Yet somehow, as he reached the end of the corridor and saw his staff with two women, a Western teenager and a Chinese woman, there was a sinking feeling in his gut. These didn’t fit the usual profile of fools to be suffered, of cranks, troublemakers, time-wasters. He could be looking at the birth of a headache, less than seventy minutes before POTUS, the President of the United States, was due to arrive. This could not be allowed to happen. Chaos had been exiled from every cubic millimetre of the Shanghai Grand Theatre and not the slightest fragment could be allowed to re-enter.
Ten minutes later, he was struggling to keep his composure. ‘Ladies, ma men’ve checked ever’ inch of this building. Ever’ inch,’ he growled. ‘If there was a bomb the size of a goddam pea in this building, we would have found it—not once, but six times over.’
Dooley narrowed his eyes and beamed an unspoken message to McQuinnie and Lu:
If you are implying that I don’t
know my job you better realise that people have died for less.
He was wondering how the hell the two women’s vague allegation got all the way to his level. The kid was clearly high on something. There was an unfocused look in her eyes that unmistakably said
drugs.
‘Yes, yes, look, sorry about this and all that,’ Joyce blurted, blinking and rubbing her eyes. ‘But I just, well, really think there’s a bomb in here, and I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I had to tell
somebody
.’
‘You think there’s a bomb in here? Well, we think there ain’t. Want some hard facts, kid? Some numbers?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know how long we bin here? You know how many times we bin through this building? You know how many staff we got here, checking things out?’
‘No, I didn’t—’
‘Well, I’ll tell you.’ Dooley liked interrupting people. With him, it wasn’t just an obnoxious habit. It was
policy
. Riding roughshod over people trying to converse with you or each other when they should be silently, respectfully listening to you—that had always been a key technique of the SecTreas that he had admired. ‘Ma team have been studying these venues for three months. We bin here, physically, on the ground, for six weeks. You know how many people are here with the President of the United States? Do you know, li’l lady?’
‘I don’t know, but—’ ‘I’ll tell you. Seven hundred and twelve. Normally we have a couple a hundred. Sometimes we go up to four or five hundred. But on this trip we are being really careful. And when I say really careful, I mean it—that’s why there are seven hundred and twelve American souls here, advising, running around, checking and rechecking ever’ inch of ever’ building that the President of the United States will place his dainty little toes into.’
‘Yeah, look, you don’t have to listen, but we just thought we should tell you because—’
‘So where is it? Where is this bomb that you have a feeling jes’ may be in here?’
A pause. And then: ‘I don’t know.’
His much-practised look of being irritated beyond endurance became even more pronounced. His next statement was little more than a low, rumbling whisper. ‘Okay. What
sort
a bomb is it?’ His staff, hearing his voice drop to dangerously bass level, sidled a step backwards in formation, worried that he might go off at any moment. They already knew that there
was
a dangerous bomb in the building, and its name was Thomas Dooley. They prayed that Joyce had an at least half-reasonable answer to the question.
She didn’t. ‘Um. I’m not sure,’ she said, and bit her lip.
Dooley wondered whether to continue the conversation or just explode now. And what sort of explosion should it be? A quiet one in front of the civilians and, after they had left, a loud one to the staff who had disturbed him to talk to these crazy women? Or a massive one to shut everyone up at once? And should he use foul language? He normally didn’t in front of civilians—you never knew what could get into the media, and they were all wary of the media these days. He decided that he would try one more question, which he also delivered with menacing quietness. ‘What ’zackly makes you think there’s a bomb in here? You have a dream about it or somethin’? A vision, mebbe?’
Joyce had no immediate answer to this. The only thing to do would be to explain in detail about the strange group who had kidnapped them yesterday, and what they had overheard. It was a long story, but there was no other option. She opened her mouth to speak, but Linyao got in ahead of her.
‘Because I put it here,’ the mother-of-one declared.
Dooley took a step back and raised his right arm. Four officers standing behind him pulled out guns and levelled them at the Chinese woman.
The Secret Service agent’s eyebrows rose. What in hell was all this about? A drug-crazed Western backpacker kid talking vaguely about a bomb threat carried zero weight—but an actual confession from a calm, obviously intelligent, bilingual Chinese woman in her thirties: this sounded like something they might just need to take seriously.
‘Now this is gettin’ serious,’ he said. ‘I want you ladies to know somethin’. Of course putting a bomb somewhere is a major crime. But jest
telling
me that you put a bomb somewhere is also a serious offence in my book, whether you did or not.
Capisce
? You gone beyond the pale. Now, ma’am, you gonna tell us about this bomb that you say you put in here?’
Linyao nodded.
Her self-assurance made Dooley begin to feel uncomfortable. He could feel his cheeks fall, so that his face no longer registered Powerful and Irascible but merely Unhappy and Ill-At-Ease. This was not good. There was only an hour or so to go before POTUS walked in and he did not want to be pulled out of his comfort zone. Normally, he knew what to do about situations that threatened to drift out of control. You bully people around you into working so hard that they rebuild the walls of your comfort zone. He had done it before, and would do it again. That was the nature of the job. But if an Actual Crisis arose at such a late stage—anything that could be classified as a Potentially Serious Incident just before POTUS arrived—this would be a major development. It could not be allowed to happen. After all, he was the ASAIC. His official title was Assistant Special Agent in Charge. But for the past twenty-four hours he was actually Acting Special Agent in Charge, his supervisor having been infiltrated by a dangerous enemy agent—a stomach bug. By taking prime responsibility for security during this meeting, Dooley had taken on a degree of responsibility that could make or break his career. Nothing could be allowed to spoil it. Dooley turned away and looked out of the window. He could feel the tension rise in his neck and shoulder muscles, his deltoids and trapezius tendons becoming stiff.
People in normal jobs could never understand just how intolerant of failure the Secret Service had become in recent years—especially at this level. When he had first been assigned to the Secret Service Presidential Protection Detail, he felt like a princely suitor in a fairytale who is given a list of Three Impossible Things To Accomplish By Noon—only in his case, he had a couple of months to do them (which was good) but the list had stretched to several thousand impossible things (which was bad). Yet the punishment for failure was similar to that suffered by princes in fairytales—off with his head. In most cases the word ‘head’ in this context referred to the boss, who would have to resign to take responsibility for the shortcomings of his staff. And now he, Thomas ‘Cobb’ Dooley, was the boss. The buck stopped with him. And this buck could stop his meteoric rise dead.
His voice lost a little bit of its subterranean resonance: ‘So where did you put it? And how did you get in? We don’t remember seeing you in here before and, believe me, lady, we see ever’one who comes in here.’
Linyao moved towards the chair.
Four guns were cocked to fire.
‘No sudden movements,’ scolded Dooley.
‘I was just going to sit down,’ she said. ‘I’ve been up all night.’
The Acting Special Agent in Charge gestured at her to take the seat. ‘Talk. Fast. If this is some sort of joke, your ass is grass, which is an American phrase you probably won’t find in your English language textbook in this goddam country.’
Linyao took a deep breath before speaking, wondering whether to add that she was Canadian. Probably best not to. Didn’t Americans have an even lower opinion of Canadians than Axis of Evil residents? ‘I didn’t personally put a bomb in here. But I am indirectly responsible, I believe, for a bomb of some sort being here. I’ll give you the facts, and you make up your own minds whether this is a serious issue or not. Does that sound reasonable?’
‘Yes, but make it quick. We got no time for time-wasters. You got two minutes, and then you’re out of here—both of you.’
Linyao painfully told the story of how her daughter Jia Lin had disappeared on her way home from school the previous night. She explained that she was a government veterinarian working for the Shanghai municipal authorities, and how an access card to the stable block north of Suzhou Creek was the only thing the kidnappers wanted in advance. And she told them that several animals from that block had been transferred a few hours ago to the back stage of this very building. She believed the kidnappers were somehow involved with a bomb plot because of some information that Joyce had. She explained that her young friend—who had also been temporarily kidnapped, they believed by a separate branch of the same group—had overheard that a large explosive device had been sneaked into the premises and was due to go off at six eighteen precisely. It might have been smuggled in with the animals.
During her recitation, Dooley’s heart speeded up. There was something just a little bit plausible about the woman’s wild story. And six eighteen was exactly halfway through the performance that both presidents would be watching—which did involve animals from somewhere, God knew where, perhaps from this woman’s stable block. Like all law enforcement agents, teachers, reporters and mothers, Dooley had a lie-detector built into his eardrums. It had not beeped once during Linyao’s tale. She was telling the truth, or thought she was. Of course there was no bomb in here—that was impossible, with all the security measures in place. But something weird had occurred, and it involved space for which he was responsible. He had to check it out. He had a mission to keep the World’s Most Important Man safer than safe and that meant that in a very real sense he, Dooley, was the World’s Most Important Man at this moment. And he could not fail.
He could not fail.
‘Come,’ he barked, his basso profundo voice scooting up to a nervous mid-baritone. ‘We needta go for a walk.’
They marched at almost running pace to the main auditorium, and then through a staff-only door that led them to the wings at the back of the stage where human and animal performers would wait for their entrance. Thomas Dooley’s brain raced as they strode. Even though his legs were relatively short, he had learned to stride in such a way that normal people had to scurry or half run to keep up. The anxiety made him move even faster than usual. A little nodule at the back of his mind was saying that it was just possible that the make-or-break moment of his career had arrived. The possibility that real trouble was afoot was still low, but it was there. And if something bad was happening, he was going to be on top of it.
Dooley had come from an embarrassingly working class background (his father was a low-ranking operative in a factory which made American Standard toilets), and so had always been hungrily ambitious. As a youngster, he had always thought that secret agents were hired through a furtive approach made in a bar late at night. But he had actually joined the Secret Service by the most mundane route imaginable: he had wandered past their stand at a jobs fair in St Louis. He signed up on the spot, soon started doing cop-like duties in his local office, and then moved to the Uniformed Division at the White House before shifting to credit-card fraud and counterfeiting. He did a short stint on a team looking after Bill Clinton, and then rapidly rose to almost the very top of the Presidential Protection Detail—and today was number one, with the help of the enterovirus bug which had temporarily promoted him.
He liked people to know that the protection service, known as the SSPPD, was not like other branches of the Secret Service. Everyone had heard of the SS, but few people really understood it. The Secret Service had been set up by Abraham Lincoln, who signed the bill, can you believe it, on the day he was assassinated at the theatre: 14 April 1865.
There had been one local patrolman assigned to guard him, and the man had wandered away to get a better view of the stage, not realising that the real action was going to take place in the audience. Yet protecting the President had not been part of the original brief of the newly founded USSS. It was set up for the specific purpose of stopping the printing of fake money, which was considered a far greater threat to the health of the country than the mere killing of the President.
Lincoln’s death did not inspire Congress to take serious action to protect their leaders. And so gunmen were allowed to kill President Garfield (not related to the cat) at a railway station in Washington in 1881 and President McKinley at an expo in Buffalo in 1901. Only then did Congress decide to assign somebody to take the blame if more Presidents got killed: the Secret Service, thanks to the catch-all nature of its name, got the job. Those who understood the SS had argued that it was really just a type of commercial crimes bureau which accidentally had a moniker that belonged in pulp fiction. But no one listened.
So the USSS continued to grow with two non-matching core functions. Over the years it had developed a good relationship with the Mint, and the two organisations prided themselves on doing their job well. The fact that the US dollar had more or less become the world’s currency appeared to be proof of this. Fighting fraud and counterfeiting—especially in these days of high technology—was relatively straightforward. The other core function, protecting the President, was not. The SSPPD, the Presidential Protection Detail, had evolved into the organisation which probably ran the most complex logistics operations in history. Its work had nothing to do with sitting at computers and devising systems to catch tech-savvy criminals. PPD officers were out there, on the street. They were visiting venues. They were prowling along alleyways. They were sneaking up stairwells. They had to be the eyes and ears of large patches of ground, because they had responsibility for unimaginably wide areas. If fifty thousand people came to see the President, they had to ensure that not a single one of them could harm him. If he went on a tour which involved him being visible from eighty buildings, then all eighty of them had to be checked out and ‘secured’. If he drove 100 miles, then every one of those miles had to be made safe.