Out of the Dark

by Gregg Hurwitz

  “That’s correct. Except for the two pieces of sushi he left out at—”

  “Is it possible he could be using poisons that don’t show up on initial tests but appear later?”

  “I’ve been assured that’s impossible.”

  Bennett’s shirt had darkened beneath the arms. His glare held no sign of the warmth from the momentary rapport they’d shared yesterday over the ugly clock. “When it comes to X, nothing is impossible.”

  “We’re switching food suppliers, of course—”

  “That’s what he’s anticipating.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We need to get new long-term procedures in place. As one solution we’re thinking about having agents buy food off supermarket shelves at random—”

  “There is no random. There are algorithms for that. Deep-learning data-mining software that can identify which supermarkets your men are most likely to choose, which ones are located along oft-driven routes of particular agents, which foods I commonly eat.”

  “You think he’d risk randomly poisoning civilians?”

  “You have no idea what he’d do to get me.”

  Bennett circled behind his desk again, and as she turned to keep him in sight, her gaze snagged on a pill bottle on the blotter. The label showed it to be Buspar, the antianxiety med his physician had prescribed after the near miss in the limo. Before Bennett would consent to taking it, Agent Demme had overseen the testing of the pills, a five-hour affair that involved three different labs and a team of Ph.D.s.

  Bennett saw that she saw the pill bottle, and something in his gaze hardened until it felt palpable, designed to impale her. He swept the bottle out of sight into a drawer.

  “He showed us a hand. Not his hand. A hand. We cannot react accordingly.” He closed his eyes and pressed his palm to his forehead, as if warding off a migraine. “All this talk about tetrodotoxin’s making me nauseous.”

  She checked her watch. “Agent Demme is due any minute with food that’s cleared our short-term emergency protocols.”

  “What are those protocols?”

  “Until we can determine precisely what Orphan X is up to, we’re shutting down all domestic food supply. We’ll feed you only from shipments that arrive via direct routes from dealers in Europe. The minute I got the call, I had our logistics team place orders in Oslo, Vienna, Paris, and Provence—”

  “We have to assume he knows all our approved vendors, even international.”

  “I had our team switch to unspecified vendors with zero notice when they ordered. The first shipment arrived an hour ago and has been tested comprehensively upon arrival. It’s a new system, special chemicals developed by a professor from Johns Hopkins.”

  Bennett finally stopped moving. He closed his eyes and blew out a breath. “Okay,” he said. “I suppose I have to eat something. Now, where are you with my protective-detail request?”

  “We’re looking at a ten-percent manpower increase.”

  Her private phone vibrated in her pocket and she inched it out, subtly tilting the screen to read the incoming text from Sunrise Villa: PROBLEM WITH YOUR FATHER. PLEASE CALL IMMEDIATELY.

  A familiar sense of dread coalesced in her stomach.

  “Ten percent isn’t sufficient,” Bennett was saying. “When I step outside again, I want an army of agents surrounding me.”

  “We’ve already borrowed agents from field offices, which is leaving us thin—”

  “How about the UN?”

  She hesitated. “We have the General Assembly in Manhattan next week. That’s a hundred and thirty heads of state, most of them with spouses. It’s contingent upon us to provide a full detail. That means CAT and countersnipers—”

  “Knock them down to a dot detail. A leader and two agents.”

  “Mr. President, that’s just window dressing. We can’t—”

  “I’m the president. That means I can. Which means we can.”

  She closed her mouth, forced herself to nod.

  “If you get any friction,” Bennett said, “have Director Gonzalez call me.”

  She wondered at a man who would hang out UN reps with minimal protection to bolster his own already fortified defenses.

  The panel door swung inward, and the assistant secretary appeared. “The vice president is on the phone.”

  “Not now.” Bennett glanced at Naomi. “The only good part of this attack is that I can use it to get the vice president and Congress off my ass.”

  Naomi had already seen him turn away requests from the secretary of the treasury and the ambassador to China. From what she’d gleaned, India’s prime minister was waiting in the Rose Garden.

  In her pocket another text announced itself, no doubt the escalating crisis at Sunrise Villa.

  “Very well, sir,” the assistant secretary said. “Also, Agent Demme is here.”

  Demme appeared bearing a tray uneasily, a man unaccustomed to serving. He stood awkwardly until Bennett nodded at the round table in the corner, and then he set down the service with a clunk.

  The White House china held endives with what looked like walnuts and blue cheese, a side of pâté with crostini, and two slices of boeuf en croûte. A glass of red wine rested to the side, a thin daytime pour.

  Demme gave a deferential nod and withdrew, leaving Naomi and Bennett alone with the savory scent of his lunch.

  “Someone eats it before I eat it,” Bennett said. “Every single item.”

  It took a moment for her to grasp his meaning.

  “You don’t trust me,” she said. “The Service, the lab, the protocols.”

  “This is your job,” he said. “To take a bullet. Eating pâté is simply a more pleasant version of that.”

  She stared at him.

  He crossed to the tray, used the edge of a fork to pinch a bite of each item onto a side plate.

  Then he stared at her. “Eat it.”

  His eyes shone behind the lenses, but whether from anger or excitement she couldn’t tell. The fact that it was a question at all, she realized, indicated that she understood him differently now.

  She picked up the fork, took a bite of each item, wadding them all together in her mouth and forcing them down with one big swallow.

  Bennett pointed to the wineglass, and she paused, humiliated, before taking a sip.

  He studied her for a minute or two, though she wasn’t sure what he expected. Vomiting? Collapse? Hemorrhaging from the eyes?

  The food sat heavily in her stomach.

  After another full minute passed, he snapped out his napkin, sat, and began to dine. “There is no measure of paranoia too great when you’re dealing with Orphan X.” He paused, head downtilted, offering her a gaze through his glasses. “You still don’t understand who you’re dealing with, do you?”

  She set her jaw, said, “I’m beginning to get the picture.”

  58

  What’s Not There

  With its open-spandrel, concrete-and-steel design, the Key Bridge is the oldest surviving bridge to cross the Potomac. Evan had driven from Georgetown to the Arlington side, where he’d pulled off and parked, letting the six lanes of traffic stream by.

  Somewhere miles and miles ahead as the crow flew, twin stone pillars marked a sloping dirt road that cut through an oak forest, leading to the apron of cleared land upon which Jack’s two-story farmhouse sat.

  That was the home Evan had grown up in from the age of twelve. An old-fashioned porch and shuttered windows. Plush brown corduroy couches in the living room, pots hanging from a brass rack in the kitchen. A fireplace in the study casting an orange glow on the bookshelves, on the framed photograph of Jack’s dear departed wife, on the faces of Jack and nineteen-year-old Evan as they massaged his first operational alias into place, wrapping it around him like a second skin.

  Now he sat and stared at taillights and office buildings cloaked in a haze of car exhaust.

  This was the closest he’d come to home since that bleak gray morning in 1997 when Jack had driven him to Dulles
International and dropped him at Departures.

  Though he was expecting the call, he didn’t fully register the RoamZone until the second ring. He answered sluggishly, “Yeah?”

  “What’s wrong?” Joey said.

  He cleared his throat, lowered his eyes from the horizon. “Nothing. What do you have?”

  “As usual, you’re asking the wrong question.”

  “Just spit it out, Joey.”

  “You’ve been looking at what’s there. You need to look at what’s not there. Agent Templeton understood that better than you. And I understand it better than her.”

  “Which means?”

  “Early this morning Templeton pulled in all the information on Secret Service schedules—the Presidential Protective Detail in particular. But she’s looking to see when they worked off-hours, say, or logged an unusual outing that didn’t line up with the official schedule. But the thing is, she’s underestimating our target. He’s DoD-trained, deep, deep black protocols. Which means if he did take an extracurricular outing, he would ensure that his PPD agents didn’t log any time at all. So. Among the cadre of inner agents, I looked at workday absences. Sure enough, a pair of his men had missing half days that correlated. They took the same two mornings off, once in October of last year, once last month. Those mornings also happen to align precisely with gaps in the target’s official schedule.”

  Evan could sense his pulse quicken ever so slightly. “So he ducked out without the detail. Just two agents and a sedan.”

  “Looks that way,” Joey said. “Next, I hacked into the iCals of the agents’ wives. No family vacay, no medical appointments listed, no kids’ soccer games. Both had an entry that their husbands were gone for the day. Too much of a coincidence.”

  “So they snuck the target out.”

  “More like he snuck them out,” Joey said. “The agents just had to play chauffeur. No knowledge of what they were participating in, no official record—technically they weren’t even working those mornings.”

  “How can we figure out where they went?”

  “Each Service vehicle has GPS,” Joey said. “Both days, same location. A house in Bethesda.” She rattled off the address, then paused. “You’ll never guess who it belongs to.”

  She told him.

  After a moment she said, “You still there?”

  “I am.”

  “I saw a picture,” she said. “It’s him.”

  He waited for his inner disturbance to still. It wasn’t turmoil he felt, not precisely, more like a vibration of his cells. A trip wire that stretched back nearly three decades had been plucked like a guitar string, and the bone-deep resonance refused to recede.

  He’d follow it, the trip wire, no matter the course, no matter the cost.

  It would lead to the answers he sought.

  Hanging up, he pulled out into traffic and pointed the car for Bethesda.

  59

  Sharp Edges

  When Naomi at last arrived at Sunrise Villa, she rushed up the corridor to see two burly orderlies pinning down her father to administer a shot. He was bellowing unintelligibly, bucking with all the force left in his failing body.

  Judging by the state of the room, he still had a considerable amount of strength left. The lunch tray had been knocked over, a comet of green Jell-O painting the wall above the TV. A bedpan lay upside down on the floor. In the corner Amanaki applied a Band-Aid to the finger of an angry male nurse.

  Naomi stood in the doorway and let the orderlies do their job. The Versed finally took effect, and her father ceased thrashing, though he looked far from subdued.

  She eased into the room. “I’m sorry about this.”

  Amanaki said, “Nothing you need to apologize for. He’s just been more … agitated than usual.”

  The male nurse said, “He bit my finger.”

  “However bad it is for you,” Amanaki said, “it’s worse for him.”

  Gripping his hand, the nurse exited.

  Naomi turned to face her father. “You can’t keep doing this.”

  She felt Amanaki’s hand, cool on her arm. “He’s confused, honey,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” She said to the orderlies, “He’ll be fine now. Thank you, gentlemen. Let’s give them some time.”

  They departed, leaving Naomi alone with her dad.

  His eyes looked sunken; dark hollows in a skull. In his face she could see the waiting grave.

  “Where are my boys?” he said, his hoarse voice laced with accusation.

  “They’re not … They can’t make it, Dad.”

  “They’d talk to these people, get me taken care of.”

  “You are being taken care of.”

  He glared around the room, his pale arms twitching on the sheets. He looked so goddamned frail in that hospital gown, like a plucked bird.

  “Is that what you call this?” he said. “Jason and Robbie, they would never stand for it.”

  She felt a rise in temperature, a flush creeping up her neck. “This is a nice place. The staff does a lot for you, Dad. I do a lot for you.”

  “My boys would never let me be treated like this.”

  Something in her chest broke, spilling heat through her insides. “Goddamn it, Dad! Jason can’t be bothered to see you, okay?” Her face was wet now, the room blurring. “And Robbie, Robbie doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. They mail their checks so they don’t have to bother with you.”

  She wiped angrily at her eyes.

  Her father lay there, stunned. His lips, framed with gray stubble, wobbled disconcertingly.

  Remorse crushed in on her, chased with guilt so intense she felt it as a swirling void in the pit of her gut.

  For a moment she thought she might die.

  She tried to breathe, but the black hole in her stomach snatched the oxygen away like a cry in the wind. It took a few seconds for her to force her gaze up to her dad again.

  “I’m sorry you feel so alone,” she said, and now she was crying, really crying. “I tried. I tried my hardest. And it still didn’t matter.”

  Standing there dumbly by the foot of the bed, she cried for a while. When she was done, her father was staring at her, the same expression frozen on his face.

  “You know the best part of being an adult?” he said. “It teaches you to forgive yourself.”

  She snatched a tissue from a box angrily. “Well, that’s great, Dad. I’m glad you can forgive yourself.”

  But she was shocked to see his grizzled cheeks glittering.

  “No,” he said. “Not like that. Because I had to. Because I couldn’t get it right. Not with my boys. And not … not with my daughter.”

  She stared at him, spellbound. This language, the language of emotion, of regret, was not how her father talked.

  “I was in the Secret Service,” he told her. “I always had to control everything. Every variable. Every outcome. That was my job. But a baby girl?” He shook his head, overcome. “When they were little, their mother carpeted every surface. No sharp edges. She carpeted over the hearth, wrapped the pillars in the living room, everything. I remember that. I remember…”

  He trailed off, losing the thread. Balanced on the razor’s edge, Naomi waited to see if he’d find it again or if fate and illness would deny her this one last story as well.

  “The problem is…” He cleared his throat. “The problem is, the world’s full of sharp edges. It was fine for the boys, but when my baby girl came along, I tore all that padding out. Her mom and I, we had a good row about that. And I told her, I told her the world would let the boys figure it out later. But a girl? My girl?” His face hardened, wiry brows lowering over a suddenly adamant stare. “I wanted her to learn. I needed her to learn. So she’d never get caught off guard. So she’d never get surprised.” His mouth trembled. He bit down on his grief, firmed his jaw. “So she’d never get hurt.”

  She blinked, freeing fresh tears. “That’s not possible, Dad. Everyone gets hurt.”

 
; “I know.” His Adam’s apple jerked in the wattle of his neck. “But when you have a daughter, you don’t care about what’s possible.”

  His head lifted weakly from the pillow. For an instant he seemed to recognize her, but then his eyes lost focus. He sank back onto the pillow, his voice growing weaker as the benzo worked its way through his bloodstream, blurring the words together. “I had to be hard on her … harder than on the boys, harder than on anyone. And if I didn’t figure out how to try to forgive myself for that, I woulda … woulda been taken to pieces long ago. Even worse than this.”

  The monitors bleeped and hummed. His blinks grew longer.

  She sat on the bed next to him and then leaned to put her head on his chest. She listened to the breath rattling through him, so fragile, so resolute.

  With great effort he lifted a hand trailing tubes and stroked her hair.

  60

  Death Itself

  The two-story Colonial home was disappointingly banal, faded brick and shingled roof, a wide grassy lot with mower stripes, the periphery dotted with what Realtors like to call mature trees.

  Evan wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this.

  He headed for the front walk, noting the signs of life. Mailbox flag raised. Bulging trash bag at the side of the house. Beat-up Honda Accord in the driveway—probably a cleaning lady or the pool guy.

  The doors were ornate, dated wood and glass, brass hardware. Evan knew he should approach more cautiously than he was, but a weariness at the center of him made him uncharacteristically rash. He was tired of the foreign minister and the trim Estonian and the strung-out girl and the round man with the loose-fitting clothes. He was tired of the Russell Gaddses and the Jonathan Bennetts, men of immense means and power who took their pounds of flesh from those who could not defend themselves. He was tired of his own past, of his training and missions, of the lives he’d ended by lead or blade or garrote, and the silent, baleful chorus of the dead who rode his shoulders, good angels and bad.

  He rang the doorbell, blading his body, ready to fight or flee depending on what answered his call.