“You’re gonna let me walk out of here,” Evan said.
One of the male cops laughed, and the female officer blinked twice. “Or?” she said.
“I’m gonna throw salt in your eyes at the precise instant I kick this table over. While you’re busy blinking, the table’s gonna hit you”—Evan’s gaze flicked to the cop in the middle—“right in the solar plexus. That’ll knock your gun to the side. Maybe you’ll fire it into your partner’s leg. Maybe not. Either way he’s gonna be distracted, because I’m gonna throw this overpriced latte in his face. Around then, when you’re all scrambling to react, you’ll notice just how slippery those wet tiles are that you’re standing on.”
He turned his focus to the cop on the right. “I’m gonna come over the top of the table, swinging my chair, clipping your wrists, which’ll knock away your Glock—if you’ve managed to hold on to it by that point. Then I’m in your midst. Which means—even if you could see, even if you still had your weapons—you wouldn’t be able to fire at me without hitting one another.”
Back to the cop in the middle: “You’ll be doubled over on the floor at this point, because … well, we’ve already covered that. I’m gonna break your nose as cleanly as I can with a quick left jab to make sure you don’t get your vision back anytime soon. Let me apologize in advance for that. I know you’re just doing your job. Then, with my right foot, I’m gonna kick you into her”—his gaze slid to the plainclothes officer—“while she’s still clawing at the salt in her eyes.”
“But you’re not gonna break my nose,” she said, “because you’re chivalrous.”
Evan gave a one-shoulder shrug of assent. Then continued, “After you three are tangled up and useless, it’ll take me four and a half strides to reach the end of the rear hall, where your backup’s waiting. The mirrored side of the espresso maker there on the service counter’s giving me a nice clear reflection of the back door with the frosted pane. Your boy with the extra Y chromosome is throwing a shadow from the hinge side. He’s holding his service pistol too far from his body, so when I kick the door open, it’s gonna knock it back into his teeth. He’ll go down hard, because that’s what muscleheads do. The veteran cop on the other side I’ll take down gently with a chicken-wing arm control, but I won’t break anything, because: respect. Before they can recover, I’m gonna bolt up the alley and disappear into the rear entrance of one of the shops that I scouted earlier, but I won’t tell you which one, because I don’t want to be predictable, and let’s face it, at this point that would be gilding the lily.”
He lowered the giant mug to the top of his stomach, and all three cops inadvertently tensed. Their hands were too tight on the grips, and too tight meant tremors and imprecision. Evan was unarmed, and his body language was so unaggressive it verged on soothing, a dissonance they clearly found blindingly bewildering.
Evan scanned the three officers, frozen where they stood. “So, guys. What’s it gonna be?”
In answer, all three muzzles raised to aim at him.
“Okay, then.” Evan adjusted his grip around the mug, readied his loose fist around the salt, firmed his foot against the table base. “Are we ready?”
5
A Not-Unfamiliar Coldness
The park bench by the artificial pond looked like a movie prop, set at an artful slant beneath a Rockwellian maple tree. In the pond a family of plump ducks paddled by, ignoring the embarrassment of bread crumbs on the shore.
The man sitting on the bench was clean-shaven, save for a patch of hoary stubble at the point of his jaw. His once-rugged face had crumbled under gravity, giving him jowls. His eyes were a touch milky, his still-brawny forearms liver-spotted.
Jogging at a pace just shy of a sprint, Naomi Templeton took note of the bench from a good distance out and decided to accelerate until she passed it. Racer-back tank top over a jog bra, black running tights, sports headphones blaring Alicia Keys—all designed to make her run faster, go harder, be better. This girl is on fire.
She crossed the finish line of the bench and leaned over, hands on knees, taking a few minutes to recover. Then she circled the bench, sat on the end opposite the old man, and flipped out her earbuds.
As she caught her breath, the old man looked over at her, gave a double take. “You remind me of my daughter.”
She said, “Is that so?”
“Yeah, she’s sturdy like you. And don’t go getting offended. I mean well built, not fat.”
“Noted.”
“Her brothers are fit, too. Athletes, both of them. Lacrosse. You shoulda seen their muscles when they came home from college. Put me to shame—me in my prime, I mean. I think she was always trying to keep up.”
Naomi leaned forward. A breeze blew across her bare shoulders, turning her drying sweat pleasingly cool. “Girls’ll do that.”
“Yeah, especially with her mother gone early.” His trembling fingers found the cross nestled in the gray chest hair visible below the notch of his throat. His shirt was buttoned wrong, misaligned. He shivered a little. “She’s a tough one, my daughter. Always tried to please me, I think.”
Naomi stared at the water. “Girls’ll do that, too.”
“She never learned that you can’t ever please anyone by trying to please them.”
“That’s a tough lesson to learn, I guess.”
For a moment they sat and watched the breeze ripple the pond’s surface. It was faux idyllic here, which made it easy to disregard the countless TVs blaring too loud from countless windows in the industrial block of a building set behind the strip of artificial turf, the wheelchair platform lift waiting at the base of the stairs, the direct-care specialists—all lovely, all patient, all ethnic—heading back from their breaks along the gently sloped walkways. All you had to do was squint a little, breathe the fresh air, and you could pretend you were in the real world, that everything was okay.
The old man shivered again.
Naomi said, “What do you say we get you inside, Dad?”
* * *
She stood at the nurses’ station in the assisted-living facility, looking over the latest medical report. The facility’s name, Sunrise Villa, always struck her as optimistic and perversely cruel. Assessing her father’s lab work, she felt a not-unfamiliar coldness wash through her gut.
She sensed Amanaki’s eyes lift from behind the counter. The nurse, with her empathic gaze and lilting Tongan accent, seemed preternaturally aware of subtle emotional shifts, a human tuning fork. “Everything okay, honey?”
“Yeah, thanks. It’s just … The labs … I have to call my brother.”
Amanaki’s eyes took on a knowing gleam, and she busied herself again at the computer.
Naomi stepped away from the desk and dialed. Jason picked up on the third ring. “What up, Nay-Nay?”
“I’m at Dad’s place. They took him off Exelon—”
“Off what?”
“One of his meds. They took him off it for nausea and dizziness, but he’s dizzy without it, too. They tried the patch form, but that doesn’t work either.” She ran her fingers through her bluntly cut blond hair. “His complex-motor stuff’s getting worse, and I guess he threw his pills at a nurse this morning.”
“Did they hit her?”
“Jason.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. Look, that’s what the nurses are there for.”
“To have pills thrown at them?”
“You know what I mean. We pay good money for the care. It’s a nice place.”
“I know. I’ve actually seen it.” She realized she was making a fist around her hair at the back of her head. “I’m just saying, you should probably get out here and see him. Soon, I mean. And Robbie. Hell, Robbie I can’t even get on the phone.”
“But he sends a check. It’s been fair all the way through.”
“This isn’t about fair. We’re not eight years old, Jason. I’m here every other day—”
“That’s because you live in D.C. And look, it’s your choice, N.”
“It’s not different.”
The lie was half-hearted; Jason barely bothered to disguise the nicety with a tone shift. She could hear voices in the background, someone shouting out a ticker update.
“Look,” Jason said, “with Tammy and the kids, you know, four schedules, four directions. You don’t appreciate how hard it is when you have a family.”
“Jason, I’ve met your family. I appreciate how hard it is.”
He laughed. “You know what I mean. And come on, the old man wouldn’t recognize me anyway. He’s lucky to have you there.”
She resisted the urge to fill the silence.
Jason finally said, “I’ll send you more money next month so he can get … I don’t know, more time with the staff or whatever.”
“I don’t need more money. I need—he needs—someone else here who loves him. He still likes listening to music and looking at his and Mom’s wedding album—”
The workplace noise grew louder in the background. “I gotta hop, N. News just hit the tape, and I’ve gotta whack some bids. Talk later.”
The call severed with a click.
Naomi pocketed the phone, walked back to the nurses’ station, and looked down at her father’s file.
Amanaki clacked away at her keyboard. “I been here a lotta years, and I can tell you, women are better at this.”
“At not being selfish dicks?”
Amanaki’s smile felt, as always, like the clouds had parted to let through a blast of soul-warming beauty. “Yeah, I’d say we are. Men talk a lot. Women stay and take care of what needs to be taken care of.”
Naomi’s phone vibrated in the zip pocket of her tights—Jason calling back? The flare of hopefulness she felt was accompanied quickly with a pang of self-recrimination. When it came to her brothers, she knew better than to allow naïve optimism to worm its way to the surface.
As she dug in her pocket, she realized that it wasn’t her personal phone that was vibrating but her secure Boeing Black smartphone.
She thumbed the ANSWER icon. “This is Templeton.”
“Special Agent in Charge Templeton?”
“The very one.”
“We need you here immediately.”
6
X Marks the Spot
Arms crossed, Naomi regarded the scene in Apartment 705 as agents from Forensic Services worked up the room all around her. She’d been recently promoted within Protective Intelligence and Assessment, and though she’d worked a file drawer’s worth of cases since, the other agents still seemed to be adjusting to her. More precisely, they were still adjusting to the last name that came attached to her.
For three administrations her father had run the “big show”—the Presidential Protective Detail. In that time he had pioneered enough security and safeguard innovations that his name had literally become synonymous with perfection within the Service. Did you Templeton the rope line? We need Templeton coverage from the hotel advance team. The motorcade route has been Templetoned.
It’s not that anyone believed that Naomi hadn’t earned her promotion. At thirty-one she was young but not too young, and there was no arguing her work ethic or performance. But most everyone came at her armed with a quiver full of assumptions. Was she a guru with a genetic gift for security matters? A haughty prima donna? If they shook her hand, would some of the old man’s magic rub off?
Few circumstances were as emotionally confusing as growing up in the shadow of a not-known-to-the-public celebrity. Her father’s fame—if it could be called that—was a spark that threw no light beyond a circle of cohorts. The problem was, she happened to share those cohorts now.
She was Hank Templeton’s kid first, Naomi Templeton second. Despite the complexities that presented, she did not deceive herself into believing that this was not without its advantages.
After getting the call at the assisted-living facility, she’d changed hastily in the car and raced to the scene. Door-to-door through rush-hour traffic in twenty-three minutes, a reaction time even her father would have found acceptable.
She returned her focus to the bolt-action sniper rifle sitting atop its tripod at the front window.
A Russian piece of gear, a Mosin-Nagant with a PSO-1 scope.
Given its placement, there was no way the motorcade’s advance team could have missed it. It was positioned to be seen.
The weapon was common enough, millions of them were scattered around the globe. Yet the choice of rifle struck her as odd.
Given the high-rent real estate of the apartment and the high-value target the assassin hoped to capture in the scope, the rifle was decidedly second-rate. Mosin-Nagants were like AK-47s. You couldn’t throw a rock in a war-torn country without hitting one. They were cheap, durable, and easy to use. But they had their problems. Sticky bolts, worn-out ejectors, screws falling out of the stocks. This one looked beat-up and dusty.
She would have expected something professional and top-tier, maybe a Remington M700 with a Leupold Variable-Power Scout Scope.
One of the forensics men, a towering guy with a drippy nose, announced his presence behind her with a sniffle. “Serial number’s been scoured off, probably with a bench grinder.”
“How deep?” she asked.
“Deep enough that there’s no way we can recover it with an etching reagent. But that’s not what’s noteworthy. The rifle? It’s not usable. The barrel’s warped, and there’s no firing pin. It’s totally sterile.”
Naomi lifted her eyes to the four blown-up surveillance photos that tiled the wall behind the rifle. Each featured a face in close-up, and each face had a letter Magic Markered across it.
A middle-aged man in what looked like a Venetian piazza: J.
What appeared to be a homeless man in a mall: C.
A handsome guy smoking a cigarette in a parking lot: L.
And the last, a photo of a man in his sixties, this one without a letter scrawled across the head. A square face, weathered and handsome, with a well-practiced squint.
The staging of the rifle and photos made clear: This wasn’t an aborted assassination attempt. It was a message.
But to whom?
Naomi flicked a hand at the photographs with the weird markings. “How ’bout those?”
“Those are sterile, too. We managed to digitally capture the faces beneath the markings and run them through facial recognition. Nothing. These people? They don’t exist. Except for him.” The agent pointed at the man in the unmarked photo. “Former station chief with the Agency, mostly through the seventies and early eighties. His personnel record gets hazy after that. His name’s Jack Johns.”
“Where is he?” Naomi asked.
“Went missing about six months ago, just vanished off the map.” The agent scratched his neck. “Maybe these are photos of past victims of the shooter.”
Naomi tried the theory on, found it ill-fitting. “You pull any prints from the pictures?”
“No. They’re clean.”
“Did you dust the backs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You pulled the photos off the wall and put them back up?”
“They’re taped, so we lifted them to dust the backs.”
“You dust the tape itself?”
“We did. Along with everything else in the apartment.”
“There isn’t anything else in this apartment.”
“Doorknobs, countertops, toilet flusher.” The agent retrieved a handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose. “There’s not a single print here. The guy’s a ghost.”
She gestured at the photos. “What’s with the letters?”
“I don’t know,” the agent said. “But there’s one more.”
“One more what?”
“Letter.”
“Where?”
H
e waved Naomi over to the rifle. The bolt had been manipulated back, revealing the round in the chamber. A single letter had been etched into it.
X.
“We found it like that,” the agent said. “X marks the spot.” He gave a nervous laugh that sounded like a giggle.
Naomi looked from the round to the photos on the wall and back to the round. “It’s not a mark,” she said. “It’s a signature.”
“Why do you think that?” the agent asked. “Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s the name of the target? Ye olde ‘bullet with your name on it’?”
“X stands for the unknown. President Bennett isn’t X. He’s the best-known human on the planet.”
“After Kim Kardashian,” the agent said.
“After Kim Kardashian,” Naomi conceded. She studied the scrawled letters covering the faces in three of the four photos. “So the would-be shooter is in on the same side as the men in these photographs. If my theory is right.”
The agent shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against a Templeton.”
“Then you’d lose a good percentage of the time.” She met his gaze, which had grown nervous, shifty. “I need your ideas. Not your deference.”
He nodded.
She moved on. “I was told PD had a run-in with a suspicious party on E Street after the rifle was spotted.”
“Yes, ma’am. Five officers.”
“When can I interview them?”
“Right now, if you’d like. Micelli just brought them up, has them waiting in the hall.”
She nodded and stepped out of the apartment.
The cops were huddled up by the elevator—a female plainclothes officer and four men. They turned as Naomi approached. She drew up short, taking in their ragged appearance.
The big rookie’s front teeth were chipped. One of the uniforms had a broken nose, bruises already coming up beneath his eyes. The other had swelling that stretched down one cheek and across his neck.
After introductions were made, Naomi said, “What’s with the red blotch?”
“Matcha green tea,” the officer said.
Out of the Dark Page 4