Waters looked at Fuller. “We can do this easy or hard. It’s up to her.”
Fuller said, “Mrs. Cox, the Service has been aware of the FBI’s actions and the official position is that we have no right to stop them on this. It’s a federal investigation. The White House lawyers also are in agreement with this.”
“So it seems that everyone is in agreement. That everyone has been going behind my back to plot against me. Does that include my husband?”
“I can’t speak to that,” Fuller said hastily.
“Well, I can. And I will when I get back to the White House.”
“That’s certainly your prerogative, Mrs. Cox.”
“No, that will be my mission!”
Waters said, “The letter, Mrs. Cox? This is all very time-sensitive.”
She slowly opened her purse and put her hand inside.
“Ma’am, if you don’t mind, I’ll get it myself.”
She gave him a look that he would probably remember for the rest of his life. “Let me see the warrant first.”
He handed her the paper, which she read through slowly, then held open her purse. “I have lipstick in there too, if you’re so inclined.”
He stared down into the contents of her purse. “The letter will be fine, ma’am.”
He slid the letter out and she snapped her purse shut, nearly pinching his fingers. “I’ll have your badge for this,” she snapped. Jane glared at Fuller. “Now can we go?”
He immediately turned to the driver. “Hit it.”
Back at 1600 Pennsylvania, Jane went swiftly up to her family quarters. She took off her coat, slipped off her shoes, went into her bedroom, and locked the door. She opened her purse and slid her hand behind the barely visible tear in the lining. She pulled the letter out. It was addressed to her at the post office box. All typed. She opened it. There was only a single page inside, also typed.
She had known she was being watched by the FBI. When she opened the box and saw the letter in there, she had held her purse close to the mailbox and slid the letter behind the torn lining of her large purse, while appearing to merely place it in her purse. The letter she’d allowed Waters to take was one of her creation that she had typed on a typewriter she’d found in storage at the White House. She had placed the fake letter in her purse before she’d left to check the mailbox. What man would think to look behind the lining of a purse when another letter was sitting in there next to her cosmetics? She’d even thrown a prescription bottle in there for some menopause issues she was having to rattle the man further, so he wouldn’t dare linger in her purse.
The envelope she’d received through the White House kitchen staff had been white, so she assumed any follow-up one would be as well. She knew that the watchers could only see a snippet of the envelope as it went from the box to her purse.
She also knew that she would be confronted once the envelope did arrive. She had sources at the White House. Like the Secret Service, there was nothing that went on there that she did not know about. Thus the FBI and the warrant were not surprises to her. Well, she’d fooled the vaunted agency.
This sense of triumph was short-lived, however. With trembling hands she unfolded the letter and started to read. It gave her a date and time to place a call to a phone number that was included in the letter. The number was untraceable, she was told. More importantly, it said that if anyone else was on the phone call, where the truth of all this would be revealed, then it would not only cost her Willa, but it would also destroy all their lives, irreversibly.
She noted that last word. “Irreversibly.” It was oddly placed, oddly used. Was there hidden meaning there? There was really no way for her to tell.
She wrote the phone number down on another slip of paper, rushed into the bathroom, crumpled up the letter, and flushed it down the toilet. For one paralyzing moment she envisioned federal law enforcement agents hiding somewhere in the White House intercepting her toilet water and reconstructing the letter. But that was impossible. That was the stuff of Orwell’s 1984. Yet in some ways, by living at the White House, she had already seen Orwell’s masterpiece of “fascism perfected” in a way most Americans could never imagine.
She flushed the toilet once more for good measure and then trudged slowly out of the bathroom. She made a call and canceled all of her appointments for the day. In over three years at the White House serving as First Lady she had never missed an event, no matter how small or relatively trivial. Ever since Willa had disappeared she had struck them off with regularity. And she had no regrets. They had had her pound of flesh. She had served her country well. The fact that her husband was running hard to earn four more years of it now made her sick to her stomach.
Suddenly chilled, she ran a hot bath and took off her clothes. Before climbing into the tub she stared at her naked self in the full-length mirror. She had lost weight. It was something she had been meaning to do, but not in this manner. She didn’t look better with the pounds gone. She looked weaker, older even. It was not a pretty sight, she concluded. The skin was slack, bones stuck out where a woman wouldn’t want them to. She turned the light off and slid into the hot water.
As she lay there she had to figure out a way to do something that no other American, perhaps other than her husband, would ever have to worry about. Jane Cox had to come up with a way to make a simple phone call that was entirely private, with no one else around. She couldn’t do it from here. If the FBI had a warrant to search her bag, they probably had a warrant to monitor calls here, at least the ones that she made. And for all Jane knew, every phone call coming in or out of this building was monitored by someone, perhaps the NSA. They seemed to listen in on anyone they wanted to.
And if Jane couldn’t make the call from here, there was really nowhere else where she was not with someone. On a plane or chopper, in a limo, eating meals, working at the office, attending a tea, cutting a ribbon for a new children’s hospital, christening a ship, visiting wounded soldiers at Walter Reed.
It was the price to be paid for winning the White House. She would think of a way, however. It would come to her. She had fooled the FBI with the letter. She’d used gloves, so there would be no prints. She’d used vague language saying that the sum of ten million dollars would be required and that the kidnappers would contact her by letter again. It had bought her some time at least, but not that much actually. The time to call the provided number was for tomorrow evening. No, not much time at all.
She closed her eyes. The word “irreversibly” kept coming back to her. And then her eyes opened as she recalled the words immediately preceding that inexplicable one.
She mouthed them while lying in the hot water in the darkness. “Your lives will be irreversibly destroyed.”
Not just my life, but your lives.