The Fifth Assassin (3 page)

“Just past eight,” I say. “If you don’t believe me, ask Tot. He drove me home and dropped me off.” Still standing by the door with the priceless Robert Todd Lincoln letter in my hands, I motion to Tot’s cubicle.

“I appreciate that. Tot dropped you off. That means he doesn’t know where you were between eight last night and about six this morning, correct?” the agent with the goatee asks, though it no longer sounds like a question.

It’s the first time I notice that neither of these guys has the hand mics or ear buds that you see on the Secret Service agents around the President. These two don’t do protection. They’re investigators. Still, the Service’s mission is to protect the President. In the Culper Ring, we protect the Presidency. It’s not a small distinction.

“Were you with anyone else last night, Beecher?” Agent Harris jumps in.

From his cubicle, Tot shoots me a look. The bear trap is about to snap shut.

“Do you always wear gloves at work?” Agent Harris adds, motioning to the white cotton gloves.

“Only when I’m handling old documents,” I say as I open the file folder and show them the mottled brown Robert Todd Lincoln letter that’s still in my open palms. “If you don’t mind…”

They step away from my cubicle, but not by much.

As I squeeze inside and carefully place the Lincoln letter on my
desk, I notice the odd slant of my keyboard and how one of my piles of paper is slightly askew. They’ve already gone through my stuff.

“And do you take those gloves home with you?” Agent Harris asks.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but are you accusing me of something?”

They exchange glances.

“Beecher, do you know someone named Ozzie Andrews?” Agent Harris finally asks.

“Who?”

“Just tell me if you know him. Ozzie Andrews.”

“With a name as silly as
Ozzie
, I’d remember if I knew him.”

“So you never met him? Never heard the name?”

“What’re you really asking?”

“They found a body,” Agent Harris says. “A pastor in a church downtown was found murdered last night around 10 p.m. Throat slit.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It is. Fortunately for us, just as the D.C. Police got there, they nabbed a suspect. Named Ozzie. He was strolling out the back of the church right after the murder. And when they went through Ozzie’s pockets, this killer had
your
name and phone number in his wallet.”

“What? That’s ridiculous.”

“So you don’t know anything about this murder?”

“Of course not!”

There’s a long pause.

“Beecher, how would you describe your opinion of President Orson Wallace?” Agent Harris interrupts.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re not asking your political views. It’s just, with St. John’s Church being so close to the White House… you understand. We need to ask.”

I turn to Tot, who doesn’t just smell the rat anymore; now we see it. Two months ago, as the President buried his best friend, he swore he’d also bury me. I thought it’d come in the middle of the
night with a ski mask. But I forgot who I’m dealing with. Tot said the President already had the bull’s-eye on my forehead, then suddenly two Secret Service guys show up? This is Wallace’s real revenge: Tie me to a murder, send in the Service, and keep your manicured hands clean as they snap my mugshot.

“Where is this Ozzie guy now?” I ask. “I’d like to know who he is.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize suspects get to make their own demands.”

“So now I’m a suspect? Fine, then let me face my accuser. Is he still in jail?”

For the first time, both agents go silent.

“What, you let him go?” I ask.

Again, silence.

“So you found the murder suspect and already let him walk? And now you think you can come here and pin it on me? Sorry, but unless you’re here to arrest me, we’re done.”

“Can you just answer one last—?”

“Done. Goodbye,” I say, pointing them to the door. For thirty seconds, they stand there, just to make it clear that it’s their choice to leave, not mine.

As the door slams behind them, I hear Tot whispering behind me.

“You’re the best, Mac. I appreciate it,” he says from his cubicle.

It’s the first time I realize Tot’s been on the phone the entire time, and when I hear the name
Mac
, I realize how much danger I’m really in.

When George Washington first created the Culper Ring, he picked regular, ordinary people because no one looks twice at them. His only other rule was this: that even he should never know the names of all the members. That way, if one of them got caught passing information, the enemy would never be able to track the others.

That’s the real reason why the Culper Ring has been able to exist to this very day—and why they’ve had a hand in everything from the Revolutionary War, to Hiroshima, to the Bay of Pigs. Before the OSS, or the CIA, these guys wrote the book on keeping secrets. So when it comes to other Culper members, there’s only one besides
Tot that I’ve met face-to-face. He’s a doctor; they call him
The Surgeon
. That’s it, no name. He took four pints of my blood in case of emergency. But there’s one other member I’ve been warned about.

Tot calls him
Mac
—which is short for
The Immaculate Deception
—which is short for
when it comes to hacking, if we need something, Mac’s the one who’ll get it
. The only thing he asks in return is that we buy Girl Scout cookies from his niece.

“You owe me another box of Samoas,” Mac says through Tot’s cell.

“Y’mean Caramel deLites,” Tot says.

“I don’t care if they changed the name. They’re Samoas to me,” Mac says in the text-to-speech voice generator that draws out every syllable in the word
sa-mo-as
and makes him sound like a 1960s robot.

No one’s ever heard his real voice.

From what Tot says, Mac was one of the Seven. In case of a national emergency, if the Internet and our computer infrastructure go down, seven people in the U.S. government have the capability to put it back up again. Five of the seven need to be present to do it. Mac, before he left the government behind, used to be one of them.

Cool story, right? It’s not the only one. According to the Surgeon, Mac isn’t a retired tech genius. He’s a nineteen-year-old social misfit who, like every talented hacker who gets
caught
by the U.S. government, is hired to
work for
the U.S. government. The Girl Scout cookies are really for his sister.

I don’t care which story is true. All I care is that when trouble hits, no one’s faster than the Immaculate Deception.

Tot hands me his phone over the cubicle partition. Onscreen is a photo of a man with buzzed black hair, standing against a light gray wall. My accuser Ozzie’s mugshot. He looks about my age, but it’s hard to tell since his face… his right eye sags slightly, making him look permanently sleepy—and the way his face is lumpy, like it’s coated with a shiny putty… I think he’s a burn victim.

Then I notice his eyes. They’re pale gold like the color of white wine.

Behind me, the door to our office opens as one of our fellow employees arrives. I barely hear it. My skin goes so cold, it feels like it’s about to crack off my body.

There’s only one person I know with gold eyes. And as I study the photo, as I look past the burns… No. It’s impossible. It can’t be him.

But I know it is.

Marshall.

Twenty years ago

Sagamore, Wisconsin

M
arshall didn’t hear the rip.

Like any fifth-grade boy, he was moving too fast as he kicked open the passenger door. Even in the small and usually slow town of Sagamore, even before his dad put the car in park, Marshall was out in the cold, racing around to the back of the car and using all his strength to pull his dad’s wheelchair from the trunk.

Barely ten years old, the youngest in his grade, Marshall was always told he was chubby, not fat—that his weight was perfect, but his height just needed to catch up. He believed it too, anxiously awaiting the day that God would even things out and make him more like his fellow fifth graders: tall like Vincent or skinny like Beecher.

Marshall was a polite kid—almost to a fault—with a mom so strict she taught him that if he had to pass gas, he had to leave the room. Discipline ran deep in the Lusk household, and the central discipline was taking care of Dad.

“At your service, sir,” Marshall announced, making the joke his dad always cringed at as he rolled the wheelchair to the driver’s-side door.

“On C,” his father said, turning his body and giving the signal for Marshall to lock the chair’s wheels and hold it in place. “A… B…”

“C…!” Marshall and his dad said simultaneously. Marshall’s father used all the strength in his arms to pivot out of the driver’s seat, toward the wheelchair, swinging what was left of his legs through the air.

In medical terms, Timothy Lusk was a double amputee. On the night of the accident, as he drove his pregnant wife to the hospital, a brown minivan that was being driven by a woman in the midst of an epileptic fit plowed into their car. Blessedly, Marshall was born without a scratch. Timothy’s wife, Cherise, was fine too. The doctors cut off Timothy’s crushed legs just below the knees.

“Careful…” Marshall said as his dad’s full weight tumbled from the car and collided with the wheelchair. He hated it when his dad rushed, but his father was always annoyed and impatient at being cooped up in snowy weather. Even though neighbors helped to shovel the Lusks’ walk, it didn’t mean they could shovel the entire town. For anyone in a wheelchair, winter was a bitch.

“Are you holding it?” his dad barked as his landing in the seat sent the chair skidding back slightly, sliding across the last bits of slush on the ground. The stump of his left leg slammed into the metal base of the armrest.

“I got it,” Marshall called back, readjusting his thick glasses and maneuvering the chair to mount the curb. Twenty years from now, every new street would be outfitted with a curb cut, and wheelchairs would weigh barely twelve pounds. But on this day, in Sagamore, Wisconsin, the curbs were unbroken and the wheelchairs weighed fifty.

In one quick motion, Marshall’s father popped a wheelie that tipped him back.

Gripping the wheelchair’s pushbars, Marshall angled the front wheels onto the curb. Now came the hard part. Marshall wasn’t strong, and he was overweight, but he knew what to do. With his palms underneath the pushbars, he shoved and lifted, gritting his teeth. His father pumped the wheels, trying to help. Marshall’s palms went red, with little islands of white where the pushbars dug in. It took everything they had…

Kuunk.

No problem. Up the curb, easy as pie.

“Galactic,” Marshall muttered.

From there, as his dad rolled in front of him, there was no plan
for where they were going. His father just wanted
out
—strolling down the main drag of Dickinson Street… an egg sandwich at Danza’s… maybe a stop in Farris’s bookshop. But all that changed when Marshall’s father said, “I gotta go.”

“Whattya mean?” Marshall asked. “Go where?”

“I gotta
go
,” he said, pointing down. But it was the sudden panic in his father’s voice that set Marshall off.

“You gotta poop?” Marshall asked.

“No! I gotta
pee
.”

“So don’t you…?” Marshall paused, feeling a rush of blood flush his face. “I-Isn’t that what the bag’s for…?” he asked, tapping the outside of his own left thigh, but motioning to the leg bag his father wore to urinate.

“It ripped,” his father said, scanning the empty street and still trying so hard to keep his voice down. “My bag ripped.”

“How could it rip? We haven’t even—” Marshall stopped, glancing back at their car. “You tore it when you got out of the car, didn’t you?”

Racing behind his dad and grabbing the pushbars, he added, “Now we gotta get back in the car and go all the way home…”

“I won’t make it home.”

Marshall froze. “Wha?”

His father stopped the wheelchair, keeping his head down and his back to his son. He’d say these words once, but he wouldn’t say them again: “I can’t make it, Marshall. I’m gonna have an accident.”

Marshall’s mouth gaped open, but no words came out. For most of his life, because of the wheelchair, he had been nearly at eye level with his father. But he’d never noticed it until this moment.

“I can help you, Dad.” Grabbing the pushbars, Marshall spun the wheelchair around, running hard up the sidewalk. The closest store was Lester’s clothing store.

His father was silent. But Marshall saw the way he was shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“Almost there,” Marshall promised, running hard, his head tucked down like a charging bull.

There was a loud
krunk
as the legs of the metal wheelchair collided with the concrete step.

“
I need help! Open up!
” Marshall shouted, rapping his fist against Lester’s glass door. The small bell that announced each customer rang lightly at the impact.

“Dad, tip
back
!” Marshall yelled as Dad popped a wheelie, and one of the employees, a thirtysomething woman with bad teeth and perfectly straight brown hair, opened the store’s front door.

“It’s an emergency! Grab the front of the chair!” Marshall yelled as the woman obliged, bending down. He jammed his own palms underneath the pushbars. “On C…” he added. “A… B…”

There was another loud
krunk
as the back wheels of the chair climbed the first step, wedging just below the second.

“Almost there! Just one more!” Marshall said.

“I’m not gonna make it,” his father insisted.

“You’ll make it, Dad. I promise, you’ll make it!”

“Sir, you need to stop moving,” the employee added, getting ready to lift again.

“Here we go,” Marshall insisted, his voice cracking. “Last one. On C…!”

“Marsh, I’m sorry… I can’t.”

“You can, Dad!
On C…!
” Marshall pleaded.

His father shook his head, his eyes welling with tears. As he clutched the armrests of his chair, his hands were shaking, like he was trying to claw his way out of his skin… out of the chair… Like he was trying to run from his own body.