The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  “If you want, I can go with you,” I finally say.

  “What?”

  “To St. Elizabeths. I can go with you. Y’know… if you want.”

  I wait for her to smile. To say thanks. Instead, she shakes her head. “You can’t.”

  “Sure I can.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Actually…”

  “I know your dad’s dead, Benjy,” she says, using the nickname only my mom uses. “You think I don’t remember that? When we were little, you not having a father… You have any idea what that meant to me? How not alone that made me feel?”

  The balloon in my throat expands, catching me off guard.

  “But to have this chance right now…” She stares down at the old photo—the one of us—still refusing to face the video behind her. “My mom used to tell me that the best part of music—even as a DJ—was that when you go to a new city, you get to be a brand-new person,” she adds. “And I chose Virginia because—all the pictures seemed to have horses in them. Horses are calming, y’know? But then to find out—of all the places I could’ve picked—I’m ten minutes from… from him,” she says, thumbing back at the screen as Nico’s video wraps up. “I’m not saying it’s a sign—but I am saying… maybe some things are meant to be. Like reconnecting with you.” Before I can say a word, she adds, “Besides, I want what’s best for you, Beecher. And right now, bringing you to meet a delusional sociopath—even one who’s been calmed down by medication—is not what your life needs at this moment. This is something I think I’m supposed to do myself.”

  “I understand.”

  “You do?” she asks.

  “Don’t you get it? I want what’s best for you too.”

  She looks up at me and grins. “That homemade photograph really made you mushy, didn’t it?” she asks.

  “Hey, Beecher! Phone!” one of the staffers calls out from the desk behind us.

  “Whoever it is, tell them—”

  “It’s Tot. Says not to let you give any lame excuses. Says it’s important. He’s on hold.”

  I shake my head, ready to ignore the call.

  “He says don’t ignore it!” the aide calls back. “On hold!”

  “Just gimme one sec,” I tell Clementine as I grab the phone at the circulation desk, which is just a few feet away.

  “What’re you doing with her?” Tot asks before I can even say hello.

  “Pardon?”

  “Clementine. You went down to buzz her in. That was twenty minutes ago.”

  I look over at Clementine, who’s finally turned back to the computer screen, where YouTube has offered a variety of recommendations for the next video to click on. Even from here, I can see what she’s looking at as bits of bright yellow jumpsuit peek out from each video option.

  “Is this really that important, Tot?”

  “You tell me. I found the cart for your guy Dustin Gyrich,” he says, referring to the last person who requested a copy of Entick’s Dictionary. “Now, do you want to hear his connection to the President or not?”

  24

  I’ll call you when I’m done,” Clementine says, stepping away from the computer and heading for the lobby. “I gotta go.”

  “Good. Let her,” Tot says through the phone.

  “Clemmi, just wait!” I call out as she pulls her coat on.

  “Let her be,” Tot says. “Whatever she’s got going on, you’ve got enough disasters to deal with.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I ask.

  “I told you. Dustin Gyrich.”

  “So he’s the last person to request the…” I look around, and I swear, in this wide mint green room, every person, from the old ladies to the young grad student, is looking directly at me.

  “Yeah… to request the dictionary,” Tot says in my ear. “That’s the thing, though. At first I thought it was odd that he just happened to request the dictionary on the exact same day that President Wallace was here for his reading tour. But when I pulled the full record, well… Dustin Gyrich—whoever he is—has requested Entick’s Dictionary fourteen different times, which isn’t that unusual—”

  “Get to the point, Tot.”

  “The point is, when I matched Gyrich’s dates up with a calendar, guess who else happened to be visiting this very building on every one of those days? I’ll give you a hint. It rhymes with President.”

  Across from me, Clementine buttons the top button on her coat and turns toward the main lobby to leave.

  “Just wait,” I whisper to her. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  “You’ll be way more than a minute,” Tot says through the phone. “Unless you’re no longer understanding the bad news I’m delivering.”

  “Thirty seconds,” I promise Clementine.

  She pauses a moment, like she really does want to wait. But as she did when the red curtain went up during the Battle of the Bands, Clementine stands there a moment, lifts her chin, and buries all her fears in whatever place she’s come to keep them. The difference is, she’s no longer facing testy tenth graders. She’s facing her father. The destroyer.

  “I’ll be okay,” she insists, even though I didn’t ask her. Her eyes blink quicker than usual, just like when she flinched at those gunshots. Before I can argue, she’s headed down the hallway, past the security desk, and through the automatic doors that take her outside into the cold. I look down at the homemade photograph of our younger selves. It’s the second time in two days that I realize I’m seeing the soft side of her no one else knows. The part she shares with no one. Ever since Iris… I forgot how good a simple crush can feel.

  But it’s not just the crush. There are some people in your life who bring back old memories. And there are others—your first kiss, your first love, your first sex—who, the moment you see them, bring a spark… and something far more potent. They bring back your old life and, with that, potential. And possibilities. And the feeling that if you were back in that time, life could be so very different from where you’re stuck right now. That’s the most tantalizing thing Clementine offers. I want my potential back.

  “You hearing me, Beecher?” Tot shouts in my ear. “Over the past four months, every single time the President of the United States has come to this building, this guy Gyrich takes this copy of the dictionary—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. I thought we weren’t sure if the copy we found in the”—I lower my voice—“in the SCIF was the same one from our collection.”

  “And for the second time, are you hearing me? Where do you think I’ve been for the past half hour? I went down and pulled Gyrich’s cart. He’s got twelve items on hold here, but—what a coincidence—there’s only eleven on the cart. So guess which one’s missing? That’s right—one copy of Entick’s Dictionary.”

  “I don’t know, does that really tell us that the Archives copy is the same as the beat-up one we have?” I ask, still watching through the glass of the automatic doors. Out by the curb, Clementine hails herself a cab. “The one we found doesn’t have identifying information, or a stamp, or even most of its own pages,” I say. “Would the Archives really keep something that beat up and let it get checked out over and over again?”

  “That’s fine—and we can look into that,” Tot agrees. “But it doesn’t change the fact that fourteen weeks in a row, every time President Wallace comes here to visit—every single time—Gyrich requests the dictionary, puts it on hold, and makes sure it’s out of general circulation. When it happens two times, that’s dumb luck. Three times? That’s a very weird fluke. But fourteen times in fourteen weeks?” His voice goes quiet. “That’s a plan.”

  He’s right. He’s always right. But as I watch Clementine duck into her cab, there’s a surprising new feeling tugging at my ribcage.

  Since the moment I saw her yesterday, I’ve been looking at Clementine through the sparkly prism of exhilaration that comes with any old flame. But now, for the first time, I’m not just seeing what I want. I’m seeing what my friend
needs.

  The door to the taxi slams shut.

  “Tot, I need to borrow your car.”

  “My car is nice. You’re not taking it anywhere. And what’re you talking about anyway?”

  “I need to run an errand.”

  “No, you need to get up here so we can find this guy Gyrich and figure out what’s really going on.”

  “And I will. Right after this errand.”

  I hear nothing but silence through the phone. “This is the part where you’re being stupid again, Beecher. And inconsiderate, considering how much of my time you’re wasting while you chase some girl.”

  “I’m not chasing a girl.”

  “So you’re not going to St. Elizabeths?” he challenges.

  I pause, thinking of the perfect lie. “Okay, fine. I’m going to St. Elizabeths. It’s not far from here.”

  “Beecher…”

  “You’re forgetting, Tot. You’re forgetting that there were three of us in that room. She was there with me—so if my life’s at risk, her life’s at risk too.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I absolutely know that—and the last time we let someone who was in that room out of our sight, Orlando showed up dead. Besides, aren’t you the one who said I should keep an eye on her… that it was too much of a coincidence that she showed up and all this went down? This is my chance to see what’s really going on. And more important than any of that, she’s about to step into what’s probably the single roughest moment of her life. How do I let her do that alone?”

  Once again, the phone goes silent. It’s the last part that’s getting to him. When Tot’s wife died, he learned exactly what it feels like to face his worst moment by himself.

  “That mean I can have the car?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he sighs. “Let’s all be stupid.”

  Twenty-four minutes and fourteen seconds later, I twist the steering wheel of the powder blue 1966 Mustang into a sharp right and pull up to the small guardhouse that sits just inside the black metal gates.

  “Welcome to St. Elizabeths,” a guard with winter-grizzled lips says as he turns down the Elliot in the Morning show on his radio. Clearly, this guy’s a genius. “Visitor or delivery?”

  “Actually, a pickup,” I tell him.

  25

  Every barber has one haircut he’ll never forget.

  For many, it’s the first good one they give. Not the first haircut they give, but the first good one, where they realize just how much they can improve someone’s looks with a few flicks of a scissors.

  For others, it’s at the end of their career, where they realize they don’t have the steady hand that had served them for so long.

  For a few, it’s that moment when a particularly famous person sits down in their chair.

  But for master barber Andre Laurent, a tall, hefty silver-haired black man with a just as silver mustache, the one that stayed with him was back in Ohio, back in the early eighties, when he was cutting the hair of that blond man with the odd cowlick, who always used to bring his eight-year-old son with him. In the midst of the cut, the door to the shop burst open and a young brunette with pointy breasts stormed in, nearly shattering the glass as the door slammed into the wall.

  “You didn’t tell me you were married!” she screamed at the man with the cowlick. But all Laurent saw were the big ash-gray eyes of Cowlick’s son, watching his dad and slowly, right there, trying to put it all together.

  Back then, their small Ohio town would’ve feasted on gossip like that. Especially when the dad left his family behind a few years later. Especially as the ash-eyed boy grew older. Especially when he became the youngest state senator in Ohio history. Especially when he reached the governor’s mansion. And even more especially when he made that run for the White House and nearly every reporter in the country came to Journey, Ohio, to see the small-town barbershop where Orson Wallace still got his hair cut on a biweekly basis.

  To this day, Andre Laurent had never said a word. Like his father and grandfather—both barbers and both midwestern gentlemen—he never would.

  “Mr. Laurent, I got a walk-in for you,” the appointment girl with the squeaky voice called out from the front of the shop.

  “Send him back,” Laurent replied, brushing a few stray hairs from the barber chair’s headrest.

  For forty-three years, Laurent had barbered at the same place his father and grandfather learned their trade. It was called, obviously enough, Laurent’s.

  Three years ago, he had moved to Washington, D.C., taking a chair at a place called Wall’s Barber Shop. He liked that Wall’s still had its original stainless steel barber chairs. He liked that there was a working red, white, and blue barber pole outside. But he especially liked that, on 15th Street, it was walking distance from the White House.

  “Shoeshine while we got you in the chair?” Shoeshine Gary called out to Laurent’s client.

  “No,” the client said without looking at him.

  When Barack Obama was first elected President, one of the very first things he said to the press was that if he could no longer go to his barber, his barber would have to come to him.

  What a good idea, President Orson Wallace thought.

  Finding a good barber was tough.

  Finding someone you trust was even tougher.

  That was the start of it. Once every two weeks, Laurent would trek to the White House to cut the President’s hair. And sometimes, if there was a real emergency—especially over the past few weeks—the White House would come to him.

  “What can I do to you?” Laurent asked as his client sat in the barber chair. “Shave or haircut?”

  “How about both?” Dr. Stewart Palmiotti replied, leaning forward and tossing the fat hardcover book he was carrying onto the glass shelf that sat just below the mirror. “I think we’re gonna need the extra time.”

  “As you wish,” the President’s barber said, reaching for a hot towel as the President’s doctor tilted his head back.

  Every barber has one haircut he’ll never forget.

  And some barbers have more than one.

  26

  The cobblestone Italian street was still damp from the overnight rain, and as the small, slender man stood there, he enjoyed the reflective view it created on Via Panisperna. Like a whole different universe, he thought, taking in the upside-down view of Sant’Agata dei Goti, the fifth-century church that now appeared—like magic—below his feet.

  He’d been standing by the side door waiting for a while now, but he wasn’t worried. In all their time coming here, she’d never stood him up. He knew she wouldn’t start now. Not with what was about to happen.

  “You look nervous,” Lenore called out as she turned the corner and marched up the bumpy stone driveway.

  “Not nervous,” the man said. “Excited.”

  “You don’t look excited. You look nervous.”

  The man smiled to himself, knowing better than to argue with Lenore, a woman well trained, from Princeton all the way up to the White House, in the fine art of arguing.

  “If I weren’t a little nervous, I’d be insane,” the man said with a laugh.

  Shoving hard on the carved wooden double doors, he pushed his way inside and winced as the hinges shrieked. But there was something instantly calming about being back here, especially that smell: the damp wood and the rosewater candles.

  “The smell reminds you of your mother, doesn’t it?” Lenore asked.

  Ignoring the question—and the slamming doors behind him—the slender man headed straight for the source of the smell, the ancient iron rack filled with the white rose prayer candles.

  “She had that smell on her when you were little,” Lenore continued. “When you went to church in Wisconsin.”

  The man couldn’t help but smile. In this world, there was nothing scarier than trusting someone. But there was also nothing more rewarding.

  “They were good memories,” he said as he picked up an unlit candle, dipped
it into the flame, and whispered a silent prayer for his mother. Two years ago, for a prayer like this, he would’ve bobbed his head sixteen times before saying amen. He would’ve pulled out two eyelashes, setting them perpendicular in his palm until they formed a miniature cross. But today, as he looked up toward the intricate stained glass window… Nico Hadrian was better.

  And so was former First Lady Lenore Manning.

  Even though she’d been dead for two years now.

  “Nico, let’s go—they want you in the day room,” the tall orderly with the sweet onion breath called out.

  Peering over his shoulder, Nico looked across his small bare room at St. Elizabeths Hospital. He looked past his single bed and the painted dresser that held his Bible and the Washington Redskins calendar. Italy was gone, and there was no one there except for Sweet Onion Breath.

  “Please tell me you’re not talking to no imaginary friends,” the orderly pleaded. “You do, I gotta report it, Nico.”

  Nico cranked his small smile into a kind, wider one. He’d made the mistake of honesty once. He wouldn’t make it again. “You know I don’t do that anymore.”

  He was mostly right. After his escape and capture, when he was finally returned to St. Elizabeths, it took Nico four months before he stopped picking off his own fingernails, determined to punish himself for what he’d done. To be manipulated like that—to be so lost in the religious spirit—to kill in the name of God. By now, the doctors were thrilled with his progress. They gave him mail privileges, even access to the grounds. For the past two years, Nico had fought back to his own level of normalcy. Yes, he was better. But that didn’t mean he was cured.