Oath of Office

“Brother Raheem, you are with me. Basir, you lead the attack through the front gate. They will assume your truck has broken down in the rain and let you in. You must cut them down quickly when they check your identification, before any one of them has a chance to hit an alarm.” He turned to his left.

Raheem touched Kazem with a trembling hand. “With you?”

“Yes,” Kazem said proudly. “You had a feeling about the sentries. The honor of taking them should naturally fall to you.”

Basir and the rest of the men were already on the move by the time Raheem fished his rifle out of the muck. Kazem forced a smile and clasped his hand on the idiot’s shoulder, hoping to imbue in him a little courage, if not good sense. The AK-47 was durable to the extreme, but mud down the barrel would cause even it serious issues.

It did not matter. The fool would never have a chance to use it. Today, he would die as a martyr. Reza Kazem would make certain of that.

17

The assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division kept her face forward but shot a sideways look at Gary Montgomery. Black, shoulder-length hair bobbed as Ruth Garcia picked up her pace, coming into a straightaway around the rubberized track in the shadows of the outdoor mezzanine of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Challenge accepted, the Secret Service agent muttered to himself — or he would have, if he’d had the breath to mutter. His wife always told him he was built for comfort, not speed — and she was right enough. A large man like him had to dig deep in order to run neck and neck with a freaking gazelle like Ruth Garcia.

Both agents were dressed in running shorts and T-shirts, Garcia’s a dark blue raid shirt with FBI emblazoned across the back in tall yellow letters, while Montgomery’s was gray with an understated USSS five-pointed star. The shirts were avatars of personality for their respective agencies — and the agents who wore them. Where Montgomery preferred to stand in the background, Garcia was brilliant and outspoken. She spoke four languages, including the Vietnamese of her maternal grandparents, along with Tagalog, and Spanish from her father’s side. Her scrappy attitude and incredible investigative mind propelled her into rapid advancement, seeing her make special agent in charge of the Tampa Field Office before her fortieth birthday. That was followed by assistant director five years later — no small feat for the mother of two.

Montgomery had met her years before during a law enforcement pistol competition in Florida. She’d beat him by the equivalent of half a bullet hole, the ragged circle in the center of her target being a quarter-inch smaller in diameter than the ragged circle in the center of his.

Montgomery’s actual Bureau counterpart was the special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office. WFO would handle the investigation of a threat to the President in tandem with the Secret Service. The SAC of WFO was a competent guy, but Ruth Garcia was Montgomery’s longtime friend. Friendship plus competence plus access to the FBI’s vast investigative apparatus were hard to beat. Even Montgomery’s wife knew he had a professional crush on this woman. She was smart, she could shoot. And she could run, damn it. She certainly outranked him, but being the special agent in charge of PPD held tremendous sway, even across agency lines, so no one in either agency said anything when he hopped lightly over the chain of command and bypassed WFO to go straight to his friend. It didn’t pay to screw with the guy who rode the Schwinn Airdyne in the White House gym next to the President.

“Big guy’s going easy on you,” Garcia said, as if reading Montgomery’s mind. She downshifted once again to kick up her speed a notch. “You’re getting soft in this cushy assignment.”

Montgomery hunched broad shoulders, leaning forward slightly to match the new stride. He’d called her that morning, hoping to set up a meeting about what he saw as online threats to the President’s character, and the President himself. She’d suggested that they could chat during her midmorning “jog.” He should have known better. Another couple of laps of this and he’d be looking for a place to puke.

Secret Service HQ had a decent gym, better than most, but, as usual, the Feebs took things to an entirely new level. Climbing ropes, free weights, machines, heavy bags, mats for defensive tactics, and the rubberized track on which Montgomery was now surely leaving divots, took up much of the secure outdoor mezzanine level overlooking 9th Street in downtown Washington, D.C. Since the track was protected from the rain but open to the wind and outside temperatures, the workouts were bracing and more real-life than plodding along on some treadmill watching cable news.

Mercifully, Garcia ripped through only two laps before slowing to a more manageable trot.

“I’m guessing you have some theories about all this,” she said, hardly even breathing hard.