The Day of the Donald (12 page)

T
rump swaggered into the Tyson Room and headed straight to his seat. Jimmie headed for the corner, where he tried to look invisible by sucking his gut in.

“All right, guys, what is it?” Trump said. “This better be important. I was midbronzing all the way down in the subbasement.”

The cabinet members looked around anxiously. Finally, it was Secretary of State Omarosa who spoke.

“The United Kingdom seems to be preparing for an escalation.”

Trump snorted. “What are we talking about? Another insult? These guys are terrible at insults.”

“No—this time they’ve taken actual action.”

“What, like recalling their ambassador or something?”

Omarosa shook her head. “They’ve recalled Patrick Stewart. Also Emily Blunt and Andrew Lincoln.”

“Aw, crap,” interjected the secretary of transportation, Clint Eastwood. “That means no more
Walking Dead
. I gotta find out what happens to Daryl!”

“Just read the comic books,” grumbled Corey Lewandowski.

“Why don’t
you
read the comic books?” snarled Eastwood with such a menacing tone that Lewandowski paled and became
very interested in his glass of water. Jimmie made a mental note to bring that moment up the next time Lewandowski got in his face (not that Jimmie would do any better if he got a full blast of Eastwood).

“So what?” Trump shrugged. “Let the Brits go crawling back to their fog and their bars that close at eleven.”

“Bringing their citizens home means they expect things to turn violent,” said Omarosa.

“They’re damn right it’s about to get violent!” said Secretary of Defense Nugent. “Just give the word, boss, and it’s boomtown at Buckingham Place.”

“This is not an emergency, folks,” said Trump. “What have any of those people actually done lately? Nada, except for that
Walking Dead
guy, and nobody knows he’s British. I didn’t find out until my first security briefing. These guys think this gives them leverage on us? They got nothing. They’re running scared.”

Now Chris Christie piped in. “You let me know what airports these guys are flying out of. I can make sure it’s a looong time before they actually make it across the pond.”

“LAX, most likely. Hartsfield for Andrew Lincoln,” said Eastwood.

Christie was already speed-dialing a number on his cell. “LAX and ATL. The full Fort Lee,” he said, then hung up. He looked at Trump. “It’s done.”

For no reason that Jimmie could figure, Christie then stared right at him with a look that said,
You’re next
.

“Let’s get the word out that these guys think they’re too good for us,” Trump said to Lewandowski. “Get into the next news cycle before the queen gets a chance to give her own reason.
Let me know if it looks like they’re actually getting their message out, and I’ll call Michelle Obama an ugg-o or something, drown them out.”

“Done,” said Lewandowski.

“Hey, can we do something really nice for the French?” asked Trump. “That’ll really get under their pale English skin.”

“I’ll get my staff on it,” said Omarosa.

“All right, enough of those guys. Is that it?”

“The governor of Kansas has finally called, looking for disaster funding to clean up after last week’s tornados,” Emma said.

“Does he want the standard relief package or the Trump Premium Plan?” asked Trump.

“What’s the premium plan?” Jimmie whispered to the assistant next to him.

“Standard, we help them rebuild. Premium, they get a Trump office complex on the demolished site of their choice,” she whispered back.

Emma checked her iPad and replied, “He’s leaning Premium. But I think we can talk him up to the Trump Executive Level.”

“Let’s do it,” said Trump. “Remind him if they license a second casino, we throw in a free school. Other business, or are we done?”

“Iran has turned away the UN’s nuclear inspectors again,” said Omarosa.

“Iran’s a nobody,” said Trump. “Do they honestly think they can get a nuke? They can’t have a nuke. Nuge, where are we at over there?”

“I got seventy-five drones within two hundred miles of Tehran,” said the secretary of defense. “We got guys in the
satellite room sitting there, waiting, watching. Tracking their habits. We know where they hide their glow sticks, all right. Just say the word, and that place will be glowing so bright,
Egypt
won’t be able to sleep.”

Note to self
, Jimmie thought.
Stay on Ted Nugent’s good side
.

“All right, let’s do that thing where we talk to the guy who talks to the guy who talks to the guy who tells Ayatollah what’s-his-name that he lets the inspectors back in or we’re gonna light up the sky like the Fourth of July. No—wait. Like Christmas. That’ll piss those Kardashians off even more,” Trump said, rubbing his hands together eagerly. “Oh, that is beautiful. I love that plan. You know what else? I love having drones. I see why Obama used them so much now.”

“Death from above,” intoned Ted Nugent.

“And I want to keep on top of the England thing,” Trump said. “Let’s find one British guy who’s an American citizen—maybe that Craig Ferguson guy—and get him to stay here. He says he picks us over them, I give him an exclusive interview or something.”

“I think he’s Scottish,” said Emma.

“Same difference, right? Or do they have more problems than we thought? Hang on a second.” Trump pulled out his phone and typed a tweet as he spoke it aloud: “If England’s so great, why is Scotland trying to break up with them all the time? England has nothing to offer! Hashtag LOSERS!”

“Good one, boss,” said Chris Christie.

“All right, good meeting. Let’s get somebody on some T-shirt designs for the party when the British surrender,” Trump said. What followed next was an unholy, jarring noise like a macaw choking—a noise that, Jimmie realized, was Trump laughing.

A
s the meeting slowly dispersed, Jimmie picked up the
Washington Post
off the pile of newspapers on the meeting-room table. The front-page stories were all about Vice President Tom Brady’s trip to the new American moon base. He’d been shot into space the previous week. His mission was scheduled to last through the week of the midterm elections. (The jokes about whether he could keep his space suit inflated had started months earlier and hadn’t let up.) It was almost as if somebody wanted the VP out of the country. Way out of the country.

Jimmie glanced at the
Post
’s review of the all-female remake of
Twelve Angry Men
, which was still called
Twelve Angry Men
. He read the score of the Nationals game. They were on a roll. Probably headed to the World Series.

He turned to the Metro section. The top local headline read, “You’ll Never Guess Which Georgetown Rowing Star Was Killed in a Military Training Exercise Gone Wrong.”

Jimmie was about to skip to the next headline when the photo caught his eye.

Jimmie did a double take, and then a triple take. The blond hair . . . the high cheekbones . . . the Millennial smirk . . . There was no mistaking it: The photo of the Georgetown student
identified as David Connor Brent was the same Connor Brent he’d met in the park two nights ago.

Brent had been rowing solo on the Potomac last night when he rowed straight into a naval training exercise. A Navy SEAL platoon was in the middle of a simulated attack using live rounds. Buoys labeled CAUTION had apparently been floating nearby to warn boats away. It wasn’t known why David Connor Brent had rowed past them, but he had been reduced to chum in a matter of seconds.

Strangest damn “accident” Jimmie had ever heard of.

Jimmie tried to keep his reaction in check, but it was impossible. It felt like he’d just been slugged in the wedding tackle.

“Everything okay?” Emma asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Jimmie folded the paper and slid it back to the middle of the table. He looked her straight in the eye. “Harper left yesterday’s game with a sprained ankle. Even if he stays off the DL, I’m looking at three to five games without his bat in the lineup on my fantasy team.”

Emma rolled her eyes at him. For a second there, Jimmie had thought she’d been on to him. It seemed apparent to him that if she’d had any involvement in Brent’s death, it would have shown on her face.

Hers weren’t the only eyes on him, though—there were others lingering in the room, watching his reaction. Corey Lewandowski had been foaming at the mouth as Jimmie read the article. It was possible the press secretary had rabies. Had there been any bite marks on Lester’s body? Jimmie didn’t know. All he knew was that the game had just gotten deadlier.

Twice as deadly, to be precise.

J
immie reached the end of the recordings. He’d spent the past five hours holed up in his office listening to Lester’s interviews . . . all for nothing.

Jimmie could see why Lester Dorset thought there were some “game-changing” admissions on the hard drive. Trump spoke candidly with Lester Dorset about buying favor in the media. He called the Mighty Mississippi a “river of slime” running through the United States. At one point, he even referred to the Second Amendment as one of the Ten Commandments. Lester, the golden boy for the country’s most liberal rag, had to have shit himself at that one!

The problem was that Lester Dorset had always been an idealist. A fool who believed in the essential goodness of the American people. Lester probably thought that if he could expose the man behind the orange mask, the people would come to their senses and storm the gates.

Unfortunately, Jimmie knew better. Trump was what those on the celebrity-gossip beat called a “Biebs.” No matter what you wrote about Justin Bieber in the dirt sheets, he still managed to top the iTunes charts. Trump was the same way. He could do wheelies on a motorbike over Ronald Reagan’s grave, and half the country would still vote for him in 2020.

While many of Trump’s admissions were indeed eye raising, none of them were “game changing.”

Still, whoever had killed Lester had thought they were. The killer also had to have known Lester was attempting to smuggle the recorder out of the White House. The motive couldn’t be clearer. They just hadn’t counted on Lester hiding the recorder so well. If the killer ever learned that Jimmie had the recordings in his possession now, they would come after him.

This was a most unwelcome realization.

The dots that had seemed rather random were beginning to connect. A web was forming, with Jimmie smack-dab in the middle of it. Regardless of the fact that Lester didn’t have anything on Trump, he’d told people he had—and someone had killed him for it.

Jimmie thought back to the list of people who had had access to the White House roof: Christie, Lewandowski, Putin. Each had a motive to protect Trump. It had to be one of them. A political scandal was brewing, the likes of which nobody had seen since Watergate. He knew next to nothing about that scandal, of course, and hoped to keep it that way. In his high school civics class, they’d watched
All the President’s Men
. He’d fallen asleep fifteen minutes into it and woke up during the end credits and was assured by a classmate he hadn’t missed a damn thing.

But he wasn’t going to fall asleep now. At least not before three o’clock (one of his three naptimes, back when he was a freelancer). He could smell something fishy, and it wasn’t the tuna sandwich he’d forgotten about in his desk drawer.

He hid the recorder back in the ceiling; he’d figure out how to get rid of it later, if necessary.

This wasn’t Jimmie Bernwood being paranoid.

This was Jimmie Bernwood being smart.

In order to investigate this thing, though, he was going to have to do something stupid: He was going to have to enlist the help of his ex-lover.

One of them, that was. He had many, just so you know.

More than he could count.

(Seven.)

Only one, however, worked in the White House.