Chapter 28 Olive Branch
Olive Branch
The soft whirring in the background was distracting. Almost as much as Manny Llorente’s muffled pleas. “God, please. Please, just wait. Hang on—hang on!” A choked scream.
But sitting on Manny’s sleek modern couch, Evan wasn’t paying attention to him. He was focused on talking to Joey over the RoamZone.
“I need you to locate Deputy Assistant Director in Charge Naomi Templeton,” he said. “Right now in real time.”
“Templeton?” Joey sounded breathless, a rare occurrence.
Evan’s and Templeton’s paths had crossed many times over the years.
She was a top-notch agent, ordained for the Secret Service as if for the priesthood.
Her father had run the “big show,” Presidential Protective Detail, and she’d earned her way up the chain with an impeccable work ethic and unimpeachable principles.
She had hunted Evan through the years, seeking to bring him down for his vigilantism.
But they spoke each other’s language and their respective codes had found resonance, flip sides of the same coin.
They were enemies. She was devoted to his capture. And yet he trusted her.
Years ago, he’d managed to steal the encryption keys to her Boeing Black smartphone and had kept a back door open to it. This would be useful for pinning down her location. With Devine’s resources and Joey’s brain, everything else could be speedily arranged from there.
“Yes,” Evan said. And told Joey what he needed.
He’d shut off the projector to enjoy the relative quiet of the loft. But the background whirring kept on, reaching a different pitch as it neared its goal.
“—please please just—don’t. I told you everything. I ta-ta—” The rest was smothered.
Joey said, “Even with Devine’s resources, that’ll take some doing.”
“—bro, just one second, I ca-ca-can’t—”
“That’s okay.” Evan leaned back on the low couch, relaxing into the lumbar bolster. “I’m not in a rush.”
Naomi Templeton ran her hand across her father’s grave marker, reading the etched markings with her fingertips like braille.
Two dates, a name, beloved husband and father.
No mention of his legendary status within the Service.
In the end that’s all there is, she thought.
A brief span of time and what we are to those we loved.
She already had the first date, of course.
She had the name, too, prominent in D.C.
As for the third slot, what would they carve on her tombstone?
Daughter? Sister? Though in her early thirties, she was perennially single.
Men seemed balky around her, unsure of her broad shoulders, her bluntly cut straw-blond hair, her hard, pretty features unenhanced by makeup.
Mascara made her eyes water, screwed up her target acquisition.
When it came to work, she was as confident as she was competent, could field-strip a SIG Sauer blindfolded and choke out a suspect nine different ways.
They could read it in her, today’s boy-men, and that rarely primed them for the demure banter over cocktails they seemed to prefer.
Her rise through the Service had been meteoric.
Her early professional years had brought predictable grumblings about nepotism, but at this point no one could deny her accomplishments and exemplary service.
Given her usual closeness with the president, Naomi had found herself elevated into a new role.
Technically her new title was deputy assistant director of strategic intelligence, though she had significant overlap with the Office of Professional Responsibility as well, guiding policies around compliance, integrity, and accountability.
She was a beneficiary of an anomaly allowed at the highest reaches of government to those who showed great talent: her pay grade remained firmly set but her responsibilities ranged freely.
One of her key purviews was quarterbacking investigations that drew the president’s personal interest and contending with all matters pertaining to Orphan X, who continued to draw more resources than any individual deserved.
She was trusted. And rightly so.
Rising, she drew in the cold February air.
D.C. was stark in winter, the trees forked and bare, charcoal trunks against banks of melting snow.
Breath clouding, she walked out of the cemetery.
Her new Jeep Wrangler waited at the curb, hardtop on, snow dusted across the amusingly named Sting Gray clear coat.
As she neared the driver’s door, a bike messenger pedaled at her, wheels improbably holding on the icy sidewalk.
She watched his eyes lock on her, mentally charted the draw from her hip holster, position of cover across the hood, angle to his critical mass.
But as he skidded to a stop on the sidewalk, he addressed her nonthreateningly, his voice cracking adolescently: “Ms. Templeton?”
“Deputy Assistant Director Templeton,” she said, because he’d put her on alert and she was feeling bitchy.
She stayed tense as he reached into his bag, withdrew a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
He proffered it across the Jeep’s hood, wisely keeping some distance. “You have a Valentine’s admirer.”
She said, flatly, “It’s only the eighth.”
“Looks like he’s planning ahead.” The young man’s cheeks were flushed from the cold. He hesitated, taking in her squared position behind the Wrangler. “Or she.”
“It would be a ‘he,’” she said. “Not all straight women look like Bambi.”
He licked his chapped lips nervously. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to imply … Everyone’s just touchy these days, so, you know.”
He shook the box in his gloved hand.
Embossed on the arterial-red cover was a naked woman with flowing hair astride a horse, Lady Godiva riding her stallion through town to bring justice to the overtaxed masses.
A pulse quickened low in Naomi’s stomach, one part alarm, one part excitement.
She took the box, popped the cover. Nestled in among the chocolates, a flat, featureless phone sans logo. Her gaze lifted but already the messenger was biking off, dodging parking meters.
Paranoia nibbled at her brain stem. Though she knew it was pointless, she couldn’t resist turning a slow three-sixty there by her Jeep, eyes picking across windows and rooftops.
The phone shrilled, startling her, and she dropped the box, chocolates bouncing out and scattering across the hood. She pried out the phone, lifted it to her face.
“X.”
“Templeton.”
Her breath misted and misted again.
“I’m texting you an address,” he said. In her hand, the phone hummed. “You’ll find all sorts of illegal shit here.”
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Conduct a federal raid.”
“This may come as a surprise, but I don’t work for you.”
“No. But we could work together.”
“‘Work together’? If I ever catch you, I’m putting your ass away.”
“Obviously,” Evan said. “But in the meantime…”
“I’d have to be fully transparent, clear anything like this with the director, deputy director, and chief counsel, not to mention half the fucking Office of Professional Responsibility, which I happen to—”
“Naomi.”
He almost never used her first name.
“This is an olive branch,” he said. “You can strangle it with red tape, bury it beneath subcommittees and oversight panels, have legal hack it up into kindling. And we’ll be right back where we started.”
“Which is?”
“Where you represent the law in all its indispensability, righteousness, and necessity. And I represent those the law fails.”
One of the dark chocolates wagged in the breeze. She thought, Fuck it, picked it up, took a bite. Cherry filling. Gross. She spit it out. Bit another. Ganache. Score.
“Or?” she mumbled around the chocolate.
“Or you can figure out which of your colleagues are more than bureaucrats, which of them are actually willing to discharge their duties cleanly in investigative, prosecutorial, and judicial channels at the federal level. Clear a lane of sanctioned competence. And I’ll hand you a case to drive through that lane lawfully. ”
“Lawfully? You? Doth mine ears deceive me?”
“Figure it out and fast. I won’t wait for the usual excuses.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It is a statement of fact.”
“What are you, Batman?”
“Impatient. That’s what I am.”
The wind blew hard, flecks of almost-snow pinpricking her cheeks. She popped the second half of the truffle in her mouth, chewed while she contemplated the impossible. “If you want to do anything like this, you have to be reachable in some way. I’d be out over my skis. Far.”
“You can contact me at 1–855–2-NOWHERE.”
“That’s real?” She sucked in another icy breath. “Of course it’s real.”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “You’ll never trace it.”
“Regardless, I’m giving the number to technical security. It covers my ass, keeps me legitimate the way you’re asking me to be.”
“If you’d like to waste resources,” Evan said, “be my guest.”
She turned around, set her rear end against the Wrangler, let her eyes pick once more across parked vehicles and surrounding buildings. “Why deliver a burner? You could’ve just called on my work phone.”
“Because,” Evan said, “this is a courtship.”
The line severed.
She forwarded herself the links from the burner and then stared at it.
Thought about all the dead ends it would lead to, all the digital threads spinning off into nothingness.
It felt like something, a concrete piece of Orphan X.
But she knew that was an illusion. Wasted resources, indeed.
How odd that she trusted that to be true. She actually trusted Orphan X.
Snapping the phone in half, she dropped it down a storm drain. Plucking another chocolate off the hood, she climbed in the Wrangler and roared off to the Joint Operations Center, the taste of sea salt caramel leaking deliciously along the side of her tongue.
Rising from the couch, Evan set his hands on his lower back and arched, stretching his spine and taking in the soaring ceiling of the architectural loft. Behind him, Manny’s complaints grew both more frantic and more muffled.
“—begging you, bro, don’t leave me—mmfff—mfff—”
The whir of the vacuum reached a high whine.
Evan strode around the couch.
Manny lay on the floor trapped inside the massive storage bag, the seal nearly airtight.
The vacuum sucked free the last remaining air, the clear polyethylene-nylon suctioning to his body.
Every wrinkle in his clothes smashed to his flesh, the sidewalls of his nose pinched tight, glasses cracked but holding shape, denting the flesh around his eyes and temples.
His face was frozen in a silent scream, the plastic concave inside his mouth, tight enough to outline the seam of every tooth.
He looked like a vacuum-sealed sausage.
Having reached its limit, the device shut off.
Manny’s eyes were open, unable to blink given the plastic layer crushed against his lids. But his eyes twitched as Evan looked down at him.
He flopped epileptically. “Mmmff! Mmffndtd!”
His head cracked the reclaimed-wood floorboards. He jolted around like the young women in the almost-snuff films he commissioned. Spasms rattled through him. He arched stiffly.
And then stilled.
The silence was refreshing.
Evan stepped one leg across his paralyzed form. Straddling him, he flicked up his Strider knife and bent down.
Manny was almost out, but his pupils tightened with terror.
Evan lowered the tip of the blade to Manny’s face.
The suctioned cup plastering the inside of Manny’s mouth dimpled under the point. Then popped.
The tiny hole allowed the faintest hiss.
Manny gagged, sucking desperately at the trickle of air. The storage bag had loosened barely across his face. He’d be able to maintain a flow of oxygen sufficient to stay conscious and fend off brain damage.
Barely.
His sobs were stifled. Gulping against the pinhead incision, he gagged, eyes watering. A full-blown panic attack that would know no end.
Rustling weakly against the floor, he sucked and huffed, sucked and huffed.
Evan leaned down.
Manny’s pupils contracted even more.
“I have called the authorities to come find you.”
As much as was possible, which was not much, Manny’s features went lax with relief.
“In D.C.,” Evan added. “I’d guess it will take at least an hour for them to coordinate a response here.”
Fresh terror bloomed beneath the skin of Manny’s face. He lost air, passed out, came back online. Broken blood vessels squiggled through his cheeks, across his nose.
“For that hour, I want you to know that the only reason you are alive is because a woman you helped rape decreed it so. Every sip of breath you take, you think about the grace she has shown you.”
Manny’s tear ducts leaked, the moisture held in place against the clear plastic, his eye sockets turned to submarine portholes.
As Evan headed back toward the fire escape, Manny tried to scream. But not much sound could escape.
Halfway onto the balcony, Evan hesitated. Lowered his head and cursed.
The soles of his boots knocked against the reclaimed wood as he reapproached with intent, knife in hand. Manny squirmed and bucked.
Evan pinned him to the floor with a knee in his chest, bent down over him, leading with the knife. A jab at his face.
The Strider had opened up the hole over Manny’s mouth.
Manny sucked oxygen, legs doing a mermaid flop. “Th-thank you,” he stuttered between gasps. “Th-th—”
Evan leaned close, their noses almost touching. “You don’t deserve this much air.”
He tore himself off Manny before his darker instincts could prevail.
The sound of Manny’s unmuffled sobbing followed him across the loft and out onto the fire escape. Even halfway down, he could still hear the wails.