“I do.”
“Thank you, Agent Templeton.”
He waited for her to exit.
The questions surrounding Wetzel’s death could be deflected, yes, but Bennett was already taking incoming fire from enough fronts that his presidency was nearing a crisis point.
Crisis management, he’d learned, generally balanced on getting others to focus on a different crisis, one of his choosing. Bait and switch, sleight of hand, a gentle tap to send the news cycle into a different spin.
Phones were omnipresent at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, always within arm’s reach. He leaned for the nearest table and dialed the assistant secretary.
Two minutes and thirty seconds later, Eva Wong appeared, pad and pen in hand, her razor-straight bangs cut high on her forehead. “Mr. President.”
“Tell the congressional committee that I will be happy to appear next week—voluntarily. There is no need for a subpoena, and there is not to be a subpoena or I will stonewall them for the next three and a half years. When’s the press briefing announcing Doug’s death?”
She fumbled through her stack to check. “We have it at ten A.M.”
“Hold another in the late afternoon regarding my cooperation with the committee. We need voters to know how obliging and transparent I am. That I’m eager to help them get to the bottom of this and to set the record straight. That there’s no smoking gun here.”
She was scribbling notes furiously. “Mr. President, given the timing, a hearing could be—”
“Eva, I have the vice chair and five of nine committee members in my pocket. It’s a dog and pony.”
He watched her attempt to digest this.
“But the vice president said—”
“What Victoria doesn’t understand is that I’ve also been busy these past seventy-two hours.”
He stood to convey that Wong was dismissed. Still jotting notes, she took a few backward steps toward the door. “Sorry,” she said. “Just trying to keep up.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, bestowing upon her a rare smile. “You’ll figure out how this works soon enough.”
37
My Business
Crouching outside the 24 Hour Fitness at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Evan unscrewed the impostor outlet he’d installed three days prior. Though he’d flown a circuitous route home, he’d driven here straight from the airport in the inconspicuous Ford Taurus he used as one of his many backup vehicles.
He popped off the outlet’s cover plate to access the microSD slot. After withdrawing the card, he sat on a metal bench by the elevator and accessed the footage on his laptop. He played it on 5x fast-forward, slowing down to look at particularly hulking men, of which there were quite a few. He focused on patrons only as they exited the gym, since that provided the best view of their forearms.
He was looking for those half-skull tattoos that Trevon had described.
It took him three-quarters of an hour to get a hit. A man pushed out through the gym’s glass front doors wearing a deep-collar tank top torn down the sides to show off bulging lats. The shoulder straps were thin, stretched up over his traps, giving the shirt an oddly feminine vibe, like a bikini top designed to expose maximum flesh.
As the man lowered his arms and headed for the elevator, walking directly toward the hidden lens, the half-skull tattoos came clear.
Evan rewound until he spotted the man on his way into the gym and then checked the time stamp of his arrivaclass="underline" 3:57 P.M.
On a hunch he zipped the footage forward to 3:50 the next afternoon. Sure enough, at 3:59 the same man appeared.
You don’t build muscle like that without committing to a routine.
Evan pulled out his RoamZone and called Trevon Gaines.
He answered right away. “Hello?”
“Trevon. It’s me. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay, thank you. How are you?”
Goal for the Day #3: Ask a personal question when someone asks you one.
“No,” Evan said. “I actually mean how are you doing?”
“Oh. I’m awful. They made me take bereavement leave from work, but I don’t like … um, I don’t like when I can’t go to work. And now I’m just sitting here at home trying not to think certain thoughts in my head. And I didn’t get to fill out my shift reports and they’re just sitting there at work all not-filled-out and we always do our job and do it well, but they won’t let me come back for two whole weeks.”
“Did the cops talk to you?”
“Yeah. I did like you said. I didn’t even have to act.”
“Okay. I’m going to text you a picture of a man.” Evan took a screen shot of the man and sent it. Over the line he heard the ding of the arriving text. “I want you to tell me if he’s Muscley One.”
“I don’t … I don’t want to look.”
“Trevon. I need you to look.”
“I’m too scared.”
Evan took a breath, held it. “We don’t cry and we don’t feel sorry for ourself.”
He could hear Trevon breathing across the receiver. Then some rustling came over the line. “That’s—” His voice cracked. “That’s him.”
His terror was undeniable. What did it feel like to behold the face of a man who’d slaughtered every single person you cared about?
“Thank you, Trevon.”
“What are you gonna do to him?”
“You don’t want to know that.”
Trevon said, “Okay.”
Evan cut the connection.
It was a bit past two o’clock now, which gave him some time before Muscley One appeared.
At an athletics shop downstairs, Evan bought some workout gear. He went out to his car and changed.
In the privacy of the driver’s seat, he took stock of his injuries. His cheek stung beneath his left eye, where he’d picked out a half dozen splinters that had embedded themselves there when he’d blasted through the floor of the Watergate room. The superficial cuts on his elbows had mostly healed, but one laceration hurt every time he bent his arm. He made a mental note to dig in it more later in case he’d missed a sliver of glass. After the firefight, he’d detoured on his way out of D.C., executing a break-in at a key location. He was getting his pieces into position on the chessboard, one painstaking move at a time.
Refocusing, he fished in his backpack and came out with a metal case the size of a deck of playing cards. Inside were two dozen ovals of silicon composite film, each vacuum-sealed inside a glass tab that resembled a microscope slide.
The fingerprint adhesives.
He removed one.
He caught himself rubbing his eyes and realized how exhausted he was. Setting his internal alarm, he napped deeply for an hour and fifteen minutes and awoke refreshed.
Leaving the ARES 1911 behind in the glove box, he rode the escalators back up and picked the lock of a service door on the gym’s lower level. Coming up the stairs, he pretended to stretch on the mats behind the check-in desk, giving him a clear view of the elevators through the glass front doors.
3:50.
Customers trickled in at intervals, pressing their index fingers to the print reader on the front counter. When the sensor blinked green, they passed inside.
After an eight-minute wait, the elevator doors parted, revealing Muscley One.
Evan walked briskly to the check-in desk. “Hey, man,” he said to the sales associate. “Someone just puked in the Jacuzzi in the locker room. It’s a mess, and it looks like a fight might break out.”
“Shit.” The guy snatched up the phone, his voice issuing over the PA system. “All personnel to the locker room.”
He hung up and hustled to the back.
Alone at the check-in counter, Evan pulled the glass slide from where he’d tucked it into his waistband. He cracked the seal, carefully removed the transparent fifty-micron film, and laid it across the fingerprint reader. Once exposed to air, the adhesive acted like candle wax; it had a thirty-second window to receive an impression before it hardened.