The President Is Missing(37)

She breathes in, breathes out. Lets her pulse slow. Keeps her finger close to but free of the trigger. There is no point in impatience. The target will come to her, as always.

And as always, she will not miss.





Chapter

23



The man takes the seat next to me without a word, his head down as he moves past me and sits to my immediate left, settling in as if we are strangers who happened to get tickets for adjacent seats.

We are, in fact, strangers. I know nothing about him. The unexpected is so common in my job as to be expected, but whenever something comes up, I have a team of advisers to help me analyze it, to collect everything we know and break it down, to impose some order amid the chaos. This time, I’m alone and clueless.

He could be nothing but a courier, delivering information that he may not even understand, impervious to interrogation because he has nothing of value to spill. If that’s true, he was misrepresented to me, but it’s not as if I can trust the source, the woman known as Nina.

He may be an assassin. This whole thing could be a ruse to get me alone and vulnerable. If so, my daughter will be without a living parent. And I will have tainted the office of the president by allowing myself to be suckered into a secret meeting by a simplistic ploy.

But I had to take the chance, all because of those two words, Dark Ages.

He turns and gets his first look at me up close, at the man he understands to be President Duncan but who, with the red beard and glasses and baseball cap, doesn’t look much like the clean-shaven, suit-wearing commander in chief he sees in the media. He gives a slight nod of his head in approval, which I take to be approval not at my disguise per se but at the fact that I’m wearing a disguise at all. It means I’m playing along—so far, at least. I’ve agreed to a secret meeting. I’ve already acknowledged his importance.

It’s the last thing I wanted to concede, but I had to. As far as I’m concerned, this man could be the most dangerous person in the world right now.

I glance around us. No one sitting on either side of us, nobody directly behind us, either. “Say the words,” I tell the man.

He is young, like his partner, Nina, maybe in his early twenties at most. Slim, like her. Bone structure suggesting eastern European, like hers. He is Caucasian, but with a darker complexion than his partner. Possibly a Mediterranean influence in his heritage, possibly Middle Eastern or African. His face is largely obscured by a long, ratty beard and thick, ropy hair that juts out from the baseball cap. His eyes are set deeply, as if bruised. His nose is long and crooked—possibly genetic, possibly the result of having been broken.

He is wearing a solid black T-shirt, dark cargo pants, and running shoes. He brought nothing with him in terms of a bag or backpack.

He doesn’t have a gun. He wouldn’t have made it past security. But there are plenty of things that can be weaponized. You can kill someone with a house key, a piece of wood, even a ballpoint pen if you insert it with surgical precision into your target’s body. In Ranger training before I shipped out to Iraq, they showed us things—self-defense tactics, opportunistic weapons—that never would have occurred to me. One quick movement with a sharp edge into my carotid artery, and I’d bleed out before medical help could arrive.

I grab his arm, my hand wrapping completely around his bony limb. “Say the words. Now.”

He is startled by the move. He looks down at my hand clutching his biceps, then back up at me. Startled, but—I take careful note—not particularly shaken.

“Son,” I say, reminding myself to keep my facial expression and voice volume in check, “this is not a game. You have no idea who you’re messing with. You have no idea how far in over your head you are.”

I wish my position was as strong as I’m making it out to be.

His eyes narrow before he decides to speak. “What words would you like me to say?” he asks. “Armageddon? Nuclear holocaust?”

The same accent as his partner. But his command of English appears stronger.

“Last chance,” I say. “You’re not going to like what happens next.”

He breaks eye contact. “You say these things as if I want something from you. Yet it is you who wants something from me.”

That last point is undeniable. My presence here confirms it. But the converse is also true. I don’t know what it is he has to tell me. If it’s nothing more than information, he has a price. If it’s to communicate a threat, he wants a ransom. He didn’t go through all this for nothing. I have something he wants, too. I just don’t know what it is.

I release the grip on his arm. “You won’t make it out of the stadium,” I say, rising from my seat.

“‘Dark Ages,’” he hisses, as if he’s uttered a curse word.

On the field, Rendon bounces a high chopper that the shortstop has to catch and throw on the run for the out at first.

I sit back down in my seat. Take a breath. “What do I call you?” I ask.

“You may call me…Augie.”

The defiance, the sarcasm, is gone. A minor victory for me. His cards are probably better than mine, but he’s a kid, and I play poker for a living.

“And what…should I call you?” he says, scarcely above a whisper.

“You call me Mr. President.”

I put my arm over his chair, as if we are old friends or family.