John Gilstrap
High Treason
For my best friend, Joy
CHAPTER ONE
In all his seventeen years with the United States Secret Service, Special Agent Jason Knapp had never felt this out of place, this exposed. The January chill combined with his jumpy nerves to create a sense of dread that rendered every noise too loud, every odor too intense.
Rendered the night far too dark.
With his SIG Sauer P229 on his hip, and an MP5 submachine gun slung under his arm — not to mention his five teammates on Cowgirl’s protection detail — he couldn’t imagine a scenario that might get away from them, but sometimes you get that niggling voice in the back of your head that tells you that things aren’t right. Years of experience had taught Knapp to listen to that voice when it spoke.
Oh, that Mrs. Darmond would learn to listen to her protection detail. Oh, that she would listen to anyone.
While he himself rarely visited the White House residence, stories abounded among his colleagues that Cowgirl and Champion fought like banshees once the doors were closed. She never seemed to get the fact that image mattered to presidents, and that First Ladies had a responsibility to show a certain decorum.
Clearly, she didn’t care.
These late-night party jaunts were becoming more and more routine, and Knapp was getting sick of them. He understood that she rejected the traditional role of First Lady, and he got that despite her renown she wanted to have some semblance of a normal life, but the steadily increasing risks she took were flat-out irresponsible.
Tonight was the worst of the lot.
It was one thing to dash out to a bar on the spur of the moment with a reduced protection detail — first spouses and first children had done that for decades — but to insist on a place like the Wild Times bar in Southeast DC was a step too far. It was five steps too far.
Great disguise notwithstanding, Cowgirl was a white lady in very dark part of town. And it was nearly one in the morning. Throw in all those bodies floating in Lake Michigan from the as yet unresolved East-West Airlines explosion last week, and you had a recipe for disaster.
Knapp stood outside the main entrance to the club, shifting from foot to foot to ward away the cold. Charlie Robinson flanked the other side of the door, and together they looked like the plain-clothed version of the toy soldiers that welcomed children to the FAO Schwarz toy store in Manhattan. He felt at least that conspicuous.
Twenty feet away, Cowgirl’s chariot, an armored Suburban, idled in the handicapped space at the curb, its tailpipe adding a cloud of condensation to the night. Inside the chariot, Gene Tomkin sat behind the wheel, no doubt reveling in the warmth of the cab. Bill Lansing enjoyed similar bragging rights in the follow car that waited in the alley behind the bar.
Typical of OTR movements — off the record — the detail had chosen silver Suburbans instead of the black ones that were so ubiquitous to official Washington, in hopes of drawing less attention to themselves. They’d driven here just like any other traffic, obeying stoplights and using turn signals the whole way. On paper that meant that you remained unnoticed.
But a Suburban was a Suburban, and if you looked hard enough you could see the emergency lights behind the windows and the grille. Throw in the well-dressed white guys standing like toy soldiers, and they might as well have been holding flashing signs.
In these days of Twitter and Facebook, when rumors traveled at the speed of light, all it would take for this calm night to turn to shit would be for somebody to connect some very obvious dots. While the good citizens of the District of Columbia had more or less unanimously cast their votes to sweep Champion into office, they’d since turned against him. It didn’t stretch Knapp’s imagination even a little to envision a spontaneous protest.
Then again, Cowgirl was such a media magnet that he could just as easily envision a spontaneous TMZ feeding frenzy. Neither option was more attractive than the other in this neighborhood.
The Wild Times was doing a hell of a business. The main act on the stage was a rapper of considerable local fame — or maybe he was a hip-hopper (how do you tell the difference?) — and he was drawing hundreds of twentysomething kids. Within the last twenty minutes, the pace of arrivals had picked up — and almost nobody was leaving.
From a tactical perspective, the two agents inside with Cowgirl — Peter Campbell and Dusty Binks, the detail supervisor — must have been enduring the tortures of the damned. In an alternate world where the First Lady might have given a shit, no one would have been allowed to touch the protectee, but in a nightclub situation, where the headliner’s fans paid good money to press closer to the stage, preventing personal contact became nearly impossible.
For the most part, the arriving revelers projected a pretty benign aura. It was the nature of young men to swagger in the presence of their girlfriends, and with that came a certain tough-guy gait, but over the years Knapp had learned to trust his ability to read the real thing from the imitation. Over the course of the past hour, his warning bells hadn’t rung even once.
Until right now.
A clutch of four guys approached from the north, and everything about them screamed malevolence. It wasn’t just the gangsta gait and the gangsta clothes. In the case of the leader in particular, it was the eyes. Knapp could see the glare from twenty feet away. This guy wanted people to be afraid of him.
“Do you see this?” he asked Robinson without moving his eyes from the threat.
Robinson took up a position on Knapp’s right. “Handle it carefully,” he warned. More than a few careers had been wrecked by YouTube videos of white cops challenging black citizens.
As the kids closed to within a dozen feet, Knapp stepped forward. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “You know, it’s pretty crowded inside.”
“The hell outta my way,” the leader said. He started to push past, but Knapp body-blocked him. No hands, no violence. He just physically blocked their path.
“Look at the vehicle,” Knapp said, nodding to the Suburban. “Take a real close look.”
Their heads turned in unison, and they seemed to get it at the same instant.
“If any of you are armed, this club is exactly the last place you want to be right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“What?” the leader said. “Is it like the president or something?”
Knapp ignored the question. “Here are your choices, gentlemen. You can go someplace else, or you can submit to a search right here on the street. If I find a firearm on any of you, I’ll arrest you all, and your mamas won’t see their boys for about fifteen years. Which way do you want to go?”
Simple, respectful, and face-saving.
“Come on, Antoine,” one of them said. “This place sucks anyway.”
Antoine held Knapp’s gaze for just long enough to communicate his lack of fear. Then he walked away, taking his friends with him.
“Nicely done, Agent Knapp,” Robinson said.
They returned to their posts. “Every time we do one of these late-night OTRs, I’m amazed by the number of people who keep vampire hours. Don’t these kids have jobs to wake up for?”
Robinson chuckled. “I figure they all drive buses or hazmat trucks.”
With the Antoine non-confrontation behind them, Knapp told himself to relax, but in the world of gang-bangers, you always had to be on your toes for the retaliatory strike. He couldn’t imagine that Antoine and his crew would be in the mood to take on federal agents, but you never knew.
He just wanted to get the hell out of here.
“Look left,” Robinson said.
Half a block away, a scrawny, filthy little man was doing his best to navigate a shopping cart around the corner to join their little slice of the world. The cart overflowed with blankets and assorted stuff — the totality of his worldly possessions, Knapp imagined. Aged somewhere between thirty and eighty, this guy had the look of a man who’d been homeless for decades. There’s a hunched movement to the chronically homeless that spoke of a departure of all hope. It would be heartbreaking if they didn’t smell so bad.