Out of the Dark

by Gregg Hurwitz

  The mob ebbed and flowed around him. He fought against the prevailing tide, trying to get off the street. Stumbling up onto the curb, he came to a halt and stared at the marquee-style sign stretching before him.

  INTERNATIONAL SPY MUSEUM.

  He smiled.

  * * *

  The museum was still evacuating as Evan careened inside, sliding past reception and in through an exit door onto the museum’s ground floor. He rooted in his backpack for the mirror phone that allowed him to listen in on Naomi’s Black Boeing, thumbing it on as he darted forward.

  Gray cobblestone was suddenly underfoot, and he looked up to find himself standing in Cold War Berlin. Sullen concrete barriers rose from the floor, routing him along like a rat in a maze. Agitprop flyers waved from kiosks. Graffiti brightened drab walls. A replica tunnel vanished into darkness, promising untold dangers.

  He passed a telefon booth, gripped by a disorientation that brought him back half a lifetime to another gray street in another gray city when he was a nineteen-year-old Orphan laying the groundwork for an assassination.

  Naomi’s voice crackled through the phone into his ear, jarring him from his reverie: lost sight of him.

  Copy that. We have PD units flooding the zone.

  We need everything locked down between 9th and 7th. Empty every single building. Search ground floors first and heaviest—he won’t want to go up and cut off his escape options.

  That was exactly right.

  So he’d do the opposite.

  Swiftly he retraced his steps to the lobby, vectoring for the stairs next to the gift shop, where a headless bust displayed a shirt emblazoned with the words DENY EVERYTHING.

  Naomi’s voice again in his ear: The Spy Museum. Let’s see if he has a sense of humor. I’m going in.

  He cleared the doorframe into the stairwell an instant before he heard her strike the push plate of the lobby door.

  Lunging all the way up to the vacated third floor, he charged out into the Covers & Legends room, the walls clad with ID cards and forged papers. A looping video explained that this was where visitors selected their new identity before partaking of the interactive exhibits ahead.

  Searching for a hiding place, he moved through the circular floor plan, gadgets and artifacts blurring past him. Poisonous umbrellas and necktie cameras. Suitcase radios and a KGB lipstick gun. Surveillance stations and a grim interrogation room.

  He was trapped inside a Disneyfied version of his life’s work, the world’s second-oldest profession repurposed as theme-park attraction.

  In the background a recording played testimony from French Resistance saboteurs. When Naomi spoke through the mirror phone again, Evan had to hike the volume to hear her.

  No one down on one or two. I’m going to three.

  Copy that. I dispatched four units to sweep the ground floor behind you. Whistle if you get a hit, and I’ll leapfrog ’em upstairs.

  Evan sped up, searching frantically for a crevice he could slither into.

  He heard Naomi’s voice now in stereo, both over the line and at the third-floor entrance behind him. “On the third floor, pressing forward. Status elsewhere?”

  As the dispatch agent started rattling off other buildings that had been cleared, Naomi’s exhalations fuzzed the line; she was jogging through the third floor, breathing hard, catching up to him.

  Keeping the Boeing Black smartphone at his ear, Evan moved with light steps into the Ninja Suite. Ahead was the entrance to one of the interactive exhibits—an air-duct crawl.

  He had a moment of unadulterated you-gotta-be-kidding-me.

  The air duct’s opening, a hatch cut into the wall, was cast in a red-light-district glow.

  Evan stripped off his backpack, shoved it ahead of him, and pulled himself inside. He inchwormed along the elevated tunnel, pushing the backpack before him, his face drawing even with a vent. Pressing his fingers around the welded seams, he found an interior wire and tore it from its mooring, the illumination around the hatch dying just before Naomi came into the room.

  She slowed her jog, pausing to catch her breath.

  Hidden in the vent, Evan watched her scan the walls, her eyes passing over the shadowed opening to the air-duct crawl.

  Was it dark enough that she’d miss it?

  “Damn it,” she said into the phone.

  The mirror phone, resting in the vent before Evan’s face, gave a faint rattle as the words came through.

  He watched her head crane, looking up in his direction.

  With excruciating slowness, he reached forward and silenced the mirror phone.

  “What?” Naomi said into her phone. And then, “I was going over to talk to Wetzel. I saw a guy getting something from what looked like a dead drop in the lobby. I think…” She swiveled away, facing the precise spot where the air duct’s opening lay barely hidden in shadow. “I think it might’ve been Orphan X.”

  She listened.

  Evan watched, praying that her gaze wouldn’t snag on the hatch in the wall.

  “I have no fucking idea why Wetzel set up a dead drop,” she said. “The only thing I know is there’s no way he’ll tell me.” A pause and then, “No. No need. I already safed it. Let’s expand the target zone down to D Street. Every building, every car, every alley.”

  She turned away and walked out.

  Long after her footsteps faded, Evan lay there in silence, holding his breath.

  30

  All Is Not What It Seems

  The key card for Evan’s room read NO NEED TO BREAK IN. The hotel phone system’s internal number included 1972, a subtle nod to the infamous date. Less subtle was Nixon’s voice, squawking over the urinals in the public bathrooms.

  In the last few decades, it seemed, the Watergate Hotel had gotten itself a sense of humor.

  Some years back the place had been bought by a new group, overhauled, and made trendy cool. Even the staff uniforms had a retro flourish; the receptionist had breathlessly informed Evan that they’d been “envisioned” by the designer from Mad Men.

  Welcome to the new world of metascandals and entertainment news.

  On the ground floor, an undulating copper wall flowed into a whiskey bar with a few thousand backlit bottles precision-lined on floor-to-ceiling shelves, casting an amber glow across sleek red armchairs and young K Streeters seeking company.

  Sitting at a corner table with his laptop, Evan studied the photograph of the woman’s body he’d taken from the dead drop.

  He’d waited for hours inside that faux air duct until the museum resumed operations and he’d been pushed out the other end by an onslaught of middle-schoolers on a field trip. Downstairs in the gift shop, he’d bought an oversize sweatshirt that read ALL IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS, a facial-hair disguise kit, and a baseball cap stating I WAS NEVER HERE. In a bathroom stall, he applied a mustache and repositioned his backpack, wearing it in front under the roomy sweatshirt, where it bulged like a gut.

  As he exited the museum, he’d thought, Thanks for the memories.

  He’d gotten himself underground and onto the Metro as quickly as possible, acquiring a limp on his way. Police officers remained out in numbers, but he was just another overweight tourist shuffling by.

  Once he was safely out of the city center, he’d made a stop to acquire a few items at Home Depot. The clerk had barely glanced at him as she’d rung him up, tapping the register slowly, careful not to snap her fake nails. After wondering if the consumers who’d come before him had endured the service with more patience, he’d taken his bag and waddled back to the train.

  It had been a peaceful ride to Foggy Bottom.

  A waiter drifted over now wearing a soul patch and a disaffected glower. Evan supposed that serving marked-up bourbon to lobbyists night in and night out might elicit a sour expression.

  He placed the photograph facedown on the table. “Do you have any vodka?”

  “Whiskey,” the waiter said. “It’s a whiskey bar. That’s why we’re called, like, th
e Next Whisky Bar.”

  “I want vodka.”

  “Vodka’s at the Top of the Gate bar,” the guy said. “You know, on the roof?”

  Evan stared at him.

  Tougher men than Soul Patch had found that intimidating.

  The guy blinked twice. “What kind would you like sent down, sir?”

  Evan told him.

  As soon as the waiter backpedaled, Evan turned the photograph over again. He typed the address and date into Google, clicked on NEWS.

  A federal prosecutor and her husband, bludgeoned to death in their own home. They’d left behind a third-grader named Zeke. No witnesses, no evidence, no motive.

  Evan lifted the photograph, stared at it closely.

  The woman’s long lashes were parted, her left eye undamaged. A beautiful brown iris flecked with yellow. Eyes that had looked at her husband through a wedding veil, had gazed down lovingly on a newborn.

  None of that was relevant now.

  The pupil was.

  Enlarged from the trauma, a black orb.

  A black, reflective orb.

  A face image recovered from a reflection in a victim’s eye was thirty thousand times smaller than an actual face.

  Evan plugged his RoamZone into the laptop and uploaded the high-resolution photo he’d taken of the high-resolution photo.

  He zoomed and depixelated, thinking that maybe Joey would be impressed with him. But probably not.

  A figure came into view, the photographer standing over the corpse. Face, upper torso, camera held out to take the picture.

  Fortunately, the camera blocked only part of his jaw. Evan zeroed in on the face, let the software do its work.

  The eyes achieved clarity first. Then the nose. At last the mouth achieved crispness, removing all doubt.

  Orphan A.

  The waiter returned, and Evan lowered the screen of his laptop.

  “I brought the Spirytus, sir. How would you like it served?”

  The Polish-made spirit claimed the title of the world’s highest-proof vodka at 192 proof, or 96 percent alcohol content. The strongest booze on the U.S. market, it had arrived here only after Eastern European communities from Brighton Beach to Sheepshead Bay had lobbied the New York State Liquor Authority.

  By comparison, rubbing alcohol came in at 91 percent.

  Evan said, “I’ll take the bottle.”

  * * *

  In honor of the hotel’s notorious past, Evan elected to stay in Room 314.

  Under the same false name, he’d booked a few other suites that could, in the event of a raid, serve the same purpose as President Bennett’s dummy limousines.

  The view was spectacular. The building’s curving avant-garde architecture mirrored the flow of the Potomac, Evan’s balcony looking across the slate-blue river at Theodore Roosevelt Island. To the south he could catch the edge of the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, a blocky rise set behind a respectable fringe of greenery.

  But he wasn’t focused on the view now.

  He was focused on what he was mixing in the ice bucket. For an oxidizer he used pool chlorine in the form of powdered crystals. For fuel, superfine 600-mesh powdered aluminum—a common paint mixture that added surface shine.

  Spirytus vodka was the last part of the explosive cocktail.

  The high-proof liquor turned the concoction into a slurry, keeping the compound stable, safer to handle, less susceptible to static and percussion.

  And it was good to drink.

  He took another sip now, let it blaze its way down his food pipe. Even on the rocks, it was an angry beverage, a longtime favorite of Siberian pilots, which was worrying for more reasons than he cared to reflect on.

  Once the slurry gooed up into formable shape, Evan packed it into a foot-and-a-half length of tubular nylon, using a wooden spoon to avoid any sparks.

  He wound the nylon into a circle and left it on the table to set. The alcohol would evaporate quickly as the compound hardened, making it more sensitive. A simple electric blasting cap and a cell-phone initiator would take care of the rest. When the time came, it would be like striking a match.

  But sped up ten thousand times.

  Evan crossed to the balcony and stared out at the water sweeping by, a ceaseless current that stopped for nothing and no one.

  He thought about a third-grader named Zeke getting pulled out of school by a social worker. What had the first few days of being orphaned been like for him? Was he racked with gut-searing grief? Or was he still lost in the concussive aftermath of shock, his mind mercifully holding reality at bay, letting it seep in a drop at a time? This would become his story now: When I was eight, my parents were murdered.

  Evan went back inside to his laptop and called up his e-mail.

  In the Drafts folder, he typed: “Update?”

  A moment later the unsent e-mail refreshed: “still nothing. take a chill pill, mr. patience.”

  Resting on the table to his right was the eight-by-ten of the bludgeoned woman. A photograph left to confirm a murder likely ordered by Bennett and augmented by Wetzel. He thought about Wetzel driving out of his condo building, coasting away in a bubble of privilege.

  He typed: “What do you know about the Tesla S?”

  A moment later the draft e-mail updated with a single word: “everything.”

  31

  Strategic Planning Meeting

  It was the neckties that got to him.

  Small price to pay for proximity to the throne, but still, Doug Wetzel would have given his left nut to wear baggy jeans and a ratty Guster T-shirt from his college days.

  Driving home from 1600 Penn, he loosened the knot at his throat and nudged the air-conditioning up another notch. This afternoon’s strategic planning meeting had been unending, the president demanding that the army hold joint military exercises with India near the Chinese border as a response to Sino-Pakistan drills planned for next week. The Joint Chiefs were split and the debate at a low boil, but the president was decisive as always, issuing directives without breaking a sweat or elevating his voice.

  When the president spoke, five hundred combined years of experience shut up, leaned in, and took orders.

  Police cordons were still in effect, shutting down several blocks east of 14th, so Wetzel shot north up Connecticut and then cut off onto side streets to dodge traffic.

  D.C. at night had a particular savage gleam, red taillights piercing through gloom, dingy alleys bookending martini-lounge hustle-bustle. And yet another realm hovered above in an angelic glow, the eye called to uplit white marble monuments, to rounded domes and thrusting peaks, to glowing penthouses floating above streets as dark as puddles. Everything that rose seemed to be mirrored in descent, the reflecting pool and the cool Potomac like portals to an underworld.

  Wetzel had read somewhere that Hollywood directors liked to hose down streets to make the asphalt sparkle on film. Washington was like that naturally, a black-ice kind of town—lose focus and you’d slip and break your neck.

  Earlier Naomi Templeton had briefed him on the day’s events. She’d hinted around a dead drop at his building, but he didn’t take the bait. He’d endured a stream of direct questions from her as well before shutting her down to get back to the business of governing.

  He wasn’t going home now, that much was certain, not after Orphan X had shown up in his lobby. He’d texted Orphan A from the disposable phone, requesting a meet in a dive bar in Tenleytown, a safe distance from the heated center of the city. After he powwowed with Orphan A, he’d return to the White House and sleep soundly in a guest room inside the fortress.

  He passed an abandoned auto shop now, its windows boarded up. On the plywood someone had spray-painted I VOTED FOR BENNETT, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY DEMAGOGUE!

  At a red light, Wetzel dialed the disposable phone for the third time in the past ten minutes. This time it rang.

  A gruff voice answered, “A.”

  “Did you get my text? Where the fuck have you been?”<
br />
  Orphan A said, “Preparing.”

  “We’ve had an incident,” Wetzel told him.

  “I saw the news.”

  “You think he followed you to my place? You think he’s onto you?”

  “‘Onto me’ doesn’t happen. But I’m getting onto him. I called your hook at the DoD, had him run some scenarios for me. That correlative software shit you types are always on about.”

  The light changed, and Wetzel accelerated off the line. “Please elaborate.”

  “You came to me because I think like him,” Orphan A said. “So. If it was me, I’d set up safely outside the White House surveillance apparatus but close enough to be within striking distance. I’m thinking three to ten klicks out. Short-term condo rental or hotel, Metro and freeway access within a block. If a condo, it’ll have an attached parking garage. If a hotel, he checked in with a rental car. I told your man to put the data in the genie lamp and tell me what comes out.”

  “Fine. In the meantime, I need to see you.”

  “Boy, aren’t you paying attention? You’re not safe to be in the world.”

  Wetzel tried to swallow, but his throat gave only a dry click. He eyed the rearview, taking in the empty streets. Steam floated up from a sewer grate, wisps unfurling like tentacles. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “If I was Orphan X, I wouldn’t be watching the president. I’d be watching you.”

  Sweat ran down the side of Wetzel’s neck. He loosened his tie a bit more, unbuttoned his shirt’s top button.

  He wasn’t sure what happened next, but he heard a screech of tires—his own—and his face smacked the top of the steering wheel. He pushed himself off, feeling a warm trickle ford his upper lip. He smelled iron and burned brake pads.

  The phone had wound up somewhere on the dashboard. His briefcase had flown from the passenger seat and landed on the floor mat.

  He gave the brake an exploratory tap, but it was still depressed.

  Then his windshield wipers went on, scraping dryly across the glass.