True Allegiance

Fifteen minutes later, Prescott was on the phone with the Chinese premier, who quickly acquiesced to the request for a major bond buy by the Chinese government. Prescott thanked him profusely, promised him that the United States understood the position of the Chinese government with respect to military exercises in the South China Sea, but asked that the exercises take place sporadically rather than all at once, and then hung up. And they say the Chinese are tough to deal with, Prescott thought to himself.

Seconds later, his intercom buzzed.

“Mr. President?” said his secretary, a hot little handpicked blonde number named Marissa. “I’ve got the governor of Texas for you.”

“Can we take a rain check?” Prescott felt too high to be brought down by the fat turd from the Lone Star State, that arrogant, bullheaded used car salesman. He hated Bubba Davis—who named their child Bubba, aside from dumb hicks from the South?—and didn’t want to hear his drawl ruining his day.

“He says it’s urgent, Mr. President.”

Prescott groaned and picked up the headset. “Put him through.”

The line beeped once. “Governor Davis, you are on with the president of the United States.”

“Mr. President.” Davis’s voice was thick with anger.

“What can I do for you, Bubba?”

“You could send me some troops to the border, is what you could do. I’m sure you saw on the news about my staffer.”

Prescott kicked off his shoes, put his feet on the desk. “Yes, sir, I sure did.” He found himself accidentally blurring into a drawl of his own when he talked with the rednecks. “Tragic. Just tragic. Not sure what anybody could’ve done about it, though.”

“You could have done something about it. You still can. It’s an act of war.”

“It’s not an act of war, Governor, if it’s not by a foreign government.”

A pause. Then the storm. “Horseshit, Mr. President. You know as well as I do that the Mexican government is run by the cartels. And they killed one of my people. One of your people. Came right across the border in that helicopter and shot her right in front of my chief of staff. I got dead kids washing up on the Rio Grande and you’re slammin’ me in the press for tryin’ to do something about it. What in the Sam Hill is wrong with you?”

Now Prescott’s ire was up. It was one thing to disagree with him. It was another to lecture him. Nobody got away with that shit. Nobody.

“You put troops on that border without my go-ahead, they’re not going to have any power,” he said. “You can give them the power to arrest, but as you know, anyone they arrest will then be processed by my Immigration and Customs Enforcement department. And we aren’t interested in noncriminal undocumented immigrants.” Prescott could almost hear Davis bristle at the euphemism. Good. He continued, “You can do what you want, but in the end, it’s our choice anyway.”

“But at least they won’t be runnin’ around the state in their helicopters. Power to arrest means power to fire on those who are a threat.”

Prescott’s voice went ice cold. “Let me be perfectly clear, Governor Davis. Your boys shoot anybody, and I’ll have my DOJ dogs down there sniffing around you like you’re a bitch in heat.”

Another pause. “And then what?”

Prescott was thunderstruck. “And then what? And then I arrest your boys, shut down your operation, and bring charges against you for violation of federal law. That’s what.”

A long pause, this time. Softly. “And then what?”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit, Bubba. You cross me, and I promise, you’ll see the inside of a cell for a very, very long time.”

Davis’s voice came through solidly. “I read you loud and clear, Mr. President.”

The phone clicked dead.

Prescott buzzed the intercom. “Marissa, get me Jazz.” That was his nickname for Jasmine Jacks, the national security advisor, his longtime political mentor.

He could hear her sexy fingers manipulating the phone. “She’s in the Situation Room, Mr. President. And she says you might want to get down there. Something about Brett Hawthorne.”

Ellen

Austin, Texas

BRETT HAD LOST WEIGHT.

Funny that that would be the first thought to cross Ellen’s mind when she saw him on television, but it was. He was always so self-conscious about the four or five pounds around his midsection he couldn’t shake, what he liked to call the Famed Hawthorne Underbelly. That had to be gone. He looked gaunt. That jutting jawline she loved to kiss looked like skin stretched taut over bone. He looked like death. That was her first thought.

Her second thought was that this could not be happening.

Her man. The man she’d married and who had cared for her and who had provided her strength and to whom she’d given her entire life—a man she had never questioned about his honor, even when the front pages of every major newspaper in America smeared it—with a knife to his throat.

She was alone, watching him. He was alone, at the mercy of his enemies. This couldn’t be real.