The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  “You think the President may’ve been trying to communicate with someone outside his circle?” I ask.

  “Either that or someone outside his circle may’ve been trying to communicate with the President,” Dallas replies.

  As I turn away from the treeline, my brain flips back to the original message: February 16. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep a secret.

  “Maybe that’s why the President asked for you to staff him this morning, Beecher. Maybe he wasn’t trying to give you a message—maybe he was waiting to get one. From you.”

  I see where he’s going. It’s the only thing that makes sense. All this time, we thought the dictionary held a letter that was written to Wallace by one of his friends. But if this is really from someone who’s not on his side… and they somehow found out about his Plumbers, and were hoping to reveal something from twenty-six years ago…

  “You think someone’s threatening Wallace?” Clementine asks.

  “I think they’re way beyond threats,” I say as a cloud of frosty air puffs out with each syllable. “If this is what I think it is, I think someone’s blackmailing the President of the United States.”

  80

  Entering the SCIF, Khazei did his own quick scan of the windowless room.

  “You think I’m stupid?” Tot asked as he fiddled with the TV that sat atop the rolling cart. “There’re no cameras.”

  Khazei checked anyway. For himself. Sure enough, no cameras.

  But that didn’t mean there was no VCR.

  “Where’d you even find it?” Khazei asked, motioning to the videotape as Tot slid it in and turned on the TV.

  “In his house. He had it hid in a box of tampons.”

  “Why’d he have tampons? I thought he lived alone.”

  “He’s got a sister. And had a fiancée. He’s not throwing their stuff away,” Tot scolded.

  Khazei didn’t respond. Instead, he looked down at his recently polished nails, tempted to start biting the cuticle of his thumb.

  On TV, the video began to play, showing Orlando, Clementine… and of course Beecher—and what they found in the SCIF that day.

  “Eff me,” Khazei muttered.

  Tot nodded. “I think they already did.”

  81

  Eightball?” Dallas asks.

  “Has to be Eightball,” I agree with a nod.

  “What’s Eightball?” Clementine asks.

  I look over at Dallas, who shakes his head. He doesn’t want me telling her. He also didn’t want me bringing her to see Nico. But that’s the only reason we got in. And got here.

  “Beecher, if you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to,” Clementine says. “It’s okay. I understand.”

  “Listen to the girl,” Dallas whispers.

  But what Dallas will never understand is what Khazei said this morning—once everything finally gets out and they verify that Orlando’s been murdered, Clementine’s just as high on the suspect list as I am, and therefore has just as much of a right to know what the hell is really going on.

  “Eightball’s a person,” I say as Clementine stands frozen in the cold. “He’s a kid, really—or was a kid—named Griffin Anderson. He was twenty years old when he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? As in abducted?”

  “No one knows. This guy Eightball was the town bully, complete with an eight-ball tattoo on his forearm. The point is, he’s what happened twenty-six years ago. February 16th. That’s the night he disappeared from the President’s hometown in Ohio.”

  “Which means what?” Clementine asks as a twig snaps back by the treeline. We all turn to look. It’s too hard to see anything. “You think that when the President was younger, he had some hand in this?”

  “I have no idea, but… well… yeah,” I say, still scanning tree by tree. “Think about it. Something happens that night, Wallace loses his cool, and—I don’t know—the future President goes all Mystic River and he and his boys somehow make Eightball disappear…”

  “Until somehow, someone from the past suddenly shows up out of nowhere and starts resurrecting the story,” Dallas says, his eyes tightening on Clementine.

  “Dallas, leave her alone,” I say.

  “No, Dallas, say what you’re thinking,” Clementine says.

  “I just did,” he shoots back.

  “And that’s your grand scenario? You think I got my hands on some old info, and then what? I’ve been using Beecher in hopes of terrorizing the President?”

  “There are more ridiculous ideas out there.”

  “And just to complete your delusion, tell me what my motive is again?”

  “I’ve seen where you live, Clementine. I was out there last night,” Dallas says. “No offense, but that house… that neighborhood… you could clearly use an upgrade.”

  “Dallas, that’s enough!” I say.

  “You do not know me,” Clementine growls, making sure he hears each syllable, “so be very careful what you say next.”

  “Ooh, nice threatening ending. I didn’t even have to bring up how far the apple tumbles from the tree. Like father, like dau—”

  Springing forward, Clementine leaps for Dallas’s throat. “You smug piece of—!”

  I dart in front of Dallas, catching Clementine in midair, inches before she clobbers him. She’s a whirlwind of wild punches, her weight hitting my chest at full speed and knocking me backward.

  “Clemmi, relax!” I insist as I dig my feet into the snow. She still fights to get past me, our chests pressing against each other.

  “Don’t you dare compare him to me! You take those words back!” she continues, still raging at Dallas.

  “He didn’t mean it,” I plead as I try to hold her in place.

  “You take it back!” she howls, her hot breath pounding against my face. It’s even worse than when she lost it with Khazei.

  “Clementine! Stop!” I order, gripping her shoulders hard enough that I know she feels it.

  Her eyes turn my way, her anger still at full boil. The scariest part is, for that half a second, she looks exactly like her father. She again grits her teeth, and the big vein swells. I wait for her to attack.

  “You can let go now,” she says in a low voice. Her arms are still tensed.

  “You sure?” I ask.

  “Let go, Beecher. I want you to let me go. Now.”

  As she tugs free of my grip, I shoot Dallas a look, hoping he’ll apologize. He doesn’t.

  “Dallas didn’t mean it,” I tell her.

  “I know who I am!” she shoots back, struggling to find control. “I know I’m impulsive. And passionate. I know I have a temper—but I’m not him, Beecher! I’m not that,” she insists, refusing to say her father’s name.

  I reach out to calm her.

  She again pulls away. By now, I know she’s good at hiding her wounded side. And her scared side. But this anger… this venom that erupts and stings so brutally… Some things can’t be hidden—especially when it’s who we really are.

  “The least you can do is pretend to stick up for me,” she adds, catching her breath.

  “C’mon, you know I don’t think you’re like Nico.”

  “I know you can say it, Beecher. The point is to mean it.”

  The words bite as she lets them freeze in the air.

  Before I can say a word, she turns around, walking back to the path alone.

  “Apologize later,” Dallas says, gripping my arm as I go to chase her. “Right now, let’s get back to the group so we can figure out what’s going on.”

  “The group? Your super-bad-ass Culper Ring?” I ask, my eyes still on Clementine, who needs some time to calm down. “In case you haven’t noticed, Dallas, for all the bragging you’ve done, they didn’t get anywhere until I gave them Nico’s answer. And in case you hadn’t noticed that, everything else has failed: The rock was empty, all the messages are gone, and we’ve got no leads to follow.”

  “That’s not true. You said Tot found that police report�
�the one that had the President’s doctor…”

  “Stewart Palmiotti.”

  “… that when Palmiotti was home from college, he was the last one who saw Eightball alive… that he told the police he saw Eightball voluntarily get into that car. While you were running around with Clementine, I had our guys confirm it. They found the report. Palmiotti knows what really happened that night, which means we can—”

  “We can what? We can send some Culper Ring guys to go confront Palmiotti? Is that the new master plan—that they march into the White House, stick a finger in his face, and accuse the President’s oldest and most trusted friend of harboring an old secret?”

  “You’d be surprised what people will say when they think you have the upper hand.”

  “But we don’t have the upper hand! All we have is a sheet of paper with someone saying, I know what you did last summer, which is proof of nothing! And I’m telling you right now—I don’t care how many brainiacs you’ve got in that Ring—if you go in there with nothing and start yanking on the tail of the lion, that lion is going to take out his claws and show us firsthand why they crowned him king of the jungle. And the first claw’s coming at me.”

  As Clementine heads back down the curving concrete path, Dallas for once doesn’t argue. He knows I’m right. He knows that the moment those tox reports come back and Khazei can prove that Orlando was murdered, every single eye is going to be aimed at the last person Orlando was seen with: me. And when that black hole opens, there’s no slowing it down. Not until it swallows every one of us in its path.

  “That still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t focus on Palmiotti,” he says, again motioning to the footprints. “Our people are looking. They can find anything. So whatever happened all those years ago, we’ll find out what they saw, or who was there… or even where they were—”

  “Wait,” I blurt. “Say that part again.”

  “We’ll find what they saw?”

  “No. Where they were. If we find where they were…” I pull out my phone, quickly dialing a number.

  “What’re you doing?” Dallas asks.

  “If we want to take down the lion,” I tell him, “we need to get a bigger gun.”

  82

  What’re you doing?” Dallas asked.

  “If we want to take down the lion,” Beecher replied, “we need to get a bigger gun.”

  Still watching from the treeline, the barber had to hold his breath to hear what they were saying. He tried to tell himself it was still okay. But as Beecher dialed whatever number he was dialing in the distance, Laurent knew the truth—and he knew just how far he was from okay.

  From what he could hear, Beecher and his group weren’t just guessing anymore. They had details. They had names—and not just the President’s. They had Palmiotti… plus, he heard them say Eightball…

  If they—for them to know about that… for them to know what happened that night…

  On the side of the apple blossom tree that hid Laurent from sight, a small patch of snow, clinging like a white island to the bark, was slowly whittled down by the intensity of the blowing wind. As he watched the island shrink, flake by flake, Laurent knew it was no different here.

  Erosion over time.

  For a while now, Palmiotti said he could stop it. That somehow, he could make it all go away. But confidence is no different than friendships or secrets. They’re all susceptible to the same fate…

  Erosion over time.

  It was so clear to Laurent now. This wasn’t the beginning of the tornado.

  This was the beginning of the end of it.

  A few inches in front of the barber, the island of snow was the size of a quarter, worn down by another slash of wind. Across the snowy field, Beecher was having much the same effect. Indeed, as the last bits of snow were tugged from the bark, Laurent once again felt a thick lump in his throat and the matching swell of emotion that overcame him earlier when he read his client’s tattoo.

  If Laurent wanted to stop the tornado, there was only one way to make it go away. Until this exact moment, though, he didn’t think he had the courage to do it.

  But he did.

  Reaching into his jacket pocket, Laurent gripped tight to the item he’d instinctively grabbed from the shop, one of only a few mementos his father brought back from the war: the Master Barbers straight-edge razor with the abalone handle.

  As he slid it out and flipped the blade open, the lasts bits of snow were blown from the tree bark.

  Across the field, both Beecher and Dallas had their backs to him.

  The tornado was about to start swirling a whole lot faster.

  83

  National Archives,” a familiar voice says through my phone. “How may I direct your call?”

  “Katya, it’s Beecher. Can you transfer me over to Mr. Harmon in Presidential Records?” Standing in the snow and reading the confusion on Dallas’s face, I explain, “The goal is to find what really happened on February 16th, right? The problem is, the only record from the sixteenth is that police report, which is a record that Palmiotti created himself. But what if we could find out where Palmiotti and Wallace were on the seventeenth… or even the eighteenth?”

  Dallas’s eyes tighten as he tries to put it together. He knows the problem. Twenty-six years ago, Wallace wasn’t President. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any presidential records.

  “Okay, so when this happened… Twenty-six years ago, the President was… back in college,” Dallas adds, quickly doing the math.

  Dallas knows how the Archives work. He knows what we keep. And knows that when Wallace or any other President gets elected, the very first thing we do is start a file for them. But most of all, we start filling that file—by preserving that person’s history. We start collecting photos and family pictures, mementos and birth records and elementary school reports.

  It’s how we have those baby photos of Clinton—and how we know what was written in Bush’s and Obama’s fifth-grade report cards. We know those documents are eventually headed for a presidential library, so the moment a new President is elected, the government starts grabbing everything it can. And best of all, guess who’s in charge of storing it?

  “You think there’re records from where Palmiotti was on February 16th?” Dallas asks.

  “We know he was in Ohio. The police report says so. He and Wallace were both home from college, which means—”

  “This is Mr. Harmon,” a curt voice snaps through the phone. As one of our top people in Presidential Records, Steve Harmon doesn’t apologize for being impatient, or for referring to himself as Mr. Harmon. A former navy man, all he cares about are facts.

  “Mr. Harmon, this is Beecher calling—from Old Military.”

  “Katya told me.”

  “Yes, well, er—I have a request here for some records from when President Wallace was in college, and—”

  “Most of those records haven’t been processed yet.”

  “I know, sir, but we’re trying to track down a particular date—the week of February 16th—back during the President’s final year of college.” As I say the words, even though she’s way down the path and nearly a football field away, Clementine glances over her shoulder. I don’t care whose daughter she is. No way can she hear me. She turns away and continues walking. “It’s for a friend of the foundation,” I tell Harmon.

  In Archives terms, friend of the foundation means one of the bigshot donors who help sponsor so many of our exhibits.

  From the silence on the phone, I know Mr. Harmon’s annoyed. But he’s also well aware that the only reason we’re still allowed to display one of the original Magna Cartas is because a friend of the foundation—the head of the Carlyle Group—loans it to us.

  “Put the request in writing. I’ll take a look,” Mr. Harmon says.

  The click in my ear tells me he’s gone.

  “Wallace’s college records?” Dallas asks as I put away my phone and we both stand there, our feet eaten by the snow. “Yo
u really think the smoking gun’s in some old English paper? ‘What I Did During Spring Break—And How We Hid Eightball’s Body,’ by Orson Wallace?”

  “There’s no smoking gun, Dallas. What I’m looking for is a timeline. And if we’re lucky, this’ll tell us whether, during that week, Wallace came back to class or was so traumatized by what happened, he spent some time away.”

  “So you’re looking for attendance records? Hate to remind you, but they don’t take attendance in college.”

  “And I hate to remind you, but you have no idea what they take. Maybe when Wallace got back to school he spoke to a guidance counselor, and there’s an incident report still floating in his old student file,” I say as I look over Dallas’s shoulder, where Clementine is just a tiny speck of coal in the white distance.

  Another twig snaps back by the treeline. “We should get out of here,” I say.

  Watching me watching Clementine, Dallas follows me to the graveyard’s concrete path, which still holds the trail of her impacted-snow footprints. “Beecher, do you have any idea how the Culper Ring has managed to successfully stay secret for over two hundred years?”

  “Trust.”

  “Exactly. Trust,” Dallas says. “Two hundred years of trusting the right people. Now let me ask you a question: Did you tell Clementine everything I said about the Culper Ring?”

  “You told me not to.”

  “I did. But the point is, you listened. And y’know why you listened? Because even though, when it comes to Clementine, there’s a little voice in your pants that’s been telling you what to do—when you thought about telling her about the Culper Ring, there was a second voice—the voice in your head—that told you not to. For whatever reason, something in your brain told you that Clementine shouldn’t know this one. And that’s the voice you need to listen to, Beecher. It’ll lead you far better than the voice in your pants,” he says as he steps out onto the concrete path and plants his own snow footprint right over Clementine’s.