To dive into that not-world and live there instead of inside a life of death and decay, of assassins probing for weaknesses and early-onset diseases that ravaged body and mind.
She wondered how it would have been to live back when there were real men like her father was, or like he used to be, real men who took care of themselves and took care of others and, yes — took care of the women in their lives, too.
What would it be like to have that comfort? To live in a real house with someone else instead of in a walk-up with a hand-me-down bed and an IKEA bookcase with lots of little-used consonants, named after a meatball.
A gravelly voice cut through her thoughts. “Visiting your mother or your father?”
She lifted her head. An ancient gentleman, back domed like a turtle shell, had perched on the chair beside her. An oxygen tube fed his nose.
“My dad.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you. Me, too.” She took a breath. “He’s not … He can’t tell what’s going on anymore. Which I guess is ironic. He used to see every angle, everything coming down the pipeline. But he never could see what was right in front of him.”
Only in hindsight did she register her words as self-pitying.
The man gave a sage nod. “It’s funny how it goes.”
They weathered a momentary silence that was neither comfortable nor awkward. He fingered the oxygen tube, caught her watching his pruned fingers.
“When you’re a kid,” he said, “time lasts forever. You’re immortal. When your grandparents die, it’s not real. Not yet. Then your parents go, and … well, it’s like there’s no more insurance. You’re next in line. You’re that guy!” He laughed. “The last one standing. The one everyone wants to make sure to see at Christmas, because you never know. You never know. I can see them grieving me even while I’m still here. And there’s a comfort in that. A love. So maybe that’s what you’re giving your father by being here. Even if he doesn’t know it in his brain, he knows it in his cells.”
Her throat was dry, and her eyes burned. She folded her hands, staring down at the ridgeline of her knuckles.
The man said, “What?”
She cleared her throat. “The mourning, it sucks, yeah, but no one tells you…”
He kept his gaze steady on her.
She forced out the words. “No one tells you how hard it is not to get resentful.”
“Accept it,” he said. “If you accept life, you accept all its rich, awful complexities. Because if you think about it, what’s the alternative?”
She thought of pork-belly sliders and dude-bros thumbing their phones over dinner and the sweet bullshit promise of demo-targeted advertising.
She took the man’s hand, skin draped over bone. “Thank you.”
In her pocket her Boeing Black phone dinged with a text. Then another. A third and fourth on its heels.
And then it started ringing.
Alarm asserted itself in her chest as she stood and fished the phone from her pocket. “Sir, will you please tell Amanaki to keep the dog for me?”
She didn’t make out his reply.
She was already reading the screen, running for the door.
33
Big, Boomy Reds
Doug Wetzel stumbled up to the northwest gate of the White House, his face so ruddy and flushed it looked almost rubbery. As he reached the guardhouse, he thumbed the white button on the intercom and announced himself in a shaky voice.
The front gate rolled open.
He stepped into the embrace of the sally-port pen, credentials held aloft in a trembling hand.
Before he could approach the slot in the bulletproof glass, one of the Uniformed Division officers keyed to him, the voice made tinny by the speaker box. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
Wetzel broke, sobbing openly, saliva gumming at the corners of his mouth.
He tilted back his head, the well-trimmed beard lifting to show what had been secured around his neck.
A bomb collar made of tubular nylon.
“Hands! Hands! Don’t move! Don’t move!”
An emergency-response team materialized instantly out of the night fog.
As Wetzel spread his arms, his jacket pulled open and the duct tape ringed around his torso came visible, securing not explosive charges but manila files from his own briefcase.
A photograph pinned to his hated tie showed a federal prosecutor lying in a pool of her own blood in her foyer.
“Please God,” Wetzel said. “Can anyone help me?”
President Bennett tipped back his big-bowled sommelier’s glass and took a considered sip of Château Lafite Rothschild. He liked big, boomy reds — deep-throated burgundies and earthy bordeaux.
He enjoyed the moment of glorious aloneness in the West Sitting Hall, elaborate chandelier dimmed, the famous half-moon window an elegant portal to the night sky.
He had a full day tomorrow. Morning briefing, fifty-five minutes of world-leader calls, physician check-in regarding A-fib and blood draw, eye and vision examination if time permitted, bipartisan delegation for a foreign-policy meeting, tailor measurements for a new rack of suits, speechwriter meeting in the Oval, lunch with senior advisers, drop-by of counsel’s office staff meeting, informal powwow with the secretary of state, a thrice-delayed photo with the NCAA Championship Wolverines, a Situation Room briefing, the daily wrap-up with the chief of staff, and then maybe — in the brief window between when Europe went to sleep and before the East woke up — a swim in Jerry Ford’s pool.
The footsteps against the plush carpet were soft and soothing, but they portended bad news.
His assistant secretary moved toward him, lipsticked mouth trembling against her porcelain skin.
He set down his wineglass and stood.
The president assembled with a few staff members in the West Wing Situation Room, where he watched a live feed of the bunker where Doug Wetzel had been secured.
Wetzel stood alone, stark against the concrete walls, broad shoulders hunched. Though he’d run out of tears, he was keening hoarsely.
The emergency-response team had acted quickly to contain the problem. Keeping a safe standoff distance from Wetzel, they’d steered him away from any public sight lines, marching him across the North Lawn. He’d kept twenty paces ahead of them, arms held wide, a prisoner walking to his execution. Following their shouted commands, he’d locked himself in a bomb-shelter room in the rear of the bunker, two blast layers removed from the world.
Over the high-def feed, Bennett could hear the ERT leader’s voice through the door: Take off your jacket!
Wetzel squirmed out of the jacket, let it fall to the floor.
Arms wide! Raise your chin!
Wetzel complied, giving a good view of the files strapped to his body and the collar tight against his neck.
Bennett spoke into the starfish-shaped speakerphone unit. “Doug. Calm down. Catch your breath.”
Wetzel was hyperventilating, chest seizing, head jittering. “… trying.”
“What does Orphan X want?”
Wetzel said something, the words blurred over a sob.
Bennett stood and neared the large screen, confronting Wetzel’s life-size image. It was just like standing in the same room with him. “What?” Bennett said. “I can’t understand you.”
Wetzel jerked in a few breaths. “… wants you … to see this.”
As the explosion came through the speakers, Bennett jolted back from the screen, banging his hip against the table’s edge.