A Social Call
Naomi awoke from a deep slumber fully dressed, flopped facedown into her fluffy duvet like a ditzy lead in a rom-com. The air blanketed her, middle-of-the-night heavy. And yet something felt different, an aspect of the space around her.
She pushed herself up, wiped drool from the corner of her mouth.
Her bedroom door was open.
She never slept with the door open, couldn’t relax with that black rectangle of exposed space staring back at her from across the room.
Like it was staring at her now.
She scrambled across the mattress, dove for her nightstand drawer, came up with her service weapon.
Rolling off the bed, she hit her knees on the far side, aiming at the doorway.
Not a sound aside from her own labored breathing.
Over on his round corduroy cushion, Fenway lifted his head sleepily, offered a curled-tongue yawn, and went back to sleep.
Useless dog.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe a draft had sucked the door open. Maybe having a mortar round dropped on her head had made her jumpy.
Naomi clenched the checkered grip of the P229. It was a highly effective weapon, the barrel modified to shoot .357 SIGs rather than the smaller nine-mils. Even so, it felt less than comforting right now.
She waited a full minute, listening, but heard nothing from within the apartment.
Rising with her pistol locked before her, she circled the bed, inching for the door.
Slowly, slowly—and then she sprang into the hall, sighting up its length.
The front door to her apartment was standing open.
It took an extra half second for her to register this simple fact, an undeniable breach of her space. She had to wrestle the image from the realm of nightmares and seat it in the present reality.
An intruder.
Had come into her apartment.
She waited another full minute for her breathing to slow, and then she moved for the front door, letting her shoulder whisper along the wall.
Her Boeing Black phone charged on the table in the entry, emitting a bluish glow. Keeping her muzzle aimed at the door, she snatched up the phone and thumbed a 911 text to HQ.
In the silence of the hall, the whoosh of the sent text sounded like a tidal wave. She cringed, letting the noise recede before stepping into the outside corridor.
No one in the open.
No one by the elevator.
But at the far side of the hall, the window to the fire escape had been unlocked, the pane bumping in the midnight breeze.
Click-click. Click-click.
Swallowing hard, she made her way painstakingly to the window.
Click-click. Click-click.
She reached for the pane, stilled it with her hand.
Nothing on the landing.
Nothing beyond.
She stepped through into the night chill.
Fog rolled over the courtyard below, wisps trailing above the cobblestone with Victorian menace. Flakes of rust poked her bare hand as she gripped the steep rail.
She descended.
She couldn’t see the fountain in the center of the fog-filled courtyard, but she heard its gurgling, like an old man choking.
“Backup’s on the way,” she said, pleased with how strong her voice came out. “You picked the wrong apartment to break into.”
A wind cut through the courtyard, lifting a curtain of fog, and she saw a form standing there indistinct in the darkness.
Orphan X?
She said, “Put your hands up.”
He did not.
“Put your fucking hands up.”
“Atlas carries the world on his shoulders,” he said. “And I used to think about how miserable he must be. You know how the Greeks love suffering. But then I realized—he’s not suffering. He’s fortunate to shoulder a responsibility of that magnitude. It’s enough weight to make him useful, to give him self-respect. If he put down his load, he’d be meaningless.”
A streamer of fog drifted by, occluding Orphan X for a moment. Her gun hand was trembling. “You have a pretty high view of yourself.”
“Not me,” he said. “You.”
Her throat felt suddenly dry. She forced a swallow. “Why didn’t you kill the president with the explosion?”
“Because you were in the vehicle,” he said. “You, the body man, the new deputy chief of staff, the driver.”
“You were willing to kill others,” she said. “If you’d been cornered in that museum—”
“Then I would’ve taken what was coming to me. Whether that meant an arrest or a bullet.” The mist swirled, and he was there and gone, there and gone. “If your men took me alive, I’d have to be condemned, sentenced, put away or put to death. It would be necessary. I accept that.” For a second, only the band of his eyes was visible. “It’s just not enough to stop me.”
“So that’s it,” she said. “You think you’re the good guy.”
“There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. There’s only what needs to be done.”
She firmed her grip on the pistol, her arms starting to ache. “Why does this need to be done? Why do you want Bennett dead?”
“You see what’s wrong,” he said. “Open your eyes wider.”
She thought about the two dead impostor agents whom Demme had just linked to the ostensible drug murders at the Watergate. There’d been no record of either man in the databases, though Demme had sworn up and down he’d seen them there. Who had the power to create and delete an authentic Secret Service agent’s profile while leaving no fingerprints?
“Something happened in 1997,” Orphan X said. “Something he’s been trying to cover up since he took office. Something he would handle personally. Look harder.”
She remembered the surveillance photographs Orphan X had left with the sniper rifle in Apartment 705, all those neutralized Orphans, their faces crossed out with Magic Marker. The files strapped to Doug Wetzel’s chest. In the wake of the explosion, they’d recovered nothing but ash and singed scraps with redaction markings. She felt that same paranoid uptick of her blood, the sense that she was listening in on a conversation between Orphan X and the president of the United States, only they were speaking in a tongue unknown to her.
“It’s not my job to investigate the president,” she said. “It’s my job to stop you from harming him. I know you’ve got a conspiracy theory you believe in deeply. I know you believe he’s committed some terrible wrong. But if you’re as honorable as you claim, what about due process?”
“Bennett’s Teflon. Nothing sticks.”
His hand dove to his pocket, and she fired.
The dry click reached her ears and—fuck —through a rush of adrenaline—misfire —she pulled the trigger again, and it cycled double-action once more and clicked uselessly, the slide not actuating—no bullets, how are there no bullets? —and she saw his hand jerk clear of his pocket.
He threw a scattering of bullets at her. The brass bounced over her boots and rolled on the concrete, snagging in cracks.
It took a moment for the dime to drop.
He’d been in her bedroom, in her nightstand, in her pistol.
The tap of metal on the ground stopped, the bullets settling. Sweat filmed her back, her neck.
“Are—” Her throat clutched. “Are you gonna kill me?”
“No,” he said. “This is a social call.”
She stared in disbelief, the gauzy air sheeting between them. At last came the sweet, sweet sound of sirens approaching, music on the night breeze. She was still rooted in place, her head numb, her legs made of concrete.
“Besides,” he said, “if I killed you, who would feed Fenway?”
She crouched, thumbed a few rounds into the mag with shaking hands, seated it with a smack of her hand.
When she looked up, he was gone.
56
Are We Ready?
Evan was burying the rental sedan in the darkness of an alley across from the target location when his RoamZone rang.
Immediately after leaving Naomi Templeton’s building, he’d saved a new message in the Drafts folder of [email protected].
“Request phone contact. Total privacy. Secure line.”
In the intervening hours while he waited for the sun to rise over Switzerland, he’d run a series of fast-strike break-ins focused on White House–approved vendors.
Remaining in his tucked-away vehicle, he answered.
Her voice came through, a burst of exuberance. “Holy shitmonkeys ! Did you see the news?”
He tilted his head back, took a deep breath, and summoned patience. The moonroof showed only the impenetrable black sheet of the sky.
“I was there,” he said. “I don’t need to see the news. Is this line secure?”
“More secure than yours,” Joey said. “But mission wasn’t accomplished. He wasn’t neutralized.”
“I noticed,” Evan said. “Listen. Our friend, the agent? I just put her into motion.”
A brief pause while Joey regrouped. “Pertaining to what?”
“Pertaining to 1997. That should open up new avenues for you, new intel. I need you to use her phone to monitor her trail. GPS, parallel queries she might make in the databases, what new intel she pulls in. She’ll be on the trail, but I want you to hound-dog out ahead of her.”
“Given the tsunami you just put into motion after the motorcade attack, does this really matter anymore? Whatever went down in ’97? I mean, at this point—”