On domestic trips President Bennett was accompanied by more than three hundred civilian and military personnel, the ranks swelling to nearly a thousand for OCONUS forays. An advance team stacked with lead agents, transportation agents, countersurveillance agents, airport agents, event-site agents, tech-security agents, intel agents, and a military comms team locked down every transition point and venue ahead of time. The Secret Service flew all equipment and vehicles, including Cadillac One, on C-130 cargo planes to ensure they wouldn’t be tampered with. The gear was guarded around the clock, ready and waiting the moment Air Force One landed. At that point a working shift swung into effect as well, a whip directing a dozen agents and body men, backed by a counterassault team. Along the route safe houses were designated at regular intervals, spaced between hospitals and law-enforcement strongholds. At all times the president wore Level III flexible body armor made of synthetic fiber, fifteen hundred filaments per strand of yarn.
Evan had a backpack and a change of underwear.
If the president stayed in a hotel, the Secret Service booked the entire floor—and the floors above and below. Every room, every item in every room, and every square inch of carpet was swept and physically examined for surveillance devices, hidden explosives, and radioactivity. Multiple escape routes were charted. An elevator repairman remained on site to respond to irregularities. Every employee in the hotel received a thorough vetting and background check. Those with priors were given the day off; those without were ordered to wear color-coded pins. Food suppliers and delivery companies were checked in similar fashion. Secret Service agents stood posts in the kitchen, monitoring the chefs, sous-chefs, and waitstaff during all stages of food preparation. The agents waited until dishes were prepared and then selected plates at random for Bennett. Sporadically, the hotel kitchen was sidestepped entirely, a navy steward brought in to prepare the president’s dishes.
Evan had a Baggie of leftover pool chlorine and a half bottle of high-proof vodka.
He dove deeper into the Secret Service databases, now focusing on White House security procedures. The water-purification system was tested semimonthly, tech-security experts procuring a sample from every faucet and tap. The president had a weekly physical and bloodwork check, his robust medical file updated constantly. X-rays and MRIs could be provided on site, and peripheral health needs—optometry, pharmacy, and orthotics—were provided by specified outside contractors whose backgrounds, procedures, and operations had endured the full scrutiny of the Service. Food vendors, too, had been vetted within an inch of their lives, shipment records showing the president’s dining proclivities. Receptions and state dinners were handled by one of three caterers, able to produce two thousand pounds of shrimp, five hundred bourbon-glazed Virginia hams, and a few hundred gallons of iced tea at a few hours’ notice. Bennett’s triweekly workout sessions with a trainer in the West Wing gym dotted his schedule, along with evening swims in the pool, but a glance at the past month showed frequent cancellations. Only cleared manufacturers could provide exercise equipment and pool chemicals; only approved janitors could service the facilities. All tailoring occurred inside the White House, with the textiles, thread, buttons, and zippers given rigorous scrutiny.
Evan had a laptop and a fake ID.
He rubbed his eyes, feeling uncharacteristically overmatched. He was a guy in a hotel room contending with all the protections that the Secret Service’s $1.4 billion annual appropriation could buy Jonathan Bennett.
Evan gave himself three seconds to feel disheartened and then refocused on the databases, digging into the Service’s response tactics and capabilities.
The best bet, it seemed, was targeting Bennett in D.C. but out of the White House. Which meant a motorcade assault. Evan read some of the operational procedures for the Uniformed Division countersnipers, who were issued .300 Win Mags and Stoner SR-25s. The training regs for Special Operations’ counterassault team were even more rigorous, encompassing everything from close-quarters combat to ambush-defense tactics. CAT members operated in teams of six, a two-man element responding to the initial offensive while the others laid down heavy cover fire. They had a singular aim: suppress the attack long enough to give the president’s limo time to get away. Clad in body armor and black BDUs, they wielded SIG P229s and full-auto SR-16s and carried flashbangs and smoke grenades.
When the time came, Evan vowed, it wouldn’t be enough.
Determining that time, unfortunately, was the biggest problem of all. It was everything. Without a definitive, advance-notice When and Where, he’d never even get to the starting gate.
A knot of frustration asserted itself at the base of his throat, and he closed his eyes, breathing it away. There were promises to keep and files to read before he slept, but he had to recharge or his effectiveness would dim.
He was about to shut down the laptop when his eye snagged on a red-tagged folder at the bottom of the highest-classification directory.
It was labeled X.
He hovered the mouse over it a moment, took a breath, and then opened it.
What he saw inside made him lean forward to bring his face closer to the screen.
Photos of his former foster home in East Baltimore. Various hangars at Fort Meade. Jack’s farmhouse, the paint peeling, shingles worn through in patches. Naomi Templeton had ordered continuous sat footage on key locations in case Evan popped his head up. The file also contained a few fragments of operations past. A high-value target gone missing in Mogadishu in 1999. A questionable passport at the Al Karamah border crossing in 2005. A bloody fight on the Las Vegas Strip in 2015.
It was barely anything, but he was amazed they had assembled even that.
After another moment reviewing these fragments of his past, he powered down the laptop.
Removing everything from his backpack, he spread the few items out on the carpet and then repacked meticulously. His laptop slid into a padded pouch just beneath Peter’s gift. He stowed Wetzel’s flash drive in the back pocket. Though the intel files it held on the other Orphans were heavily redacted, they could still provide enough for Orphan A and his goons to pick up the scent. It was a sober reminder for Evan of the stakes should he fail.
Which meant failure was not an option.
He finished zipping up his belongings in the backpack. Traveling light meant he could depart on an instant’s notice without leaving a trace.
He set the backpack on the foot of the mattress and lay on top of the goose-down comforter, fully clothed, boots tightly laced. Resting his left hand on his stomach, his right on his chest, he let his mind range over the incalculable number of safeguards and contingencies the Secret Service had erected around President Bennett.
Endless impediments, endless complications.
An idea nibbled at the back of his brain, expanding until he saw, sketched in his mind’s eye, the rough outline of a plan. An insane, Hail Mary pass of a plan.
It was a start.
He mused on the impossibility of what lay before him until he fell asleep.
* * *
Sitting in the passenger seat bathed in darkness, Orphan A felt the sweat bead along his widow’s peak.
Excitement.
That’s what life had become for him now. All it held. A jungle cat’s momentary thrill when the right kind of movement flickered across its visual field.
In the other seats, he could sense Wade and Ricky Collins and their cousins displacing a large quantity of air. The van was turned off, its lights killed, the interior laden with the smell of gun oil and hardware.
“Weapons check,” Holt said.
Various clinks and metallic clanks answered him.
Ricky’s blocklike fists encircled the steering wheel. He wore a fully loaded grenade-carrier vest, camo design, over Kevlar body armor. The pockets covering the front of the vest were unsnapped, flaps raised for ready access to the safety-pin rings. He looked ready for an assault on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Ricky’s brother and the fiv
e cousins had likewise gone militia chic, bedecking themselves in army-surplus offerings with fetishistic delight.
It was overboard, all right, but Holt was fine with that. They’d require overboard if they hoped to get X. Part of the Collinses’ job was to loom large anyway. Ultimately they were decoys to draw X’s attention so Holt could get the kill shot.
The hotel parking structure was dimly lit and sparsely attended, the van cloaked in shadow. Zeroing in on the Watergate had taken a hefty amount of computing power. The DoD had put Holt’s hypotheticals through their magic machine, and it had spit out a reservation.
Though only one man had checked in, there were three rooms registered under the same name.
On the part of X, this was smart business. In case he had surveillance in place, Holt and his crew would have to hit all three rooms simultaneously. Divide to conquer.
The only benefit to splitting up was that it would make them less conspicuous. They wore trench coats that fastened at the belt to cover up the gear, but still, if the sight of two Collinses drew attention, seven would elicit widespread panic. They’d break into three teams and infiltrate the hotel through different entrances. Holt would float in a central location, at the ready to respond once the firefight broke out.
Twenty minutes earlier they’d driven unnoticed into the structure and taken the only spot available on the ground floor, in the southwest corner. Unfortunately, that pinned them in, the parking-attendant booth positioned between the van and both exits.
From the shadows they watched the attendant, a heavyset Hispanic man with bulges at the back of his neck. If the guy didn’t exit the booth soon to take a bathroom break, Holt planned to call in a phony alert.
“Let’s go,” Ricky hissed through his teeth, the words riding a tobacco-scented stream.
“Sure thing,” Holt said. “We’ll just clank out of the van and file past him, all eight of us in full battle rattle.”
“We got trench coats.”
“Have you seen you motherfuckers? Police response to this location averages seven minutes. Believe me, we’re gonna need all seven. That countdown can’t start till we engage X.”
“I don’t need seven minutes to cap some bitch,” Wade said from the middle bench seat.
Holt lifted his eyes to the rearview, catching Wade’s reflection in the green glow of an exit sign. His cheeks looked raw from shaving, a few nicks at the jawline.
“This isn’t a fistfight behind a biker bar,” Holt said. “If you know that, you might have a chance.”
“A chance at what?”
“Surviving.”
The parking attendant rose from his stool, stretched, and exited the booth.
“Finally,” Ricky said.
The man looked around and then pulled a pack of American Spirits from his sagging pants and started walking.
Directly toward the van.
“Shit,” Wade said. “He’s coming over here to sneak a smoke.”
“What do we do?” Ricky racked his SIG. “Put him down?”
“It’ll be loud,” Wade said. “But worth it.”
“One in the chest, one in the head,” a cousin piped in. “Pap-pap. People’ll think it’s a car backfiring.”
Holt watched the attendant draw near. The guy had a brick-size radio clipped to his belt. One click of a button and they’d be looking at a whole new set of variables. Holt swept his gaze around the concrete structure, gauged the acoustics of a fired shot.
The attendant stopped a few yards from the van.
By unspoken accord Holt and the Collins crew stayed frozen in their seats.
The attendant tilted his head to light up, and in the flare of light, his name tag came visible: ERNESTO. He sucked in a lungful, leaned back, and dispensed a plume of smoke overhead.
In the rear row of the van, another Collins boy tightened his grip on his FN P90. He spoke quietly, a whisper through clenched teeth. “I say we kick this shit off here, go full Benghazi. Take care of business hard and then run and gun straight for the three rooms.”
In his peripheral vision, Holt noted Ricky’s hand on the door handle.
Ricky said, “We go on my three.”
Moving his hand slowly, Holt opened the glove box. Inside rested the clawhammer.
“One…”
Ernesto’s pivot felt inevitable, his gaze drawn to the pent-up energy emanating through the windshield. He looked at the van loaded with men and weaponry, his forehead furled with curiosity, not yet processing what his eyes were telling him.
“… two…”
Holt climbed out of the van and strode toward the man, spinning the hammer a half turn in his hand. Ernesto managed to say, “Hey. Um…?” before Holt clipped him beneath the chin on the rise.
When the deadweight hit the concrete floor, it sounded like a dropped sandbag.
Holt turned back to the van. “Coming?”
35
Shadow and Shape and Nothing More
The door to 314 smashed inward, the latch assembly splintering the frame, the swing bar tearing the fastened bolt free.
Evan was airborne before he was fully awake, a lifetime of muscle memory moving him from horizontal to vertical. His consciousness caught up to his body an instant before his boots struck the floor, and he had a split second to contemplate why no one was charging the room when a small blur of movement from the doorway caught his focus.
A bouncing ball, thudding on the carpet once, twice, spinning to a stop in the dead center of the room.
Not a bouncing ball.
A frag grenade.
Evan bounded once, twice, clearing the threshold of the bathroom and diving for the bathtub.
He struck the cast-iron side hard, bucketing into the bottom as the floor heaved, accompanied by a rush of sound and heat. A metal-on-metal clang rocked the tub, the side studding in, black denting through the enameled white surface at the impact points.
Dust powdered the air, cut through with a torrent of sparks from a shattered ceiling light above. A buzz-saw whine filled Evan’s head, his ears vibrating with a concussive roar.
He flipped over in the tub, shards from the blown-out light crunching beneath his elbows and shoulder blades.
Over the wavering white-noise rush, he heard a voice. “The fuck is he? Is he here?”
“I thought I saw him.”
“Safe the bathroom, Carl. I’ll go balcony.”
Footsteps thudded the floor, muted taps Evan registered as if he were underwater.
A gunshot shattered the shower enclosure, the pane giving way in strobe-light bursts thrown from the sparking wires.
A form cut through the pixelated air, pistol swinging down at the bathtub.
Evan reared up.
He caught Carl’s gun hand at the wrist and hooked his other thumb so it rode the knuckle of Carl’s trigger finger. Evan fired down twice, once through the meat of the thigh, once through the top of the foot.
Carl sagged forward, clutching Evan in a limp hug, howling in his ear. Over Carl’s shoulder Evan spotted a massive figure pivoting back in from the balcony, phone raised to his mouth—Ricky Collins.
Evan hooked an arm around Carl, holding him upright, a two-hundred-plus-pound shield. Blood spurted from Carl’s thigh, painting the wall beside them. Inches from Evan’s cheek, the bellowing continued.
Evan couldn’t hear Ricky, but he read his lips against the nighttime lights spilling in from outside—Here, he’s here!
Ricky hoisted an FN P90, but there was no shooting Evan without shooting the slab of meat between them.
Evan released Carl, his hands blurring. In the instant before gravity caught up, Evan seized Carl’s meaty forearm, firmed his clamp on the pistol, and drove the man’s arm back through the resistance point of the elbow, hyperextending it ninety degrees.
Carl’s scream reached operatic heights.
The barrel was now aimed directly behind Carl, his arm bent precisely the wrong way. Evan stayed behind the gun-turret safety
of Carl’s mass, chin resting on the ledge of the man’s shoulder, their cheeks slapped together, faces pointing in opposite ways.
Evan jerked his thumb backward against Carl’s trigger finger twice, firing the upside-down gun across the room at Ricky. The first shot missed, but the second clipped his shoulder, sending him in a half spin to the floor.
Carl fell away, the pistol spinning loose and clattering off into the darkness by the toilet. He reached weakly with both hands to clamp the arterial gush.
Evan stepped out of the bathtub, kicking Carl’s right hand off the wound and grinding it into the shard-layered floor. Bones popped.
He’d be unable to stop the bleeding now.
Ricky rolled onto all fours as Evan darted through the ragged doorway into the main room. Ricky rose, yanking the FN P90 across his barrel chest, catching Evan in its wobbling sights.
The submachine gun purred, unleashing lead at a rate of 850 rounds per minute. Evan dove at Ricky, rolling over a shoulder, sensing the air vibrate around him, the wall disintegrating at his back.
He came up beneath the gun, driving it up, the barrel smacking Ricky’s jaw before the weapon was knocked free.
But now he was in the grasp of the big man.
Ricky bear-hugged him, tilting back so Evan’s boots lifted off the carpet. Without a base, Evan dangled ineffectively in the vise grip, his chest mashed to Ricky’s vest, which looked to be laden with grenades, an explosive overlay to the Kevlar vest beneath.
Ricky drove his face forward, head-butting Evan.
Evan dipped his face, letting his forehead take the brunt, a clack of bone on bone. He crumpled, free-falling, and didn’t realize he’d been laid flat until his head smacked against his backpack, blown onto the floor by the explosion.
Ricky readied to deliver a kick to Evan’s face, and Evan scissored his legs, spinning around the pivot of his hip, hooking Ricky’s planted ankle.
The leg sweep worked, knocked Ricky flat on his back beside Evan. Ricky hammered the bar of his forearm at Evan’s face, Evan catching it just before it smashed the bridge of his nose.
Out of the Dark Page 19