“Here, hold this,” Orlando says, offering me his cup of coffee so he can work on the combo lock.
“No food or drinks allowed in the SCIFs,” I remind him, refusing to take it.
“Really, are those the rules, Beecher?” he shoots back. Before I can answer, he hands Clementine his coffee cup and gives a few quick spins to the lock.
With a click and a low wunk, the door pops open like the safe that it is.
Even Orlando is careful as he cranes his neck and glances inside, just in case someone’s in there.
I do the same, already up on my tiptoes to peer over Orlando’s shoulder and make sure we’re all clear.
Clementine’s different. She doesn’t rush-she’s not overeager in the least bit-but with a quick, confident step she heads inside, totally unafraid. It’s even sexier than telling me to stare at her breasts.
“Our own little Oval Office,” Orlando adds, motioning palms-up like a flight attendant showing off the emergency rows. Yet unlike the Oval and its grand decor, the small windowless room is beige, beige, and more beige, centered around a wide oak table, a secure phone that sits on top, and two wooden library chairs.
When they first see it, most staffers blurt, “That’s it?”
Clementine circles the desk, studying each beige wall like she’s taking in a Picasso. “I like the poster,” she finally says.
Behind me, stuck to the back of the metal door, is a poster featuring a steaming hot cup of coffee and a red-lettered warning:
A lot of information can spill over one of these.
Make sure that your conversation is secure to the last drop.
Yet as I read the words, my brain backflips to-
Crap. Orlando’s coffee.
“No, not on there,” I plead with Clementine just as she’s about to take a seat and lower the open cup onto the President’s desk. If it spills…
I reach to grab it; she jerks her hand to protect it. That’s all it takes. The back of my hand brushes against the styrofoam-the cup tips-and the light brown liquid splashes across the desk, racing to Clementine’s side of the table.
A waterfall of coffee pours down, tap-dancing in a fine neat kick-line across the polished floor.
We need to get this clean before the President…
Clementine jumps back to avoid the mess, and her legs slam into her chair, sending the wooden seat toppling backward.
“Orlando, go get paper towels!” I yell, ripping off my blue lab coat to use it as a sponge.
The wooden chair hits the floor with a crack…
… followed by an odd, hollow thump.
I turn just in time to see the exposed bottom of the chair, where a square piece of wood pops out from the underside, falls to the floor-and reveals the shadow of an object hidden within.
From the table, coffee continues to drip down, slowing its kick-line across the linoleum.
My throat constricts.
And I get my first good look at what was clearly tucked inside the chair’s little hiding spot and is now sitting on the floor, right in the path of the spreading puddle of coffee. It looks like a small file folder.
“Beech?” Orlando whispers behind me.
“Yeah?”
“Please tell me you had no idea that was in there.”
“No idea. Swear to God.”
He picks up the coffee cup and takes a final swig of whatever’s left. As my magic key spot-welds to my chest, I know he’s thinking the same thing I am: If this was put here for, or even worse, by the President…
“Beech?” he repeats as the puddled coffee slowly seeps into the folder.
“Yeah?”
“We’re dead.”
“Yeah.”
4
Seventeen years ago
Sagamore, Wisconsin
Running up the snowy front path, young Clementine Kaye bounced up the wooden staircase toward the small house with the dangling green shutter. She made sure her left foot was always the first one to touch the steps. Her mom told her most people lead with their right foot. “But hear me on this, Clemmi,” Mom used to say, “what’s the fun in being most people?”
Even now, at thirteen years old, Clementine knew the answer.
Reaching the front door, she didn’t ring the doorbell that went ding, but never dong. She didn’t need to ring the doorbell.
She was prepared. She had a key and let herself inside.
As the door swung open and the whiff of rosewater perfume washed over her, she didn’t call out or ask if anybody was home. She knew no one would answer. Her mom was still traveling-three shows in St. Louis-which meant she’d be gone until next week.
Clementine didn’t even worry about getting help with homework, or what she’d eat for dinner. She’d grown accustomed to figuring things out. Plus, she knew how to cook. Maybe tonight she’d make her sausage stew.
In fact, as Clementine twisted out of her winter coat and let it drop to the linoleum floor, where it deflated and sagged like a body with no bones, she was all smiles. Giving quick chin-tickles to two of the three ginger cats her mom had brought back from various trips, Clementine was still moving quickly as she burst into the overcluttered living room, turned on the CD player that teetered so precariously off the edge of the bookshelf, and inserted the disc labeled Penny Maxwell’s Greatest Hits.
Penny wasn’t just Clementine’s favorite singer. Penny was Clementine’s mother-who still had nearly three hundred copies of her Greatest Hits CD stacked in the closets, under the bed, and in the trunk and backseat of the car. It was yet another of Mom’s brainstorms that brought more storm than brain. (“If you do a Greatest Hits first, it’ll sell faster because people will think they’re missing something.”) Clementine didn’t notice. For her, this was life.
Indeed, as the music began and the sly hook from the trumpet seized the air, Clementine closed her eyes, soaking in the familiar husky voice that’d been singing her to bed-with this same song, Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child”-since she was a baby.
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got her own
Clementine had no idea that her mom had changed the words so it was about a little girl. And had no idea that Billie Holiday had written the song after a particularly brutal argument with her own mother, over money-which is what that’s got his own really refers to. But right there, as she stood there in the living room, swaying back and forth in the pretend dance she always did with her mom after school, thirteen-year-old Clementine Kaye wasn’t sad about being alone… or having to cook dinner… or even having to fend for herself.
She was prepared. She was always prepared.
But more than prepared, she was just happy to hear her mom’s voice.
5
Today
Washington, D.C.
"I don’t see what the big disaster is,” Clementine says in the SCIF.
“Nonono-don’t touch it!” Orlando yells as I reach for the small file folder.
“What? It’s soaking wet,” I argue, snatching it, now dripping, from the coffee puddle.
“We could’ve put it back,” he says.
“It’s soaking. Look. See the soaking?” I hold up the file so he can spot the drip-drip from the corner of the manila folder. “You think I can just shove this back under the chair like nothing happened? We need to report this.”
“Lando, you there? Vault all clear?” a voice crackles through his walkie-talkie.