The Inner Circle Read online

  No, they wouldn’t.

  Last night was a mess. But today… Beecher wasn’t going anywhere.

  60

  Y’hear what I said?” Tot asks, his cloudy eye seeming to watch me in the passenger seat as he waves the photocopied sheet between us. “February 16th. Don’t you wanna know?”

  I nod, trying hard to stay focused on the traffic in front of us.

  “Beecher, I’m talking to you.”

  “And I hear you. Yes. I’d love to know.”

  He turns his head even more. So he sees me with his good eye. I don’t know why I bother. He’s too good at this.

  “You already know, don’t you?” Tot asks. “You know what happened on February 16th.”

  I don’t answer him.

  “Good for you, Beecher. What’d you do—look it up when you got home?”

  “How could I not?” I spend every day doing other people’s historical research. All it took was a little extra footwork to do my own. “Khazei wants to pin the murder on me. This is my life on the line, Tot.”

  “So you saw the story? About Eightball?”

  I nod. Even without his training, it wasn’t hard to find. When it comes to figuring out what happened twenty-six years ago on February 16th, all you really need is a newspaper from the following day: February 17th.

  Twenty-six years ago, President Orson Wallace was in his final year of college at the University of Michigan.

  “You did the math, didn’t you?” Tot asks.

  “That what? That February 16th was a Saturday?”

  This is when I’d usually see Tot’s smile creeping through his beard. Right now, though, it’s not there—even though I know Saturday was the breakthrough for him too. At this point, nearly every American has heard the story of how Wallace used to come home every weekend to check on his mom and his sick sister, who suffered from Turner syndrome. So if young Wallace was home in Ohio…

  All I needed was the Cleveland News Index and their digital archives of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I searched every keyword I could think of, including the names of family members. Not a single article on February 17th mentioned Wallace. But there was one—and only one—that did mention Wallace’s hometown of Journey, Ohio:

  Local Man Goes Missing

  From my inside jacket pocket, I pull out the printed-out story, which was buried in the back of the newspaper. Just like Orlando. According to the piece, a twenty-year-old man named Griffin Anderson had gone missing the previous night and was last seen voluntarily getting into a black Dodge Diplomat with two other twenty-year-olds. All three men had tattoos of a black eight-ball on the inside of their forearms—a sign that police said made them a part of a Cleveland gang known as the Corona Kings.

  “And that’s all you found?” Tot challenges.

  “Was there something else to find?”

  “Tell me this first: Why were you testing me?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “What you just did—you were testing me, Beecher. You came to pick me up, you knew you had done the same research, yet you stayed quiet to see what I offered up.” If Tot were my age, this is the part where he’d say I didn’t trust him and turn it into a fight. But he’s got far more perspective than that. “So what’s my grade?” he asks. “When I said the word eight-ball, does that mean I passed?”

  “Tot, if you know something else…”

  “Of course I know something else—and I also know I’m the one who told you not to trust anyone, including me. So I don’t blame you. But if you’re gonna insult me, try to be more subtle next time.”

  “Just tell me what you found!”

  He ignores the outburst, making sure I get his real point: No matter how good I think I am, he’s still the teacher. And still on my side.

  “It’s about the eight-ball tattoo, isn’t it?” I ask. “I was going to look it up…”

  “There’s nothing else to look up—not unless you also happen to have an old colleague who still works in the Cleveland Police Department.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” Tot says. “Especially when you hear who, twenty-six years ago, also happened to be in the original police report.”

  61

  The barber knew the hotel well. But as he followed the curving staircase from the Capital Hilton lobby up to the second floor, it didn’t stop the sense of dread that was now twisting into the small of his back.

  “Sir, can I help you?” a passing hotel employee with close-cropped red hair asked just as Laurent hit the final step.

  Laurent was nervous, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew that when the President was in the building, the Secret Service disguised their agents in hotel uniforms.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” the barber said.

  “And you know where you’re going?” the hotel employee asked.

  No question. Secret Service.

  “I do,” the barber said, trying hard to keep it together as he headed left and calmly turned the corner toward his destination: the far too appropriately named Presidential Ballroom.

  “Good morning!” an older blonde with a homedone tint job sang out. “Welcome to the Caregivers’ Conference. What can I do for you?”

  “I should be on the list,” Laurent said, abruptly pointing to the few unclaimed nametags—including the one he’d been using for so many months now. “Last name Gyrich.”

  “Mmm, let’s find you,” the woman said, scanning the names one by one, but also stealing a quick glance at his face.

  Laurent felt the dread digging deeper into his back. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When Orson (he’d known the President since Wallace was little—he couldn’t call him anything but Orson) first showed up all those years ago… in that rain… Laurent was just trying to do what was right. And when they first started in D.C.… when he first agreed to help with the Plumbers, it wasn’t much different: to do what’s right… to serve his friend… to serve his country.

  “Here we go! We have you right here, Mr. Gyrich,” the woman said, handing the barber the nametag. “You’re the one they called about… the guest of the White House. You should go in—he’s just started. Oh, and if you like, we have a coat check.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, sliding the nametag into the pocket of his pea coat. “I’m not staying very long.”

  “This way, sir,” a uniformed Secret Service agent said, motioning him through the metal detector that was set up just outside the main doors of the ballroom. From inside, he heard the familiar yet muffled baritone of President Orson Wallace booming through the ballroom’s speakers. From what he could tell, Orson was keeping this one personal, telling the crowd about the night of Minnie’s stroke and that moment in the ambulance when the paramedics asked her where she went to school, and the twelfth-grade Minnie could only name her elementary school.

  In many ways, Laurent realized, it was the same problem at the Archives. The way they were rushing around—to even let it get this far—Orson was letting it get too personal.

  “Enjoy the breakfast, sir,” the Secret Service agent said as he pulled open the ballroom door. Underneath the brightly lit chandelier that was as long as a city bus, every neck was craned upward, all six hundred people watching the rosy-cheeked man who looked so comfortable up at the podium with the presidential seal on the front of it.

  As always, the President glanced around the crowd, making eye contact with everyone. That is, until Laurent stepped into the room.

  “… which is no different from the personal myths we tell ourselves every day,” the President said, his pale gray eyes turning toward the barber in the back of the bright room. “The myths we create about ourselves are solely there so our brains can survive.”

  Across the red, gold, and blue carpet, the barber stood there a moment. He stood there waiting for the President. And when the two men finally locked eyes, when Laurent nodded just slightly and Orson nodded right back, the barber knew that the President had seen him. />
  That was it. Message sent.

  Pivoting on his heel, the barber headed back out toward the welcome desk. The President cocked his head, flashing a smile and locking on yet another stranger in the crowd.

  For the first time since this started, the Plumbers finally had something going their way.

  62

  So you’ve never heard of this guy Griffin?” Tot asks, stealing a glance at me as the Mustang zips through Rock Creek Park and we make our way to Constitution Avenue.

  “Why would I’ve heard of him?”

  “And there’s no one you know who has an eight-ball tattoo?”

  “Is this you testing me now?” I ask.

  “Beecher, I’m seventy-one years old.”

  “You’re actually seventy-two.”

  He thinks on this a moment. “I’m seventy-two years old. I have plenty of patience. I just don’t like having my time wasted—and right now, since you’re treating me like the enemy, you seem to be wasting it,” he explains without any bitterness.

  “I know you’re not the enemy, Tot.”

  “Actually, you know nothing about me. For all you know, this is just another attempt to reel you in and grab you with the net. Do what you’re doing, Beecher—keep asking the tough questions. And as for the toughest one so far: Every neighborhood in the country has a guy like Griffin.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning according to the police report, Griffin’s first arrest came when he was in high school—selling fake marijuana to a bunch of ninth graders. Then he got smart and started selling the real thing. His dad was a pharmacist, so he quickly graduated to selling pills. During one arrest—and remember, this is still in high school—Griffin spit in a cop’s face, at which point he became the kid that even the tough high school kids knew you didn’t mess with.”

  I see where he’s going. “So when Griffin was kidnapped—”

  “Not kidnapped,” Tot corrects, approaching the end of Rock Creek Park. “They never use the word kidnapped. Or abducted. In the report, they don’t even call it a crime scene. But you’re painting the picture: When this guy Griffin finally disappeared, neighbors weren’t exactly tripping over themselves to form a search party.”

  “It’s still a missing kid.”

  “You sure? Griffin was twenty years old, no longer a minor. He got in a car—voluntarily—with two guys from his gang. And then he drives off into the sunset,” Tot says as we make a left on Constitution Avenue and momentum presses me against the passenger door. “A crime? Where do you see a crime?”

  “Okay,” I say. “So where’s the crime?”

  “That’s the point, Beecher. There isn’t one. Griffin’s dad goes to the newspaper. He begs the cops to find his son. But the cops see it as a young man exercising his independence. And they shut the case, I’m guessing secretly thrilled that Griffin and his eight-ball friends are someone else’s problem.”

  “And now, all these years later, the case is back. So for the second time—where’s the crime?”

  Tot points his beard at the famous landmark all the way up on our left: the breathtaking home of President Orson Wallace. The White House.

  “Don’t tell me Wallace has an eight-ball tattoo,” I say.

  “Nope. Near as I can tell, Wallace was nowhere near this one.”

  “So what makes you think he’s involved?”

  As we pass the White House and weave down Pennsylvania Avenue and toward our building, Tot’s smile finally pokes through his beard. “Now you’re seeing the real value of an archive. History isn’t written by the winners—it’s written by everyone—it’s a jigsaw of facts from contradictory sources. But every once in a while, you unearth that one original document that no one can argue with, like an old police report filed by two beat cops twenty-six years ago.”

  “Tot…”

  “He was the one who gave them the info—the one eyewitness who told the cops everything he saw.”

  “The President was?”

  “No. I told you, Wallace was nowhere near there.” As we make a sharp right onto 7th Street and pull toward the garage, Tot picks up his photocopied sheet of paper and tosses it in my lap. It’s the first time I notice the name he’s handwritten across the bottom. “Him! He was there!”

  I read the name and read it again. “Stewart Palmiotti?”

  “Wallace’s personal doctor,” Tot says, hitting the brakes at the yellow antiram barrier outside the garage, just as the security guard looks up at us. “That’s who we want: the President’s oldest friend.”

  63

  The cemetery reminded him of his mother.

  Not of her death.

  When she died, she was already in her eighties. Sure, she wanted a year or two more—but not much. She always said she never wanted to be one of those old people, so when it was her time to go, she went calmly, without much argument.

  No, what the cemetery reminded Dr. Palmiotti of was his mother when she was younger… when he was younger… when his grandfather died and his mom was screaming—her face in a red rage, tears and snot running down her nose as two other family members fought to restrain her—about the fact that the funeral home had neglected to shave her father’s face before putting him in his coffin.

  Palmiotti had never seen such a brutal intensity in his mother. He’d never see it again. It was reserved solely for those who wronged her family.

  It was a lesson Palmiotti never forgot.

  Yet as he leaned into the morning cold and followed the well-paved, hilly trail into the heart of Oak Hill Cemetery, he quickly realized that this was far more than just a cemetery.

  All cities have old money. Washington, D.C., has old money. But it also has old power. And Oak Hill, which was tucked into one of the toniest areas of Georgetown and extended its sprawling twenty-two acres of rolling green hills and obelisk-dotted graves deep into Rock Creek Park, was well known, especially by those who cared to know, as the resting place for that power.

  Founded in 1849, when W. W. Corcoran donated the land he had bought from a great-nephew of George Washington, Oak Hill held everyone from Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie, to Secretary of War Edward Stanton, to Dean Acheson, to Washington Post publisher Philip Graham. For years, the cemetery management refused to take “new members,” but demand grew so great, they recently built double-depth crypts below the main walking paths so that D.C.’s new power families could rest side by side with the old.

  Welcome to Oak Hill Cemetery, the wooden sign read just inside the wrought-iron gate that was designed by James Renwick, who also designed the Smithsonian Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. But what Palmiotti couldn’t shake was the message at the bottom of the sign:

  All Who Enter Do So At Their Own Risk

  So needlessly melodramatic, Palmiotti thought to himself. But then again, as he glanced over his shoulder for the fourth time, that didn’t mean it was any less unnerving. Using the Archives, or a SCIF, or even the barbershop was one thing. But to pick a place like this—a place so public and unprotected…

  This was where they were going wrong. He had told the President just that. But right now, like that night in the rain with Eightball back when they were kids, Palmiotti also knew that sometimes, in some situations, you don’t have a choice. You have to take matters into your own hands.

  With a quick look down at his iPhone, Palmiotti followed the directions that took him past a headstone carved in the shape of an infant wrapped and sleeping in a blanket. He fought against the ice, trudging up a concrete path and a short hill that eventually revealed…

  “Hoo…” Palmiotti whispered as he saw it.

  Straight ahead, a wide-open field was sprinkled in every direction with snow-covered headstones, stately family crypts, and in the far distance, a circular Gothic family memorial surrounded by thick marble columns. Unlike a normal cemetery, there was no geometric grid. It was like a park, the graves peppered—somehow tastefully—everywhere.

  Leaving the c
oncrete path behind, Palmiotti spotted the faint footprints in the snow and knew all he had to do was follow them to his destination: the eight-foot-tall obelisk that sat next to a bare apple blossom tree.

  As he approached, he saw two names at the base of the obelisk: Lt. Walter Gibson Peter, aged twenty, and Col. William Orton Williams, aged twenty-three. According to the cemetery visitor guide, these two cousins were relatives of Martha Washington. But, as Palmiotti continued to read, he saw that the reason they were buried together—both in Lot 578—was because during the Civil War they were both hanged as spies.

  Crumpling the brochure, Palmiotti stuffed it in his coat pocket, trying to think about something else.

  Behind him, there was a crunch. Like someone stepping through the snow.

  Palmiotti spun, nearly slipping on the ice. The field was empty.

  He was tempted to leave… to abort and walk away. But as he turned back to the grave, he already saw what he was looking for. Kneeling down, he brushed away the snow that had gathered at the base of the obelisk. A few wet leaves came loose. And some clumps of dirt. Then he heard the hollow kkkkk—there it was, the pale beige rock that was about the size of his palm.

  The rock was round and smooth. It was also plastic. And hollow.

  Perfect for hiding something inside.

  Just like a spy would use, he thought to himself as he reread the inscriptions for Lt. Walter Gibson Peter and Col. William Orton Williams.

  As a blast of wind galloped across the hill, Palmiotti reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the folded-up note that said: I Miss You.

  Simple. Easy. And if someone found it, they wouldn’t think twice about it. Not unless they knew to read between the lines.

  And so far, even if Beecher had figured out the ink, he still hadn’t figured out how to read the true message inside.

  With a flick of his thumb, Palmiotti opened the base of the rock, slid the note inside, and buried the rock back in the snow.