Atlantic City office at one in the morning and was told that
the old couple had been paid the right money at the right time
and escorted to their car and all the way out to 1-95, where they
had turned north. She clicked off her phone and sat for a spell
in a window seat, just thinking. It was a quiet night, very dark.
Very lonely. Cold. Distant dogs barked occasionally. No moon,
no stars. She hated nights like this. The family-house situations
were always the trickiest. Eventually anybody got thoroughly
sick of being guarded, and even though Armstrong was still
amused by the novelty she could tell he was ready for some
down time. And certainly his wife was. So she had nobody at
all in the interior and was relying exclusively on perimeter
defence. She knew she should be doing more, but she had no
real option, at least not until they explained the extent of the
present danger to Armstrong himself, which they hadn’t yet
done, because the Secret Service never does.
Saturday dawned bright and cold in North Dakota, and preparations
began immediately after breakfast. The rally was
scheduled for one o’clock in the grounds of a church community
centre on the south side of the city. Froelich had been
surprised that it was an outdoor event, but Armstrong had told
46
her that it would be heavy overcoat weather, nothing more.
He told her that North Dakotans usually didn’t retreat indoors
until well after Thanksgiving. At which point she was almost
overcome by an irrational desire to cancel the whole event. But
she knew the transition team would oppose her, and she didn’t
want to fight losing battles this early. So she said nothing. Then
she almost proposed Armstrong wear a Kevlar vest under his
heavy overcoat, but eventually she decided against it. Poor guy’s
got four years of this, maybe eight, she thought. He’s not even
inaugurated yet. Too early. Later, she wished she’d gone with
her first instinct.
The church community centre’s grounds were about the
size of a soccer field and were bordered to the north by the
church itself, which was a handsome white clapboard structure
traditional in every way. The other three sides were well fenced
and two of them backed onto established housing subdivisions,
with the third fronting onto the street. There was a wide gateway
that opened into a small parking lot. Froelich banned
parking for the day and put two agents and a local cop car on
the gate, with twelve more cops on foot on the grass just inside
the perimeter. She put two cop cars in each of the surrounding
streets and had the church itself searched by the local police
canine unit and then closed and locked. She doubled the
personal detail to six agents, because Armstrong’s wife was
accompanying him. She told the detail to stick close to the
couple at all times. Armstrong ,didn’t argue with that. Being
seen in the centre of a prowling pack of six tough guys looked
very high-level. His successor-designate would be happy about
it, too. Some of that D.C. power-elite status might rub off on
him.
The Armstrongs made it a rule never to eat at public events.
It was too easy to look like idiots, greasy fingers, trying to talk
while chewing. So they had an early lunch at home and drove
up in convoy and got right to the business at hand. It was
easy enough. Even relaxing, in a way. Local politics was not
Armstrong’s problem any more. Wouldn’t be much of a problem
for his successor either, to be truthful. He had a handsome
newly minted majority and was basking in a lot of reflected
glow. So the afternoon turned out to be not much more than a
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pleasant stroll around a pleasant piece of real estate. His wife
was beautiful, his successor stayed at his side throughout, there
were no awkward questions from the press, all four network
affiliates and CNN were there, all the local papers had sent
photographers, and stringers from the Washington Post and the New York Times showed up, too. All in all it went so well he