The President's Shadow (14 page)

M
ost people walk right past it. The storefront door is boarded up, all the windows are covered with newspaper. There’s even a sign taped to the glass that say
s

In this trendy newly gentrified neighborhood, it almost fools me into thinking I have the wrong address.

But here’s the thing: One, I know this address. And two, I know what used to be located here two hundred years ago.

Back in 1996, this building at 437 7th Street, NW, was set to be demolished, until a local carpenter was sent inside to make sure no homeless people were lingering. As he walked into the front room, something fell from the ceiling onto his shoulder. Looking up, he noticed a letter sticking out from a crack in the ceiling.

In the atti
c
, he found stacks of Civil War–era newspapers, piles of old files, and thousands of mottled letters. There was also a sign for
Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office
.

Over a hundred years ago, this redbrick building held the third-floor office where legend Clara Barton helped track down missing soldiers from the Civil War, long before she founded the American Red Cross.

Back then, Barton got over sixty-three thousand requests from families looking for lost loved ones. She and a small staff helped find twenty-two thousand of them, just by writing letters. It’s one of the main reasons that, to this day, the army issues dog tags to people like my father.

For nearly two decades, promises were made to restore this building, but it’s been sitting here since.

I lean toward the
Contractors
sign and see that in the corner, there’s a tiny GSA logo. General Services Administration, the agency in charge of all U.S. government buildings and real estate.

I take that back. This structure hasn’t been sitting here at all. It’s designed to look like a shuttered storefront, but this is an official—and officially hidden—government building.

I glance over my shoulder. Across the street, in the front window of the restaurant Jaleo, two men in suits sip coffee. Neither looks my way, but even from here, I see their earpieces and blue lapel pins. Secret Service.

It’s the same when I ring the bell. The newspaper-covered door pops open. The lights are off. I can’t see much. A shadowy figure grabs me by the arm.

“Let’s go, Beecher. Quickly,” A.J. says, tugging me inside and scanning the street for himself. “They’re waiting for you upstairs.”

S
he was breaking the first rule of the job. It wasn’t a small rule either. It was a big one—the very first rule she was taught on her very first day:
Do the job you were hired for.

Mina had nodded as her predecessor said it. When it came to the Secret Service, even the secretaries and support staff quickly got caught up
spotting imagined threats. A few years back, the guy who washed towels in the Secret Service gym followed a suspicious-looking Saudi man for six blocks before realizing he was a diplomat.

So since the day she started, Mina Arbogast had always kept to the mission:
Be the Archivist. Do the job. Leave the investigating to others.
She’d never broken that rule.

Until today.

Was it a mistake? She was still asking herself that question, but when it came to Beecher, no matter how much she wanted to doubt him, all she kept seeing was that photo of her brother—crooked arms up in victory—and that nice guy who’d excused himself to go to the restroom.

Ping
, the elevator rang as it yawned open, revealing the ninth-floor hallway.

On 9/11, when the first plane hit, the head of the Secret Service ran up to the ninth floor. Years ago, when a ricin letter was sent to the Oval Office, that investigation was brought up here too. The ninth floor was the home of the director’s Command Cente
r an
d
the Intelligence Division. Not the offices of the Archivist.

Do the job
, Mina told herself, ignoring the Command Center
an
d
plowing toward the door marked
ITU
. Internet Threat Unit.

“Sign in,” the receptionist announced as she buzzed the door open.

“How dare you show your face up here!?” a female voice called out.

To the right of the receptionist, from a nearby cubicle, a Hispanic female agent with mossy green eyes tipped back her chair, giving Mina a playful grin. Raquel Dominguez. Fellow female. Fellow marathoner. And based on the receptionist’s stare, the perfect distraction.

“How’s your knee?” Mina asked as she printed her name in the sign-in book.

“Better. How’s your hip?” Raquel countered.

“Hurts when I run. Or walk. Crawling feels good, though.”

“You should give it a rest before the marathon.”

“I know,” Mina said.

“But you won’t.”

“I know,” Mina said, faking a limp and hobbling past the receptionist, who spotted Mina’s ID and didn’t even bother asking who she was here to see. With a wave to Raquel, Mina headed deeper into the maze of cubicles that was filled with so many young agents, they called this office the
Food Court
.

Throughout American history, the number one way to threaten the President has been via handwritten letter. Today, God bless Facebook, 80 percent of threats came through social media, which explained why every desk in the office was staffed with a clean-cut, fresh-faced agent clicking at a computer screen. Almost all of them were men, all of them in their twenties.

Except one.

“Mr. Goddard?” Mina asked as she approached the double-size cubicle in back. She called his name again before he finally turned around.

“Do I know you?” the older man asked, lowering his reading glasses. He had the sharp eyes of a professor and the well-trimmed gray goatee of someone trying to look younger than his sixty-three years. It didn’t help.

Well known as the oldest agent on staff, Harlan Goddard should have retired a decade ago, but after taking time off to launch a failed private investigation firm, and then calling in favors to come back, he had less than a year to earn his full pension.

“I’m Mina Arbogast,” she said, extending a strong hand. “From the Archivist’s office.”

Goddard looked at her hand but didn’t shake it. “I thought the Archivist was that boring black guy with the wire glasses.”

“He was. We upgraded.”

Goddard rolled his eyes. “Is this something quick, or is it gonna be a pain in my ass?”

“Depends if you know your navy memorabilia as well as everyone says you do.”

Goddard rolled his eyes again. “Listen to me, Mina Arbogast. I’ve been charmed by better than you. Just tell me what you want.”

“I already did,” Mina said, pulling a sheet of paper from her folder, slapping it against Goddard’s desk, and revealing a photocopy of Beecher’s flattened penny and the owl that was clutching a plank. “What can you tell me about this?”

N
ico used to have dozens of them. Most were women; a few were gay men. All of them, back when he first pulled the trigger a decade ago, claimed to love him. Or at least wanted to help him.

When you try to murder the President of the United States, 99.999 percent of the country hates you. But infamy also brings you a few fans.

They start by sending letters. The desperate ones add photos. The naïve ones add gifts: brownies and homemade cookies that quickly get confiscated. Doesn’t matter how bad the crime is. When the Boston Marathon bomber was arrested, dozens of young women built adoring webpages to get his attention.

It was no different for Nico.

Still, after year one, most of the groupies had faded away, especially when the trial ended and the circus lights disappeared. By year five, tha
t
number had been cut in half again. By year te
n
, only the dedicated were still writing a daily or even weekly letter. Four of them. Again four, Nico noted.

One of them was AnnaBeth.

She fit the profile: unmarried, slightly overweight, and a ton of love in her heart for strangers and for God. She wasn’t weird or deranged. She was a bookkeeper at a local insurance agency and ran the canned goods drive for her church.

Nico? It was simple: Lifers made the greatest, most devoted boyfriends. Whether AnnaBeth admitted it or not, Nico wouldn’t reject her, and he certainly couldn’t leave her. When you factored in Nico’s own commitment to God, he burrowed to the core of her dreams and vulnerabilities.

Years ago, at her church’s summer camp, a counselor whose breath smelled like chocolate licorice had snuck into her bunk, held her down, and changed her life forever. She muttered prayers to herself as it was happening, but that didn’t stop it. It continued for the next six summers she was at that camp.

When AnnaBeth was a child, no one saved her. But she could save Nico. And tonight, at nearly four in the morning in a grassy field behind a Tennessee rest stop, she would.

“
Nicky! Nicky, can you hear me!?
” AnnaBeth called out, bending down over Nico, her bulging eyes at full salute as her wiry black hair dangled in his face.

“
Nico, tell her I hate when she uses that pet name
,” the dead First Lady said.

Blinking back to consciousness, Nico glanced around to make sure this wasn’t a dream.

“Mother of pearl, you scared me!” AnnaBeth added. “And your face—! Who did this t—?”

“You have a car, yes?” Nico asked.

“First tell me who—”

“You have a car. I need you to take me somewhere.”

AnnaBeth sat up straight. Her eyes went even wider with excitement, like she wasn’t capable of blinking. “Whatever you need. You know I’ll take care of you.” Over the past decade, AnnaBeth had visited Nico at least once a year. To finally be able to touch him, she still couldn’t believe it. “I’m just so glad you called me, Nicky.”

There were three other girlfriends Nico could’ve called. AnnaBeth was from North Carolina, closest to Tennessee.

“
You realize you’ll have to snap her neck when we get there
,” the First Lady pointed out.

As AnnaBeth pulled him to his feet, Nico stayed silent. AnnaBeth slid an arm around his waist, and the two walked together to her car.

I
s this some made-up ghost story?” Alby asked, sitting Indian-style at the back of the boat.

“It’s not a ghost story,” Julian promised, licking salt water from his lips and kneeling on one knee for balance. It wasn’t just exhaustion, or that it was the middle of the night. The water was choppy, shoving against the boat that sliced southwest through the darkness.

“Look it up yourself,” Julian said. “John Wilkes Booth was the one who pulled the trigger, but back in 1865, in the months before he shot Abraham Lincoln, Booth plotted with a group of coconspirators. He wasn’t working alone. He was—”

“
Guys! Guys, look at this…!
” Timothy whisper-hissed from the side of the boat as he peered through the rifle scope. “
I think I see something!
”

Like twelve-year-olds fighting over a nudie mag, the small group swarmed Timothy, elbowing for a view.

“Julian, you with me?” Alby asked, noticing how transfixed Julian was by the crowd.

Kneeling down on both knees, Julian had been picking at a sharp but narrow fragment of fiberglass on the boat deck.

“You were saying about John Wilkes Booth,” Alby prompted.

“Yeah….no…” Julian said, now staring at the crowd, but knowing the consequence of joining it. “For me, it goes back to— Last week, when we all met on the plane, I was coming from Fort McNair. In Washington, D.C.”

“What’s that have to do with—?”

“Can you please stop interrupting?
Please
,” Julian begged, picking at the fiberglass and wedging it under his fingernail to bend it slightly upward. “I’m trying to tell you: A hundred years ago, on what’s now the tennis courts of Fort McNair, there used to be a penitentiary and wooden gallows. In the months after Lincoln was killed, that penitentiary held the eight coconspirators who plotted to kill Lincoln. Seven men and one woman—”

“Mary Surratt,” Alby said.

“Mary Surratt. She was the only woman,” Julian said with a nod. “On a sweltering July in 1865, after their sentences were handed down, a Union Army captain named Christian Rath marched four of those prisoners—Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt—out to the gallows and put nooses around their necks. He made the other four prisoners watch. Then, while Mary was screaming that she was innocent, Rath clapped his hands three times. On that third clap, his fellow soldiers kicked out the supports and Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt fell down through the gallows.

“Mary’s neck snapped instantly, the first woman executed by our government. One of the other men wriggled there for a solid five minutes. Soon, al
l
four were dead. And y’know what Atzerodt’s last words were?
May we meet in another world
,” Julian said. The words hung in the warm air.

Glancing to his left, toward the crowd, Alby noticed a fellow recruit trying to eavesdrop, though he was working hard not to look like it. The Boy Scout. Nico.

“What happened to the other four prisoners?” Alby asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Julian said as he continued to pick at the fiberglass deck, digging at it with his fingernail and bending the fiberglass upward. “Those four who weren’t hung—Samuel Arnold, Ne
d Spangle
r
, Michael O’Laughlin, and Dr. Samuel Mudd—were scheduled to be transferred to a federal prison in Albany. But in the middle of the night, a soldier woke them up, taking them out to a boat on the Potomac River.”

“A boat?”

“Like this one. Unmarked. Meant to be unseen. Theirs was a medical ship. Mudd wrote about it in a diary. He figured they were being transferred to the prison in Albany…”

“Julian…”

“…but when the ship started heading south, he knew they weren’t going to Albany anymore.”

“
Julian, your hand!
” Alby said, pointing down to the gush of red blood pouring from Julian’s finger onto the deck. He’d been pressing so hard, the shard of fiberglass had pierced his skin.

Nico and a few others started to stare. None of them came to help.

“
Guys, I swear to God I see something!
” Timothy called out, still looking through the rifle scope.

“See, it’s already starting,” Julian said as the crowd again began to rumble.

“What’re you talking about?” Alby asked.

Julian sucked the tip of his bloody finger. “Don’t you see?” Julian asked. “It’s the same as a century ago. There’s something bad about this place.”

“What place? What’re you even—?”

There was a loud pop. A bright magenta flash arced like a rainbow through the black sky. Flare gun.

“
There! You see it!? There it is!
” Timothy shouted as the light from the flare headed toward the water and revealed the outline of…something.

“
Holy… I see it!
” the kid from Arkansas joined in. So did another. Within seconds, a dozen young recruits were all pointing into the distance. They were in the middle of the ocean, but there was definitely something out there. Something big.

Hukkkk
, the boat belched, jerking violently and slowing down.

“
On your feet. Here we go!
” the marine guard called out, racing up from the downstairs cabin. Behind him, D
r
. Moorcraft with his Arthur Ashe glasses carried a rack of syringes holding malaria vaccines.

Hopping up and joining the line, Alby was still gripping his knotted rope. Next to him, Julia
n
was still sucking his finger. There was another bright flash as the boat’s white spotlight spun out toward the water, revealing what looked like…

“
That a castle?
” someone asked.

“Julian, where the hell are we?” Alby whispered.

“
A perfect hell.
That’s what the Lincoln conspirators called it,” Julian explained as a brick fort, wide as a city block, came into view. One of Uncle Sam’s best hiding spots. “For four years, here’s where the government hid them: seventy miles from Key West, on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle. Devil’s Island.”