It’s not that anyone believed that Naomi hadn’t earned her promotion. At thirty-one she was young but not too young, and there was no arguing her work ethic or performance. But most everyone came at her armed with a quiver full of assumptions. Was she a guru with a genetic gift for security matters? A haughty prima donna? If they shook her hand, would some of the old man’s magic rub off?
Few circumstances were as emotionally confusing as growing up in the shadow of a not-known-to-the-public celebrity. Her father’s fame—if it could be called that—was a spark that threw no light beyond a circle of cohorts. The problem was, she happened to share those cohorts now.
She was Hank Templeton’s kid first, Naomi Templeton second. Despite the complexities that presented, she did not deceive herself into believing that this was not without its advantages.
After getting the call at the assisted-living facility, she’d changed hastily in the car and raced to the scene. Door-to-door through rush-hour traffic in twenty-three minutes, a reaction time even her father would have found acceptable.
She returned her focus to the bolt-action sniper rifle sitting atop its tripod at the front window.
A Russian piece of gear, a Mosin-Nagant with a PSO-1 scope.
Given its placement, there was no way the motorcade’s advance team could have missed it. It was positioned to be seen.
The weapon was common enough, millions of them were scattered around the globe. Yet the choice of rifle struck her as odd.
Given the high-rent real estate of the apartment and the high-value target the assassin hoped to capture in the scope, the rifle was decidedly second-rate. Mosin-Nagants were like AK-47s. You couldn’t throw a rock in a war-torn country without hitting one. They were cheap, durable, and easy to use. But they had their problems. Sticky bolts, worn-out ejectors, screws falling out of the stocks. This one looked beat-up and dusty.
She would have expected something professional and top-tier, maybe a Remington M700 with a Leupold Variable-Power Scout Scope.
One of the forensics men, a towering guy with a drippy nose, announced his presence behind her with a sniffle. “Serial number’s been scoured off, probably with a bench grinder.”
“How deep?” she asked.
“Deep enough that there’s no way we can recover it with an etching reagent. But that’s not what’s noteworthy. The rifle? It’s not usable. The barrel’s warped, and there’s no firing pin. It’s totally sterile.”
Naomi lifted her eyes to the four blown-up surveillance photos that tiled the wall behind the rifle. Each featured a face in close-up, and each face had a letter Magic Markered across it.
A middle-aged man in what looked like a Venetian piazza: J.
What appeared to be a homeless man in a mall: C.
A handsome guy smoking a cigarette in a parking lot: L.
And the last, a photo of a man in his sixties, this one without a letter scrawled across the head. A square face, weathered and handsome, with a well-practiced squint.
The staging of the rifle and photos made clear: This wasn’t an aborted assassination attempt. It was a message.
But to whom?
Naomi flicked a hand at the photographs with the weird markings. “How ’bout those?”
“Those are sterile, too. We managed to digitally capture the faces beneath the markings and run them through facial recognition. Nothing. These people? They don’t exist. Except for him.” The agent pointed at the man in the unmarked photo. “Former station chief with the Agency, mostly through the seventies and early eighties. His personnel record gets hazy after that. His name’s Jack Johns.”
“Where is he?” Naomi asked.
“Went missing about six months ago, just vanished off the map.” The agent scratched his neck. “Maybe these are photos of past victims of the shooter.”
Naomi tried the theory on, found it ill-fitting. “You pull any prints from the pictures?”
“No. They’re clean.”
“Did you dust the backs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You pulled the photos off the wall and put them back up?”
“They’re taped, so we lifted them to dust the backs.”
“You dust the tape itself?”
“We did. Along with everything else in the apartment.”
“There isn’t anything else in this apartment.”
“Doorknobs, countertops, toilet flusher.” The agent retrieved a handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose. “There’s not a single print here. The guy’s a ghost.”
She gestured at the photos. “What’s with the letters?”
“I don’t know,” the agent said. “But there’s one more.”
“One more what?”
“Letter.”
“Where?”
He waved Naomi over to the rifle. The bolt had been manipulated back, revealing the round in the chamber. A single letter had been etched into it.
X.
“We found it like that,” the agent said. “X marks the spot.” He gave a nervous laugh that sounded like a giggle.
Naomi looked from the round to the photos on the wall and back to the round. “It’s not a mark,” she said. “It’s a signature.”
“Why do you think that?” the agent asked. “Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s the name of the target? Ye olde ‘bullet with your name on it’?”
“X stands for the unknown. President Bennett isn’t X. He’s the best-known human on the planet.”
“After Kim Kardashian,” the agent said.
“After Kim Kardashian,” Naomi conceded. She studied the scrawled letters covering the faces in three of the four photos. “So the would-be shooter is in on the same side as the men in these photographs. If my theory is right.”
The agent shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against a Templeton.”
“Then you’d lose a good percentage of the time.” She met his gaze, which had grown nervous, shifty. “I need your ideas. Not your deference.”
He nodded.
She moved on. “I was told PD had a run-in with a suspicious party on E Street after the rifle was spotted.”
“Yes, ma’am. Five officers.”
“When can I interview them?”
“Right now, if you’d like. Micelli just brought them up, has them waiting in the hall.”
She nodded and stepped out of the apartment.
The cops were huddled up by the elevator—a female plainclothes officer and four men. They turned as Naomi approached. She drew up short, taking in their ragged appearance.
The big rookie’s front teeth were chipped. One of the uniforms had a broken nose, bruises already coming up beneath his eyes. The other had swelling that stretched down one cheek and across his neck.
After introductions were made, Naomi said, “What’s with the red blotch?”
“Matcha green tea,” the officer said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The cop with the incipient black eyes stepped in. “Look, he got the better of us, okay?”
“And it looks like you caught the worst of it.” Naomi tilted her head back, appraising the nose. “Jesus. At least it’s a clean break.”
At this the man scowled a little.
Naomi turned her attention to the veteran cop and the woman. “Seems like you two got off okay.”
The woman shrugged. “I did get knocked down pretty hard. When Kryzanski was kicked into me.”
Naomi said, “Lucky you didn’t crack your head.”
“I think the attacker…” The female cop cleared her throat.
“What’s that?”
“I think he cradled my head on the way down.”
Naomi nodded and then nodded again, unsure what to make of that. “Romantic,” she said. A closer look showed the female officer to have red-rimmed eyes. Naomi decided not to ask about that at the moment. Instead she said, “How ’bout you tell me how this all kicked off.”
“The guy threatened us,�
�� Kryzanski said.
“Well,” the woman said, “he didn’t really threaten us. More like he told us what was gonna happen.”
The cop with the slight facial burn added morosely, “And then it did.”
Naomi chewed the inside of her cheek. “What did he say precisely?”
They told her.
Naomi said, “Huh.”
They all stared at one another for longer than was comfortable. Though the incident had occurred nearly two hours ago, the cops still looked glazed. Regarding them now, the word that popped into Naomi’s head was “shell-shocked.”
She lifted her hand to help form her next question but then dropped it. They stared some more. “So he just went ahead and did all that? When you were expecting it?”
“Well, not exactly like that,” Kryzanski said. “Before he … went … he said … He said the slide on my Clock was out of battery.”
“Was it?” Naomi asked.
“No.”
She grimaced. “Did you check?”
He hesitated, then gave a faint nod.
“Then what?”
“I don’t remember much after that.”
“Is it fair to assume that’s when the flying-table sequence started?” Naomi asked.
The female officer said, “I believe that’s fair to say, yes.”
“What’d he look like?” Naomi asked. “This guy?”
“Average height, average build,” the female cop said. “Regular features. He had a baseball cap pulled low, so it was hard to tell.”
“But you three were right there within a few meters of him in a well-lit restaurant.”
“I don’t know.” The cop shook her head. “He looked like a guy. Like anyone.” She was staring at the floor, still shaking her head. “He looked like anyone.”
One of the forensics agents stuck his head out of 705 and called in a shout-whisper up the hall, “Agent Templeton?”
His tone sounded sufficiently alarmed that Naomi hustled back to the crime scene, vowing to get a full debrief from the cops later. The din of clamoring voices inside 705 rose as she neared. She came into the room to find a man in a suit plucking the photographs off the wall.
“Who the hell is he?” she said. “Who are you?”
The man turned around, sliding the photos into a manila folder. It took a moment for Naomi to place the round boyish face here, out of context.
Douglas Wetzel, the deputy chief of staff.
With curly chestnut hair a touch longer than D.C. standard, a full but neatly trimmed beard, and a suit priced well beyond the range of his salary, he looked like a trust-fund hipster conforming reluctantly to professional expectations.
She knew better than to take the laid-back adornments at face value. Wetzel was President Bennett’s hatchet man, a political pit bull through and through.
As Wetzel clasped the folder to his chest and started out, Naomi stepped to intercept him. He was around her age, early thirties, and thick—a big-boned guy with some extra padding. She remembered reading somewhere that in order to match Bennett’s schedule he functioned on three hours of sleep, snatched at intervals throughout the day. His entire existence was designed to remain at the president’s beck and call 24/7.
“I’m Special Agent in Charge—”
“Templeton,” Wetzel said. “We’re aware.”
“What’s the president’s deputy chief of staff doing at my crime scene?”
“Invoking executive privilege.”
“You’re tampering with evidence in an active investigation—”
“I was told it had been processed.”
“—and last I checked, you weren’t the commander-in-chief.”
“I’m acting on the president’s authority. He needs this contained.”
“The president’s safety comes first,” she said. “Containment second.”
Wetzel moved to step around her, and she moved as well, keeping her body between him and the door. He glared at her, and she held his stare. A number of her agents sidled up behind her casually, pretending to aim their focus elsewhere.
Wetzel’s glare snapped off, replaced with a smile that showed little amusement. “It’s okay,” he said, taking a step back. “You’re new. You don’t understand how this works yet.”
As he pulled out his phone and dialed, Naomi cast a glance over at the sniper rifle and the left-behind tape on the wall. A tableau staged to send a message.
Wetzel’s appearance made clear who X had intended the message for.
Wetzel muttered into the phone and then looked up at Naomi. “He wants you in his office now.”
Naomi felt herself flush. “Director Gonzalez?”
Wetzel extended the phone, and she took it, pressed it to her ear in time to hear an all-too-familiar voice say, “No. The president.”
7
First Domino to Fall
Evan had taken the southwest corner penthouse suite at the Hay-Adams. The hotel was suitable for a number of reasons. The building itself, a venerable Italian Renaissance–style beauty, had pleasing architectural flourishes, from walnut wainscoting to Elizabethan ceiling treatments. The service was superb—old-fashioned and discreet. Its 145 rooms provided relative anonymity.
And it had a superb view of the White House.
Sitting at his picture window, snacking on Virginia poached oysters bedded with cauliflower mousse, caviar, and a touch of yuzu, Evan let his Steiner tactical binoculars scan across Lafayette Square once more and lensed in on the northwest gate, the first point of entry to the West Wing. He’d been down in the park yesterday in an appropriated Parks and Recreation uniform, moving among the stalwart protesters and strategically trimming branches to clear the sight lines.
Despite the advent of dusk, he maintained a perfect view of the guardhouse now, the range-finding binocs designed for low-light conditions. A cable ran from the binoculars to his laptop, feeding it a steady stream of data.
He paused to slurp another oyster and took a sip of mint tea.
It was a civilized way to conduct an assassination.
Down at the gate, a woman in a royal-blue pantsuit hit a buzzer and spoke to a uniformed agent through the bulletproof glass. She gestured with annoyance, waving a yellow pass, but was turned away.
As she stomp-hobbled away in blocky high heels, Evan regarded his laptop, which mapped the woman’s facial features, identifying her as a congresswoman from Florida’s sixth district.
Another oyster. More tea.
He could get used to this.
The overhead vent wafted a cool current across his shoulders. The air was perfumed with French-milled soap from the bathroom. He was shirtless, an Egyptian cotton towel still wrapped around his waist from the shower; he hadn’t bothered to get dressed.
Today Evan had announced himself to President Bennett. The rifle was the make and model Evan had used for his first assassination in 1997, the mission that—for whatever reason—Bennett was trying to eliminate any trace of all these years later. The photos Evan had taped on the wall were a few of the Orphans murdered at Bennett’s command. Those men were no longer invisible, unseen and unmourned, but displayed as proudly as the stars carved into the white Alabama marble of the Memorial Wall at Langley.
And Jack.
Jack’s face had been taped up in Apartment 705 as well, watching as Evan made his preparations, setting up the rifle, etching the round, parting the curtains to allow that first domino to fall.
For the past forty-five minutes, Evan had been set up here on the one-armed chaise longue of his hotel suite, waiting to see who Bennett would summon to handle the investigation. So far all Evan had captured in the lenses was a parade of White House workers and the occasional politician. He was hoping for a sign of Eddie Gonzalez, the Secret Service director, and whichever deputy assistant director he’d bring with him to run point on the investigation. Evan had figured that President Bennett would want to oversee the matter in person but, given the delay, he was beginning to think
that Bennett might handle it over the phone.
A Jeep Wrangler parked beyond the gate, and a woman emerged. Tough-pretty, athletic build, her blond hair artlessly cut. No makeup, no jewelry. She was dressed nicely—dark jeans, white button-up, black fitted blazer—but not too nicely, as an aide or politician would be.
Promising.
The Steiners were a great set of glass, crisp up to a mile, refined enough that Evan could see the pierce holes in the woman’s ears. As she reached the guardhouse, he screen-captured her on the laptop and ran facial recognition.
Naomi Jean Templeton, special agent in charge, Protective Intelligence and Assessment.
Evan pulled up her record from the databases and scanned it.
She was a pay grade below the agents Evan had been anticipating, and newly promoted at that.
Bennett would think she was malleable, controllable.
There was nothing the president valued more than control.
Evan adjusted the focus and watched the agent in the guardhouse tapping on his computer, a hardline telephone shrugged to one ear.
Naomi Templeton waited, penned in, the outer fence closed behind her, the inner fence not yet open. The guard gestured, and she placed her credentials in the pass-through tray. He examined them and sent them back.
The inner fence rolled smoothly open, releasing her from the sally-port pen, and she started for the West Wing.
A marine sentry guarded the entrance, motionless as a carving, his spit-polished shoes throwing a gleam even at this distance, even in this light. As she neared, he pivoted with automated grace, held the door for her with a white glove. His spine was a steel rod.
Evan watched Naomi disappear inside.
At last he rose and let the towel fall away. He’d made the opening gambit. It was time to formulate the next move.
8
Presidential Shit Management
The air in the Oval Office tasted of velvet. Perhaps it was the purity afforded by the filters, or perhaps it was just the flavor of the rich furnishings, of history itself. Naomi never got used to it. She’d been here three previous times with her father, all when she was small enough that he’d carried her in.
This was the first time she was here under her own power.
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