He reached for the door, but it stayed locked.
At once the Tesla reversed, so fast that he had to brace against the steering wheel with his forearms, eliciting a baleful honk.
The Tesla spun around, smacking his head against the driver’s-side window, the wheel spinning of its own accord. Driving itself, the car eased through a laid-open chain-link gate and coasted into the shadows in the far reaches of the dilapidated auto shop.
It stopped, shifting itself into park.
Dots clouding his vision, Wetzel white-knuckled the steering wheel, his hands quivering. He tried to shift gears, but the car wouldn’t obey.
His thoughts roiled, a paranoid flurry. Someone had hacked his car?
The familiar hum made him start, a waft of night-cool breeze blowing across his face. His window had rolled down. He turned to look out and spotted a dark figure in the shadows no more than five feet away, sitting on the side steps that led to the old auto shop’s office. The man was lit faintly by the glow of a laptop resting on the uneven wooden plank beside him. He removed his hands from the keys as if relinquishing a joystick.
The sweat seemed to freeze on Wetzel’s face.
The figure rose.
Wetzel scrunched his eyes shut, a long-buried childish impulse. He heard the crunch of a footstep and then another.
He opened his eyes. The man was standing right there, the top of the window frame cutting him off above the chin.
A hand came at Wetzel’s face, grabbed the lanyard around his neck, and tore the flash drive free. Next the disposable phone was plucked from the dashboard, the call presumably still active.
Wetzel watched the phone rise out of sight to the man’s face.
The voice carried back to him. “Orphan A,” it said. “Wetzel first. Then everyone else who’s helping you. Then you. Then him.”
Wetzel strangled a sob in his throat.
He heard the reply, tinny through the disposable phone. “Not if I kill you first.”
The phone dropped to the ground. A heel crushed it into the asphalt.
The man leaned down, at last bringing his face into view.
“Hello, Doug,” Orphan X said. “You and I need to have a talk.”
32
See Every Angle
Tonight’s Class 3 threat was that Naomi’s father was refusing to eat prunes.
Hank Templeton, legend of the Service and protector of presidents, was backed up from an array of meds and so far out of his right mind that he refused to cooperate with two nurses and the rounding physician. He shook his head back and forth like a child confronted with broccoli, grizzled lips clamped shut before the proffered prune.
Naomi had been called into her father’s room, which smelled of urine and the too-strong detergent necessary for bedsheets in a facility like this. “Dad, you have to—”
Hank knocked the prune out of her hand with his bone-lumpy knuckles. “No, goddamn it. Where’s Jason?”
“He’s not here, Dad. It’s just me.”
“Where’s Robbie? Where are my sons? I need someone who can get something done around here.” His pronounced eyebrows bunched, his face set with familiar New England obstinacy.
A nurse unknown to Naomi leaned her father forward and started to untie his gown to change him. Naomi looked away. For her modesty or his? Clearly he didn’t care. Fenway nuzzled into her side, wet nose in her palm.
Naomi took a step back, gathered her bangs in a fist, squeezed hard enough to feel the hair pull at the roots. She kept her eyes on the floor. “Okay, Dad. Look, I brought Fenway. Do you want to see…”
Her voice went dry, and she lost the back half of the sentence.
Amanaki suddenly was at her side. “I got it from here, honey. Why don’t you take a moment?”
Not trusting her voice, Naomi nodded and relinquished the leash.
In the hall she called Jason and got voice mail. But she reached Robbie. In the background she could hear the sound of a family dinner in full swing.
“Hi, Nay-Nay,” he said.
“Robbie.” She pressed a knuckle to her lips. There was no crying in the Templeton family. “I’m with Dad. I could really use your help.”
“Jesus, Naomi.” The full name now. “I’m sending, what? Four grand a month? I have two kids in private school and—”
“Not money. Just someone else here. I’m dealing with … I have a thing at work and trying to manage that and Dad is a lot. Plus, you should see him. You should just see him.”
“Dad doesn’t recognize anyone. He doesn’t know who the hell we are anymore.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“Maybe you do, okay? Because the way you frame it, to try and guilt me into dropping everything for Dad, it’s bullshit. If you thought about it, you’d realize—you don’t want me there for him. You want me there for you.”
She felt it then, a blowtorch flame of anger cutting through the grief. “No, Robbie. It’s so that when you’re lying in a bed like … like a remnant of who you were, you can look back and not be embarrassed by how you acted when he needed you.”
“That’s the thing. He doesn’t need me. Never did. He never needed any of us.”
“Be a man,” she said. “Not a child.”
She hung up and walked down the corridor, her head hot and thrumming. She sat on the plastic-cushioned chair, a shade of aqua not found outside waiting rooms, and tilted her face into her hands.
When had men gotten so small?
Her father, for all his flaws, had been forthright and loyal, shouldering responsibility and adhering to his own strict code. He’d always shown up, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.
It was difficult to square who he’d been with the boy-men her brothers were—let alone the dude-bros on the open market. Guys who were overmanicured and body-sprayed, who talked about little beyond microbrews and college basketball, who thought texting ’SUP? at booty-call hours constituted witty repartee. She replied the same every time: SERIOUSLY?
Her last date had been months ago, procured through one of the less-gropey dating apps. “Wellesley,” he’d said over pork-belly sliders. “Isn’t that, like, a girls’ college with no men?”
“No,” she’d said. “It’s, like, a women’s college with no boys.”
She recalled the furrowing of his brow, more confusion than offense.
“Oh,” he’d said.
Like her, they’d been raised on YouTube and swipe-right screens. On every billboard and music video, there was the unattainable fantasy, curated personalities, skin smooth and shiny, glammed up and spray-tanned, and she knew it was all fake, a media creation or whatever, but it was still effective, still teasing some high-school not-belonging part of her. That was even more infuriating: to know it was a lie but to want to believe in it anyway.
To dive into that not-world and live there instead of inside a life of death and decay, of assassins probing for weaknesses and early-onset diseases that ravaged body and mind.
She wondered how it would have been to live back when there were real men like her father was, or like he used to be, real men who took care of themselves and took care of others and, yes—took care of the women in their lives, too.
What would it be like to have that comfort? To live in a real house with someone else instead of in a walk-up with a hand-me-down bed and an IKEA bookcase with lots of little-used consonants, named after a meatball.
A gravelly voice cut through her thoughts. “Visiting your mother or your father?”
She lifted her head. An ancient gentleman, back domed like a turtle shell, had perched on the chair beside her. An oxygen tube fed his nose.
“My dad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you. Me, too.” She took a breath. “He’s not … He can’t tell what’s going on anymore. Which I guess is ironic. He used to see every angle, everything coming down the pipeline. But he never could see what was right in front of him.”
<
br /> Only in hindsight did she register her words as self-pitying.
The man gave a sage nod. “It’s funny how it goes.”
They weathered a momentary silence that was neither comfortable nor awkward. He fingered the oxygen tube, caught her watching his pruned fingers.
“When you’re a kid,” he said, “time lasts forever. You’re immortal. When your grandparents die, it’s not real. Not yet. Then your parents go, and … well, it’s like there’s no more insurance. You’re next in line. You’re that guy!” He laughed. “The last one standing. The one everyone wants to make sure to see at Christmas, because you never know. You never know. I can see them grieving me even while I’m still here. And there’s a comfort in that. A love. So maybe that’s what you’re giving your father by being here. Even if he doesn’t know it in his brain, he knows it in his cells.”
Her throat was dry, and her eyes burned. She folded her hands, staring down at the ridgeline of her knuckles.
The man said, “What?”
She cleared her throat. “The mourning, it sucks, yeah, but no one tells you…”
He kept his gaze steady on her.
She forced out the words. “No one tells you how hard it is not to get resentful.”
“Accept it,” he said. “If you accept life, you accept all its rich, awful complexities. Because if you think about it, what’s the alternative?”
She thought of pork-belly sliders and dude-bros thumbing their phones over dinner and the sweet bullshit promise of demo-targeted advertising.
She took the man’s hand, skin draped over bone. “Thank you.”
In her pocket her Boeing Black phone dinged with a text. Then another. A third and fourth on its heels.
And then it started ringing.
Alarm asserted itself in her chest as she stood and fished the phone from her pocket. “Sir, will you please tell Amanaki to keep the dog for me?”
She didn’t make out his reply.
She was already reading the screen, running for the door.
33
Big, Boomy Reds
Doug Wetzel stumbled up to the northwest gate of the White House, his face so ruddy and flushed it looked almost rubbery. As he reached the guardhouse, he thumbed the white button on the intercom and announced himself in a shaky voice.
The front gate rolled open.
He stepped into the embrace of the sally-port pen, credentials held aloft in a trembling hand.
Before he could approach the slot in the bulletproof glass, one of the Uniformed Division officers keyed to him, the voice made tinny by the speaker box. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
Wetzel broke, sobbing openly, saliva gumming at the corners of his mouth.
He tilted back his head, the well-trimmed beard lifting to show what had been secured around his neck.
A bomb collar made of tubular nylon.
“Hands! Hands! Don’t move! Don’t move!”
An emergency-response team materialized instantly out of the night fog.
As Wetzel spread his arms, his jacket pulled open and the duct tape ringed around his torso came visible, securing not explosive charges but manila files from his own briefcase.
A photograph pinned to his hated tie showed a federal prosecutor lying in a pool of her own blood in her foyer.
“Please God,” Wetzel said. “Can anyone help me?”
* * *
President Bennett tipped back his big-bowled sommelier’s glass and took a considered sip of Château Lafite Rothschild. He liked big, boomy reds—deep-throated burgundies and earthy bordeaux.
He enjoyed the moment of glorious aloneness in the West Sitting Hall, elaborate chandelier dimmed, the famous half-moon window an elegant portal to the night sky.
He had a full day tomorrow. Morning briefing, fifty-five minutes of world-leader calls, physician check-in regarding A-fib and blood draw, eye and vision examination if time permitted, bipartisan delegation for a foreign-policy meeting, tailor measurements for a new rack of suits, speechwriter meeting in the Oval, lunch with senior advisers, drop-by of counsel’s office staff meeting, informal powwow with the secretary of state, a thrice-delayed photo with the NCAA Championship Wolverines, a Situation Room briefing, the daily wrap-up with the chief of staff, and then maybe—in the brief window between when Europe went to sleep and before the East woke up—a swim in Jerry Ford’s pool.
The footsteps against the plush carpet were soft and soothing, but they portended bad news.
His assistant secretary moved toward him, lipsticked mouth trembling against her porcelain skin.
He set down his wineglass and stood.
* * *
The president assembled with a few staff members in the West Wing Situation Room, where he watched a live feed of the bunker where Doug Wetzel had been secured.
Wetzel stood alone, stark against the concrete walls, broad shoulders hunched. Though he’d run out of tears, he was keening hoarsely.
The emergency-response team had acted quickly to contain the problem. Keeping a safe standoff distance from Wetzel, they’d steered him away from any public sight lines, marching him across the North Lawn. He’d kept twenty paces ahead of them, arms held wide, a prisoner walking to his execution. Following their shouted commands, he’d locked himself in a bomb-shelter room in the rear of the bunker, two blast layers removed from the world.
Over the high-def feed, Bennett could hear the ERT leader’s voice through the door: Take off your jacket!
Wetzel squirmed out of the jacket, let it fall to the floor.
Arms wide! Raise your chin!
Wetzel complied, giving a good view of the files strapped to his body and the collar tight against his neck.
Bennett spoke into the starfish-shaped speakerphone unit. “Doug. Calm down. Catch your breath.”
Wetzel was hyperventilating, chest seizing, head jittering. “… trying.”
“What does Orphan X want?”
Wetzel said something, the words blurred over a sob.
Bennett stood and neared the large screen, confronting Wetzel’s life-size image. It was just like standing in the same room with him. “What?” Bennett said. “I can’t understand you.”
Wetzel jerked in a few breaths. “… wants you … to see this.”
As the explosion came through the speakers, Bennett jolted back from the screen, banging his hip against the table’s edge.
His palm had come up to cover his mouth.
On-screen, singed bits of paper fluttered in the air.
It was hard to look at the mess on the floor but harder not to look at it.
The secretary was neither screaming nor crying, but the noises escaping her were an awful hybrid of both. To her credit, she’d kept her feet.
The other staffers were sunk into their chairs, pale, faces drawn. To a one, their blink rates had picked up—were it not for that, they would’ve looked like mannequins.
On the screen the bomb-shelter door swung inward, the team pouring in.
Bennett lowered his hand from his mouth. He noticed that he was still in a protective crouch and drew himself upright.
He gave a wave that was feebler than he would have liked, and someone cut the feed.
34
Mr. Patience
Evan arrived back in his room at the Watergate, locked the door behind him, and threw the swing-bar guard. Setting down his backpack, he tilted his face to the ceiling and exhaled.
His neck had knotted up, and his hands smelled of chlorine and high-proof vodka.
Removing his laptop from the backpack, he logged in to his e-mail, opened his Drafts folder, and typed: “Update?”
He started to walk away, hesitated, then returned and signed the unsent note.
“—Mr. Patience.”
That almost made him smile.
He passed through the wide door into the spa-like embrace of the marble bathroom, forgoing the freestanding bathtub for a punishingly hot shower. Setting both hands on the tile, he
leaned into the powerful stream, letting the jets pound against his crown.
Wetzel had told Evan everything he knew, some of which Evan already knew himself. That Orphan A had been set on his trail. That A had recruited a death squad of down-and-dirty ringers headed up by two convicts, Ricky and Wade Collins. That once they killed Evan, they were going to track down and neutralize the remaining Orphans. That President Bennett was eliminating any trace of Evan’s 1997 mission. When pressed—and Evan had pressed Wetzel in a fashion that would have produced results—Wetzel had no specifics about why the mission was so menacing to Bennett.
Whatever the secret was, Bennett couldn’t even trust it to his own deputy chief of staff.
Evan turned off the shower, dressed, sat at the desk, and refreshed the screen.
Joey’s reply was waiting: “we’re in.”
A chill rippled across his back, his skin tightening. It wasn’t a thrill so much as a predatory focus, the whiff of prey in the wind.
Beneath her two-word reply was a series of links.
He clicked.
All of a sudden, he was looking at the inner workings of the Secret Service, prized data and classified intel, private squabbles and dirty laundry.
It took him ten minutes to orient within the private network, another ten to start identifying areas of interest.
First he ran through the travel logs. President Bennett’s schedule was in a state of upheaval; clearly there’d been a directive to move as many engagements and meetings around as close to scheduled dates as possible. The commitments were endless, more than Evan could review now, but he scanned them, searching for events that seemed difficult to reschedule.
Mid-September showed a promising fund-raiser in Los Angeles with the mayor and the senior state senator, mere miles from Evan’s penthouse. But two months was a long time to wait, and there was no guarantee that the reception wouldn’t be delayed or canceled.
Evan scrolled through other upcoming trips, assuming that catching the protection detail off their home turf would be easier. But the more he read, the more he realized that was not the case.
Out of the Dark Page 18