Evan’s penthouse condo, a seven-thousand-square-foot sprawl, was open design and coldly modern—slab counters, streamlined appliances and fixtures, workout pods sprouting like mushrooms from the poured-concrete floors. It was also a fortress protected by rigorous alarms and surveillance systems, bullet-resistant polycarbonate thermoplastic resin windows, and armored sunshades. A freestanding fireplace dotted the center of the great room, and a spiral staircase rose to a reading room that he rarely made use of.
A black suede couch and an area rug, miniaturized by the vast space, fulfilled the homey quotient.
Still disgruntled by the restaurant’s standard booze offerings, Evan breezed into the kitchen and tugged open the freezer drawer of the Sub-Zero. Lined neatly inside were a selection of exceptional vodkas. He plucked out his bottle of choice for the evening.
Fog Point was made with water harvested from San Francisco fog. To capture the Bay Area mist, mesh fog catchers designed to emulate water-capturing plants were positioned high on the hilltops around Outer Sunset and Sutro Tower. A full day’s harvest amounted to a mere few cups of the precious liquid.
Evan filled a cocktail shaker with purified ice, poured in a jigger, and shook it until his hands adhered to the metal. From the freezer’s middle shelf, he removed a stainless-steel martini glass, frosted from the chill, and poured in the mist’s newest iteration.
He sipped.
Hint of citrus. Maybe honeysuckle.
Lovely.
He circled the kitchen island to the so-called living wall, a vertical rise germinating herbs and vegetables, and snapped off a sprig of basil, which he let float among the ice crystals.
Then he washed and dried the shaker and jigger and put them away. A few drops of water remained on the counter, so he wiped them and then wiped the rest of the counter for good measure, and then he wiped it again to get rid of the wipe marks.
He told himself, “Stop.”
Padding across the great room, drink in hand, he passed between racks of kettlebells, his shoulder brushing a heavy bag.
A single hall led to the master bedroom, where his Maglev bed literally floated above the floor, repelled from it by unreasonably powerful neodymium rare-earth magnets. A cable anchored to each corner moored the bed to keep it from flying up and smashing against the ceiling.
In the en suite bathroom, a nudge of his knuckle sent the wide glass shower door rolling aside on its barn-door track, and then he stepped inside and gripped the hot-water lever.
An embedded digital sensor read the print of his curled palm and allowed him to twist the lever through the point of resistance. A hidden door, disguised seamlessly in the wall tiles of the shower, swung inward, and he entered the concealed four hundred square feet he mentally referred to as the Vault.
Part command center, part armory, the Vault was where Evan did the majority of his operational planning. The underbelly of the public stairs to the roof crowded the space in the rear, where weapon lockers stood aligned. In the center of the room, a sheet-metal desk shaped in an L supported a proliferation of computer hardware.
Right now there were no monitors in sight.
With a finger he clicked the mouse, and three of the four walls—a horseshoe wrapping the desk—shimmered to life. Over the past few weeks, he’d tiled those walls with OLED screens, made of glass embedded with mesh so fine it was undetectable to the bare eye. When not engaged, the screens shut off, transforming into invisible panes.
With everything up and running now, the Vault came alive with color and movement. One screen rotated through pirated feeds of Castle Heights’ surveillance cameras, showing angles of hallways, the lobby, and surrounding streets.
The other mounted screens hosted a profusion of evidence pertaining to Evan’s 1997 mission. Operational details, archived newspapers from the era and region, maps detailing every location he’d visited as a nineteen-year-old formulating his first hit. There were compiled records on the targeted foreign minister, his wife, the generals who had occupied the vehicle with him that day. The round man who’d supplied the steel shell casing with the fingerprint, the Estonian arms dealer, the heroin addict tucked in the shabby office of the abandoned textile factory who had overdosed in early 1998—each had a painstakingly assembled dossier as well.
Evan had resurrected every last thread of evidence as he conducted his own postmortem, but nothing he turned up showed the assassination to be anything but a standard kill.
Not one piece of intelligence had produced a worthwhile lead.
A flowchart of Jonathan Bennett’s career through 1997 dominated the right wall—every known post, every documented trip and meeting, every on-the-record colleague and contact.
All dead ends.
Evan still had no idea why his first mission was so important to Bennett and why it was so threatening that Evan had to be neutralized for the role he’d played in it.
What—all these years later—was he still not seeing?
If the right wall was an attempt to diagnose the past, the left wall diagrammed the future. It was a living tableau, aggregating data that would aid in the assassination of the president.
Evan immediately noticed a number of changes on the left wall since his latest excursion to D.C.
The White House’s Web site had taken the president’s public schedule offline. No information available at this time.
Evan looked down at the pinecone-shaped aloe vera plant nestled in a glass bowl filled with cobalt glass pebbles. “Okay, lady,” he told her. “It’s all up to you and me now.”
Aside from the living wall, Vera II was the only other living organism of note in the penthouse. He watered her by slipping an ice cube between her serrated spikes once a week, which was all the caretaking she required and all the caretaking he was capable of.
He returned his focus to the screens. Mentions of the president’s movements from other credible Web sites showed his agenda in sudden motion, fund-raising events sliding around, speeches put on hold, ceremonial events delayed until further notice. Bennett wasn’t holing up, but the Secret Service was smart enough to obscure his comings and goings so as to give little advance notice of his itinerary to Orphan X.
The president had no unavoidable, predetermined appearances scheduled in the upcoming months, such as an address to the UN or a G8 summit. The State of the Union, another palatable opportunity, wasn’t until January.
A media feed showed the usual screaming headlines—an arms deal with Syrian rebels gone to shit, Bennett resisting pressure to testify before Congress, gerrymandering resolutions sneaking their way onto ballots before the midterms.
Evan sank into his chair and took another sip of the Fog Point. Definitely a trace of honeysuckle.
He refocused on the task before him.
The Stingray he’d used to such fine effect last night now rested on the sheet-metal desk, downloading data and encryption keys into an out-of-the-package Boeing Black smartphone he planned to use as a mirror for the one belonging to Special Agent in Charge Naomi Templeton.
He’d already transferred the data onto his hard drive and spread it around the OLED screens facing the desk. A GPS dot showed a nice, strong signal from her apartment.
He remotely activated the microphone on her smartphone, picking up the noise in the room.
A doorbell.
A barking dog.
And then Naomi’s voice. “Hush, Fenway. Hush.”
There was some rustling, perhaps as she moved away. Then her words came again, less clearly. “Hey, thanks for stopping by. I wanted to see, you know … any chemistry.” Sounds of movement, and then she said, “He likes you.”
The next exchange was obscured. When Evan could again hear Naomi’s voice, she was saying, “—so it’s forty bucks to walk him, fifty-five to drive him over to visit my dad during the day, and a hundred for a hike and a grooming, yeah?”
A low-pitched man’s voice murmured something Evan couldn’t make out. He switched his focus to Naomi’s calendar, notes, and e-mails, also up on display. An algorithmic software program scrolled through her information, grabbing data indicative of future movements.
Lots of meetings at headquarters, interagency consultations, countless visits to her father’s facility. No social plans. No documentation of specific movements with or regarding the president.
Any information concerning Bennett was wisely kept off a phone that could be misplaced or stolen.
“Okay,” Naomi’s voice cut in again. “So he needs a walk every day? I don’t know all this stuff yet. He’s my dad’s dog, and I’m … I’m sorta still catching up to all this.” More masculine mumbling, and then Naomi said, sharply, “No, I don’t want to get rid of the dog. My dad likes seeing him. Christ, Fenway’s the only thing that makes him happy.”
On the screens Evan brought forward another window. Before he’d left for dinner, he’d deployed Hashkiller’s 131-billion-password dictionary on every last piece of encryption on Naomi’s phone, hoping to grind through a portal and bust onto the Secret Service’s private secure network.
On the activated microphone, he heard a door close, and then Naomi said, “Maybe I should give you away, you mongrel.” A scrabbling of paws answered her. “How am I supposed to take care of you in the middle of all this?” More footsteps, more scrabbling paws. “Dad would know exactly how to help me, but he’s not really Dad anymore, you know?”
Evan heard the puff of a deflating cushion—Naomi had plopped onto a couch?—and then another, louder plop as the dog presumably landed beside her.
Naomi sighed. “Looks like it’s up to you and me, Fenway.”
Evan glanced at Vera II and pictured Naomi a dozen states away conferring with her own loyal adviser, plotting to catch Evan just as he was plotting to evade her.
On the mounted screen, Hashkiller continued to make superb progress on Naomi’s applications and log-ins, but Evan watched with rising pessimism as gateway after gateway led nowhere he wanted to be. Despite all his machinations, he’d hit a hard roadblock and had to figure out how to get around it to the useful data, the data hiding safely on the Secret Service’s secured network. Those databases would hold a treasure trove of information on everything from Bennett’s contingency motorcade routes to which company supplied chemicals to the White House dry cleaner.
Unfortunately, the network—and all the computers on it—looked to be air-gapped, unhooked from the Internet and any external devices.
Evan’s middling hacker skills couldn’t get him in.
He knew only one person good enough for the job.
Perhaps it was time to pay her a visit.
He’d just started researching tickets to Milan-Malpensa Airport when his line rang. Not the RoamZone. His home line.
He’d forgotten what it sounded like.
He jogged out of the Vault and all the way to the kitchen, picking up on the fifth ring.
It was Mia.
She was screaming.