144
There were many more Secret Service agents at the Paley house than Chief Ball thought there would be. They were a humorless bunch, for the most part not given to chitchat, but that was just as well — Ball worried that saying too much to the wrong person might inadvertently give him away. He spent most of his time sitting in the den with one of the liaisons to the federal marshal detail — brought in for extra coverage and mostly assigned to the grounds — watching a soccer match on television. Ball had no interest in soccer, but the marshal was far and away the most amiable of the feds inside the house.
An agent stuck his head through the door.
“Hey, emergency ser vices briefings. Let’s go.” Chief Ball got up, then fell in behind the marshal as they walked to the kitchen. Two ambulances from a local company had been retained to provide coverage if any guests or staff members got sick. The Ser vice itself would handle getting the senator to the hospital if necessary, using a special SUV and following a pre-scouted route.
“Who’s Stevens?” asked a pug-nosed, light-skinned black Secret Service agent, entering the room at full gallop.
“That would be me,” said Ball.
The agent looked at him as if he’d just ruined his day.
“Call your office. Now.”
“All right.” Ball started toward the nearby wall phone.
“Not on that line,” hissed the man.
A titter of barely suppressed laughter ran through the room.
Ball went outside and found a sympathetic sheriff’s deputy to lend him a phone.
“I’m supposed to call in,” he told the woman who answered at campaign headquarters.
“Bruce Chazin wants to talk to you.” Chazin was O’Rourke’s nominal supervisor.
“This is Stevens,” said Ball when he came on the line.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
“Where the hell is O’Rourke?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I kind of assumed he was there.”
“When did you last talk to him?”
“Well, he called around noon to check on me,” said Ball.
“Sounded like he was having lunch.” He answered the rest of Chazin’s questions as vaguely as possible. The deputy campaign manager needed someone to review the arrangements at the next day’s events.
“I’d be glad to do that for you, but they have us in a lock-down situation here,” said Ball. “Can’t go in or out.”
“I don’t want you. I want O’Rourke. I need someone at the meeting.”
Chazin fumed some more, and seemed on the verge of ordering Ball to check on O’Rourke’s hotel — and the bar in the lobby. But finally Chazin just hung up.
Ball realized as he went back into the kitchen that being yelled at had transformed his status. Before, everyone had stared at him, trying to figure out who he was. Now, they smirked.
That was a lot better. Having a role to play — even as the butt of everyone’s jokes — meant he belonged. He took a bottle of water from the cooler on the floor, opened it, and leaned against the sink.
The nearby clock said it was ten minutes past five. Guests wouldn’t be arriving until seven; the senator was expected around nine.
Just a few hours to go, Ball told himself, taking a long slug from the bottle.
145
There was a perceptible uptick in the energy level of the President’s aides as Marcke entered the back of the banquet hall where he was to give the keynote address to a group of entertainment executives. The number of BlackBerries being consulted at any one moment doubled; men and women tilted their heads forward ever so slightly as they walked.
The chief of staff veered to the side of the bubble to take a phone call.
The President, though he couldn’t have helped but notice, continued into the reception area, shaking hands and smiling as he greeted the guests. Dean glanced at the Secret Service agents fanned out around Marcke. They watched the crowd warily, eyes sweeping indiscriminately, checking and rechecking. A few of the guests pulled back under their stare, but the President seemed not to notice his bodyguards or their concerns, plunging deeper into the crowd.
“Hard to watch what’s going on in a place like this,” Dean said to a Secret Service agent he’d been introduced to earlier. The man, concentrating on a nearby doorway, grunted.
As the President reached the entrance to the main reception hall, his chief of staff, Ted Cohen, approached from his left and touched his elbow. Marcke bent toward Cohen, listened to a whisper, and then nodded before continuing into the hall. Dean followed along, now at the back edge of the bubble. The buzz in the room grew louder. All eyes except the Secret Service agents’ either were on the President or were trying to get there. There was wonder and awe in people’s faces; Dean realized he must have looked that way, too, when he first met Marcke.
“Charlie, we’re going to go back to Washington after this,” said Cohen, sidling up next to him. “The President has a problem to deal with. Are you coming with us or staying here?”
“I don’t know,” said Dean. “I’ll have to check in and find out.”
“There’s food in the room there for staff,” Cohen added.
“The President wants you to stay close. Is that all right?”
“Of course.”
Dean found a quiet spot in the hallway. Pretending to use his sat phone, he turned his com system on.
“This is Dean.”
“Hey, Charlie, how’s it going?” said Rockman in the Art Room.
“I’m all right. The President is cutting short his trip and flying back to D.C. to night. What am I supposed to do?”
“Stand by.”
Dean glanced down the hall. Beside the Secret Service agents, there were men from the LA Police Department and two federal marshals who’d been called in for extra protection.
“Charlie, this is Chris Farlekas. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Chris.”
“If the President doesn’t need you, we’d like you to stay in LA and help look for Ball. We’re pretty sure he’s in Los Angeles. We’re supposed to get an update from the research people and the FBI people at ten p.m. Ambassador Jackson will be on the conference call. A Secret Service agent named John Mandarin will be in charge. He’s traveling with the McSweeney campaign but will be back at the local office by then. We’ll plug you into the circuit.”
“The President still may want to talk to me,” said Dean.
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
“He’s the boss,” said Farlekas. “Let us know when you’re free.”
The applause that greeted the end of the President’s speech was polite but not particularly enthusiastic. The President had told the movie and television moguls how important their industry was to the country and in the course noted several times how profitable it was. They — rightly — interpreted that to mean they weren’t getting
