The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [138]
With a playful shoo of his hand, the President got rid of the nanny and the other staffers, closed the door to the dining room, and flicked off the lights.
“Dad, I got two new ones—and found the one where they’re plumbers.” Andrew beamed, flipping open his laptop and angling it so they could both see. With the push of a button, a black-and-white episode of The Three Stooges started playing onscreen.
As President, Wallace knew he could use the White House movie theater downstairs. But as a father, just as he’d done long before he won the election, there was nothing better than being hunched over some mac and cheese, watching the classics with his son.
Kuuk-kuuk-kuuk.
Someone knocked on the door.
Wallace turned, all set to unleash on his staff—until the door opened and he saw who was knocking.
“It’ll take only a second,” Dr. Palmiotti said.
The President shot him a look that would need ice later. Sliding inside, Palmiotti didn’t care.
“Sorry, Andrew—I’ll be fast,” the doctor added, trying to sound upbeat. “It’s about your haircut,” he told the President.
As Palmiotti leaned to whisper in his ear, Wallace knew lunch was over.
“I’m on this. I’m taking care of it. And I’m sorry,” Palmiotti whispered. “He’s gone. They found him dead. Slit wrists.”
Nodding as if he were hearing a baseball score, the President stared across the table at his eight-year-old son.
“Y’have to go now, don’t you?” the boy asked his father as Palmiotti left the room.
“You kidding?” the President asked, reaching for the laptop and hitting the play button himself. “What kinda dad misses mac and cheese with his boy?”
As the theme music began and Moe, Larry, and Curly jumped around onscreen, Wallace sat there in the semidark room, listening to his son laugh hysterically, while trying hard not to think about the dead friend he’d known since he was nearly the same age as his boy.
98
You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Dallas says.
“I’m coming,” I tell him. “It’s just—The caves?” I ask from the passenger seat. “They’re far.”
“They’re in Pennsylvania,” Dallas says, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. “We just cut through Maryland and the facility’s right there.”
I know where he’s talking about. In our downtown building, we house nearly one billion documents. There’re another 3.2 billion out in College Park, Maryland. And there’s overflow storage in places like Suitland, Maryland, whose building is the size of more than twenty football fields and houses over 6.4 billion documents. But since the most important issue—and biggest cost—surrounding document storage is room temperature, the Archives saves millions of dollars each year by using the natural cold of underground caves all across the country, from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, to Lenexa, Kansas, to, in the case of documents coming in from Ohio, the caves in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
“Can I ask you one last question?” I say, my eyes catching my own reflection in the windshield. “When you were back at the office… why’d you pick up my phone?”
“What?”
“Before. After we left the cemetery. You went back to the office; I was going back to see Nico. You said they called. You said you spoke to Mr. Harmon yourself,” I add, referring to the guy from Presidential Records who I called from the cemetery. “You said that while they didn’t find anything in Wallace’s old college records—”
“Which I said they wouldn’t.”
“—I was still right about one thing: Our Archives staff collects every document from every place Wallace ever visited, including elementary school, junior high, and… even the records from the hospital he was born at.”
“But do you understand what happened, Beecher? That hospital—sure, it’s great that they have the President’s birth records. But when Mr. Harmon started digging, he also found another file with Wallace’s name on it: for a broken finger that Wallace had treated in the emergency room twenty-six years ago. That means that emergency room—”
“—is the same emergency room they took Eightball to that night. I know. The barber told me they were