The President's Shadow Read online

  “Because he didn’t know who I was. Though now we gave him that too.”

  Still catching my breath, I shake my head. “I’m not so sure that’s the only reason he picked this spot,” I add, motioning to the base of the statue. The face of the limestone is inscribed with a line from Shakespeare:

  WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE

  There’s only one sociopath I know who leaves overdramatic spooky messages like that. The sociopath they think is somehow looking out for me.

  “Now you think Eyelashes is working with Nico?” Marshall asks. “I thought you said Nico doesn’t leave clues.”

  “This isn’t a clue. It’s Nico’s mantra. In his crazy-ass head, he thinks he’s been chosen by history—that he’s part of the same secret club as John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. For him, killing a President is destiny.”

  “That doesn’t mean Eyelashes is working for him.”

  “I agree. Eyelashes could be someone inspired by Nico, or maybe he’s a nutbag who happens to like burying body parts in the Rose Garden.”

  Marshall doesn’t reply. He just stares over my shoulder.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask, following his gaze.

  He continues scanning.

  “You think Eyelashes is still watching us?” I add.

  “That’s what I’d do.” For a full two minutes, he stands there, picking apart every car, tourist, and bus that passes.

  “I don’t think he’s here, Marsh.”

  “I can see that, but unless you have a better solution—”

  “Actually, I do,” I say, pulling out the orange lapel pin that I stole from White Eyelashes’s jacket. “If we wanna know who he is, here’s the best way to track him. Now c’mon, you coming?”

  Marshall doesn’t move.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. “This is our chance.”

  “Our chance for what? I told you, this isn’t the old treehouse. I didn’t ask to be part of your club. I don’t want a membership.”

  “Then why’d you come to the White House this morning?”

  “Because you said it might help us find out what they did to our dads.”

  “And it will.”

  “You keep saying that. Just like you keep saying that this is just about yours and your dad’s history.”

  “It is about our history!” I say, feeling my temper rise.

  “And that’s the only reason? I know you since kindergarten, Beecher. Tell me what you think is in our dads’ file.”

  “I told you, that’s what I’m looking for!”

  He shakes his head, still scanning the street. “I have a reporter friend who plays this game with his fellow reporters: Would You Eat a Shit Sandwich? They pick a big story and ask, Would you eat a shit sandwich to get the missing eighteen-and-a-half-minute Nixon tapes? Then they all decide if they’d do it.”

  It’s an unsubtle point. Some stories aren’t worth the cost of getting them. “This one’s worth it,” I tell Marshall. “It’s my dad.”

  “You sure it’s just your dad? You’re now tracking down a murderer and personally putting your neck in presidential places where it shouldn’t be. Is that really worth finding out whether your dad died on this Tuesday or the Tuesday after that?”

  “It’s about how he died—and who took him from me! Can’t you see that!?” I explode as a few tourists turn to stare.

  Marshall stares right back, scaring them off. “I buried my dad. So I know it feels good to think this is bringing you closer to your father,” he tells me. “But it’s also bringing you closer to the other person you’re chasing: the only person who can make all those reporters eat shit sandwiches on a daily basis.”

  I know who he’s hinting at. The big man himself. “That’s why you think I’m helping the President? That I’m hoping to find something else to nail him on?”

  “Have you asked yourself that question?”

  I look away, watching a puff of black exhaust swirl from a bus’s tail pipe. It clouds everything in front of me.

  “I know you hate him, Beecher. And I know you still blame him for Tot being shot.”

  “This isn’t about Tot.”

  “Sure it is. With you these days, everything is. But what you’re doing here… You can keep telling yourself it’s out of kindness…or an investigation about your dad. But all these risks you’re taking…the hunt you’ve so quickly and recklessly turned this into… You’re not just looking for answers. You’re looking for a fight.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Says the person who’s now closer to Wallace than you’ve ever been—and with the whole Culper Ring standing behind you. That certainly makes it easier to put the knife in, doesn’t it?” he asks, his voice slowing down. “I know it’s hard being in charge, but from personal experience, listen to me on this: Blind, heated vengeance is the easiest way to get yourself and everyone else killed.”

  “That’s really how you see this? That this is my vendetta? What about doing something simply because it’s right?”

  He stares at me, his waxy face unmoving. “Sometimes I think we’re from very different worlds, Beecher.”

  “We grew up two blocks from each other. It can’t be that different.”

  “What do you want me to say? I’ll stand by you because we’re friends?”

  “I didn’t realize that was such a silly concept for you.”

  “Beecher, this isn’t me, you, and Clementine eating Halloween candy in her backyard hammock. Those days are gone.”

  “That’s my worry: Are you my friend here, or is this just about your own self-interest?”

  His glare tightens, but as always, he’s unreadable. “Last month, when you finally found me again, do you remember the very first question you asked me?”

  “I asked where you got your burns.”

  “And do you remember my answer?”

  “You didn’t give one.”

  He lowers his chin and presses his lips together, making me feel his silent threat. This is the reason Tot doesn’t trust him. I don’t know Marshall. I don’t know what he’s been through. And if Tot weren’t lying unconscious in a hospital bed, he’d kill me for inviting Marsh into the Culper Ring. In fact, this is the exact moment where he’d remind me that Marshall’s real expertise is finding weaknesses in things. Including me.

  “You watched me bury my mother,” he finally says. “But I’ve also buried my father; I’ve buried my aunt; I’ve buried a woman who gave me more pure happiness than I ever thought I’d be allowed to have—”

  “I get the picture.”

  “I don’t think you do. What I’m really trying to say is—when it comes to White Eyelashes, and this arm in the Rose Garden, and the President himself—I don’t want to be burying you.”

  On my left, another city bus pulls into the bus stop, hissing and belching as the doors swing wide and a few passengers step our way, toward the Archives.

  “I appreciate you worrying about me,” I tell him.

  Marshall’s silent as the crowd flows past us. Latching on to their momentum, he follows them up the block.

  “It’s tempting when that power comes, Beecher. But y’know the fighter who’s in the most danger? The one who doesn’t realize he’s slowly starting to like it.”

  I look down at the orange Secret Service pin and the six digits engraved in the back of it. Considering where I’m now headed, I know he’s right.

  17

  Twenty-nine years ago

  Fort Sill, Oklahoma

  Alby always thought he would die when he was young. His death was coming. Soon. But it wouldn’t be in an airplane crash.

  “…there you go, son. Need you to squeeze my fingers,” a scratchy voice with a Tennessee twang said.

  Blinking awake, Alby squinted up at the fluorescent lights. There were two men—one white, one black—standing over him. Both were wearing light blue button-down shirts. No white coats. No stethoscopes. But everyone knows a doctor w
hen he’s hunched over them.

  “He’s awake!” the white doctor called out to someone outside the room.

  “Albert, can you squeeze my fingers?” the black doctor with the Tennessee accent repeated. He had a thin but kind face with two snaggly bottom teeth. As he leaned down, a set of dog tags swayed from his neck like a tire swing. This was a military hospital. “Albert, are you—?”

  “Alby… My name’s Alby,” he sputtered, his throat feeling tight. As he squeezed the doctor’s fingers, his right leg pulsed in pain. Two of his fingers were taped together in a metal finger splint.

  The fall. He remembered jumping, falling from the plane. And the smell. That bitter black smoke. Like a human barbeque.

  “He’s awake!” the white doctor shouted for the second time.

  Yet as Alby lay there motionless, sinking down into the hospital bed, the one memory he couldn’t shake was of the elderly couple—the woman with the ice blue eyes begging for help—that he’d turned his back on.

  “You know what a miracle it is that you got out of there!?” the white doctor asked.

  “Not just a miracle,” the black doctor said. “The quick thinking…his reflexes…” He shook Alby’s hand, pumping it like a politician. “That was impressive, son. And I can tell you right now, it didn’t go unnoticed.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Alby offered.

  “You will, son. I promise: Men like you are exactly who we’re looking for.”

  18

  Today

  Washington, D.C.

  White eyelashes? What is he, a supervillain?” she asks through my phone.

  “You asked for distinctive features,” I tell her, keeping my voice down as I weave through the lunchtime crowds and local food trucks on 7th Street.

  “No, Beecher, I asked for a name. A department. Even whether he was uniform or suit-and-tie,” a mechanical robot voice says in my ear. She uses it as a disguise, but I know who she is. Immaculate Deception. Also known as Mac. Also known as the Culper Ring’s resident hacker.

  “So you couldn’t find anything?”

  “It’s the Secret Service, Beecher. I can ask around, but there’s a reason the word Secret’s in the title. This isn’t like looking for twenty-four-hour locksmiths in the yellow pages.”

  She shows her age with that one. In reality, Mac’s a seventy-two-year-old former navy officer named Grace Bentham. During her time at Harvard, Amazing Grace invented the term debugging when she found a moth in a Harvard Mark II computer. Since then, she and Tot have been the heart of the present-day Culper Ring. And its fiercest protectors. Decades ago, when the Black Hawk helicopters went down in Mogadishu, Mac was one of the first ones notified—and helped find spare local copters and jeeps to send in for the bloody rescue.

  “By the way,” she adds, “as long as we’re on the topic of missing people who’re pissing me off, where’d your boy Marshall race off to?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s the second time. Three minutes after he left you at the Archives, his cell phone went poof.”

  “Poof?”

  “No signal. Untrackable.”

  “Wait, are you—? You’re spying on him?”

  “I spy on you too. It’s my job, Beecher. You told me Marshall was helping us. I always look out for those who help us,” Mac says. “But when someone’s cell signal goes dead, y’know what that means?”

  “He shut his phone off.”

  “No. Shut phones still bleed a traceable signal. If I needed to, I could track a shut phone on a plane. But if the signal goes black like Marshall’s, it means he took out his battery or placed it in one of those lined bags that block all transmissions. Wherever he’s going, he doesn’t want to be seen.”

  “Or maybe he just doesn’t want to be seen by you. Don’t forget, with the job he has, people aren’t supposed to see him coming.”

  “That’s exactly my fear,” she says, her mechanized voice slowing down. “That you’re not gonna see him coming.”

  As I turn on H Street, my destination’s halfway down the block: the tan-brick, nine-story building. There’re no food trucks allowed around here. No trash cans either, so no one can leave a bomb. Plus, they don’t keep a sign out front. They don’t want anyone knowing what’s in there.

  “I appreciate the concern, Mac. But I’ve known Marshall my whole life—”

  “No, you knew him in junior high. Then you both grew up, and he happened to come back into your life, oh that’s right, just as you were getting involved with us.”

  “Now you’re simplifying.”

  “Beecher, I’ve had seventy-two birthdays. I appreciate the emotional tug and swell of youth that comes from seeing an old childhood friend, but let me tell you what Tot would tell you—”

  “That I don’t know this man anymore. I’ve heard the speech.”

  “Then start listening to it,” she says as I reach the front of the brick building and spy the eye-in-the-sky security cam hidden under the overhang. “This isn’t just about you. Every time you invite Marshall inside, you’re also giving him a free look at us.”

  She won’t say it out loud, but I know who us is. The Culper Ring.

  As I open the glass door and step into the dark lobby, there’s no ignoring the shiny silver writing in giant block letters along the brushed silver wall:

  WORTHY OF TRUST AND CONFIDENCE

  I turn away, preferring my metaphors a bit more subtle.

  “Mac, I will never, ever do anything to hurt what you and Tot have built.”

  “You’re missing the point. This was built two hundred years ago, long before the two of us. And you want to know why it’s lasted this long?” She pauses to make sure I’m listening. “Because from the very first days that George Washington put it together, he had two rules: First, even he wasn’t allowed to know everyone in the organization. That way, no one person could ever take us all down. And second, when you get tapped for membership, you put the needs of the organization before your own.”

  She pauses again, leaving me staring at the word TRUST on the lobby’s silver wall. On my right, two burly men with thick military necks pull off their IDs and hide them in their jacket pockets as they’re about to leave the building. In most of D.C., people keep their IDs on as a way to professionally brag. Here, they take them off, so no one knows where they work.

  “Beecher, during my early years in the military, I was lucky enough to work with three different astronauts. All three of them made it to the moon,” Mac explains. “And the thing about being an astronaut is they train their whole life to do this one thing. Then when it’s over, they all react the same way: The moment they leave the moon, they know they’re never going back again. Even worse, they know they can’t talk to anyone about it since no one can truly appreciate the full scope of what they’ve seen. It’s the same here. If you’re committed to the mission, we’ll give you a breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime view. But like those astronauts, you need to understand: It’s a lonely view.”

  I think of Tot lying there in the hospital over these past few weeks. Besides me, Mac, and two coworkers who dropped off cookies shaped like little Declarations of Independence, he hasn’t had a single visitor.

  “It’ll save your life,” Mac says in my ear. “Speaking of which, you think I don’t see where you’re headed right now? That’s a dangerous fight you’re picking.”

  I hadn’t told her where I was going, but I’m not surprised. She’s always watching.

  “You Beecher White?” a man with a flat nose calls out from the security booth across the lobby. He’s behind thick ballistics glass—bulletproof and bombproof—in a seat that makes him a full two heads taller so he can look down at me. Better view to see whether I’m hiding a weapon.

  “They’ll never let you in,” Mac warns.

  Usually she’s right. On a daily basis, every threat that’s made against the President of the United States comes through this building. On 9/11, it’
s where they hid the First Lady. It has multiple armories, a joint operations center, and thousands of agents who aren’t afraid to take a bullet. But if you want to sneak into the headquarters of the United States Secret Service, like anything else in life, it all depends who you know.

  “I’m Beecher White, from the National Archives,” I tell the guard. “I have an appointment with your Archivist.”

  19

  Marshall didn’t smell it at first. He knew it was coming, though.

  Flashing a fake ID and a matching smile, he blew past the young security guard who clearly bathed in Axe body spray.

  As he headed past the hospital’s gift shop, it was the whiff of Mylar balloons and fresh flowers.

  Even as he followed the crisp white hallway past the visitor waiting area in George Washington University Hospital, all he could smell was the usual mix of old couches, bleach and disinfectant.

  But again, he knew it was coming. Every hospital smelled of it, even if most patients didn’t know where the smell was coming from.

  Sure enough, as he reached the entrance for the emergency room and its automatic doors slid wide, there it was.

  Silverol.

  At just a whiff of the ointment’s harsh antiseptic and metallic smell, Marshall’s throat went dry and his brain raced back to those first days in the burn unit when they’d lie to him and say that by rubbing Silverol into his red-and-yellow open flesh and the skin hanging off it, the pain would go away.

  It wasn’t their only lie. When they first brought him in, Marshall’s left arm was so swollen, blood stopped flowing to his hand. A doctor appeared at his bedside with a dozen different scalpels. He told Marshall that he needed to cut into his skin so he could drain all the liquid and reduce the swelling. The catch was, since Marshall’s lungs were so damaged, they needed to do the operation in his hospital bed. No anesthetic.

  “Don’t worry,” the doctor had reassured him. “All the nerves in your arm are dead. You won’t feel it.”

  He was wrong.

  Two male nurses held down Marshall’s arms and legs.