Lakeside Cottage

The flow of events unfolded with a peculiar inevitability. Later—much, much later—Harris would watch the videos made by both the security monitors and the press corps, but he would remember none of it.

Seconds before the personnel in the hallway responded to the alert, the patient swept aside the thermal blanket. With his free hand, he yanked away the gown to reveal rows of dynamite duct taped to a body-hugging vest.

“Anybody takes me out,” he screamed at the glass wall, “and I go up like the Fourth of July. And I take this whole wing of the building with me.” He leaped to the floor and glared at the horrified crowd on the other side of the glass. His fist closed around the igniter, ready to detonate the explosives.

The President stood stock-still. Darnelle Jefferson gave a hiccuping gasp of sheer terror. Harris froze, too experienced to let fear get in the way. He recognized the shield tattooed on Muldoon’s forearm. It was the iron falcon and sword of a Special Forces unit.

So they were dealing with a rogue from Special Forces, as highly trained as Harris himself, a disciplined killer gone awry. The assassin hadn’t seen him yet. He was strutting in front of the wire-embedded glass while a dozen firearms were aimed at him.

Harris studied the homemade explosive vest and wondered how the hell the transport crew had failed to notice it. The explosives appeared to be plastic ordnance with an igniter operated by a toggle mechanism secured with more duct tape and connected to wires that would activate the explosives. It would have to be detonated manually, unless there was a secondary trigger he wasn’t seeing.

Outside the cubicle, bodyguards and marines broke into action. Honed by countless drills, procedure would be followed to the letter. There would be an immediate lockdown, all units would come to full alert and alarms would shriek across the vast, snowy campus of Walter Reed. Even now, a security squadron was probably surrounding the building.

Mrs. Jefferson made a tiny sound for such a big woman and fainted dead away, taking a Lifepak monitor along with her. It crashed to the floor, startling Muldoon, and Harris was sure he’d spook and ignite the explosives. His left hand, which had been gripping the manual trigger, let go momentarily as he regrouped.

Darnelle had given Harris a seconds-long window of opportunity. Knowing he had a chance was all he needed. It was only one chance, though. If he blew it, they were all toast. Or confetti, more accurately.

He burst through the double doors, everything focused on the assailant’s trigger hand. His entire body launched itself at the assassin in a single-move tactic, one he’d been trained for but had never used until now.

Muldoon went down, screaming as Harris crushed the man’s left wrist to disable his hand. They hit the floor together. Muldoon was shocky from the crushed wrist. That was something.

There was a sound like a rifle shot. Harris felt something hit him like a cannonball. Jesus, had the son of a bitch detonated the explosives?

No, the igniter, Harris realized. The impact had triggered it, but it had misfired. That was the good news. The bad news was, the failed explosion was killing him. His limbs went immediately ice cold as if everything had been sucked out of him. He was aware of movement all around, the President taking cover, the frenzy of highly trained Secret Service men jolted into action. Alarms bayed and someone was screaming. A furious ringing sound blared in his ears. The reek of chemicals seared his throat.

The world dissolved into double images as Harris’s consciousness seeped away like the blood on the floor. Sounds stretched out with an eerie echo, as though shouted down a well. “Freeze … freeze, freeze….” The barked order reverberated through Harris’s head. “Nobody move! oove, oove….”

Harris’s pulse was thready. Lying in a widening pool of blood, he imagined each system shutting down, one by one, a theater’s lights going dim after a final performance. He felt himself quiver, or maybe it was the assassin struggling against him. To die like this, he thought, at the President’s feet. That just sucked. Offended his sense of propriety. Sure, it wouldn’t matter to him after he was gone. It shouldn’t matter at all, but somehow it did.

Harris could see his own reflection in the dome of the 360-degree security camera mounted in the ceiling. Blood spreading out like an inky carpet. It always looks worse than it is, he told himself. He said that to his patients all the time.

The swarm descended, a pandemonium of black suits and dress uniforms as the Secret Service came forward to apprehend the crazy and secure the chief executive.

Harris was cold and headed somewhere dark. He could feel himself slipping, falling into a black well.

“Make way,” a loud voice barked, the words echoing, then fading. “Somebody get this man some help.”

PART TWO

“The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.”

—Alan Saporta, American musician

Two

Port Angeles, Washington Summer

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a half-grown boy must be in want of a husband.” Squinting through her vintage cat’s-eye glasses, Mable Claire Newman defied Kate Livingston to contradict her.

“Very funny,” Kate said. “You tell me this every year.”

“Because every summer, you come back here, still single.”

“Maybe I like being single,” Kate told her.

Mable Claire aimed a look out the window of the property management office at the half-grown boy and his full-grown beagle, playing tug-of-war with a sock in Kate’s Jeep. “Are you at least dating someone?”

“Dating I can manage. It’s getting them to come back that seems to be the problem.” Kate offered a self-deprecating grin, an almost jaunty grin, just wide enough to hide behind. Men were often startled to discover she was a mother; she’d had Aaron at twenty and had always looked young for her age. And when they saw what a handful her boy was, they tended to head straight for the door.

“They’re nuts, then. You just haven’t run into the right fellow.” Mable Claire winked. “There’s a guy staying at the Schroeder place you ought to meet.”

Kate gave an exaggerated shudder. “I don’t think so.”

“Wait until you see him. You’ll change your mind.” She opened a cupboard with an array of tagged house keys and found the one marked with Kate’s name. “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

“We decided to come up a day early,” Kate said, hoping there would be no further questions. Though Mable Claire had known Kate through all the summers of her life, she wasn’t ready yet to talk about what had happened. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Nothing wrong with starting the summer a day early. The housekeeping and yard crew have already been to your place. School out already?” she asked, tilting her head for a better view of Kate’s boy through the window. “I thought the kids had another week.”

“Nope. The final bell rang at three-fifteen yesterday, and third grade is just a bad memory for Aaron now.” Kate dug through her purse, looking for her key chain. Her bag was littered with small notes to herself because she never trusted her own memory. Besides, this made her feel organized and in control, whether or not she actually was. She had a number of projects lined up for the summer. She needed to re-grout the downstairs bathroom tile at the cottage. Paint the exterior trim. Not to mention renewing the bond with her son, reinventing her career and finding herself.

In that order of importance? She had to wonder at her priorities.

“So are you going to be all right,” Mable Claire asked, “just the two of you in that big old house?”

“We’ll be fine,” Kate said, though it felt strange to be the only one in the family headed for the lake house this summer. Every year, all the Livingstons made their annual pilgrimage to the old place on Lake Crescent, but recently everything had changed. Kate’s brother, Phil, his wife and four kids had relocated to the East Coast. Their mother, five years widowed, had remarried on Valentine’s Day and moved to Florida. That left Kate and Aaron in their house in West Seattle, on their own a continent away. Sometimes it felt as though an unseen force had taken her close-knit family and unraveled it.

This summer it would be just the two of them—Kate and her son—sharing the six-bedroom cottage.

Quit wallowing, she warned herself, and smiled at Mable Claire. “How have you been?” she asked.

“Good, all things considered.” Mable Claire had lost her husband two years before. “Some days—most days—I still feel married, like Wilbur never really left me. Other times, he seems as distant as the stars. I’m all right, though. My grandson Luke is spending the summer with me. Thanks for asking.”

On the form to activate trash pickup, Kate filled in the dates. The summer loomed before her, deliciously long, a golden string of empty days to fill however she wished. A whole summer, all to herself. She could take the entire time to figure out her life, her son, her future.

Mable Claire peered at her. “You’re looking a little peaked.”

“Just frazzled, I think.”

“Nothing a summer at the lake won’t cure.”

Kate summoned up a smile. “Exactly.” But suddenly, one summer didn’t seem like enough time.

“‘In want of a husband,’ my eye,” Kate muttered as she locked the Jeep at the Shop and Save, leaving the window cracked to give Bandit some fresh air. Aaron was already scurrying toward the entrance. Heck, thought Kate, watching a guy cross the parking lot, at this point I’d settle for a one-night stand.

He was a prime specimen in typical local garb—plaid shirt, Carhartts, work boots, a John Deere cap. Tall and broad-shouldered, he walked with a commanding, almost military stride. Longish hair and Strike King shades. But was that a mullet under the green-and-yellow cap? From a distance, she couldn’t tell. Ick, a mullet. It was only hair, she conceded. Nothing a quick snip of the scissors couldn’t fix.

“Mom? Mom.” A voice pierced her fantasy. Aaron rattled the cart he’d found in the parking lot.