phone that could go secure with the flip of a switch. The phone with the gold presidential seal on the receiver. The phone that was installed in his house two years ago. By the White House Communications Agency. And the Secret Service.
The drop phone was about to ring again, but as Palmiotti knew, only a schmuck lets the drop phone ring twice.
“Dr. Palmiotti,” he answered, sitting up in bed and looking out at the late-night snow that had already blanketed his street in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Please hold for the President,” the White House operator said.
“Of course,” he replied, feeling that familiar tightening in his chest.
“Everything okay?” whispered Palmiotti’s…
Palmiotti wasn’t a teenager. He was forty-eight. Lydia was forty-seven. Lost her husband to… she called it cancer of the soul. Meaning he was screwing the overweight girl from the dry cleaners.
It took Lydia two years before she would date. She was happy now. So was Palmiotti. He was happy and warm and ready to dream.
And then his phone rang.
Palmiotti didn’t like being on call. He had given it up years ago. But that’s part of the job of being personal physician-and one of the oldest friends-of the most powerful man in the world.
“Stewie, that you?” President Orson Wallace asked.
By the time they entered their freshman year at the University of Michigan, Palmiotti and Wallace had called each other by first names, last lames, nicknames, and most every good curse word they could find. But it wasn’t until Inauguration three years ago that Palmiotti started calling his friend
“Right here, sir,” Palmiotti replied. “You okay? What’s wrong?”
The President doesn’t have to choose his physician. Most simply go to the White House Medical Unit. But a few, like George H. W. Bush, who appointed a dear family friend, understand that sometimes the best medicine is simply having someone to talk to. Especially someone who knows you well.
“I’m fine,” Wallace replied.
“If you’re fine, don’t wake me up in the middle of the night.”
“Wait. You got Lydia sleeping there, don’t you?”
At that, Palmiotti paused.
“Don’t lie to me, Stewie.” The President laughed. “I got satellites. I can see you right now. Look out your window and-”
“Orson, this a doctor call or a friend call?”
This time, Wallace was the one who was silent. “I just… I think I did something to my back. It’s bothering the hell outta me.”
Palmiotti nodded. His predecessors had warned him as much. Most calls from the Oval would be stress- related. “You want me to come over and take a look?”
“Nah. No. That’s silly. It can wait till tomorrow.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah-absolutely,” the President of the United States said. “Tomorrow’s just fine.”
13
The archivist was patient.
Of course he was patient.
Impatient people would never stand for this-would never take a job where half your day was spent alone with ancient government paperwork, poring through memos and speeches and long-forgotten handwritten letters, treasure-hunting for that one minute detail that a researcher was so desperately looking for.
No, impatient people didn’t become archivists.
And without question, this archivist-with the scratched black reading glasses-was plenty patient.
Patient enough to stay quiet all day.
Patient enough to let the ambulances fade and the EMTs and the firefighters and the Secret Service leave.
Patient enough to go about his job, helping a few tourists in the second-floor research room, then answering a few letters and emails that came in through the Archives website.
And even patient enough to drive home, cook his spaghetti with turkey meat sauce, and spend the last hour before bed noodling with a double acrostic word puzzle in
That’s how they taught him to do it.
But when all was quiet. When the street was dark. When he was sure that anyone watching would’ve long ago become bored and left, he finally reached into his briefcase and pulled out the true treasure from today’s hunt.
According to Benjamin Franklin, “He that can have patience, can have what he will.”
The archivist had something far more valuable than that.
He had a videotape.
The one Orlando was carrying when-
He put the thought out of his head as he slid the tape into his old VCR. Right now, the danger was that it was all coming undone… everything was at risk.
Hitting rewind, he leaned in close as the picture slowly bloomed onto his TV. The angle looked down from the top corner of the SCIF, no different than any security camera. Sure enough, there was Orlando, rushing around as-
Wait.
In the corner. By the door. A shadow flickered. Then another.
Realizing he hadn’t gone back far enough, the archivist again hit rewind.
The shadow-No. Not a shadow.
A person. Two people.
His eyes narrowed.
Now it made far more sense. That’s why they couldn’t find the book.
Orlando wasn’t alone in the SCIF. There were two other people with him.
One of them a girl. And the other? The one with the bunched-up lab coat and the messy blond hair?
The archivist knew him. Instantly.
Beecher.
Beecher had what the Culper Ring wanted.
14
My phone starts screaming at 7:02 the next morning. I don’t pick it up. It’s just a signal-the morning wake-up call from my ride to work, telling me I now have twenty-four minutes until he arrives. But as the phone stops ringing, my alarm clock goes off. Just in case the wake-up phone call doesn’t do its trick.
I have two sisters, one of them living in the D.C. area, which is why, instead of waking to the sound of a buzzer, my alarm clock blinks awake with a robotic male voice that announces, “… Thirty percent chance of snow. Twenty-one degrees. Partly overcast until the afternoon.”
It’s the official government weather forecast from NOAA-the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-where my sister Lesley’s been working for the past year and a half, studying tides and weather and
