Amanaki’s smile felt, as always, like the clouds had parted to let through a blast of soul-warming beauty. “Yeah, I’d say we are. Men talk a lot. Women stay and take care of what needs to be taken care of.”
Naomi’s phone vibrated in the zip pocket of her tights—Jason calling back? The flare of hopefulness she felt was accompanied quickly with a pang of self-recrimination. When it came to her brothers, she knew better than to allow na? ve optimism to worm its way to the surface.
As she dug in her pocket, she realized that it wasn’t her personal phone that was vibrating but her secure Boeing Black smartphone.
She thumbed the ANSWER icon. “This is Templeton.”
“Special Agent in Charge Templeton?”
“The very one.”
“We need you here immediately.”
6
X Marks the Spot
Arms crossed, Naomi regarded the scene in Apartment 705 as agents from Forensic Services worked up the room all around her. She’d been recently promoted within Protective Intelligence and Assessment, and though she’d worked a file drawer’s worth of cases since, the other agents still seemed to be adjusting to her. More precisely, they were still adjusting to the last name that came attached to her.
For three administrations her father had run the “big show”—the Presidential Protective Detail. In that time he had pioneered enough security and safeguard innovations that his name had literally become synonymous with perfection within the Service. Did you Templeton the rope line? We need Templeton coverage from the hotel advance team . The motorcade route has been Templetoned.
It’s not that anyone believed that Naomi hadn’t earned her promotion. At thirty-one she was young but not too young, and there was no arguing her work ethic or performance. But most everyone came at her armed with a full quiver of assumptions. Was she a guru with a genetic gift for security matters? A haughty prima donna? If they shook her hand, would some of the old man’s magic rub off?
Few circumstances were as emotionally confusing as growing up in the shadow of a not-known-to-the-public celebrity. Her father’s fame—if it could be called that—was a spark that threw no light beyond a circle of cohorts. The problem was, she happened to share those cohorts now.
She was Hank Templeton’s kid first, Naomi Templeton second. Despite the complexities that presented, she did not deceive herself into believing that this was not without its advantages.
After getting the call at the assisted-living facility, she’d changed hastily in the car and raced to the scene. Door-to-door through rush-hour traffic in twenty-three minutes, a reaction time even her father would have found acceptable.
She returned her focus to the bolt-action sniper rifle sitting atop its tripod at the front window.
A Russian piece of gear, a Mosin-Nagant with a PSO-1 scope.
Given its placement, there was no way the motorcade’s advance team could have missed it. It was positioned to be seen.
The weapon was common enough, millions of them scattered around the globe. And yet the choice of rifle struck her as odd.
Given the high-rent real estate of the apartment and the high-value target the assassin hoped to capture in the scope, the rifle was decidedly second-rate. Mosin-Nagants were like AK-47s. You couldn’t throw a rock in a war-torn country without hitting one. They were cheap, durable, and easy to use. But they had their problems. Sticky bolts, worn-out ejectors, screws falling out of the stocks. This one looked beat up and dusty.
She would have expected something professional and top-tier, maybe a Remington M700 with a Leupold Variable-Power Scout Scope.
One of the forensics men, a towering guy with a drippy nose, announced his presence behind her with a sniffle. “Serial number’s been scoured off, probably with a bench grinder.”
“How deep?” she asked.
“Deep enough that there’s no way we can recover it with an etching reagent. But that’s not what’s noteworthy. The rifle? It’s not usable. The barrel’s warped, and there’s no firing pin. It’s totally sterile.”
Naomi lifted her eyes to the four blown-up surveillance photos that tiled the wall behind the rifle. Each featured a face in close-up, and each face had a letter Magic Markered across it.
A middle-aged man in what looked like a Venetian piazza: J .
What appeared to be a homeless man in a mall: C .
A handsome guy smoking a cigarette in a parking lot: L .
And the last, a photo of a man in his sixties, this one without a letter scrawled across the head. A square face, weathered and handsome, with a well-practiced squint.
The staging of the rifle and photos made clear: This wasn’t an aborted assassination attempt. It was a message.
But to whom?
Naomi flicked a hand at the photographs with the weird markings. “How ’bout those?”
“Those are sterile, too. We managed to digitally capture the faces beneath the markings and run them through facial recognition. Nothing. These people? They don’t exist. Except for him.” The agent pointed at the man in the unmarked photo. “Former station chief with the Agency, mostly through the seventies and early eighties. His personnel record gets hazy after that. His name’s Jack Johns.”
“Where is he?” Naomi asked.
“Went missing about six months ago, just vanished off the map.” The agent scratched his neck. “Maybe these are photos of past victims of the shooter.”
Naomi tried the theory on, found it ill-fitting. “You pull any prints from the pictures?”
“No. They’re clean.”
“Did you dust the backs?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You pulled the photos off the wall and put them back up?”
“They’re taped, so we lifted them to dust the backs.”
“You dust the tape itself?”
“We did. Along with everything else in the apartment.”
“There isn’t anything else in this apartment.”
“Doorknobs, countertops, toilet flusher.” The agent retrieved a handkerchief from a back pocket and wiped his nose. “There’s not a single print here. The guy’s a ghost.”
She gestured at the photos. “What’s with the letters?”
“I don’t know,” the agent said. “But there’s one more.”
“One more what?”
“Letter.”
“Where?”
He waved Naomi over to the rifle. The bolt had been manipulated back, revealing the round in the chamber. A single letter had been etched into it.
X.
“We found it like that,” the agent said. “X marks the spot.” He gave a nervous laugh that sounded like a giggle.
Naomi looked from the round to the photos on the wall and back to the round. “It’s not a mark,” she said. “It’s a signature.”
“Why do you think that?” the agent asked. “Doesn’t it make more sense that it’s the name of the target? Ye olde ‘bullet with your name on it’?”
“X stands for the unknown. President Bennett isn’t X . He’s the best-known human on the planet.”
“After Kim Kardashian,” the agent said.
“After Kim Kardashian,” Naomi conceded. She studied the scrawled letters covering the faces in three of the four photos. “So the would-be shooter is in on the same side as the men in these photographs. If my theory is right.”
The agent shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet against a Templeton.”
“Then you’d lose a good percentage of the time.” She met his gaze, which had grown nervous, shifty. “I need your ideas. Not your deference.”
He nodded.
She moved on. “I was told PD had a run-in with a suspicious party on E Street after the rifle was spotted.”
“Yes, ma’am. Five officers.”
“When can I interview them?”
“Right now, if you’d like. Micelli just brought them up, has them waiting in the hall.”
She nodded and stepped out of the apartment.
The cops were huddled up by the elevator—a female plainclothes officer and four men. They turned as Naomi approached. She drew up short, taking in their ragged appearance.
The big rookie’s front teeth were chipped. One of the uniforms had a broken nose, bruises already coming up beneath his eyes. The other had swelling that stretched down one cheek and across his neck.
After introductions were made, Naomi said, “What’s with the red blotch?” “Matcha green tea,” the officer said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The cop with the incipient black eyes stepped in. “Look, he got the better of us, okay?”
“And it looks like you caught the worst of it.” Naomi tilted her head back, appraising the nose. “Jesus. At least it’s a clean break.”
At this the man scowled a little.
Naomi turned her attention to the veteran cop and the woman. “Looks like you two got off okay.”
The woman shrugged. “I did get knocked down pretty hard. When Kryzanski was kicked into me.”
Naomi said, “Lucky you didn’t crack your head.”
“I think the attacker…” The female cop cleared her throat.
“What’s that?”
“I think he cradled my head on the way down.”
Naomi nodded and then nodded again, unsure what to make of that. “Romantic,” she said. A closer look showed the female officer to have red-rimmed eyes. Naomi decided not to ask about that at the moment. Instead she said, “How ’bout you tell me how this all kicked off.”
“The guy threatened us,” Kryzanski said.