“What other logical actions can be predicted in the wake of an explosion like that?” Bennett said, loud enough now to address the entire room. “I give a speech. So. Where’s my speech?”
A wiry man in the far corner held up a notepad and a sheaf of papers. “Not quite there yet, Mr. President.”
Bennett pointed. “Those papers. The notepad. Take them to the lab. They need to be checked.” He rubbed his wrist. “Where’s my watch?”
Across the room the assistant secretary was on her feet. “Already en route to Geneva to be fixed, Mr. President.”
“No, no. I want it fixed here in the U.S. Orphan X could intercept it, apply contact poison to the band.” Abruptly, he removed his new pair of wire-frame eyeglasses and regarded them. His other hand worked the top of his shirt, unbuttoning it. “And these. Did someone check these for toxins?”
Naomi said, “Every item that goes on your body is acquired from a security-cleared vendor and is double-checked before it enters the White House.”
“Were they checked again for toxins and poisons? After the attack but before they were brought to me on a silver tray?”
Demme cleared his throat. “They were, Mr. President, right before they were brought in.”
Reluctantly, Bennett slid his glasses back on and released his shirt, which gapped open at the throat.
Demme continued nervously, “After an AOP, we take nothing for granted. Every conceivable measure is—”
“How about my other clothes? The bedsheets? He could sneak a contaminant into the detergent.”
“I have two agents down at laundry operations right now, Mr. President,” Naomi said. “One from Protective Intelligence and Assessment, the other from the Technical Security Division. We understand the level of this threat, and we are tightening operations to an unprecedented level. We’ll even be adding more panic buttons through the residential areas of the White House. They’ll be disguised as Presidential Seals embedded in surfaces and on the walls—”
The double doors opened, and a team of agents entered with cameras. They began systematically photographing the room.
“Who are they?” Bennett said.
“I’m having our advance-team techs sweep all the rooms in the White House,” Naomi said. “They’ll photograph everything so we can make sure nothing has been touched or moved. This is the baseline series.”
“Do you personally recognize these men?”
“I do.”
“I want those cameras taken apart,” Bennett said. “Orphan X, he would have predicted this measure in the wake of the limo attack. He could have planted a charge inside the cameras. You need to start thinking like him.”
The agents stopped taking pictures and stood awkwardly, the offending cameras in hand. Demme started over to them.
“Not while I’m here,” Bennett said. “Templeton, come with me.”
He exited the sitting room swiftly.
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
Too Damaged
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 the swelling uproar of 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?