Out of the Dark

4 What’s It Gonna Be?

Evan moved swiftly along E Street a few blocks from the commotion. The closure had backed up traffic through the surrounding streets, though the presidential convoy had already made its retreat, doubling back and darting away before the public was let in on the ostensible threat. Evan had wanted to leave a message for Bennett, yes, but he also wanted to note the driver’s procedures for altering the route in the event of an emergency.

Commuters were laying on their horns, a symphony of displeasure. Cops jogged by at intervals, spreading through the area. This section of D.C., a sniper round’s distance from the White House, had as many CCTV cameras as a London street corner, so Evan kept his head lowered, his face hidden by the brim of the baseball cap.

The Secret Service’s Forensic Services Division had cutting-edge software that would review all footage in the area. Not wanting his movements to be pieced together after the fact, Evan paused directly beneath a cluster of cameras on a streetlight, stripped off his Windbreaker so it fell casually into the gutter behind him, and heeled it back through a storm drain. He let the Nikon camera swing low at his side before delivering it to the same fate.

He waited for the crowd to swell and wash him up the sidewalk. A trash bin waited ahead at the edge of a crosswalk in the blind spot beneath another streetlight. He gave a swift scan for cops, found none close enough to take note of him. Quickening his pace, he removed his Nationals baseball hat, palmed the cotton rolls out of his mouth, and trashed them together. From his back pocket, he pulled out a worn Baltimore Orioles cap and tugged it on before stepping back into the sight lines of the CCTV cameras overhead.

In his peripheral vision, he noticed a face holding on him for a beat too long. He risked a glance across the heads of the pedestrians crossing the street with him and grabbed an instant of direct eye contact with a square-jawed woman in a sweatshirt.

She turned away hastily, raising a cell phone to her face.

A band of pale skin showed on her finger; she’d removed her wedding ring to avoid its snagging on a trigger guard. In an instant he read her build and bearing — a plainclothes officer scouting for suspicious behavior.

Like, say, a man switching baseball hats in the middle of an intersection.

Careless.

And lazy.

Evan berated himself with the Second Commandment: How you do anything is how you do everything.

He could see the woman’s mouth moving against the phone. Up the block, two uniformed cops keyed to their radios.

He kept walking.

The woman followed him.

The cops split up, taking opposite sides of the street, fording the current of passersby, heading in his direction.

Three tails were manageable. No one needed to get hurt.

People spilled out of bars and restaurants. A guy was handing out flyers for the Spy Museum. A frazzled father had gotten the wheel of his baby stroller stuck in a sewer grate. Chaos was helpful.

Evan cut around the corner just as another pair of uniformed officers spilled out of an alley ahead, blocking his best route to freedom. An older cop with a ready-for-retirement bulge at his belt line and a muscle-bound kid who couldn’t have been a year out of the academy.

Twenty yards apart the officers and Evan stared at each other.

Evan nodded at them.

And then stepped off the sidewalk and into a bustling café.

The pair of officers would reverse and cover the rear as the other three flooded into the front.

Evan had ten seconds, maybe twelve.

Given his training, that was a lifetime.

Evan threaded through the packed tables, requisitioning a mammoth latte mug from the service counter. In the back of the café, a brief hall led to a gender-neutral bathroom and a rear door with an inset pane of frosted glass. To the side of the hall, a small table remained bare, having just been wiped down.

Heading for the open seat, he plucked an ice-water jug from a busboy’s hands and sloshed it across the tile floor in front of the table. As he swung into the chair, he reached between the couple dining beside him and snatched their saltshaker.

The wife aimed a do-something stare at her husband, who managed a feeble, “Dude, what the hell?”

Evan didn’t answer. He was down to five seconds.

He unscrewed the top of the shaker and poured its contents into his fist. Then he tilted back in his chair so his shoulders touched the rear wall, tasted the matcha green tea latte, and waited.

On the surface of the latte, a swan was rendered in steamed milk, its tail smeared to peacock proportions by Evan’s sip. Over at the service counter, an artichoke and sun-dried-tomato panini sizzled on the press, releasing delightful aromas. Evan watched the front door.

At the behest of a harried manager, a waitress approached, clutching a menu to her chest in withholding fashion. She looked down at the wet floor and then up at Evan, uncertain where to start. “Sir, I’m sorry. You can’t just sit here. We have to seat you.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

“We’re not a nightclub. We’re, like, a café. We don’t take bribes.”

He kept his eyes on the front door. With his foot he pushed the table away from him another six inches, getting it into position. “It’s not a bribe,” he said.

“No?” She regarded the proffered bills. “What’s it for, then?”

“The damage,” he said.

The plainclothes officer and two cops shoved through the front door of the café, spotting Evan immediately.

Evan sensed the waitress’s head swivel from him to the officers and back to him. There was a slight, mouth-ajar delay as she processed his meaning. Then the hundreds lifted from his hand and she scurried back to the manager.

The energy in the café shifted as the officers advanced through the tables. One of the men unsnapped the thumb strap on his holster, and a kid screamed, and then there was yelling and jostling as the place cleared out.

The cops crept forward, hands hovering over their holsters in case Sergio Leone decided to bust in with a crew and start filming.

Evan sipped the matcha tea once more. It wasn’t half bad. He wondered at the kind of life that called for a steamed-milk waterfowl decorating one’s hot beverage.

The officers stopped ten feet from his table and spread out. But not enough.

The café suddenly felt quite silent.

“Why are you chasing me?” Evan asked.

“Why are you running?” the plainclothes officer said.

“Because you’re chasing me.”

“We had an incident a few blocks away,” she said.

“An incident.”

“That’s right. And then I saw you switching your hat.”

The two uniformed cops unholstered their Glocks. They didn’t aim at Evan, not yet, keeping the muzzles pointed at the floor. An ice cube crunched under one of their boots.

Evan looked at the three cops facing him down. “So that’s why you’re all here? Because I changed hats?”

“Why would you do a thing like that?” the woman said.

“The Nationals need some heart-of-the-order bats,” he said. “I decided the Orioles are a stronger bet for the postseason.”

“And you decided this in the middle of E and Eleventh?”

He liked her.

“I did,” he said. “And while I know that civil liberties have been under assault by the current administration, I would think you could overlook an epiphany regarding the national pastime.”

The amusement went out of her eyes. “Why don’t we stop fucking around?” she said.

Evan took another sip of the tea. Hot, not scalding. “I’d like that.”

“I’m gonna tell you what’s gonna happen next,” she said.

“No,” Evan said. “I’m gonna tell you what’s gonna happen next.”

He was still tilted back in his chair, casual as could be, but beneath the table he pressed his foot to its base. The uniformed cops were holding their Glocks too stiffly, seams of white showing at their knuckles. The muzzles were now aimed halfway between the tips of their boots and Evan’s table.

“You’re gonna let me walk out of here,” Evan said.

One of the male cops laughed, and the female officer blinked twice. “Or?” she said.

“I’m gonna throw salt in your eyes at the precise instant I kick this table over. While you’re busy blinking, the table’s gonna hit you”—Evan’s gaze flicked to the cop in the middle—“right in the solar plexus. That’ll knock your gun to the side. Maybe you’ll fire it into your partner’s leg. Maybe not. Either way he’s gonna be distracted, because I’m gonna throw this overpriced latte in his face. Around then, when you’re all scrambling to react, you’ll notice just how slippery those wet tiles are that you’re standing on.”

He turned his focus to the cop on the right. “I’m gonna come over the top of the table, swinging my chair, clipping your wrists, which’ll knock away your Glock — if you’ve managed to hold on to it by that point. Then I’m in your midst. Which means — even if you could see, even if you still had your weapons — you wouldn’t be able to fire at me without hitting one another.”

Back to the cop in the middle: “You’ll be doubled over on the floor at this point, because … well, we’ve already covered that. I’m gonna break your nose as cleanly as I can with a quick left jab to make sure you don’t get your vision back anytime soon. Let me apologize in advance for that. I know you’re just doing your job. Then, with my right foot, I’m gonna kick you into her”—his gaze slid to the plainclothes officer—“while she’s still clawing at the salt in her eyes.”

“But you’re not gonna break my nose,” she said, “because you’re chivalrous.”

Evan gave a one-shoulder shrug of assent. Then continued, “After you three are tangled up and useless, it’ll take me four and a half strides to reach the end of the rear hall, where your backup’s waiting. The mirrored side of the espresso maker there on the service counter’s giving me a nice clear reflection of the back door with the frosted pane. Your boy with the extra Y chromosome is throwing a shadow from the hinge side. He’s holding his service pistol too far from his body, so when I kick the door open, it’s gonna knock it back into his teeth. He’ll go down hard, because that’s what muscleheads do. The veteran cop on the other side I’ll take down gently with a chicken-wing arm control, but I won’t break anything, because: respect. Before they can recover, I’m gonna bolt up the alley and disappear into the rear entrance of one of the shops that I scouted earlier, but I won’t tell you which one, because I don’t want to be predictable, and let’s face it, at this point that would be gilding the lily.”

He lowered the giant mug to the top of his stomach, and all three cops inadvertently tensed. Their hands were too tight on the grips, and too tight meant tremors and imprecision. Evan was unarmed, and his body language was so unaggressive it verged on soothing, a dissonance they clearly found blindingly bewildering.

Evan scanned the three officers, frozen where they stood. “So, guys. What’s it gonna be?”

In answer, all three muzzles raised to aim at him.

“Okay, then.” Evan adjusted his grip around the mug, readied his loose fist around the salt, firmed his foot against the table base. “Are we ready?”