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 covered 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 dead woman 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, the 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.
Thank God for computers.
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.