“She may not know what happened to him. You said yourself the police are overwhelmed today. Also, he could be crashing with a friend, if the aunt’s house isn’t safe.”
An engine roared to life behind us. Its deep growl reverberated off the concrete, echoing throughout the garage like a minotaur stalking its prey in a maze. If I’d had a few more seconds, I might have been able to guess the make and model from its purr. I didn’t have to guess. Tires screeched, and at that moment I saw the shock in Barack’s eyes. Before I could turn around, he wrapped an arm around my waist and spun me out of the way.
Barack sidestepped the speeding BMW at the last possible second. The car spun out into the exit ramp, where it disappeared. We could hear the BMW making the rounds, tires squealing the whole way.
Steve, jumping out of the shadows, watched over the edge as the car went round and round. He turned back to us. “I got his plate. We’ll have the police put out an APB and snag him. If he’s drunk, they’ll make an arrest. If not, I can send a couple of agents over to his house to give him a hard time.”
“Beat him up?” I asked.
“Ask him questions. Tough questions.”
I was breathing heavily. First the undercover cop on us, and now some fool in a Bimmer. I was tired of being chased for one day. It was time to do the chasing.
“What do you want to do, Joe?” Barack asked.
“That maniac almost killed us.”
“You know how wound up you can get inside these parking garages. Don’t tell me you’ve never stepped on the gas a little too hard rounding a corner and almost taken a few people out.”
“I’ve never…OK, once or twice. But only once or twice. And never a president and former vice president. Almost took out a House rep once. Nobody important.”
Now that the threat had passed, reality was starting to set back in. Did I really think chasing down some crazed driver was a good idea? It wouldn’t have been my first car chase. But the last one had left Steve with a couple cracked ribs. So, fine, I said: let the Secret Service do their follow-up. We didn’t have time for distractions. We didn’t even have time for Shaun to wake up from sedation. The chances of bringing the shooter to justice were going down by the hour and would dwindle to next to nothing within forty-eight hours. Any idiot who’d ever seen a Dick Wolf produced television show could tell you that.
“Back to Shaun. If the shooting was workplace related, the cops would have been on top of that,” I said, thinking aloud. “And if his friends were gangbangers, they’re not going to come clean to us. No family to speak of. Who was working with him from your foundation? Did he have a mentor?”
“Caruso. Not sure where he disappeared to. I had Steve leave him a message to call us. He needs to know about Shaun.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. A kid is shot, and his supposed mentor goes off the grid. Still, nothing pointed in his direction. I had to be careful about jumping to conclusions. Especially about Barack’s friends.
“The Rising Stars had to apply for the program, right? They must have put down contact information. An address. A next of kin.”
“Michelle did all the processing.”
“Then we’ll get your wife on the horn—”
“She’s with Oprah right now.”
“I thought they were having brunch. It’s almost one.”
“And?”
“And that makes it lunch.” I shook my head. “I don’t care if Michelle is in a confessional with the pope. We need to get that paperwork.”
“There’s another way to get Shaun’s paperwork,” Barack announced in a take-charge voice that said we could change the world right now. It had been a long time since I’d heard him sound so certain, so confident. Together, we could solve this mystery. Bring the shooter to justice. Right a wrong. Some might have said we were wasting our time when there were bigger problems in America. In the world. But to me, there was no injustice too small to right if I had the chance. And there was no one I’d rather work with than Barack Obama.
13
“We can’t just break into the building.”
Barack was silent.
“Oh, no,” I said. I should have slammed on the brakes right there, but we were almost to his foundation’s temporary offices.
“Technically, it wouldn’t be breaking and entering. As the foundation chair, I have every legal right to be in the offices. It’s like breaking into your own car.” The hitch was that he wouldn’t be the one breaking in to pilfer the paperwork—I would. Through a secret tunnel from an adjoining building on the University of Chicago campus. The Obama offices were the only ones closed today. The rest of campus never locked its doors.
“You’re pulling my leg,” I said. “I can’t believe you don’t have a key.”
“I was a professor at the law school for roughly a decade. There’s a series of underground steam tunnels that connect every building on campus. They added security gates to the tunnel entrances several years ago, but when I toured our foundation offices, the gate wasn’t padlocked.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“There are sternly worded signs warning trespassers to stay out of the tunnels.”
“And that keeps kids out. Sternly worded signs.”
“When I was at the school, most kids were too busy partying to wonder what was behind the basement doors. The kids who did know about the tunnels were smart enough to heed the warning signs. The ceilings are low, and the walls are lined with massive steam pipes. Bump into one, and you would have wound up in the burn unit for the rest of the semester.”
I looked at Steve, who was riding shotgun, to see if he found this as disturbing as I did. You couldn’t tell what the heck he was thinking behind those pitch-black sunglasses of his. He might have been sleeping.
“You’re sending me in by myself?” I asked Barack. “Why aren’t you going in?”
“I’m going to provide a distraction.”
“And how do you expect to do that?”
Barack grinned. “By being myself.”
I pulled into a metered space in front of the weathered brick building that housed Barack’s nonprofit foundation. A couple of co-eds with backpacks walked past us on the otherwise deserted sidewalk—the rest of their classmates were either uptown at the parade or off-campus drinking themselves sick. Barack handed me his credit card to plug the meter.
“It’s a holiday weekend,” I said. “Parking is always free on holidays.”
“Not in Chicago,” he said.
I grumbled a few words that would have sounded more natural coming out of Rahm Emanuel’s mouth.
“It’s not even your credit card,” Barack said. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
Thing was, I didn’t know either.
As soon as I reached the steps of the building next door to the foundation’s, Barack and Steve emerged from the Firebird. I watched from behind a row of bushes as Barack carefully rolled up his shirt-sleeves, showing off his powerful forearms. He was unhurried, cool as a cucumber sandwich. The two girls stopped in their tracks.
This was Barack Obama. The man, the myth, the legend.
The distraction.
Barack introduced himself, though he needn’t have been so modest. One girl held out her phone to take a selfie with him, almost as a reflex. Even though he had a strict no-selfies rule, today he was breaking it. He wanted to cause as much commotion as possible. In a matter of seconds, half a dozen students trickled outside. News traveled fast these days.
A bearded guy with a man-bun trudged down the stairs. He was on his phone. “Yeah, Barack Obama—the president. President Barack Obama!”
I slipped through the door. The last I saw of Barack, two dozen students were gathered around him. They seemed to be multiplying like rabbits. Hopefully, Steve could hold them off until I returned with Shaun’s file.
I hurried down a long hallway, headed for the service elevator. It was empty. Following Barack’s instructions, I took
it down to the basement.
The elevator landed with a sharp thud. The doors creaked open. A kitchen. Normally, it would have been bustling with workers, but they’d all gone upstairs to get a glimpse of 44. I took a sharp left through a laundry room, where a dozen industrial washers were running, and then entered a storeroom marked FALLOUT SHELTER. It was one of those old yellow signs, the ones we’d plastered across the country in the fifties as we prepared for mutually assured destruction.
I flicked a light switch on the wall. A single bulb lit up. There were red-and-green tubs stacked all around. Three artificial Christmas trees leaned against the wall in a corner. I moved the trees aside, revealing a metal door with the warning sign Barack had told me about: POSITIVELY–NO–ADMITTANCE.
Had to admit, that was very sternly worded.
The door wasn’t locked. The badly rusted knob turned easily—too easily. It fell off in my hand. This was not a good omen. Still, I was able to inch the door outward using my fingertips. It opened into a stairwell that led down to the tunnel.
The tunnel was lit with flickering emergency bulbs. This is where democracy dies, I thought. In darkness. Back at Archmere, me and the other academy boys had snuck through secret passageways similar to this. Without the hissing pipes that could land you in the ER. If I touched the wrong pipe, nobody aboveground would hear me scream. I’d once read that all it took was six feet of solid earth to soundproof a bunker. Six feet was also the depth at which the dead were buried so that their rest would not be disturbed by the living.
I should have had a flashlight. Or at least a phone with a flashlight. The guy at the Verizon store had done me dirty, telling me that flip phones with limited functionality were about to “come back in a big way.” I couldn’t even get a signal down here.
I kicked something with my foot—a tipped-over plastic Solo cup, which rolled to a stop. A baby rat with big eyes poked its head out of the cup. He sniffed the air and blinked, dazed from being rattled around. He reminded me of the rubber rats Jill sometimes left on my podiums to scare the bejeesus out of me.
“Sorry to disturb you, little guy.”
He blinked and retreated into his cup.
I heard the pitter-patter of little feet on the concrete behind me. Scritch scratch, scritch scratch. I swallowed hard. The little guy wasn’t alone.
Terror rooted me in space. For the first time today, I began to wonder what the holy heck I was doing. OK, maybe not for the first time—maybe the thought had been running through my mind the entire time I’d been underground. Maybe it had been running through my mind since I’d bolted from the conference to hunt down the BlackBerry. All I knew was that I was seconds away from the rats chewing their way through me, suit first, skin second. Bones third. Whatever’s inside bones fourth.
Barack had warned me of the hissing pipes along the walls. He hadn’t mentioned the ravenous rats chock-a-block on keg beer.
I didn’t know how much farther I had to go to reach the correct stairwell. I didn’t know if my bum knee would pick now, of all times, to start acting up. All I knew was that if I didn’t start pumping my getaway sticks, democracy wasn’t the only thing that was going to die in the darkness.
So I ran.
14
The first stairwell I found opened into a musty basement that looked like every campaign field office I’d ever been in—a complete mess. I picked up a piece of paper on one of the desks. It was printed on Obama stationery. This was the right place. The Rising Hope Center. I wasn’t getting eaten by rats. Not today.
I flipped on the lights. My heart skipped a beat when I saw Barack standing in the middle of the room, arms crossed and grinning. It wasn’t him, however—it was a cardboard stand-up. I was all alone in the office.
A row of cabinet drawers lined the far wall. Beside them sat a foosball table, lending the space a vibe closer to a Silicon Valley company than a professional adult workplace. I knew a little about foosball tables: one night my aides had found one in the basement of the Eisenhower. Legend had it that the table once belonged to Jimmy Carter, a two-time regional foosball champion in Alabama. It was the kind of myth almost dumb enough to be true.
I never brought it up with Jimmy.
I rifled through the cabinet drawers looking for the application paperwork. There were folders and dividers, but most were packed tight with financial records. According to Barack, hard copies were the most secure way to store things in a world where anything digitized was fair game for hackers. Yet here I was, “hacking” the records using the oldest of old-school methods. The only way to prevent someone from stealing information was to not write it down in the first place. And even then, some enterprising criminal would eventually devise a way to hack your ideas directly from your brain. Human ingenuity knew no bounds, so long as there was enough money on the line.
I moved on to the next filing cabinet and hit the Powerball.
The applications—hundreds of them—were in alphabetical order. I flicked through until I found the Ds at the back of the drawer. Darrow…Decker…Denton. Deshaun Denton. Five pages. His legal guardian was identified as Chelyne Woodson. Relationship: aunt. There was an address and contact number.
Footsteps. Upstairs. A janitor? Or campus security?
I’d been planning on leaving through the front door—no sense risking the rats in the tunnel again. That plan was shot to heck. Even though I was within my rights to be in the offices, there was no telling how much time would be wasted if I was detained by security and forced to talk my way out of the building.
I pocketed Shaun’s application. Doing double-time, I slipped back through the unsecured door and down the stairwell. There weren’t any rats waiting for me. The second my feet hit the concrete, I took off in a sprint.
Five minutes later, I was still running. In retrospect, I should have paused on the stairwell to catch my breath before scampering off willy-nilly. It was clear what happened—I’d headed right instead of left, or left instead of right. Okay, not so clear. I backtracked through the tunnel. Ten minutes later, and I reached a fork. I hadn’t remembered a fork. I was all sorts of turned around and mixed up six ways to Sunday.
I glanced over my shoulder. Was that heavy breathing I’d heard, or just the pipes? Shadows crept in around me. An amateur trespasser might have been frightened to the point of wetting his pants. Barack hadn’t said the tunnels were haunted, but there was old history in this city. Dark history. The air went cold here and there in the tunnels. Random drafts. A phenomenon the less skeptical sometimes believed was evidence of paranormal activity. The university didn’t need a ghost hunter; they needed a contractor.
After several minutes standing still, I decided no one was on my tail. Not this time. I veered left and continued until I reached another set of metal stairs. They all looked the same. I didn’t care—I just wanted out. It seemed like I’d been pinging around all afternoon. When you get lost in space, you also get lost in time.
I opened the door and was greeted by a sheet of plywood. The back of a wooden bookcase. There were high-pitched giggles on the other side. Too young to be college kids.
“…hopped together all around the garden. We hopped over daisies, we hopped over tiny carrots…”
A woman’s voice, muffled.
There was barely enough space for my fingers to fit between the edge of the bookcase and the doorframe. I had to push it to the side carefully, without sending it toppling over, which could be trouble. If I dropped it on a bunch of kids, Biden 2020 would be over before it officially began. Heck, even I’d vote for Oprah over a guy who pushed bookcases onto children.
They say you’re supposed to “lift with your legs, not your back.” Fine advice. Not very practical. I never skipped leg day—once a month, I did a few kicks on those machines at the Y. You know, the ones where you lift the weights with your legs. I could do forty, fifty pounds. In the real world, though, you couldn’t isolate your glutes or quads like that. You had to use what your mama gave you.
And what Ma Biden gave me were pencil-thin legs and a lower back made of iron.
The kids on the other side started shouting as the bookcase screeched along the tiled floor. By the time I moved it far enough to the side to squeeze through, I realized that I was interrupting story time. A dozen boys and girls, all around preschool age, were seated cross-legged on the floor. They were staring at me with wide eyes, like I was some sort of mole monster that had emerged from underground.
To my left was a terrified young woman with clear-framed specs, clutching a picture book like a shield. I recognized the cartoon bunny on the cover. Marlon Bundo. The miscreant who was dropping rabbit pellets on the carpet Jill had installed at One Observatory Circle.
Before I could apologize for interrupting, the woman swung the hardcover over her head and brought it down on my face. It wasn’t enough to knock me out, but the shock of being thwacked caused me to stagger. That was all the opening she needed. She slugged the edge of the book into my gut like a battering ram. The air went out of my lungs, and I instinctively backpedaled to get away. The heel of my right shoe caught the lip of the doorframe and I tumbled backward, somersaulting down the staircase and into the darkness.
15
“Tell me again how you ended up inside 57th Street Books,” Barack said. We were standing in line at Valois, a cafeteriastyle diner that he used to frequent during his years in academia. I was lucky not to have broken my neck tumbling down the stairs. Once the bookseller realized who I was—one of the kids pointed and shouted that I was “the president’s brother”—she helped me back up.
I explained all this once more to Barack, who still couldn’t believe how I’d wound up over a quarter mile away from the foundation offices. He asked if I needed a bag of ice for my nose. It hurt like an accidental circumcision, but I didn’t need ice. I needed to get my bearings, that was all. I could handle a little pain and swelling.
I grabbed a tray at the counter. There was a special “Obama Menu” tacked on the wall, underneath the regular menu. All of the president’s old favorites were represented: eggs, bacon, wheat toast. Barack ate a little better these days—less grease, more fruit and veggies—but I wasn’t going to be the one to issue a correction. There were a handful of OBAMA ATE HERE coffee mugs for sale. It was the first Barack Obama merchandise I’d seen in Chicago. At one point, there’d been an entire industry built around his image: T-shirts, dolls, action figures, buttons. Even pillowcases. (The pillowcases weirded me out a little, to be honest. I’d seen my fair share of unlicensed Joe Biden merchandise, but nobody had printed my face on a pillowcase. There were some lines you didn’t cross. Drooling during the night on your favorite politician was one of them.)
Hope Rides Again Page 6
