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

her jaw dropped. Her eyes shot to the clock on the wall. It was nearly 5 PM. There was no time. She wanted to ask Evans if he was sure, if he wasn’t in some way mistaken, but she knew he wouldn’t have told her if it hadn’t been the truth. All she could do was thank him.

“What is it?” Nathan asked, his eyes widening in increasing concern.

For some reason Jane had trouble getting the words out, and her mind got stuck on something Bethany Morrin had said about how wild her husband had been.

“Evidently the president is on his way out to meet with a woman.”

Jane and Nathan raced out of the Protective Intelligence and Assessment Division office and took the stairs up two flights to the top floor, dashing past a pair of agents with quizzical looks on their faces as they approached the Joint Operations Command Center.

Pulling open the large tinted doors, they stepped inside the Secret Service’s Live Monitoring Station, where data and footage of all of their protectees coalesced under the direction of the Watch Commander. The nerve center of their entire organization, it had light panels on the walls displaying code names and locations next to a huge screen with a map currently tracking the president’s movements.

They’d arrived just in time to see the panel for Cold Turkey change from “White House” to “In Transit.”

Watch Commander Matthew Winger was a longtime veteran of the Secret Service with time spent in the military in what now must’ve seemed like a previous life. Though he was in his late sixties with sunspots on his forehead, he had a stout figure and looked strong enough to push over a tree. It was hard not to be a tad intimidated, especially when he turned from a few agents working at their computers to march over to Jane and Nathan.

“Do you have any idea what this sudden departure is about?” Winger asked loudly enough for it to echo throughout the entire chamber. Jane wished she had a better answer, but no doubt they already knew everything she did.

“It’s Friday night and apparently the president wants to go out,” she said, swallowing. Winger’s face was growing visibly red even in the dim light of the Joint Operations room.

“But where…and doing what…and with whom?” he asked, seemingly flabbergasted.

In one sense a guy going out to meet a lady somewhere shouldn’t have been so eye-raising, but when that guy was the president of the United States and there were twenty-five professionals in this room tracking him, not to mention the fifteen agents and drivers on the ground, any unexpected movement was a big deal and a grave cause for concern.

While the Secret Service could forcibly move the president in a potentially harmful situation, they were also expected to give him wide latitude to conduct his life the way that he wanted. The trouble was nobody else knew what that entailed, and now that Alex Morrin evidently felt released from his marriage they were all about to find out.

An agent with a headset on working at one of the computer stations turned to them.

“Evans has learned that they’re on their way to pick up a woman who the president has been exchanging communication with over Messenger,” she said.

The map taking up most of the wall showed the presidential caravan creeping north through the city. Watch Commander Winger looked like he’d seen a ghost.

“Can somebody call in an emergency medical team? No, not for the president. For me, in here. Because I’m about to have a heart attack. The president has started sending messages to people through social media that we haven’t known about? This is outrageous. I’m tempted to hand this over to the Director’s Crisis Center.”

While Winger’s mention of the Director’s Crisis Center may have been tongue in cheek, it had the effect of ratcheting up Jane’s nerves tenfold. That was the office that took over in the case of the direst emergencies, like 9/11 caliber events. Considering the unmonitored communications and possibility for unprecedented exposure, maybe it was necessary. That was up to the Watch Commander.

“The president is giving directions to his driver one turn at a time like he’s riding in the back of his buddy’s car. We don’t know what their destination is,” the agent with the headset said.

All they could do was watch as the presidential limo, nicknamed the Beast, wound toward the Colombia Heights neighborhood and turned onto smaller and smaller roads. They were getting close to somewhere, and they came to a halt at a place on Taylor Street not far from an elementary school. It was a suburban part of town, and a feed came up immediately of a three-story apartment building of a modern style with patios and red shutters by the windows.

“Evans is exiting the vehicle,” the agent said. At least the president wasn’t trying to get out and approach a strange building himself. But Jane watched in anticipation as Evans entered the building in search of the person the president was attempting to meet. Whoever she was—if it even was the same person that the social media account represented—Evans would put her through the wringer. A thorough body search, some pointed questions, and more.

“I don’t like this at all,” Winger said, and Jane could sympathize with his consternation. Every day she got up wondering if this would be the day the president would be killed, and the odds of it actually happening on this particular day kept going up.

A minute later the screen changed from the map to a huge blown-up image of a District of Colombia driver’s license for an individual named Leslie Hodge. Jane’s eyes couldn’t help but go straight to the headshot of a woman with flowing dark hair, thick eyelashes, and big lips. It was hard to look good in a driver’s license photo where smiling was prohibited, but she was pulling it off. 5’6”, roughly the same height as Jane. One hundred and thirty pounds.