The Intern Read online

  Evan aligns himself with the rifle to reduce recoil and allow for quick repeatability if he has to cycle a second shot. He calculates the mechanical offset—the one-and-seven-eighths measurement between the crosshairs and bore axis. Then he adjusts the intersection point for ninety meters, the spot where the vehicle spacing is optimal for the angle he requires. His field of view will diminish the closer the car gets. If the target passes the mark, his shot will grow more difficult by the meter. It must be ninety meters—no more, no less.

  He sets himself in position. Aside from the breath cooling his pursed lips, he is still.

  At once, looming large in the scope, is the target. A tall, balding man with a dignified bearing, lean in a dark suit, surrounded by various generals in full regalia and his wife in a flowy aubergine dress. Waving to the crowd, they are clustered in an open boat of a vehicle that brings to mind the Popemobile.

  One hundred ten meters.

  One hundred.

  There is a problem.

  The foreign minister’s wife turns to face the opposite side of the street, completely blocking Evan’s view. Her head right in front of her husband’s.

  Ninety-five meters.

  Panic. In a split second, Evan falls apart and regroups.

  If he has to go through her, it’s better to penetrate the eye socket so there’s only one chance for the skull to deflect the round. Evan lays the crosshairs directly on her pupil.

  Ninety-three.

  He takes the slack out of the two-stage trigger, breathes breath number one.

  He is looking directly into her eye, into her. Mascara on the curled lashes, joy crinkling the upper lid. She is not part of the mission. Should he disregard her as collateral damage? In the corridors of his mind, Evan listens for Jack but hears nothing aside from the hiss of passing tires and the frenzied stir of the crowd.

  Second breath. Exhale. The final half breath before the shot.

  If he waits any longer, a host of new problems will present themselves.

  A one-millimeter movement of his finger pad gets it done.

  Inconveniently, Jack’s voice announces itself now, a whisper in his ear: The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.

  The vehicle coasts forward. It is on the X. The dark dot of her pupil, the minister’s head pulling back, aligning perfectly behind her. Now.

  And then they are past.

  Evan discards the half breath. Sweat stings his eyes. His mind races, recalculating, adjusting intersection points, dialing back the magnification, faces zooming and shrinking as he fights to hold the mission together in the circle of the scope. As he’s feared, his field of view diminishes, complications stacking on top of complications.

  He breathes. Focuses.

  Slack out of the trigger. Mag dialing back, back. There will be a moment, one moment, to get it done right and clean, and when it presents itself, he will be ready.

  The generals shuffle around the wife, smiling beneath mustaches, the minister’s face popping in and out of view, there and then gone. Seventy-five meters now, the preceding vehicle squeezing the angle tighter and tighter, diminishing it to a slice.

  The universe is reduced to the tunnel of the scope. There is nothing else, not even breath. The wife turns, her sturdy bosom filling the vantage, the minister drifting again behind her. Evan waits for her arm to rise for another wave to the crowd, and at last it does, a sheet of cloth draped winglike beneath her arm. The minister is invisible behind it, but Evan has tracked his movement, anticipates how far to lead him.

  He exhales slow and steady, then pulls. The bullet punches through the gauzy cloth an inch and a half below the wife’s straightened elbow.

  Evan’s hands move of their own volition, manipulating the bolt for a follow-up shot, the shell spinning free and clattering at his feet. But there will be no need for a second bullet. The foreign minister leans propped against two of the generals, his eyes vacant, one cheek dimpled by a hole the size of a thumb. His wife’s mouth is stretched wide and trembling in a scream, but Evan can hear nothing over the eruption of the crowd.

  He drops the weapon into the stream of passing waste below. After pocketing the kill brass, he takes out the plastic bag and shakes onto the dank ledge the copper-washed steel shell case with its invisible fingerprint, a fingerprint that he now knows belongs to a Chechen rebel of some reputation.

  They will search the crowd, the surrounding buildings, the parked vehicles before they will think to look beneath the earth, but nonetheless Evan runs to his exit point and emerges through a manhole cover into a park five blocks north. He walks three blocks east, away from the quickening commotion, and boards a bus. A few klicks later, he exits, flips his reversible jacket inside out, and zigzags the city, the spreading news on the lips of passersby, wafting in snatches from café tables, blaring from car radios.

  Once he’s safely back in his rented room, he logs in to the e-mail account and creates a new saved message consisting of a single word: “Neutralized.”

  A moment later the draft updates: “Close the operation.”

  Evan stares at the words, feeling the glow of emotion beneath his face. He runs a hand over his short hair, and his palm comes away damp with perspiration. He stands up, walks away from the laptop, walks back. Types: “Request phone contact.”

  He hits REFRESH. Hits it again. Nothing.

  Jack is thinking it over.

  * * *

  Seventeen anxious hours later, Evan finally receives a response, and two hours after that he is standing at the specified cross street, having reached Jack at a pay phone from a pay phone. He’s caught Jack on the front edge of an East Coast morning, though he seems as alert as ever, his station-agent’s mind shaping his responses into neat packets of words, articulate silences, loaded intonations.

  “All he did is provide a cartridge case,” Evan says.

  Jack says, “That’s all he did of which you’re aware.”

  “He seems loyal. An asset.”

  “Don’t believe everything you think.”

  The breeze blows flecks of moisture into Evan’s face, and he hunches into the collar of his jacket, turning this way and that, watching pedestrians, vehicles, the windows of the towering, stone-faced buildings all around.

  “He’s not a friend to us,” Jack says. “He’s a friend to everyone. A businessman. He doesn’t just sell cartridge cases with fingerprints. He moves weaponry.”

  “Weaponry?”

  “Fissile material. Highest bidder. He is a complicating factor in our work there. That has to be enough for you.”

  “What about the Sixth Commandment?” Evan says, anger creeping into his voice. “‘Question orders.’”

  “You’ve questioned them,” Jack says. “Now execute them. Close the operation. Your friend and anyone else you might have used. This cannot—will not—come back on us.”

  The steady hum of a dial tone follows.

  Evan wanders the neighborhood until he comes upon a GAZ Volga, a four-door sedan as common on these streets as a Chrysler in Detroit. He hot-wires it and leaves the city, driving into a bruise-colored sunset. He parks several blocks from the apartment with the curved stucco staircase and then closes the distance under cover of the rapidly falling night. Only once he’s reached the blue-and-white Turkish tiles does he remove his pick set. The rusting lock on the arched wooden door gives itself up within seconds.

  Evan steals silently across the dark front room with its vaulted ceiling. The Makarov pistol remains in its place, resting atop the antique television. It is loaded.

  In the rear of the apartment, the kitchen is lit, and carrying through the beaded curtain is the static-filled sound of an animated radio announcer rattling on in a language with which Evan is unfamiliar. Tajik? Bukhori?

  How little he knows of this life he is about to extinguish.

  The hanging beads slice his view into vertical slats. The man sits at the small chipped table, facing away, spoon
ing soup from a bowl. An old-fashioned radio rests on the counter beside a hot plate. A prosaic little portrait: Man Eating Dinner Alone.

  Evan steps through the curtain, the clattering beads announcing his presence. The man turns and looks back through his wireless spectacles. There is a moment of recognition, and then the lines of his face contract in sorrow. There is no anger or fear—only sadness. He nods once and turns slowly back to his soup.

  Evan shoots him through the back of the head.

  As the man tilts forward, his chair slides back a few inches and his body remains resting there, chest to the table’s edge, face in the soup.

  Evan lifts him out of the soup, upright into the chair, and cleans his face as best he can. His left eye is gone, and part of his forehead. As Evan returns the dish towel to the counter, he comes upon a crude clay ashtray, shaped by a child’s hand.

  He vomits into the sink.

  After, he finds a bottle of bleach in a cabinet and sloshes it into the drain.

  As he exits onto the dark staircase, he becomes aware of a man easing up the stairs, drawn perhaps by the sound of the gunshot. The man’s left fist gleams even in the shadow.

  They freeze midway down the stairs.

  The man is all dark silhouette to Evan, just as Evan is to him. The man’s head dips, orienting on the pistol in Evan’s hand. The man lowers his own gun, opens his other palm in a show of harmlessness, and shakes his head. Evan nods and brushes past him.

  Ten minutes later, halfway back to the city, his knotted chest still prevents him from drawing full breaths.

  His next stop is the abandoned textile factory. As he enters, darting through the warren of giant fabric rolls, the trim Estonian appears suddenly. He holds a no-shit Kalashnikov, its curved magazine protruding like a tusk. Evan has brought a pistol to an AK-47 fight. They are standing by the industrial weaving loom where they met before.

  The Estonian cocks his head with benign curiosity, but his grip stays firm on the assault rifle, his small eyes hard like pebbles. Even at this hour, roused from sleep, he wears neatly pressed trousers and a tailored shirt, though one flap remains untucked. The door to the office behind him is closed, but a smudged glow illuminates the fogged glass of the window.

  The men square off in an uneasy truce, not aiming their weapons but not putting them away either.

  “I need your help,” Evan says. Slowly, cautiously, he raises the Makarov, then fiddles with the slide. “It keeps jamming.”

  The Estonian’s smile appears, a neat arc sliced through soft pink cheeks. “That is because you did not buy it from me.” He reaches for the gun. “But seriously, this is a statistical near impossibility. Makarovs do not jam.”

  Evan knows this, but it was the only excuse he could fabricate in the moment.

  The Estonian shakes his hand impatiently. Beneath his other elbow, the muzzle of the AK nudges forward. “Well?”

  Evan is forced to relinquish the pistol.

  The Estonian takes it, then sets down his own weapon on the loom. He drops the magazine, examines it, then grins at Evan’s ignorance. “The underside of the magazine feed lip has a burr from grinding on the clearance.”

  With the toe of his loafer, he hooks a cardboard box and tugs it out from beneath the loom. Digging through the contents, he produces a new magazine, jams it home, and hands the pistol back to Evan.

  “I’m sorry,” Evan says, and shoots the man through the chest.

  The Estonian falls back, his palms slapping the concrete. He is trembling, his arms wobbling violently. A cough leaves a coat of fine spittle on his blue lips. His pupils track up in little jerks, find Evan. Never has Evan seen such terror in another person’s face.

  Evan crouches, takes his manicured hand. The nails are clean and cut short. The Estonian clutches Evan’s fingers, grips his forearm with his other hand, pulls him closer. The partial embrace in another context would be affectionate. Perhaps it is even now. Evan lowers him gently to the floor, cradling his head so it doesn’t strike the concrete. He holds the man’s hand until it goes limp.

  Then he rises, walks back to the humble office, and opens the door. The girl, bloody-lipped and ashen, lies balled up on the mattress. A heroin kit rests on a metal folding chair. She is naked, spotted with bruises, skin tented across bones. Her left shoulder looks dislocated. It is impossible that she would not have heard the gunshot.

  On a metal desk across from the mattress, a cigar box brims with bills. Evan picks it up, sets it on the floor by her thin arm. “You’re free to go now,” he says.

  She rolls her eyes languidly toward him. “Where?” she says.

  He leaves her there with the box full of cash.

  That night he beds down at a different hotel, logging in to e-mail and leaving a draft for Jack. “Operation closed.”

  He checks departure times out of the second-largest airport of the neighboring country. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

  And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

  Now

  1

  Face in the Crowd

  A man melted into the throng of tourists gathered along the E Street walkway. He was neither tall nor short, muscle-bound nor skinny. Just an average guy, not too handsome.

  A Washington Nationals baseball cap was pulled low over his eyes to thwart the security cameras. He’d shoved rolls of dental cotton above his molars to alter his facial structure and thwart the biometrics software that the Secret Service ran on every face in the crowd. He wore fitted clothing that showed the contours of his body, no out-of-season overcoat that might conceal gear or weaponry and draw unwanted focus.

  He had flown to D.C. from the West Coast—as he had the time before and the time before that—under a passport in another name. He’d rented a car using a different identity and checked in to a hotel using a third.

  He slurped the Big Gulp he’d picked up at 7-Eleven, another prop to augment the T-shirt from the National Air and Space Museum and the Clarks walking shoes he’d bought last week and tumbled in the dryer with dirty rags so they’d look broken in. The soda tasted like what it was, sugar soaked in corn syrup, and he wondered why people willingly put this type of fuel through their system.

  He knew which visual triggers to avoid; he wasn’t sweating and was careful to make no nervous movements—no protective hunching of the shoulders or jittering from foot to foot. He didn’t carry a bag or a backpack and he kept his hands out of his pockets.

  Evan Smoak knew the Secret Service protocols well.

  He’d spent the past half year assembling intel piece by piece and tiling it into a larger mosaic. He was nearing the final stages of general reconnaissance. It was time to get down to mission planning.

  He set his hands on the bars of the eight-foot-high gates. The trees of the South Lawn formed a funnel leading to the White House, which would have been a fine metaphor for Evan’s own narrowed focus if he were the type to bother with metaphors.

  Setting his Big Gulp on the pavement, he raised the camera dangling around his neck and pretended to fuss with it. In order to slip it between the bars of the fence, he had to remove the hood from the 18-200mm Nikkor lens. When he put his eye to the viewfinder, a zoomed-in image of the White House’s south side loomed unobstructed.

  Lost in a mob of tourists taking pictures, he let the lens pick across the grounds. The obstacles were impressive.

  Strategically positioned steel bollards dotted the perimeter.

  Subterranean beams waited to thrust up from the earth at the slightest provocation.

  Ten feet back from the fence line, ground sensors and high-res surveillance cameras lay in wait, ready to capture any flicker of movement or tremble of the earth on the wrong side of the bars.

  Uniformed Division officers stood “at” high-visibility posts at intervals across the terrain, backed by an emergency-response team equipped with FN P90 submachine guns. In keeping with Secret Service stereotypes, the agents wore Wiley X sunglasses, but the shades had a strategic advant
age as well: A would-be assailant could never be sure precisely where they were looking. The high-visibility posts kept people in the crowd from seeing all the security measures they were supposed to miss.

  At the southwest gate, a pair of Belgian Malinois commanded a concrete apron that was thermoelectrically cooled so it wouldn’t burn their paws in the summer heat. They sniffed all incoming vehicles for explosives. They were also cross-trained to attack in the event a fence jumper made it over the spikes. If there were worse places to wind up than in the jaws of a seventy-five-pound Malinois, Evan wasn’t sure where they were. The dogs were bona fide assaulters, way above their weight class; SEAL Team Six had gone so far as to parachute into the Abbottabad compound with a specimen of the breed.

  Next Evan swiveled the camera to the White House itself. The semicircular portico of the south side, like the rest of the building’s exterior, was outfitted with infrared detectors and audio sensors, all of them monitored 24/7 by on-site nerve centers as well as by the Joint Operations Center in the Secret Service headquarters a mile to the east.

  Agents at JOC additionally monitored radar screens that showed every plane entering the surrounding airspace. They maintained an around-the-clock interface with the Federal Aviation Administration and the control tower at Reagan National Airport. If a drone or a superhuman pilot managed to steer through the gauntlet of early warning mechanisms, an air defense system loaded with FIM-92 Stinger missiles was hard-mounted to the White House itself, standing by for dynamic air interception.

  Evan tilted the zoom lens up to the roof above the Truman Balcony. A designated marksman with a Stoner SR-16 rifle held a permanent position providing overwatch for the south lawn, where enormous red coasters marked the landing zone for Marine One, the presidential helicopter. Countersnipers patrolled the roof toting .300 Win Mags, good to fifteen hundred meters out, which created a protective dome stretching a mile in every direction.

  It wouldn’t merely be tough to reach the White House. It would be impossible.