She was in.
“My job is to cover every contingency,” she began.
“You can’t cover every contingency. Not against him.”
She paused. “Do you know who the suspect is?”
“No one does. Not really.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of that. “There was a run-in with an unidentified individual in a café minutes after the threat was spotted. His face was blocked by a hat in all CCTV footage, but we’re looking to see if any of the mikes picked up audio. If so, we can match his recorded voice with those from threat calls we have in the database.”
“I read the report,” Bennett said. “It was him. He won’t have spoken in range of the surveillance units. And he won’t be in the databases.”
She regrouped. “The letters he wrote over the faces in the photographs. We can analyze the handwriting and backtrace the ink. We’ve got just shy of ten thousand ink samples in the International Ink Library, and a lot of manufacturers are adding invisible tags to help us—”
“Handwriting analysis will give you nothing. And the ink won’t be traceable.”
“Okay,” she said, a touch of frustration leaking into her voice. “Then we can start with the records we already have. You know the formula. Does he have a prior history of mental illness? Has he had military training? Does he have the capability to execute a plan? Exactly how serious is the threat?”
“No. Extensive. Yes. Grave.”
They stared at each other.
The panel door swung inward, and the assistant secretary stuck her head into the room. Without moving, Bennett said, “Not now,” and she withdrew.
Naomi pursed her lips. “The team is reviewing the squeal sheets and pulling Class 3 threats from records going back—”
“Don’t bother.”
“We have twenty-five hundred working investigations—”
“Drop all of them,” Bennett said.
He was staring through the windows in the direction of the Rose Garden, but his eyes were unfocused.
“Mr. President?”
He swung his gaze back to her.
“What the hell is going on?”
He smiled now, an actual smile. “It seems as though we’re talking. But that’s not what’s really been happening.”
“No? Then what has been happening?”
“I’m deciding.” That stare, direct and unremitting.
She weathered it, gave him back the kind of loaded silence he was so skilled at deploying.
“You’re now in charge,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Everything,” he said. “At least everything that pertains to this case. Which means, from my perspective, everything.”
“I have a deputy assistant director who’s running point,” Naomi said. “Plus Director Gonzalez—”
“That’s no longer relevant. You will have the full resources of the Service at your disposal. You will focus exclusively on this investigation.” He paused for two seconds, an effective emphasis. “Be advised, what I am about to tell you is classified, not just at the highest level but at a level you aren’t even aware of. Understand?”
The question hung there, a threat. She held his gaze. “Yes. I understand.”
He rose, circled the couch, and rested his hands on the back, looking across at her. “The man trying to kill me is a U.S.-trained black operative who has gone rogue. Code name: Orphan X.”
Naomi suddenly became aware of the chilled air in the room, a tightening of the skin at her nape. “I thought…” She cleared her throat. “I thought that program was apocryphal. Conspiracy-theory stuff.”
Bennett said, “No.”
“The photographs—”
“Former Orphans, also rogue. Now eliminated.”
“And what information do you have on … Orphan X?”
It felt odd, saying the name as if it were something real.
“About as much as I just gave you,” Bennett said. “We are dealing with a specter.”
“Then until I can get a handle on this investigation, we have to dial back your public exposure.”
“That can’t happen. These are critical months, ramping up for the midterms. Speeches and fund-raisers. I have a party to feed. Plus, I’ve been besieged by claims of obfuscation. So the ‘optics,’ as the pundits like to say, must show me in contact with the populace.”
“Okay. We can hold the events, but we’re gonna have to shuffle your schedule around and make additional game-day adjustments to throw Orphan X off.”
Bennett gave a slight nod.
“If you insist on working the rope lines, you can only interact with smaller groups of prescreened people. We’ll add another layer to checking media credentials so he can’t infiltrate the press corps. Any events you do, no matter the size, every last attendee goes through magnetometers.”
Bennett’s mouth downturned faintly, just shy of a grimace. “That’ll make fund-raisers trying.”
“A lot less trying than getting shot.”
“I’m running a keep-control-of-both-houses campaign.”
“And I’m running a keep-you-alive campaign.”
He came around the couch, offered his hand to indicate that the meeting was ending. “You don’t relent, do you?”
“No, Mr. President.”
His grasp was cool, firm, and dry.
“One more thing,” she said.
He halted, his loafers silent on the monochromatic oval carpet. The Presidential Seal was rendered in bas-relief, the eagle and stars sculpted into the pile itself.
She said, “If I’m going to protect you from a threat of this magnitude, I need you to share all relevant information with me.”
“You have my word that I’ll keep you apprised of everything that pertains to this matter. In return I expect that anything that comes up in the course of your investigation is brought immediately to me.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” She exited into the secretary’s office.
Bennett enjoyed the empty room for a moment. A moment of solitude was generally all he got at a time.
Sure enough, another door opened and Doug Wetzel stepped through. “What’d you decide?”
Bennett said, “I trust her enough to let her run things from the Service side.”
“She skates by on her old man’s name.”
“Don’t make that mistake. She’s highly competent.”
“I haven’t had time to get full background on her yet,” Wetzel said. “How do you know?”
“Because that’s what I do.” Bennett paused to assess the displeasure emanating off his deputy chief of staff. “We’re not going to rely on her solely,” Bennett said. “She can’t play offense against a threat like this. Neither she nor the whole goddamned Secret Service has the skills or the capabilities. If we want to get Orphan X, we can’t rely on official channels.”
Wetzel leaned against the desk, scratched at his beard. “So what do we do, then?”
Bennett said, “Release him.”
“Who?”
Bennett just looked at him. Watched his Adam’s apple bob, a particularly evident swallow.
Wetzel’s voice, hoarse with apprehension: “Right away, Mr. President.”
He withdrew.
Before summoning his next meeting, Bennett took a deep breath and exhaled. The more lines he crossed, he’d discovered, the more he found necessary to cross. But this one in particular merited a respectful pause.
Once you unleashed hell, it was goddamned hard getting it back on the leash again.
9
Eternally Trapped Souls
Judd Holt awoke in his cell as he had every morning for the past 1,779 days. Physically, he was located inside a prison, but the issue of his legal whereabouts was more convoluted.
On a quiet winter day in 2006, Indiana’s Federal Correctional Complex at Terre Haute inaugurated a euphemistically named Communications Management Unit, which floated inside the larger prison. The unit’s nickname, Litt
le Guantanamo, was more apt.
Like its cousin in Marion, Illinois, the Indiana CMU was created without any formal review process required by law. Mind-fuckingly, the unit was located on U.S. soil while somehow not existing on sovereign land—a clever Schrödinger’s-cat contortion designed to suspend prisoners’ inalienable rights once they entered the sealed, windowless box.
CMU detainees—mostly terrorists or suspected terrorists—were deprived due process. Once ensconced inside the complex, they had radical restrictions placed on their phone calls, visits, and written correspondence.
For Judd Holt, this was perfect.
He needed to stay hidden as much as President Jonathan Bennett preferred him to be hidden.
Of course, Holt could have done without the incarceration bit, but he’d fucked up, stepping into an FBI sting operation that was too high-profile to cover up. Almost five years ago in the East Ward of Trenton, New Jersey, he’d illegally acquired an FN M249 SAW.
If he was going to kill Orphan X, he knew he’d require a serious platform.
He’d also acquired a Predator backpack that could hold eight hundred linked rounds to feed the rifle. Then he procured that amount of firepower four times over, in case it took more than a minute-long sustained burst to put down Orphan X. He’d driven to an isolated patch of woods outside Langhorne, Pennsylvania, to test the weapon. When the task force closed in, he’d been wearing the bulging rucksack on his back, unleashing on a stand of yellow birch like Ol’ Saint Nick with a rage-control issue.
He could’ve obliterated his pursuers with a twitch of his trigger finger, but as accustomed as he was to bloodletting, he didn’t need deaths of federal agents on his conscience.
So he’d allowed himself to be taken.
They couldn’t believe that he was planning to use so much firepower for anything but a public massacre. They didn’t understand the man he was hunting.
Needless to say, they had no idea who he really was. He lived under a false identity buttressed by authentic government-issued papers that were backstopped at the highest level.
Gun laws came with sentencing guidelines as draconian as those for drug laws, so he’d been slapped with two sixty-month sentences, one for the hog and the ammo, one for transporting across state lines.
He didn’t expect to survive his first night in jail. He figured he’d be neutralized as soon as the sun dropped. Those were the rules of the game. He’d been caught—in the act of executing a personal mission, no less—and being caught risked exposure for those above him. The people who really mattered.
But that night a proxy had arrived who’d given him a choice. A deal could be cut to take him off the boards. Holt would be buried in a CMU, out of sight and out of mind, where he’d finish his sentence. He wasn’t to make any noise or file any appeals. He’d get out once his time had been served or when he was required—whichever came first.
He never went to trial. He zippered his mouth and got on the bus and had lived inside this box ever since. It was so cramped that when he lay on the cardboard-thin mattress of his cot, his outstretched arms could touch the opposing walls.
Of the three thousand prisoners housed in the entire complex, Holt was the most lethal, despite the fact that he’d already breached his fifties. He was a “balancer,” one of the few non-Muslims scattered throughout the population to inoculate the unit against lawsuits. He’d been told more times than he could count that he looked like he had Scottish blood, but he didn’t know where his people hailed from any more than he knew where he did.
He was built like an anvil, a whisper over five-nine, broadened with veiny, bulging muscle. His short-cropped hair, dull brown tinged with copper, receded into a severe widow’s peak, a monk’s tonsure beginning to crown in the back. A beard crowded his face, bristle so dense it looked like wiry fur. Under armed guard he was allowed to shave in his cell twice a week, and he required a fresh razor each time.
He was given fifteen minutes of yard time in a pen every Sunday—when it wasn’t raining, when there were no threats of riots, when no irregularities had occurred during the week. During that time he had kept to himself, as was his habit, but he’d observed the others closely and forged a few alliances, not for protection but because he never knew when savage men might come in handy.
Today was not Sunday, which meant that he had sixteen hours to fill inside this six-by-eight-foot cell before he could go to sleep again.
That was fine. His training had prepared him for this. Time was money, and he had plenty to spend in here, 1,779 days with nothing to do but hammer his body into shape, hone his mind, and stoke his personal obsession to a high blaze. The instant he walked free from these four walls, he’d be ready to resume his mission.
Murder Orphan X.
Holt lay on the cot now, eyes still closed, feeling the warmth of sleep depart his face. The air was cool and smelled strongly of industrial cleaner. He let his lids part.
Directly over his head, a grapefruit-size orb bulged from the low ceiling, sufficiently tinted to hide the surveillance lenses inside.
The air felt different. He sensed it before he even sat up.
When he did, his cell door was standing open.
He stayed perfectly still, focused on the door, waiting. Ten minutes passed, maybe twenty.
He rose and knuckled the door gently. The rarely used hinges creaked.
He stepped into the hall.
The gate at the end was rolled back.
He moved toward it, drifting past other cells. Through the tiny glass squares, pairs of eyes watched him glide by.
Silence prevailed.
He reached the gate.
The guard chair just beyond was empty, a folded-back Sports Illustrated left on the padded seat.
Holt stepped through.
Now he was in a wider corridor that led to a solid steel door and a guard station. He kept on.
The guard on duty was watching the morning news.
Holt approached slowly and stood in full view of the tempered glass. The guard didn’t remove his eyes from the small TV screen. His hand dipped beneath the counter, a buzz electrified the air, and the steel door clicked open.
Holt grasped the cool handle and pulled it wide. He stepped through into the gen-pop unit, two stories high. The range floor was spotless, broken only by floating staircases to the second-level catwalks. The animals were all in their precast-concrete houses, still behind locked doors, a face darkening every tiny glass window.
Holt ambled across the empty plain of concrete, sensing myriad heads swiveling to note his progress. Breath huffed across the tempered panes, fogging them sporadically.
So enormous was the hall of warehoused humans that it took Holt a full ninety seconds to traverse its length. Total silence accompanied him at every step. Given the height of the ceiling and the number of lives housed under it, the quiet felt thunderous, weighty, religious—as if he were moving through some netherworld, passing beneath the gaze of eternally trapped souls.
He reached the controlled entry point at the far side. He stopped and faced the security camera above.
The locking mechanism disengaged. He opened the door.
He was in the reception center now, where he’d been screened and processed nearly five years ago. An obese guard sat at the counter, working her gum like a cud. In the pass-through tray, a neatly folded stack of clothes waited.
It took Holt a moment to recognize them as his own.
As he approached, the guard swiveled on her chair, turning her back with evident disgust.
He stripped off the gray prison jumpsuit and stepped clear of it, leaving it puddled on the tile floor. For security reasons he’d been issued no undergarments, so he stood naked now, the air cold against his flesh.
He crossed to the counter, retrieved the clothes he’d last seen 1,779 days ago, and dressed. Olive drab vintage fatigue pants, worn T-shirt, steel-toed boots. A hundred bucks in gate money rested in the tray next to the wallet holding hi
s authentic if illegitimate driver’s license. He folded the five crisp twenties into his pocket and headed out.
A guard stood by the concrete façade of the entrance, twelve-gauge shotgun in hand.
The men stared at each other, and for a moment Holt wondered if he’d misread the situation, that he’d been led to his execution.
But the guard spit in the dirt and turned away.
Holt started across the dusty yard. In the tower the sniper kept up his watch, his wraparound shades winking back the sunlight. Holt watched the sunglasses scan right past him as if he didn’t exist.
Which, he supposed, he didn’t.
He came to the front gates, two layers deep, topped with coils of concertina.
They parted like the Red Sea.
He walked through one and then the other.
The instant he stepped free, a bizarre chime sounded, accompanied by a vibration against his thigh.
He reached down to one of his cargo pockets and lifted free an old-fashioned flip cell phone. He had never seen it before.
He snapped it open.
A voice he didn’t know said, “There’s a Nissan Maxima across the parking lot to your right. No, farther right.” He adjusted his gaze. The voice continued, “The keys are in the ignition. The destination is in the GPS.”
The call severed with a click.
Orphan A closed the phone and ambled to the waiting car.
10
Last Chance and Final Offer
The ride up the center of the marble obelisk took a full sixty seconds. The transparent elevator allowed for a mine-shaft effect, burrowing past carved blocks donated by various states and nations.
It was early on a Tuesday, so the number of tourists was thin. Evan stood in the back of the lift. He wore a roomy button-up shirt, nylon cargo pants, and a floppy sunhat. The Steiner binoculars, a favorite of bird-watchers and sightseers, dangled around his neck. He wore a fucking fanny pack, which he’d stuffed with sunscreen and maps so the security guards at the base would have something to paw through.
The doors parted on the Washington Monument’s observation deck five hundred feet above the ground, and he shuffled out after the others into the narrow hall encircling the elevator shaft. Observation windows, two per cardinal direction, gave postcard views of the iconic scenery.
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