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. “And 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, Little 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 Schr? dinger’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 Santa Claus 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.