Capitol Punishment (An Art Jefferson Thriller Book 3) by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page A

from earlier. “Just because you can make something doesn’t mean you have to.”
    “Did anyone else know how to make it?” Frankie asked, picking up on her partner’s line of questioning.
    “Yes.”
    “Did anyone actually produce it for their military?” Art pressed.
    “Yes.”
    “Who?” Art asked.
    “The Russians,” Orwell answered. “Why?”
    He didn’t get an immediate answer from the agents, who were locked in a suspicious, almost knowing stare.
    “King, huh?” Art said, repeating his doubts from earlier.
    “Da,” Frankie agreed.
    *  *  *
    The West Executive Avenue entrance gate to the White House grounds swung open an hour shy of midnight as a light snow dusted the nation’s capital. Three white Ford vans, windowless from the cab rearward, pulled in behind a government sedan, which led the small caravan around the executive mansion to a spot near the East Wing. There they stopped, met by a tall, serious-looking Secret Service agent who went to the lead car, brushing the snow off his shoulders as he walked.
    “Who are the drivers?” Secret Service Agent Ted O’Neil, head of the presidential detail, asked.
    Fellow agent Larry Price, stepping from the warmth of the Service Buick, pulled the collar of his overcoat up. “Tenth Mountain Division from Fort Drum. All louies.”
    “Good.” O’Neil, the man charged with keeping the president alive for the four or eight years he was in office, walked to the back of the first van with Price at his side. The driver already had the twin doors open.
    “Where are these going?” the lieutenant, wearing nothing even remotely Army, inquired.
    O’Neil looked at the piles of duffels in the back of the vehicle, at least two dozen in number. “Everything’s going down in my office.”
    “You’re not going to have any room left, Ted,” Price commented quite correctly.
    “How often am I there?” O’Neil asked. The leader of the presidential detail, a man of great importance himself, existed on a schedule that left little time for anything other than being close to the Man. The office was really just a place O’Neil visited once a day, late in the evening, after the president had been put to bed, to complete his portion of the requisite daily reports. Then it was sleep in the small bunk stuffed among others in a small section of the East Wing reserved for the Secret Service, and then up an hour before the president’s scheduled wake-up time so he could walk the Man from his private quarters to the Oval Office. Once every two weeks O’Neil went home to his family in suburban Maryland to reacquaint himself with his wife and four children. This lasted but a weekend, and already three of those had been preempted by overseas trips, and the one coming in just twenty-four hours was now just a dream fading away. O’Neil felt the pressure, dreaded the long hours, missed his family, and loved the job he did more than anything he could imagine. “Who’s going to instruct us?”
    Price looked down the line of vans. “The louie in the back.”
    “His name’s Morrison,” the lieutenant with the two agents clued them in.
    “Tell him to bring two of the...what are they called?” O’Neil wondered aloud, searching his fatigued mind for the word.
    “MOPP suits,” the lieutenant said.
    “Tell Morrison to bring two MOPP suits to the bunk room,” O’Neil told Price. “You escort him and keep them in the duffels. I don’t want some steward catching sight of them and letting it slip.”
    “Gotcha, Ted.”
    O’Neil backed away and let the officers and two of his detail begin the chore of lugging the seventy-plus duffels into the dark and quiet basement of the East Wing, the smaller and less important sibling of the power center on the opposite side of the executive mansion.
    “JESTER is down for the night,” the report came through O’Neil’s earpiece. JESTER was the Service code name for the president. The first lady was TULIP. And there was a third code