The President's Shadow

by Brad Meltzer

  “So was it you, then? Someone asked for my father’s military file. The Plankholder files,” I say, pointing to two nearby tables, both of them covered with files. “They told me someone here requested it. I want to know why.”

  Francy’s eyes slide toward A.J., then back to me. “And that’s why you came here?”

  “Why else would I come here?”

  A.J. turns back to the TV with the four video feeds. Every minute or so, the four feeds shift, presenting views from four new cameras. The ones he’s staring at now are all exterior shots, including one that shows all the tourists walking along 16th Street and another that shows a close-up of one of the front gates. He’s looking for something. Or someone. “You’re telling me you don’t know about the garden?” A.J. challenges.

  Francy holds up a hand, shooting A.J. a stony glare. As she turns, it’s the first time I notice that like A.J., Francy’s wearing a Secret Service earpiece. I don’t care what they say: The President’s listening. And giving instructions. If the leader of the free world is making time for this, I’ve got bigger problems than even I thought.

  “So this visit isn’t Culper Ring business?” Francy asks, resting her leather binder near the file folder that’s on the card table between us.

  I shake my head, now confused.

  “And it doesn’t have anything to do with the penny? Or the garden?”

  I’m still lost. “What garden? I don’t understand…”

  Francy puts a finger to her earpiece. A.J. doesn’t. Whatever the President’s whispering, he’s talking only to one of them. I make a mental note.

  “Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” I demand.

  Across the table, Francy still has her finger to her earpiece. She shakes her head no. Whatever the President’s saying, she doesn’t have a choice.

  “Beecher, yesterday morning,” Francy begins, “we found a body part buried in the Rose Garden.”

  “A what?”

  “A body part.”

  “An arm,” A.J. clarifies, watching my reaction. “Someone’s left arm. Sawed off from the elbow down.”

  The room goes so silent, I hear the buzz from the fluorescent lights. Francy’s picking me apart. Her right hand grips the temple of her reading glasses like it’s a pen. Her arms are no longer flat at her sides.

  “Y’know what’s the most important part of my job?” she asks me.

  “Keeping the President safe.”

  “No. Trusting my gut,” she says. “I know you hate Wallace, but I also know what you did weeks ago, to stop the shooter at the Lincoln Memorial. You saved the President’s life. So God help me, I trust you, Beecher. I do. For all our sakes, don’t make me regret it.”

  “What’re you doing?” A.J. asks.

  Francy doesn’t even look at him, doesn’t care what he thinks.

  On my left, she pushes aside an old phone on the card table and opens one of the file folders, revealing a color photo: At the bottom of a dirt hole, a severed arm looks pale green, the color of an old, rotting egg. The skin is starting to slip, the outer layer peeling away from decomposition. As the knuckles peek out from the dirt, the hand is squeezed into a tight fist.

  My father’s been dead for thirty years. Or at least I think he’s been dead. Either way, no way is it his. From the coloring and tightness, this corpse is of someone young.

  “What’s this have to do with my dad?” I ask.

  “Truthfully, we didn’t think anything,” Francy says, flipping to the next photo. “Until we pried open the fist and saw what was hidden inside.”

  8

  And this was in the dead person’s hand?” I ask.

  “He was clutching it. In his fist,” Francy says, pointing to the color photo, where the severed arm is laid out on a piece of white gauze. Hunks of tendons and bone dangle from the elbow, along with a cheesy substance, making it look like a prop from a zombie film. All I’m focused on is the way the pale green hand is pried open, palm up. At the center of the palm is an oval piece of copper no bigger than—

  “A penny. It’s a flattened penny,” Francy adds.

  I nod, studying for myself. It’s one of those elongated pennies you get from a coin-pressing machine at the amusement park. This one’s shine is gone. It’s nicked and beaten, like it’s been through its own war. But as I look closer, I spot the words that’re pressed into it. The font’s tiny:

  OUR FATHER

  WHO ART IN HEAVEN

  HALLOWED BE THY NAME

  “The Lord’s Prayer,” I say, recognizing it from all the years Mom dragged me to church. I squint to read it all. Not a single word is missing. It ends with a simple:

  AMEN

  “I take it you’ve seen one of these before?” Francy asks, again holding a finger to her ear. Whatever the President’s whispering, she’s focused more on me than him. I know where her loyalties are, but even former reporters have an irrational addiction to the truth.

  “We have a few of these in the Archives,” I say, “one or two even from the Spanish-American War. It’s an old military tradition. When you get your dog tags and get to your unit, some chaplains may give you a Saint Michael pendant or a pressed coin with the Lord’s Prayer on it. You wear it around your neck. For good luck.”

  “Not just good luck. Like a dog tag, it’s also a form of ID. Some even put their unit’s logo on the back,” Francy says, flipping to a new page and putting on her reading glasses.

  Unlike the other photos, this one’s a tight close-up of the back of the penny and the small hole at the top of it. It’s as weathered and rusty as the front, but instead of the Lord’s Prayer, this side’s imprinted with a diamond-shaped crest and a waving banner along the bottom.

  Usually, you see logos like this on a soldier’s shoulder patch. Some units have a lion as a mascot, a few use dragons, and of course, a ton use some version of an eagle. This one has a wide-winged owl clutching a branch. The banner below it reads HL-1024.

  “Know anything about owls?” Francy asks.

  “They used to be symbols of imminent death. Julius Caesar’s murder was supposedly predicted by a shrieking owl. Though this one looks pretty content sitting on its branch.”

  “It’s not a branch.”

  I tighten my squint, pulling the photo closer. Sure enough, the owl’s claws aren’t holding a crooked branch. They’re clutching a flat piece of wood, more like a two-by-four.

  “It’s a plank,” A.J. jumps in. “The owl’s holding a plank.”

  Plankholder.

  I look up from the photo. Francy and A.J. are staring back at me. “This penny’s from my father’s old unit,” I say.

  “Not just your father’s,” Francy says, lowering her glasses to the end of her round nose. I thought she was worried I was a threat. She’s worried about something far more dangerous.

  “There’s someone else who was in that same unit with your father,” A.J. adds, his face lit by the glow from the security screens.

  He doesn’t have to say it. We all know who it is. The man who took a shot at the previous President. And who put a bullet in the brain of the previous First Lady. And who recently escaped his padded cell at St. Elizabeths mental institution.

  A.J. refuses to say his name. But there’s no question who he’s talking about.

  Nico.

  9

  Two weeks ago

  Collierville, Tennessee

  Nico was down on both knees, mouthing a silent prayer. He had promised he’d say just one, which he did just before he tugged open the screen door, took a final breath of the night air, and picked the locks to sneak inside the small yellow house.

  He said another as the screen door snapped shut behind him and he knelt on the cheap linoleum floor. The house smelled of mothballs and old people. Holding his breath, he waited. No dogs. No alarm. No surprise. God was always on his side.

  “Nico, you need to hurry!” the dead First Lady warned.

  Back when he was a patient, Nico knew
what the St. Elizabeths doctors would do if they caught him talking to the woman he’d killed a decade ago. These days, the doctors were gone.

  “We’re fine,” he told his former victim. “I’ve broken eight different commandments. And still God provides.”

  The dead First Lady rolled her eyes, but how else could Nico explain these past few weeks? Or the return of his daughter Clementine? A decade ago, Nico had tried to kill a President. Declared insane, he’d been in the country’s most famous mental hospital. He’d never thought he’d get another chance at his mission. There was only one person to thank for that.

  Closing his chocolate brown eyes, set so close together, Nico knelt down and said another prayer in the kitchen, then another in the living room, then yet another in the hallway lined with family photos and military medals.

  “You’re getting worse, Nico,” the dead First Lady warned as he finished his work in the bedroom. “It’s because your medications ran out.”

  Nico knew she was right, but he still did each prayer the exact same way: He mouthed the words. His head bobbed up and down sixteen times, always sixteen. Then he closed his left eye on the word Amen.

  “It’s the same reason you’re seeing the crosses,” the First Lady added as Nico headed back to the kitchen and noticed the way the seams in the tile floor formed a hidden crucifix. He saw them everywhere now—around the neck of the waitress at the truck stop, on the young girl in the fast-food commercial that kept running on TV, and—like those first few weeks at St. Elizabeths, when they were worried he would kill himself—in those places no one else sees: hidden in telephone poles and windowpanes…in intersecting sidewalk cracks and perpendicular tree branches…in pens that crisscrossed, extension cords that overlapped, and of course, in the white spaces between the columns of a newspaper, in the blank spaces between the push buttons of a phone, and right now, in the small X’s he had carved into the nails of his four main fingers.

  Four. Always four.

  Four seasons. Four states of matter. Four directions on a compass. Four earth elements. Four chambers of the heart. Four movements in a symphony. And who could forget the four suits in a deck of cards? Nico never forgot the cards.

  In chemistry, the valence of carbon—the basis for all life—is four. In religion, Buddhism has Four Noble Truths, Islam has four sacred months, and Judaism has four questions, four cups of wine, and even writes God’s name with four letters. Darkest of all were Christianity’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Always four. Indeed, when ancient tribes first wrote the number four—as just a glyph on a cave wall—they did it by joining four lines into a modern plus sign. An actual cross! One, two, three, four pieces. But as Nico stared down at the four X’s on his nails, he knew that the true Four Horsemen had already arrived. Throughout history, four Presidents had been assassinated. Again. Four.

  It was time for a fifth. There was no choice. All the others were dead. The only way to survive was to move forward! Liberation! he told himself as—

  “Nico, don’t get fixated!” the First Lady scolded. “Forward thinking, not backward thinking!” she added, stealing the words from the pretty black nurse Nico always responded to at St. Elizabeths.

  “Forward thinking,” Nico whispered, readjusting his knit cap and tugging open a nearby kitchen drawer. Inside were steak knives, carving knives, even a cleaver. There were also two small measuring cups whose handles overlapped like a—

  “Forward thinking,” the First Lady repeated as Nico slammed the drawer shut and pulled open the one next to it. Forks, spoons…No, that wasn’t it either.

  He knew what he was looking for. The house was small; no garage, no work shed. That meant…

  He pulled open the last drawer, next to the stove, which clanged as it opened. There we go.

  Tool drawer.

  Nico’s fingers dug to the bottom, burrowing past screwdrivers, wrenches, even a hammer. So much to do damage with. But the only thing he pulled out was a pair of small needle-nose pliers with a red rubber grip.

  Heading for the bedroom, Nico squeezed the pliers, relishing the small joy in the way they sprang back open in his hand. The nurses would never have let him have a tool like this. It’d been nearly a month since he’d escaped St. Elizabeths. A month since Clementine had snuck him out of D.C. and brought him to the best place to hide.

  For the first few days, he couldn’t adjust to the quiet. In the hospital, every meal, every shower, even when he was punished in a quiet room, it was all so noisy. He also couldn’t adjust to the color. Or the size. A decade of beige rooms, locked doors, and closed fences made even a two-lane street in Tennessee seem blinding and endless. But by now, Nico knew what needed to be done.

  Giving a final squeeze to the pliers, he looked down at the four small crosses on his fingernails. Always four. Could any mission be more clear? He’d seen it in his head…plotted it…dreamed it…for years. Four Horsemen had come. Four Presidents were dead at the hands of four assassins. Four assassins. And now that he was out, he could be the Fifth. The one to put a bullet in the President of the United States.

  Stopping at the half-open bedroom door, Nico once again dropped to his knees in prayer. The dead First Lady stayed quiet. She knew what was waiting inside. Nico had earned this one.

  “Amen,” he whispered, climbing to his feet and slowly elbowing the door open.

  Across the room, an elderly man was tied to the headboard of the bed, arms spread wide, knotted in place by the cords that Nico had ripped from the vertical blinds. Nothing was stuffed in his mouth. This far out in Tennessee, Nico didn’t care if he screamed.

  “Nico…please…I’m not your enemy!” the seventy-year-old pleaded, his voice starting to fracture. He was young for his age, still stout in the chest, though his round Santa face had thinned over time.

  “Colonel Doggett, I know what you look like when you’re lying,” Nico told the man who had first brought him into the Plankholders all those years ago. There were four of them back then too. Always four. “That is the last lie you’ll ever tell me.”

  A decade ago, Nico had tried to kill the President. A different President. Now he’d been given a second chance. A chance to finish the mission.

  But not until he finished this mission.

  Holding up the needle-nose pliers with the red rubber grips, Nico headed for the old man’s left hand.

  “Nico, no…! What’re you doing!?” Colonel Doggett begged.

  “I told you,” Nico said, his voice a dull monotone. “I’m going to ask you about Devil’s Island. If I don’t like your answer, I’m going to puncture your finger with a pencil and use these pliers to peel away your skin, finger by finger.”

  “That’s not—! Son, be smart—! You’re a good person!”

  “I know that, Colonel. That’s why I need you to help me find a cure for my daughter.”

  10

  Today

  Washington, D.C.

  A severed arm? A hidden penny with his old unit logo? Plus burying it in the Rose Garden?” I ask. “That doesn’t sound like Nico at all.”

  “Suddenly you’re the expert on him?” A.J. challenges.

  “Let him speak,” Francy warns.

  “Remember the last time Nico attacked a President? He walked right up to him at a NASCAR race and pulled the trigger. When he broke out of St. Elizabeths, he put a pen through the orderly’s arm and calmly waltzed out a nearby door. He’s not the Riddler. He doesn’t leave clues.”

  “We didn’t say it was a clue,” A.J. shoots back from the table on my left. He’s hunched in front of the TV with the rotating security feeds. For a second, he turns away from the TV, pointing to the photo of the flattened penny. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not a message.”

  “Are you hearing me? Nico doesn’t do messages. There’s no subtleness to him. He sees himself as a knight on a holy mission. If he wants you dead, he’ll step into your personal space and put a knife in your eye.”

  “This is a knife in our eye
,” A.J. says. “For him to come onto the White House grounds—”

  “So you have video of him? I see those security cameras. Was Nico the one you saw in the Rose Garden?”

  A.J. looks at Francy, who again is focused on her earpiece. No question, the President’s listening, which means there’s still something they’re not saying. Eventually, Francy nods the okay.

  “There are no security cameras in that part of the Rose Garden,” A.J. finally offers.

  “What? Why not? Isn’t it right next to the Oval?”

  “It is—which tells you why there’re no cameras,” A.J. explains. “After Nixon…and honestly, post–Monica Lewinsky…no President wants a video camera recording who’s coming and going into his office.”

  “So whoever buried that arm…” I say.

  “Knew our line of sight,” A.J. says. “Or maybe got a look at our camera placement last time he was here.” He keeps his eyes on me.

  “Do you realize how untactful you are?” I ask. “You think last time I was here, I somehow studied where all your cameras are?”

  “Beecher, when was the last time you heard from Nico?” A.J. pushes back.

  “You’re joking, right? Why would Nico care about me?”

  “You know exactly why. Your girlfriend Clementine—”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “She was your girlfriend…”

  “She was my first kiss. In eighth grade!”

  “She also happens to be Nico’s just-as-crazy daughter, who, last I checked, tried to blackmail us and manipulate you. What was the lie she told last time? That she was dying of cancer? There’s nothing she won’t say. And like her dad, for some reason, they both refuse to hurt you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You’ve been around Nico multiple times, yet he’s never laid a hand on you. He looks out for you, Beecher. So it’s not a question of if they’re coming back. It’s just a matter of when.”