“He wouldn’t get caught,” Bennett said. “Not by a second-rate security patrol. No—he wanted to get caught. That commercial kitchen is merely the place he chose to be seen. We’re not reading the chessboard right. We need to figure out what we aren’t looking at. The chemicals in the swimming pool? The newly tailored suits? The water supply to my shower?”
Continuing to pace, he pulled off his jacket and flipped it onto the desk, tugging at his tie. His face looked flushed, a vein bulging in his forehead. Naomi stood perfectly still between the couches, letting him revolve around her like an electron.
For the first time, it seemed he was having trouble focusing. She’d had to cover the basics with him several times.
That a security patrol had intercepted Orphan X in the commercial kitchen of the White House’s primary caterer.
That he’d left behind two pieces of fugu sushi, the white slabs of puffer fish rich with deadly tetrodotoxin.
That KAZ Sushi Bistro in Foggy Bottom had reported a burglary earlier in the night, several of the rare fish stolen before they could be expertly prepared by the chef.
That each fish contained enough toxin to kill thirty men.
That a pinhead drop of tetrodotoxin, ten thousand times more lethal than cyanide, was sufficient to paralyze the diaphragm and the intercostal muscles and halt breathing.
That there was no antidote.
That break-ins had been reported in three other kitchens and two food plants last night and early this morning, all of them on the approved-vendor list.
That the Service was unsure if more intrusions had been executed but remained as of yet undetected.
Though Bennett had refused to eat anything since the news emerged early this morning, he looked poisoned now, with his red face, agitated gestures, and patch of flesh twitching beneath his eye. He was under tremendous stress and holding up relatively well, but even so she found the unraveling of his famously perfect composure to be sobering.
Not that she felt any better. After filing a report on Orphan X’s social call last night, she’d gone straight into HQ. Though she hadn’t repeated X’s claims of a presidential cover-up pertaining to a 1997 incident, her curiosity had been piqued. The impostor ERT agents, the tampered-with database entries, and Bennett’s increasingly erratic behavior had raised enough red flags to motivate her to undertake some reckless digging.
Orphan X had clearly stated that the matter was sufficiently explosive that Bennett would have handled it—or at least part of it—personally. Which would require off-the-books contact with an intermediary. But the president’s official movements were well known and well documented. If he beckoned someone to the White House, the name would show up in the visitor logs. Phone calls, even highly classified ones, were memorialized by date, time, and participants.
What Naomi needed to uncover were the president’s unofficial movements. Since taking office Bennett could go nowhere without Secret Service protection. From her father she knew precisely how this kind of covert outing would work. In order to identity the negative space, she had to shade in the terrain around it.
Which meant: Don’t follow the president. Follow the agents.
So, against her better judgment, in the first glow of dawn she had started digging around to find what she could about off-duty outings by the Presidential Protective Detail. From digital deep storage, she’d excavated time sheets, work logs, travel movements, and hotel and restaurant receipts and set her software running on it.
Before she could get up a head of steam, she’d been called away on the kitchen intrusion, and the day had cascaded sloppily downhill from there.
Bennett broke in on her thoughts. “How the hell does he know which vendors we’re using?”
“We’re still trying to—”
“You said you didn’t find any more traces of poison at the other locations?”
“That’s correct. Except for the two pieces of sushi he left out at—”
“Is it possible that he could be using poisons that don’t show up on initial tests but appear later?”
“I’ve been assured that’s impossible.”
Bennett’s shirt had darkened beneath the arms. His glare held no sign of the warmth from the momentary rapport they’d shared yesterday over the ugly clock. “When it comes to X, nothing is impossible.”
“We’re switching food suppliers, of course—”
“That’s what he’s anticipating.”
“It doesn’t matter. We need to get new long-term procedures in place. As one solution we’re thinking about having agents buy food off supermarket shelves at random—”
“There is no random. There are algorithms for that. Deep-learning data-mining software that can identify which supermarkets your men are most likely to choose, which ones are located along oft-driven routes of particular agents, which foods I commonly eat.”
“You think he’d risk randomly poisoning civilians?”
“You have no idea what he’d do to get me.”
Bennett circled behind his desk again, and as she turned to keep him in sight, her gaze snagged on a pill bottle on the blotter. The label showed it to be Buspar, the antianxiety med his physician had prescribed after the near miss in the limo. Before Bennett would consent to taking it, Agent Demme had overseen the testing of the pills, a five-hour affair that involved three different labs and a team of Ph.D.s.
Bennett saw that she saw the pill bottle, and something in his gaze hardened until it felt palpable, designed to impale her. He swept the bottle out of sight into a drawer.
“He showed us a hand. Not his hand. A hand. We cannot react accordingly.” He closed his eyes and pressed his palm to his forehead, as if warding off a migraine. “All this talk about tetrodotoxin’s making me nauseous.”
She checked her watch. “Agent Demme is due any minute with food that’s cleared our short-term emergency protocols.”
“What are those protocols?”
“Until we can determine precisely what Orphan X is up to, we’re shutting down all domestic food supply. We’ll feed you only from shipments that arrive via direct routes from dealers in Europe. The minute I got the call, I had our logistics team place orders in Oslo, Vienna, Paris, and Provence—”
“We have to assume he knows all our approved vendors, even international.”
“I had our team switch to unspecified vendors with zero notice when they ordered. The first shipment arrived an hour ago and has been tested comprehensively upon arrival. It’s a new system, special chemicals developed by a professor from Johns Hopkins.”
Bennett finally stopped moving. He closed his eyes and blew out a breath. “Okay,” he said. “I suppose I have to eat something. Now, where are you with my protective-detail request?”
“We’re looking at a ten-percent manpower increase.”
Her private phone vibrated in her pocket and she inched it out, subtly tilting the screen to read the incoming text from Sunrise Villa: PROBLEM WITH YOUR FATHER. PLEASE CALL IMMEDIATELY.
A familiar sense of dread coalesced in her stomach.
“Ten percent isn’t sufficient,” Bennett was saying. “Now when I step outside, I want an army of agents surrounding me.”
“We’ve already borrowed agents from field offices, which is leaving us thin—”
“How about the UN?”
She hesitated. “We have the General Assembly in Manhattan next week. That’s a hundred and thirty heads of state, most of them with spouses. It’s contingent upon us to provide a full detail. That means CAT and countersnipers—”
“Knock them down to a dot detail. A leader and two agents.”
“Mr. President, that’s just window dressing. We can’t—”
“I’m the president. That means I can. Which means we can.”
She closed her mouth, forced herself to nod.
“If you get any friction,” Bennett said, “have Director Gonzalez call me .”
She wondered at a man who would hang out UN reps with minimal protection to bolster his own already fortified defenses.
The panel door swung inward, and the assistant secretary appeared. “The vice president is on the phone.”
“Not now.” Bennett glanced at Naomi. “The only good part of this attack is that I can use it to get the vice president and Congress off my ass.”
Naomi had already seen him turn away requests from the secretary of the treasury and the ambassador to China. From what she’d gleaned, India’s prime minister was waiting in the Rose Garden.
In her pocket another text announced itself, no doubt the escalating crisis at Sunrise Villa.
“Very well, sir,” the assistant secretary said. “Also, Agent Demme is here.”
Demme appeared bearing a tray uneasily, a man unaccustomed to serving. He stood awkwardly until Bennett nodded at the round table in the corner, and then he set down the tray with a clunk.
The White House china held endives with what looked like walnuts and blue cheese, a side of pâ té with crostini, and two slices of boeuf en croute. A glass of red wine rested to the side, a thin daytime pour.
Demme gave a deferential nod and withdrew, leaving Naomi and Bennett alone with the savory scent of his lunch.
“Someone eats it before I eat it,” Bennett said. “Every single item.”
It took a moment for her to grasp his meaning.
“You don’t trust me,” she said. “The Service, the lab, the protocols.”
“This is your job,” he said. “To take a bullet. Eating pâ té ’s just a more pleasant version of that.”
She stared at him.
He crossed to the tray, used the edge of a fork to pinch a bite of each item onto a side plate.
Then he stared at her. “Eat it.”
His eyes shone behind the lenses, but whether from anger or excitement she couldn’t tell. The fact that it was a question at all, she realized, indicated that she understood him differently now.
She picked up the fork, took a bite of each item, wadding them all together in her mouth and forcing them down with one big swallow.
Bennett pointed to the wineglass, and she paused, humiliated, before taking a sip.
He studied her for a minute or two, though she wasn’t sure what he expected. Vomiting? Collapse? Hemorrhaging from the eyes?
The food sat heavily in her stomach.
After another full minute passed, he snapped out his napkin, sat, and began to dine. “There is no measure of paranoia too great when you’re dealing with Orphan X.” He paused, head downtilted, offering her a gaze through his glasses. “You still don’t understand who you’re dealing with, do you?”
She set her jaw, said, “I’m beginning to get the picture.”