But that night a proxy had arrived who’d given him a choice. A deal could be cut to take him off the boards. Holt would be buried in a CMU, out of sight and out of mind, where he’d finish his sentence. He wasn’t to make any noise or file any appeals. He’d get out once his time had been served or when he was required—whichever came first.
He never went to trial. He zippered his mouth and got on the bus and had lived inside this box ever since. It was so cramped that when he lay on the cardboard-thin mattress of his cot, his outstretched arms could touch the opposing walls.
Of the three thousand prisoners housed in the entire complex, Holt was the most lethal, despite the fact that he’d already breached his fifties. He was a “balancer,” one of the few non-Muslims scattered throughout the population to inoculate the unit against lawsuits. He’d been told more times than he could count that he looked like he had Scottish blood, but he didn’t know where his people hailed from any more than he knew where he did.
He was built like an anvil, a whisper over five-nine, broadened with veiny, bulging muscle. His short-cropped hair, dull brown tinged with copper, receded into a severe widow’s peak, a monk’s tonsure beginning to crown in the back. A beard crowded his face, bristle so dense it looked like wiry fur. Under armed guard he was allowed to shave in his cell twice a week, and he required a fresh razor each time.
He was given fifteen minutes of yard time in a pen every Sunday—when it wasn’t raining, when there were no threats of riots, when no irregularities had occurred during the week. During that time he had kept to himself, as was his habit, but he’d observed the others closely and forged a few alliances, not for protection but because he never knew when savage men might come in handy.
Today was not Sunday, which meant that he had sixteen hours to fill inside this six-by-eight-foot cell before he could go to sleep again.
That was fine. His training had prepared him for this. Time was money, and he had plenty to spend in here, 1,779 days with nothing to do but hammer his body into shape, hone his mind, and stoke his personal obsession to a high blaze. The instant he walked free from these four walls, he’d be ready to resume his mission.
Murder Orphan X.
Holt lay on the cot now, eyes still closed, feeling the warmth of sleep depart his face. The air was cool and smelled strongly of industrial cleaner. He let his lids part.
Directly over his head, a grapefruit-size orb bulged from the low ceiling, sufficiently tinted to hide the surveillance lenses inside.
The air felt different. He sensed it before he even sat up.
When he did, his cell door was standing open.
He stayed perfectly still, focused on the door, waiting. Ten minutes passed, maybe twenty.
He rose and knuckled the door gently. The rarely used hinges creaked.
He stepped into the hall.
The gate at the end was rolled back.
He moved toward it, drifting past other cells. Through the tiny glass squares, pairs of eyes watched him glide by.
Silence prevailed.
He reached the gate.
The guard chair just beyond was empty, a folded-back Sports Illustrated left on the padded seat.
Holt stepped through.
Now he was in a wider corridor that led to a solid steel door and a guard station. He kept on.
The guard on duty was watching the morning news.
Holt approached slowly and stood in full view of the tempered glass. The guard didn’t remove his eyes from the small TV screen. His hand dipped beneath the counter, a buzz electrified the air, and the steel door clicked open.
Holt grasped the cool handle and pulled it wide. He stepped through into the gen-pop unit, two stories high. The range floor was spotless, broken only by floating staircases to the second-level catwalks. The animals were all in their precast-concrete houses, still behind locked doors, a face darkening every tiny glass window.
Holt ambled across the empty plain of concrete, sensing myriad heads swiveling to note his progress. Breath huffed across the tempered panes, fogging them sporadically.
So enormous was the hall of warehoused humans that it took Holt a full ninety seconds to traverse its length. Total silence accompanied him at every step. Given the height of the ceiling and the number of lives housed under it, the quiet felt thunderous, weighty, religious—as if he were moving through some netherworld, passing beneath the gaze of eternally trapped souls.
He reached the controlled entry point at the far side. He stopped and faced the security camera above.
The locking mechanism disengaged. He opened the door.
He was in the reception center now, where he’d been screened and processed nearly five years ago. An obese guard sat at the counter, working her gum like a cud. In the pass-through tray, a neatly folded stack of clothes waited.
It took Holt a moment to recognize them as his own.
As he approached, the guard swiveled on her chair, turning her back with evident disgust.
He stripped off the gray prison jumpsuit and stepped clear of it, leaving it puddled on the tile floor. For security reasons he’d been issued no undergarments, so he stood naked now, the air cold against his flesh.
He crossed to the counter, retrieved the clothes he’d last seen 1,779 days ago, and dressed. Olive drab vintage fatigue pants, worn T-shirt, steel-toed boots. A hundred bucks in gate money rested in the tray next to the wallet holding his authentic if illegitimate driver’s license. He folded the five crisp twenties into his pocket and headed out.
A guard stood by the concrete fa? ade of the entrance, twelve-gauge shotgun in hand.
The men stared at each other, and for a moment Holt wondered if he’d misread the situation, that he’d been led to his execution.
But the guard spit in the dirt and turned away.
Holt started across the dusty yard. In the tower the sniper kept up his watch, his wraparound shades winking back the sunlight. Holt watched the sunglasses scan right past him as if he didn’t exist.
Which, he supposed, he didn’t.
He came to the front gates, two layers deep topped with coils of concertina.
They parted like the Red Sea.
He walked through one and then the other.
The instant he stepped free, a bizarre chime sounded, accompanied by a vibration against his thigh.
He reached down to one of his cargo pockets and lifted free an old-fashioned flip cell phone. He had never seen it before.
He snapped it open.
A voice he didn’t know said, “There’s a Nissan Maxima across the parking lot to your right. No, farther right.” He adjusted his gaze. The voice continued, “The keys are in the ignition. The destination is in the GPS.”
The call severed with a click.
Orphan A closed the phone and ambled to the waiting car.
10
Last Chance and Final Offer
The ride up the center of the marble obelisk took a full sixty seconds. The transparent elevator allowed for a mine-shaft effect, burrowing past carved blocks donated by various states and nations.
It was early on a Tuesday, so the number of tourists was thin. Evan stood in the back of the lift. He wore a roomy button-up shirt, nylon cargo pants, and a floppy sunhat. The Steiner binoculars, a favorite of bird-watchers and sightseers, dangled around his neck. He wore a fucking fanny pack, which he’d stuffed with sunscreen and maps so the security guards at the base would have something to paw through.
The doors parted on the Washington Monument’s observation deck five hundred feet above the ground, and he shuffled out after the others into the narrow hall encircling the elevator shaft. Observation windows, two per cardinal direction, gave postcard views of the iconic scenery.
Across the National Mall, the morning sun bronzed the dome of the Capitol Building. Evan circled to the north window, which provided a crystal-clear vantage onto the White House, the Ellipse, and, just beyond, the streamer of 16th Street rising up, up, and away.
He posted up with his binoculars and waited. The president was scheduled to meet the Israeli prime minister at the National Gallery of Art for the ribbon-cutting of an exhibit featuring Nazi-looted art. Evan was tempted to attend, but at this stage of his operational planning he had to keep his distance. After yesterday’s events the Secret Service would be deploying even more electronic surveillance to feed in real time to the Joint Operations Center on the ninth floor of HQ, where facial-recognition software would be applied.
Given that, strolling in wearing Groucho Marx glasses seemed ill-advised.
Evan faded back to let a few other tourists take a turn with their faces to the window. But even from the rear, he kept his binoculars raised.
Sure enough, at ten past the hour he saw movement across the White House’s South Lawn. A number of motorcycle units peeled out first, fanning wide and posting themselves at intersections, a heightened security measure. Evan watched them position themselves, the observation deck giving him an ideal perspective to take in the grid of the city.
Finally the motorcade pulled into view, the three limos in a row crawling like beetles.
This time the convoy took a new route, cupping the edge of the White House lawn before cutting west to 17th Street NW.
A roundabout way to get to the Smithsonian. The Service was varying routine now, striving for unpredictability.