Naomi hurried to keep pace, flipping through her notebook. “Mr. President, until we can get our arms around this situation, we have to make some adjustments. No more rope lines or jogging, no unmagged crowds, wider buffer zones—”
She looked up from her notebook, realizing only now that they’d arrived in the master bedroom. That broad plain of brown carpet, the rounded north side, the oddly delicate letter desk. Bennett had opened his closet door, an inset panel that had been papered like the rest of the wall. He had a necktie in hand, which he regarded with evident suspicion. The muscles of his back flexed like scales, a physical tell of his mounting frustration.
She said, “For right now I’d like to cancel all public appearances, meals eaten out—”
He whipped around, jabbing his finger in her direction. “I’m the most powerful person on this planet. I won’t be trapped in my own goddamned house, no matter how big it is.”
She heard her father’s voice reminding her that ultimately a Secret Service agent was a babysitter, and she kept her mouth shut. Even so, she could feel her face burning.
Bennett looked down at the tie in his hand. He dropped it on the floor. His shoulders sank, and then he walked heavily across the room and sat on his bed.
All the heat had gone out of him.
He snickered, a single note muffled in his throat. “After a time you forget the privilege of this place,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Everywhere you look.” He gestured at an ornate gold clock resting on the nightstand. “What do you think of that?”
She stared at the scrolled acanthus leaves and cherubs floating around the white face. She pocketed her notebook. “I think it’s hideous.”
This seemed to amuse him. “It’s a French mid-nineteenth-century Louis XVI ormolu,” he said. “It cost a hundred seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“That doesn’t make it pretty.”
“No. I suppose not.”
“It looks like something my gamma would’ve had on the mantel next to a velvet Jesus painting.”
He was silent for a time.
Then he said, “I know why I do this job. At least I used to. Why do you do yours?”
She pictured her dad again, a husk of what he used to be. She thought of his countless stories, his undying pride in the Service, his sureness of his place in the world.
She said, “I can change history.”
“How do you mean?”
She shrugged. “If Robert Kennedy doesn’t get shot in ’68, Nixon doesn’t become president.”
“And if I don’t get killed by Orphan X? Then what?”
She studied the carpet, perhaps for too long. When she finally looked up, his gaze was waiting, as steady as she’d ever seen it.
She said, “I suppose that’s up to you, Mr. President.”
54
Free and Clear
In the shower’s stream, Evan soaped himself from head to toe and then did it again. On the third go, he finally felt he’d gotten the sewer muck off himself, but he went a fourth round anyway. Technically none of the waste had touched his flesh, but he felt it, a phantom contamination in his nostrils, his lungs.
Myriad aches had taken up residence in his muscles, but he refused to acknowledge them directly. There would be time enough to be sore when the mission was over.
After toweling off, he leaned against the counter of the sink and checked the Drafts folder of his Gmail account.
The message, twelve hours old, was only two sentences. And yet they seemed to carry the weight of the world.
“can’t find anything in secure SS databases re: 1997 mission. sorry. x, j.”
His frustration brimmed, spilling over and assailing him with impressions. A man slumped over a table, chair shoved back, face in his bowl of soup. A fastidious Estonian arms dealer bleeding out beside a loom in an abandoned textile factory. A naked girl, skin tented across her bones, curled on a mattress beside a metal folding chair holding a heroin kit. The foreign minister falling back, his eyes bulging in a final instant of awareness, a hole the size of a 7.62 × 54mmR round replacing his left cheek. His wife’s stretched-wide mouth, her scream buried beneath a swell of uproar from the crowd. The generals surrounding them in the open sedan, stolid and loyal. Or not.
And the bits and pieces sent into motion by that single squeeze of a trigger. A copper-washed steel cartridge holding an invisible fingerprint, left on a sewer ledge. The untold grief and rage left in the wake of the murdered. The power vacuum after the foreign minister and his hawkish views on nuclear development had been dispatched. What fault lines and tectonic shifts had Bennett’s order set into motion? What hurricane had been unleashed by the flapping of a butterfly’s wing? How the hell had a nineteen-year-old’s first mission evolved into a storm sufficient to threaten the president of the United States?
Evan stared at his reflection, a ghostly form in the fogged glass. For the first time in years, he felt a stab of self-pity, wishing that the Mystery Man had never showed up to peruse the offerings of the Pride House Group Home in East Baltimore. The foster home had proven a rich recruiting ground for the Program. The boys used to jostle at the window, hoping for a glimpse of the man lingering by the chain-link surrounding the cracked basketball courts across the street. They were unsure who he was or where he’d come from, but they sensed he was there for them. There were rumors of boys pulled off the street, boys who had gone on to fresh lives. There were rumors of sex-slave operations and stolen-organ rings, too, but those weren’t strong enough to quell their curiosity.
They all had so little to lose.
If the Mystery Man hadn’t chosen Evan—or, more precisely—if Evan hadn’t gotten himself chosen—he would never have had Jack. He wouldn’t have become an Orphan. He wouldn’t have been sent halfway around the world at the age of nineteen to a country he didn’t know to assassinate the foreign minister of a government he cared nothing about. He probably would have died of a drug overdose or in a prison cell. But maybe, just maybe, he might have seen himself clear to a normal life. A life where he wasn’t hunted by the most powerful man on the planet.
A life where he might have met a single-mother district attorney and her nine-year-old son and figured out how to be with them.
He saw himself punching the mirror, spiderwebbing it into a thousand fragments as impossible to put together as his own past. He imagined the blood dripping from his knuckles, the wounds that would slow him, imperfections he could not afford.
He finished dressing and emerged into the hotel room.
Candy faced away, wearing jeans, readying a shirt to pull over her head. The TV was muted, but the news—with its apoplectic hosts, blaring chyrons, and manic breaking-news scroll—seemed to be screaming anyway.
She turned quickly to hide the burned flesh of her back, but he’d seen it already. It looked scraped up, probably from the fight with Wade, the ruined skin cracked and weeping.
The front of her was unmarred. She held the shirt low by her stomach, her breasts exposed.
Her shorn hair accented the shape of her head—beautiful, regal—and the absence of her locks made her curves more pronounced. She looked like a different person and more like herself all at once, as if she’d been laid bare, distilled to her essence.
She locked down a wince of pain, said, “I’ll be fine.”
He said, “Okay.”
She looked over at the news, annoyed. She turned off the screen and threw the remote onto the couch with more force than seemed necessary. Then she stood a moment, breathing, T-shirt still bunched in her hands as if she couldn’t bring herself to pull it on.
“A cool washcloth helps sometimes,” she said.
She did not meet his eyes.
He said, “Okay.”
He returned to the bathroom. When he emerged with the washcloth in hand, she was lying on her stomach on the bed, shirt mopped around one fist.
He stood a moment, regarding the damage that he had wrought. Then he went over, sat next to her, and dabbed gently at the whorled, angry flesh.
She did not flinch.
After a time she said, “The person who called you the other night. Was it a woman?”
Evan said, “I have some gauze in my backpack.”
“Doesn’t help. It just sticks, and then it’s worse when I have to peel it off.”
He folded the washcloth, applied the cool compress to a gouge on her right shoulder.
“What if we’re too damaged?” she said. “For anything … real? Ever think about that?”
He folded the washcloth once more and kept at it.
“All the time,” he said.
He finished blotting her lower back, and then she spun off the bed and pulled on her T-shirt. It was odd to see her move so gingerly. Already the wounds started to spot through the fabric.
She looked over her shoulder, noticing.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I have a jacket.”
He gathered his stuff and she gathered hers.
They met at the door.
“We did exactly what we needed to,” he said. “I got it from here.”
Her lips softened in a smile that seemed more sad than not. “I’m gonna miss trying to kill you, X.”
They stepped out into the hall and walked away in opposite directions.
Neither looked back.
55