The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) (10 page)

After a short bathroom break, the eight individuals were broken into two groups of three and one group of two. Lance was paired with Sarah and Carl, the 32-year-old gold-rimmed glasses guy from Albuquerque. Grisham escorted the group down the hall to a small conference room.

Waiting in the room was the liar Marsco. Lance wasn’t supposed to recognize him. His hair was lighter, almost blond and he had a mustache and tortoise shell glasses. Lance paused the playback and looked at Marsco again from above. It was a lousy disguise. Too easy.

“Hello, I’m Drew Marsco,” Stuart Braden lied.

Without skipping a beat and with nothing but a boyish smile, Lance shook his hand and shot right back. “Hi, I’m Lance Priest.”

“Nice to meet you Lance.” Braden then turned to Sarah and Carl to introduce himself. Lance gave Braden a complete look over. The suit was expensive and looked radically different than the jeans and flannel shirt he wore during the exam in Tulsa. Lance turned away to take in the room. Grisham was right behind him with a smile.

“Okay guys. We’ve been joined for this portion by Drew. He is with the Department of State and is a veteran of many of these sessions.

“Too many.” Marsco/Braden joked. “I should probably get a real job.”

“And miss all this?” Grisham replied.

The group took a seat around the table. Grisham stayed on his feet and walked around the room as he read a scenario he pulled from an envelope. After reading the document, he smiled at the three candidates. “You’ve got a good one guys. I’m to read you this scenario and then let you three work out an initial response. Then Drew and I will prompt you with a series of questions to evaluate your reasoning, understanding, response and strategy.”

He stepped back over to the door and closed it. “For this session, you are all U.S. embassy staff in Harare, Zimbabwe. You have just received word via telephone that a tour bus loaded with international passengers, including 14 U.S. citizens, has been involved in an accident on the outskirts of town. The area is particularly impoverished with no infrastructure or government resources. The bus collided with a vehicle carrying a family with three small children. All passengers in the car were killed. Several of the tourists have been injured but more importantly, and certainly more dangerous, a crowd, or better yet a mob, has surrounded the bus and is attempting to remove passengers to gain a certain amount of monetary retribution for the loss of the local family.”

Grisham moved to the other side of the room. “Local authorities are slow to arrive on scene. By the time they show up, several of the passengers, including US citizens, have been dragged from the bus and taken away into the surrounding village. This information has just been phoned into the embassy by a local resident whose wife works in the embassy as a housekeeper.”

“There you have it. You now have your scenario and you are to discuss the situation and develop a response plan for 30 minutes. At that time Mr. Marsco and I will begin asking you questions.”

Lance, Sarah and Carl looked at each other for a few moments and then each turned to their notes just jotted down. Sarah had the best notes; Carl’s covered three quarters of a page and Lance had a few bullet points.

“Can we have that sheet?” Sarah asked Grisham.

“Afraid not. You are to respond to this situation as if the brief phone call is your sole source at this point,” Grisham answered and pulled back a chair across from Braden to watch the action around the table.

Preacher jumped right in with what he knew and what he saw as the best course of action. “First of all, we know that we don’t know much.”

“Right,” Carl added.

“And we probably won’t have any more information for awhile so we need to confirm what we do know.” He added.

Sarah recited the facts as she had recorded them. It took about two minutes. Lance became acutely aware of the time crunch. Only 27 minutes left.

“Okay, first things first, who do we need to call and bring into this?” He asked.

Carl and Sarah looked at one another and back to Preacher. In a matter of minutes, he had become the leader of the small group as the other two’s brief exchange transferred leadership to the youngest candidate at the table. “I imagine there is a shitload of protocol we have been trained to put in place in this type of event.” Lance looked to Grisham and Braden. No reply. They were playing their roles of unobtrusive observers. “But since we don’t have all that background, let’s quickly write a list of who we should call.”

“The embassy director first.” Sarah followed his lead.

“And then we would call back to Washington right?” Carl tacked on.

“Don’t know if that would be our job or not,” Preacher surmised. “Who would we call outside the embassy? Where would we start?” The question was to no one in particular and with it Lance’s wheels started turning. He stood up. The stratified layers of the situation started coming into focus. In the next two minutes, he dictated calls to local government officials, law enforcement, the tour bus company and most importantly, to the embassy security detail to arrange for protection for one of them to be taken to the scene. His research of embassy operations came into play.

He continued, “It would probably be best for the Marines in the embassy to be accompanied by local police or army in a little convoy out to the accident site. We should get eyeballs at the scene as quickly as possible.”

In the next seven minutes, the three of them decided on roles, responsibilities, a communication plan and timeline to follow. Preacher peppered the other two with questions throughout, but half of them were really rhetorical in nature as he processed information out loud.

Grisham stood up at 29 minutes and announced one minute remaining to get notes and assignments in order. Sarah feverishly wrapped up a ninth page of notes. Carl nailed down his roles and Lance returned to his initial bullet points to add three more on his single page.

“Okay, time.” Grisham stepped back from the table and looked to Braden. “Drew, please go right ahead.”

For the next hour, Grisham and Marsco/Braden asked the group dozens of questions. The quick-hit nature was purposeful in that its aim was to shoot holes and enlighten dark spots. On several occasions, the two prompters exchanged looks that confirmed what Braden knew already and Grisham had read in a file. This Priest kid had it. The rapid-fire approach he had employed with the others had sewn up loose ends that usually dangled for others in this drill. The plan he had led the others in developing covered nearly every angle.

“What about search and rescue once onsite at the accident?” Grisham asked no one in particular.

“We would be limited to relying on local police and military,” Lance responded. “Our Marines could show up and use some force, but five or six of them against a crowd in the hundreds and then hundreds of houses the tourists could have been taken to. No good. We would have to rely on local cops who knew the area.”

Sarah and Carl smiled at his response. He made them look good.

“Very good,” Grisham concluded the session by standing. “Very good work by all of you. We are now finished with the small group portion of your day. You are going to head back down the hall and join the others for lunch and then it will be individual exams to wrap up the day. We will join you down there shortly.”

The three candidates stood up from the table and were surprised to see Seibel leaning against the wall by the door. He had silently entered the room at some point and neither Grisham nor Marsco/Braden had given any indication he had joined them. Lance watched from above as Seibel moved, performed.

“Very impressive, very solid analysis,” Seibel said to everyone and no one in particular. “I especially enjoyed the decision making on several levels in a time crunch. I could see this scenario unfolding pretty much as discussed here.” He stepped from the wall and moved to the other side of the room. The way Grisham and Marsco remained motionless told the other three that their session was actually not quite over. Seibel turned back to the group and his smile was replaced with something of a sneer; not menacing, but certainly a changed point of view from a few seconds earlier.

“I wonder though,” he let it trail off as he looked from each of the three and settled on Lance. “What if you didn’t have time to wait for local authorities? What if you had arrived on the scene and it was obvious which home a hostage had been taken to because of the crowd gathered around it? And that property was just across the street from the accident, only seconds to get there for the Marines. What would you do if you were giving the orders?”

Lance was probably expected to think about this for a few seconds, to contemplate options and reply with something less than an assured outcome. But he didn’t take a second to reply.

“We make sure the other people on the bus are secure and we hold that position or even fall back from the scene of the crowd.” He looked from Sarah to Carl. They both nodded in support of his response.

“You leave hostages in danger when they are right there in front of you in a structure you could easily enter and take control?” Seibel looked only at Lance.

“Easily?” Lance furrowed his brows. “What’s easy about hundreds of people going crazy? Six Marines against that would mean lots and lots of people hurt or killed for hostages we don’t know are in there. That’s easy. Stick with what you know and stay in control.”

Seibel let the sneer fade into something of a frown and then moved his gaze from Lance to Sarah and Carl. “Do you two agree?”

Carl and Sarah nodded again.

Seibel continued, “A bird in the hand, huh?”

“Better than two in the bush with a bloodthirsty crowd between you and the bush,” Lance added. He was confident, maybe too confident. Maybe.

“
Potete credere questo capretto?” Seibel turned and posed the question to Braden.

“Nada surpreende-me,” Braden replied. Grisham nodded.

He turned back to Lance, “I think I would have to agree with you. Keeping those we have safe is first priority before launching any kind of rescue mission, regardless of the numbers or support. Tactical gamesmanship aside, going into that crowd is an absolute no-win. Casualties would be expected and repercussions would extend well beyond a local flare-up. Probably turn into an international incident.” Seibel moved back to the door.

“Congratulations again, you have averted an international pain in the ass for our government and probably saved lives. Now wouldn’t it be fun to get to do this in real life?” The smile came back and Seibel turned and exited the room.

Grisham laughed a personal little laugh and moved to the door. “Congratulations for passing a little test within a test. Sometimes they are more important than the results that show up on paper.” He gave Lance a fake punch to the gut walking past him. Lance smiled like he was supposed to.

The lunch around the pushed-together conference tables in the large conference room involved lots and lots of small talk between oral exam candidates and prompters. The civilians in the room shared their stories from the morning session and the small group exercises. Lance made small talk with those around him. Sarah sat next to him again. She kept her eyes on him. He could see her glances and outright staring from his peripheral vision.

From above, he paused the scene and looked around. He had not noticed at the time that neither Seibel nor the guy he knew as Marsco joined them for lunch. Grisham was there along with the other prompters.

Video cameras were also watching from above. This lunch gathering, like the morning session and Lance’s small group exercise, was being captured for analysis. Two video cameras, one in the fake clock on the wall, the other protruding ever so slightly out of a smoke alarm on a pillar a few yards from the table, watched the room. Both cameras were trained on one individual as they had been during the written exams, while he spoke with customers on the car lot, while he ate dinner on his one date over the last three months and during several of his classes. At the other end of the video cable sat Wyrick peering into his monitor. Braden had just joined him and sat eating his boxed lunch sandwich. The psychologist found it difficult to eat with the fake mustache, but didn’t dare take it off and have to fight to put it on again. That tried his patience more than anything.