other cops, watching her city burn again, knowing she was pregnant by the slick detective. Her life became quite focused as she watched the smoke. Her sole ambition at that moment, and at every moment since, was to raise a son to manhood who would never see his city burn. She took the next fed exam—it happened to be Treasury—and came east with her mother and her baby, Tevon Joseph Williams.

  She did a trainee tour in Crim, D.C.-Metro station, and was sent to Beltsville for reeducation as a bodyguard. She spent ninety days in Beltsville learning the theory and practice of what they called the Dome, the cities of security in which each protectee moves and never dies. They trained the bodyguards at the Protection Campus, low buildings on a quadrangle, the Plans Pavilion, Movements, the Threat Assessment Center (most of it computer, cooled and highly dustproof), Technical Support, Psych Services, the Weapo School, and the mock-up parking lot (right next to the real parking lot) where the agents practiced what they did in parking lots, all of it quite modern, post-1963, when the budget for bodyguards zuptupled overnight. The campus behind fences in the corn of Maryland was the heart and soul and brain of the entire protectocracy.

  The great mind of that time, the Einstein of this Princeton, was Senior Plans Analyst Lloyd L. Felker, veteran of Carter, veteran of Reagan, veteran of Hinckley, author of fifty-seven seminal white papers known collectively at Beltsville as the Certainties, the basic text on every operational topic: signal integrity, the encrypted comm, bafflers and jamming, set-prepping and site-checking, optimal bomb-dogging given crowd size n, snipers, spotters, counter-snipers, counter-sniper-spotter teams. Felker was the man who saw the Dome on long reflective walks around the quad, who saw the Dome and wrote it down over twenty years, and who watched the Service, with its budgets and its muscle, make his writing real. Felker’s methodology, his quirk or tic of mind, was to work backwards, to counterplan, to imagine an assassin and defeat him in advance, to plug every hole, shore up every weakness, until none remained, and this was safety. It was a bit like lying to cover up a lie you had told to cover up your lying. Felker’s tic of mind became, in a sense, the instinctive constitution of the agency, which in turn became a way of life for those who lived within it. A lot of it was jive, Gretchen decided, sitting through long lectures in the amphitheater, lanky Felker at the blackboard, chalking diagrams, cones and vectors, many little arrows, but she didn’t care because the job was Washington, a world away from whatever was written in the book of urban futures for Los Angeles, some brew of earthquakes, deadlocked freeways, gangs, and power outages, and her son was safe, not just from riot or the shock waves of the riot (which had set her father on the road and had sent his daughter fleeing east), but also from the vision of a city burning—a thing her son would never see.

  She could not explain her closet Caliphobia to anyone, not to her mother, not to Debbie Escobedo-Waas, native of the outerlying nowhere, so proud of her dress size and of her husband, the podiatrist (he had treated Debbie for her hammertoe from all those laps around the White House, and they had found that they had a lot in common, a love of animals and a taste for sweaters—marriage followed). She could not explain her fear to the Director, the whitest white man on the mountain (except perhaps for Lloyd L. Felker), and so she was amazed (and, later, when she calmed down, quite impressed) that he had somehow figured out her weak point, the hole in her personal Dome, which was her maternal terror of L.A.

  The Director said (with a little smirk) that either she signed on as VP’s lead and chief-of-detail or else he would find her something cozy in the SoCal station, chasing porn stars with fake twenties out to Rancho Cucamonga as she listens to the ticking in the sky.

  Gretchen wavered.

  The Director said that Debbie Escobedo-Waas, his n
ew executive assistant, had already drawn up orders to L.A.

  She wavered and he said, “I’ve picked the VP’s team, crack agents all of them, except for Bobbie Taylor-Niles. You know Bobbie Niles, the diva of Protection? She’s on the first daughter’s detail presently, but there was an incident of some kind in the Lincoln Bedroom, and now the first lady wants her gone pronto. I’m sure you’ll be whipping Agent Niles into shape, but let’s not dwell on it, Gretch, because I have great news: your deputy lead agent will be Lloyd L. Felker.”

  Gretchen wavered, overwhelmed—Felker, Mr. Theory, in the field?

  The Director said, “It’s settled then. Someday, Gretchen Williams, when you are directress, I’m sure you’ll find a way to pay me back for this.”

  Gretchen listened to the Sunday-morning sounds of home, her mother in the bathroom humming as she primped for church, a zot of hairspray, water from the faucet, soft gospel on the radio. Gretchen lay in bed, looking at the plaster cracks in the ceiling. With all her travel, it was always weird to wake up in a room she recognized.

  Mildred Williams appeared in the doorway, her hair in curlers, gooped up with a gel that smelled like melted cheese. “When did you get in?” she asked.

  “Pretty late,” said Gretchen.

  It was four days after Iowa, the crucial party caucus, three days before the New Hampshire primary. The VP was running even in the polls, fighting for his skin against his only rival for the nomination, a do-good former senator, the darling of reform. Gretchen had the blanket over one eye, peeking at her mother with the other.