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Spencer stops, takes a breath.
Liam says, “Was this before or after the vice president got sick in Vegas?”
“Well before,” Spencer says. “The president said the Secret Service worked with the White House Mess to check the quality of the food coming in, and he didn’t think they went far enough. He … started talking quickly, very quickly, like this had been bothering him for a while. He said that there should be another level of defense for him and his health.”
Liam feels frozen in place. “Like what?”
Spencer shakes his head, like he can hardly believe what he was about to say.
“He said the old regimes used to have food tasters in court, to make sure the kings or queens wouldn’t be poisoned,” Spencer says. “The president thought it was time to do that again. Hire food tasters at the White House, to make sure he was never poisoned, or attacked. An important man like him, he said, needed every level of protection. He had lots planned for the months ahead, and he wanted to eliminate any chance of an illness striking him down before he could achieve what he wanted. Food tasters made sense to him.”
Liam says, “Food tasters? Did he say where he would find such people?”
A thin smile. “Death row prisoners in federal prisons, where else. Serve as presidential food tasters for six months, and then get their sentences commuted.”
Liam knows there is traffic behind him and people talking, but all he can hear now are Spencer’s words.
“God, Spencer, he must have been joking.”
Spencer shakes his head. “No,” he says. “The way he talked, his loud voice, the look in his eyes …. Liam, I’ve done some residenciesat mental institutions as part of my training. It’s my judgment that the president has what’s known as a ‘Cluster A’ personality disorder.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he demanded.
The next six words from his friend seemed to punch right through his mind.
Spencer says, “Our president is a full-blown paranoid.”
CHAPTER 43
BEFORE HE BROKE his sister’s jaw two years ago, Michael Balantic put up with her calling him a mercenary at holidays and gettogethers. Again and again, he tried to gently explain to her that he was a security consultant, until one day at a family reunion in Milwaukee, he had just had enough of her teasing and socked her one.
It put a bit of a damper on the reunion, but nobody—even her wimpy husband Ross—did anything about it, and that had been the end of being teased.
This night Michael is working a shift in Arlington, keeping track of a man that he was told to follow and record. That’s been his entire focus, all night long. It’s been a pretty easy job, because instead of using his own equipment, he’s been piggybacking on the host of surveillance gear that’s spread out through this heavily federal part of Arlington, from local police to state police to the FBI and a number of other agencies.
Some of the surveillance equipment and wiretaps out there are even legal.
He’s in a dark-red Mercedes Benz SL with Virginia license plates that would trace back to an actuarial firm, and never in the historyof the world have the police ever rousted a driver in a Mercedes-Benz in a rich neighborhood like this.
Michael’s confident he’s just fine.
But the evening is turning into something not fine indeed.
He’s wearing Apple earbuds that are connected to a classified drug interdiction program being run by the DEA and a Virginia State Police task force, and listening in to a conversation between two men standing in the doorway of a closed store, just yards away from a Mick restaurant.
“Well, damn,” he says.
He goes to the side of the front seat, picks up a cell phone, dials a programmed number.
It’s answered on the first ring.
“Yes?”
Michael says, “We have a problem.”
“Tell me more,” says Carlton Pope, special assistant to the president.
CHAPTER 44