The key card for Evan’s room read NO NEED TO BREAK IN . The hotel phone system’s internal number included 1972, a subtle nod to the infamous date. Less subtle was Nixon’s voice, squawking over the urinals in the public bathrooms.
In the last few decades, it seemed, the Watergate Hotel had gotten itself a sense of humor.
Some years back the place had been bought by a new group, overhauled, and made trendy cool. Even the staff uniforms had a retro flourish; the receptionist had breathlessly informed Evan that they’d been “envisioned” by the designer from Mad Men .
Welcome to the new world of metascandals and entertainment news.
On the ground floor, an undulating copper wall flowed into a whiskey bar with a few thousand backlit bottles precision-lined on floor-to-ceiling shelves, casting an amber glow across sleek red armchairs and young K Streeters seeking company.
Sitting at a corner table with his laptop, Evan studied the photograph of the dead woman he’d taken from the dead drop.
He’d waited for hours inside that faux air duct until the museum resumed operations and he’d been pushed out the other end by an onslaught of middle-schoolers on a field trip. Downstairs in the gift shop, he’d bought an oversize sweatshirt that read ALL IS NOT WHAT IT SEEMS , a facial-hair disguise kit, and a baseball cap stating I WAS NEVER HERE . In a bathroom stall, he applied a mustache and repositioned his backpack, wearing it in front under the roomy sweatshirt, where it bulged like a gut.
As he exited the museum, he’d thought, Thanks for the memories.
He’d gotten himself underground and onto the Metro as quickly as possible, acquiring a limp on his way. Police officers remained out in numbers, but he was just another overweight tourist shuffling by.
Once he was safely out of the city center, he’d made a stop to acquire a few items at Home Depot. The clerk had barely glanced at him as she’d rung him up, tapping the register slowly, careful not to snap her fake nails. After wondering if the consumers who’d come before him had endured the service with more patience, he’d taken his bag and waddled back to the train.
It had been a peaceful ride to Foggy Bottom.
A waiter drifted over now wearing a soul patch and a disaffected glower. Evan supposed that serving marked-up bourbon to lobbyists night in and night out might elicit a sour expression.
He placed the photograph facedown on the table. “Do you have any vodka?”
“Whiskey,” the waiter said. “It’s a whiskey bar. That’s why we’re called, like, the Next Whisky Bar.”
“I want vodka.”
“Vodka’s at the Top of the Gate bar,” the guy said. “You know, on the roof?”
Evan stared at him.
Tougher men than Soul Patch had found that intimidating.
The guy blinked twice. “What kind would you like sent down, sir?”
Evan told him.
As soon as the waiter backpedaled, Evan turned the photograph over again. He typed the address and date into Google, clicked on NEWS .
A federal prosecutor and her husband, bludgeoned to death in their own home. They’d left behind a third-grader named Zeke. No witnesses, no evidence, no motive.
Evan lifted the photograph, stared at it closely.
The woman’s long lashes were parted, her left eye undamaged. A beautiful brown iris flecked with yellow. Eyes that had looked at her husband through a wedding veil, had gazed down lovingly on a newborn.
None of that was relevant now.
The pupil was.
Enlarged from the trauma, a black orb.
A black, reflective orb.
A face image recovered from a reflection in a victim’s eye was thirty thousand times smaller than an actual face.
Thank God for computers.
Evan plugged his RoamZone into the laptop and uploaded the high-resolution photo he’d taken of the high-resolution photo.
He zoomed and depixelated, thinking that maybe Joey would be impressed with him. But probably not.
A figure came into view, the photographer standing over the corpse. Face, upper torso, camera held out to take the picture.
Fortunately, the camera blocked only part of his jaw. Evan zeroed in on the face, let the software do its work.
The eyes achieved clarity first. Then the nose. At last the mouth achieved crispness, removing all doubt.
Orphan A.
The waiter returned, and Evan lowered the screen of his laptop.
“I brought the Spirytus, sir. How would you like it served?”
The Polish-made spirit claimed the title of the world’s highest-proof vodka at 192 proof, or 96 percent alcohol content. The strongest booze on the U.S. market, it had arrived here only after Eastern European communities from Brighton Beach to Sheepshead Bay had lobbied the New York State Liquor Authority.
By comparison, rubbing alcohol came in at 91 percent.
Evan said, “I’ll take the bottle.”
* * *
In honor of the hotel’s notorious past, Evan elected to stay in Room 314.
Under the same false name, he’d booked a few other suites that could, in the event of a raid, serve the same purpose as President Bennett’s dummy limousines.
The view was spectacular. The building’s curving avant-garde architecture mirrored the flow of the Potomac, Evan’s balcony looking across the slate-blue river at Theodore Roosevelt Island. To the south he could catch the edge of the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, a blocky rise set behind a respectable fringe of greenery.
But he wasn’t focused on the view now.
He was focused on what he was mixing in the ice bucket. For an oxidizer he used pool chlorine in the form of powdered crystals. For fuel, superfine 600-mesh powdered aluminum—a common paint mixture that added surface shine.
Spirytus vodka was the last part of the explosive cocktail.
The high-proof liquor turned the concoction into a slurry, keeping the compound stable, safer to handle, less susceptible to static and percussion.
And it was good to drink.
He took another sip now, let it blaze its way down his food pipe. Even on the rocks, it was an angry beverage, a longtime favorite of Siberian pilots, which was worrying for more reasons than he cared to reflect on.
Once the slurry gooed up into formable shape, Evan packed it into a foot-and-a-half length of tubular nylon, using a wooden spoon to avoid any sparks.
He wound the nylon into a circle and left it on the table to set. The alcohol would evaporate quickly as the compound hardened, making it more sensitive. A simple electric blasting cap and a cell-phone initiator would take care of the rest. When the time came, it would be like striking a match.
But sped up ten thousand times.
Evan crossed to the balcony and stared out at the water sweeping by, a ceaseless current that stopped for nothing and no one.
He thought about a third-grader named Zeke getting pulled out of school by a social worker. What had the first few days of being orphaned been like for him? Was he racked with gut-searing grief? Or was he still lost in the concussive aftermath of shock, his mind mercifully holding reality at bay, letting it seep in a drop at a time? This would become his story now: When I was eight, my parents were murdered.
Evan went back inside to his laptop and called up his e-mail.
In the Drafts folder, he typed: “Update?”
A moment later the unsent e-mail refreshed: “still nothing. take a chill pill, mr. patience.”
Resting on the table to his right was the eight-by-ten of the bludgeoned woman. A photograph left to confirm a murder likely ordered by Bennett and augmented by Wetzel. He thought about Wetzel driving out of his condo building, coasting away in a bubble of privilege.
He typed: “What do you know about the Tesla S?”
A moment later the draft e-mail updated with a single word: “Everything.”