Out of the Dark by Gregg Andrew Hurwitz

Author:Gregg Andrew Hurwitz [Hurwitz, Gregg Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

34

Mr. Patience

Evan arrived back in his room at the Watergate, locked the door behind him, and threw the swing-bar guard. Setting down his backpack, he tilted his face to the ceiling and exhaled.

His neck had knotted up, and his hands smelled of chlorine and high-proof vodka.

Removing his laptop from the backpack, he logged in to his e-mail, opened his Drafts folder, and typed: “Update?”

He started to walk away, hesitated, then returned and signed the unsent note.

“—Mr. Patience.”

That almost made him smile.

He passed through the wide door into the spa-like embrace of the marble bathroom, forgoing the freestanding bathtub for a punishingly hot shower. Setting both hands on the tile, he leaned into the powerful stream, letting the jets pound against his crown.

Wetzel had told Evan everything he knew, some of which Evan already knew himself. That Orphan A had been set on his trail. That A had recruited a death squad of down-and-dirty ringers headed up by two convicts, Ricky and Wade Collins. That once they killed Evan, they were going to track down and neutralize the remaining Orphans. That President Bennett was eliminating any trace of Evan’s 1997 mission. When pressed—and Evan had pressed Wetzel in a fashion that would have produced results—Wetzel had no specifics about why the mission was so menacing to Bennett.

Whatever the secret was, Bennett couldn’t even trust it to his own deputy chief of staff.

Evan turned off the shower, dressed, sat at the desk, and refreshed the screen.

Joey’s reply was waiting: “we’re in.”

A chill rippled across his back, his skin tightening. It wasn’t a thrill so much as a predatory focus, the whiff of prey in the wind.

Beneath her two-word reply was a series of links.

He clicked.

All of a sudden, he was looking at the inner workings of the Secret Service, prized data and classified intel, private squabbles and dirty laundry.

It took him ten minutes to orient within the private network, another ten to start identifying areas of interest.

First he ran through the travel logs. President Bennett’s schedule was in a state of upheaval; clearly there’d been a directive to move as many engagements and meetings around as close to scheduled dates as possible. The commitments were endless, more than Evan could review now, but he scanned them, searching for events that seemed difficult to reschedule.

Mid-September showed a promising fund-raiser in Los Angeles with the mayor and the senior state senator, mere miles from Evan’s penthouse. But two months was a long time to wait, and there was no guarantee that the reception wouldn’t be delayed or canceled.

Evan scrolled through other upcoming trips, assuming that catching the protection detail off their home turf would be easier. But the more he read, the more he realized that was not the case.

On domestic trips President Bennett was accompanied by more than three hundred civilian and military personnel, the ranks swelling to nearly a thousand for OCONUS forays. An advance team stacked with lead agents, transportation agents, countersurveillance agents, airport agents, event-site agents, tech-security agents, intel agents, and a military comms team locked down every transition point and venue ahead of time.

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