Free Executive Actions by Gary Grossman

coming around on his second target when a trio of SAM’s locked on to him from a portable launch facility. He evaded two. The last caught Morgan Taylor’s left intake.
    Taylor was pissed off he couldn’t bring back the $24 million machine he’d signed out. But his Air Wing commander onboard the USS Carl Vinson was happy that an Army puke had saved Taylor’s sorry butt to fly another day. He’d even take home the Navy Cross, commending his valor in the presence of great danger and at great personal risk.
    As a result, Taylor established a special bond with Roarke. The Annapolis pilot and the inner city kid. They helped each other many times over the past decade. Three years ago, at the request of the first term president, Roarke came to the Secret Service. A personal request with private duties.
     
    A few years following the September 11 th attacks on the World Trade Center towers, then-Senator Taylor resolved to personally address the level of uncertainty that surrounded the near certainty of future attacks.
    As Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he identified the need to centralize much of the internal anti-terrorist intelligence-gathering process. Taylor proposed the creation of a hybrid FBI/Secret Service/Homeland Security unit, piggy-backing on already funded programs.
    Behind closed doors he urged the White House to make the paradigm shift from viewing the Secret Service as walking bullet proof vests for the president to strategists and combatants in the terrorist war. Their tools would be political sleight of hand utilizing misinformation, domestic and foreign investigation and, when necessary, outright deception.
    He received solid support in the Republican-held Senate, but his measure was undermined when it hit the House. The head of the House Ways and Means Committee was a young congressman named Teddy Lodge. He argued in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building where the House Un-American Activities Committee once held its historic hearings, that “President Taylor was willing to risk too many freedoms; freedoms Americans must not be willing to abandon.” The sound bite that led the news and killed the proposal in conference committee sharply stated, “We don’t need an enemy within.”
    The plan was dead, but only for awhile. When Taylor took the Oath of Office as president he finished what he had started, this time without the approval of Congress and the oversight of Congressman Lodge. He simply reassigned “unique” Secret Service duties, transferred vast sums, created new budget line items, and brought in an ex-Army special ops commando named Roarke to join the team. Few people beyond the CIA, NSA, and FBI chiefs knew about it. The fewer the better. He designated it PD16, short for Presidential Directive 1600; an homage to his new forwarding address.
    No one’s the worse for it , thought the president as he signed the papers to reorganize the Secret Service. Except maybe Lodge .

CHAPTER
7

Monday 23 June
    Hudson, New York
    An assassin fired one round through the silencer of his assault rifle yesterday. It made no sound, yet its impact was heard across the country. The target was a congressman. The victim was the woman he loved. It was time for Theodore “Teddy” Lodge to bury another memory.
    M any voters knew that Lodge had cheated death himself before and buried too many people close to him. But Michael O’Connell brought the story forward with facts from the archives and the breaking news of the day. His report in The New York Times was written with a passion that left readers more closely connected to the congressman’s pain.
    Teddy Wilson Lodge cried once more. His tears streamed down his cheeks as he cradled his wife’s head in his lap. Another family member was taken from him before he had a chance to say goodbye.
    O’Connell took readers through three generations of Lodge family history. Though he represented Vermont voters as a congressman, his roots were in