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He laughed. He was still looking at me like he was trying to read secrets from my bones. “Where are you from?” he asked. His voice had shifted again. Softened.
“Louisiana. I was a detective with the New Orleans Police Department before joining the Secret Service.”
I am from the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest of the swampy wetlands that blankets Louisiana. It’s backwoods country, full of third- and fourth-generation Cajuns who live their whole lives within those murky marshes. I grew up swiping power from the logging companies for our stilt-legged home, wading through chest-deep water with an extension cord over my head as I kicked away ’gators that took too much interest in me.
Unlike most everyone else from the Basin, I left, heading for the city to strike out in the world. The New Orleans police are always hiring and firing, and I was picked up for the job three days after setting foot on Canal Street.
I worked lonely graveyard shifts, hauled roustabouts and roughnecks to the drunk tank, and chased knife fighters and crack addicts up and down the Big Easy’s twisted streets. I moved from patrolman to officer to detective, until I decided to set my aspirations higher.
Now I’m here, beside the president of the United States.
Still, the bayous and blues are in my blood, and I dream in the Cajun patois I was raised in. Swamp French rattles around inside me, and when it rains, I go right back to the Basin, as if each drop were falling on a memory.
Walker smiled. “Two cities famous for their politics and their politicians. I bet you have stories.”
In Louisiana, politicians are always under investigation, and homicide often isn’t the worst crime they’re indicted for. DC was a step up on the ladder of moral turpitude. “Sure I do, but as I said, they’ll go with me to my grave, Mr. President.”
“Like this conversation?”
“What conversation?” My drawl rolled in. It’s something I shove away in polite society but it comes out like a party trick when I’m tired, when I’m stressed, or when I’m showing off. Which of those I was feeling just then, I don’t know.
“You’re going to test me on that briefing, aren’t you?”
“When you least expect it, sir.” Jesus, what was I doing? It was too easy to banter with him.
“We’re closer than each other’s shadow,” he said, repeating my words back to me. His gaze darkened, le saphir shifting to the roiling shades of a disquiet ocean. The air between us grew heavy, charged with something that seemed ready to spark.
Any reply I might have made was cut off when the elevator doors slid open on a corridor, exactly the kind you’d expect deep underground. Cold concrete, humming fluorescent lights, and a damp, musty smell.
There’s always a team on duty in the bunker, and I led Walker to the watch room and the wide-eyed, slack-jawed operators who had never, not in their entire careers, been visited by the president they served.
We talked him through the drills we run once a month, always when the president is off-site. During each, an off-duty agent or one of the military aides plays the president in a full-scale evacuation of the White House.
When it’s go time, it’s go at full speed. My teams clear the building to the bunker and bring the “president” down. From there, we evacuate the actor-president out through tunnels to the secondary Marine One landing site and then make an emergency flight to Andrews Air Force Base.
Air Force One is part of the training, too, and as soon as my guys haul the package—the “president,” moving as fast as the Secret Service can make him move—on board, those pilots are taxiing at full speed and leaping into the sky in a stomach-clenching takeoff that gets us out to safe waters and a waiting navy patrol while we’re still buckling in.
“Sounds like fun.” Walker laughed at all the right parts, hung on to the stories the watch standers shared. “Can I tag along for the next one?”
“We’ve never used the real president in our drills. They’re usually busy, sir.”
“I’m sure we could work something out.” He grinned at me like we were planning a conspiracy.
He was more relaxed on the elevator ride back up from the bunker. We weren’t clinging to opposite walls, either. He stood beside me, his jacket off. I could smell his cologne, thin at the end of the day. The fabric draped over his elbow brushed my forearm.
I should have shut my mouth. I should have kept quiet. But—
“Good first day, Mr. President?”
Our eyes locked. His chest rose. Held. “It started great and got better every hour.”
I nodded, tried to smile, and was saved by the elevator doors gliding open at the ground floor of the East Wing.
I walked him to the Residence, all the way to the Grand Staircase. The agent on post gave us a few feet of privacy.
“This is where I stop, Mr. President. The Residence is your private home. We guard the entrances and exits, and we maintain watches on the roof. If you need our help, there are phones and intercoms in every room.”
“Thank you, Agent Theriot.”
