“What’re you doing?” Dallas asks.
“If we want to take down the lion,” I tell him, “we need to get a bigger gun.”
82
'
“
Still watching from the treeline, the barber had to hold his breath to hear what they were saying. He tried to tell himself it was still okay. But as Beecher dialed whatever number he was dialing in the distance, Laurent knew the truth-and he knew just how far he was from
From what he could hear, Beecher and his group weren’t just guessing anymore. They had details. They had names-and not just the President’s. They had Palmiotti… plus, he heard them say
If they-for them to know about that… for them to know what happened that night…
On the side of the apple blossom tree that hid Laurent from sight, a small patch of snow, clinging like a white island to the bark, was slowly whittled down by the intensity of the blowing wind. As he watched the island shrink, flake by flake, Laurent knew it was no different here.
Erosion over time.
For a while now, Palmiotti said he could stop it. That somehow, he could make it all go away. But confidence is no different than friendships or secrets. They’re all susceptible to the same fate…
Erosion over time.
It was so clear to Laurent now. This wasn’t the beginning of the tornado.
This was the beginning of the end of it.
A few inches in front of the barber, the island of snow was the size of a quarter, worn down by another slash of wind. Across the snowy field, Beecher was having much the same effect. Indeed, as the last bits of snow were tugged from the bark, Laurent once again felt a thick lump in his throat and the matching swell of emotion that overcame him earlier when he read his client’s tattoo.
If Laurent wanted to stop the tornado, there was only one way to make it go away. Until this exact moment, though, he didn’t think he had the courage to do it.
But he did.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, Laurent gripped tight to the item he’d instinctively grabbed from the shop, one of only a few mementos his father brought back from the war: the Master Barbers straight-edge razor with the abalone handle.
As he slid it out and flipped the blade open, the lasts bits of snow were blown from the tree bark.
Across the field, both Beecher and Dallas had their backs to him.
The tornado was about to start swirling a whole lot faster.
83
'National Archives,” a familiar voice says through my phone. “How may I direct your call?”
“Katya, it’s Beecher. Can you transfer me over to Mr. Harmon in Presidential Records?” Standing in the snow and reading the confusion on Dallas’s face, I explain, “The goal is to find what really happened on February 16th, right? The problem is, the only record from the sixteenth is that police report, which is a record that Palmiotti created himself. But what if we could find out where Palmiotti and Wallace were on the seventeenth… or even the eighteenth?”
Dallas’s eyes tighten as he tries to put it together. He knows the problem. Twenty-six years ago, Wallace wasn’t President. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any presidential records.
“Okay, so when this happened… Twenty-six years ago, the President was… back in college,” Dallas adds, quickly doing the math.
Dallas knows how the Archives work. He knows what we keep. And knows that when Wallace or any other President gets elected, the very first thing we do is start a file for them. But most of all, we start
It’s how we have those baby photos of Clinton-and how we know what was written in Bush’s and Obama’s fifth-grade report cards. We know those documents are eventually headed for a presidential library, so the moment a new President is elected, the government starts grabbing everything it can. And best of all, guess who’s in charge of storing it?
“You think there’re records from where Palmiotti was on February 16th?” Dallas asks.
“We know he was in Ohio. The police report says so. He and Wallace were both home from college, which means-”
“This is Mr. Harmon,” a curt voice snaps through the phone. As one of our top people in Presidential Records, Steve Harmon doesn’t apologize for being impatient, or for referring to himself as Mr. Harmon. A former navy man, all he cares about are facts.
“Mr. Harmon, this is Beecher calling-from Old Military.”
“Katya told me.”
“Yes, well, er-I have a request here for some records from when President Wallace was in college, and-”
“Most of those records haven’t been processed yet.”
“I know, sir, but we’re trying to track down a particular date-the week of February 16th-back during the President’s final year of college.” As I say the words, even though she’s way down the path and nearly a football field away, Clementine glances over her shoulder. I don’t care whose daughter she is. No way can she hear me. She turns away and continues walking. “It’s for a friend of the foundation,” I tell Harmon.
In Archives terms,
From the silence on the phone, I know Mr. Harmon’s annoyed. But he’s also well aware that the only reason we’re still allowed to display one of the original Magna Cartas is because a friend of the foundation-the head of the Carlyle Group-loans it to us.
“Put the request in writing. I’ll take a look,” Mr. Harmon says.
The click in my ear tells me he’s gone.
“Wallace’s college records?” Dallas asks as I put away my phone and we both stand there, our feet eaten by the snow. “You really think the smoking gun’s in some old English paper? ‘What I Did During Spring Break-And How We Hid Eightball’s Body,’ by Orson Wallace?”
“There’s no smoking gun, Dallas. What I’m looking for is a timeline. And if we’re lucky, this’ll tell us whether, during that week, Wallace came back to class or was so traumatized by what happened, he spent some time away.”
“So you’re looking for attendance records? Hate to remind you, but they don’t take attendance in college.”
“And I hate to remind you, but you have no idea what they take. Maybe when Wallace got back to school he spoke to a guidance counselor, and there’s an incident report still floating in his old student file,” I say as I look over Dallas’s shoulder, where Clementine is just a tiny speck of coal in the white distance.
Another twig snaps back by the treeline. “We should get out of here,” I say.
Watching me watching Clementine, Dallas follows me to the graveyard’s concrete path, which still holds the trail of her impacted-snow footprints. “Beecher, do you have any idea how the Culper Ring has managed to successfully stay secret for over two hundred years?”
