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“Fucking vultures,” Barratt had said venomously as he buckled up and hunched down in the seat, pulling a pair of sunglasses from the breast pocket of his uniform jacket and effortlessly sliding them onto his face. Seconds later, the tie was loosened, the top shirt button undone, and an iPod was being pulled from nowhere. The Pretty Reckless blasted from the speakers as the car pulled away from the army hospital and headed back into DC with the president’s son lighting up a cigarette and rolling the window down fully.
“Hey, do you mind if we stop for Starbucks?”
Chris raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”
“Starbucks,” Jamie repeated in a tone more suited to a petulant teenager. “I’ve been stuck in a damn hospital for six weeks, away from anything good. I want a Frap, and then I want Krispy Kremes, and then we can go to the White House.”
Chris reluctantly agreed, telling the driver to make a detour. Foster had told him not to deviate, to take James Thomas Barratt directly to the White House, but Chris really couldn’t see the harm in taking the guy to get a coffee and a donut. That was until they pulled up to the drive-through.
Jamie unfastened his seat belt and kneeled on his seat, leaning over Chris’s lap to see the girl at the window. He gave the girl the most charming smile. “Hey there, beautiful!”
“Good morning, sir. Can I take your order?” The girl blushed slightly, smiling as she keyed into the cash register.
“Yeah, I’ll take the biggest Frap you guys do, caramel, extra shot, extra cream, extra everything and…Roberts, do you want anything?”
Jamie leaned back to look at Chris, shifting in his lap and pressing down with hips just where Chris really didn’t need the pressure.
He shook his head. “No, thank you, sir.”
Jamie shrugged and turned back to the Starbucks’s girl, mercifully shifting his weight. “Nothing for Roberts!”
“Anything else, sir?” she asked with a smile.
“Only your phone number.”
The girl gave Jamie her damn phone number, written on the side of the enormous plastic Frappuccino cup. Later, at the Krispy Kreme, he did the exact same thing. When he’d finished both the frozen coffee and the two glazed donuts, Jamie deposited the trash and the phone numbers in the parking lot bin.
Chris frowned.
“Why did you ask for their phone numbers if you’re just going to throw them away?”
Jamie shrugged and looked at Chris, licking the sugar of the donut from the tips of his fingers. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Chris’s frown deepened. “Do you not think they might be…I dunno…upset when you never call?”
James Barratt lowered his sunglasses and blinked slowly at him, his head tilted to the side. “Why do you care?”
Chris took a deep breath and looked out of the window. “I don’t, sir. Only voicing an opinion, that’s all.”
Jamie snorted and let his head fall onto the head rest, replacing his sunglasses over his eyes and folding his arms over his chest. “Next time, just keep it to yourself,” he had murmured.
Now, back at the White House, when the president ushered her staff out of the room for a moment alone with her son, Chris turned immediately to her aide, Natalie Richmond, and launched into the story of the morning. They had worked together for two years now, and she was particularly good at keeping secrets. Chris trusted her.
“Why is he such an ass?”
Natalie looked up from the papers she was leafing through and smiled wryly at him. “He hasn’t always been.”
Nat had been with the president for three years, and was not only her assistant, but her bodyguard. Richmond had been recruited by the CIA at the tender age of eighteen. She was incredibly smart and had fast-tracked through college with a Political Science major and spent a year working for the Agency in Russia before joining President Barratt’s election campaign.
“But when you’re held and tortured by the Taliban for three months, things tend to change you a little. And then there was that thing with Agent Reiss…”
Chris’s eyebrows rose, curiously. “What did happen with Brett Reiss?”
Natalie looked hard at him, then lowered her green eyes to her papers. “Trust me, Roberts. You don’t really want to know.”
He sighed and leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “Was Jamie that much different before Afghanistan?”
Natalie glanced up again and sighed, closing the file and joining Chris to lean against the wall. “A little. He was sweet. Funny. His smile reached his eyes, and you’d want to smile, too, when you saw it, it was so infectious. Always confident, always cocky, but I guess he still is. I suppose he was just a little softer around the edges than he is now.”
