The Fifth Assassin (37 page)

“That’s fair, but—” Beecher leaned in slightly as Marshall turned the page… to a shot where the tennis player was now completely nude. “Y’know, I understand why you’d take your
shirt
off to play tennis—but there’s something that makes no sense about taking off your
bottoms
.”

“Maybe it’s hot out there.”

“Maybe. But your bottoms…? There’s something that—Maybe it’s me, but that doesn’t seem very hygienic.”

“No, I agree. Especially when… look… that’s a clay court.”

The two of them leaned in, squinting to see.

“Definitely clay,” Beecher agreed, though the crinkle still
wouldn’t leave his forehead. “Marsh, can I just say: I love that you found us all these free nudie shots, but we need to be smart and get rid of it.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I’m talking about if Pastor Riis realizes we have these—”

“Then what? What’s he gonna do? Come and take them? He can’t do anything, Beecher! At least not without letting everyone know that they were his in the first place, which I guarantee he doesn’t want!”

“Maybe. But I’m telling you right now: No good can come from having the pastor’s collection of porn.”

“Will you stop worrying? No one even knows we have it.”

A loud thud hit the treehouse as Vincent Paglinni shoved the plywood door open, barging inside. “Hey, Marshmallow, heard you got porn,” Paglinni barked, pumping his bushy eyebrows.

Behind him, he led three other kids—two of them a year older—into the treehouse. For a moment, Beecher thought Paglinni might’ve come to steal it.

“Y-You wanna look?” Marshall offered, handing him a copy of
Leg Show
.

Paglinni stood there for a moment, personally deciding whether he’d be friend or foe.

To Marshall and Beecher, it felt like an hour of silence.

“Aw, why the hell not?” Paglinni eventually replied, plopping into one of the flat beanbag chairs as his three friends grabbed their own copies.

Within twenty minutes, the treehouse was crowded again, crowded with more teenage boys than when it was first built almost a year ago. Good news traveled fast. But porn at puberty? That moved at light speed.

“Marshmallow, you are one righteous nutjob!” Paglinni’s best friend, a skinny redhead named Paul Mackles, announced as he flipped through a copy of
High Society
. In twelve years, that was the very first time Mackles ever spoke to him.

Today

Camp David

T
he agent with the small ears doesn’t say a word to us.

Instead, he motions for me to extend my arms outward, then waves a handheld metal detector up the back of my legs and along my back. He’s the second guard to wand me.

The first was at the front entrance to Camp David. Those guards didn’t say a word to us either, even when I told them that someone was going to try and kill the President in twenty minutes. They looked at Palmiotti, then over at each other. When problems got this big, the decisions were made elsewhere.

From there, the agent with small ears put us in a souped-up golf cart with all-terrain wheels and weaved us between trees and along a macadam hiking path to our current location: a modest ranch-style house with freshly painted shutters. At the front door, instead of house numbers, there’s a carved wooden sign that reads
Elm
.

I know where we are. Nearly every cabin in Camp David is named after a tree:
Laurel, Hickory, Birch, Dogwood. Elm
is home to the Secret Service command post. That means…

I glance over my shoulder. There are more ranch-style cabins in every direction. The whole place looks like Boy Scout camp. But directly across the snow-covered field, there’s a perfect view of one bigger cabin: a rustic but elegant California-style bungalow with a low-pitched gable roof, tall brick chimney, and wide bulletproof windows. Even without the four agents in winter coats standing
along the front steps, there’s no doubt that I’m looking at the cabin known as
Aspen
. The President’s house.

“They’re gonna try and kill Wallace. In seventeen minutes,” I tell the agent in the sweater who’s watching Palmiotti.

“Stewie, tell him to keep his mouth shut,” the agent with small ears warns, running the metal detector up the front of my legs, toward my chest.

“Beecher, let them do their job. They’ll get us to who we need to see,” Palmiotti insists as Small Ears grips my shoulder and spins me back toward him, away from the President’s cabin.

At my chest, the detector
beep-beep-beeps
. The other agent, a tall Muslim man, pulls his gun, pointing it at my heart. In the distance, through the bare trees, two different snipers—one on another cabin’s roof… one in a tree—appear from nowhere.

“Whoa—no—it’s a key.
Just a key
,” I tell them as I pull out the old skeleton key that I wear around my neck. The Muslim agent lowers his gun. It doesn’t make anyone unclench. The snipers stay where they are.

There’s a loud
zuu-zeee
as the detector curves up my neck, to my chin. Wanding complete.

“You should wand him too,” I insist, pointing at Palmiotti. I’m done taking chances. He may’ve been helpful getting us here, but that doesn’t mean I trust him.

Palmiotti raises his hands, knowing the Service think the same. But it’s not until the agent steps toward Palmiotti and moves the buzzing wand away from my ears that I realize just how quiet it is here. And how alone we are.

I shift my weight, hearing the crunch of rocks below my feet. There’s a high-pitched hum that always lurks around campgrounds, and a far-off squawk of a distant bird. I glance around, but there are no staffers, no bigshots, not even a stray golf cart. This place feels like a ghost town. In fact, as I scan the compound and check each residence, every single cabin has its lights off… except for Wallace’s. A wisp of smoke twirls from his brick chimney. It’s just him and his family.

Across the snow-covered field, all four of the agents outside the President’s house are staring only at me.

One by one, I search each of their faces. They’re all wearing winter coats and khakis. None of them match A.J.’s description. That means A.J.’s inside, closest to the President. But for the first time, I wonder if that’s good or—

“He’s clear,” the agent with the small ears calls out behind me as he finishes wanding Palmiotti.

Up on our left, toward the porch, there’s a low metal thunk. Like a bank vault unlocking.

At the top of the concrete steps, the front door of the Secret Service’s Elm cabin swings open, revealing a Secret Service agent with thin curly hair that’s graying at the temples. He’s not in sweater and khakis. He’s suit-and-tied. We’re moving up the chain of command.

“Reed, before you say anything,” Palmiotti pleads.

Reed shoots him a look that’s usually saved for drunk relatives. “Get them inside,” he barks to his agents as they fall in behind us and usher us into the cabin. For a full thirty seconds, I think everything’s going perfectly.

I
nside the Secret Service house, it’s no different from any rustic foyer. Hardwood floors. Wood-paneled walls. There’s even an iron umbrella stand in the corner. But as I look to my left, in what was designed to be the living room, there are two side-by-side desks. Both are covered with an array of high-tech radio consoles and TV monitors. From the bird’s-eye view of the cameras, these are the feeds from the hundreds of security cams throughout Camp David.

“This way,” Reed says, leading us away from the surveillance room.

There’s a Secret Service agent at the desk with more TVs. The other desk—the one with more radio equipment and views of the President’s helicopter—is manned by two uniformed marines, one of whom is wearing headphones and presumably scanning marine frequencies. Forget the three outdoor fences.
This
is why Palmiotti said Camp David was safer than the White House. Even assuming you get past the Park Service… even if you fight your way past the Secret Service… you still have to take on the marines.

“They ready for us?” Reed calls out as we follow him into the room on our right. I’ve read about rooms like this: a Secret Service
down room
. Filled with old couches, folding chairs, and a small TV, it’s where the agents rest and relax when they’re not on post. But what catches my eye is what’s at the back of the room: a heavy steel door with a high-tech card swipe, and next to it, an old gray phone built into the wall.

It reminds me of the SCIFs we have at the Archives—the bombproof saferooms where the most classified documents are read. Like
ours, this one has redundancies built-in: In addition to swiping your card, you also have to be cleared in manually.

On cue, Agent Reed swipes his ID through the scanner and then looks up toward the ceiling. A thin security cam, like the ones in the White House, stares down at us. “Viv, coming down,” he announces.

Down?

There’s a pregnant
poomp
—my ears pop—and the airtight steel door opens toward us. The foul whiff of—I can’t place the smell, but it’s awful as it wafts through the room.

I look back toward Palmiotti, who nods that it’s okay.

Before I can change my mind, Agent Reed grips my shoulder and adds a not-so-subtle shove. As I near the threshold, I finally place the smell. Burnt hair.

With our first step through the doorway, automated lights blink awake. Another burst of foul cool air belches from below. Industrial metal stairs go at least two stories down.

This isn’t a saferoom. Or a SCIF. Or even a basement.

This is where they brought President Bush after 9/11. One of the safest places in the entire United States. The real hidden tunnel below Camp David.

Eighteen years ago

Sagamore, Wisconsin

B
y now, it ran like clockwork.

The school bell rang at 3 p.m., and most kids reached the schoolyard by 3:05. Of course, there was always some screwing around in the schoolyard… a quick game of boxball or off-the-wall… and then the extra lingering that weeded out anyone with after-school commitments, tutors or piano lessons.

By 3:20, the group was set. There were sometimes a few variations, but like any neighborhood bar, the regulars were the regulars: Marshall, Beecher, Paglinni, Lee Rosenberg, Paul Mackles, and the rest. Every day, they’d gather around Marshall, humming impatiently in place until they found the critical mass that sent them weaving back across the six-block, eight-minute trip to their final destination: Marshall’s treehouse. No two ways around it, the Watchtower was finally living up to its name.

“Dibs on the beanbag!” Paglinni called out.

“I get the other!” Paul Mackles added as the rest of the group spread out, taking seats on the foldout beds, on the floor, or, as Lee Rosenberg (in his Lee jeans) always did, alone on one of the milk crates.

Otherwise, as Marshall gathered the porn from the hiding spots—in the Lucky Charms box… under the mattresses in the foldout beds—there was no arguing. As he handed out copies, they all knew the math. There were seven magazines in total, so the
group would peacefully, without fuss, silently pair off into seven smaller factions. Paglinni usually got his own. Same with Mackles and any of the other older ones. The rest would share.

At this point, after nearly two weeks with their X-rated contraband, every member of the group had been through the photos hundreds of times. But that didn’t mean they were finished. Like the pubescent vultures they were, they scoured every single page for something new, something unseen. They read the articles, the ads, the interviews, even the letters page, in the hopes it would contain some new piece of illicit information.

On this day, Eddie Williams realized that in
Chic
, at the bottom of every
Letter to the Sexpert
, they’d print the letter writer’s full name and address, prompting Paglinni to wonder what would happen if they wrote a letter to Coco Bean.

“We should tell her we’re tall. She likes tall men,” Paul Mackles said.

“Are you illiterate?” Paglinni asked with a laugh. “She likes
big
men. When she says
big
, she doesn’t mean
tall
.”

“Then what’s she—? Oh.
Ew
,” Mackles said as the group piled on, their laughter echoing through the treehouse. Then, at precisely 5:15 p.m., Marshall’s mom would get home from work at the church and yell up to the treehouse that it was time for everyone to go.

On this night, though, Marshall’s mom was working late. So whatever they were laughing at, it continued well into the dark. Beecher was laughing. Paglinni was laughing. Even Lee Rosenberg, still in his Lee jeans, still sitting alone on the milk crate in the corner, was laughing.

In twelve years, most of them had shared nothing in common, but tonight they were one unit. And at the center of it, finally the ringmaster, Marshall relished every second. Even Beecher couldn’t argue with the uncontainable joy that lit up his friend’s chubby face.

They had porn; they had friends; they had laughter.

By tomorrow night, it would all be gone.

Today

Camp David

T
he clanging is loud, like we’re in a submarine, as we descend the metal staircase.

Agent Reed leads the way, followed by me and Palmiotti. Behind us, there’s another loud
pooomp
as the agent with the small ears yanks the steel door shut, sealing all four of us down here as we head for the hidden tunnels below.

I’d heard rumors they existed. In the Archives, we have most of Camp David’s building plans. According to some, the tunnels are part of an underground shelter that connects with the President’s cabin and has its own secret entrance that’s built into the President’s bedroom closet. If there’s an emergency, the Service can burst out of his closet and grab him at a moment’s notice.

“So this’ll take us to Wallace?” I ask.