By year six, he was ankle-deep in photocopies and old White House files. Dr. Eng’s people offered to help, but Boyle was six years past naive. In the world of Eng, the only priority was Eng, which was why, when Manning had him introduced to Dr. Eng’s group all those years ago, Boyle told them about The Three, and their offer to make him The Fourth, and the threats that went along with it. But what he never mentioned — not to anyone — was what The Three had already stolen. And what Boyle was determined to get back.
He’d finally gotten his chance eleven days ago, on a muddy, rainy afternoon in the final month of year seven. Huddled under the awning as he stepped out of the post office on Balham High Road, Boyle flipped through the newly processed releases from Manning’s personal handwriting file. Among the highlights were a note to the governor of Kentucky, some handwritten notes for a speech in Ohio, and a torn scrap from the Washington Post comics section that had a few scribbled names on one side… and a mostly completed crossword puzzle on the other.
At first, Boyle almost tossed it aside. Then he remembered that day at the racetrack, in the back of the limo, Manning and his chief of staff were working a crossword. In fact, now that he thought about it, they were always working a crossword. Staring down at the puzzle, Boyle felt like there were thin metal straps constricting his rib cage. His teeth picked at his bottom lip as he studied the two distinct handwritings. Manning’s and Albright’s. But when he saw the random doodles along the side of the puzzle, he held his breath, almost biting through his own skin. In the work space… the initials… were those—? Boyle checked and rechecked again, circling them with a pen.
Those weren’t just senior staff. With Dreidel and Moss and Kutz — those were the people getting the President’s Daily Briefing, the one document The Three asked him for access to.
It took three days to crack the rest: two with a symbols expert at Oxford University, half a day with an art history professor, then a fifteen-minute consultation with their Modern History Research Unit, most specifically, Professor Jacqui Moriceau, whose specialty was the Federalist period, specifically Thomas Jefferson.
She recognized it instantly. The four dots… the slashed cross… even the short horizontal dashes. There they were. Exactly as Thomas Jefferson had intended.
As Professor Moriceau relayed the rest, Boyle waited for his eyes to flood, for his chin to rise with the relief of a seemingly lifelong mission complete. But as he held the crossword in his open palm… as he slowly realized what Leland Manning was really up to… his arms, his legs, his fingertips, even his toes went brittle and numb, as if his whole body were a hollowed-out eggshell. God, how could he be so blind — so trusting — for so long? Now he had to see Manning. Had to ask him to his face. Sure, he’d unlocked the puzzle, but it wasn’t a victory. After eight years, dozens of missed birthdays, seven missed Christmases, six countries, two surgeries, a prom, a high school graduation, and a college acceptance, there would never be victory.
But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be revenge.
Fifteen minutes south of Palm Beach, Ron Boyle pulled to the side of the highway and steered the beat-up white van to the far corner of a dead-empty emergency rest stop. Without even thinking about it, he angled just behind a crush of ratty, overgrown shrubs. After eight years, he had a PhD in disappearing.
Behind him, sprawled along the van’s unlined metal floor, O’Shea shuddered and moaned, finally waking up. Boyle wasn’t worried. Or scared. Or even excited. In fact, it’d been weeks since he felt much of anything beyond the ache of his own regrets.
On the floor, with his arms still tied behind his back, O’Shea scootched on his knees, his chin, his elbows, slowly and sluggishly fighting to sit up. With each movement, his shoulder twitched and jumped. His hair was a sopping mess of rain and sweat. His once-white shirt was damp with dark red blood. Eventually writhing his way to a kneeling position, he was trying to look strong, but Boyle could see in the grayish coloring of his face that the pain was taking its toll. O’Shea blinked twice to get his bearings.
That’s when O’Shea heard the metallic click.
Crouching in the back of the van, Boyle leaned forward, pressed his pistol deep into O’Shea’s temple, and said the words that had been haunting him for the better part of a decade:
“Where the fuck’s my son?”
96
Can I help you?” a deep voice crackled from the intercom as the man pulled his car up to the closed wooden security gate.
Refusing to answer, the driver pulled his ID from his jacket pocket and shoved it toward the hidden camera stuffed into the tall shrubs.
The intercom went silent. Moments later, a metallic click released the magnetic lock, and the security gate swung open.
Slowly easing his foot against the gas, the man inched the car up the private brick driveway, where three suit-and-tie Secret Service agents turned and stared. When they didn’t approach his car, he knew they were getting the news of his arrival in their earpieces. And by the looks on their faces, they were unnerved by it. No one likes when the boss comes to check on things. But with Nico on the loose, they weren’t the least bit surprised.
With a tug to the left, he steered his car between the matching black Chevy Suburbans, then readjusted his leather shoulder holster and made sure the strap that held his gun in place was unsnapped. This wasn’t like his trip to the office. With the principals here, he needed to be ready. And if the reports were true — that a neighbor had already found Kenny’s and Micah’s bodies and that fingerprints were already making the rounds — well, this was now about much more than seventy million dollars in payouts and four more years in office.
It was so much easier back when they started. After War College, they spent the first six months doing nothing but running simulations and war-gaming. No need to rush. Better to make it a science. Take no chances, make no contact, and make sure nothing’s traced back. Of course, the key to that was creating The Roman, right down to the stolen thumb they snatched from a Tanzania morgue to use with the fingerprint cards required for every informant payout. From there, people would just be chasing a ghost. Once The Roman was “real,” the true work began.
It was Micah who struck gold first. As a CIA case officer stationed in Khartoum, he received a tip about someone in the Sudanese security agency trying to sell eleven pristine U.S. visas — all of them sterile and untraceable — to al-Zaydi, a known terrorist organization. According to Micah’s source, al-Zaydi was paying with its usual mode of untraceable African diamonds—$500,000 worth, which would be delivered in Taormina, Sicily, on October 15.
That morning, to communicate with his fellow members, Micah left piecemeal coded messages in the agreed-upon online chat rooms. Then he wrote up his full official report, which detailed only one of the facts — that the Sudanese security agency was rumored to be selling eleven visas. He intentionally left out the rest. That afternoon, O’Shea — in his position as an FBI Legat in Brussels assigned to working with foreign law enforcement officials — took full advantage of the info Micah had sent about the diamonds. Now knowing what to look for, and reaching out to overseas security agencies, he combed through foreign customs reports, eventually finding a suspected al-Zaydi member traveling through Italy — legally — with nearly $500,000 of diamond jewelry. That night, Secret Service Agent Roland Egen — as the resident agent in charge of the Service’s office in Pretoria, South Africa — put the cherry on top. Calling up his supervisor in the Rome office, he said, “I’ve got a source bragging about black market U.S. visas for sale — and that he’ll give us the time and place for the drop.”