Evan arrived back in his room at the Watergate, locked the door behind him, and threw the swing-bar guard. Setting down his backpack, he tilted his face to the ceiling and exhaled.
His neck had knotted up, and his hands smelled of chlorine and high-proof vodka.
Removing his laptop from the backpack, he logged in to his e-mail, opened his Drafts folder, and typed: “Update?”
He started to walk away, hesitated, then returned and signed the unsent note.
“—Mr. Patience.”
That almost made him smile.
He passed through the wide door into the spa-like embrace of the marble bathroom, forgoing the freestanding bathtub for a punishingly hot shower. Setting both hands on the tile, he leaned into the powerful stream, letting the jets pound against his crown.
Wetzel had told Evan everything he knew, some of which Evan already knew himself. That Orphan A had been set on his trail. That A had recruited a death squad of down-and-dirty ringers headed up by two convicts, Ricky and Wade Collins. That once they killed Evan, they were going to track down and neutralize the remaining Orphans. That President Bennett was eliminating any trace of Evan’s 1997 mission. When pressed—and Evan had pressed Wetzel in a fashion that would have produced results—Wetzel had no specifics about why the mission was so menacing to Bennett.
Whatever the secret was, Bennett couldn’t even trust it to his own deputy chief of staff.
Evan turned off the shower, dressed, sat at the desk, and refreshed the screen.
Joey’s reply was waiting: “we’re in.”
A chill rippled across his back, his skin tightening. It wasn’t a thrill so much as a predatory focus, the whiff of prey in the wind.
Beneath her two-word reply were a series of links.
He clicked.
All of a sudden, he was looking at the inner workings of the Secret Service, prized data and classified intel, private squabbles and dirty laundry.
It took him ten minutes to orient within the private network, another ten to start identifying areas of interest.
First he ran through the travel logs. President Bennett’s schedule was in a state of upheaval; clearly there’d been a directive to move as many engagements and meetings around as close to scheduled dates as possible. The commitments were endless, more than Evan could review now, but he scanned them, searching for events that seemed difficult to reschedule.
Mid-September showed a promising fund-raiser in Los Angeles with the mayor and the senior state senator, mere miles from Evan’s penthouse. But two months was a long time to wait, and there was no guarantee that the reception wouldn’t be delayed or canceled.
Evan scrolled through other upcoming trips, assuming that catching the protection detail off their home turf would be easier. But the more he read, the more he realized that was not the case.
On domestic trips President Bennett was accompanied by more than three hundred civilian and military personnel, the ranks swelling to nearly a thousand for OCONUS forays. An advance team stacked with lead agents, transportation agents, countersurveillance agents, airport agents, event-site agents, tech-security agents, intel agents, and a military comms team locked down every transition point and venue ahead of time. The Secret Service flew all equipment and vehicles, including Cadillac One, on C-130 cargo planes to ensure they wouldn’t be tampered with. The gear was guarded around the clock, ready and waiting the moment Air Force One landed. At that point a working shift swung into effect as well, a whip directing a dozen agents and body men, backed by a counterassault team. Along the route safe houses were designated at regular intervals, spaced between hospitals and law-enforcement strongholds. At all times the president wore Level III flexible body armor made of synthetic fiber, fifteen hundred filaments per strand of yarn.
Evan had a backpack and a change of underwear.
If the president stayed in a hotel, the Secret Service booked the entire floor—and the floors above and below. Every room, every item in every room, and every square inch of carpet was swept and physically examined for surveillance devices, hidden explosives, and radioactivity. Multiple escape routes were charted. An elevator repairman remained on site to respond to irregularities. Every employee in the hotel received thorough vetting and background checks. Those with priors were given the day off; those without were ordered to wear color-coded pins. Food suppliers and delivery companies were checked in similar fashion. Secret Service agents stood posts in the kitchen, monitoring the chefs, sous-chefs, and waitstaff during all stages of food preparation. The agents waited until dishes were prepared and then selected plates at random for Bennett. Sporadically, the hotel kitchen was sidestepped entirely, a navy steward brought in to prepare the president’s dishes.
Evan had a Baggie of leftover pool chlorine and a half bottle of high-proof vodka.
He dove deeper into the Secret Service databases, now focusing on White House security procedures. The water-purification system was tested semimonthly, tech-security experts procuring a sample from every faucet and tap. The president had a weekly physical and bloodwork check, his robust medical file updated constantly. X-rays and MRIs could be provided on site, and peripheral health needs—optometry, pharmacy, and orthotics—were provided by specified outside contractors whose backgrounds, procedures, and operations had endured the full scrutiny of the Service. Food vendors, too, had been vetted within an inch of their lives, shipment records showing the president’s dining proclivities. Receptions and state dinners were handled by one of three caterers, able to produce two thousand pounds of shrimp, five hundred bourbon-glazed Virginia hams, and a few hundred gallons of iced tea at a few hours’ notice. Bennett’s triweekly workout sessions with a trainer in the West Wing gym dotted his schedule, along with evening swims in the pool, but a glance at the past month showed frequent cancellations. Only cleared manufacturers could provide exercise equipment and pool chemicals; only approved janitors could service the facilities. All tailoring occurred inside the White House, with the textiles, thread, buttons, and zippers given rigorous scrutiny.
Evan had a laptop and a fake ID.
He rubbed his eyes, feeling uncharacteristically overmatched. He was a guy in a hotel room contending with all the protections that the Secret Service’s $1.4 billion annual appropriation could buy Jonathan Bennett.
Evan gave himself three seconds to feel disheartened and then refocused on the databases, digging into the Service’s response tactics and capabilities.
The best bet, it seemed, was targeting Bennett in D.C. but out of the White House. Which meant a motorcade assault. Evan read some of the operational procedures for the Uniformed Division countersnipers, who were issued .300 Win Mags and Stoner SR-25s. The training regs for Special Operations’ counterassault team were even more rigorous, encompassing everything from close-quarters combat to ambush-defense tactics. CAT members operated in teams of six, a two-man element responding to the initial offensive while the others laid down heavy cover fire. They had a singular aim: suppress the attack long enough to give the president’s limo time to get away. Clad in body armor and black BDUs, they wielded SIG P229s and full-auto SR-16s and carried flashbangs and smoke grenades.
When the time came, Evan vowed, it wouldn’t be enough.
Determining that time, unfortunately, was the biggest problem of all. It was everything. Without a definitive, advance-notice When and Where, he’d never even get to the starting gate.
A knot of frustration asserted itself at the base of his throat, and he closed his eyes, breathing it away. There were promises to keep and files to read before he slept, but he had to recharge or his effectiveness would dim.
He was about to shut down the laptop when his eye snagged on a red-tagged folder at the bottom of the highest-classification directory.
It was labeled X .
He hovered the mouse over it a moment, took a breath, and then opened it.
What he saw inside made him lean forward to bring his face closer to the screen.
Photos of his former foster home in East Baltimore. Various hangars at Fort Meade. Jack’s farmhouse, the paint peeling, shingles worn through in patches. Naomi Templeton had ordered continuous sat footage on key locations in case Evan popped his head up. The file also contained a few fragments of operations past. A high-value target gone missing in Mogadishu in 1999. A questionable passport at the Al Karamah border crossing in 2005. A bloody fight on the Las Vegas Strip in 2015.
It was barely anything, but he was amazed they had assembled even that.
After another moment reviewing these fragments of his past, he powered down the laptop.
Removing everything from his backpack, he spread the few items out on the carpet and then repacked meticulously. His laptop slid into a padded pouch just beneath Peter’s gift. He stowed Wetzel’s flash drive in the back pocket. Though the intel files it held on the other Orphans were heavily redacted, they could still provide enough for Orphan A and his goons to pick up the scent. It was a sober reminder for Evan of the stakes should he fail.
Which meant failure was not an option.
He finished zipping up his belongings in the backpack. Traveling light meant he could depart on an instant’s notice without leaving a trace.
He set the backpack on the foot of the mattress and lay on top of the goose-down comforter, fully clothed, boots tightly laced. Resting his left hand on his stomach, his right on his chest, he let his mind range over the incalculable number of safeguards and contingencies the Secret Service had erected around President Bennett.
Endless impediments, endless complications.
An idea nibbled at the back of his brain, expanding until he saw, sketched in his mind’s eye, the rough outline of a plan. An insane, Hail Mary pass of a plan.
It was a start.
He mused on the impossibility of what lay before him until he fell asleep.
* * *
Sitting in the passenger seat bathed in darkness, Orphan A felt the sweat bead along his widow’s peak.
Excitement.
That’s what life had become for him now. All it held. A jungle cat’s momentary thrill when the right kind of movement flickered across its visual field.
In the other seats, he could sense Wade and Ricky Collins and their cousins displacing a large quantity of air. The van was turned off, its lights killed, the interior laden with the smell of gun oil and hardware.
“Weapons check,” Holt said.
Various clinks and metallic clanks answered him.
Ricky’s blocklike fists encircled the steering wheel. He wore a fully loaded grenade-carrier vest, camo design, over Kevlar body armor. The pockets covering the front of the vest were unsnapped, flaps raised for ready access to the safety pin rings. He looked ready for an assault on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Ricky’s brother and the five cousins had likewise gone militia chic, bedecking themselves in army-surplus offerings with fetishistic delight.
It was overboard, all right, but Holt was fine with that. They’d require overboard if they hoped to get X. Part of the Collinses’ job was to loom large anyway. Ultimately they were decoys to draw X’s attention so Holt could get the kill shot.
The hotel parking structure was dimly lit and sparsely attended, the van cloaked in shadow. Zeroing in on the Watergate had taken a hefty amount of computing power. The DoD had put Holt’s hypotheticals through their magic machine, and it had spit out a reservation.
Though only one man had checked in, there were three rooms registered under the same name.
On the part of X, this was smart business. In case he had surveillance in place, Holt and his crew would have to hit all three rooms simultaneously. Divide to conquer.
The only benefit to splitting up was that it would make them less conspicuous. They wore trench coats that fastened at the belt to cover up the gear, but still, if the sight of two Collinses drew attention, seven would elicit widespread panic. They’d break into three teams and infiltrate the hotel through different entrances. Holt would float in a central location, at the ready to respond once the firefight broke out.
Twenty minutes earlier they’d driven unnoticed into the structure and taken the only spot available on the ground floor, in the southwest corner. Unfortunately, that pinned them in, the parking-attendant booth positioned between the van and both exits.
From the shadows they watched the attendant, a heavyset Hispanic man with bulges at the back of his neck. If the guy didn’t exit the booth soon to take a bathroom break, Holt planned to call in a phony alert.
“Let’s go,” Ricky hissed through his teeth, the words riding a tobacco-scented stream.
“Sure thing,” Holt said. “We’ll just clank out of the van and file past him, all eight of us in full battle rattle.”
“We got trench coats.”
“Have you seen you motherfuckers? Police response to this location averages seven minutes. Believe me, we’re gonna need all seven. That countdown can’t start until we engage X.”
“I don’t need seven minutes to cap some bitch,” Wade said from the middle bench seat.
Holt lifted his eyes to the rearview, catching Wade’s reflection in the green glow of an exit sign. His cheeks looked raw from shaving, a few nicks at the jawline.
“This isn’t a fistfight behind a biker bar,” Holt said. “If you know that, you might have a chance.”
“A chance at what?”
“Surviving.”
The parking attendant rose from his stool, stretched, and exited the booth.
“Finally,” Ricky said.
The man looked around and then pulled a pack of American Spirits from his sagging pants and started walking.
Directly toward the van.
“Shit,” Wade said. “He’s coming over here to sneak a smoke.”
“What do we do?” Ricky racked his SIG. “Put him down?”
“It’ll be loud,” Wade said. “But worth it.”
“One in the chest, one in the head,” a cousin piped in. “Pap-pap. People’ll think it’s a car backfiring.”
Holt watched the attendant draw near. The guy had a brick-size radio clipped to his belt. One click of a button and they’d be looking at a whole new set of variables. Holt swept his gaze around the concrete structure, gauged the acoustics of a fired shot.
The attendant stopped a few yards from the van.
By unspoken accord Holt and the Collins crew stayed frozen in their seats.
The attendant tilted his head to light up, and in the flare of light, his name tag came visible: ERNESTO . He sucked in a lungful, leaned back, and dispensed a plume of smoke overhead.
In the rear row of the van, another Collins boy tightened his grip on his FN P90. He spoke quietly, a whisper through clenched teeth. “I say we kick this shit off here, go full Benghazi. Take care of business hard and then run and gun straight for the three rooms.”
In his peripheral vision, Holt noted Ricky’s hand on the door handle.
Ricky said, “We go on my three.”
Moving his hand slowly, Holt opened the glove box. Inside rested the clawhammer.
“One…”
Ernesto’s pivot felt inevitable, his gaze drawn to the pent-up energy emanating through the windshield. He looked at the van loaded with men and weaponry, his forehead furled with curiosity, not yet processing what his eyes were telling him.
“… two…”
Holt climbed out of the van and strode toward the man, spinning the hammer a half turn in his hand. Ernesto managed to say, “Hey. Um…?” before Holt clipped him beneath the chin on the rise.
When the deadweight hit the concrete floor, it sounded like a dropped sandbag.
Holt turned back to the van. “Coming?”