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

at the fabric of her pants over her knee, feeling like she was running out of arguments to employ.

“But that’s just it though. You have complete freedom to make it your own. People are listening to you. Advocate for what you care about. Be empowering and make a difference. I know it’s easy for me to tell someone to live in a stale marriage, but I hope you realize what kind of a chance you have,” she said, but the words had no sooner left her lips than she could see that the First Lady was unmoved.

“No, it’s done. I’ve filed my papers and I’m not going to wait around for the inevitable when it comes to Alex getting what he wants. If he’s not in love with me then he’s not with me. Nobody here knows what he was like in college before my friends started telling me I tamed him. He has a mind of his own.”

“Oh, I see,” Jane said meekly, her mind turning to the hard part of what she would have to say.

“I mean, we’ll see what he does at the hearing in Dayton, but I fully expect that one way or another it’ll work itself out and we’ll go our separate ways.”

Jane cleared her throat, reminding herself that she needed to start planning for the president’s trip home to Ohio. Leaning closer to the woman on the couch, Jane gently but firmly took her hand, demanding her attention.

“Just know what you are saying. The president gets death threats on a daily basis. Some of them are serious. If they think you are unprotected, they will go after you, using you to get to him, whether you’re married or not. You are taking a big risk. We’ll no longer legally be able to force you to accept our protection, but there are parts of being here that you will never actually be able to leave behind.”

Even though Jane had retained eye contact the entire time that she spoke, Bethany still managed to shake her head, growing defensive and angry.

“I don’t think you understand that I’m really nobody,” she said, and at this Jane had to laugh.

“Try having a name that’s one letter away from being synonymous with a complete lack of identity.”

Bethany stood up and Jane followed suit. The feelings of resentfulness weren’t good and were bordering on unprofessional, but seeing someone knowingly put herself in danger was as close as Jane had come to failing to protect someone.

“I think you’ll see that I can take care of myself,” Bethany said when she’d escorted Jane around the boxes to the door, but she couldn’t turn away without making one more unexpected, perplexing comment. “I almost don’t talk to Alex at all anymore, but I can’t figure out why the one time I did he ended up mentioning you.”

5

Secret Service Headquarters

950 H St. NW

Washington, DC

At her desk a couple of weeks later, Jane still found herself chewing over what exactly she’d done that had been memorable to the president during their brief meeting in the Oval Office. The conversation had been routine, mundane, and for most of it he’d been talking to the vice president about personal matters. She was exhausted from the bike training even though she’d been growing stronger, but fortunately the final preparations for the president’s security itinerary for the rapidly upcoming divorce hearing in Dayton were coming together easily. She was getting too good at this.

The downside was the ease of her work left too much time for speculation about what had caught Alex Morrin’s attention and why he felt the need to say something to the First Lady about her. Perhaps out of all the people he crossed paths with on a daily basis, she had managed to comport herself with restrained dignity when inside she was having a fangirl freakout moment.

No, it probably wasn’t that.

Once she felt good enough about her security plan, it was time for her to take it up to the office of the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division, another one of the repositories for the Secret Service’s brainpower. Here, they would review and integrate the plans into their database, as well as crosscheck the destination with any persons who had a threat risk profile in the area. They identify any Class III threats in the area—those being the most serious group with both the intent and the capability of carrying out an attack—and place people on them for the duration of the president’s visit to the area, even going into prisons if the person is incarcerated. Nothing is left to chance.

Jane handed over her folder to an agent in the division before turning to find Nathan Carr talking to someone at another desk.

“Make sure you realize I’m accounting for courthouse security in addition to local PD,” she said to the agent receiving the documents, but she found herself lingering and trying to listen in to what Nathan was working on rather than returning straight to her desk downstairs. As much as the space around the president was her job, she always wanted to hear about how they were simultaneously taking down threats to him all around the world.

It sounded like the White House had received a threatening phone call—the second most common method used to issue a threat behind sending letters in the mail—and they needed to compare samples of the audio against the database of sound recordings they had. Just when Jane thought she was about to hear something juicy, Nathan abruptly thanked the guy at the desk for checking over it and then turned to walk straight up to Jane.

She hadn’t imagined he’d even known she was standing there beside a computer terminal, but the way he looked at her with his big brown eyes was like he’d come up here for the explicit purpose of meeting with her. For all she knew, maybe he had.

Crossing her arms over her stomach, she looked at him without any particular regard, while he seemed