His plan when he’d woken up that morning had been pretty mundane. Hit Home Depot to pick up some lumber for Maggie’s gate and then get some ribs on the smoker. Maybe extend a last-minute dinner invitation to Skip McMahon. The retired FBI agent was full of entertaining stories and there was at least a fifty-fifty chance he’d drink too much and fall asleep in his barbecue sauce. Always good for a laugh.
But then Rapp had called with his cryptic request.
Hey, Mas. Would you mind driving toward DC about an hour or so before the president’s rally? Then, when he goes onstage, park your truck by the side of the road and run into the forest with a sniper rifle?
Why?
No reason.
What forest?
Don’t care.
How long do I have to stay out there?
I dunno. Half an hour?
Not that it was the strangest request Rapp had ever made of him. That prize would probably go to the time he’d handed him a suitcase full of cash and told him to purchase—then temporarily manage—a brothel outside of Fez, Morocco.
In retrospect, not the worst job he’d ever had. Not by a long shot.
He grabbed another beer from the refrigerator next to his grill before carefully arranging lettuce, tomato, and a roasted green chili on a bun he’d just finished toasting. After putting a slice of cheddar on the patty, he drained the can in one long pull and went in for another.
The cheese was barely starting to melt when he heard a hum overhead. Apparently, the surveillance drone operator was no longer under orders to be subtle. It slowed to a hover over the patio, turned on a spotlight, and focused it on him. Maslick put his spatula down and raised the middle finger of his newly freed hand.
The clock was ticking.
He slid his burger onto the patty and began wolfing it down. A little rarer than he liked, but he ground his own steak, so not bad. The cheddar still had a little tooth, though. And in his haste, he’d completely forgotten the onion slices lying on his kitchen counter.
As Rapp had predicted, the sound of cars roaring up his driveway became audible a few moments later. He kept cramming the burger in his mouth as men armed with assault rifles approached from both sides of the house. The exact models were impossible to discern in the semidarkness but that was less important than the fact that they were all pointed in his direction.
“Put your hands where I can see them!” someone shouted.
Maslick jammed the rest of his dinner in his mouth and then obeyed the command. When he spoke, the burger made his words nearly unintelligible.
“What seems to be the problem, Officer?”
Catherine Cook was clicking through the news channels in the White House residence, stopping whenever she saw a video of her husband being dragged offstage. It had been hours ago, but the clips were still saturating every media outlet from cable television to Twitter to Facebook. She hit the pause button a split second before the lead Secret Service man reached him, and took in how small he looked. How frightened and weak.
Apparently, he had been taken directly to one of the new fortified locations that Rapp and Kennedy knew nothing about and was now on his way back to the White House.
For what it was worth.
She lowered herself into a chair, staring silently at that frozen image until the door opened. Her husband walked across the wood floor and stopped behind her. He didn’t seem to have anything to say. But she did.
“You can steal, Tony. You can lie. Cheat. You can even pursue policies that destroy the lives of your own constituents.” She pointed to the screen. “What you can’t do, is look like that.”
“Sam’s already working on a story about an operation I’m carrying out against ISIS. We’re going to say that we received information that they were planning an attack. Darren’s feeding the FBI disinformation about an Egyptian immigrant studying at Georgetown. They’re going to pick him up tomorrow. It’ll have more impact if we can put a face on it.”
Again, she pointed to the TV. “You have put a face on it, Tony. That’s going to be your next opponent’s campaign poster.”
“Joe Maslick—”
“I heard,” she interrupted. “How far from that venue was he? Still an hour? With traffic an hour and a half? What exactly was the threat again?”
“You have no idea,” Cook responded defensively. “Killing is all Mitch Rapp and his people do. We can’t afford to take chances.”
She held up an eight-by-ten photo depicting Joe Maslick flipping off a surveillance drone. “He’s toying with you, Tony. How much more obvious could it be? He wanted to make a fool out of you and to make you pull back from the public even more. What Rapp wants is for you to lose the next election. Because once you’re out of the White House, you’re defenseless.”