Out of the Dark

29 The Second-Oldest Profession

Naomi was frozen in place, as was Evan, the air between them like spun glass — one move and everything would shatter.

He noticed a sudden awareness tighten her focus.

He was, after all, standing in the lobby of the deputy chief of staff’s building, his hand in the cookie jar of an evident dead drop.

Not a pose that screamed innocence.

He couldn’t hear her through the thick window, but he watched her mouth the words, Don’t move!

He stuffed the envelope into his front waistband, took a step back toward the door to the garage.

He barely had time to wonder how she’d react before her SIG Sauer cleared leather.

That was a lot of bullets to dodge.

He dove behind the nearest couch as the window blew inward, pebbled glass raining down on the tile. Sprawled on his back, the double pip of the shots still echoing in his head, he watched the rounds embed in the throwback cottage-cheese ceiling.

She’d fired not at him but up through the pane.

Which meant she was clearing the glass to take the quickest route from the sidewalk into the lobby.

He popped to his feet and sprinted for the rear door to the garage, backpack bobbing violently up and down on his shoulders.

Behind him she hurdled the window frame and landed with a grunt, her shoes crunching glass. “Stop! Hands—hands!”

As he barreled into the garage, he heard her shouting for backup into her Boeing Black phone.

He skidded on an oil slick on the shiny floor, his boots giving him just enough traction to hold course. The obvious way out was the gated vehicle exit to the right, which led back onto I Street. But there was a service door to his left.

He spun in that direction, slammed through the service door into a back hall that reeked of cleaning solvent. Dodging mop buckets, he sprinted up its length and cut the corner hard away from the lobby. He battered through a side door into an alley.

Behind him a dead end.

Ahead I Street.

He ran forward onto the main street.

Twenty yards distant, Naomi stood on the sidewalk, facing away from him, aiming at the garage gate.

He took off in the other direction, knocking through the crowd.

Naomi’s voice cut through the din. “Stop!” And then, “Suspect heading west on I Street!”

He pulled up a mental map of the surrounding blocks. As the Second Commandment mandated, he’d memorized every alley, doorway, and building. With alarm he noted that Secret Service headquarters was three and a half blocks away.

And that he was running toward it.

He hit the intersection with 7th to find a wall of cruisers bearing down from the convention center. At his appearance they amped into high gear, predators sighting prey. A multitude of sirens emitted overlapping screams. Light bars strobed the buildings, disco-balling windows all around.

Evan bolted south.

Whether by design or shitty luck, he was being herded to the doorstep of the Secret Service.

He moved between street and sidewalk, eluding cars, slicing through pedestrians. People were now gawking at him and at the vanguard of cruisers, a block back and closing.

So many units had been on standby.

For him.

He knocked over a guy handing out flyers, juked right just in time to avoid smashing into a baby stroller. The Smithsonian American Art Museum watched him fly past, its seen-it-all Greek Revival façade unimpressed, its colonnades like bared teeth.

About fifty yards behind him, Naomi blazed through the crowd, shouting for people to clear the way.

Most civilian vehicles had pulled over now, leaving the road open. Drawn by the commotion, onlookers spilled out of stores and restaurants, clotting the sidewalks, narrowing Evan’s path to a high-wire sprint.

The screech of the sirens reached an earsplitting pitch. The cop cars would be on him in seconds.

He had to get to F Street, still gummed up with traffic. He barreled into a surge of tourists, the summer-fun smell of Coppertone and ice cream enveloping him. He bucked free of the press of bodies, emerging mere yards from the intersection.

Directly ahead of him, an officer stepped out of a Mexican joint, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin, radio barking on his shoulder.

The officer sighted Evan, dropped his napkin, and drew his pistol.

Without breaking stride Evan threw his right arm free of the backpack strap, letting centrifugal force fling the heavy bag up the trajectory of his left arm. He caught the left strap as it flew by, whipped the backpack around like a softball pitcher winding up, and slammed the cop’s pistol on the rise just as he fired into Evan’s face.

The bullet trailed heat across the top of Evan’s head, riffling his hair.

He slammed into the officer, shoulder to sternum, sending him airborne right back into the Mexican restaurant.

He let the backpack continue its rotation, threading the straps with one arm after another, and then he was wearing it again, still in a dead sprint.

The sirens were so loud it seemed they were inside his head.

Jackknifing past a parking meter, he cut up F Street. Behind him came a squeal of brakes and a crumple of fenders as the lead cars failed to make the turn. Already they were working their way free, tires spinning in reverse, horns blaring.

The sign for 8th Street flew by overhead. Casting a look back, he caught a flash of blond hair as Naomi tumbled around the corner, plunging into the crowd on the sidewalk. Office buildings and museums were emptying out all along the block, people hustling onto the sidewalks to find out what was going on.

He kept on, the next intersection coming up fast. Shooting a glance along 9th, he saw a half dozen G-rides screaming toward him, hot from Secret Service headquarters. From the south, two new Metro Police units accelerated at him.

He reversed course, plunging into the throng surging from storefronts.

Back at 7th, the cruisers had almost untangled themselves. He couldn’t see Naomi for the moment.

He had three seconds, maybe five, before they picked him up again.

And nowhere to go.

Tightening his backpack straps, he wheeled around. The crowd pressed in on him, fear and excitement coming off bodies like an electric charge.

The mob ebbed and flowed around him. He fought against the prevailing tide, trying to get off the street. Stumbling up onto the curb, he came to a halt and stared at the marquee-style sign stretching before him.

He smiled.

The museum was still evacuating as Evan careened inside, sliding past reception and in through an exit door onto the museum’s ground floor. He rooted in his backpack for the mirror phone that allowed him to listen in on Naomi’s Black Boeing, thumbing it on as he darted forward.

Gray cobblestone was suddenly underfoot, and he looked up to find himself standing in Cold War Berlin. Sullen concrete barriers rose from the floor, routing him along like a rat in a maze. Agitprop flyers waved from kiosks. Graffiti brightened drab walls. A replica tunnel vanished into darkness, promising untold dangers.

He passed a telefon booth, gripped by a disorientation that brought him back half a lifetime to another gray street in another gray city when he was a nineteen-year-old Orphan laying the groundwork for an assassination.

Naomi’s voice crackled through the phone into his ear, jarring him from his reverie: lost sight of him.

Copy that. We have PD units flooding the zone.

We need everything locked down between 9th and 7th. Empty every single building. Search ground floors first and heaviest — he won’t want to go up and cut off his escape options.

That was exactly right.

So he’d do the opposite.

Swiftly he retraced his steps to the lobby, vectoring for the stairs next to the gift shop, where a headless bust displayed a shirt emblazoned with the words DENY EVERYTHING.

Naomi’s voice again in his ear: The Spy Museum. Let’s see if he has a sense of humor. I’m going in.

He cleared the doorframe into the stairwell an instant before he heard her strike the push plate of the lobby door.

Lunging all the way up to the vacated third floor, he charged out into the Covers & Legends room, the walls clad with ID cards and forged papers. A looping video explained that this was where visitors selected their new identity before partaking of the interactive exhibits ahead.

Searching for a hiding place, he moved through the circular floor plan, gadgets and artifacts blurring past him. Poisonous umbrellas and necktie cameras. Suitcase radios and a KGB lipstick gun. Surveillance stations and a grim interrogation room.

He was trapped inside a Disneyfied version of his life’s work, the world’s second-oldest profession repurposed as theme-park attraction.

In the background a recording played testimony from French Resistance saboteurs. When Naomi spoke through the mirror phone again, Evan had to hike the volume to hear her.

No one down on one or two. I’m going to three.

Copy that. I dispatched four units to sweep the ground floor behind you. Whistle if you get a hit, and I’ll leapfrog ’em upstairs.

Evan sped up, searching frantically for a crevice he could slither into.

He heard Naomi’s voice now in stereo, both over the line and at the third-floor entrance behind him. “On the third floor, pressing forward. Status elsewhere?”

As the dispatch agent started rattling off other buildings that had been cleared, Naomi’s exhalations fuzzed the line; she was jogging through the third floor, breathing hard, catching up to him.

Keeping the Boeing Black smartphone at his ear, Evan moved with light steps into the Ninja Suite. Ahead was the entrance to one of the interactive exhibits — an air-duct crawl.

He had a moment of unadulterated you-gotta-be-kidding-me.

The air duct’s opening, a hatch cut into the wall, was cast in a red-light-district glow.

Evan stripped off his backpack, shoved it ahead of him, and pulled himself inside. He inchwormed along the elevated tunnel, pushing the backpack before him, his face drawing even with a vent. Pressing his fingers around the welded seams, he found an interior wire and tore it from its mooring, the illumination around the hatch dying just before Naomi came into the room.

She slowed her jog, pausing to catch her breath.

Hidden in the vent, Evan watched her scan the walls, her eyes passing over the shadowed opening to the air-duct crawl.

Was it dark enough that she’d miss it?

“Damn it,” she said into the phone.

The mirror phone, resting in the vent before Evan’s face, gave a faint rattle as the words came through.

He watched her head crane, looking up in his direction.

With excruciating slowness, he reached forward and silenced the mirror phone.

“What?” Naomi said into her phone. And then, “I was going over to talk to Wetzel. I saw a guy getting something from what looked like a dead drop in the lobby. I think…” She swiveled away, facing the precise spot where the air duct’s opening lay barely hidden in shadow. “I think it might’ve been Orphan X.”

She listened.

Evan watched, praying that her gaze wouldn’t snag on the hatch in the wall.

“I have no fucking idea why Wetzel set up a dead drop,” she said. “The only thing I know is there’s no way he’ll tell me.” A pause and then, “No. No need. I already safed it. Let’s expand the target zone down to D Street. Every building, every car, every alley.”

She turned away and walked out.

Long after her footsteps faded, Evan lay there in silence, holding his breath.