The Grid

by Nick Cook

  Physiologically, the President is OK. From a neurological and cardiovascular perspective, no harm has been done.

  I give him a mild sedative – five milligrams of benzodiazepine – and advise him to get his head down, and to cancel any appointments he has before lunch. I give the First Lady a half dose of the same good stuff and advise her to do likewise. I inform the President I would like to check on him during the afternoon. Reuben and I confirm that we’ll meet before I do – in his office at three.

  I ride the elevator to the first floor and step across the lobby. There’s no sign of Molly in the outer office – she won’t be in for another hour and a half – so I’m surprised to see the light’s on in mine. Hetta is in the chair opposite the window, her back to me. She is scrolling down her iPhone and scribbling in a notebook. A Styrofoam cup rests on the edge of my desk.

  She stops writing and looks up. Her eyes narrow. ‘If you don’t mind my saying, Colonel, you look like shit.’

  I thank her for her candor. She doesn’t look too good herself, but, unlike Hetta, who seems to filter little between her brain and her mouth, I manage to stop myself from saying anything beyond the obvious. I ask her what she’s doing here.

  ‘There’ve been some developments overnight. First up, they found a partial list. You were right. I was wrong. I owe you one.’

  She owes me one, but she’s not sorry. ‘Where was it?’

  I put down my physician’s bag and sit at the desk.

  ‘In a drain hole two meters below the floor of the janitor’s cupboard. Looks like he set up camp there before he made his move to the tower. They found spots of his blood on the tiles. It was twenty-four to thirty-six hours old. They think he cut himself eating. There was a knife in one of his pockets and, along with the bottle of water and maps of the White House, they found breadcrumbs and what analysis says are strips of deer meat.’

  ‘Deer meat?’

  ‘And traces of ash. When they pulled the drain cover off of the dirty water chute, they found more food debris, and the remains of a partially burned piece of paper with writing on it.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘The top was destroyed. We may be able to get some of it back through analysis. But the fragment that was left said this …’

  She picks her notebook off the desk and hands it to me.

  The handwriting is spidery and it has a backward slope.

  There are three words on what looks like the hashed lines of a damp and dirty page from a kid’s schoolbook.

  Proof.

  Mac.

  Jerusalem.

  ‘FISH is running a check on it. If he’s in there, we’ll find him.’

  The Forensic Information System for Handwriting database contains the tens of thousands of letters and documents that have outlined any kind of a threat to the Service’s protectees.

  ‘We can take a stab at the missing piece, based on what you and he discussed: God and Threat.’

  She scribbles on a piece of paper: God, Threat, Proof, Mac, Jerusalem.

  ‘Do Jerusalem and Mac mean anything to you – anything at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re quite sure?’

  I begin to feel my hackles rising. It’s early and I’ve had too little sleep. Lefortz had said something about rescuing Hart from trouble. I should have asked, but can only presume it was her mouth. ‘Quite sure. I’ve got a load of work to catch up on, Agent Hart, and you said that there’d been some other developments.’

  ‘There have. MPD has formally identified the guy. They’ve also charged two members of its Special Tactics Branch – Anders’ unit – with his death.’

  I see Guido lying on the autopsy table, and hear Kate Ottoway’s unambiguous assessment that a single bullet had unzipped his skull.

  ‘Two?’

  ‘It’s not yet official, but Anders is going to be charged too.’

  Hetta drops her cup into the trash, wipes the ring left on the desk with a Kleenex, and disposes of that too. She takes a bottle of hand gel from her pocket, dabs some on her palm and works it into her fingers. ‘Lefortz has a source on the Feds’ investigation. No names, but you met him.’

  DJ.

  I ask her to go on.

  ‘He reckons it’s open and shut. Tactical Officer Jimenez took the shot. Says Anders gave him the order. Anders denies it.’

  ‘He’s consistently denied it.’ I shared the post-shooting debrief in her boss’s office – Anders, staring into his lap as he repeated his mantra: that no one gave any order to shoot.

  ‘You saw how he was in the command post. The guy’s an asshole.’

  I take a seat behind my desk. ‘There’s audio of this, I presume.’

  She nods. ‘Special Tactics just upgraded to an encrypted system. The audio’s clear. Anders tells Jimenez to take the shot. End of. An official memo will go out within the hour stating that –’ she raises her notebook, ‘– the department’s own review process will result in “a thorough assessment of the events that took place so that we may continue to move forward as a professional organization”.’

  ‘And the jumper?’

  ‘A guy by the name of Voss. Master Gunnery Sergeant Matthew L. Ex-Marine. Transferred around a decade ago to the Army, where he had been in some kind of special recon unit.’

  MPD found him in a DNA trawl on the veterans healthcare register – much quicker than I expected, too.

  ‘Age thirty-seven. Dropped out after two tours of Afghanistan. We’re looking for next-of-kin, but he was raised in an orphanage. Never featured in any investigation of a protest group. Discharge papers cite the skull fracture and the burn. I’ve asked for his full medical records. I’m guessing you’d like to see them too.’

  I would.

  Hetta slides a printout across the desk. I study it. Matthew L. Voss wasn’t a good-looking man before the burn, but he had a face, at least.

  ‘You’re sure you never came across him? Maybe in your clinical work?’

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘In the tower, he spoke about your nature, Colonel. Why? Odd turn of phrase.’

  I think about this. Being a perfectionist, hard on myself, and an inveterate multi-monitor, was in my nature, Hope used to say.

  I rub my temples. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You OK?’

  I nod. But I have a headache and it’s threatening to become a migraine. I’m going to need caffeine – preferably intravenously. So I’m only half listening as Hetta starts telling me of a time she worked in some godforsaken field office way down south.

  ‘When a thing weren’t right there, the locals used to say somethin’ in the milk weren’t clean.’ She gives the local accent her best shot, but she’s no mimic. Her eyes narrow again. ‘Well, somethin’ in our milk definitely ain’t clean, Colonel, ’cos there’s no CCTV footage.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of our guy. Voss.’

  The intelligence division, her department, receives feeds via the MPD’s downtown control center from every CCTV network within a fifty-mile radius of the city. From every freeway, every school bus, every Metro and train station, every drug and liquor store – anywhere there’s a camera.

  Nowhere is this surveillance more tightly focused than in a two-block grid around the White House, an area that is picked over in real time for unusual activity. You bend down to tie your shoelaces, artificial intelligence is watching you, conducting a rapid facial pattern analysis against the digital imagery. To get to St John’s Church, no matter what direction he came from, Voss would have passed dozens of cameras. Maybe hundreds.

  Hetta gives me the name of a sixty-three-year-old preacher she is on her way to see. The Reverend Elliott Hayes is the director of the Georgetown Presbyterian Mission, a charitable shelter.

  ‘A preacher?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Got any better ideas, Colonel?’

  A guy who seems to know about my nature.

  Who us
es an idiom that’s shorthand for our sick President.

  Who never leaves so much as a shimmer on a CCTV frame.

  I get to my feet.

  Maybe a priest is just the guy we need.

  10

  STEVE SITS RAMROD STRAIGHT. IF HE COULD, I KNOW HE’D salute me.

  He’s wearing a black sleeveless Puffa jacket that draws the eye to his amputated right arm. His head brushes the roof of his makeshift home, a piece of orange tarp suspended from a rope fixed between two trees. Steve is in a wheelchair. He doesn’t want to get involved, so the meeting is off the record. I do not know his second name. I don’t need to.

  The only other things in here are a plastic chair and a shopping cart. The cart contains a plastic bag full of clothing, a prosthetic leg and an American flag. The night-time temperature has been cold enough to freeze the contents of a slop bucket beneath it.

  Steve is clean-shaven, with closely cropped black hair, in his early forties, maybe. He calls Hayes ‘Isaac’.

  The Settlement is a two-hundred-strong community that has sprung up beneath an overpass on a patch of parkland between the river and 26th and K. Steve’s tent sits right in the middle of it.

  Hetta and I met the Reverend Hayes at a hole in the fence that has been erected around the site by the Department of Health and Human Services.

  The whole place is like some Hollywood version of a Civil War tableau: men hunched in the mud and snow, government-issue blankets over their shoulders, staring into the embers of campfires. All it lacks is a guy playing a harmonica.

  Steve motions Hetta to the chair. Hayes and I crouch by the opening. The light comes from a battery-operated storm lamp that’s running low on juice. It is still an hour before sunrise, but there’s a steady rumble of traffic from the overpass.

  Steve turns to me before the Reverend Hayes can introduce us. ‘You were the guy that tried to talk him down. You were the guy in the tower.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I read you’re the President’s doctor. That true?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Slick Bob for real?’ He wipes his nose with the back of his sleeve.

  ‘I’m just his doctor.’

  ‘They said you were a combat medic.’

  ‘Also true. What happened to you?’

  ‘My Stryker got hit by an RPG. Mosul, 2004. I was the only one to get out. I was lucky.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Hetta says.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Lucky. I lost an arm and a leg. I cried when I saw the Towers go down. But the tragedy of my life is that I took it as an article of faith that my government knew more’n I did.’

  I look to the Reverend Hayes, a softly spoken man sporting a clerical vest and dog collar beneath a plain green, Vietnam-style combat jacket. He is black, earnest and heavy-set, with deep lines in his forehead. His dusting of hair is almost entirely gray. He has been distributing food, water and essential medicines to the inhabitants of the Settlement for the past fifteen years.

  At 17.24 yesterday, he called Health and Human Services to report a conversation that a member of his community had allegedly had with the protester.

  The call was routed to the Virginia Fusion Center, one of a score around the country to merge intelligence from local, state and national law enforcement, as well as every three-letter agency, to provide threat data on anyone who has the potential to become a ‘near-lethal approacher’ – someone capable of killing the President.

  ‘Just tell them,’ Hayes says gently, ‘what you told me.’

  Steve takes the roll-up he’s laid on the arm of his wheelchair, tamps down the loose tobacco at both ends, gives it a final inspection, and places it between his lips. He leans forward and lights it with a Zippo emblazoned with a blue and yellow unit badge. The 24th Infantry Regiment took a pretty heavy pounding in Mosul. I know, because I was there.

  ‘What happened?’

  Hetta leaves the talking to me. She doesn’t need to compete with the connection between two combat veterans.

  ‘It was Friday night. Couple nights before the storm. Someone had lit a fire an’ it drew a bunch of new people. The guy stuck to himself, but he was watchin’ everything. He was wearin’ this mask … like a balaclava …’

  He takes down some smoke and exhales slowly.

  ‘The next night he’s back. It’s late. Two, maybe three in the mornin’. I don’t sleep great, ’cos I sleep in my chair. Everybody else has turned in and it’s just him an’ me and he’s starin’ at the flames. I ask his name and he tells me it’s John.’

  ‘John?’

  ‘Yeah. He says it in this weird way. “I, John”, like it really means somethin’, which is kinda funny, ’cos it’s only afterward, when I see the news, I realize he’s done given me the name of the church. But everybody here’s runnin’ from some shit or other.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘He tells me he’s ex-military, that he’s picked up some injuries and that he’s sick to shit with the fact we’re fightin’ countries we can’t fuckin’ spell. Well, I heard it all before. I may not like the government, but I love my country. When I ask him what he’s gonna do about it, he tells me somethin’ people are gonna remember. He’s gonna mount a protest at the church where the President goes. He wants the world to know.’

  ‘To know what?’ Hetta asks.

  ‘That things can’t go on the way they bin goin’. That things gonna change.’

  I glance at Hetta. ‘Did he say in what way?’

  ‘Yeah. In a way the whole world gonna know about.’

  ‘I mean details.’

  He laughs. ‘Too fuckin’ many. He tells me everything. He’s gonna reach it through the sewer system. He’s made a study of it and knows which parts to use and which parts to avoid. He’s got tools for bustin’ into the church. He knows how to cover his tracks. Ya-de-ya …’

  He looks at me and holds up his hands. ‘I’m sorry, man, truly I am. I shoulda told Isaac sooner, but I thought the guy was fuckin’ nuts. I didn’t know he was really gonna do it.’

  Steve is a proud man whose world fell apart when his wife left him, taking their two children with her back to Columbia, South Carolina. He retrained as a bookkeeper, but he’s been at the Settlement for three years now. He prefers it to the shelters established by the Mayor in a bid to rid the capital of its ten thousand homeless. They’re rife with every kind of abuse, which gives an edge to my next question.

  ‘The Reverend Hayes said that the guy made you touch him. Is that true?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s when I knew he wasn’t just crazy, but weird.’

  ‘Describe what happened.’

  His smoke has spluttered out. He lights it again.

  ‘When he’s done tellin’ me what he’s gonna do, he gets up, walks over and squats down in front of me so we’re eyeballin’ each other. I have no idea what this guy is on, really I don’t. But those eyes jus’ keep watchin’ me. And then, very slowly, he takes off his ski mask. Well, I seen some combat injuries …’

  I wait for him to collect his thoughts.

  ‘I look at him for as long as I can and then, when I can’t stand it no more, I turn. He grabs my hand real hard an’ pulls it to his face an’, like, holds it there … against the knots an’ the scars. I ask what the fuck he thinks he’s doin’ and he just stares back at me and says: “Remember”.’

  ‘Remember?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He shakes his head. ‘Like I’m ever gonna forget.’

  Hetta and I stand on a spit of land overlooking the river between the Settlement and the Watergate complex.

  To the south, the early morning commuter traffic is building on the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. To the northwest, the face of the Healy Clock Tower shines across the Georgetown University campus. The snow on the rooftops gives the oldest part of the city a fairytale quality I’ve never seen before.

  Scarcely a breath of wind plays on the river’s surface. The reflection of the lights from Arlington and Rosslyn is disturb
ed by a lone rower who’s plotting a course against the current toward the Alexandria Aqueduct. Blocks of ice bob in the reeds by the water’s edge.

  Hetta is convinced Voss entered the capital by boat – most probably a collapsible canoe. She’s asked Lefortz to authorize the Service’s uniformed branch to search for it along the riverbank, called for a review of all imagery of the river, and for a forensics team to survey the culverts, sewers and drains between the Settlement and the church.

  Four or five miles away, the Potomac hits open country. It would have taken Voss a couple of hours, if that, to navigate to where we’re standing, ditch the canoe and make his way to the Settlement and then the church.

  The corridor is normally well served by CCTV: the systems within the Watergate complex, the Kennedy Center, and an office building that backs onto the land beneath the overpass all provide a measure of interlocking surveillance.

  Camera systems regularly go U/S, but the pattern-mining software the Service uses showed the glitch at the office block had never previously occurred, and was momentary: a few hours at most, but long enough for Voss to have made his way from the river to the camp. So either it was accidental, or it was orchestrated.

  When she asks me what I make of Steve’s story, I tell her I just know the assessment I filed for Reuben – that the discussion Voss and I had was lucid and cogent and, on balance, that he probably wasn’t mentally ill – may need revision.

  ‘That thing he made him do was almost ritualistic,’ she says.

  ‘Or it had religious significance.’

  ‘And that “I, John” shit. That’s pure Koresh.’ She looks at me. ‘You’re the shrink. What do you think?’

  I cast my mind back to the list she showed me: God, Threat, Proof, Mac, Jerusalem.

  Memory, or the lack of it, is important to this guy.

  ‘How well you remember something depends on how quickly and clearly your senses take in an experience. Seeing and hearing are key, but so too are smell, taste and touch. Getting Steve to run his hands over his burns – especially burns to his face – is powerful because there’s revulsion there. You saw it. Revulsion runs deep. It imprints.’