the NSC meeting?” Speers offered. “Bet you’ve never had the Executive Omelet.”
“ I only eat egg whites.” They headed down the stairs. “Was it just me, or was Eva’s tan a little orange?”
“ No, it was bronze.”
“ You think she’s got any tan lines?”
“ Funny.”
“ I should ask the President.”
Speers didn’t like the tone of the remark. “Don’t believe the rumors.”
“ Rumors are a threat to national security,” Carver said. “So if Eva Hudson, the hottest woman in politics, is intimately involved with the leader of the free world, I need to know about it.” Carver referred to the latest issue of Vanity Fair , in which Eva had taken the top honors in an article titled “World’s Sexiest Feds.”
Whispers of an intimate relationship between Eva and the nation’s first widower President had plagued them for years. Carver knew that Hudson had started working for the president twelve years earlier, as his Assistant Chief of Staff, when he was Governor of Virginia. During the term, Hudson’s husband died in a tragic car wreck. A month later, then-Governor Hatch’s wife was struck with a rare, aggressive bone cancer that ended her life within weeks. That was when the whispers started. Staffers went on record that the two spent an inappropriate amount of alone time together soon after the tragedies. Eva was then suddenly promoted to State Congressional Liaison, and then the next year, Lieutenant Governor. She didn’t stay in the role long. The International Monetary Fund came knocking, and Eva, sick of the gossip and southern politics, jumped at the chance to join the IMF as Assistant Director. But two years later, after the election, she couldn’t refuse President Hatch when he asked her to join his cabinet.
Sweat ran down Speers’ forehead. “You okay?” Carver asked him.
“ Forget for a second what I said in there. What if the President’s right? What if it’s the wrong time to stir up trouble at the Defense Department?”
“ That’s crazy talk.”
“ You’ve seen his approval rating among the military.”
“ Please. Most of those guys voted GOP anyhow. And besides, the President’s a second-termer. Nothing to lose.”
“ Any head of state will tell you,” Speers warned Carver, “you don’t wanna piss off the guys with the guns.” Speers had long believed that if Thailand could have seventeen military coups in the past sixty years, and a superpower like Russia could have two in the past twenty years, it could happen anywhere. While most Americans worried about whether a few Arabs had weapons of mass destruction, it was the President’s enemies at home that kept Speers from sleeping at night.
They came to the kitchen, where the President’s security detail chief, Special Agent Hector Rios, was eating a five-egg omelet. Rios had been in the Secret Service for twelve years and spent the past six with President Hatch’s team. Even before the six-foot-ten Rios stood to shake Carver’s hand, Carver recognized the former NFL linebacker.
“ Jacksonville Jaguars,” Carver said, grinning, revealing a full set of semi-straight, but perfectly white, teeth. “The first Latino middle linebacker to ever be drafted in the first round.”
Rios grinned and extended his oversized paw for a handshake. “I’m impressed,” he said. “Intel guys are usually into the fringe sports. Mixed martial arts, roller derby. You know.”
“ I’ve been known to take in the odd roller derby match myself. So whatever happened to you? How’d you become a Fed?”
“ Same answer to both questions. Osama .”
“ What? Osama bin Laden killed your football career?”
“ Different Osama. In my second year training camp, this defensive tackle named Osama Sinclair busted my left knee. He was just some poor guy from Miami trying to make the squad, but he ruined me. Couldn’t get his name out of my head. Osama. Osama. Osama. I was in the hospital having fantasies about what I was