The air in the Oval Office tasted of velvet. Perhaps it was the purity afforded by the filters, or perhaps it was just the flavor of the rich furnishings, of history itself. Naomi never got used to it. She’d been in here three previous times with her father, all when she was small enough that he’d carried her in.
This was the first time she was here under her own power.
As she entered, President Bennett waited on one of the couches, his legs crossed. His eyes moved, but the rest of him didn’t, a haunted-house-portrait effect. They tracked her progress in.
“Mr. President.”
The rest of him animated. Slightly. “Agent Templeton.”
Somewhere behind Naomi, she heard the assistant secretary withdraw, the panel door suctioning shut, locking them in with an emphasis that called to mind the securing of an airplane cabin. The air hummed with silence, a vacuum-sealed effect.
His wire-frame eyeglasses conveyed a certain loftiness while adding a protective layer between himself and the world, augmenting his inscrutability.
“Why don’t you sit,” he said.
Not a question.
She looked at the scattering of chairs and couches, realized that choosing her spot was a test of sorts. She took the couch directly opposite him, an assertive selection. Then she made full eye contact, though it was uncomfortable. He’d left the curtains at his back precisely parted to throw a slice of light into her face if she picked that seat.
He said, “I heard you’re not acceding to my wishes.”
“With all due respect, Mr. President—”
“Is that phrase ever followed with due respect, Templeton?”
She pursed her lips. Recalled what her father used to say: Ultimately a Secret Service agent is a babysitter. He just happens to be babysitting the most powerful person in the world.
A memory flash kicked her in the gut—her father standing right there backlit on the carpet, broad-shouldered and stolid, and her reaching up to hold his hand.
Two hours ago, when she’d left him at the hospital, he’d been asleep, a bony fist clutching the top of the blankets, the downward slash of his mouth gapped with exhaustion.
She gathered herself, squared her own shoulders now. “Okay, Mr. President. Shall we get straight to it, then?”
“I’d appreciate that. I’m told my time is valuable.”
She cleared her throat and smoothed down the fabric of her pant leg, immediately annoyed at this release of nervous energy, especially given Bennett’s motionless perch on the couch. He radiated latent power and menace, a coiled snake.
“My job isn’t to accede to your wishes,” she said. “It’s to keep you safe. If you interfere with my investigation, I can’t do that. I’d rather have you displeased with me and alive than happy and dead.”
He studied her for a moment. Then he smiled faintly. After the stone-faced commencement of their conversation, it felt like a full-body hug. She realized that this was a practiced technique, that he was conditioning her to react favorably to minor displays of reinforcement. She was a rat, and he controlled the rewards she’d receive if she pawed the right levers.
“My shit,” President Bennett said.
Her throat had gone dry, but she resisted clearing it. “Excuse me?”
“When I travel abroad, a special portable toilet is flown with me. My feces and urine are captured and flown back to be disposed of here.”
He was studying her closely, gauging her reaction to the unusual tack. This was also a test—with Bennett everything was a test—and her reaction would determine her fate.
She went for unflappable. “And?”
“Do you know why that is?”
At last familiar ground. Presidential shit-management tales were among her dad’s favorite anecdotes.
“So foreign intelligence can’t capture it in specimen canisters and have it analyzed to determine what medical conditions you might have,” she said, striking a tone that bordered on disinterested. “We did it to Gorbachev in the late eighties. The Mossad did it to President Assad when he traveled to Jordan for King Hussein’s funeral.”
The president leaned forward on the couch, the slight movement as impactful as if he’d leapt to his feet. “My waste is a national-security issue. I was the undersecretary of defense for policy at the DoD for two administrations and the secretary for a third. I’ve sat behind the Resolute desk”—at this a hand flicked to indicate the wooden behemoth pinning down the oval carpet—“for five years now. Do you really think I need you to explain my own safety to me?”
Naomi said, “Evidently.”
It was a big gamble, and during the ensuing silence she envisioned herself clearing out her desk at headquarters, working security for a jewelry shop in Falls Church.
He absorbed this without reaction. When it was clear that no response was forthcoming, she said, “Your job is to run the world. My job is to cover your blind spots in one specific arena. That’s all I do and all I’m here for. Will you let me do that for you?”
His snake eyes glittered, flat and impenetrable. He was still sizing her up, determining whether she was an asset or something worth eating.
“You catch a lot of flak being a female agent?” he asked.
“My SIG P229 shoots the same regardless of my anatomy.”
“That sounds like a well-rehearsed line.”
“It’s a tired question, Mr. President,” she said, then added, “with all due respect.”
A hint of a smile teased the corners of his mouth but faded before it could get up steam. “Let’s try this one, then. You catch a lot of flak for your last name?”
She hesitated, saw that he saw it. It was like opening a tiny window into her soul. She packed down her regret, slammed the window shut. But it was too late. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Okay. Then let me ask you the generic question you’ve been answering since you stepped off the graduation dais at FLETC. Would you take a bullet?” His index finger jabbed into his chest, left side, slightly off the midline. “For me?”
“That’s not my job,” she said. “My job is to keep that bullet from ever being fired. If it comes down to me having to play target dummy, I’ve already failed”—she caught herself—“Mr. President.”
He must have been breathing, though she could discern no rise and fall of his chest, no flare of his nostrils, no parting of his lips. Just the stare.
The discomfort of waiting grew until it became physical, expanding in her torso. She went on offense. “You mentioned that your time was valuable,” she said. “I’m gonna take you at your word. Which means I’d like to discuss the investigation.”
No nod, which she took as an invitation to continue.
“Everything about what we uncovered in that apartment is concerning to me,” she said. “Not just the extent of the planning but the presentation of specifics. I believe your would-be assassin was speaking to you. And I believe you received the message.”
Something shifted in Bennett’s expression, a loosening of the mask, and she saw that her words had turned a key in him. His locked-down posture eased, finally allowing a bit of slack in his muscles. He gave a faint nod.
She was in.
“My job is to cover every contingency,” she began.
“You can’t cover every contingency. Not against him.”
She paused. “Do you know who the suspect is?”
“No one does. Not really.”
She wasn’t entirely certain what to make of that. “There was a run-in with an unidentified individual in a café minutes after the threat was spotted. His face was blocked by a hat in all CCTV footage, but we’re looking to see if any of the mikes picked up audio. If so, we can match his recorded voice with those from threat calls we have in the database.”
“I read the report,” Bennett said. “It was him. He won’t have spoken in range of the surveillance units. And he won’t be in the databases.”
She regrouped. “The letters he wrote over the faces in the photographs. We can analyze the handwriting and backtrace the ink. We’ve got just shy of ten thousand ink samples in the International Ink Library, and a lot of manufacturers are adding invisible tags to help us—”
“Handwriting analysis will give you nothing. And the ink won’t be traceable.”
“Okay,” she said, a touch of frustration leaking into her voice. “Then we can start with the records we already have. You know the formula. Does he have a prior history of mental illness? Has he had military training? Does he have the capability to execute a plan? Exactly how serious is the threat?”
“No. Extensive. Yes. Gravely.”
They stared at each other.
The panel door swung inward, and the assistant secretary stuck her head into the room. Without moving, Bennett said, “Not now,” and she withdrew.
Naomi pursed her lips. “The team is reviewing the squeal sheets and pulling Class 3 threats from records going back—”
“Don’t bother.”
“We have twenty-five hundred working investigations—”
“Drop all of them,” Bennett said.
He was staring through the windows in the direction of the Rose Garden, but his eyes were unfocused.
“Mr. President?”
He swung his gaze back to her.
“What the hell is going on?”
He smiled now, an actual smile. “It seems as though we’re talking. But that’s not what’s really been happening.”
“No? Then what has been happening?”
“I’m deciding.” That stare, direct and unremitting.
She weathered it, gave him back the kind of loaded silence he was so skilled at deploying.
“You’re now in charge,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Everything,” he said. “At least everything that pertains to this case. Which means, from my perspective, everything.”
“I have a deputy assistant director who’s running point,” Naomi said. “And Director Gonzalez—”
“That’s no longer relevant. You will have the full resources of the Service at your disposal. You will focus exclusively on this investigation.” He paused for two seconds, an effective emphasis. “Be advised, what I am about to tell you is classified, not just at the highest level but at a level you aren’t even aware of. Understand?”
The question hung there, a threat. She held his gaze. “Yes. I understand.”
He rose, circled the couch, and rested his hands on the back, looking across at her. “The man trying to kill me is a U.S.-trained black operative who has gone rogue. Code name: Orphan X.”
Naomi suddenly became aware of the chilled air in the room, a tightening of the skin at her nape. “I thought…” She cleared her throat. “I thought that program was apocryphal. Conspiracy-theory stuff.”
Bennett said, “No.”
“The photographs—”
“Former Orphans, also rogue. Now eliminated.”
“And what information do you have on … Orphan X?”
It felt odd, saying the name as if it were something real.
“About as much as I just gave you,” Bennett said. “We are dealing with a specter.”
“Then until I can get a handle on this investigation, we have to dial back your public exposure.”
“That can’t happen. These are critical months, ramping up for the midterms. Speeches and fund-raisers. I have a party to feed. Plus, I’ve been besieged by claims of obfuscation. So the optics, as the pundits like to say, must show me in contact with the populace.”
“Okay. We can hold the events, but we’re gonna have to shuffle your schedule around and make additional game-day adjustments to throw Orphan X off.”
Bennett gave a slight nod.
“If you insist on working the rope lines, you can only interact with smaller groups of prescreened people. We’ll add another layer to checking media credentials so he can’t infiltrate the press corps. Any events you do, no matter the size, every last attendee goes through magnetometers.”
Bennett’s mouth downturned faintly, just shy of a grimace. “That’ll make fund-raisers trying.”
“A lot less trying than getting shot.”
“I’m running a keep-control-of-both-houses campaign.”
“And I’m running a keep-you-alive campaign.”
He came around the couch, offered his hand to indicate that the meeting was ending. “You don’t relent, do you?”
“No, Mr. President.”
His grasp was cool, firm, and dry.
“One more thing,” she said.
He halted, his loafers silent on the monochromatic oval carpet. The Presidential Seal was rendered in bas-relief, the eagle and stars sculpted into the pile itself.
She said, “If I’m going to protect you from a threat of this magnitude, I need you to share all relevant information with me.”
“You have my word that I’ll keep you apprised of everything that pertains to this matter. In return I expect that anything that comes up in the course of your investigation is brought immediately to me.”
“Yes, Mr. President.” She exited into the secretary’s office.
Bennett enjoyed the empty room for a moment. A moment of solitude was generally all he got at a time.
Sure enough, another door opened and Doug Wetzel stepped through. “What’d you decide?”
Bennett said, “I trust her enough to let her run things from the Service side.”
“She skates by on her old man’s name.”
“Don’t make that mistake. She’s highly competent.”
“I haven’t had time to get full background on her yet,” Wetzel said. “How do you know?”
“Because that’s what I do.” Bennett paused to assess the displeasure emanating off his deputy chief of staff. “We’re not going to rely on her solely,” Bennett said. “She can’t play offense against a threat like this. Neither she nor the whole goddamned Secret Service has the skills or the capabilities. If we want to get Orphan X, we can’t rely on official channels.”
Wetzel leaned against the desk, scratched at his beard. “So what do we do, then?”
Bennett said, “Release him.”
“Who?”
Bennett just looked at him. Watched his Adam’s apple bob, a particularly evident swallow.
Wetzel’s voice, hoarse with apprehension: “Right away, Mr. President.”
He withdrew.
Before summoning his next meeting, Bennett took a deep breath and exhaled. The more lines he crossed, he’d discovered, the more he found necessary to cross. But this one in particular merited a respectful pause.
Once you unleashed hell, it was goddamned hard getting it back on the leash again.