The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller by Whitley Strieber Page B

enter, passing through elegant rooms on the ground floor while the presidential family’s life unfolds upstairs. It’s not a home, really, the White House, but more an intimate version of Versailles, where a relentlessly public person carries out a rigidly constrained existence under ceaselessly watching eyes.
    The domestic staff and the Secret Service personnel assigned to it know essentially everything that happens in it, including the private areas. Even so, the tradition of discretion is rarely broken. For example, most presidents have entertained a continual succession of women—interns, secretaries, social acquaintances—who have brought momentary comfort to what is, invariably, a fraught existence. The presidency of the United States is not quite powerful enough to succeed, but too important to fail. They enter young and confident and leave it old and useful. When they leave, they all take a secret with them: All that power is an illusion. The presidency is about compromise, frustration, and broken promises. It is also about fear, constant and ever-increasing, escalated each morning by the first terror trip of the day: the intelligence briefing.
    Flynn was not naive. He’d seen presidents come and go. Bill Clinton, the amateur with a taste for bimbos; George W. Bush, with his strange and very private vulnerabilities and needs; Barack Obama, who like Ronald Reagan, had a wife too domineering to allow him to get into female trouble.
    And now Bill Greene. Back in Texas, Lorna had hired Manny the Torch to burn down the Governor’s Mansion after she’d found him in bed with his secretary of state, Will Shifley. It was whispered that rent boys slipped into press conferences and stayed the night.
    How in the world had he ended up as a governor, and now in the White House? What can the American people have been thinking, to believe for even a moment that he could run the country, he who could not even begin to run his own life? But the American people were ever ready to be led, and the money behind him—money that knew his secrets—had led them very well.
    Flynn knew all of these things and more, and reflected on them as he drew up to the private entrance. The uniforms let him through, but not without glares of pure steel. He was an invader. He didn’t belong here, not in this most exclusive few acres in the world, the White House, where slept the most important human being on the planet and her husband, the president.
    The elevators in the White House are small and not new, and they don’t give the impression that they’ll necessarily get you where you’re going. More than that, as far as Flynn was concerned, they were liable to be turned off by vindictive Secret Service agents. He could easily be left in one all night, so he took the back stairs to the second floor. He was met there by an agent and a butler.
    â€œI need to see them,” he said.
    The agent looked at the butler. Then they both turned their eyes to Flynn. “The doors are closed,” the butler said. “We can’t enter unless called, not at night.”
    â€œYou two do your thing,” he said. “I have to have eyes on them, all three of them. I’m going to expect free use of the building for the rest of the night. I don’t want to be followed, watched, spoken to, or disturbed in any way whatsoever. Is that clear?”
    The agent’s face was basalt. He looked like he belonged on Easter Island. The butler said, “Of course, sir, that’s our understanding.”
    In recent years, the president and First Lady had slept together in the master bedroom. That was not the case now. Lorna had the master. Bill was in the living room, which had been converted into a bedroom with a narrow single bed and a bookcase containing the thrillers that he loved. There was a big-screen TV and a PlayStation. He’d spend hours plugging away at tactical military games, then settle into a