Page 59 of The Night Of
“No one breaks into the Oval Office. How could they get past the Secret Service?”
I said nothing.
Hammer was a smart man. He put things together. He paled, and he looked from the phone numbers to me and back to the paper. “You think this goes up. That’s why you’re off books.”
“Are you going to help me find the president’s murderer, or what, Ham?”
“Damn it, Sean, this is big. I could go to jail for this.”
“I’ll make sure the president knows you and your guys helped catch his best friend’s killer. And, if you do go down, I think I can get you a pardon. I know a guy.” Yeah, I knew him all right. If this worked, I could get Hammer out of a jam. If this worked.
Hammer snorted. He jerked the golf cart’s steering wheel around and floored the little engine, heading for DPortal. I watched him until the black hole of the earth swallowed him up.
I tipped my seat back and closed my eyes. It was going to be a while.
* * *
Two hours later,Hammer slapped my windshield, ripping me out of a deep sleep. I’d been dreaming about Jonathan, about beaches and sunsets and starlight, about holding his hand as waves tickled our toes. I’d been dreaming we were walking in the surf, our suit pants rolled up to our knees and our shirtsleeves up to our elbows. There had been a man walking toward us, waving, someone we both thought we recognized but who was too far off to make out clearly. He’d called Jonathan’s name. I’d squeezed Jonathan’s hand.
Jerking awake, I wiped the drool from my chin as I glared at Hammer. I thought he’d have something smart to say, some joke at my expense, but he was as serious as death outside of my window.
“Ham?”
“You motherfucker,” he hissed. “Did you give me the president’s phone number? Did I just fucking pull the president’s cell phone logs? You know that’s way above my fucking pay grade! Way,wayabove my clearance level!”
“I gave you two presidents’. Baker’s and Sharp’s.”
“I could go to prison for life!”
I shook my head. “What did you find?”
He wasn’t getting over his fury anytime soon. Snarling, Hammer shoved three pages through my window. The first was a long series of outgoing calls that started at ten p.m. and continued every two minutes until eleven. Then the calls got more sporadic, sometimes every six or eight minutes, sometimes every thirty seconds. “Who is this?”
“President Baker’s cell phone.” Hammer sent me a glare full of poison. “He took it off the secure net at twenty-two hundred and started calling this one number, over and over again, for over an hour and a half. Whoever he was trying to call, they never picked up.”
Rose. He’d been trying to call Carl Rose, who couldn’t answer because he was dead.
“There are no calls dialed from this number after twenty-three thirty,” Hammer said. “On either the cell network or the secure net. This is all President Baker did, all evening.”
I nodded and flipped to the next page. There was only one call listed. My heart stopped.
“This phone wasn’t at Camp David,” Hammer said. “Vice President Sharp dialed one number that was, though. At twenty-three fifty-five. Could this be the guy you’re looking for?”
“No.” My voice cracked. I pushed through the pain. Tried again. “No.”
No, because that wasmynumber. Jonathan had tried to callme.
I remembered the moonlight, the sounds of the woods, the trail beneath my boots. The crisp smell of the pine and the midnight air. Walking my patrol route, keeping an eye on the glow coming from Aspen. And then the vibration of my cell phone. It had been a blocked number, and I’d thought it was just one of the guys being stupid, but no, it was Jonathan. My God, Jonathan had tried to call me. That night. One year, three hundred and sixty-five days, after the beach. Had he been remembering me, like I’d been remembering him? Had he felt his heart breaking, too, the memory of us beating against the ruins of what we’d become oh so poignant that night?
He’d been thinking about me, had tried to call me, minutes before his best friend had been murdered.Jonathan…
I flipped to the last page. It was blank. No outgoing or incoming calls until almost one a.m. “The First Lady’s number,” Hammer growled. “She didn’t make any calls.” Not until she was at Bethesda with Baker’s corpse and she called her sister, all the way in England.
“Where are the burners?”
He passed me another paper, a single sheet. “There was the usual noise from the media. Journalists all have two or three burners on them at all times, trying to keep up with their sources. Everyone was cluttering the net up until after twenty-three hundred. Things get interesting after that, though. In the forty-five minutes before the president’s death, we’ve got a few things going on. We’ve got President Baker making his phone calls to that same number every minute or so, until twenty-three thirty. Those stop, and then we have this.”
He pointed to a pair of calls coming from one number, made back-to-back. “At twenty-three thirty-nine, this phone called another phone, which was also inside Camp David. The call was short, about twenty seconds. I geolocated both phones, and the caller? They were either inside Aspen cabin or very close by. The number that was called was within five hundred feet, and almost straight north.”
