Page 22 of The First Gentleman

“I’d like to do one more,” Garrett says. “I dedicate this song to the most brilliant, most resourceful, mostdiabolicalwoman in the room tonight.” Damn it. He’s looking right at me. “Brea Cooke—please stand up!”

Hadn’t planned on payback. I half rise from the booth, give a little wave, and sit right back down again.

“Uh-uh,” says Garrett from the stage. “If I’m going to sing about the woman I love, I need her right here beside me.”

You son of a bitch…

The crowd starts chanting: “Brea! Brea! Brea!”

I walk toward him. A server grabs an empty chair and sets it next to Garrett’s stool, right under the spotlight. I step up onto the stage and sit down.

“Hi, Brea,” says Garrett sweetly.

I could kill him right now, but I guess turnabout is fair play. “Hi, Garrett.”

The crowd roars.

Garrett looks down at the guitar strings, then up at me, and then he starts to sing an old Joe Cocker hit. But there’s no rasp in Garrett’s version of “You Are So Beautiful.” He sings it soft and sweet while looking straight into my eyes. “‘You’re everything I hoped for, everything I need…’”

After a few seconds, my embarrassment fades away and it’s just the two of us. In a restaurant full of people, he’s the only one I see.

By the time he gets to the last chorus, tears are running down my cheeks.

CHAPTER

18

The man occasionally known as Jack Doohan has his powerful night-vision spotting scope trained on the window of the third-floor room at the Hanover Marriott where his targets are staying. He’s been surveilling the two subjects for hours, mumbling his fake name over and over until he believes it himself.

When the room lights go off, Doohan lowers his scope and figures he might as well turn in too. It’s been a long two days, first locating the subjects, then following them around town here. Nice school. Pricey. High-class. Stuffed to the gills with snobs.

Doohan had nursed a beer at the roadhouse bar while the subject named Wilson did his little show for his girlfriend. The set list was way too sappy for Doohan’s taste. He much prefers thrash metal, which is what’s pulsing through his earbuds right now. It clears his mind.

He moves a bit in his position on a roof across the street from the hotel. No need for a full ghillie suit here, just light-gray overalls that blend in with the concrete. He wasn’t able to access thehotel room to bug it, and the windows are too thick for his surveillance boom mic. Unfortunately, his lip-reading skills aren’t great at night. All he can do is snap a few pics with his telephoto lens for documentation purposes.

Earlier, he’d circled back to campus for a chat with a maintenance supervisor and learned that Wilson and Cooke had talked with Judd Peyton, who’d been working the buildings and fields of Dartmouth for nearly three decades.

That was not good news.

Paperwork could be destroyed or misfiled, but old-timers knew things. And they loved to talk.

Doohan sighs. It would be so simple to track Mr. Peyton down tonight and persuade him to give up everything he’d told the subjects, but that would be outside the scope of the assignment.

Observe and report.

For now.

That could change.

He has his CWS sniper rifle beside him just in case.

Doohan takes one last look at the room through his night-vision scope. Still dark. No activity. Or maybe the subjects are having wild, passionate sex out of view. The bed is hidden behind the half-closed drapes.

Time to get some sleep. Start fresh tomorrow.

He eases up to his knees, packs up his gear, then gets to his feet and heads for the parking garage three stories down. He has another little problem to dispose of before bedtime. Tedious, but necessary. The result of an unfortunate encounter in the woods earlier that day.

Doohan had been testing his scope and sighting his rifle when some crazy bird-watcher popped up out of the bushes and started giving him shit. A kid. Early twenties. And he would not let up: “Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a conservation area. No weapons allowed. I’ve got sensitive birdcall recordingequipment set up all over. I’m working on my master’s project here.” Then he’d pulled out his iPhone. “I’m getting your face and plate number, buddy.”

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