The Book of Fate - Brad Meltzer [161]
At first, Boyle almost tossed it aside. Then he remembered that day at the racetrack, in the back of the limo, Manning and his chief of staff were working a crossword. In fact, now that he thought about it, they were always working a crossword. Staring down at the puzzle, Boyle felt like there were thin metal straps constricting his rib cage. His teeth picked at his bottom lip as he studied the two distinct handwritings. Manning’s and Albright’s. But when he saw the random doodles along the side of the puzzle, he held his breath, almost biting through his own skin. In the work space . . . the initials . . . were those—? Boyle checked and rechecked again, circling them with a pen.
Those weren’t just senior staff. With Dreidel and Moss and Kutz—those were the people getting the President’s Daily Briefing, the one document The Three asked him for access to.
It took three days to crack the rest: two with a symbols expert at Oxford University, half a day with an art history professor, then a fifteen-minute consultation with their Modern History Research Unit, most specifically, Professor Jacqui Moriceau, whose specialty was the Federalist period, specifically Thomas Jefferson.
She recognized it instantly. The four dots . . . the slashed cross . . . even the short horizontal dashes. There they were. Exactly as Thomas Jefferson had intended.
As Professor Moriceau relayed the rest, Boyle waited for his eyes to flood, for his chin to rise with the relief of a seemingly lifelong mission complete. But as he held the crossword in his open palm . . . as he slowly realized what Leland Manning was really up to . . . his arms, his legs, his fingertips, even his toes went brittle and numb, as if his whole body were a hollowed-out eggshell. God, how could he be so blind—so trusting—for so long? Now he had to see Manning. Had to ask him to his face. Sure, he’d unlocked the puzzle, but it wasn’t a victory. After eight years, dozens of missed birthdays, seven missed Christmases, six countries, two surgeries, a prom, a high school graduation, and a college acceptance, there would never be victory.
But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be revenge.
Fifteen minutes south of Palm Beach, Ron Boyle pulled to the side of the highway and steered the beat-up white van to the far corner of a dead-empty emergency rest stop. Without even thinking about it, he angled just behind a crush of ratty, overgrown shrubs. After eight years, he had a PhD in disappearing.
Behind him, sprawled along the van’s unlined metal floor, O’Shea shuddered and moaned, finally waking up. Boyle wasn’t worried. Or scared. Or even excited. In fact, it’d been weeks since he felt much of anything beyond the ache of his own regrets.
On the floor, with his arms still tied behind his back, O’Shea scootched on his knees, his chin, his elbows, slowly and sluggishly fighting to sit up. With each movement, his shoulder twitched and jumped. His hair was a sopping mess of rain and sweat. His once-white shirt was damp with dark red blood. Eventually writhing his way to a kneeling position, he was trying to look strong, but Boyle could see in the grayish coloring of his face that the pain was taking its toll. O’Shea blinked twice to get his bearings.
That’s when O’Shea heard the metallic click.
Crouching in the back of the van, Boyle leaned forward, pressed his pistol deep into O’Shea’s temple, and said the words that had been haunting him for the better part of a decade:
“Where the fuck’s my son?”
96
Can I help you?” a deep voice crackled from the intercom as the man pulled his car up to the closed wooden security gate.
Refusing to answer, the driver pulled his ID from his jacket pocket and shoved