“Well, aren’t you going to do something about it?”
“It should be over soon. In my experience, these things never last more than eight or nine minutes. Especially with how vigorous they are going at it. By the time I got up from my desk and walked over there-well, they’d be vaping on the balcony.”
Jimmie slammed the phone down. Eight or nine minutes? The sex tape went on for a full two and a half hours. It was as long and grueling as Batman v Superman. In fact, the tape was so grim and gritty at points that some believed it had also been directed by Zack Snyder.
It had been played so many times during the jury trial that it was burned into Jimmie’s mind. Sometimes at night, when he closed his eyes, the candidate’s smarmy visage slithered across his field of vision. In night-vision green, which impossibly made him look even creepier. To this day, Jimmie couldn’t hear Pitbull’s “Timber” without thinking of the rattling venetian blinds, Cruz’s saggy pecs, and the squeaking.
Dear God, the squeaking.
It wasn’t surprising somebody was watching it in the next room. The video had spread far and wide after he’d posted it in full on the Daily Blabber. Once a sex tape gets out, there’s no putting that genie back into the bottle of lube. Everyone and their mother had seen it; some people had probably watched it with their mothers. Jimmie wasn’t one to judge.
What bothered him, however, was that whoever was on the other side of the wall had started playing it just as he arrived home for the day. Was somebody taunting him?
There was something else nagging him, too. It took him a few more minutes to figure it out. When he did, it was as obvious as Jimmie’s day had been long: The knocking of the headboard against the wall didn’t have the regular ebb and flow of a couple making whoopee. It came and went in odd fits:
BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.
BUMP-BUMP.
BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.
It reminded him of the rhythmic code used by the human traffickers in California, the ones he’d been embedded with. They’d used it over the phone, though, and not through a wall. Was someone tapping out a message?
Listen to yourself, Jimmie, he thought. Only in Washington for a week, and already you’re seeing conspiracies. Get your head checked, or get out of town.
That was one thought-that was what he wanted to think. But what he wanted to be true and what was true were probably two very different things. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory if it checked out; it was just a conspiracy.
BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP.
BUMP.
BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-
Jimmie searched for a pen and paper. Inside the bedside drawer, he found a Royal Linoleum Hotel ballpoint pen. No paper-the closest he could find was a Gideon Bible.
He opened it to the title page and began recording the knocking on the wall as hash marks.
After he’d filled two pages of the Bible, a pattern emerged. He’d recorded the same message twice now. Whoever was over there was going to keep banging it out (pun intended), but he had enough to go on now.
It was definitely the same code used by the smugglers: Morris code. It had been invented by some woman named Katie Morris, who felt that Morse code was too complicated. (Jimmie happened to agree with her.) The idea was simple: The number of taps between each pause corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. One tap for A, two for B, and so on. He translated the message as:
MEETMEINCLINTONPLAZAATMIDNIGHTTELLNOONELEAVEYOURPHONEBEHINDYOURLIFEISINDANGER
Which could be parsed as:
MEET ME IN CLINTON PLAZA AT MIDNIGHT. TELL NO ONE. LEAVE YOUR PHONE BEHIND. YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER.
Jimmie had plenty of questions. Meet where in Clinton Plaza? How would he recognize who he was supposed to be meeting? Why not pick a meeting place without a Z in its name? (Those twenty-six taps had taken forever.) For that matter, why not cut a few words out of that message? It was quarter past ten already. Had this guy never sent a code before? And if Jimmie’s life were truly in danger, why not just tell him face-to-face right now? They were just some cheap wood and insulation apart. Why meet clandestinely in a park at the witching hour?
Jimmie rapped on the wall with knuckles to begin his own Morris code message. Before he got to his third rap, the television went silent. Jimmie heard the door open and close. There were footsteps on the stairs. His neighbor was on the run.
Jimmie rushed onto the outdoor balcony that connected the hotel rooms. He leaned over the second-floor railing. He couldn’t see anybody down in the parking lot. Whoever had been next door was gone. But he knew where the mysterious wallbanger would be in just a few short hours. The same place he would be: Clinton Plaza.
Chapter Fourteen
We Honor and Remember Their Sacrifice
Jimmie strolled through the park, kicking a hypodermic needle along the sidewalk like a can. Though the pathway was well lit, Clinton Plaza was still a war zone of drug users, transients, and anonymous-sex seekers. And it was all by design.
One of Trump’s earliest executive actions was to have the Federal Bureau of Land Management take over Logan Park. It had long been known as the most degenerate of public spaces in the city. Instead of cleaning it up, however, Trump simply renamed it after his Democratic rival. With the twelve-acre land under federal jurisdiction, local authorities stopped patrolling it at night. Trump conveniently didn’t approve funds to staff it with federal officers, and things went downhill even further. On a scale of one to ten for safety, Clinton Plaza scored just under a Trump rally.
Clinton Plaza was only a short walk from where Jimmie was staying. He arrived about fifteen minutes ahead of time. At least, that was his estimate-he’d left his government-issued phone back at the hotel. Now that he was here, though, he kind of wished he had ignored the stranger’s request to leave his phone behind. What if it was all a ruse to get him away from his room so that somebody could ransack it?
The phone was useless without his thumbprint. But there was always a chance they could lift his prints from the bottle of coconut oil beside the bed and cast a replica of his thumb, and-
Okay, now you’re moving from “conspiracy theories” into “hospitalization” territory, he told himself. All that’s missing is for you to hear voices.
As if on cue, he started hearing voices. Whispers from an element-battered tent; a hushed argument taking place somewhere deep in the woods. Closer to him, the chirping of a house finch. The same type of bird that had landed on Bernie’s podium at a Portland rally. The poor bird had become an unofficial symbol of the last of the protestors in America.
Jimmie kicked the needle into the grass and picked up his pace. He was headed nowhere in particular, but he was in a hurry to get there. Whoever wanted to meet him would find him.
He stopped at the polished granite wall in the center of the park. The structure stood ten feet tall and stretched at least fifty feet along the pathway. There were hundreds of names engraved on it. The plaque bearing the wall’s name and dedication was covered in moss. One word was visible: BENGHAZI.
So this was the Benghazi Memorial. Jimmie remembered the press conference where Trump had announced it. Speaking alongside his then wife Megyn Kelly, Trump had said, “Let us remember the sacrifices made in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s terrible, embarrassing foreign policy disasters when she was the worst secretary of state in history.”
“What a joke,” a voice said from behind Jimmie.
Jimmie glanced over his shoulder. A solidly built man clad in a gray hoodie and jeans had crept up behind him. He didn’t know if this was some random weirdo or the person who’d tapped out the code. Either way, Jimmie had to assume he was dangerous.