The Book of Fate (33 page)
“Doesn’t look like you missed anything,” Lisbeth says as she turns past the first page of the book and stares down at the double-page spread of contact sheets filled with sixty or so tiny black-and-white shots, each one barely bigger than a postage stamp.
“If you keep flipping, there should be six more—eight rolls total, including reaction shots,” Kenny says. “I’ve got most of them blown to 8 x 10, but you said the library was looking for some new angles, so . . .” From his pocket, he pulls out a photographer’s loupe—a small, round magnifier to see the details of the photos—and hands it to Lisbeth.
For a half second, she forgets that she introduced herself as library staff. “No . . . no, that’s great,” she says. “With the ten-year anniversary of the shooting coming up, we just want an exhibit that does more than reprint the same old stuff.”
“Sure, that makes perfect sense,” Kenny says dryly, his Popeye eye narrowing as he calmly stares me down. “With two years to go, it’s much smarter for you to come all the way to Key West than to have me make a few copies and mail them to you at the library.”
Lisbeth freezes. So do I. The Popeye eye is barely a sliver.
“No bullshit, Wes. This for you or for
him
?” Kenny asks. He says
him
in that tone that people reserve for God. The same tone we all used during our days in the White House.
“Me,” I say, feeling my throat go dry.
He doesn’t respond.
“I swear, Kenny. On my mom.”
Still nothing.
“Kenny, please—”
“Listen, that’s my phone,” Kenny interrupts, even though the house is dead silent. “Lemme go grab this call. I’ll be upstairs if you need me. Understand?”
I nod, holding my breath. Kenny pats me on my scars like a godfather, then disappears up the staircase, never looking back. It’s not until I hear his upstairs bedroom door close that I finally exhale.
Lisbeth pops open the notebook’s binder rings with a metallic thunk. “You take the loupe—I’ll take the 8 x 10s,” she says, unlatching the first eight sheets and sliding them my way.
Kneeling over the cocktail table, I put the loupe over the first photo and lean in like a jeweler studying a diamond.
The first shot is a close-up on the limo just as we pulled into the pits of the racetrack. Unlike the video at Lisbeth’s office, the background here is crisp and clear. But the camera’s so close up on the car, all I see are the backs of a few NASCAR drivers’ heads and the first row of people sitting in the stands.
One picture down . . . 287 to go . . .
W
e’re looking for Kara Lipof,” Rogo said, stepping into the messy room that was as wide and long as two side-by-side bowling lanes.
“Two to the right,” a male archivist with a phone number written on his hand said as he pointed his thumb two desks away.
Housing all eight archivists in a shared space with nothing but a metal bookshelf to separate each desk from the one next to it, the room was littered with paper on every desk, shelf, chair, computer monitor, mini-fridge, and window ledge. Fortunately for Rogo, the paper didn’t cover the plastic nameplate on the front of Kara’s desk.
“Kara?” Rogo asked warmly, always preferring to charm.
From behind her desk, a woman in her early thirties with auburn hair and a trendy floral-print blouse looked up from her computer screen. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” Rogo replied, adding a smile. “I’m Wes Holloway—from the personal office. I spoke to you yesterday about Ron Boyle’s files.” Before she could register any difference in Wes’s and Rogo’s voices, Rogo added the one thing guaranteed to get her attention. “The President wanted to know if you’d pulled them together yet.”
“Yes . . . of course,” Kara said, fidgeting with the piles on her desk. “It’s just . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were coming to pick them up.”
“You said there were 36,000 pages to copy,” Rogo added, keeping the smile as he repeated the details Wes gave him. “We figured if we came down here and flipped through them first, we’d save you on the Kinko’s bills.”
Kara laughed. So did Dreidel, just for effect.
“You have no idea how much you’re saving my life right now,” Rogo added. “Thanks to you, I’ll actually live to my twenty-third birthday. Okay . . . twenty-fifth. Twenty-ninth, tops.”
“Don’t go turning me into a saint just yet,” Kara said, pulling out a thin manila folder. “Faxing you a crossword was one thing—but if you want access to Boyle’s full file, I need an official FOIA request, plus authorization that—”
“See, that’s the tickle,” Dreidel interrupted, putting a hand on Rogo’s shoulder and trying to get him to step aside. Rogo didn’t budge. “If the President makes an official request, people take notice. They start thinking something’s happened. That there must be news with Boyle’s case. Next thing we know, Boyle’s family wants to know what the government’s hiding. We say
nothing
, they say
everything
, and that’s how conspiracies are born. So how about saving all of us the migraines and instead treating this as an
unofficial
request? As for authorization, I’m happy to sign for it.”
“I’m sorry . . . do I know—?”
“Gavin Jeffer,” Dreidel replied before she could even finish the question. “Y’know . . . from
here
. . .”
Pointing a finger down toward her desk, Dreidel stabbed a piece of library letterhead just next to where his name appeared along the left margin.
To this day, it was Dreidel’s greatest get. In order to build the Manning Library, a separate foundation was set up with a board of directors that included the President’s closest friends, biggest donors, and most loyal staff. The select group included Manning’s daughters, his former secretary of state, the former CEO of General Motors, and—to almost everyone’s surprise—Dreidel. It took surgically precise phone calls and begging in all the right places, but those were always Dreidel’s specialties.
“So the files?” he said to the archivist.
Kara looked to Rogo, then back to Dreidel. The way she flicked her thumb against the edge of the manila folder, she was clearly still on the bubble.
“Kara, if you want, call the President’s office,” Dreidel added. “You know Claudia’s number.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It’s not like we’re talking about NSC staff,” Dreidel said, continuing to pound away as he referred to the National Security Council. “Boyle’s domestic.”
“And dead,” Rogo said, bouncing on his feet to keep the mood upbeat. “C’mon, what’s the worst that happens? He suddenly comes back to life?”
For the second time, Kara laughed. For the second time, Dreidel pretended to.
“And you’ll sign off on it?” she asked Dreidel.
“Gimme the form and I’m your man. And if it makes you feel better, I’ll have President Manning write you a thank-you note personally.”
Shaking her head, she stood from her desk. “This better not get me fi—”
Rogo’s phone rang in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said, fishing it from his pants and flipping it open. Caller ID said
PB Sher. Off.
Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office.
“I’ll catch up in a second,” he said to Dreidel and Kara as they headed for the door. Turning to the phone, he answered, “This is Rogo.”
“Hey, fatty, we missed you in court today,” a man teased with a high voice and unforgivable New York accent. Rogo knew it instantly. Deputy Terry Mechaber. Palm Beach County’s number one writer of illegal U-turn tickets . . . and Rogo’s oldest friend in law enforcement.
“Yeah, receptionist was sick, so I had to stay back and kiss my own butt this morning,” Rogo replied.
“That’s funny, because I just spoke to your receptionist. Sounded like her lips were just fine—especially when she said you’d been gone since this morning.”
For a moment, Rogo was quiet. “Listen, Terry—”
“I don’t wanna know, I don’t wanna hear, I don’t wanna read about it in tomorrow’s paper,” Terry said. “And based on this fight you’re picking, I don’t even wanna see the bad TV movie with the scene of me passing this along to you.”
“Wh-What’re you—?”
“The Three . . . y’know, the guys you asked me to run through the databases here . . .”
“Wait, you found something?”
“Yeah, here in the Florida DMV, we have records of all the international bad guys. No, I passed it to my partner’s sister’s brother-in-law, who’s been spending the last few years doing some high-tech computer job I still don’t understand for DOD.”
“Dee-oh-dee?”
“Department of Defense,” Terry replied, his voice slow and serious. “And when he ran
The Three
through there, well, remember the time when that eighteen-wheeler hauling all that rebar triple-flipped on I-95, sending metal javelins through the air and impaling nearly everyone in the ten nearest cars behind it?”
“Yeah . . .”
“It’s worse than that.”
W
elcome to Key West,” the pilot called out, brushing his wispy blond hair back on his head.
Following him out of the seaplane door and down the scaffolding to the white pontoon floats that gave the orange and red plane its buoyancy, O’Shea and Micah barely waited for the plane to be tied to the dock.
“How long you gonna be?” the pilot asked.
“Not long,” O’Shea said, careful to time his jump just right. Waiting for the seaport’s light waves to sink, then swell, he hopped from the edge of the pontoon float and landed square on the dock. “Just make sure—”
“Don’t stress so much,” the pilot called back. “I know every dockmaster working this place. Soon as I tie us up, I’ll take care of it—no one’ll ever know we were here.”
“We should call Wes’s office again,” Micah said, only a few steps behind. “Maybe he checked in.”
“He didn’t check in.”
Tracing the maze of wooden planks past dozens of sailboats and charter boats that swayed against the docks, O’Shea didn’t stop until he reached the end of William Street. As Micah skidded to a stop next to him, the sound of acoustic folk rock drifted in from the bar on their far right. O’Shea narrowed his eyes, searching through the crowds of tourists clogging the shops along the docks. From the side streets, a steady stream of cars and cabs circled the block, replenishing the tourist supply.
“What’re you—?”
“All the cabs are pink,” O’Shea blurted.
“Taxi!”
On their right, a bright pink cab shrieked and stopped. Opening the back door, O’Shea slid inside. “You have radios in these cars?”
The skinny African-American cabbie glanced over his shoulder at O’Shea’s dark blue suit, then over at Micah, whose tie dangled downward as he leaned in through the open door. “Let me guess—lost your wallet in a pink cab.”
“Actually, I lost my friend.” O’Shea laughed, playing nice. “He’s pretty unforgettable, though—huge mess of scars on the side of his face. Plus the redhead he’s running around with. So whattya say,” he added, lowering a twenty-dollar bill onto the armrest of the front seat. “Think you can help me track him down?”
The cabbie grinned. “Damn, man, why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”
One quick description later, a slow, easy voice squawked through the radio’s receiver. “Yeah, I seen ’em, Rogers. Kid with the scars . . . Dropped ’em twenty minutes ago. Three twenty-seven William Street.”
“That far from here?” O’Shea asked as the cabbie looked at him in the rearview.
“You can walk if you want.”
Micah hopped inside, tugging the door shut.
“We’ll drive,” O’Shea said as he tossed another twenty onto the armrest. “Fast as you can.”
“Like your life depended on it,” Micah added.
W
ith my knees digging into the carpet, my chest pinned against the coffee table, and the weight of my face pressed against the photographer’s loupe, I study a black-and-white profile shot of the President and First Lady as they leave Cadillac One, their chins up toward the astonished crowd. Like the best White House photos, the moment is flush with the pomp of the presidency mixed with the humanity of the players involved.
Manning has his hand on the small of his wife’s back, gently edging her out of the limo and into his world. As she leaves the car, one foot already on the pavement of the racetrack, she’s in mid-blink, frozen awkwardly between the private quiet of the limo and the public roar of the crowd. For support, the First Lady holds the hand that the President’s extended to her. But even in that moment—her holding him, his fingertips on the curve of her back— whatever tenderness exists between husband and wife is swallowed by the fact that instead of looking at each other, both smile up to the fans in the stands.
“These are unreal,” Lisbeth says, flipping through the notebook of 8 x 10s in her lap.
I glance over to see what she’s looking at. She’s about ten seconds ahead of my sequence, moments after the last shot was fired and Manning was pulled down by the swarm of drivers, guests, and Secret Service agents. In her photo, people in the stands scream and scurry in every direction, their hair spiked as they run.
In mine, they’re enraptured and calm, completely immobile on the edge of their seats. In Lisbeth’s, I hear the screams. In mine, I hear the thrill of their first true look at the President and his wife.
There he is . . . There he is . . . There they are . . .
Ten seconds apart. Ten seconds to change everyth— No. It didn’t change everything. It changed me.
An electronic ring interrupts the thought as I quickly trace the noise to the cell phone we borrowed from Lisbeth’s coworker at the paper. Pulling it from my inside jacket pocket, I see
Pres. Manning Library
on caller ID. At least he’s smart enough not to call from his—
“They’re all in it together,” he insists before I can even say hello. “That’s how they pulled it off.”
“What’re you—?”
“It’s just like we said, Wes—you can’t do this without help.”
“Slow down . . . who’re you talking about?”
“The Three—that’s what Boyle called them. But they’re not what you—”
“Who’d you get this from? Dreidel or someone else?”
