The Inner Circle (40 page)

It’s a fair question. And the one assumption we’ve been relying on since the moment this started: that when we found the dictionary in the SCIF, it held a message between the President and someone from his inner circle. But if that’s not the case…

“You think the President may’ve been trying to communicate with someone
outside
his circle?” I ask.

“Either that or someone outside his circle may’ve been trying to communicate with the President,” Dallas replies.

As I turn away from the treeline, my brain flips back to the original message:
February 16. Twenty-six years is a long time to keep a secret
.

“Maybe that’s why the President asked for you to staff him this morning, Beecher. Maybe he wasn’t trying to
give
you a message—maybe he was waiting to
get
one. From
you
.”

I see where he’s going. It’s the only thing that makes sense. All this time, we thought the dictionary held a letter that was written to Wallace by one of his friends. But if this is really from someone who’s
not
on his side… and they somehow found out about his Plumbers, and were hoping to reveal something from twenty-six years ago…

“You think someone’s threatening Wallace?” Clementine asks.

“I think they’re way beyond threats,” I say as a cloud of frosty air puffs out with each syllable. “If this is what I think it is, I think someone’s blackmailing the President of the United States.”

80

Entering the SCIF, Khazei did his own quick scan of the windowless room.

“You think I’m stupid?” Tot asked as he fiddled with the TV that sat atop the rolling cart. “There’re no cameras.”

Khazei checked anyway. For himself. Sure enough, no cameras.

But that didn’t mean there was no VCR.

“Where’d you even find it?” Khazei asked, motioning to the videotape as Tot slid it in and turned on the TV.

“In his house. He had it hid in a box of tampons.”

“Why’d he have tampons? I thought he lived alone.”

“He’s got a sister. And had a fiancée. He’s not throwing their stuff away,” Tot scolded.

Khazei didn’t respond. Instead, he looked down at his recently polished nails, tempted to start biting the cuticle of his thumb.

On TV, the video began to play, showing Orlando, Clementine… and of course Beecher—and what they found in the SCIF that day.

“Eff me,” Khazei muttered.

Tot nodded. “I think they already did.”

81

Eightball?” Dallas asks.

“Has to be Eightball,” I agree with a nod.

“What’s Eightball?” Clementine asks.

I look over at Dallas, who shakes his head. He doesn’t want me telling her. He also didn’t want me bringing her to see Nico. But that’s the only reason we got in. And got here.

“Beecher, if you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to,” Clementine says. “It’s okay. I understand.”

“Listen to the girl,” Dallas whispers.

But what Dallas will never understand is what Khazei said this morning—once everything finally gets out and they verify that Orlando’s been murdered, Clementine’s just as high on the suspect list as I am, and therefore has just as much of a right to know what the hell is really going on.

“Eightball’s a person,” I say as Clementine stands frozen in the cold. “He’s a kid, really—or
was
a kid—named Griffin Anderson. He was twenty years old when he disappeared.”

“
Disappeared?
As in abducted?”

“No one knows. This guy Eightball was the town bully, complete with an eight-ball tattoo on his forearm. The point is,
he’s
what happened twenty-six years ago. February 16th. That’s the night he disappeared from the President’s hometown in Ohio.”

“Which means what?” Clementine asks as a twig snaps back by the treeline. We all turn to look. It’s too hard to see anything. “You think that when the President was younger, he had some hand in this?”

“I have no idea, but… well… yeah,” I say, still scanning tree by tree. “Think about it. Something happens that night, Wallace loses his cool, and—I don’t know—the future President goes all
Mystic River
and he and his boys somehow make Eightball disappear…”

“Until somehow, someone from the past suddenly shows up out of nowhere and starts resurrecting the story,” Dallas says, his eyes tightening on Clementine.

“Dallas, leave her alone,” I say.

“No, Dallas, say what you’re thinking,” Clementine says.

“I just did,” he shoots back.

“And that’s your grand scenario? You think I got my hands on some old info, and then what? I’ve been using Beecher in hopes of terrorizing the President?”

“There are more ridiculous ideas out there.”

“And just to complete your delusion, tell me what my motive is again?”

“I’ve seen where you live, Clementine. I was out there last night,” Dallas says. “No offense, but that house… that neighborhood… you could clearly use an upgrade.”

“Dallas, that’s enough!” I say.

“You do
not
know me,” Clementine growls, making sure he hears each syllable, “so be very careful what you say next.”

“Ooh, nice threatening ending. I didn’t even have to bring up how far the apple tumbles from the tree. Like father, like dau—”

Springing forward, Clementine leaps for Dallas’s throat.
“You smug piece of—!”

I dart in front of Dallas, catching Clementine in midair, inches before she clobbers him. She’s a whirlwind of wild punches, her weight hitting my chest at full speed and knocking me backward.

“Clemmi, relax!” I insist as I dig my feet into the snow. She still fights to get past me, our chests pressing against each other.

“
Don’t you dare compare him to me! You take those words back!
” she continues, still raging at Dallas.

“He didn’t mean it,” I plead as I try to hold her in place.

“
You take it back!
” she howls, her hot breath pounding against my face. It’s even worse than when she lost it with Khazei.

“
Clementine! Stop!
” I order, gripping her shoulders hard enough that I know she feels it.

Her eyes turn my way, her anger still at full boil. The scariest part is, for that half a second, she looks
exactly
like her father. She again grits her teeth, and the big vein swells. I wait for her to attack.

“You can let go now,” she says in a low voice. Her arms are still tensed.

“You sure?” I ask.

“Let go, Beecher. I want you to let me go. Now.”

As she tugs free of my grip, I shoot Dallas a look, hoping he’ll apologize. He doesn’t.

“Dallas didn’t mean it,” I tell her.

“I know who I am!” she shoots back, struggling to find control. “I know I’m impulsive. And passionate. I know I have a temper—but I’m
not him
, Beecher! I’m not
that
,” she insists, refusing to say her father’s name.

I reach out to calm her.

She again pulls away. By now, I know she’s good at hiding her wounded side. And her scared side. But this anger… this venom that erupts and stings so brutally… Some things can’t be hidden—especially when it’s who we really are.

“The least you can do is pretend to stick up for me,” she adds, catching her breath.

“C’mon, you know I don’t think you’re like Nico.”

“I know you can
say
it, Beecher. The point is to
mean
it.”

The words bite as she lets them freeze in the air.

Before I can say a word, she turns around, walking back to the path alone.

“Apologize later,” Dallas says, gripping my arm as I go to chase her. “Right now, let’s get back to the group so we can figure out what’s going on.”

“The group? Your super-bad-ass Culper Ring?” I ask, my eyes still on Clementine, who needs some time to calm down. “In case you haven’t noticed, Dallas, for all the bragging you’ve done, they didn’t get anywhere until I gave them Nico’s answer. And in case you hadn’t noticed that, everything else has failed: The rock was empty, all the messages are gone, and we’ve got no leads to follow.”

“That’s not true. You said Tot found that police report—the one that had the President’s doctor…”

“Stewart Palmiotti.”

“… that when Palmiotti was home from college, he was the last one who saw Eightball alive… that he told the police he saw Eightball voluntarily get into that car. While you were running around with Clementine, I had our guys confirm it. They found the report. Palmiotti knows what really happened that night, which means we can—”

“We can
what
? We can send some Culper Ring guys to go confront Palmiotti? Is that the new master plan—that they march into the White House, stick a finger in his face, and accuse the President’s oldest and most trusted friend of harboring an old secret?”

“You’d be surprised what people will say when they think you have the upper hand.”

“But we don’t have the upper hand! All we have is a sheet of paper with someone saying,
I know what you did last summer
, which is proof of
nothing
! And I’m telling you right now—I don’t care how many brainiacs you’ve got in that Ring—if you go in there with nothing and start yanking on the tail of the lion, that lion is going to take out his claws and show us firsthand why they crowned him king of the jungle. And the first claw’s coming at me.”

As Clementine heads back down the curving concrete path, Dallas for once doesn’t argue. He knows I’m right. He knows that the moment those tox reports come back and Khazei can prove that Orlando was murdered, every single eye is going to be aimed at the last person Orlando was seen with: me. And when that black hole opens, there’s no slowing it down. Not until it swallows every one of us in its path.

“That still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t focus on Palmiotti,” he says, again motioning to the footprints. “Our people are looking. They can find anything. So whatever happened all those years ago, we’ll find out what they saw, or who was there… or even where they were—”

“Wait,” I blurt. “Say that part again.”

“We’ll find what they saw?”

“No.
Where they were
. If we find where they were…” I pull out my phone, quickly dialing a number.

“What’re you doing?” Dallas asks.

“If we want to take down the lion,” I tell him, “we need to get a bigger gun.”

82

What’re you doing?
” Dallas asked.

“
If we want to take down the lion
,” Beecher replied, “
we need to get a bigger gun.
”

Still watching from the treeline, the barber had to hold his breath to hear what they were saying. He tried to tell himself it was still okay. But as Beecher dialed whatever number he was dialing in the distance, Laurent knew the truth—and he knew just how far he was from
okay
.

From what he could hear, Beecher and his group weren’t just guessing anymore. They had details. They had names—and not just the President’s. They had Palmiotti… plus, he heard them say
Eightball
…

If they—for them to know about that… for them to know what happened that night…

On the side of the apple blossom tree that hid Laurent from sight, a small patch of snow, clinging like a white island to the bark, was slowly whittled down by the intensity of the blowing wind. As he watched the island shrink, flake by flake, Laurent knew it was no different here.

Erosion over time.

For a while now, Palmiotti said he could stop it. That somehow, he could make it all go away. But confidence is no different than friendships or secrets. They’re all susceptible to the same fate…

Erosion over time.

It was so clear to Laurent now. This wasn’t the beginning of the tornado.

This was the beginning of the end of it.

A few inches in front of the barber, the island of snow was the size of a quarter, worn down by another slash of wind. Across the snowy field, Beecher was having much the same effect. Indeed, as the last bits of snow were tugged from the bark, Laurent once again felt a thick lump in his throat and the matching swell of emotion that overcame him earlier when he read his client’s tattoo.

If Laurent wanted to stop the tornado, there was only one way to make it go away. Until this exact moment, though, he didn’t think he had the courage to do it.

But he did.

Reaching into his jacket pocket, Laurent gripped tight to the item he’d instinctively grabbed from the shop, one of only a few mementos his father brought back from the war: the Master Barbers straight-edge razor with the abalone handle.