‘Why the lighting towers?’ asked Connor, avoiding his question.
‘Because that’s where the Secret Service’s Special Agent in Charge will be stationed, and I want to find out what the job’s really like.’
‘Why?’ asked Connor, folding up his paper. This was clearly not a conversation he could easily cut short.
‘I’m thinking about joining them when I leave college. I’ve already taken the graduate training course, but I want to see them working at close quarters. An agent told me the one job nobody wants is taking meals up to the guys on the lighting platforms behind the end zones. All those steps scare them off.’
All 172 of them, thought Connor, who had dismissed the idea of the lighting towers early on, not because of the steps, but because there was no escape route. Brad started to tell him his life story, and by the time Connor reached the front of the queue he knew which school the boy had been to, that he was now a senior at Georgetown studying criminology — that made him think of Maggie — and why he still couldn’t decide whether to join the Secret Service or be a lawyer. ‘Next,’ said a voice. Connor turned round to the man seated behind a trestle table.
‘What have you got left?’ Connor asked.
‘Not much,’ said the man, looking down at a list covered with ticks.
‘Anything in catering?’ asked Connor. Like Brad, he knew exactly where he wanted to be.
‘Washing dishes or serving meals to employees around the stadium is all I’ve got left.’
‘That will be just fine.’
‘Name?’
‘Dave Krinkle,’ said Connor.
‘ID?’
Connor handed over a driver’s licence. The man filled in a security pass and a photographer stepped forward and took a Polaroid of Connor, which seconds later was laminated onto the pass.
‘OK, Dave,’ the man said, handing it over. ‘This pass will get you everywhere inside the stadium except the high-security area, which includes the executive suites, the club boxes and the VIP section. You won’t need to go there anyway.’ Connor nodded and clipped the pass onto his sweater. ‘Report to Room 47, directly below Block H.’ Connor moved off to the left. He knew exactly where Room 47 was.
‘Next.’
It took him a lot longer to get through the three security checks, including the magnetometer, than it had the previous day, as they were now manned by Secret Service personnel rather than the usual rentacops. Once Connor was inside the stadium, he ambled slowly along the inner walkway, past the museum and under a red banner declaring ‘HAIL VICTORY’, until he came to a stairway with an arrow pointing down to ‘Room 47, Private Catering’. Inside the small room at the foot of the stairs he found a dozen men lounging around. They all looked as if they were familiar with the routine. He recognised one or two who had been standing in the line in front of him. No one else in the room looked as if they didn’t need the money.
He took a seat in a corner and returned to the Post, rereading a preview of the afternoon’s game. Tony Kornheiser thought it would be nothing less than a miracle if the Redskins beat the Packers — the finest team in the country. In fact, he was predicting a twenty-point margin. Connor was hoping for a totally different outcome.
‘OK,’ said a voice, ‘pay attention.’ Connor looked up to see a huge man wearing a chef’s uniform standing in front of them. He was about fifty, with an enormous double chin, and must have weighed over 250 pounds.
‘I’m the catering manager,’ he said, ‘and as you can see, I represent the glamour end of the business.’ One or two of the old hands laughed politely.
‘I can offer you two choices. You either wash dishes or you serve stadium employees and security guys stationed around the stadium. Any volunteers for the dishes?’ Most of the men in the room put their hands up. Dishwashing, Pug had explained, was always popular because not only did the washers get the full rate of $10 an hour, but for some of them the leftovers from the executive boxes were the best meal they had all week.
‘Good,’ he said, picking out five of them and writing down their names. When he had completed the list, he said, ‘Now, waiting. You can either serve the senior staff or the security personnel. Senior staff?’ he said, looking up from his clipboard. Almost all the remaining hands shot up. Again the catering manager wrote down five names. When he’d finished, he tapped his clipboard. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Everyone on the list can now report to work.’ The old pros rose from their seats and shuffled past him, through a door that Connor knew led to the kitchens. Only he and Brad were still in the room.
‘I’ve got two jobs left in Security,’ said the catering manager. ‘One great, one lousy. Which one of you is going to get lucky?’ He looked hopefully at Connor, who nodded and placed a hand in his back pocket.
The catering manager walked up to him, not even glancing at Brad, and said, ‘I have a feeling you’d prefer the comfort of the JumboTron.’
‘Right first time,’ said Connor, slipping him a hundred-dollar bill.
‘Just as I thought,’ said the catering manager, returning his smile.
Connor said nothing as the fat man pocketed the cash, exactly as Pug had predicted he would.
That man had been worth every cent of his fee.
‘I should never have invited him in the first place,’ Tom Lawrence growled as he boarded Marine One to take him from the White House to the Redskins’ stadium.
‘And I have a feeling that our problems aren’t over yet,’ said Andy Lloyd, strapping himself into his seat.
‘Why? What else can go wrong?’ asked Lawrence as the helicopter blades slowly began to rotate.
‘There are still two public events before Zerimski returns to Russia, and my bet is that Fitzgerald will be waiting for us at one of them.’
‘This evening shouldn’t be a problem,’ said Lawrence. Ambassador Pietrovski has told the Secret Service on countless occasions that his people are quite capable of protecting their own President. In any case, who would take that sort of risk with so much security around?’
‘The normal rules don’t apply to Fitzgerald,’ said Lloyd. ‘He doesn’t work by the book.’
The President glanced down at the Russian Embassy. ‘It would be hard enough just getting into that building,’ he said, ‘without having to worry about how you’d get out of it.’
‘Fitzgerald wouldn’t have the same trouble this afternoon, in a stadium holding nearly eighty thousand spectators,’ replied Lloyd. ‘That’s one place he would find it easy to slip in and out of.’
‘Don’t forget, Andy, there’s only a thirteen-minute window when any problem could arise. Even then, everybody in the stadium will have passed through the magnetometers, so there’s no way anyone could get a penknife in, let alone a gun.’
‘You think Fitzgerald doesn’t know that?’ said Lloyd as the helicopter swung east. ‘It’s not too late to cancel that part of the programme.’
‘No,’ said Lawrence firmly. ‘If Clinton could stand in the middle of the Olympic Stadium in Atlanta for the opening ceremony, I can do the same in Washington for a football game. Damn it, Andy, we live in a democracy, and I’m not going to allow our lives to be dictated to in that way. And don’t forget that I’ll be out there, taking exactly the same risk as Zerimski.’
‘I accept that, sir,’ said Lloyd. ‘But if Zerimski were to be assassinated, no one would praise you for standing by his side, least of all Helen Dexter. She’d be the first to point out...’
Who do you think will win this afternoon, Andy?’ asked the President.
Lloyd smiled at a ploy his boss often fell back on if he didn’t wish to continue discussing an unpalatable subject. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he replied. ‘But until I saw how many of my staff were trying to cram themselves into the advance cars this morning, I had no idea we had so many Skins fans working at the White House.’