Oak and Dagger (3 page)

Gordon took another step forward as he grimaced. “Mr. President,” he called, “John, don't—”

With a determined look, President Bradley thrust his shovel back into the hole with greater force than before.

A low rumble shook the ground.

The three of us started to run toward the hole just as it exploded in the President's face.

Chapter Two

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.

—ABIGAIL ADAMS, FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES (1797–1801)

M
UD
and water shot at least ten feet into the air from the hole. I hooked my arm with President Bradley's and pulled him away from the gushing geyser. Bradley's Secret Service detail grabbed for him as well. One burly agent knocked me to the ground and stepped on my hand as the protective team converged like a tight cocoon around the President. Moving as one undulating mass, they ushered him into a sleek black van and sped away.

Taking their cue from the President, Bradley's staffers herded the soaked press back up the hill toward the White House.

Nearly everybody who'd come out to watch the show was slowly returning to their duties, but not Frida. She stood at the edge of the lawn and squinted at us from behind her thick glasses. Her lips were pulled into a grin that took up most of her round face. She looked happier than a puppy with two tails.

Gordon had noticed her, too. His fingers curled into a pair of tight fists. He ground his jaw as he glared at her.

Her behavior was intolerable.

Every member of the White House staff was on the same team. We were supposed to do our jobs with pride and help one another. I had a mind to march over and wipe that oversized smirk off Frida's thin lips.

But I didn't have time. Lorenzo had already set to work moving the young little-leaf linden trees out of the damaging water spray. Gordon and I scrambled toward the nearest shutoff valve for the irrigation system as water rained down on our heads, soaking us with icy cold spray.

Gordon flipped the lid off the water box, but without the help of a wrench, neither of us could wrestle the corroded valve closed.

“Move over.” A hard shoulder nudged me out of the way.

I looked up to find a warrior with short-cropped hair looming over me. Dressed in a black military uniform, dark sunglasses, and a menacing P-90 submachine gun slung across his chest, he looked like an assassin on a mission.

Good thing I knew he was one of the good guys. A member of the Secret Service's elite military Counter Assault Team—or CAT, as they liked to call themselves—he was one of the best of the best.

“
Jack
.” My heart raced at the sight of him. Special Agent Jack Turner was my . . . my . . . Hell, I didn't know how to categorize our relationship. He made me nervous and happy and so very confused. I rarely knew what was going on in that head of his.

He grimaced at the stuck valve and then grabbed his P-90 submachine gun as if he were at a firing range and the valve was his target.

“W-What are you doing?” I demanded as I moved out of the way.

“Helping,” he answered.

“Don't shoot it! That's not going to help.”

One corner of his lips turned up. He shook his head as he spun the submachine gun around and used the butt of the P-90 as a lever to turn the valve.

The geyser sputtered and died.

“Shoot it? Oh, Casey . . .” He chuckled and slung his gun's strap over his shoulder again. His callused thumb gently brushed my cheek before he jogged back toward the rest of his team.

Gordon sat back on his heels and scratched his mud-splattered head. “I don't understand it. You checked for irrigation lines on the plans, didn't you?”

“Double-checked! Triple-checked!” I splashed through a puddle of water as I paced. “Out of all the things that could have gone wrong, this wasn't one of them, and this shouldn't have happened.”

A few steps later, I tripped into a shallow hole and twisted my ankle. “Milo!” I cried. The President's overgrown puppy had recently taken to digging up the lawn.

Jack returned and watched me with a curious expression as I hopped on one foot and shook my throbbing ankle in frustration.

The rest of the team had joined him. “What's she doing?” Jack's buddy asked. “A rain dance?”

“I think so,” Jack answered.

Jack and the other CAT agents offered to help us cordon off the President's muddy hole to keep anyone from stumbling into it. While they worked, we returned the tools and the trees to the utility shed that was hidden behind a canopy of trees on the west side of the South Lawn.

When we'd finished, I caught Jack's arm as we both shivered in the chilly fall air. Water dripped from my sodden bangs onto my nose. “Thank you for helping with the valve. What a disaster.” I bit my lower lip and fitted my hand in his. “I'm glad you were here. I owe you.”

An honest-to-God smile creased his lips. “Perhaps we can talk about payment later.”

“Tonight?” I blushed like a schoolgirl. “What time?”

“Did I
say
tonight?” Jack's smile dropped as if it had never existed.

“You implied it.” Although we saw each other several times a week at the White House, we'd only dated a handful of times since I'd kissed him at the Fourth of July fireworks show. And he'd canceled our last two dates . . . at the last minute . . . and without a good explanation, which probably explained why everything about our relationship still felt new and uncertain and, well, terrifying.

“Casey?” Gordon called. “Are you coming? We need to figure out what happened here.”

“Just a minute,” I said, and then turned back to Jack. “Well, what's going on between us?”

“Go on.” Jack gave me a little nudge with his shoulder. “We can talk about this later. I promise.”

Since he always kept his promises, I relented. “Okay. Later.”

Jack had played Watson to my Sherlock a couple of times this past year when I'd found myself in difficult situations. Although, if you were to ask him, he might say he was Ned Nickerson to my Nancy Drew, and then he'd make a remark about my perkiness just to get my blood boiling.

I am
not
perky.

Friendly? I'll admit I'm that. It's a Southern thing. My Southern-fried manners should never be mistaken for sugary perkiness, thank you very much.

Sure, I might have had a perky ringtone on my cell phone for a while this past summer. It was a mistake I had since remedied.

Kelly Clarkson's girl-power anthem, “Stronger,” which celebrated Nietzsche's maxim “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” was my current ringtone of choice. Which reminded me . . . I pulled my phone from my pocket to switch the ringer back on. That's when I noticed that while the President had been digging his hole, a text message from a restricted number had come to my phone. The message was short and to the point.

Die
.

• • • 

THAT THREATENING TEXT MESSAGE ECHOED IN
my mind like a bad special effect in a low-budget horror flick.

Die.

Die.

Die.

Who could have sent it?

I hadn't done anything recently, in several months actually, to merit a death threat. Even so, I rubbed my soggy arms to chase away the goose bumps that prickled my skin as Gordon, Lorenzo, and I sloshed back to the grounds offices.

Our offices were located underground, directly underneath the North Portico. Or as Lorenzo liked to say, in the bowels of the White House. Water dripped from our hair and the hems of our clothes onto the basement hallway's concrete floor. Our shoes squished with each step.

“This is your last chance, Gordon.” Frida's shrill voice made me jump. She must have been lurking just inside the doorway, waiting for us.

Gordon passed her without a second glance. Undeterred, she followed. Her body swayed as her short legs struggled to keep up with Gordon's long stride.

Gordon picked up his pace.

Frida had to jog to keep up. “You won't like what I have to say to Ambrose.”

“Why would you think Gordon would steal anything from you?” I asked.

“He wants to use my research to find Jefferson's treasure,” she said, panting as she tried to catch up. “Isn't that it? You're hoping to upstage me. That's how you plan to get your revenge.”

Gordon snorted at that.

“
Treasure?
” I asked.

Frida ignored me and instead wagged her finger at Gordon's back. “Don't you dare deny it, Gordon Sims. Just ask the First Lady's sister. She was the one who first noticed my research was missing. I bet you didn't realize how closely she's been working with
me
on the history project.”

“She is? She's working with you?” I asked. That surprised me. Lettie Shaw had arrived two weeks ago to help Margaret Bradley take care of the twins, only she'd spent most of that time in the grounds office. She'd rearranged my desk three times in an attempt to be helpful. Her attempts, unfortunately, hadn't been at all successful. Yesterday, it took me over an hour to find my to-do list. I'd finally found it filed under
D
for
Do
.

If Frida enjoyed working with her, the next time Lettie showed up, I planned to send her over to the curator's office.

“Of course Lettie prefers to work with me over Gordon,” Frida crowed. “She's a university professor and is interested in the White House's history. We're kindred spirits, which makes Gordon jealous. He's always been jealous of the prestige the curator's office gets when all you get is”—her nose wrinkled as she looked us up and down—“muddy.”

We'd reached the grounds office. Gordon grabbed my arm and yanked me inside.

“Go away, Frida,” he snapped and slammed the office door in her face. He then stomped across the large room that served as storage space and office space that Lorenzo and I shared. With a huff, Gordon disappeared into his private office.

“Do we need to worry about her?” I asked Lorenzo since he'd been working for the White House for nearly nine years and knew the political landscape much better than I did.

Lorenzo looked at the closed grounds office door and then toward Gordon's office. “Frida's not someone you want as an enemy,” Lorenzo said while I took a couple of towels out of my desk's bottom drawer. I tossed him one. “But Gordon knows what he's doing . . . I think.”

“Of course I know what I'm doing,” Gordon said as he emerged from his private office. He was using a small white terrycloth towel to dry his wet hair. “Now, let's figure out what happened out there with the irrigation line.”

“What was she saying about a treasure?” I asked, unable to put the thought of digging up a box of glittering gold or jewels out of my mind. “Don't tell me she thinks Thomas Jefferson hid gold somewhere in the gardens.”

Gordon stamped his wet shoes on the concrete floor, creating a small puddle underneath him. “I have no idea what she's talking about. She's always going on and on about finding so-called priceless artifacts here and there. She rarely makes any sense.”

“I agree,” Lorenzo said. “She's nuts.”

“Exactly.” Gordon draped the towel over his shoulder. “Now back to the matter at hand. Casey, what happened? How did you manage to locate the planting site over an irrigation line?”

“I don't know! I had selected the site because, according to my research, it was where Thomas Jefferson had originally planted an allée of little-leaf lindens along a carriage path.” Gordon already knew this. He liked the idea of re-creating the historic planting one commemorative tree at a time. “I swear there wasn't anything on the schematic to indicate an irrigation line would be there.” Even though I was wet and cold, I went straight to the large flat metal filing cabinet where the schematics and plans for the utilities in the gardens were kept and yanked open the drawer. The plans were right where I'd filed them.

Gordon took the schematic for the South Lawn and laid it out on Lorenzo's large wooden drafting table.

I pointed to the tiny pencil X-marks on the schematic I'd drawn to denote where, according to my research, Jefferson had planted the carriage path's allée of little-leaf lindens. “See. There are no irrigation lines indicated anywhere within the planting area.”

“This schematic has to be thirty years old,” Gordon said, studying the paper. “See here? And here? All of this predates the most recent upgrades to the irrigation system.”

“It's the only schematic in the drawer,” Lorenzo said after digging through the rest of the plans filed there.

“Are you sure you didn't misplace the current utility schematic?” Gordon asked. He glanced in the direction of my desk piled high with paperwork.

“Yes, I'm sure. I didn't lose anything.” The large-scale and woefully out-of-date schematic seemed to be laughing at me from the drafting table. “That was the only one available.”

“Are you sure?” Gordon asked again.

My heart quailed to see him frowning at me like that. My lovable supervisor had supported me time and again. Even when all the facts seemed to indicate I was wrong, he had stood up for me. I considered him more than a friend. He was fast becoming as dear to me as family. I loved him as a daughter should love her father. I didn't want to let him down.
But what could I say?

I was disappointed in myself.

Not because I'd misfiled the schematic for the South Lawn, because I hadn't. It hadn't been there for my use. Perhaps Frida's rants weren't as crazy as we'd all thought.

What if there was a thief—or saboteur—in the White House?

Whoever had sent me that ominous “die” text message might have also taken the schematic in an effort to disrupt the President's commemorative tree planting.

“Yes, Gordon,” I said, “you're looking at the only schematic I could find in that drawer.”

“Ah, it's a mystery for you to solve.” Gordon rubbed his hands together while an excited gleam brightened his blue eyes. “Perhaps I can join you on this caper.”

I'd been a bad influence on him. He was starting to enjoy the trouble that seemed to find me. “I like my mysteries in fiction. Not in real life. I've turned over a new leaf, remember?”