She’d just reached the door when he said, “You need to be careful, Templeton. The world’s got a lot of sharp edges.”
She read the threat beneath the surface, and for an instant it scared her to the core.
Then she thought of her father’s chest rising and falling beneath the hospital gown.
She paused, looked back.
She said, “I’m not afraid of sharp edges.”
* * *
A snack waited for him back in the Oval, the silver tray bearing a Double Gloucester cheese and an aged Gouda, flown in this morning. He ate quickly, washing them down with a 1985 Richebourg Grand Cru from Côte de Nuits, which cost slightly less than a Volkswagen.
He circled to the Resolute desk, plucking up the phone to get Director Gonzalez on the line.
That’s when it happened.
A weakness in his legs pulling him down into the chair. His temperature spiked, a film of sweat covering his flesh, making his shirt and pants cling to him. His heartbeat ramped up to a drumroll that seemed to vibrate under his skin.
An awareness dawned, as certain as the walls around him. In the marrow of his bones, he knew that he was about to die.
Through his confusion and terror, he managed a single clear thought: how unjust that he was going to expire here in the safest room in the world.
He fumbled his hand up to the telephone, the black one on the left that allowed him direct access to an outside line.
With a shuddering hand, he managed to dial the familiar number.
* * *
Evan removed the bottle of Tigre Blanc from the freezer drawer, the French wheat vodka swirling inside. He loaded a cocktail shaker with ice cubes and poured in two fingers.
His RoamZone rang.
As he saw the 202 area code, he knew.
When he answered, he could hear Bennett gasping on the other end of the line.
Bennett forced out the word: “How?”
Evan set down the shaker. “Your eyeglasses,” he said. “I swapped out the nose pads and temple tips.”
The president’s schedule had shown him to be due for a prescription update. Before the limo strike, Evan broke into the designated optometrist’s office. Bennett’s glasses and supplies were stored separately under lock and key.
Not a superb lock and key.
Evan said, “The new ones were coated with a high-dose antidepressant medication administered through the skin.”
Emsam, a common med, wouldn’t show up on any poison or toxin scans—at least not on any panel used by the Technical Security Division. It was intended to be administered only once a day. But Bennett had been getting around-the-clock transdermal delivery of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
“It elicits a host of nasty interactions,” Evan said. “Headaches, agitation, nausea, tremors, rapid heart rate, heavy sweating. Which any reasonable doctor would misattribute to stress and treat with—of course—an antianxiety med. Which doubles down on the effects.”
Over the line Bennett’s breaths turned into screeches as he raked in air, trying to breathe.
“But to weaponize it,” Evan continued, “it has to be combined with specific foods. Organ meats, hard cheese, fava beans, red wine, or any other tyramine-heavy cuisine.”
That included the majority of Bennett’s favorite dishes, which he asked to have imported internationally. By throwing a scare into the Service about domestic food supply, Evan had ensured that they leaned more heavily on foreign vendors.
Everything had relied on Bennett’s being the person he was. Paranoid, manipulative, strategic, solipsistic. There’d been holes in the plan, yes. But Bennett had filled them.
Evan watched frost creep around the base of the cocktail shaker. “The combination of MAOIs and tyramine potentiate a hypertensive crisis, which leads to a heart attack,” he said. “That’s what you’re experiencing now.”
Bennett tried to say something, but all that came out was a throaty rush of air.
Evan heard the thump of a body striking the plush Oval Office rug.
He hung up.
Picking up the shaker, he rattled it until his hands stuck to the stainless steel, the chill pleasing against his still-healing palms. Then he wrapped a dish towel around it and shook it some more.
Retrieving a martini glass from the freezer, he poured the frosty vodka and garnished it with a leaf of basil from the vertical garden.
Jonathan Bennett had had the full force of the United States government behind him, the military-industrial complex, and all the alphabet-soup agencies.
Evan had Vera II and a living wall.
Bennett had boundless resources and boundless manpower.
Evan had a sixteen-year-old foster girl and a nine-fingered armorer.
Bennett had a willingness to do anything to get what he wanted.
Evan had a willingness to do what needed to be done.
And now, at the ragged end of the long road, Bennett lay sprawled on the Oval Office rug and Evan stood here, far from the corridors of power, cloaked in anonymity, protected by his very unimportance.
He had a chilled glass of high-end vodka and a piece of quiet in his clean, well-lit place. Perhaps that was all he needed.
Perhaps it was all he deserved.
He strolled before the floor-to-ceiling Lexan windows that constituted the penthouse’s east wall. The discreet armor sunshades shielded him from sight and sniper bullets while still letting in the view through the finely woven metal links.
He looked out across Wilshire Boulevard to the glimmering rise of downtown. All those twinkling lights, so many lives in progress behind windshields and windows, people doing the best they could with their private trials and tribulations, their everyday triumphs and tragedies.
He saw his own window as if from afar, one anonymous dot among millions.
He was a part of the living hive of the city and apart from it, too. Like everyone else, he found comfort where he could. Like many others, he tried to give some comfort as well.
He took a sip of the Tigre Blanc. It had been distilled five times, getting it down to its essence. Clean nose, a touch of fruit, maybe a hint of pepper on the finish.
He closed his eyes and enjoyed the drink.
It had been a long time coming.
67
A Damning Light
The funeral was an all-out affair. The flag-draped coffin making its solemn descent into the earth. State troopers firing a three-gun salute. Speeches about a life dedicated to public service. And then the bagpipes, which never failed to make Naomi mist up.
Robbie and Jason managed to show up for once, to say good-bye to their father.
The former president was due to go into the ground next week, but given the recent torrent of revelations, White House officials were still figuring out how to deal with the pomp and ceremony of the state funeral.
Two days ago the Newseum had been breached, a full display showing up in the Today’s Front Pages installation on the sixth floor. It contained logistics reports from a three-decades-old mission that cast a damning light across Jonathan Bennett and his entire scandal-riddled legacy. The display was effective if unartful, an impeccably neat tiling of pinned documents behind glass.
Naomi had a guess who’d curated the illicit display.
When she’d woken up this morning, the light streaming beneath her shade had caught something on the lip of the nightstand drawer where she stored her service weapon. A gummy dime-size disk, slightly oblong, that on further inspection proved to be an adhesive made of silicon composite. When she’d held it up to the light, she’d seen a print pressed into its surface.
And a second print on the other side.
Which meant that one was fake—but one had to be real. After all, he’d been wearing it.
Orphan X, she was sure, had no prints on record. If she brought the adhesive in to the Forensic Services Division after the funeral, she could add one key piece of evidence to the exceedingly thin file that had been prov
ided to her what felt like a lifetime ago.
As Robbie and Jason tipped shovelfuls of dirt into the open grave, she lifted the fingerprint adhesive from her pocket and stared at it there, perched on her thumb.
Director Gonzalez approached, and she lowered her hand to her side. “Ready to get back at it tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I am.”
He hugged her before taking the shovel from Robbie and stepping around the waiting backhoe to the grave.
Naomi stood with her brothers watching another throw of dirt fall and then another, covering their father, the legend of the Service.
Robbie pursed his lips. “He was tough.”
Yeah, Naomi thought. And so am I.
As her brothers drifted away with the other mourners, she stayed a moment, just her and the open wound of the rectangle marring the green grass. Maybe there would be peace now. For her father, for herself, for Orphan X, even for President Bennett.
Stepping forward, she flicked the fingerprint adhesive into the grave, and then the backhoe did its work, layering over the coffin, her father, the past.
Acknowledgments
Orphan X would like to convey his gratitude to his Special Operations Group:
—Keith Kahla, Andrew Martin, Sally Richardson, Don Weisberg, Jennifer Enderlin, Alice Pfeifer, Hector DeJean, Paul Hochman, Kelley Ragland, and Martin Quinn at Minotaur Books
—Rowland White and his team at Michael Joseph/Penguin Group UK
—Lisa Erbach Vance and Aaron Priest of the Aaron Priest Agency
—Caspian Dennis of the Abner Stein Agency
—Trevor Astbury, Rob Kenneally, Peter Micelli, and Michelle Weiner of Creative Artists Agency
—Marc H. Glick of Glick & Weintraub and Stephen F. Breimer of Bloom Hergott Diemer et al.
—Geoff Baehr, Philip Eisner, Dr. Melissa Hurwitz, Jay Karnes, Dana Kaye, Dr. Bret Nelson, Billy Stojack (R.I.P.), and Kurata Tadashi
—Simba and Cairo, the lion hunters
—And my favorite trio, Delinah, Rose, and Natalie
Also by Gregg Hurwitz
THE ORPHAN X NOVELS
Orphan X
The Nowhere Man
Hellbent
OTHER NOVELS
The Tower
Minutes to Burn
Do No Harm
The Kill Clause
The Program
Troubleshooter
Last Shot
The Crime Writer
Trust No One
They’re Watching
You’re Next
The Survivor
Tell No Lies
Don’t Look Back
YOUNG ADULT NOVELS
The Rains
Last Chance
About the Author
GREGG HURWITZ is a New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of twenty novels, including the Orphan X novels. An award-winning novelist, Hurwitz is also a screenwriter and TV producer. His novels have been published in thirty languages around the globe. Hurwitz lives in Los Angeles.
Visit the author’s website at www.gregghurwitz.net or find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/gregghurwitzreaders, or sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue: Perennial Rain
1. Face in the Crowd
2. An Absence of Light
3. Identified Threat
4. What’s It Gonna Be?
5. A Not-Unfamiliar Coldness
6. X Marks the Spot
7. First Domino to Fall
8. Presidential Shit Management
9. Eternally Trapped Souls
10. Last Chance and Final Offer
11. Active Nightlife
12. High-Functioning
13. Good Little Lamb
14. Expensive Fish
15. Outside the Purview
16. A Bucket of Warm Spit
17. Stray Dogs
18. Coldly Modern
19. Bad Men
20. Yes, Please
21. Heavy Weaponry
22. The Small Gestures of Intimacy
23. Backtracing an Outbreak
24. Worthy of Trust and Confidence
25. Kick Like a Girl
26. Celebrating Individual Strengths
27. The Good Guys
28. A Touch to the Outside
29. The Second-Oldest Profession
30. All Is Not What It Seems
31. Strategic Planning Meeting
32. See Every Angle
33. Big, Boomy Reds
34. Mr. Patience
35. Shadow and Shape and Nothing More
36. What We’re Not Dealing With
37. My Business
38. As Long a Long Shot As Ever There Was
39. A Method to the Madness
40. Making Good Choices
41. Customer Service
42. Cut Both Ways
43. Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing
44. Shock-and-Awe Charm
45. The Entitlement of the Mighty
46. Comprehensively Impossible
47. Roused Beast
48. Dirty Work
49. Kill Zone
50. A Sleek Instrument of Destruction
51. Breaking News
52. Decades-Long Fuse
53. Antianxiety
54. Too Damaged
55. A Social Call
56. Are We Ready?
57. Negative Space
58. What’s Not There
59. Sharp Edges
60. Death Itself
61. A Knot Tightening
62. Final Look Back
63. Why Fuck Around?
64. Let It All Out
65. The Flip Side of Intimacy
66. A Long Time Coming
67. A Damning Light
Acknowledgments
Also by Gregg Hurwitz
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
OUT OF THE DARK. Copyright © 2019 by Gregg Hurwitz. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photographs: man © Mark Owen/Arcangel; street © istock/Laura Niemuth
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-12042-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-22436-1 (international, sold outside the U.S., subject to rights availability)
ISBN 978-1-250-12044-1 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250120441
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First U.S. Edition: January 2019
First International Edition: January 2019
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