Barrios isn’t the first opponent to underestimate her. Being sold short has been an undercurrent in Hayley’s life. Her gender, family background, and West Virginia accent have all played into her status as an underdog and not one she encourages. But she won’t hesitate to exploit that poor judgment. They just think they’re going to win. Barrios laid his trap, miscalculating the advantages of Hayley’s smaller size in the cramped toilet. The error is a catastrophic one. He failed to foresee the sheer ferocity with which his pursuer would wage close-quarters combat. Who would? Her destructive force is freakish and, in that way, completely unpredictable.
As she slams her spiked fist repeatedly into his face, Hayley recognizes one unavoidable fact: the Cuban will not be taken alive. Barrios will fight as long as he is physically able. The longer their brawl continues, the greater his odds of success. Though Hayley has gained the upper hand, the ultimate result of their fight is not predetermined. She could die here, in this fetid toilet.
She drives her elbow into the man’s head. The blow causes him to drop his knife. Hayley retrieves the knife from the floor and, holding it close to her body, buries it in Barrios’s chest as she stands up straight with knees locked. The Cuban struggles for a few moments, as she drives the blade deeper into his thoracic cavity, and then goes limp. He falls backward, sitting comically on the closed toilet seat. The blare of a siren signals the approach of the police, summoned by Hayley’s call to 911.
Winded and delicately spritzed with her adversary’s blood, she withdraws her phone from a pocket. After snapping a photo of the dead man on the toilet, she quickly exits the bathroom. Standing again at the rear of the long, narrow storefront, Hayley can hear the cashier ringing up a sale and chatting with an unseen customer.
The past days have posed a dilemma, with rapidly unfolding events forcing her to choose between the worse of twin evils. Duty bound and genetically unable to shirk her responsibilities, she has thrown herself against the country’s inexorable creep toward the precipice. There is no time to lose. With Alberto Barrios’s death, she has given the United States a slim chance to avert a domestic catastrophe. Turning right, Hayley Chill, a covert agent for the “deeper state,” exits the delicatessen through the rear door.
1
THE LIVES WE SAVE
Ten Days Earlier
Wednesday, 8:25 a.m., Kyle Rodgers, a bespectacled black man of expanding girth, is waiting for Hayley when she walks through the office door. His coveted position as president whisperer and sounding board landed Rodgers with premium real estate on the West Wing’s main floor. Richard Monroe’s chaotic first year as president culminated with an attempt on his life. The wholesale purge that followed those tumultuous events spared the genial and eminently capable senior advisor. Among several outstanding attributes, Rodgers is notable in Washington for having gained his influential position without having made bones of anybody.
He is as good a boss as one can expect in the White House’s pressure-cooker environment. For that indisputable fact, Hayley Chill esteems and admires Kyle Rodgers. The feelings are mutual. His office is the best run in the building, and he has his young chief of staff from West Virginia to thank for it. The secret machinations of Hayley’s superiors in the deeper state—a clandestine association of former presidents and Supreme Court justices, retired directors from the intelligence community, and other discharged heavyweights of the government establishment that calls itself “Publius”—placed her in the West Wing twenty months ago as an intern. But it has been by the sheer dint of her extraordinary skills that Hayley is where she is today: fifty feet down the carpeted corridor from the Oval Office.
“Thank God you’re here,” Rodgers says without looking at her. “Today is going to be insane.” He mixes sugar-free Red Bull with coffee at his desk, his go-to breakfast.
Hayley’s meteoric rise from humble intern to the chief of staff for one of the president’s key advisors generated widespread acrimony among the other West Wing staffers. The army veteran—possessing only an associate’s degree from a two-year community college and an accent particular to people from the Appalachians—is widely considered by her peers to be undeserving of her fantastic success. Hayley Chill has dealt with this poisonous envy all her life and unfailingly turns it to her advantage. But the exertions of holding down two high-pressure jobs—as White House staffer and covert agent—has taken its toll. Twenty-hour workdays are the norm.
Wearing a Jones of New York knee-length, dark blue skirt, a tie-front silk blouse, and sensible shoes, she drops her knock-off tote on the couch. “What’s up?”
Rodgers scans his computer screen for Monroe’s daily schedule, a detailed, minute-by-minute rundown available only to West Wing staffers. “Okay. First off, we—”
“—need to get the president up to speed on the LA Times, Washington Post, and New York Times hack.” Hayley read reports on her way into work. Coordinated cyberattacks hit computer servers at printing plants across the country. The nation’s major newspapers managed to get the day’s editions out, but only after significant delays.
“Yeah, I heard about that,” Rodgers says absently, taking a sip of his energy drink concoction. Glancing toward his young chief of staff for the first time since she’d arrived, he notes Hayley’s slightly haggard countenance. “What happened to you?”
She got only a few hours of sleep the night before. Hayley spent most of her Tuesday at the Library of Congress; the president’s speechwriters required material for Monroe’s address to workers at an auto plant in Ohio on Wednesday, and the job was tasked to Kyle Rodgers’s wunderkind. A two-hour workout—six sets of a circuit of exercises that included timed pull-ups, crunches, and push-ups, followed by a twelve-mile run—followed a nine-hour stint at the library. After a quick dinner, Hayley put in several hours compiling a detailed weekly report on the president’s activities for her superiors in the deeper state. Naturally, she squeezed in another workout this morning before leaving for the White House.
She disregards her boss’s question. “Has there been any attribution yet?”
“Who do you think?”
“We can’t always blame Russia, sir. Other players out there have the same capabilities. North Korea, for instance. Tehran.”
Rodgers shrugs and turns his attention back to his computer, reading through an email to the president’s chief of staff and vice president one last time before sending. He had joined Monroe’s presidential campaign just before the start of the primary swing, proving indispensable in tailoring the candidate’s message for early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. A veteran of numerous national and state-level campaigns, Kyle Rodgers possesses the highly desirable ability to distill a politician’s incoherent and insecure ramblings into network-ready sound bites. Married to his college sweetheart and distracted dad of four-year-old twin girls, he is a pessimistic optimist. Rodgers recognizes humanity is on a collision course with its stunning idiocy. Simultaneously, he believes in the restorative powers of a competent executive branch. Bolstered by that conviction, Rodgers sets himself apart from 98 percent of the other political wonks in town mired by their jaded nihilism.