The Oval Office ✓ (Book One)

Chapter Twenty Eight

  I allow myself, this time, an extra five seconds to scan the area. My eyes zoom in on every little thing like they're trained to do, showing me a few possibilities.

  One rose bush, slightly behind the tree line, which shouldn't still be alive this deep into winter.  The suspiciously large tree bordering the field. A ring in the grass.

  I bend down to pick it up, my fingers running over the dried blood. "Is it hers?" I ask my earpiece, or whoever's listening in.

  "Yeah-" Kyle replies with a shaky voice. "It is." I shove the ring in my pocket to return to them when I can.

  I cautiously walk over to the tree, waiting to be blown to bits at any moment. Parts of the bark are soft, almost at the point of decaying. Others are too hard to push in, the way a tree normally would be.

  I run my finger along one of the soft areas, pushing in until it creates enough of a hole to look through. I look down, and there's a ladder leading straight into a dark room. Dumbasses.

  "The fuck is that?" Troy asks.

  "The back door-looks like the power went out." Laughing right now would be extremely inappropriate, but I almost want to laugh at how fucking stupid they are. I mean- here, you have a terrorist organization, without the common sense to buy backup generators. Come on, if you're gonna kidnap the First Lady you gotta be smarter then that.

  I head down first, watching my surroundings the entire time. The room I'm greeted with is relatively plain, just the ladder and door. When I signal that it's clear, my team follows, with Troy last. The door looks like it would ordinarily be controlled by fingerprint, but now, with the power out, I can simply push it open. The darkness of the hallway is almost blinding, twenty-ish feet underground, so I turn my headlamp to the lowest setting just for some visibility.

  It's quiet. Almost too quiet as we near a corner. "Get behind me." I whisper to Troy, whose been beside me since we got down here. "I'm not supposed to let you die, remember?" 

At a painstakingly slow pace, I approach it, making sure that I don't make a single sound as I walk. I can feel my heartbeat come to a complete stop as I peek my head around the corner and am greeted with the barrel of a gun. Still, it takes less than a second for me to pull the trigger before he's has a chance to pull his.

  Then,  twenty feet down the hallway, i spot a very faint light emitting out of a room- and, as I get closer, I catch on to the conversation.

"...move  my thumb and it's over for all of you." I recognize Lauren's  former head of security, James.

Somebody's footsteps sound like they're about to walk out of the room, so we jump back around the corner, my head barely peeking out, and that's when we see her. "Holy shit." Troy mumbles under his breath. Shit is right. Perfect, circular third degree burns cover most of her body like it's chicken pox. Light stab wounds and cuts cover her arms and back, and she's shivering from the lack of clothes and heat.   From here, she looks unconscious, so as a guy drags her back into the room, we quickly and silently approach again.

"... you've always been too sentimental. You fail to see the bigger picture in all of this."

  "Oh yeah? What is the bigger picture?" James says again.. "Cause right now it apparently involves the First Lady dying."

  "No- if she dies the president will have a full blown mental breakdown. The entire world will see what a shitty fucking person he really is." Now, I recognize the Princess's voice. Fuck.

  "You're really fucking delusional if you think you're even half the person he is- is your brain seriously not registering how fucked up this is?" James replies.

  "Oh James-" Princess Ariyah laughs. "You really don't know the president as well as you seem to think you do."

  "Think again, motherfucker." I say, not wanting to waste another second. I pull the trigger, aiming directly at the Princess. For the ordinary person, that would be grounds for immediate execution. The knowledge, however, that she's involved with a terrorist organization, is what'll save me, alongside my immunity. Troy's bullet passes straight through another guys skull, splattering blood on the four of us in the room. As he rushes to the First Lady, the rest of us have our guns trained on James.

"Put that down and get on the ground now!" I yell.

"If I do that it'll self destruct and blow everything within a one mile radius to fucking nothing." He calmly replies.

"Mr.president we're going to need the-" I start saying into my earpiece.

"Bomb squad- got it." Kyle says. "We've got a helicopter from the military base over there on the way, it shouldn't be be longer than four minutes-"He pauses for a second as I turn my head to Lauren, watching through my body cam. I can hear him trying not to hyperventilate on the other end and struggling to keep his composure. "Lauren? Lauren?!!"

"She's barely conscious." Troy replies, quickly pulling things out of his bag, though there's not much he can do for her right now but keep her awake, disinfect and stop the bleeding from some of her wounds. A couple of the burns are so severe that they'll most likely need grafting surgeries to heal. Her eyes may be open, and she may be breathing, but she looks past us, barely noticing we're there.

"Lauren? Hey- stay with me. You can't leave us yet." I lean down in front of her, letting the other members of my squad guard James.

"Is it over?" She asks like a child, her voice weakened.

"Yeah- almost. We just need to get you out of here, okay? We're going to have to move you." I say, knowing full well it's going to hurt, but that we don't have much of a choice. Troy's given her a morphine drip already , but we'll have to move her in just a few seconds.

She won't go to a British hospital, with the slight possibility of them trying to off her there with everything she's seen. Instead, she'll be loaded into the helicopter, which is fully equipped for all medical emergencies, and brought to Walter reed-an eight hour flight. A full medical team'll be ready for her upon arrival, by then we will have already done a full medical assessment and set up her treatment plan. They'll simply take care of most of her aftercare. 

  Troy lifts her over his shoulder, and he and I move as quickly as possible to get to that helicopter, leaving the others to watch James until the bomb squad gets here. We actually see them on our way out as we get into a helicopter loaded with secret service and another doctor, who all immediately jump into action.

  Well goddamn. That was quite the eventful day. I almost have this sinister feeling it's not over yet.