The Omega's Bodyguard

Adam Davidson spent seven years trying to get me into the right car, and he was still losing.

“Car’s this way.”

“I know where the car is.”

“You said that in Boston.”

“I found it eventually.”

“You got into a senator’s SUV.”

“It was black.”

“They’re all black, Forest.”

He didn’t look at me when he said it. Adam never looked at me in corridors. He looked at the fire door at the far end, at the caterers stacking chafing dishes onto a trolley, at the kid from the AV crew looping cable around his elbow. He looked at everyone in Philadelphia except me, and I have never in my life felt so thoroughly watched over.

Behind us, the civic hall was still roaring. Six hundred people on their feet for the Designation Privacy Act, which, if you’d told me at nineteen that a room would give a standing ovation to a bill about employment records, I’d have asked what you were taking and whether you’d share.

“You were good tonight,” Adam said.

“I was brilliant tonight.”

“You were good. You rushed the bit about heat leave.”

“I did not rush—”

“You rushed it. You always rush the parts that are about you.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Seven years. The man knew where all my soft places were and had the decency to only press on them in private.

He slowed at the corner where the corridor bent toward the side exit and fished his phone out of his jacket with two fingers, eyes still on the door.

“Here.” He tilted the screen at me. “Before you get in the wrong car and I forget.”

Rory. Eleven years old, all elbows and fierce eyebrows, gripping a clarinet in front of a school curtain as if it owed her money.

“Oh my God. Look at her face.”

“She played the whole solo with that face.”

“She’s going to be terrifying.”

“She already is.” He took the phone back before I could zoom in on the eyebrows. “Next recital’s in December.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You said that about the last one.”

“I was in Geneva, Adam. There was a treaty.”

“You sent flowers. She said they smelled like a funeral.”

I laughed so loudly the AV kid dropped his cable.

That’s the part I keep going back to. I was laughing. I had my hand on Adam’s sleeve because he’d made me laugh, and he let me keep it there for three whole steps, which for Adam was practically an embrace, and then he said into his wrist, “Hawthorn moving to side exit,” and opened the door onto the street.

Cold air. October in Philadelphia smells like wet brick and diesel and someone’s street cart burning pretzels.

The motorcade sat nose-out along the curb—three black SUVs, the limo in the middle, lights ticking. Across the pavement the police had set up a barricade line and there were people behind it, maybe a hundred, bundled in scarves, holding phones up and hand-painted signs. MY BODY MY RECORDS. THANK YOU FOREST. One little omega girl on her father’s shoulders held a sign with my name spelled with two Rs.

“Thirty seconds,” Adam said, before I asked.

“I love you.”

“Twenty-five.”

I went to the barricade. That was always our deal. He gave me the thirty seconds and I didn’t argue about the car afterward, and we both pretended neither of us was keeping score.

Hands reached for me. Cold fingers, warm fingers. A woman grabbed my wrist and said her daughter had been fired for missing work during a heat and I’d made her cry on television tonight in the good way. I told her I was sorry. I told her I was working on it. I meant it, which is the only trick I have.

Adam stood at my right shoulder, half a step back. Always the right shoulder. Always half a step.

“Time,” he said.

“Ten more.”

“Time, Forest.”

Down the line, two men started shoving.

It wasn’t dramatic at first. A shout. A sign going over. The crowd rippled away from the scuffle, and the ripple became a push, and the push hit the barricade and the barricade scraped a foot across the pavement toward me. Somebody screamed. The little girl with the two-R sign started crying, high and scared, and I turned toward her.

Adam’s hand closed on the back of my collar.

Not my arm. My collar. He’d never done that before.

“Car,” he said, in a voice I’d never heard him use.

A catering van was parked two spaces behind the last SUV. White, dented, a cartoon lobster on the side. I remember the lobster. I remember thinking it was a strange van to have at a speech about employment records, and then its side door slid open.

People think gunshots are loud. They’re flat. They sound like somebody slamming a heavy book on a table in the next room.

Pap.

Adam threw me.

I don’t have another word for it. I was upright and then I was going sideways toward the limo’s back wheel, and he came with me, and the pavement came up and took the skin off my palm and my cheek hit wet asphalt, and Adam Davidson landed on top of me.

Pap. Pap-pap.

I felt them.

Nobody tells you that part. His whole body jumped. Each time. The jolt went through his chest into my back, through my ribs, into the road, as if someone was hitting him with a hammer and I was the anvil underneath. He grunted once, a soft short sound, the noise he made when he stood up too fast from Jarrod’s kitchen stools.

Then he got heavy.

Screaming. Engines. Somebody shouting GUN, GUN, VAN, and more shots, a whole flat rattle of them now, from our side.

“Adam?”

Nothing. His cheek was against the back of my head. I could feel his breath in my hair, short and wet and wrong.

“Adam.”

Warm on the back of my neck. Spreading into my collar.

“Adam, get off, you’re heavy, get—”

A hand fisted in the shoulder of my coat.

It was an enormous hand. I know because it took half my coat and most of my shirt with it. And a voice, right at my ear, low and very calm, the calm of a pilot announcing turbulence:

“I’ve got you. Move.”

The weight came off me. Adam’s weight. Somebody rolled him and his arm flopped onto the pavement, palm up, fingers loose.

“WAIT.”

I was being lifted. Not helped up. Lifted, my feet not doing any of it, the hand in my coat and an arm round my chest like a steel bar.

“WAIT, HE’S HURT—”

“Sir, we have to move.”

“GET HIM.”

“They have him.”

“HE’S STILL THERE.”

I twisted. I got an elbow into something that felt like a wall and the wall didn’t care. I was facing backward, being carried backward, and I could see Adam on the ground behind the wheel with two agents on him and blood under him, black in the streetlight, so much of it I couldn’t make it make sense.

The SUV door opened. The arm put me in the footwell and a hand shoved my head down, and I had a split second, before the door slammed, of the man who’d carried me.

Dark suit. Dark hair. Big. That’s all. He’d already turned. He wasn’t getting in with me.

He was running back to Adam.

The door shut. The locks thunked. The SUV lurched off the curb so hard I hit my shoulder on the seat frame.

“Hawthorn secure. Moving. Moving.” Astrid Kaufmann, in the front passenger seat, one hand pressed to her earpiece and the other on her weapon. “Route blue. I need a count on the van.”

I got up onto my knees. Somebody’s hand pushed me back down.

“Stay down, Forest.” Astrid’s voice cracked on my name. She never used my name.

“Where’s Adam?”

She didn’t answer. She was listening to her earpiece.

“Astrid. Where is he?”

“They’re working on him.”

“Then turn around.”

“We can’t—”

“Turn the car around!”

"Forest." She twisted in her seat and looked at me, and her face was white and wet and furious, and that was when I understood that I had never once seen Astrid Kaufmann cry. “Stay down. That’s what he’d want. Stay down.”

I stayed down.

I lay in the footwell of an armoured car doing eighty down Broad Street with somebody else’s blood cooling on my neck, and I held my own wrist, thumb pressed hard into the inside of it, and I counted the pulse there because it was the only one I could reach.

♥♥♥

They put me in the second-floor sitting room of the residence, which is yellow and has too many lamps.

A doctor checked me over. Grazed palm. Grazed cheek. Bruised shoulder. “Not a scratch otherwise,” she said, smiling at me, as if it was good news.

Someone took my coat. I didn’t see who. It went into a bag and the bag went away, and later I realised it was evidence, because it had Adam on it.

Nobody took my shirt. I was still wearing it. The collar had dried stiff.

Staff came and went. An usher with tea. A staffer from the press office who took one look at me and walked straight back out. Two agents I didn’t know by name stood at the doors. None of them looked at me. They looked at the walls, the windows, the carpet, the portrait of some dead first lady above the fireplace. Nobody had avoided my face this hard since I went on a morning show at twenty-two and told the country I’d stopped taking suppressants.

My father arrived at half past ten, still in his apron.

He’d been downstairs in the kitchen, he said, testing a menu for the state dinner, and someone had come in and turned off the burner under his sauce without asking, and he knew. Jarrod Madden has cooked for three heads of state and a pope, and nobody touches his burners.

He didn’t say anything else. He sat down next to me on the yellow sofa, took my scraped hand in both of his, and held it.

I took my phone out with the other.

Where’s the car, I typed to Adam.

Sent.

No dots. No reply.

Tell me you’re being dramatic.

Sent.

Adam. Rory’s recital. December. I’m coming. I’ll bring better flowers.

Sent.

My father watched me do it and didn’t stop me.

At twenty past midnight, the door to the sitting room opened and my mother walked in.

President Caroline Madden does not walk into rooms. She arrives in them. There is always a wave in front of her—an aide, a chief of staff, two agents, a military attaché with the football, someone murmuring a schedule. She has not been alone in a doorway since the night she won.

She came in alone.

She closed the door behind her with her own hand.

My father stood up. He looked at her face. And then he sat back down again, slowly, and took my hand back into both of his, and held it harder.

I looked at my phone. At the three messages with no dots under them.

“Forest,” my mother said. “Sweetheart.”

She has never called me sweetheart. Not in my whole life.

She didn’t have to finish. I’d been underneath him. I’d felt him get heavy.