Mo’s lips perked into an impish grin. “Mrs. Ryan has agreed to go in full Marvel Comics disguise.”
The President raised a brow.
“A ball cap, sir. She’s more recognizable than Captain America, but, as I said, it’ll be dark, and the less fuss we make, the less we stand out.”
Mo Richardson went on to explain where she’d have rovers and post-standers, “looking chill, but armed and ready to react.” Advance agents would personally contact Ann Arbor PD and the local office of the FBI late on the evening before arrival.
Gary Montgomery, who’d received his undergraduate from the University of Michigan, quizzed her at every turn, peeling back the layers of her plan and giving inside information from recent trips to watch Wolverine football.
“I’ll scrub up with SURGEON,” Mo went on, “going into the operating room with her. General Song travels with four security people. One of those will stay with the cars. According to State and CIA, he’ll travel with one aide, and a minder from Department Two, or possibly the Ministry of State Security. My money is on a Two man from military intelligence, though. The minder changes periodically, so we’ve not identified him yet. Director Foley is assisting with that. Besides me, I’ll have four agents dressed as hospital techs. And two more behind the nursing station. Shoulder weapons will be staged there, in the event of any escalation. We’ve already tried it and the scrubs are loose enough to hide sidearms. The team watching from the operating theater viewing window will have radios. They’ll have me and the First Lady in sight at all times. It goes without saying — but I’m going to say it anyway. We all plan to stay out of the way and let the doctors do their jobs, but my number-one priority is to keep Dr. Ryan safe.”
Ryan mouthed a silent Thank you.
“You should be good security-wise in the operating room,” Montgomery pointed out. “It’s after that when it gets touchy.”
“I agree,” Mo said. “Dr. Ryan will attempt contact when the general is allowed in to see his granddaughter in recovery. It’s a small area, so that minimizes the number of his people present while maximizing ours. If the general cops an attitude, we’ll be outta there with SURGEON before any of his people even know what’s going on.”
“I appreciate your work, Mo…” Ryan leaned back in his chair, coffee in hand. “It sounds as though you have every conceivable scenario covered.”
“Mr. President,” Gary Montgomery said. “I lived in Ann Arbor for four years while I was in college. I’m familiar with the layout of the city and the campus. Perhaps…”
He stopped.
Special Agent Richardson bristled.
“Perhaps what?” Ryan set his cup on the desk.
“Nothing, Mr. President,” Montgomery said. “The First Lady is in excellent hands.”
“Very well, then,” Ryan said. He stood, shaking each agent’s hand in turn.
“I won’t let you down, Mr. President,” Richardson said.
Ryan swallowed hard, feeling more than a little emotional. “Cathy trusts you, Maureen, and so do I. You and Gary both have our full trust and confidence.”
With one problem mitigated, if not solved, the President picked up his phone to call Arnie and let him know he was ready to move on to Chadwick. That would be interesting, to say the least…
Maureen Richardson paused outside the Oval, digging her heels into the thick carpet.
“What the hell was that all about, Gary?” She kept her voice low, in keeping with the decorum of the White House, but there was plenty of force behind it. “You were on the verge of, what? Taking over the trip to Ann Arbor. If you can’t trust me, then you may as well relieve me.”
“I trust you,” Gary said. “You know that.”
“Do you?” Richardson said. “Because it sounded like you were going to play the ‘I went to Michigan so I can do a better job’ card.”
“Well,” Montgomery said. “I checked myself.” He leaned in closer, lowering his voice even more. “Look, Mo, I don’t apologize very often, because I’m hardly ever wrong…” He grinned, but she was having none of it. “Seriously. I’m sorry. I trust you, and, more important, so does the boss.”
“Thank you,” Richardson said. “Apology accepted. I got this, Boss. Really. No one will know we’re there.”
“Okay.”
“And, just to show my ego isn’t so large I don’t know when to ask for assistance, didn’t you say you used to live near Kellogg Eye Center?”
Montgomery looked up to find Senator Chadwick loitering in the doorway just a few feet away, waiting on Arnie van Damm. She gave them a nonchalant smile, like a cat ignoring its prey. Claws out, but seemingly disinterested. She couldn’t have heard much, but it didn’t take much. The good senator had a habit of making up the details when she wasn’t sure about something.
“Let’s move this down to W16,” Montgomery said, turning away from the woman he knew to be his boss’s bitter political enemy.
Fifteen feet away, Michelle Chadwick made a mental note to check and see where the Kellogg Eye Center was and what it had to do with the White House. She recognized the big guy, Mathews, or Montgomery, or something like that. He was Ryan’s chief Ray-Ban-wearing head-smasher. The woman looked familiar, and since the Secret Service was tribal and stuck with their own, she was surely a head-smasher as well. Chadwick had seen her with the First Lady, which raised some very interesting questions. David Huang had been right about one thing. She could learn a hell of a lot as Jack Ryan’s new best friend. All she had to do was connect the dots — and then figure out what she wanted to do with the information.
“Ready?” Arnie van Damm said, giving her a start as he came out of his office at a half-gallop, heading for the Oval.
“I am,” she said.
“You look like someone just stomped your big toe. You okay?”
“Not really,” Chadwick said. “I’m kind of in the belly of the beast here.”
Van Damm gave her a wary side-eye. “And from my point of view, you’re giving the beast a bad case of heartburn. If it were up to me…” He stopped, took a deep breath. “But it’s not up to me. Come on. We don’t want to keep the President waiting.”
30
Chavez spent the last two hours of their flight leading a gear check — sometimes referred to by the rest of the team as a “pocket dump” or a “show me yours I’ll show you mine.” The nature of their work and the places they did it made their loadout extremely fluid. Talking about everyday carry, or EDC, was all the rage these days. Everyone from accountants to war-fighters who were integrating back into civilian life took to various EDC forums on social media, posting neatly knolled professional-quality photos of their assorted blades, flashlights, firearms, and other pocket litter. Chavez talked smack about it sometimes, but he’d been known to spend more time than he should have scrolling on his phone to check out what other operators thought was important. Patsy called it “gun porn.” It was a mystery to her why anyone would need to carry two knives. An odd sentiment, considering who her father was.
Chavez had tried to explain once, years before, over Thanksgiving dinner with his in-laws and other close family. He’d pointed out that just as surgeon Patsy required assorted scalpels and other medical instruments, he needed different kinds of blades for different types of work. JP, maybe six or seven years old at the time, sitting on the piano bench by his cousin, asked his daddy what kind of work the big Benchmade automatic folder in his pocket was for. Patsy and the other women at the table had glared, but without missing a beat, Clark, the boy’s grandfather, had drawn his own Benchmade auto-folder, sliced a ginormous drumstick off the turkey carcass in front of him, and passed it to the delighted boy. It was enough explanation for JP, and Clark expertly steered the conversation to baseball.