The Inner Circle

38

"How’s my car?” Tot asks.

“How’d you get Khazei to back down like that?” I challenge.

“How’s my car?”

“Tot…”

He refuses to turn around, shuffling as he leads us past dusty bookshelf after dusty bookshelf on the eighteenth floor of the stacks. He’s not fast, but he knows where he’s going. And right now, as the automatic lights flick on as we pass, he’s got me and Clementine following. “Khazei doesn’t want a fight,” he explains. “He wants what you found in the SCIF.”

“I agree, but… how do you know?”

“Why didn’t he push back? If Orlando’s death is really his top concern, why hasn’t Khazei thrown you to the FBI, who’re really in charge of this investigation… or even to the Secret Service, who by the way, have been picking apart the SCIF all morning and afternoon? You’ve got every acronym working quietly on this case, but for some reason, Khazei’s not handing over the best pieces of dynamite, namely the two of you,” Tot says as another spotlight flicks on. I search the corner of the ceiling. The stacks of the Archives are too vast to have cameras in every aisle. But near as I can tell, Tot has us weaving so perfectly, we haven’t passed a single one. “Now tell me how my car is,” he says.

“Your car’s nice,” Clementine offers, still trying to make up for the rage parade she just put on. “I’m Clementine, by the way.”

For the second time, Tot doesn’t look back. He doesn’t answer either.

He wants nothing to do with Clementine. As he said this morning, he doesn’t know her, doesn’t trust her. But once she got grabbed by Khazei, he also knows he can’t just chuck her aside. For better or worse, she was in that SCIF-she was there with Orlando-and that means her butt’s in just as much of the fire as mine.

“Your car’s fine,” I add as we make a final sharp left. “Clemmi, this is Tot.”

A spotlight blinks awake, and I’m hit with a blast of cold air from a nearby eye-level vent. Our documents are so fragile, the only way to preserve them is to keep the temperature dry and cool. That means intense air conditioning.

Tot hits the brakes at a wall of bookcases that’re packed tight with dusty green archival boxes. At waist height, the bookcase is empty, except for a narrow wooden table that’s tucked where the shelves should be. Years ago, the archivists actually had their offices in these dungeony stacks. Today, we all have cubicles. But that doesn’t mean Tot didn’t save a few private places for himself.

The spines of the boxes tell me we’re in navy deck logs and muster rolls from the mid-1800s. But as Tot tosses the fat file folder on the desk, and a mushroom cloud of dust swirls upward, I know we’re gonna be far more focused on…

“Dustin Gyrich,” Tot announces.

“That’s the guy you think did this, right?” Clementine asks. “The guy who’s been checking out books for a hundred and fifty years. How’s that even possible?”

“It’s not,” Tot says coldly. “That’s why we’re up here whispering about it.”

“So every time President Wallace comes here on his reading visits,” I add, “this man Gyrich requests a copy of Entick’s Dictionary…”

“Just odd, right?” Tot asks. “I started sifting through the older pull slips… seeing how far back it went. The more pull slips I looked at, the more requests from Dustin Gyrich I found: from this administration, to the one before, and before… There were eleven requests during Obama’s administration… three during George W. Bush’s… five more during Clinton’s and the previous Bush. And then I just started digging from there: Reagan, Carter, all the way back to LBJ… throughout the term of every President-except, oddly, Nixon-Dustin Gyrich came in and requested this dictionary. But the real break came when I tried to figure out if there were any other books that were pulled for him.”

“Can’t you just search by his last name?” Clementine asks.

“That’s not how it works,” I explain. “If it were today, yes, we’ve got a better computer system, but if you want to see who requested a particular document in the past, it’s like the library card in the back of an old library book-you have to go card by card, checking all the names on it.”

“And that’s when I thought of Don Quixote,” Tot says.

I cock my head, confused.

“Remember that list we looked at-from Mount Vernon-of all the books that were in George Washington’s possession on the day he died? Well, in his entire library, guess what single book he had more copies of than any other?”

“Other than the Bible, I’d say: Don Quixote?” I ask.

“Uncanny guessing by you. And did you know that in 1861, during a U.S. Circuit Court case in Missouri-whose records we happen to keep since it’s a federal trial-one of the parties presented into evidence all the personal property and baggage that was left behind by one of their passengers? Well, guess what book that passenger was carrying?”

“Don Quixote,” I say for the second time.

“History’s fun, isn’t it?” Tot says. “That’s now two books in our collection that were also in the collection of President Washington. Today, that copy is stored out in our Kansas City facility, but on April 14th, 1961, during the JFK administration, a man named D. Gyrich once again came in and-”

“Wait, what was that date again?” I interrupt.

“Ah, you’re seeing it now, aren’t you?”

“You said April 14th…?”

“Nineteen sixty-one,” Tot says with a grin.

Clementine looks at each of us. She’s lost.

“The Bay of Pigs,” I tell her.

“Actually, a few days before the Bay of Pigs… but that’s the tickle,” Tot says, rolling his tongue inside his cheek. “Our dear friend D. Gyrich also came into the building and asked to see that same copy of Don Quixote on October 3, 1957, and on May 16, 1954, and on August 6, 1945.”

My skin goes cold. It has nothing to do with the chill from the extreme air conditioning.

“What?” Clementine asks, reading my expression. “What happened on those dates?”

“October 3, 1957-that’s the day before the Russians launched Sputnik, isn’t it?” I ask.

“Exactly,” Tot says. “And May 16, 1954?”

“The day before the Brown v. Board of Education decision was handed down. But that last one, I forget if it’s-”

“It’s the later one,” Tot says, nodding over and over. “You got it now, don’t you?”

I nod along with him. “But to be here the day before… to always be here the day before… You think he knew?”

“No one has timing that good,” Tot says. “He had to know.”

“Know what?” Clementine begs.

I look at her, feeling the icy cold crawl and settle into the gaps of my spine. Dustin Gyrich, whoever he is, was in here days before the Bay of Pigs… Sputnik… the Brown decision… and August 6, 1945…

“Hiroshima,” I whisper. “He was here the day before Hiroshima.”

“He was,” Tot agrees. “And you’ll never believe where he was before that.”