In the Lion's Den

7:52 PM, Saturday. Washington, D.C.

The wand passed over her left ear and chirped.

Camille did not breathe.

"Earrings, ma'am," said the Secret Service agent. He was a young man with a shaved head and a face as blank as a plate. "I'll need you to remove them."

"Of course." She reached up, smiling a nervous girl's smile, and unscrewed the little gold stud. It lay in her palm, a plain faux pearl the size of a lentil. "My mother's. I never take them off. I get a little superstitious."

"Yes, ma'am."

He passed the wand over it. A second chirp, shorter. He turned it over, examined it, held a small black scanner against the backing, and the scanner trilled a bright, harmless, cheerful ring tone.

"Cell phone chip," he said.

"It's a tracker. Dad put it in. He's very protective." She laughed. "I told him I was too old for that, but he doesn't listen."

The young man looked at her for another half second. Then he handed it back.

"Enjoy your evening, Ms. Duarte."

She screwed the earring into her ear with fingers that did not shake.

Thank you, Dara, she thought. Thank you for the B-flat.

She walked on through the oak-paneled hall, her heels loud on the floor, between two more men in dark suits with the flat unblinking eyes of statues, and with every step she felt the whole vast weight of the building settle upon her: the portraits, the carpets, the silence, the sense of an enormous machine turning very slowly behind the walls.

Somewhere three blocks away, in a gray van with a laundry company's logo on its side, a man with scarred hands was listening to her breathing.

He's there, she thought. He's right there.

It was the only thing keeping her upright.

…

The private dining room was smaller than she expected.

A round table for two, set with white linen and heavy silver. Two candles. A fire crackling in a marble fireplace. On the wall, a portrait of some long-dead statesman in a powdered wig, regarding her with an air of mild disapproval. Beyond a pair of tall windows, in the dark, the lawn sloped away toward the Washington Monument, a white spike lit from below like a needle.

The President of the United States rose from his chair.

"Miss Duarte!"

He was in shirtsleeves. That was the first thing she noticed. No jacket, no tie, the collar of his blue oxford open at the throat, the sleeves rolled to the elbow like a man at a family barbecue. He looked bigger without the suit, and older, and somehow far more dangerous, because there was nothing to remind her of the office. He was just a large, warm, silver-haired man in his sixties with a rancher's tan and a smile that reached all the way to his eyes.

"Mr. President."

"Grant. Please. I abhor ceremony after six o'clock." He took her hand in both of his. "I'm so glad you came. I wasn't sure you would. It's rather a lot to ask of a young lady, to turn up for supper with an old man she barely knows."

"You're not so old, Mr. President."

"You see? She's diplomatic, too." He laughed, delighted, and drew out her chair. "Sit, sit. I took the liberty of asking the kitchen for something simple. I don't suppose you're a vegetarian?"

"No, sir."

"Thank God. I can't abide vegetarians. Like dining with a Quaker." He sat across from her, spread his napkin, and reached for a decanter. "Wine?"

Never eat or drink anything you did not see poured.

She watched.

He poured with a steady hand, first his own glass, then hers. Then, with an easy gesture, as though it were nothing, he swapped them. He set hers at the head of the table and drew his own toward himself, and smiled at her over the rim.

"A habit," he said. "In my business, one learns."

"Of course."

"Don't be alarmed. I haven't poisoned you." The smile deepened. "Not yet."

Camille laughed. It was a very good laugh. She was proud of it for years.

"To craftsmanship," said Grant Wallace, raising his glass.

"To craftsmanship."

They drank.

…

The food was simple, as promised. Roast chicken with lemon. New potatoes. A salad of bitter greens. A wedge of crumbly cheese. She ate steadily, with small bites, and watched him.

He was a wonderful talker. She had expected that. He talked about the Residence, about the ghosts the staff swore haunted the Lincoln Bedroom, about a chef who had once threatened to quit over a dispute about gravy. He talked about his mother, who had been a seamstress in Ohio, who had sewn his first suit from her wedding dress, and he said it with a catch in his voice that was so well judged that Camille wanted, absurdly, to comfort him.

"She had hands like yours," he said. "Quick. Sure. She could look at a bolt of cloth and tell you what it would become. People thought it was luck. It wasn't luck. It was attention."

"It usually is."

"Precisely. Attention. That's what the world doesn't understand about craftsmanship." He cut a potato with great precision. "People think it's about talent. It's about noticing."

"I notice a lot of things."

"I know you do." His eyes rested on her, warm and amused. "I've been reading about you."

Her pulse jumped.

Breathe. Count to four.

"I'm flattered."

"Don't be. I read about everyone." He took a sip of wine. "You're a very interesting person, Miss Duarte. Born at Elmhurst. Mother deceased. Raised in Queens, educated at public schools, a nail technician since eighteen, with a reputation, I'm told, for extraordinary discretion. Women trust you with their secrets."

"I just listen."

"A rare gift." He smiled. "Your father, now. He's a different sort of artist."

The fire popped. The candles shivered.

Camille set down her fork.

"My father?"

"Rafael." He said it affectionately. "I understand he's been unwell. A stroke, I'm told. Dreadful. I'm very sorry. I hope he's recovering."

She could not feel her hands.

"He is," she said. Her voice came out perfectly steady. "Thank you."

"I once held in my hands a sheet of paper that your father made." Wallace's voice grew warm, almost reverent. "I can't tell you how rare that is. A single sheet. The weave, the weight, the ink. When you tilt it, the ink shifts color, did you know? Gold to green, the way a pigeon's neck does. It was perfect. I've been a collector of fine things for forty years, and I've never seen anything more perfect than that."

He looked at her.

"Do you know, I'd been looking for the man who made it for six years?"

Be calm, she told herself. Be a stupid girl. Be a stupid girl who doesn't know what you're talking about.

"I don't know what you mean," she said slowly.

"Don't you?"

"My father repaired printers."

"Did he?" Wallace's eyes crinkled. "How wonderful. And is that why Viktor Sokol kept him in a safe house in Queens for three years?"

…

The room was perfectly silent.

Camille sat with her hands in her lap, under the tablecloth, where he couldn't see them. They were clenched so tightly that her nails had broken the skin. A small bright part of her mind, the part that noticed hands, observed with detached interest that she was not afraid. She was past that. She had gone through fear and out the other side into a cold, flat, clear country where everything stood out in sharp relief: the shadow on his cheek, the glint of the candle on his fork, the fine white lines at the corners of his eyes.

He was not threatening her. That was what chilled her. He was enjoying her.

"Mr. President," she said quietly. "I think there's been a misunderstanding."

"Has there?"

"I'm a nail technician. I came to have supper."

"And you shall have it." He lifted the decanter and refilled his own glass. "I'm not accusing you of anything, my dear. Quite the opposite. I'm confessing. I wish to be perfectly open with you, since I intend to ask something of you, and it would be dishonest to ask it in the dark."

"Ask what?"

"First, the confession." He leaned back in his chair. "Yes. The paper is mine."

The words were so casual that for a moment she did not take them in.

"Four hundred thousand sheets of it. Gone, of course, in Hunts Point. A minor inconvenience." He waved a hand. "We have other printers. We always have. But the ink is a loss. Your father, Miss Duarte, was the finest chemist I have ever had the privilege to employ."

She thought: He is telling me. He is telling me everything.

"You see, I believe in honesty," Wallace said, "between people who are going to be close. I have signed an order that will remove six million human beings from this country, and I have commissioned the forgery of a great many documents to ensure that it removes the right six million. You think it's a paradox. A president who rails against false papers and a president who prints them."

"I don't—"

"It isn't." He smiled. "It's efficiency. A nation is a set of documents, my dear. A residence card, a birth certificate, a stamp. Nobody sees the person. They see the paper. So if I want an empty city, I need only change the paper. The people will follow."

Her stomach turned. She forced herself not to flinch. She forced herself to look at him as she had looked at Viktor Sokol, steadily, mildly, with the open hands of a girl who had nothing to hide.

"Why are you telling me this?" she said.

"Because it doesn't matter." He said it gently. "Who would you tell? Julian? He knows. He's known for months, I think. Marcus Doyle has made a hobby of it, poor man. The newspapers? My dear. Who is going to believe that the President of the United States has an unlisted printing plant in a laundry? Who will read the footnotes?" The easy smile did not waver. "I tell you because I want you to understand what I am. A man who is never afraid of being known. You will find that quite restful, after Julian."

"After Julian?"

"Ah." He put down the glass. "That is the thing I wished to ask."

…

He did not touch her. That surprised her afterward. He sat in his chair and turned his wine glass in the firelight, and in a reasonable, kindly voice, as though proposing a job at a bank, he said:

"I would like you to leave him."

She stared.

"I am quite serious. I have been watching you for a month. At the Metropolitan, I thought: There. That one. A girl who sees things. Who has the coolness of a surgeon and the heart of a poet. Who can sit across from Viktor Sokol and lie in a perfect B-flat." Her blood froze. "Yes. I've heard the tapes. Anthony Gray is very thorough."

He knows about the study.

"You're wasted on a boy," Wallace said. "You're wasted on a Kastellan. Julian is a talented young man, but he is not, shall we say, free. He has a ghost in him. A man with a ghost makes terrible decisions. He will get you killed."

"He won't."

"He nearly did at Hunts Point." The President smiled sorrowfully. "I read the report. A bullet through your sleeve, was it? He lost all his cool. He ran into a firefight with no plan. It was very moving. But it is not competent."

"I'm not leaving him."

"I'm not asking you to leave him tonight. I'm asking you to think." He leaned forward, folded his big hands on the cloth, and spoke very softly, almost tenderly. "I would give you a house in Georgetown. A title. Official Arts Liaison to the Executive Office, a nice phrase, isn't it? A salary larger than your father will earn in a lifetime. Your father in the best clinic on the continent, with a private nurse for every shift, and a green card on his pillow when he wakes. And no one, my dear, no one at all, would ever ask you to explain yourself again."

The fire crackled. The portrait stared down from the wall with mild disapproval.

"And if I refuse?" Camille said.

"Why, then you refuse." He spread his hands. "I'd never force a lady. I'm a gentleman." A pause. "But I should tell you I've always had a fondness for the Kastellans. Such a distinguished family. Such a sad history with winter roads."

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

Camille did not move. She did not blink.

The Taconic, she thought. He knows. Or he knows enough to say it.

Behind her ribs, her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

Say the word, the small voice said. Say it. Chipping. Say it now and Julian will come through the wall.

She thought of him on his knees on the oak floor. If something is wrong, you walk out.

Not yet, said another voice, colder. He's still talking.

"That sounds like a threat, Mr. President," she said.

"Does it?" He looked genuinely wounded. "Not at all. It's an observation. About history. I'm a great student of history. One only has to read it, to see how often a man is undone by what he loves." He picked up his glass. "I would hate to see it happen to Julian."

She stood.

It was not a decision. Her body did it for her, the same way it had run to Hunts Point, the same way it had thrown the acetone. She rose from her chair with her napkin in her hand, and her voice, when it came, was low and quiet and absolutely steady.

"Thank you for supper, Mr. President. I'll think about what you said."

"Of course."

"May I go?"

"My dear." He rose, too, courteous to the last. "You were never a prisoner."

She turned. She walked, step by measured step, across the long room to the door. A man in a dark suit opened it from the outside. The long corridor lay beyond, empty and golden and very, very long.

"Miss Duarte."

She stopped, without turning.

"The polish," said Grant Wallace, behind her, in a voice of pleasant curiosity. "On your left hand. Is it chipping?"

The corridor did not move. The portraits did not move. For a single long second, the whole world held its breath.

She looked down.

The oxblood on her left ring finger was perfect. Flawless. Not a mark on it.

She turned her head and smiled over her shoulder, the best smile of her life.

"No, Mr. President," she said. "I do my own."

…

The black car was waiting at the curb.

She walked to it with her shoulders back and her head high. She did not run. She did not look behind her. She opened the rear door, slid into the leather seat, and shut it, and the driver pulled smoothly out into the dark street, and it was not until the White House had dwindled to a glow in the rearview mirror that she let out the breath she had been holding since the soup.

Her hands began to shake.

They shook all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. They shook as she pulled the earring from her ear and cradled it in her palm. They shook as she said, hoarsely, to the gold stud, in a voice she did not recognize as her own:

"I'm out. I'm out. I'm all right."

A pause. The static. And then, in the stud, so low and rough she nearly missed it:

"I'm here."

She put her forehead against the cold window glass and closed her eyes.

And behind her eyelids, in the dark, there was a big warm man in his shirtsleeves, smiling over a candle, saying efficiency, and you were never a prisoner, and she thought, with a slow sick certainty that went right to the bone:

Julian is the dangerous one, I told myself. Julian is the monster who caged me.

I was wrong. He was only a boy playing at it.

That man is the real thing.