The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  Orlando’s desk phone.

  According to Khazei, I’m the last person Orlando called. But that doesn’t mean I’m the last one who called him.

  I rush toward his desk—and just as quickly stop myself. This isn’t the time, especially with half the staff still standing around and watching. But as I think about Orlando’s wife and son… about everything I should’ve said to them just now… this is exactly the time. Forget the Culper Ring and the dictionary and all of Nico’s ramblings. If I can find out what really happened to Orlando—I owe his family at least that much.

  Sliding into his chair, I take a final glance around to see who’s looking. But to my surprise, the only one watching is the person who just stepped into the office. I turn toward her just as she peeks inside. Rina.

  I lock eyes with the Mona Lisa, but by the time the chair fully swivels around, she’s already gone.

  I saw her, though. I know she was there.

  But right now, I need to stay focused on the current problem.

  My fingers dive for the phone’s keypad, tapping the button for caller ID. The first one reads Security—ext. 75020. Those’re the guys from the front desk, probably wondering when Orlando was coming to do his shift. The next one’s from someone in Exhibits. Then a call from Westman, Aristotle—ext. 73041.

  Tot? Why’s Tot calling him?

  But as I scroll down to make sure I have it right, a brand-new name pops up. Then pops up again. It only gets worse.

  Forget the slipknot around my stomach. My whole chest tightens like it’s squeezed by a noose.

  My fingers attack caller ID like a woodpecker. Of the last dozen calls made to Orlando… seven of them… eight of them… nine of them… my Lord, ten of them…

  … are all from Rina.

  I spin back toward reception.

  “Get off me!” a woman’s voice yells.

  I know that voice. I’ve known it since junior high. It sure as hell ain’t Rina.

  By the time I see what’s going on, sure enough, Rina’s not there. But in her place—

  “I said, get… off!” Clementine barks, fighting to get free.

  Just behind her, Khazei grips her by the biceps. I almost forgot. I’m in his territory.

  The deputy chief of security isn’t letting go.

  * * *

  37

  Let go of me!” Clementine insists, still fighting to free her arm from Khazei’s grip.

  He shoves her into the hallway, refusing to let go.

  Khazei’s no idiot. If he’s bringing us out here, he’s hoping to avoid a scene.

  Too late.

  “I didn’t do anything!” Clementine adds, her feet slip-sliding along the checkerboard tile.

  “Really? So waiting in the Rotunda—strolling there for nearly twenty minutes without taking a single look at the gasper documents,” he shouts back, referring to the Constitution and the other documents that make tourists gasp. “You’re telling me that you weren’t waiting there for Beecher to sneak you over?”

  “It’s a public area! I can stroll there all I want!” she yells.

  Khazei pulls her close, squeezing her arm even tighter. “You think I didn’t look you up when you signed in this morning and last night? We’ve got cameras outside! I saw him drop you off on the damn corner!”

  A puddle of sweat soaks the small of my back. The only reason I tried to sneak her in was so Clementine—and her dad—would avoid getting linked to everything with Orlando and the President. So much for that. Still, Clementine doesn’t seem to care. She’s got far more pressing problems to deal with.

  “I swear to God, if you don’t let go…!” she threatens, still thrashing to get free.

  “Clemmi, calm down,” I tell her.

  “She can’t, can she?” Khazei challenges. “Got too much family blood in her.”

  “Get your hands off me!” she explodes, the intensity catching me off guard. A flick of spit leaves her lips as she roars the words. Her eyes have volcanoes in them. This isn’t anger. Or rage. This is her father.

  Khazei doesn’t care. He grips Clementine by the back of her neck, hoping it’ll take the fight out of her.

  He doesn’t know her at all. And the way she continues to boil, her whole body shaking as she fights to break free of his grip, I start thinking that maybe I don’t know her either.

  She twists fast, trying to knee him in the nuts. He turns just in time to make sure she misses.

  “Clemmi, please… It’s enough,” I beg.

  “Stop fighting and I’ll let you go,” Khazei warns her.

  “Get… off… me!” she snarls as a silver spit bubble forms at her lips.

  “You hear what I said?” Khazei asks.

  Clementine refuses to answer. Still trying to escape, she punches at his hands. Her body trembles. She’s determined to break away. Khazei grits his teeth, pinching her neck even tighter.

  “Let her go…!” I shout, shoving Khazei’s shoulder.

  “You listening?” he asks her again, like I’m not even there.

  Her trembling gets worse. The spit bubble in her mouth slowly expands. She’ll never give up. It has nothing to do with Khazei. Clementine just met her father for the first time in her life. She had to sit there and listen as he told us that our lives and our choices are predetermined. Then Khazei jumped in and basically accused her of the same.

  Clementine looks over at me, her face flushed red. She’s trying so hard to prove them wrong, to prove to the entire world—and especially to herself—who she really is. But as the volcanoes in her eyes are about to blow, that’s exactly her problem. No matter how far we come, our parents are always in us.

  “Eff. You!” she explodes, spinning hard and sending Khazei off balance, lost in his own momentum. Before he realizes what’s happened, Clementine twists to the left and grabs the antenna of his walkie-talkie, yanking it from his belt and wielding it upside down, like a miniature baseball bat. It’s not much of a weapon. It’ll probably shatter on impact. But the way she’s gripping it—the way she’s eyeing his face—it’s gonna leave a hell of a scar.

  I rush forward, trying to leap between them.

  “What in the holy hell you think you’re doing?” a voice calls out behind us.

  I spin around just as he turns the corner. Clementine lowers the walkie-talkie to her side. He’s far down the hallway, but there’s no mistaking the wispy white beard… the bolo tie… the one man who’s been here longer than me and Khazei combined.

  “Y’heard me,” Tot says, honing in on me and readjusting the thick file he’s got tucked under his arm. “Y’know how long I’ve been waiting, Beecher? You missed our meeting. Where the heck you been?”

  I know it’s an act. But I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.

  “I… I…” I glance over at Khazei.

  “He’s been talking with me,” Khazei says, his voice serene, making peace rather than war. He’s definitely smarter than I thought. Khazei’s been here a few years. Tot’s outlasted eleven Presidents and every Archivist of the United States since LBJ. It’s the first rule of office politics: Never pick a fight you can’t win.

  “So no problem then? They’re free to go?” Tot challenges, lumping in Clementine and leaning in so Khazei gets a good look at his milky blind eye. “I mean, I thought I heard yelling, but I’m old and creaky,” he adds. “Maybe I was just imagining it, eh?”

  Khazei studies the old man. I can feel the anger rising off him. But as the two men share a far too long, far too intense look, I can’t help but think that there’s something else that’s going unsaid in their little standoff.

  Khazei puffs out his chest, all set to explode, and then…

  He shakes his head, annoyed. “Just get them out of my face,” he blurts, turning back to his office.

  As Tot continues to hit him with the evil eye, I can’t tell if I’ve underestimated the power of seniority, or the power of Tot. But either way, we’re free to go.

  “Clementi
ne…” Tot calls out, pretending to know her.

  “Yeah.”

  “Give the man his walkie-talkie back.”

  She hands it to Khazei. “Sorry. That’s not who I usually am.”

  To my surprise, Khazei doesn’t say a thing. He grabs the walkie, slotting it back into his belt.

  I go to step around him, and he stabs me with a final dark glare. “I saw you sitting at Orlando’s desk,” he says. “Got something needling at your conscience?”

  “Why should I? Everyone’s saying it was a heart attack,” I shoot back. “Unless you suddenly know something different.”

  “I know you were in that SCIF with him, Beecher. It’s just a matter of time until that video proves it, and when that happens, guess who everyone’ll be looking at?”

  I tell myself that if it all comes out, I can point a finger at the President—but that’s when Orlando’s words replay louder than ever. No matter who you are or how right you are, no one walks away the same way from that battle.

  “Beecher, if you help me with this, I promise you—I can help you.”

  It almost sounds like he’s doing me a favor. But there’s still plenty of threat in his voice. Before I take him up on anything, I need to know what’s really going on.

  “You want help? You should talk to Rina,” I tell him. “Y’know she called Orlando ten times on the morning he died?”

  He barely moves, once again making me wonder what he’s really chasing: Orlando’s killer, or the George Washington book?

  Without a word, he turns back to his office. I race to catch up to Tot and Clementine, reaching them just as they turn the corner. Before I can say anything, Tot shoots me a look to stay quiet, then motions down to the real reason he came looking for me: the thick accordion file that’s tucked under his arm. The flap says:

  Gyrich, Dustin

  The man who’s been checking out documents for over a hundred and fifty years.

  38

  How’s my car?” Tot asks.

  “How’d you get Khazei to back down like that?” I challenge.

  “How’s my car?”

  “Tot…”

  He refuses to turn around, shuffling as he leads us past dusty bookshelf after dusty bookshelf on the eighteenth floor of the stacks. He’s not fast, but he knows where he’s going. And right now, as the automatic lights flick on as we pass, he’s got me and Clementine following. “Khazei doesn’t want a fight,” he explains. “He wants what you found in the SCIF.”

  “I agree, but… how do you know?”

  “Why didn’t he push back? If Orlando’s death is really his top concern, why hasn’t Khazei thrown you to the FBI, who’re really in charge of this investigation… or even to the Secret Service, who by the way, have been picking apart the SCIF all morning and afternoon? You’ve got every acronym working quietly on this case, but for some reason, Khazei’s not handing over the best pieces of dynamite, namely the two of you,” Tot says as another spotlight flicks on. I search the corner of the ceiling. The stacks of the Archives are too vast to have cameras in every aisle. But near as I can tell, Tot has us weaving so perfectly, we haven’t passed a single one. “Now tell me how my car is,” he says.

  “Your car’s nice,” Clementine offers, still trying to make up for the rage parade she just put on. “I’m Clementine, by the way.”

  For the second time, Tot doesn’t look back. He doesn’t answer either.

  He wants nothing to do with Clementine. As he said this morning, he doesn’t know her, doesn’t trust her. But once she got grabbed by Khazei, he also knows he can’t just chuck her aside. For better or worse, she was in that SCIF—she was there with Orlando—and that means her butt’s in just as much of the fire as mine.

  “Your car’s fine,” I add as we make a final sharp left. “Clemmi, this is Tot.”

  A spotlight blinks awake, and I’m hit with a blast of cold air from a nearby eye-level vent. Our documents are so fragile, the only way to preserve them is to keep the temperature dry and cool. That means intense air conditioning.

  Tot hits the brakes at a wall of bookcases that’re packed tight with dusty green archival boxes. At waist height, the bookcase is empty, except for a narrow wooden table that’s tucked where the shelves should be. Years ago, the archivists actually had their offices in these dungeony stacks. Today, we all have cubicles. But that doesn’t mean Tot didn’t save a few private places for himself.

  The spines of the boxes tell me we’re in navy deck logs and muster rolls from the mid-1800s. But as Tot tosses the fat file folder on the desk, and a mushroom cloud of dust swirls upward, I know we’re gonna be far more focused on…

  “Dustin Gyrich,” Tot announces.

  “That’s the guy you think did this, right?” Clementine asks. “The guy who’s been checking out books for a hundred and fifty years. How’s that even possible?”

  “It’s not,” Tot says coldly. “That’s why we’re up here whispering about it.”

  “So every time President Wallace comes here on his reading visits,” I add, “this man Gyrich requests a copy of Entick’s Dictionary…”

  “Just odd, right?” Tot asks. “I started sifting through the older pull slips… seeing how far back it went. The more pull slips I looked at, the more requests from Dustin Gyrich I found: from this administration, to the one before, and before… There were eleven requests during Obama’s administration… three during George W. Bush’s… five more during Clinton’s and the previous Bush. And then I just started digging from there: Reagan, Carter, all the way back to LBJ… throughout the term of every President—except, oddly, Nixon—Dustin Gyrich came in and requested this dictionary. But the real break came when I tried to figure out if there were any other books that were pulled for him.”

  “Can’t you just search by his last name?” Clementine asks.

  “That’s not how it works,” I explain. “If it were today, yes, we’ve got a better computer system, but if you want to see who requested a particular document in the past, it’s like the library card in the back of an old library book—you have to go card by card, checking all the names on it.”

  “And that’s when I thought of Don Quixote,” Tot says.

  I cock my head, confused.

  “Remember that list we looked at—from Mount Vernon—of all the books that were in George Washington’s possession on the day he died? Well, in his entire library, guess what single book he had more copies of than any other?”

  “Other than the Bible, I’d say: Don Quixote?” I ask.

  “Uncanny guessing by you. And did you know that in 1861, during a U.S. Circuit Court case in Missouri—whose records we happen to keep since it’s a federal trial—one of the parties presented into evidence all the personal property and baggage that was left behind by one of their passengers? Well, guess what book that passenger was carrying?”

  “Don Quixote,” I say for the second time.

  “History’s fun, isn’t it?” Tot says. “That’s now two books in our collection that were also in the collection of President Washington. Today, that copy is stored out in our Kansas City facility, but on April 14th, 1961, during the JFK administration, a man named D. Gyrich once again came in and—”

  “Wait, what was that date again?” I interrupt.

  “Ah, you’re seeing it now, aren’t you?”

  “You said April 14th…?”

  “Nineteen sixty-one,” Tot says with a grin.

  Clementine looks at each of us. She’s lost.

  “The Bay of Pigs,” I tell her.

  “Actually, a few days before the Bay of Pigs… but that’s the tickle,” Tot says, rolling his tongue inside his cheek. “Our dear friend D. Gyrich also came into the building and asked to see that same copy of Don Quixote on October 3, 1957, and on May 16, 1954, and on August 6, 1945.”

  My skin goes cold. It has nothing to do with the chill from the extreme air conditioning.

  “What?” Clementine asks, reading my expression. “Wh
at happened on those dates?”

  “October 3, 1957—that’s the day before the Russians launched Sputnik, isn’t it?” I ask.

  “Exactly,” Tot says. “And May 16, 1954?”

  “The day before the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down. But that last one, I forget if it’s—”

  “It’s the later one,” Tot says, nodding over and over. “You got it now, don’t you?”

  I nod along with him. “But to be here the day before… to always be here the day before… You think he knew?”

  “No one has timing that good,” Tot says. “He had to know.”

  “Know what?” Clementine begs.

  I look at her, feeling the icy cold crawl and settle into the gaps of my spine. Dustin Gyrich, whoever he is, was in here days before the Bay of Pigs… Sputnik… the Brown decision… and August 6, 1945…

  “Hiroshima,” I whisper. “He was here the day before Hiroshima.”

  “He was,” Tot agrees. “And you’ll never believe where he was before that.”

  39

  Okay, here… go back another thirty years,” Tot says. “Nineteen fifteen… two days before the Lusitania was attacked…”

  “That’s what brought us into World War I,” I explain to Clementine, who’s still confused.

  “Then again in 1908, the week the Model T was introduced,” Tot says, flipping through a stack of photocopies, his voice filled with newfound speed. “Some dates, nothing big happened. But I even found a visit two days before they changed the U.S. penny to the Abraham Lincoln design.”

  “How’d you even—?” I cut myself off. “That’s impossible. He couldn’t have come here.”

  “You’re right,” Tot says.

  “Huh… why?” Clementine asks.

  “We weren’t open back then,” I tell her. “The Archives was founded in 1934. Staff didn’t start moving in until 1935.”

  “But lucky us, the Library of Congress has been making books available since 1800,” Tot explains. “And when I called some of my friends there, well, considering that they’re the largest library in the world, what a shocking surprise to hear that they had their own copies of Don Quixote as well.”