by Brad Meltzer
“What about PI?” Rogo asked.
“Whattya mean?”
“PI,” Rogo repeated, turning his sheet toward Dreidel. “Isn’t your last one PI?”
Dreidel looked at his own sheet, which ended with PUB, then turned toward Rogo’s, squinting to read the letters with the handwritten message next to them:
PI—note May 27
Dreidel’s face went white.
“What?” Rogo asked. “What’s it mean?”
“What’s the date on yours say?”
Reading from the top corner of the sheet, Rogo could barely get the words out. “June 16th,” he said. “Right before the shooting.”
“Mine’s January 6th—days before we moved into the White House.”
“I don’t understand, though. What’s PI?”
“Paternity issues,” Dreidel said. “According to this, just before he was shot, Boyle had a kid no one knew about.”
75
What’d you do?” The Roman asked, his voice squawking through the scrambled satellite phone.
“It’s fine. Problem solved,” O’Shea replied, keeping the phone close and staring out the small oval window of the chartered seaplane.
“What does that mean? Let me speak to Micah!”
“Yeah, well . . . that’s a little harder than it used to be,” O’Shea said as the plane dropped down, approaching the aquamarine waves of Lake Worth. From the current height—barely a few hundred feet above the water—the backyards of the Palm Beach mansions whizzed by in a blur.
“O’Shea, don’t tell me— What’d you do to him?”
“Don’t lecture me, okay? I didn’t have a choice.”
“You killed him?”
O’Shea stared out the window as the plane sank down to just a few feet above the waves. “Be smart. He’s covert in Directorate of Operations. He shouldn’t be working on U.S. soil. And for some reason, he’s caught standing on the track at the speedway? Once Wes IDed him, they would’ve brought him right in.”
“That doesn’t mean he’d talk!”
“You think so? You think if they offered him a deal and said they’d go easy on him, every one of Micah’s fingers wouldn’t’ve pointed our way?”
“He’s still CIA!” The Roman shouted through the phone. “You have any idea what kinda fire that starts? You just lit the damn volcano!”
“You think I enjoyed it? I’ve known Micah since War College. He was at my niece’s communion.”
“Well, I guess there goes his invite for her sweet sixteen!”
With a final jolt, the plane dropped down for its landing. The instant the floats hit the water, the plane bounced and wobbled, slowing down until it was cruising with the current.
“Enough,” O’Shea warned as the floating plane chugged toward the floating dock of the Rybovich Spencer boatyard. “It was hard enough as it is.”
“Really? Then maybe you should’ve thought twice before you decided to put a bullet in him! You know how hard it’s gonna be to find another person inside the Agency?”
“You’re lecturing me about forethought? Have you forgotten why we’re even stamping around in all this manure? It’s the same jackass thing you did with our so-called six-million-dollar payment for Blackbird. You rush in, stick your finger in all the electrical sockets, then get mad at me when I have to deal with the cleanup.”
“Don’t even— Blackbird was a mutual decision!” The Roman exploded. “We voted on that!”
“No, you voted. You’re the one who put the number that high. Then when they decided they weren’t paying it, you came crying that we needed an assist from the inside.”
“Okay, so now you didn’t want that six mil?”
“What I didn’t want was to have to ask for that kinda cash twice. We spent nearly a decade building up your damn Roman identity—all those tips we snatched and passed your way so it looked like you had some big, great informant out there—hell, they still think The Roman’s a real person who feeds the government info—all for the goal of going in for that one huge multimillion-dollar hit. One time! One ask! That’s all it was supposed to be—until you got the dollar signs in your eyes and thought we could do it on a regular basis.”
“We could’ve done it on a regular basis—fifty, sixty, seventy million, easy. You know you agreed.”
“Then you should’ve listened to us and never approached Boyle first,” O’Shea said, his voice calmer than ever. “And unlike last time, I’m done letting a loose end come back to bite us in the ass. As long as Wes is out there with that photo, we’ve both got targets on our chests.”
“What, so now you’re putting Wes on your hit list as well? I thought you agreed he was just bait.”
Without a word, O’Shea watched as the seaplane angled past half a dozen pristine yachts and nosed up to the floating dock.
“Check out that sailboat in front of us,” the pilot announced as he pulled off his headphones and entered the back of the plane. “That’s Jimmy Buffett’s day sailer. You see the name of it? Chill.”
O’Shea nodded as the pilot opened the hatch, stepped outside, and tossed the grab line to the dock.
“O’Shea, before you get stupid, think about next month,” The Roman said through the phone. “If this thing comes through in India . . .”
“Are you even listening? There is no next month! There’s no India! Or Prague! Or Liberia! Or Lusaka! We brought our resources together—we created the perfect virtual informant—and we made some cash. But now I’m done, pal. D’you understand? The pot of gold—the seventy million—it’s bullshit. I’m over.”
“But if you—”
“I don’t care,” O’Shea said, heading for the door and stepping out to the edge of the plane’s floats. A short hop took him onto the dock, where he waved a thank-you to the pilot and followed the path toward the buildings of the boatyard.
“O’Shea, don’t be such a mule,” The Roman continued. “If you touch Wes now—”
“Are you listening? I. Don’t. Care. I don’t care that he’s bait. I don’t care that he’s our best bet for getting Boyle. I don’t even care that Nico might get to him first. That kid knows my name, he knows what I look like, and worst of all—”
There was a soft beep on O’Shea’s phone. He stopped midstep, halfway up the dock. Caller ID said Unavailable. On this line, there was only one person that could be.
“O’Shea, listen to me,” The Roman threatened.
“Sorry, signal’s bad here. I’ll call you later.” With a click, he switched over to the other line. “This is O’Shea.”
“And this is your conscience—stop having sex with men at truck stops. Go to a bar—it’s easier,” Paul Kessiminan said, laughing, in his fat Chicago accent.
O’Shea didn’t even bother responding to the joke. Tech guys—especially those in the Bureau’s Investigative Technology Division—always thought they were funnier than they were. “Please tell me you got a hit on Wes’s phone,” O’Shea said.
“Nope. But after taking your advice and watching his friends, I did get a hit on the fat kid’s.”
“Rogo’s?”
“For the past few hours, it’s quiet as death. Then ping, incoming call from a number registered to an Eve Goldstein.”
“Who’s Eve Goldstein?”
“Which is why I looked her up. Y’know how many Eve Goldsteins there are in Palm Beach County? Seven. One owns a Judaica store, one’s a school principal, two retirees—”
“Paulie!”
“. . . and one who writes the gardening section for the Palm Beach Post.”
“They switched phones.”
“Ooooh, you’re good. You should get a job with the FBI.”
“So Wes is still with Lisbeth?”
“I don’t think so. I just called the newsroom. She’s apparently on another line. I think she gave Wes her friend’s phone and ditched his on the plane or something. Telling you—boy’s smart,” Paul said. “Lucky for you, I’m smarter.”
&n
bsp; “But you traced the new phone to his current location?”
“It’s an old model, so there’s no GPS. But I can get you to the closest cell tower. Cell site 626A. On County Road, just a few blocks south of Via Las Brisas.”
At the center of the long dock, O’Shea froze. “Las Brisas? You think he went to—?”
“Only one way to find out, Tonto. Be careful, though. With Nico out there, headquarters just opened their own investigation.”
Nodding to himself, O’Shea reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a black ostrich-skin wallet and matching CIA badge. As he flipped it open, he took one last look at the picture in Micah’s driver’s license. From the messy brown hairstyle and the crooked bottom teeth, the photo had to be almost a decade old. Before the teeth were fixed. Before the hair got meticulously slicked back. Before they were making real money.
O’Shea didn’t like lifting his old friend’s wallet, but he knew it’d buy him at least a day in IDing the body. Though right now, as he readjusted his shoulder holster and rechecked his gun, all he needed was an hour or so to wrap things up and leave this life behind.
They’d created an alter ego for Egen as The Roman. Certainly, O’Shea could create something new for himself.
“How fast you think you can get there?” Paul asked through the phone.
Grinning to himself, O’Shea tossed Micah’s IDs from the dock into the water. They floated for half a second, then sank out of sight. “At this rate? I’ll be in and out lickety-split.”
76
Try calling him again,” Dreidel said as he spun the acid-free archival box around and checked the dates on its typed spine: Boyle, Ron—Domestic Policy Council—October 15- December 31.
“Just did,” Rogo said, working his way through his own stack and checking the last few boxes in the pile. “You know how Wes gets on the job—he won’t pick up if he’s with Manning.”
“You should still try him agai—”
“And tell him what? That it looks like Boyle had a kid? That there’s some note referencing May 27th? Until we get some details, it doesn’t even help us.”
“It helps us to keep Wes informed—especially where he is right now. He should know that Manning knew.”
“And you’re sure about that?” Rogo asked. “Manning knew about Boyle’s kid?”
“It’s his best friend—and it’s in the file,” Dreidel said. His voice cracked slightly as he looked up from the last few boxes. “Manning definitely knew.”
Rogo watched Dreidel carefully, sensing the change in his tone. “You’re doubting him, aren’t you, Dreidel? For the first time, you’re realizing there might be a crack in the Manning mask.”
“Let’s just keep looking, okay?” Dreidel asked as he tilted the final two milk-crate-sized boxes and scanned the dates. One was labeled Memoranda—January 1-March 31. The other was Congressional AIDS Hearing—June 17-June 19. “Damn,” he whispered, shoving them aside.
“Nothing here either,” Rogo said, closing the last box and climbing up from his knees. “Okay, so grand total—how many boxes do we have that include the May 27 date?”
“Just these,” Dreidel said, pointing to the four archival boxes that they’d set up on the worktable. “Plus you pulled the schedule, right?”
“Not that it helps,” Rogo replied as he waved Manning’s official schedule from May 27. “According to this, the President was with his wife and daughter at their cabin in North Carolina. At noon, he went biking. Then lunch and some fishing on the lake. Nothing but relaxing the whole day.”
“Who was staffing him?” Dreidel asked, well aware that the President never traveled without at least some work.
“Albright . . .”
“No surprise—he took his chief of staff everywhere.”
“. . . and Lemonick.”
“Odd, but not out of the ordinary.”
“And then those same names you said were from the Travel Office—Westman, McCarthy, Lindelof—”
“But not Boyle?”
“Not according to this,” Rogo said, flipping through the rest of the schedule.
“Okay, so on May 27th, barely two months before the shooting, Manning was in North Carolina and Boyle was presumably in D.C. So the real question is, what was Boyle doing while the cat was away?”
“And you think the answer’s in one of these?” Rogo asked, circling the tops of the four boxes with his hand.
“Those’re the ones that have date ranges that include May 27th,” Dreidel said. “I’m telling you,” he added as he flipped off the top of the first box, “I’ve got a good feeling. The answer’s in here.”
“There’s no way it’s in here!” Rogo moaned forty-five minutes later.
“Maybe we should go through them again.”
“We already went through them twice. I picked through every sheet of paper, every file, every stupid little Post-it note. Look at these paper cuts!” he said, extending his pointer and middle fingers in a peace sign.
“Voice down!” Dreidel hissed, motioning to the attendant by the computers.
Rogo glanced over at Freddy, who offered a warm smile and a wave. Turning back to Dreidel, he added, “Okay, so now what?”
“Not much choice,” Dreidel said as he scanned the remaining thirty-eight boxes that were stacked like tiny pyramids across the floor. “Maybe they filed it out of order. Flip through each box—pull out anything that has the date May 27th on it.”
“That’s over 20,000 pages.”
“And the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll know the full story,” Dreidel said, tugging a brand-new box up to the worktable.
“I don’t know,” Rogo said as he gripped the handholds of a beaten old box and heaved it up toward the desk. As it landed back-to-back with Dreidel’s box, a puff of dust swirled like a sandstorm. “Part of me worries we’re sifting through the wrong haystack.”
77
Port St. Lucie, Florida
Edmund had been dead for nearly twelve hours. During hour one, as Nico strapped him into the passenger seat of the truck, thick frothy blood bubbles multiplied at the wound in Edmund’s neck. Nico barely noticed, too excited about telling his friend about Thomas Jefferson and the original Three.
By hour four, Edmund’s body had stiffened. His arms stopped flopping. His head, bent awkwardly back and to the right, no longer bobbed with each bump. Instead of a rag doll, Edmund was a frozen mannequin. Rigor mortis had settled in. Nico still didn’t notice.
By hour ten, the cab of the truck began to take its own beating. On the seats . . . the floor mat . . . across the vinyl interior of the passenger-side door, the blood began to decompose, turning each stain a darker, richer red, tiny speckles of liquid rubies.
But even when they left all that behind—when they abandoned the truck and used Edmund’s wool blanket to switch to the clean maroon Pontiac—there was no escaping the smell. And it wasn’t from the body. That would take days to decompose, even in the Florida heat. The true foul horror came from what was inside, as Edmund’s lack of muscle control caused everything from feces to flatulence to leak out, soaking his clothes, his pants, all the way through to the once-parchment-colored cloth seat and the dusty blanket that covered Edmund from the neck down.
In the driver’s seat next to him, Nico couldn’t have been happier. Up ahead, despite rush hour, traffic looked clear. On his right, out west, the sun was a perfect orange circle as it began its slow bow from the sky. And most important, as they blew past another green highway sign, they were even closer than Nico expected.
PALM BEACH 48 MILES
Less than an hour and we’re there.
Barely able to contain himself, Nico smiled and took a deep breath of the car’s outhouse reek.
He didn’t smell a thing. He couldn’t. Not when life was this sweet.
Quickly picking up speed, Nico reached for the wipers as a late-day sun-shower sent a few speckles against the Pontiac’s front windshield. But before he could flick the wip
ers on, he thought twice and left them off. The rain was light. Just a drizzle. Enough to cleanse.
Maybe you should—
“Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing,” Nico said, nodding to himself. With the push of a button on the dash, he opened the sunroof of the car, held his stolen Orioles baseball cap, and tilted his head back to stare up at the gray sky.
“Hold the wheel,” he told Edmund as he clamped his eyes shut.
At eighty miles an hour, Nico let go of the steering wheel. The Pontiac veered slightly to the right, cutting off a woman in a silver Honda.
Saying a prayer to himself, Nico kept his head back. The wind from outside lashed against the brim, blowing his baseball cap from his head. Needles of rain tap-danced against his forehead and face. The baptism had begun. Wes’s home address was clutched in his hand. Salvation—for Nico and his mom—was less than an hour away.
78
Lisbeth thought the neighborhood would be a dump. But as she drove west on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and followed Violet’s directions—past the Home Depot and Best Buy and Olive Garden, then a right on Village Boulevard—it was clear she didn’t need to lock the car doors. Indeed, as she pulled up to the guard gate for Misty Lake—A Townhome Community, the only thing she had to do was lower her window.
“Hi, I’m visiting unit 326,” Lisbeth explained to the guard, remembering Violet’s instructions to not use her name. Of course, it was silly. Lisbeth already had her address—who cared about her name?
“ID, please,” the guard said.
As she handed over her driver’s license, Lisbeth added, “I’m sorry, I think it’s unit 326—I’m looking for . . .”
“The Schopfs—Debbie and Josh,” the guard replied, handing her a guest parking pass for the dashboard.
Lisbeth nodded. “That’s them.” Waiting until the security gate closed behind her to scribble the name Debbie Schopf in her notepad, she followed the signs and never-ending speed bumps past row after row of identical pink townhomes, eventually pulling into the guest spot just outside the narrow two-story house with blinking holiday lights dangling from above the door and an inflatable snowman in the thriving green garden. Christmas in Florida at unit 326.
