The Wolf In The White House Read online

  His mind was muddy, but one thing was clear—he was in trouble. Big trouble.

  He felt his hands being cuffed behind his back, and his legs being tied together. He was hauled up by one of the men, who looked into his face in the glow of the streetlights and frowned.

  “You’re still awake, are you? Well, we’ll have to take care of that.” Chad heard the man rustling around in a box, then he felt a sharp jab in his neck. “There,” the man said. “That should fix you right up. We can’t have you running around and getting away now.”

  “Wh-wh-who are ya-ya-”

  “Don’t waste your breath, Hardwick. It’s almost lights out, and this will be all over for you. Just let the medicine do its job, and you’ll be fine.” He felt the man reach into his pocket and pull something out. “Fancy phone,” the man said, holding up Chad’s personal cellphone. “I might have to get myself one like this.”

  Chad’s head slumped, then shot back up and slumped again.

  “Don’t fight it. Let the darkness creep in. You’ll feel better.”

  “No,” he said weakly.

  “Listen to this fighter over here,” the man said to his companion. “He’s quite tough. I can see why he has the job he has.”

  “Too bad for him,” another voice said.

  Chad tried to focus on the voices, to listen to their words and try to glean any clues from what they were saying that he could. But his head was so heavy that it felt like it would break his neck, and he was struggling to breathe. Whatever was in the syringe was starting to take hold, and Chad wasn’t going to be able to fight them much longer.

  He had to warn- He stopped. Who did he have to warn? He searched his memory but came up empty. He remembered a woman and hazel eyes, but that was it. Was his wife kidnapped, too? Did he even have a wife?

  His thoughts were getting muddier by the second, and pretty soon, his eyes slipped closed. He tried and failed to open them, panic setting in even as the strangest sense of calm washed over him. This was it; this was the end.

  Still, he tried to fight. His eyes were heavy, opening them impossible. He could hear the muffled sounds of the road beneath them, his ear still pressed to the cold floor of the van. The men talked, but their words made no sense when strung together.

  The darkness was surrounding him now, bleeding closer on all sides, as if the darkness was a sinkhole swallowing Chad whole. He gave one more, valiant effort to push the darkness away, but his efforts fell short, and soon, he had lost the fight completely.

  I thought death would be painful, he thought, then everything dropped away and Chad was left there on the floor of the van. Alone.

  And there was no one in the world that would ever know what happened to him except for the three men in that van.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Logan hung up the phone, putting it back in his pocket and looking out into the night as the lonely highway stretched before them.

  “Who was that on the phone?”

  “An old friend,” he said without elaborating. “Turn here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We need to lie low for a little while, maybe even a week. I’m not sure yet.”

  “Because they came to my house?”

  “That, and because now they think that you’re a kidnapping victim, and they’re going to be looking for us both.”

  Maci sighed.

  “You sound relieved.” He laughed.

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ve never been in trouble before, and the thought of being accused of trying to assassinate the President is disturbing to me.”

  “But he’s not the real President.”

  “But the rest of the country doesn’t know that.”

  “If you know the truth, why does it bother you?”

  She shrugged, her eyes still on the road but her mind somewhere else as she considered his question.

  “I don’t know. I just prefer not to be viewed as an assassin.”

  “Fair enough,” he said, the light quality in his voice irritating Maci.

  “How can you be so blasé when we are on the run and the FBI is breaking down my door and looking through my things?”

  “Do you have anything to hide?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you worried? I’ve been in your house; it’s like you’re just sleeping there. There’s nothing personal or sentimental there. It’s a nicely decorated house without a single personal touch. Even the pictures on the wall are stock photos and not pictures of your actual family.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that those people couldn’t be your family. And one of the pictures was the stock photo that came with the frame. Hasn’t anyone ever noticed?”

  “I’ve never had anyone over.”

  He was silent for a moment, shocked by this revelation.

  “Are you serious?”

  “I’m always serious.”

  “But why?”

  “Look, I take my job seriously, and Archer is one of the only friends I’ve ever had. I don’t have friends; I have a few acquaintances that I talk to if I see them in public.”

  “What about your family? Surely, they’ve been here to visit DC.”

  “I don’t have a family,” she said quietly.

  She could feel his eyes on her in the darkness, the scrutiny unnerving her like no one had ever done before.

  “Everyone has a family,” he said quietly.

  “Well, not me,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice still quiet. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “The imposters,” she said without missing a beat. “I want to know how you came to know about the imposters.”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “But I guess, since we are going to be on this highway for the next hour, I probably have time to tell it.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “About a year ago, a friend of mine called me and asked me look into something he thought was suspicious.”

  “Was it the man on the phone?” Maci asked.

  “Do you want to hear the story, or do you want to interrogate me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway, he asked me to come to DC and to quietly look into some strange things that kept happening.”

  “Strange how?”

  “People were disappearing for a couple days, then coming back completely different people.”

  “Like Archer?”

  “Do you know when he disappeared?”

  “It must have been around Thanksgiving. I’ve gone on every family vacation with them since before they got married, but this time, Archer told me that I couldn’t go.”

  “Then he must have been swapped out already, because the one thing we know for sure is that the victims don’t know they’re being replaced by clones until it’s happening. Think back. Was there any time where Archer was gone for a few hours, or maybe even a day or two, with no explanation?”

  “Yes. It was Halloween. I remember because he was wearing a costume even though I thought it was a bad idea for him to be in full costume. It makes it harder to protect him.”

  “I can see that being an issue, but he did it anyway?”

  “Archer was always trying to get me to lighten up. He said that I stay too strict, even after we won the Presidency. But it’s hard to get out of campaign mode. Every little move he made was under a microscope for eighteen months. It takes a while to shake that paranoia.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “He chose a costume that ended up being really popular. He was that six-foot-tall, hairy thing from the space movies. Well, there were four more attendees just like him, and there were a couple of times that I thought I had lost him in the crowd, only to have him pop up again finally.”

  “When he popped up, are you sure it was him?
Doesn’t that costume have a full mask?”

  “It does.” She sat there for a moment, quietly guiding the car down the highway, heading west, away from DC. “He waved at me and gave me a thumbs up,” she finally said. “I knew it was him.”

  “But you never saw his face?”

  “I did later, but no, not during the party.”

  “So, you have no idea who was waving at you.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “That is probably when it happened. Those parties are usually long, and all they needed was to lure him somewhere quiet and snag him, sending the clone in the same costume.”

  Maci shook her head.

  “I should have watched him better.”

  “You can’t beat yourself up for that. It really isn’t your fault. I’ve been protecting powerful people my entire working life, and you can’t account for their whims sometimes. He should have chosen a different costume, one that didn’t obscure his face. He decided that it wasn’t that important, and he paid with his life.”

  They went over a rough patch in the highway, which had gone from the smooth, well-maintained, four-lane highway to a two-lane highway lined on either side with trees and dips and bumps that made her cringe every time she hit them with the low-slung car.

  “Davis is going to kill me when he gets this car back.”

  “This isn’t your car?”

  “You sound amused.”

  “I am. I thought it was your car. Pull over for a second,” he said.

  She did as he asked, releasing the latch on the engine as he went to the rear of the car.

  He was there for so long that she almost got out to help him, but he finally came back, holding the little GPS tracking unit in his hand.

  “Get off at the next exit.”

  “There’s nothing but a truck stop there,” she said.

  “I know. It’s perfect.”

  She pulled off the highway, parking under an old, burned out street lamp and watching as Logan got out of the car and moved quietly among the sleeping semis. Many of them had their engines running, their drivers sleeping the last few hours before dawn. Logan slipped in between two long haul company trucks and disappeared.

  He was back almost as quickly as he’d left, grinning widely.

  “I’m glad you said something before we got too close to where we are going. We have another thirty minutes or so before we get off the highway, and there are a few interchanges between here and our destination. But once we are off the highway, there’s only one way to go, and if they had tracked the Porsche, we would have been sitting ducks.”

  “I didn’t think about a tracker,” she said, getting back onto the highway.

  “You’re not used to being a criminal,” he said. “I don’t expect you to think like anything but a law-abiding citizen.”

  “I should have thought of it,” she insisted.

  “Good thing you have me, then,” he said, squeezing her hand impulsively.

  His touch was warm, sending shivers up her spine. Her stomach clenched in response to him, then just like that, the feeling was gone. He let go of her hand, as if realizing just then what he had done.

  They were silent for a few minutes, each lost in thought as the miles passed and the sky began to turn gray with the first hints of morning.

  “Do you think Archer is dead?” she asked, her voice pained.

  “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I wish I could tell you that I know he’s fine, but that wouldn’t be true. There are a lot of things that I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know that he’s not the only one that is been replaced, and I don’t think that whoever is doing it is done replacing key players in Washington. I think they’re going to keep replacing people one by one until the entire government is clones. Then and only then will we know what’s truly going on. That is, if we ever find out.”

  “But wouldn’t replacing the President be enough?”

  “Not really. There are checks and balances in place to keep a President from just trampling the Constitution and doing whatever he wants without regard for the people. Right now, the President would still have to answer to the other branches of the government. But once all the senators, judges, and congressmen are replaced, the President will have free reign and can do anything and everything that he wants.”

  “Do you think that Archer’s clone is in on it?”

  “I think Archer’s clone is a puppet, just like the rest of the clones. Someone else behind the scene is calling all the shots, and the Archer clone almost paid for it with his life.”

  “What if you had succeeded?”

  Maci could see Logan shrug in the dark.

  “They would have replaced the Vice President with a clone, if they haven’t already.”

  “Have they?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “The President was easier to pinpoint because of the scar. Not everyone has something so obvious.”

  “If Archer had to have his appendix out, why doesn’t the clone? Shouldn’t he have the same issues?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. And the other thing you have to consider is that the clone is only a couple of months old. Archer didn’t have that surgery at birth, so a clone of him wouldn’t have problems already. He might look full grown, but his body is only weeks old, if that.”

  “That makes sense,” Maci said. A laugh bubbled up suddenly. “What the hell am I saying? None of this makes sense. This is all crazy and completely unbelievable.”

  “But you believe.”

  “I know, but that is only because I’ve known Archer practically my entire life, and except for two days at Thanksgiving, he hasn’t been out of my sight long enough to get a scar removed.”

  “A scar like his can never be completely removed.”

  “You’re right. I guess I’m still trying to find a way to explain away the unbelievable.”

  He was quiet for a moment. She turned and looked at him in the darkness, the occasional street lamp sending a streak of light across his face in the moonless night.

  “What?” she asked.

  “What about me? Would you try to explain me away?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, of course not. Everyone knows that werewolves exist. This is different.”

  “It really isn’t.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there was a time when werewolves were just part of stories and fantasies. We were used to scare young people into respecting curfew and boundaries, or we appeared in stories that helped young wives escape from a rough day. Some of us had fun with it, but for a lot of us, it was hard to always be that crazy, mystical creature to be feared.”

  “How in the world would you even have fun with that?”

  He chuckled.

  “You know the models that they use on the cover of some of the novels?”

  “Yes,” she said, wondering where he was going and enjoying the lighthearted laughter.

  “One of the most famous models is actually a werewolf.”

  “You mean, Fa-”

  “Yes. You didn’t think that he had all that glorious hair because he was human, did you?”

  Maci laughed then, shaking her head.

  “I never even thought about it, but you’re right. He is a little too fabulous to be a human.”

  “I guess after being one of the things that no one believed exist for most of my life, I guess I don’t have a hard time believing in clones plotting to take over our government.”

  She nodded.

  “If you think about it, it does make sense in a way. Clones slowly taking over the government really is the only way to explain some of the crazy stuff that is happening in our world. So, what’s the plan?”

  “We are laying low for now.”

  “Then what?”

  “I have a guy on the inside. He’s going to contact me in a week and let me know what the situation is. We’ll go from there.”
/>
  “And until then, we’re just going to hang out?”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy, or that boring,” he said. “We are in hiding, so it’s more like we are actively avoiding being caught until the timing is right. The FBI raid on your house, and their belief that you were kidnapped, gave us the best cover. Because they won’t look as actively for you as they would if you were believed to be in on the assassination attempt with me.”

  “That is kind of disappointing.”

  “It is, but it also works to our advantage. If I’m caught, you can go on your own, and they’ll never suspect a thing.”

  “Is this something I can take down on my own? I don’t even know everything you know about it.”

  “I’m going to catch you up while we are in hiding, and I don’t know if this is something you can do on your own. It’s a lot to ask of a human, though I think by the way you took me on that you’re no ordinary human.”

  She could feel his eyes on her again, and she was glad for the darkness that hid her sudden blush at the obvious compliment. She was well aware of her expertise in the field, but it was different hearing it from someone else. Especially from a werewolf who had been thwarted by a human.

  “I see better in the dark than you think I do,” he said quietly.

  She drew a quick breath, her flush going from pink to the heat of red.

  “I don’t really like to be the center of attention,” she admitted. “I never have. Archer was a good friend choice because he was so comfortable being in the spotlight and I loved running things from the sidelines. That is where I’m comfortable.”

  “How did you end up his security detail?”

  She laughed softly.

  “That is a funny story, but not something that we share with other people.”

  “I’m not people; I’m a werewolf.”

  “That is true. It was back when Archer was first running for a local office. It was for the Mayor of this tiny town we grew up in, a real ‘good ole boy’ kind of town where everyone knew everyone and the sitting Mayor was Mayor because he owned most of the town. He was a real piece of work, and he would push rezoning through to make property taxes soar in areas of town where he didn’t have friends, then keep his friends’ homes zoned agricultural, which gave them the chance to claim tax exemptions, among other perks.”