Chapter 49

Washington

11:20 pm GMT, 7:20 pm Local

Carter Logan was on his second glass of Zinfandel when the doors to the Grand Ballroom opened and the lights blinked, like a Broadway theater signaling the audience it was time to be seated. He’d been invited to the event by Hilton Clark but, when he’d made it through the line at the attendees’ check-in, he’d learned that he was not seated with any of his former WaPo colleagues. Instead, he’d been relegated to the hinterlands, aka the overflow space that had been set up in the adjacent Chinese Room.

The accordion wall had been folded open to create one large area that could hold a total of eight hundred guests sardined into eighty tables of ten. The stage, fitted with a lectern and a dais for the night’s eight roasters, seemed light years away. But Logan didn’t mind; two days ago, he’d planned on spending the night binge-watching Bosch, and now here he was, staking out a chair at a table in the back row at the top DC journo event of the year. He was a mere flea on the underbelly of the beast known as the Fourth Estate but, somehow, he’d managed to make it into Downton Abbey. Mixed metaphors, but that’s what free wine was for.

His table included a professor of journalism at American University and five of his students, two cable interns, and a tech writer who had won a White House essay contest on the future of American media. Four of the ten were vegans, which was good news for them because all that was left by the time the servers got to their table was the quinoa bean salad and Mediterranean eggplant roll-ups. Logan didn’t mind; Katya had been an animal rights activist and he’d learned to honor her dietary preferences, whenever he was with her.

It was a memory that momentarily reminded him of the flash drive and note Monica Cross had passed to him earlier that afternoon. Again, he wondered how she was doing, and if she’d made it out of Dodge.

Up on the dais the talk show host dressed in the blue tux and lace shirt was hurling one-liners at the president, who seemed to be taking her crude humor in stride.

“What’s the difference between a politician and a banana slug?” Pause. “One is a slimy creature that leaves a slick trail everywhere he goes, and the other is a gastropod who eats animal shit.” Another pause. “On second thought, maybe there’s no difference at all.”

The audience thought this was funny, the president guffawed, and she went on to her next ribald dig. Something about not caring for political jokes because she’d seen too many of them get elected to Congress.

Somewhere toward the tail-end of her monologue, something caught Logan’s eye. Up there in the front of the vast ballroom, standing in a closed doorway that led out to the roped-off promenade where cocktails had been served less than an hour earlier, was the woman who last night had told him her name was Giselle—the one who had left Hobo’s with him and then had come at him with a knife, just as he’d punched her in the eye with a hard, right hook.

The one whose face—before he’d clocked it—looked exactly like the woman in the surveillance video that his contact at the hotel had texted to him.

What the fuck was she doing here?

Standing that close to the president?

Up on the dais the comedienne told her final one-liner of the night, stating, “Presidential candidates are like a roll of toilet paper. Think about it: they’re soft on the outside, hollow on the inside, and no matter which one you vote for, you end up getting an ass.”

That drew lots of laughter, boos, hisses, and jeers, everything this dinner was all about. She gave a polite bow as the audience jumped to its feet to applaud, obscuring Logan’s view of the front of the room. Even at this distance he remained convinced—beyond any reasonable doubt—it was the woman who had tried to kill him. And, if the surveillance video from the hotel was anywhere close to being accurate, she had killed Supreme Court Justice Colin Wheeler, then staged the autoerotic set-up in his suite as grand legerdemain.

As the audience collectively settled back into their seats, the comic hostess offered her heartfelt thanks to everyone in the room. Then she said, “Now, without any further ado, I present to you—joining us tonight from the most expensive public housing project in the entire city—the President of the United States, Frank Mitchell.”

More applause and another standing ovation followed. Those who supported him clapped and cheered the most, and even those who opposed his economic and social policies put their differences aside for a moment. But Carter Logan, seeing his chance, did neither. Instead, he slipped away from the table of ten and edged toward the far wall, sizing up the situation as the eight hundred guests in attendance remained on their feet.

By the time he made it to the perimeter of the room most of them had taken their seats, and President Mitchell was standing at the lectern, adjusting the microphone.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and all those millions of my fellow Americans who can’t hear or see me, because this thing isn’t on television,” he began. “But rest assured, I’m sure everything that’s said tonight will be live-streamed in a matter of minutes. Everything today is about going viral, like the summer cold I seemed to have picked up this morning that’s spreading like lobbyists around this town.”

While the audience had been on its feet, Logan had lost sight of the woman named Giselle. Even though folks now were seated, he couldn’t spot her anywhere. She’d been standing a few yards from where Mitchell had been seated on the dais, but when he’d taken over the spotlight, she’d disappeared. Had she sat down at a nearby table, or maybe ducked out? She’d been wearing a silver dress that shimmered like the sea on a calm summer afternoon, but there was nothing like that to be found anywhere near the front of the ballroom.

“I’ve heard a lot of politicians give speeches throughout my career in government, and Lord knows I’ve made a lot of them myself,” the president was saying at the front of the room. “I can tell you—and I quote from the great book of wisdom, otherwise known as Mad magazine—political speeches are like steer horns: a point here, a point there, and a ton of bull in between.”

As Logan tried to find her in the crowd, he realized he could have been imagining things. He’d spoken with the woman no more than ninety minutes last night, and she’d had blonde hair that glimmered like a waterfall at high noon. Tonight, however, she was wearing a French beanie, reddish-purple in color, probably to shade the bruise that must have formed from the force of his blow. He tried to remember what she’d said she did for a living, realized she’d never told him. Which again begged the question: What was she doing here, hovering just ten feet from the president?

Up at the lectern President Mitchell was saying, “Another thing I learned here in Washington: Never, ever take friendship personally—”

Logan was now standing along the far wall of the expanded ballroom. Thus far, he had not drawn the attention of the Secret Service agents, twelve of whom he could count from his vantage point. He suspected more were lurking in the shadows, and some were probably planted at tables near the dais, pigtail devices stuck in their ears while they monitored every bit of motion anywhere even remotely near the president.

“Now, as I was saying—” Mitchell continued, but by this time Logan had tuned him out. He was one hundred percent sure that the woman named Giselle had left the room, which meant her role here tonight was done. He stood on his toes to give him a few inches of added height, surveyed the crowd at the front of the room. Not there.

Not anywhere.

The lady vanishes, Logan thought, although he doubted that even master director Alfred Hitchcock would characterize her as a lady.

Everything was set. The Secret Service agents had been oblivious to Angela Wilde’s sleight of hand in the president’s ad hoc green room, and Mitchell had been too busy admiring her assets to detect a thing.

His jacket collar was already stiff from the heavy dose of starch that the White House laundry had applied to the tux, and he had not felt the improvised explosive device she’d positioned two inches from his second cervical vertebrae—and, by extension, no more than three or four inches from his Medulla Oblongata, the section of the brain stem that controlled cardiac, respiratory, and vasomotor functions. The strip of explosive was the size and shape of a stick of Juicy Fruit and, with the detonator device attached, weighed about seven grams. Half of that was the C4 itself which, when triggered, would cause a blast radius of about six inches, which was seemingly small, but more than enough to take out a good chunk of the base of his skull.

The best part was, forensic analysis would trace it back to a Czech factory that was owned by a company controlled by a former KGB operative and longtime associate of the current Russian president.

Her job done, Angela had slipped out a side door of the ballroom just as the mistress of ceremonies finished her warm-up routine. She’d staked out her escape route two weeks ago, posing as a hotel guest and casually taking cell phone video of every angle of the marble promenade outside the ballroom and throughout the first floor. She’d counted fourteen surveillance cameras in all, and subtle scrutiny told her where the dead spots were, and where her face was most likely to be captured by a lens. She had sketched it all out in an elaborate floorplan, letting the live zones determine her path of egress once she had set the play in motion.

Her abrupt departure from the ballroom would have to appear genuine, since every frame of video captured by every camera in the hotel would be examined exhaustively over the coming weeks. Justice Department and Homeland Security analysts would fume and fuss over it, and countless Congressional task forces would run it through the equivalent of an electron microscope. The networks would run it backwards and forwards, and social media would tear it apart, hunting for every hint of conspiracy.

None of that really mattered. She had dressed in silver and raspberry in order to attract attention, to stand out in a crowd much the way Spielberg had dressed the girl in red in Schindler’s List. When she slipped through the side door into the wide promenade, where the remnants of the cocktail reception were being cleared away, she made a beeline for the ladies’ room. After a quick wardrobe change, she dumped her gown and handbag in a trash bin and casually sauntered back out of the lavatory. Instead of heading back to the Grand Ballroom, however, she turned to her right and confidently made her way toward the lobby. She had memorized the placement of all the cameras, confident she hadn’t missed any during her stakeout, and made sure to casually pretend to look at something or glance down as she came into range of their respective lenses.

A few minutes from now she would be the most wanted assassin in the world; all she required was a few minutes’ head start and she’d be home free.

And she would be ten million dollars richer.

• • •

Logan glanced to his right and left, saw that the only way to leave the annexed Chinese Room was through a set of double exit doors. Unguarded, which he found unbelievable. He inched his way along the wall and, when he got close enough, nudged one of them open just wide enough to slip through.

He’d been wrong about the unguarded part. A Secret Service suit with a pigtail in his ear was positioned just outside the door, alert and at attention. Of course, Logan thought. He’s here to keep people out, not to keep them in.

“Where are you going?” the agent demanded, raising his hand as the door started to close behind him.

“Men’s room,” Logan explained. “Too much wine.”

“No re-entry until after the president is off the stage.”

Logan did a little jig while standing in place, indicating the urgency of the moment. “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he said. “Besides, I didn’t vote for him.”

“Neither did I,” the agent replied with a grin. “Have a good evening.”

“Same to you.”

The exchange took only fifteen seconds, but they were fifteen seconds he felt he did not have. He tipped a nod at the Secret Service man, then headed toward the rest room he’d used earlier, when he’d first come down from Hilton Clark’s room. He was certain the agent’s eyes were boring into the back of his head, which meant he had to at least enter the lavatory and remain there long enough to have relieved himself.

Considering the number of people seated right across the hall, it was remarkable that the men’s room was empty. And for good reason: The White House Media Dinner was best-known for the president’s scripted and acerbic comments, followed immediately by a bristling roast from a half dozen select politicians and celebrities. As the president had said a minute ago, it would all go viral within minutes, but no one in attendance would miss it for the world.

No one, that is except for whoever was in the ladies’ room next door.

Logan was washing his hands when he heard a toilet flush through the tile walls. He figured someone was in there, checking her make-up, maybe applying a fresh layer of lipstick, even if she wasn’t going to be let back inside the ballroom. He counted to five, then ten before he pushed his way back out into the promenade—empty, except for the agents standing guard outside every entry to the ballroom. He raised his hand in acknowledgment to the sentinel he’d spoken with a minute before, a brief motion that momentarily distracted him and almost caused him to miss her.

Giselle, or whatever the hell her real name might be, was casually sashaying through the promenade area toward the lobby. She’d lost the sequins and beret, replaced by tight jeans and a lightweight blouse, black New Balance shoes that made it easier to walk.

But it clearly was her; no question about it. Logan thought about calling out to her, but realized that would only draw her attention and cause her to run. And from the look of things, she definitely wanted to get away from there fast, while appearing to seem casual, almost blasé.

He started to follow her, trying not to let his pre-owned Oxfords make too much noise on the marble floor. She was about forty yards ahead of him by the time she reached the check-in desk in the main lobby. Then, without even the slightest of pauses, she pulled a cell phone out of a back pocket and took a quick glance at it. She tapped the screen, and Logan realized she had just speed-dialed a pre-set number.

What the fuck? he thought, at the very instant a defeaning blast reverberated from inside the Grand Ballroom behind him.