The Map Room earned its name during the Second World War when FDR agonized over the war’s progress within these four walls, charting his army’s headway across the Continent and a scattering of blood-drenched Pacific islands. A half century later, Bill Clinton provided closed-circuit testimony to Ken Starr from this same space, the only time a sitting president gave evidence under oath while being investigated.
The waitstaff moved silently in the background, clearing out dishes from the tea that Bennett had just completed with his press secretary and the chief of staff.
The room’s stuffed-back armchairs and Chippendale-style case goods brought an Old World luster to the White House, a sense of gravity.
Which Naomi tried to summon now, here, before the president.
She’d quietly recounted for him her investigations and what they had yielded. That the Service’s satellite feed of the Arlington farmhouse had been hijacked by the DoD and forwarded on to the Orphan whose body had been recovered at the scene. That the same Orphan appeared to have been in contact with the late Doug Wetzel. That the other three bodies had been tentatively linked to the missing impostor profiles in the databases as well as to the bloodbath at the Watergate. That the more strings she pulled, the more she seemed to find.
Bennett snapped his fingers, and the room cleared instantly. He dug in his pocket, palmed another pill into his mouth, swallowed it dry. Leaning against the rear side of a couch, he crossed his arms but couldn’t manage to keep still, instead scratching at the nape of his neck. “So that’s what you’ve been doing? Investigating me instead of the man trying to kill me?”
“The latter led to the former,” she said. “Which is why…” She took a moment to steady her voice. “Which is why I can no longer in good faith be responsible for your protection. I can’t have an instant’s hesitation about stepping between you and a bullet. Or ordering my agents to do the same.”
Bennett’s face glimmered with sweat. He bit at his lower lip, rolled it between his teeth. “But you do. Why is that?”
“I’m no longer certain that protecting you is in the best interest of the United States.”
She could feel the heat coming off him even from this distance. Waves of barely suppressed rage.
His jaw clenched. “I will wreck you. Your name will be scraped off your office door before you reach your car.”
She hoped he couldn’t read how shaken she was. Drawing an uneven breath, she started out.
She’d just reached the door when he said, “You need to be careful, Templeton. The world’s got a lot of sharp edges.”
She read the threat beneath the surface, and for an instant it scared her to the core.
Then she thought of her father’s chest rising and falling beneath the hospital gown.
She paused, looked back.
She said, “I’m not afraid of sharp edges.”
* * *
A snack waited for him back in the Oval, the silver tray bearing a Double Gloucester cheese and an aged Gouda, flown in this morning. He ate quickly, washing them down with a 1985 Richebourg Grand Cru from Cô te de Nuits, which cost slightly less than a Volkswagen.
He circled to the Resolute desk, plucking up the phone to get Director Gonzalez on the line.
That’s when it happened.
A weakness in his legs pulling him down into the chair. His temperature spiked, a film of sweat covering his flesh, making his shirt and pants cling to him. His heartbeat ramped up to a drumroll that seemed to vibrate his skin.
An awareness dawned, as certain as the walls around him. In the marrow of his bones, he knew that he was about to die.
Through his confusion and terror, he managed a single clear thought: How unjust that he was going to expire here in the safest room in the world.
He fumbled his hand up to the telephone, the black one on the left that allowed him direct access to an outside line.
With a shuddering hand, he managed to dial the familiar number.
* * *
Evan removed the bottle of Tigre Blanc from the freezer drawer, the French wheat vodka swirling inside. He loaded a cocktail shaker with ice cubes and poured in two fingers.
His RoamZone rang.
As he saw the 202 area code, he knew.
When he answered, he could hear Bennett gasping on the other end of the line.
Bennett forced out the word: “How?”
Evan set down the shaker. “Your eyeglasses,” he said. “I swapped out the nose pads and temple tips.”
The president’s schedule had shown him to be due for a prescription update. Before the limo strike, Evan broke into the designated optometrist’s office. Bennett’s glasses and supplies were stored separately under lock and key.
Not a superb lock and key.
Evan said, “The new ones were coated with a high-dose antidepressant medication administered through the skin.”
Emsam, a common med, wouldn’t show up on any poison or toxin scans—at least not on any panel used by the Technical Security Division. It was intended to be administered only once a day. But Bennett had been getting around-the-clock transdermal delivery of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
“It elicits a host of nasty interactions,” Evan said. “Headaches, agitation, nausea, tremors, rapid heart rate, heavy sweating. Which any reasonable doctor would misattribute to stress and treat with—of course—an antianxiety med. Which doubles down on the effects.”
Over the line Bennett’s breaths turned into screeches as he raked in air, trying to breathe.
“But to weaponize it,” Evan continued, “it has to be combined with specific foods. Organ meats, hard cheese, fava beans, red wine, or any other tyramine-heavy cuisine.”
That included the majority of Bennett’s favorite dishes, which he asked to have imported internationally. By throwing a scare into the Service about domestic food supply, Evan had ensured that they leaned more heavily on foreign vendors.
Everything had relied on Bennett’s being the person he was. Paranoid, manipulative, strategic, solipsistic. There’d been holes in the plan, yes. But Bennett had filled them.
Evan watched frost creep around the base of the cocktail shaker. “The combination of MAOIs and tyramine potentiate a hypertensive crisis, which leads to a heart attack,” he said. “That’s what you’re experiencing now.”
Bennett tried to say something, but all that came out was a throaty rush of air.
Evan heard the thump of a body striking the plush Oval Office rug.
He hung up.
Picking up the shaker, he rattled it until his hands stuck to the stainless steel, the chill pleasing against his still-healing palms. Then he wrapped a dish towel around it and shook it some more.
Retrieving a martini glass from the freezer, he poured the frosty vodka and garnished it with a leaf of basil from the vertical garden.
Jonathan Bennett had had the full force of the United States government behind him, the military-industrial complex, and all the alphabet-soup agencies.
Evan had Vera II and a living wall.
Bennett had boundless resources and boundless manpower.
Evan had a sixteen-year-old foster girl and a nine-fingered armorer.
Bennett had a willingness to do anything to get what he wanted.
Evan had a willingness to do what needed to be done.
And now, at the ragged end of the long road, Bennett lay sprawled on the Oval Office rug and Evan stood here, far from the corridors of power, cloaked in anonymity, protected by his very unimportance.
He had a chilled glass of high-end vodka and a piece of quiet here in his clean, well-lit place. Perhaps that was all he needed.
Perhaps it was all he deserved.
He strolled before the floor-to-ceiling Lexan windows that constituted the penthouse’s east wall. The discreet armor sunshades shielded him from sight and sniper bullets while still letting in the view through the finely woven metal links.
He looked out across Wilshire Boulevard to the glimmering rise of downtown. All those twinkling lights, so many lives in progress behind windshields and windows, people doing the best they could with their private trials and tribulations, their everyday triumphs and tragedies.
He saw his own window as if from afar, one anonymous dot among millions.
He was a part of the living hive of the city and apart from it, too. Like everyone else, he found comfort where he could. Like many others, he tried to give some comfort as well.
He took a sip of the Tigre Blanc. It had been distilled five times, getting it down to its essence. Clean nose, a touch of fruit, maybe a hint of pepper on the finish.
He closed his eyes and enjoyed the drink.
It had been a long time coming.