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 new 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.
The smell of her mother’s hair was making Gretchen hungry, which made her think of eating, sleep, energy, and weight. She was coming off a solid year of food-verb events on the campaign trail, corn-boils, fish-frys, wiener-roasts, bean-bakes, salad-tosses. She snacked at these events, ate McDonald’s in between, kept it going with black coffee, sixteen cups a day, and then there was the hassle and the worry and the stress, calls at three a.m. from Fundeberg, the hairy aging wunderkind, the VP’s freewheeling campaign genius. Fundeberg, who never slept or needed to, apparently, never wore a coat outdoors even in Storm Lake that time just after New Year’s when the mechanisms froze in the agents’ sidearms and they had to warm their guns before they worked the crowd. Fundeberg would call her hotel room with some new instance of his brilliance, a way to break the figurative wall between the VP and true contact with the people. He would call at three a.m. and say, “Gretchen, are you sleeping?” and often, surprisingly, she wasn’t. She would listen long enough to veto his latest proposed stunt (no, the VP can’t raid a crack house with the cops; no, he can’t spend a night homeless in Detroit to dramatize the plight of the homeless in Detroit; no, he can’t drive in the demolition derby; no, he can’t sponsor an elementary school essay contest, with the winner being “agent for a day”). Eating made her heavy, slow, and weak; coffee kept her up, which made her sleepy, slow, and weak, and over time she lost the will to veto, and Fundeberg began to take control of where they went.