The Night Stalkers White House - Books 1-3

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

“You dog.”

Daniel just laughed which only increased the President’s smile. They sat across from each other in the West Wing presidential dining room. The European Union’s latest Greece-bailout plan covered the parts of the table that weren’t already covered with sausage, pepper, and onion sandwiches, macaroni salad, and potato chips. Tall glasses of iced tea perched on cork coasters.

“You finally saw her.”

Daniel nodded. Did way more than see her. He did his best to hide his smile in a large bite of crunchy hoagie roll. Knew he’d been too slow by Peter Matthews’ smile.

“Good?”

There were a dozen layers to the question.

“Really good. The sandwich that is,” he spoke around a partially chewed bite, but wasn’t fooling Peter in the slightest.

“Good.” This time the statement was definitive. The President’s approval a tangible thing of great importance.

“I think we did way better than ‘Really good.’” A woman’s voice sounded from the doorway. “‘Great!’ would at least get you in the right ballpark.”

Daniel stumbled to his feet and attempted to swallow nearly choking himself. Alice stood in the doorway to the dining room. She radiated. There was no other word for it. She slouched lightly against a doorframe and looked at perfect ease. Her hair, still slightly damp in spots she’d missed with the blow dryer, a shining cloud about her face. Her eyes were wicked.

The President rose much more elegantly and crossed to her. He took her hand, and shook it with that perfect, real sincerity that Peter Matthews brought to everything he did.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Thompson. Care to join us for lunch?”

She nodded her assent and crossed to the table.

Daniel shoved some of the Greece plan toward the other end of the table, and one of the ushers had a place set even before the President had tucked her chair in beneath her.

“If you don’t kiss her good morning, I will.”

Daniel finished his swallow, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and did just that. Reveled for just a moment in how soft her lips were. Knew enough about her now to feel both the bright smile and the nervousness beneath. He squeezed her hand in encouragement, a gesture quickly returned, before he returned to his seat.

“We were just taking a quick look at the EU bailout plan for Greece. They dropped twenty billion Euro, twenty-five billion dollars, and it appears to finally be working six months later.”

“Now if only the same thing could work in a U.S. market, Mr. President.” Alice offered brightly as someone set a plate and sandwich down in front of her.

The President sighed. “The previous administration dropped half a trillion dollars, and mostly it shuffled the balance of problems around. Mitigated the worst of the disasters, but we’re still a long way from a solution.”

Daniel offered the President a nod. The President had known that Alice would be nervous and chosen a neutral topic to allow her a moment to land. Walking in on the middle of being the subject of conversation… Not good. Really not good.

And the President continued until Daniel found himself able to enter the conversation as well. For twenty minutes or more, they explored general topics while simultaneoulsy working their way through the lunch spread before them.

After they’d set plates aside, and the ushers had swept them away, he could see Alice clearly had something on her mind.

He nodded to her and she smiled back at the encouragement.

“I actually came to see you last night for a, ah, another reason.”

# # #

Alice took a deep breath, thankful that at least the President showed a steady hand. No wry glance at Daniel. No roll of his eyes.

Daniel, on the other hand, should never get near a poker table. He had progressed through a dozen shades of red and twice as many stages of awkwardness since she had invited herself to lunch.

“Good.” Somehow, there’d been a whole conversation between them, all wrapped up in one, single word. Guy speak was so strange. Maybe that’s why her father had never spoken. Could never even get his one word in edgewise past his wife.

Clear your head, Alice. Back to business.

“I have a theory. And it’s a little on the completely whacked-out side of possibility.”

The two men nodded in unison, sharing a neat sense of accord. The President waved the ushers out, and the door behind Alice closed with a discreet click.

“I presume we’re discussing North Korea.”

She nodded to the President. Right. These two could talk about twenty different countries a day. She, however, was only paid to care about one at the moment.

“Who are you planning to send to the meeting?” She’d decided to cast aside any lingering doubts about whether or not there would actually be a meeting. It had been someone else’s task to determine the efficacy of that original request. Her task was to decide what to do about it if it was real.

The problem was the backcheck to verify the situation, however in the world that was done. The response hadn’t come through the same channel. The first had been a simply encrypted message, just sufficient to stop prying eyes, but not requiring the NSA to c***k it either. The message had passed off to an NGO. Some Non-Governmental Organization that had been granted a three-day pass into North Korea to test for mercury in the coastal waters. They’d come out with a message in hand.

“Daniel has suggested Vincent, the deputy ambassador to the U.N. I was more inclined to Elisa, the Assistant Secretary of State. We never got much past that. Why?”

Alice sipped at her iced tea to buy a moment to collate factors, but they didn’t change. The backcheck had come from the conductor of the Sea of Blood Opera Company at a carefully staged performance in Paris. An abruptly scheduled event, very reminiscent of the 1972 North Korean circus ensemble who had stormed Paris the week before Nixon went to China.

“We could send somebody military, that is if you think that’s more appropriate.” Daniel’s idea.

“I believe,” Alice rolled her mental dice and came up double-sixes. A good backgammon roll; the same one that had landed her in Daniel’s bed last night. Which had been amazingly worth it. What the hell! Play the game! Double or nothing.

“I believe that we’re thinking too small. I think that the Vice President is the minimum you should send, but that you Mr. President should be prepared to follow immediately if not attend yourself.”

The President started to shake his head, then noticed Daniel’s silence.

Alice studied Daniel as well. In the last few seconds he’d done that mercurial shift; this time from slightly fumbling lover to most astute advisor to the most powerful man on the planet.

She could see the cogs turning. Shifting the pieces to include what he knew of the situation, and what he knew of her.

“What don’t I know?” his question came after a full thirty seconds of echoing silence.

“Methods of communication of the two messages. Personalities of the individuals who I termed the Top Six, the highest advisors and leaders in the North Korean regime.”

“The personalities I know; which is why I had difficulty accepting your initial report. Two messages?”

“Original channel and backcheck.”

“Which were?”

She shook her head. Alice wasn’t even supposed to know, but Director Smith had released the data to her when she’d insisted it was necessary to assess the request’s authenticity. Names and exact movements had been expunged from the reports she read, but there was no questioning them. However, she also wasn’t at any liberty to reveal them, not even to the President.

Again that silence. Daniel stood and walked slowly to the window and back. God! The man even moved beautifully. She could spend a day simply watching him walk about, with or without clothes.

And in addition to beauty, she realized his other blazingly attractive quality to her; Daniel Drake Darlington would have made an amazing analyst. She could she him working through the possibilities. Interpreting and discarding them far faster than she had. Of course she’d had to build up from a blank slate. He’d had a head start built by her reports and information. Still he—

A low whistle indicated that he’d reached the same conclusion she had. He shook his head in clear rejection of his own conclusions being too preposterous. Definitely the same result she’d synthesized in eight days of hard work.

But finally he turned to her and softly voiced a question, “Really?”

She nodded, which appeared to cut his knees out from under him and dropped him back into his chair.

The President turned from one to the other and finally said, “No. That’s not possible.” But drew it out in a tone revealing he too would have made a fine analyst.