Her Secret Service (Jane Roe 1), Jason Letts [story reading .txt] 📗

he’d just found a hundred-dollar bill on the ground. He’d fooled the Secret Service, and now he was going to send them down a rabbit hole they’d never climb out of.

Only a noob wouldn’t have thought to cement a tip from an innocent third party, and Oliver had more of them than he could count. There were the fake accounts he controlled, but that was just the beginning. He’d convinced more than a few older people to give him their passwords under the pretense of official investigative reporting. Not only would they lack any information at all for this Nathan Carr, they wouldn’t even be able to remember sending him the message about the threat, because they never had.

And all of it was done with disguised ISP addresses or straight from the user’s own machine using programs like TeamViewer. Everything was perfectly untraceable, and the threat was gaining a higher profile after being aired in a web video interview and a call from the Secret Service.

After checking off another box on his mental to-do list, he was getting closer to the moment when he pulled the trigger.

4

Catocin Mountain Park

Hauvers, MD

The wind coming through the open window tousled Jane’s hair as the car cruised around the roughly ten-mile loop at Camp David at exactly twenty-five miles per hour. Snow still crept against the edges of the road and the first buds had yet to appear on the trees, but they needed to prepare for the president’s Saturday morning rides, and that meant a handful of agents were on road bikes attempting to keep up with the car and avoid small patches of ice after a frosty night.

“They’re falling behind,” said Agent Diwecki from the other end of the back seat. He had the same job Jane did organizing and preparing for the president’s upcoming security needs.

In Jane’s humble opinion, Diwecki was one of the few people she’d come across at the Secret Service who took the clandestine nature of their work too far. Thin to the point where the suits he wore seemed like they were still on the rack, he never once let slip anything resembling a personal comment. She didn’t know where he lived, where he was from, what he liked, or even what his first name was. Sometimes being impersonal could be taken to a fault.

“Give them a chance,” she said, but she had to twist herself pretty far around to catch a glimpse of even the leading rider, who was standing on the bike in a desperate sprint he wouldn’t be able to maintain for long. Some of the others had already disappeared out of sight behind the last turn. She only needed two to be able to ride with the president in addition to any accompanying vehicles.

At least they were miles away from public roads and President Morrin’s rides would be kept off his public schedule, meaning there’d be no chance of encountering other people.

“Looks like we’ll be hiring from the U.S. Olympic team for this,” Diwecki said. Jane refused to look at him and cringed at his quick dismissal of the other agents.

“We’ve got a couple more weeks to get ready,” she said, though it was fairly possible they’d be paying a pair of them almost exclusively to train to be cyclists.

Some static came through on the radio, followed by a gasping, huffing voice.

“Are you sure you’re only going twenty-five?” Agent Dedan groaned, and Jane turned around in her seat to see him about twenty meters behind the car now. They were coming up to a big hill that could very well require him to get off the bike and walk to the top.

“It’s on cruise control,” she said, though surely Morrin didn’t mean that he rode at this pace even up the hills. It struck her that he then had to be riding even faster on the flats than they were modeling.

“The trick is to take your mind off of it. Talk about something else,” said Agent Evans, who they’d left behind almost immediately. He sounded relaxed and calm enough that for all Jane knew he’d given up and was sitting by the road while he waited for them to come around again.

“Like what?” asked Dedan, whose heavy wheezing was constantly clouding up the radio line.

“The First Lady made her initial divorce filing in Dayton. Turned out it was a no-fault claim under the pretense of incompatibility. The president has an opportunity to disagree if he so chooses,” Evans said.

“That’ll never happen,” Dedan said, slowly creeping up the hill with overwrought strokes on the pedals. Jane reached out to touch their driver on the shoulder. There was no point maintaining their pace when no one could keep up.

“Could you imagine what it would be like if he did though and she had to come back with a fault claim saying he had abandoned her by becoming president or had treated her badly?”

“A messy divorce is the last thing he wants. I’ve heard him say it a dozen times,” Dedan said. He’d reached the top of the hill and was letting gravity pull him down the other side.

“Sometimes we don’t get what we want. I’ve never heard of a couple going through this without experiencing a little turbulence.”

Jane sat forward with her arms crossed in front of her, glancing at Diwecki out of the corner of her eye. The secret part of the Secret Service was that they weren’t supposed to discuss the details of their protectees’ personal lives with anyone, but try stopping them from talking about it with each other. Maybe it was a gray area, but some of the stories agents told about things previous presidents did while in office made her head spin.

If it seemed like it was going to be a stretch getting these guys into shape enough where they could keep up with the road racer in chief, there was only one thing for her to do about it. She was a runner, and getting on a