At the southwest gate, a pair of Belgian Malinois commanded a concrete apron that was thermoelectrically cooled so it wouldn’t burn their paws in the summer heat. They sniffed all incoming vehicles for explosives. They were also cross-trained to attack in the event a fence jumper made it over the spikes. If there were worse places to wind up than in the jaws of a seventy-five-pound Malinois, Evan wasn’t sure where they were. The dogs were bona fide assaulters, way above their weight class; SEAL Team Six had gone so far as to parachute into the Abbottabad compound with a specimen of the breed.
Next Evan swiveled the camera to the White House itself. The semicircular portico of the south side, like the rest of the building’s exterior, was outfitted with infrared detectors and audio sensors, all of them monitored 24/7 by on-site nerve centers as well as by the Joint Operations Center in the Secret Service headquarters a mile to the east.
Agents at JOC additionally monitored radar screens that showed every plane entering the surrounding airspace. They maintained an around-the-clock interface with the Federal Aviation Administration and the control tower at Reagan National Airport. If a drone or a superhuman pilot managed to steer through the gauntlet of early warning mechanisms, an air defense system loaded with FIM-92 Stinger missiles was hard-mounted to the White House itself, standing by for dynamic air interception.
Evan tilted the zoom lens up to the roof above the Truman Balcony. A designated marksman with a Stoner SR-16 rifle held a permanent position providing overwatch for the south lawn, where enormous red coasters marked the landing zone for Marine One, the presidential helicopter. Countersnipers patrolled the roof toting .300 Win Mags, good to fifteen hundred meters out, which created a protective dome stretching a mile in every direction.
It wouldn’t merely be tough to reach the White House. It would be impossible.
Not that it got easier if some lucky soul managed to get to the building’s threshold.
Between metal detectors, guard stations, and magnetometer wands, nothing entered the White House that hadn’t been painstakingly screened. Not a single one of the million pieces of annual incoming mail. Not even the air itself. Electronic noses at all entrances detected the faintest signature of airborne pathogens, dangerous gases, or any other ill wind blowing no good. The Technical Security Division ran daily sweeps on every room, checking for weaponized viruses, bacteria, radioactivity, explosive residue, and contaminants of a more exotic stripe.
Even if by a miracle someone was able to actually penetrate the most secure building on earth, the White House was equipped with further contingencies yet. The interior hid not just countless panic buttons, alarms, and safe rooms but also multiple emergency escape routes, including a ten-foot-wide tunnel that burrowed beneath East Executive Avenue NW into the basement of the Treasury Department across the street.
Lowering the camera, Evan drew back from the reinforced steel bars and let out an undetectable sigh.
Killing the president was going to be a lot of work.
2
An Absence of Light
Orphan X.
That was Evan’s designation, bestowed upon him at the age of twelve when he’d been yanked out of a foster home and brought up in a full-deniability program buried deep inside the Department of Defense. It wasn’t just a black program; it was full dark. You could stare right at it and comprehend nothing but an absence of light.
About a decade ago, the inevitable ambiguities of the operations Evan was tasked with reached a tipping point. So he had fled the Orphan Program and blipped off the radar.
He’d kept the vast resources he had accrued as a black operator and the skills embedded in his muscle memory. But he’d also kept the bearings of his moral compass that had, despite the blood he’d spilled across six continents, stubbornly refused to be shattered.
Now he was the Nowhere Man, lending his services to the truly desperate, to people who had nowhere else to turn. He’d been content to leave the past in the past. Even within the intel community, the Program had remained largely unknown. Evan’s code name, Orphan X, was dismissed as a figure of myth or an urban legend. Few people knew who Evan was or what he’d done.
Unfortunately, one of them happened to be the president of the United States.
Jonathan Bennett had been the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Department of Defense during Evan’s incipient years in the Program. Through a trickle-down system designed to maximize plausible deniability, Bennett had given the mission orders. Evan had been the most effective operator on Bennett’s watch, killing enough declared enemies of the state to fill a graveyard. Evan knew where the bodies were buried; he’d put them in the ground.
Years later, when Bennett had become president, he’d set about erasing any record of the constitutionally questionable program he’d overseen. Through sweat, blood, and hard work, Evan had discovered that Bennett was particularly obsessed with eradicating any trace of the 1997 mission.
Which put Evan at the top of the hit list.
He didn’t know why the mission held a special place in Bennett’s paranoiac heart or why that assassination in that distant gray city was relevant today. On that cold fatal morning, what mysteries had lingered outside the periphery of Evan’s scope? In pulling the trigger, had he toppled a domino, sparking a chain reaction with momentous consequences? Or in the dankness of that sewer, had he waded into something intimate, putting himself in the crosshairs of a personal vendetta? He didn’t have any answers.
Only that Bennett wanted him eliminated.
And that he, in turn, wanted to eliminate Bennett.
But Evan’s motives weren’t merely self-protective. Bennett was morally corrupt in the most profound sense, a rot seeping down through the chain of command. From the highest office, he had ordered the deaths of a number of Orphans, executing those who, under his tenure, had risked their lives for their country. And he’d had someone else killed as well, a man so steadfast and true that Evan had come to view him as a father.
That had been a miscalculation.
Which was why Evan was here now, pressed against the White House gates with a gaggle of tourists in the sticky June heat, waiting for a sign of the Man.
The woman to Evan’s side rose onto tiptoes, funneling her children before her to provide them a better view. “Look! I think that’s him! I think he’s coming!” She swatted her eldest on the arm. “Close out that Poké mon nonsense and take some pictures for your Instagram.”
Evan lowered the camera and retrieved his Big Gulp as the phalanx of vehicles rolled into sight, tailing down the circular drive as they departed the West Wing. The motorcade was the so-called informal package, eight Secret Service G-rides and three indistinguishable presidential limos. The three limos forced potential assassins to play a shell game when choosing a target; they never knew for sure which one the president was riding in. The decoys pulled double-duty as backup vehicles in the event of an attack.
As the convoy neared the South Lawn, it halted abruptly.
Excitement flickered in Evan’s chest, the lick of a cool flame. Was this the opportunity he’d been waiting on for 237 surveillance hours spread over the past six months?
He lifted the camera again in time to see an aide jog out from the edge of the Rose Garden, a soft-sided leather briefcase in hand. The trees cut visibility, the aide flickering in and out of view as he neared the motorcade. To keep the aide in sight, Evan threaded through the crowd along the gate.
The aide halted by the middle limousine, barely visible between the trees. The tinted, armored window lowered six inches, and the aide slid the briefcase through.
The window rolled back up.
The episode could have been witnessed by only a dozen people standing in the right vantage point along the gate.
It was indeed the break Evan had waited half a year for.
Bennett had shown his hand.
But because the president was in the middle limo now, that didn’t mean he’d be in the middle limo next time. Or that the limos drove in the same order each time.
Evan’s mind raced, grasping for variables.
The president might not have a favorite presidential limousine. But he’d almost certainly have a favorite driver .
Evan had to watch not the limos. But the drivers.
Or more precisely—since the drivers were hidden behind tinted windows in identical vehicles—Evan had to watch how the drivers drove , identifying any distinctive feature of how the middle wheelman commanded his vehicle.
He locked his primary attention on the central limo while also letting his vision widen to encompass the other two. The sun beat at the side of his neck. The crowd jostled with anticipation, the air smelling of Coppertone and deodorant. The Instagram kid whined that he was starving and sagged as though he’d misplaced his spine.
Evan maintained perfect focus.
As the convoy started up again, the end vehicles turned their wheels before the vehicles moved, rotating them in place on the asphalt while the limos were still at rest. But the middle driver turned the wheels only as he coasted forward, providing a smoother ride for the president.
A poker tell.
If Evan were the type to smile, he would have now.