The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [134]
“Will you stop? There is no mission!” I explode, slapping his hand from my shoulder. “There’s no test! There’s no trials! There’s no George Washington—and stop calling me Benedict Arnold! All that matters is this! This, right here,” I hiss, pointing back at the body of the barber. “I know you and she… you caused this! I saw the sign-in sheet! I saw Clementine’s name! And if it’d help you get out of here, I know you’d do anything, including making your daughter blackmail the Pr—!”
“What’d you call her?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know she’s your daughter,” I challenge.
He takes a half-step back and stands perfectly still. “She told me she was a graduate student. But students… students don’t come to see me. That’s how I knew,” Nico admits, blinking over and over and suddenly looking… he actually looks concerned. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it just as fast. He’s fitting his own pieces together. But as his eyes stop blinking and the concern on his face slowly turns to pain, I can’t help but think that I have it wrong. Maybe this isn’t the father-daughter operation I just thought it was.
“When I fed the cats, Clementine used to—I saw her one Wednesday. When the barber was cutting hair,” Nico blurts. “She helped him. She told the barber Griffin’s hair looks better when it’s long in front. He listened. It made her smile more.”
On my right, across the field, the security guard is less than fifty yards away. On my left, down by the front gate, the guardhouse’s white-and-orange-striped gate arm rises in the air. A black car pulls up the service road. Someone’s just arrived.
“It made me smile more too,” Nico adds, barely noticing. “But she heard the barber, didn’t she? She heard his confession.”
“Nico, you need to get away from here,” I tell him as the guard picks up his pace, coming right at us.
“She did this… she caused this, didn’t she?” Nico says, motioning to the barber.
On the service road, the black car picks up speed.
“The doctors here… they say I have a sickness,” Nico says. “That’s what put the evil in my body—the sickness did. And so I prayed—I begged God—I begged God since the first day she came to visit… I worried she had it too.”
“Nico, get out of here,” I insist, tempted to jump in the car and take off. But I don’t. The barber’s dead—I can’t take him with me. But if I stay and try to explain, there’s only one place I’m going if they find me with Nico and a bloodied corpse.
“All these years, I knew my fate. I always knew what God chose me for,” Nico adds. “But when Clementine came… when she reached out to me like that… I thought I finally got—I was lucky. Do you know what that means, Benjamin? To be a lucky man?” he asks, his voice cracking.
“Nico, please get out of here,” I beg, grabbing my phone from the front seat.
The black car knifes to the left, heading straight for our parking lot.
The security guard is now running.
“But there is no luck, is there, God?” he asks, talking to the sky. “I knew that! I knew it all along! But when I met her… when I saw her… how could I not hope? How could I not think that I’d finally been blessed—the truest blessing—that despite the sickness inside myself, that You made her different than me.” He stares up at the sky, his eyes swollen with tears. “I begged You, God! I begged You to make her different than me!”
“Nico, back to your building! Now!” the security guard shouts in the distance.
Behind me, the black car speeds up the service road, its engine roaring.
“You! Away from Nico!” the guard yells at me.
There’s a loud screech. The black car skids into the parking lot, punting bits of frozen gravel at us. But it’s not until the passenger door bursts open that I finally see who’s driving.
“Get in! Hurry!” Dallas shouts from behind the steering wheel.
“Nico, don’t you move!” the guard yells as he reaches the parking lot. That’s still his priority.
“Nico, I’ll see you next week!” I call out, trying to make it all sound normal as I dart to the black car, which is already pulling away.
As I