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

plan. By now he assumed the Post had ratted him out and that Heath had been released by the FBI, who no doubt had put together that they’d missed the target by a fraction. He knew enough about how they worked to know they’d be scouring everything. Until the key moment when he made his big stand, Oliver Ip had to no longer exist.

Moving past the hearth to a corner of the structure, Oliver came to a large cabinet with a glass door revealing a number of rifles inside. He pulled open a drawer underneath with a handful of pistols, picking one up and holding it in his hands. The brand and model were unknown to him, and he put his index finger over the trigger while thinking about what a crude implement this was.

The gunshot startled him, sending a bullet ripping through the ceiling as he jumped nearly as high out of surprise and fright. Maybe he should figure out which part was the safety and how to tell whether or not the guns were loaded before he attempted to use one on anybody.

As he ate his creamed corn and Spam right out of the cans, Oliver felt ready to turn his attention to the task at hand. The pistol in his hand would feel more natural after a few more tests, but he’d never get to use it on his target unless he developed a genius plan. Luckily, being a genius was his specialty, but even then getting into the White House and getting within eyesight of the president was going to be the epitome of difficult.

The only thing driving him more than saving the people who were being tortured and experimented on was the thought of being hailed as a hero and taking the job of the one who’d betrayed the nation. It was still possible if he pulled it off in the right way.

But after entering the White House a thousand times he knew full well that sneaking in there was next to impossible. He’d seen with his own eyes what happened to people who showed up at the gate demanding to get in. Jumping the fence was a recipe for getting tackled or shot on sight.

He spent some time considering how he could impersonate someone else in the press pool. Was there someone from another news agency that remotely looked like him? It was getting late, and the fire in the hearth wasn’t doing much to keep him warm. Even if he could pass himself off as someone else, steal their credentials, and make sure that person was in no position to talk, he didn’t believe for a second that he could smuggle a gun inside the building. Getting to the president was just as unlikely.

Growing angry and desperate, regretful that he’d blown his best chance, he tried to think about how he could create an attack when the president was exposed. He had no way of knowing when Morrin came and went from the White House. Live speeches with rope lines for shaking hands wasn’t something the president was doing anymore since the campaign had ended.

It wasn’t long before he grew despondent, knowing a fool’s errand when he saw one. There was no way he’d make it close to the president with a gun in or outside the White House, much less get out alive. It would take a highly trained team with inside knowledge of the president’s plans to perform an attack with any chance of success, and that was something he simply didn’t have.

Hunkering down with a musty blanket on an old couch that was about a foot shorter than it needed to be for Oliver to get comfortable, he started to think the whole thing was a lost cause. He had no means to feasibly do anything about the grotesque procedures and mass graves they talked about on the Internet. The president had no weaknesses or vulnerabilities he could exploit. When he woke up, he expected that he would be Eric Hanlahan, living off disgusting canned food and water straight from the stream as long as he could.

But as he dozed, a thought came to him. Often his best ideas arrived moments before falling asleep, and this one startled him into being fully awake. He sat up with alertness that couldn’t be exceeded if a bear were pawing at the door.

What if the best way to attack the president wasn’t by attacking the president? What if on that trip to Dayton he’d had the wrong target in mind the entire time? All of the impenetrable security Alex Morrin had that left Oliver beating his head was only focused on one client. His ex-wife, Bethany Morrin, wouldn’t have any of that, but there was no way the knight in shining armor would stand by and let anything happen to her if she were suddenly at risk.

Oliver was fully conscious of the irony that if he had an ex-wife and someone threatened her, he’d shrug his shoulders and leave her for dead, but there was no way President Morrin would do that. He was a sucker.

Grabbing a poker and stoking the coals before tossing another log onto the burning embers, Oliver felt a new plan take shape in his mind, one arguably better than any he’d had before. He could hold Bethany Morrin at gunpoint and demand that the president reveal the details of the Human Enhancement Program and resign from office. The best part was he could broadcast the message with her own phone, since he no longer had one.

More perks of this new scheme came readily to mind. He wouldn’t have to kill anyone to get what he wanted, and he could still deny that he was ever involved in the Air Force One bombing once he was swept into office with the will of the people at his back. Everything would be so much easier to justify as necessary once the dismaying news of the experiments came to light. He