Jack & Jill

with me. At the same time, I wondered how much of what he’d said I could believe. He was, after all, a politician. The best in the land.
    “Every year, several people try to break into the White House, Alex. One man succeeded by tagging onto the end of the marine marching band. Quite a few have tried to ram the front gates with cars. In ninety-four, Frank Eugene Corder flew a single-engine Cessna in here.”
    “But so far, nothing like this,” I said.
    The President asked the real question on his mind. “What’s your bottom line on Jack and Jill?”
    “No bottom line yet. Maybe a morning line,” I told him. “I disagree with the FBI I don’t see them as pattern killers. They’re highly organized, but the pattern seems artificial to me. I’ll bet they’re both attractive, white, with well above normal IQ. They have to be articulate and persuasive to get into the places that they did. They want to accomplish some-thing even more spectacular. What they’ve done so far is only groundwork. They enjoy the power of manipulating both us and the media. That’s what I have so far. It’s what I’m prepared to talk about, anyway.”
    The President nodded solemnly. “I have a good feeling about you, Alex,” he said. “I’m glad we met for a couple of minutes here. I was told that you have two children,” he said. He reached into his jacket and handed me a presidential tie clasp and a pin especially designed for kids. “Keepsakes are important, I think. You see, I believe in tradition as well as in change.”
    President Byrnes shook my hand again, looked me directly in the eye for a moment, and then left the room.
    I understood that I had just been welcomed to the team, and the sole purpose of the team was to protect the President’s life. I found that I was powerfully motivated to do just that I looked down at the tie clasp and pin for Damon and Jannie and was strangely moved.

CHAPTER
37

    “SO DID YOU get to meet the royal couple yet?” Nana Mama asked when I entered her kitchen about four that afternoon.
    She was making something in a big gray stewpot that smelled like the proverbial ambrosia. It was white bean soup, one of my favorites. Rosie the cat was prowling around on the counters, purring contentedly.
Rosie in the kitchen.
    At the same time Nana cooked at the counter, she was doing the crossword puzzle in the
Washington Post.
A book of her word jumbles was also out in view. So was
No Stone Unturned—The life and Times of Maggie Kuhn.
Complicated woman, my grandmother.
    “Did I meet who?” I pretended not to understand her crystal-clear and very pointed question to me. I was playing the game that the two of us have had going for many years, and probably will until death do us part somehow, sometime, someway.
    “Meet
whom,
Dr. Cross. The President and Mrs. President, of course. The well-to-do white folks who live in the
White
House, looking down on the rest of us. Tom and Sally up in Camelot for the nineties.”
    I smiled at her usual high-spirited and occasionally bittersweet banter. I looked in the fridge. “I didn’t come home for the third and fourth degree, you know. I’m going to make a sandwich from this brisket. It looks moist and tender. Or are looks deceiving?”
    “Of course they are, but this brisket is moist and you could cut it with a soup spoon. Seems as if they work very short hours over at the White House, considering all that they have to do. Somehow, I suspected as much. But I could never prove it until now. So
who
did you meet?”
    I couldn’t resist I had been going to tell her this much anyway. “I met and talked with the President this morning.”
    “You met
Tom?”
    Nana pretended to take a punch in the manner of the heavyweight boxer George Foreman. She did a stumbling stutter-step back from the counter. She even cracked a tiny smile. “Well, tell me all about
Tom,
for heaven’s sake. And Sally. Does Sally wear a black pillbox hat inside the White House in the daytime?”
    “I think that was Jacqueline Kennedy. Actually, I liked President Byrnes,” I said as I commenced making a thick brisket sandwich on fresh rye with bib lettuce, tomatoes, and a dab of mayonnaise, lots of pepper, a whisk of salt.
    “You would. You like everybody unless they kill somebody,” Nana said as she began to slice up some more tomatoes. “Now that you’ve met Mr. President, you can get back on the Sojourner Truth School case. That’s very important to the people in this