Page 54 of The Night Of
We shaved and dressed in silence. I came up behind him when he pulled his tie around his neck. Our eyes met in his mirror as I laid my hands on top of his and guided him through the loops and pulls of a full Windsor. His hands fell away as I straightened the knot, making sure it was even.
“It’s not your fault,” I whispered. I slid my hands along his chest and held him to me. Kissed his temple. “It’s not your fault, Jonathan.”
He closed his eyes as I spoke. I felt the shudder of his exhale. He laid his palm on my hand, resting over his heart. “The clock is ticking,” he eventually said. “Let’s find this son of a bitch.”
We drove to the White House in silence. My thoughts consumed me, a nonstop churn of the facts we’d assembled mixing and merging with the bits and pieces of Baker’s last year that I’d missed, now supplied by the First Lady and Dr. Fernandez and Jonathan himself.
The West Wing had gone into partial lockdown after Baker’s murder, and the place was as bustling as a ghost town. I expected tumbleweeds of crumpled paper to blow by my feet. There was no one in the halls as I followed Jonathan to the Oval Office. We opened every door, and then I went across the corridor and sat in the Roosevelt Room, as close as I could get to him without interfering in presidential business.
Jonathan settled in for the morning meeting with his senior staff. He faced his team as they crowded on the sofas. He’d positioned his own chair so that, with one sideways flick of his eyes, he could see me. We stared at each other as his chief of staff ran through the timeline of events for President Baker’s funeral the next day.
President Baker’s body was going to be delivered back to the White House in the morning, to lie in repose in the East Room until his funeral procession arrived at the North Portico. From there, pallbearers would transport the casket to the horse-drawn caisson for his final trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.
“Mr. President,” Baker’s former chief of staff said, sitting beside Jonathan’s chief of staff as they tried to juggle the role between them, “I understand you wish to be a pallbearer?”
Jonathan nodded. His face was stone. His body was carved from ice. Was I the only one who could see the hurricane tearing him apart? The shame that bled like spilled ink down the inside of his soul?
“Yes,” Jonathan said. “Steven was my closest, dearest friend. I will carry him all the way to his end.”
Pens scratched on paper in the silence that followed. Jonathan’s eyes flicked to mine.
“Yes, sir,” the chief of staff said quickly. “So, the First Lady—excuse me, the First Widow—will follow, escorted by the commanding general of Joint Force Headquarters…” He read from his notes, his jaw clenching. “Members of Congress and members of President Baker’s administration will follow behind, paying their honors—” His voice tightened. Broke off.
A sniff came from the Oval Office.
Jonathan bowed his head. He waited. Another sniff shattered the stillness, and one of the men in the back of the room turned and walked out, his hand over his mouth.
“The missing man formation will take place above the intersection of Pennsylvania and Fourth as the procession approaches the steps of the Capitol,” Jonathan’s chief of staff said, taking over. She rubbed a tear from her eyes before it fell. “Mr. President, you and the other pallbearers will then carry President Baker’s casket up the steps to the Capitol rotunda. The ceremony there will begin at noon.”
This time, the tear-choked inhale came from Jonathan. He nodded. Kept his head down. His thumbs were white where they pressed into the backs of his hands.
The meeting moved on, switching to press releases and statements and then to security concerns and precautions for Baker’s state funeral. Nguyen was there. I heard him brief Jonathan, even though I couldn’t see him. He sounded like he’d gone ten rounds with a boxing champion and had lost every one. Like he was at the very end of his rope.
When the meeting finished, Jonathan asked for time alone for the rest of the morning. He sat at the end of his sofa and stared out over the Rose Garden, watching the sunlight twist and twirl in the branches of the dogwoods and slide between the tender, blooming buds. Fresh roses were being cut for Baker’s memorial wreath.
I texted him, a single heart from my burner to his.Know, Jonathan. I’m here.
To really be there for Jonathan, I had to find Baker’s killer. I had to expose him, drag him out of the shadows.
I stripped the noise from the hard facts of the murder and turned over what I was left with.
From the timeline, I was certain something had happened between President Baker and Carl Rose at their one-on-one meeting. Dr. Fernandez had said Baker was enthused about his plan to go after Hardacre and about how he’d turned to his best man in the CIA. That had to be Rose.It all goes back to Belgium.Brussels, where they’d all met.
The two men had discussed something. Hardacre? His disappearance? Something Rose had been working on for President Baker. Had Baker taken notes? Was that why the president’s documents were stolen only minutes after his murder?
Whatever they’d discussed in the private sanctum of the Oval Office, it had been monumental enough for both Rose and Steven to be murdered less than thirty-six hours later, seventy-five miles apart. That implied conspiracy. Coordination. A master hand guiding the movements of two different assassins.
And Baker, somehow, had known he was in danger. He’d known to ask Rose for a gun.
A gun that had been turned on him, in the end. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind: him on his knees, both hands wrapped around the barrel and trying to push the gun away.
Guilt strummed my guts again. If only I’d still been on his detail. Baker could have turned to me.
Would he have? If he’d been this alarmed, this uncertain and mistrustful of everyone around him, so much that he only dared to reach out to Jonathan in a hidden, secret way, would he have trusted me? Or would I have been painted with the same brush of suspicion as the rest of Baker’s detail? The same as Nguyen had been?
Could Nguyen have been involved? My replacement, the man who had become Baker’s right hand. Where was he the night of? He’d been at Baker’s side all day, from the White House into Marine One and then on deck at Camp David. He’d only gone off shift when Baker had turned in for the night, and he’d given the reins over to… me. The night shift supervisor.
Last I’d heard that night, Nguyen had been buttoned up in Witch Hazel, no doubt face-planted into his rack, greedily grabbing every minute of sleep he could.
