~Declaration~
The sand scorched her feet. It was one of those painfully hot days where you needed UV protection from the sunlight bouncing off the sand, even if you’d hollowed out a little cocoon of shade from the umbrella you’d lugged from the parking lot to the water’s edge. A local theater was playing “Jaws” on repeat, but given the number of families who showed up sporting floral suits and planting themselves under colorful umbrellas like little clusters of persistent flowers on an unrelenting desert, the movie hadn’t quite dented the American spirit. Not this Fourth of July.
Julia picked up her phone, buzzing against the paperback novel and sunscreen in her bag. Dad. The jig was up. She could practically feel Lily smiling behind those dark sunglasses, stretched out to roast herself like an almond.
“Hey, Dad.”
Bex, Lily’s pup, lay as close as she could to Lily while still in the shade. Her little pink tongue hung out as she panted to keep cool. Julia reached over and stroked her silky white fur.
“Julia, where are you? I must have missed you.”
“I didn’t come.”
Silence, then, “We discussed this.”
“Yes, we did.”
“Honey—”
“Dad, I wanted to be with my friend, on the beach. Not fodder for photographers. Your image is pretty sterling already, and I want my holiday.”
“We wanted to spend it with you.”
“You’re welcome to join me here, at the beach. I’ve got a chair with your name on it.”
He laughed. Only she could make him laugh that way. He couldn’t leave his entourage, and she knew it. Still, she wondered if he even wanted to. Did he prefer the limelight, or even just the offstage glow he was relegated to, over a quiet day on an overcrowded beach with her?
“Where are you?” he asked. He was trying to sound casual, but really there was no need for him to be worried.
“Boston, a beach on old harbor.”
“Boston! You’d never catch me in that traffic. On the Fourth? What did you pay for parking?”
“Forty dollars.” She smiled as she said it, knowing how much it was vexed him. Even after a long campaign trail that had filled his pockets rather than emptied them, her father was still a stickler for prices.
“Forty dollars!” Genuine shock, that broke her smile into a broad grin.
“Don’t worry. We split it, twenty each.”
“There’s no one else with you then? Just the two of you?”
“Yep, and about a million tourists. All of Boston chose this beach.”
“Oh, excellent,” he said, displeased.
“Where is she?” Julia heard her mother on the other side of the phone.
“Boston,” he said.
“On the Fourth?!”
“Don’t get me started,” he grumbled.
“She knows how much you wanted her to be here—”
But Julia had played that game, going to every “family event” that was just an excuse for shaking hands and taking pictures. Her holidays had been hijacked for career advancement; she couldn’t remember the last time she was alone with her parents and sibling on a holiday. But her sister was married, and her brother was stationed in the Northwest, about to be married. She was the youngest, and it was time to start building her own memories. From her point of view, this was a relatively pathetic act of rebellion. For the love of all that is good, she was twenty-two! If this is the worst they had to worry about, Charlotte and Ben were doing pretty well. Besides, it was Independence Day.
“You have Jim with you,” her Dad asked.
“I gave him the day off.”
“Julia.” That did it. One step too far, and she was now talking to The General. “He doesn’t work for you, and Jim Lancaster would never leave his post before ordered.”
Too right he was.
“The man deserves to have his holiday,” she joked.
She’d given agent Lancaster the slip, going down the fire escape from her apartment, where Lily had been waiting with a car and Bex. After that, driving through the one-way streets of Boston on a holiday had pretty much done the work for them. Independence day in Boston? Good luck.
“What beach are you at?” She was silent. “What beach?” Ben demanded.
So much for a private holiday. She sighed and told him.
“Share location with him, and me,” he ordered.
She didn’t respond, jaw gritting. At first the idea of a private bodyguard was intriguing, romantic even, to her young self. Imagine always being watched over. But Julia had discovered the opposite; instead of feeling safe, having someone constantly dogging her shadow set her on edge. She felt less safe, more paranoid. She was never able to relax or settle into herself. Knowing there was someone watching her made her feel like she was, well… being watched.
She couldn’t help watching herself as if from the outside, and so her life felt more like a TV show. Lily was one of the only people who didn’t care that she was Ben’s daughter and didn’t have a problem thwarting the system. When Julia started spending more time with her fellow student, she and her family had (unbeknownst to them) been put through a thorough background check. They’d passed. Turned out, Lily was just a regular American girl who was content to let the cogs of government work in her favor.
“Julia?” The general wanted his affirmative.
“Yep,” she said, trying to hide the grinding in her tone. She wanted a peaceful day on the beach, no family drama.
“It’s not forever,” he said, his tone gentler.
“Just the rest of this term, right?” she snapped. Guess she didn’t have as good a grip on her temper as she thought. “Oh, but then we have to account for running for the actual seat itself, and then the term after that. I you had your way, Dad, I’d put my life on hold for the next ten years! I’m not doing that.”
With that, Julia hung up on the Vice President of the United States of America and leaned back to soak in her independence.
Agent Lancaster got a ping. The youngest Foreworthy started sharing her location with him, no doubt by executive decree. As if in confirmation, he got a text from the VP himself.
>> Get to her. Now.
He cursed. He realized what Julia had done about a half hour ago and had been fighting holiday Boston traffic ever since. He’d alerted his supervisor, of course, so they were aware of the situation. But he’d hoped to have the girl safely back in his custody by the time the VP found out. There was going to be hell to pay.
Jim cut off another car trying to merge and ignored the horn, following the exit to the beach.
He understood the instinct, of course, the need for privacy, a life of her own separate from her parents. But things were the way they were, and she needed to accept that. There were certain privileges to Julia Foreworthy’s situation. She just needed to accept this part as a necessary evil.
Agent Lancaster huffed in frustration. He was grid-locked in Boston traffic, on the Fourth of July, instead of, say, sitting on a beach with a beer, chasing a twenty-two-year-old, after a decade and a half of grueling training and faithful service, and he had just casually referred to himself and his efforts to serve and protect as a necessary evil.
He bit back resentment. He and Julia were going to have a very serious conversation about their situation, whenever he found a parking lot with even one empty spot.
Sanders stood at the back of his station wagon, back hatch open, fiddling with the dials on a remote control. He wore a faded blue bucket hat, Hawaiian shorts, sturdy flip-flops, and a long-sleeved Life is Good t-shirt he just picked up from a tourist shop down the street. He eased the knob for the high-pitched frequency.
A hundred feet away, a German Shepherd started barking. The dog leaned on the leash and yanked, pulling on his owner, a tall man with heavily inked arms. The dog’s body was at an angle to the pavement, the back feet pushing powerfully as he barked his head off, nose pointed straight at Sanders.
Sanders didn’t look, but he quietly turned the frequency down and off. The owner calmed his dog and pulled him on towards the beach.
Sanders turned another nob. No dogs barked, but they wouldn’t hear this frequency. He stretched his hand to the clear silicone sphere, housing the transmitter: a reverberating steady pressure against his skin.
He loaded up the cylinder into a beach bag with towels, sunscreen, and the remote console. He closed the trunk, locked the car, shouldered the bag, and slipped on his sunglasses. He joined the crowds of overly sunned holidaymakers walking towards the beach. It was late morning, around ten, but already there was barely enough sand between umbrellas and beach chairs to pick your way through. Families who’d slept late, lingered over their morning coffee, or, frankly, just picked the wrong lane in traffic, schlepped at the back with chairs and umbrellas awkwardly slung over their shoulders.
Sanders wove through without hurry. Once he got far enough, he dropped his bag and kicked off his sandals. He sat on a towel, pulled off his shirt, and lathered himself with sunscreen just like any other middle-aged man on the beach. He took in the tourists, the families, and parents watching young children playing at the water’s edge while older family members got a head start on the Independence Day libations. This, this was what their might had come down to. The right to procreate and get smashed on a beach after a scalping to park their cars, in the morning. Great land of liberty indeed.
Sanders took his transmitter and got up to go for a swim. Just out and back.
He sat on his towel, dripping wet, and pulled out the crisps. Then, he pulled out his remote console.
Bex blinked at the sun. Bright. So bright. Smells. So many smells. So many people. It was overwhelming, so she just stayed close to her people. She was thirsty, she needed water. But it would be too much work to get Lily’s attention. She was lying in the burning sun anyway, and Bex had just found a cool patch of sand. She’d dug a little lower. The sand was always moving. It was so exciting. The more she dug, the more it moved. Lily would have to give her a bath after this, and that was always fun.
Sound. SOUND! A piercing call, cutting through the other sounds. Bex sat straight.
The others heard it too. They all barked, running.
Bex barked once.
The other human, the nice one that smelled like flowers, looked at her. She would pick up Bex, and then Bex would never know.
In a second, Bex was gone, sand flying beneath her little paws. The heat wasn’t so bad when you moved fast.
She heard her name, and then she heard Lily calling, but that was not nearly so important as the SOUND. All the other agreed, they heard it too. They were all there. Big dogs, small dogs. All of them, barking. She wanted to jump into the water, to find it, it was out there. But the waves were so big, and she was so small, and her little feet would not let her move in deeper. Other dogs swam out, so she barked after them too.
“Bex!” Lily climbed up, dusting off her hands from the sand.
A scream went up. Julia couldn’t understand it. More screaming joined it, and finally, a discernable word.
“SHARK!!!”
She blinked at Lily, whose face went pale.
“SHARK ATTACK!!!”
Confusion. Chaos. Sand flew everywhere as people got up. Some ran towards the screams, some away, and some sat frozen, looking, rising to see.
Lily took off into the chaos, screaming, “BEX!!!”
Stunned, Julia rose. She wanted to chase after Lily and help her find Bex. The lap dog was so small that she would be trampled by the mob of people running towards the water, running away, at some point.
All the dogs on the beach, or at least all dogs off-leash, had run to the water’s edge. They barked their heads off, that pitch reaching a desperate tone of sheer animal panic. Beyond the people running back and forth on the beach, Julia saw a few bobbing heads, dogs who had swum out, something dark in the water, and then a fin.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. She only knew she didn’t imagine it because she had never seen teeth like that in real life, and a massive jaw, holding a mangled furry leg.
The dogs out the furthest seemed torn, wanting to bark at the shark but unable. They started paddling away. But more shadows glided in, and she saw their fins breaking the water. The screaming on the beach continued as everyone realized there were sharks and the dogs were still in the water.
“Bex.” The word came out quiet, lost in the stampede as people ran away on either side of her. They knocked into each other, people hitting the sand. A hand gripped her arm, something hard pressing into her back.
She pulled away, the shock making her numb. Her brain couldn’t catch up, what was happening? She didn’t want to get squashed in the chaos of a confused mob. But the hand around her arm didn’t let go, the pressure didn’t relieve from her back, and a mouth drew to her ear.
“Move.”
She looked up, but all she caught was the edge of a bucket hat before he turned her firmly onward.
Her bare feet stumbled onward, burning on sand churned with seashells and stones.
Gun, she realized. It was a gun pressed to her back. There was a towel thrown over his arm, hiding the gun. He looked like a worried boyfriend or husband, guiding her away from the mob. And if she screamed for help, her cry would be swallowed in the chaos of a shark attack. Nobody would remember this moment. They were all looking the other way.
When Jim arrived, the beach was pandemonium, people screaming about a shark. His skin went cold, despite the heat, and then he was running, forcing his way through the crowd, checking his phone for the shared location pin. He was close, so he just looked.
It was like a massive wave had come in and left a wall of vacation detritus, colorful towels, umbrellas, and bags strewn across the beach.
“JULIA!” He called. “JULIA!!!!”
Nothing. He scrutinized every woman, but surely, she was wearing a hat, sunglasses, a bathing suit. He ignored the old women, young girls, the women carrying children, but everyone else…
Finally, he stood on the spot of the shared location, two towels, bags, and an umbrella. He searched through the bag and found the phone. Julia’s phone, and no Julia.
A woman came towards him clutching a trembling white dog. The dog yelped and barked without control, looking half-trampled. The young woman, Lily, he remembered, had a long red mark on her face and a few more scratches on her neck. The burning red stood out stark against her pale face.
“Where is she? Where is she?!” Jim demanded.
“I don’t— She was here. I left her here,” Lily gasped. Finally, Jim heard the buzzing in his ear.
“--eagle’s nest. I repeat, Code Eagle’s Nest. Come in, Agent Lancaster. Do you copy?”
Jim clicked the comm.
“I’m here, repeat?”
“Bring Julia Foreworthy to a safe location, immediately. Code eagle’s nest.”
Lancaster frowned, his brain refusing to accept what his gut instinctually knew.
“Eagle’s nest? But Julia isn’t, Ben Foreworthy isn’t—”
“Jim…”
Jim’s mouth went dry, knowing in that pause that everything in life was about to burn.
“The president’s been shot.”
“But he’s not—”
“He’s dead, Jim. Ben Foreworthy is now POTUS. Do you have eyes on his daughter?”
Agent Lancaster looked at the young woman before him. The wrong young woman. The dog began licking her face.
“Agent Lancaster, I repeat, confirm you have eyes on Julia Foreworthy.”
He swallowed, training taking over and forcing the words out.
“Negative. She’s been taken. It was a setup.”
Lancaster looked over the crowd of families swarming over the beach, wearing American flag trunks and baseball caps, their blankets and hotdogs abandoned as everyone tried to figure out what was next. At the moment, they were dealing with the shark attack, but eventually, someone would hear the radio, or see the news, or the alerts blowing up their phones, and they would know the administration had shifted hands. Eventually, they would learn the most important event of that day on that beach was not their ruined holiday or the inexplicable shark attack.
It was that agent Lancaster had lost sight of his charge one hour earlier, and Julia Foreworthy, the youngest daughter to the President of the United States had been abducted.
Lancaster watched the crowd, but telling the difference between young women pulled against their will and those running for safety was impossible.
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