Brad Meltzer - The Inner Circle

“Eff. You! ” she explodes, spinning hard and sending Khazei off balance, lost in his own momentum. Before he realizes what’s happened, Clementine twists to the left and grabs the antenna of his walkie-talkie, yanking it from his belt and wielding it upside down, like a miniature baseball bat. It’s not much of a weapon. It’ll probably shatter on impact. But the way she’s gripping it-the way she’s eyeing his face-it’s gonna leave a hell of a scar.

I rush forward, trying to leap between them.

“What in the holy hell you think you’re doing?” a voice calls out behind us.

I spin around just as he turns the corner. Clementine lowers the walkie-talkie to her side. He’s far down the hallway, but there’s no mistaking the wispy white beard… the bolo tie… the one man who’s been here longer than me and Khazei combined.

“Y’heard me,” Tot says, honing in on me and readjusting the thick file he’s got tucked under his arm. “Y’know how long I’ve been waiting, Beecher? You missed our meeting. Where the heck you been?”

I know it’s an act. But I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.

“I… I…” I glance over at Khazei.

“He’s been talking with me,” Khazei says, his voice serene, making peace rather than war. He’s definitely smarter than I thought. Khazei’s been here a few years. Tot’s outlasted eleven Presidents and every Archivist of the United States since LBJ. It’s the first rule of office politics: Never pick a fight you can’t win.

“So no problem then? They’re free to go?” Tot challenges, lumping in Clementine and leaning in so Khazei gets a good look at his milky blind eye. “I mean, I thought I heard yelling, but I’m old and creaky,” he adds. “Maybe I was just imagining it, eh?”

Khazei studies the old man. I can feel the anger rising off him. But as the two men share a far too long, far too intense look, I can’t help but think that there’s something else that’s going unsaid in their little standoff.

Khazei puffs out his chest, all set to explode, and then…

He shakes his head, annoyed. “Just get them out of my face,” he blurts, turning back to his office.

As Tot continues to hit him with the evil eye, I can’t tell if I’ve underestimated the power of seniority, or the power of Tot. But either way, we’re free to go.

“Clementine…” Tot calls out, pretending to know her.

“Yeah.”

“Give the man his walkie-talkie back.”

She hands it to Khazei. “Sorry. That’s not who I usually am.”

To my surprise, Khazei doesn’t say a thing. He grabs the walkie, slotting it back into his belt.

I go to step around him, and he stabs me with a final dark glare. “I saw you sitting at Orlando’s desk,” he says. “Got something needling at your conscience?”

“Why should I? Everyone’s saying it was a heart attack,” I shoot back. “Unless you suddenly know something different.”

“I know you were in that SCIF with him, Beecher. It’s just a matter of time until that video proves it, and when that happens, guess who everyone’ll be looking at?”

I tell myself that if it all comes out, I can point a finger at the President-but that’s when Orlando’s words replay louder than ever. No matter who you are or how right you are, no one walks away the same way from that battle.

“Beecher, if you help me with this, I promise you-I can help you .”

It almost sounds like he’s doing me a favor. But there’s still plenty of threat in his voice. Before I take him up on anything, I need to know what’s really going on.

“You want help? You should talk to Rina,” I tell him. “Y’know she called Orlando ten times on the morning he died?”

He barely moves, once again making me wonder what he’s really chasing: Orlando’s killer, or the George Washington book?

Without a word, he turns back to his office. I race to catch up to Tot and Clementine, reaching them just as they turn the corner. Before I can say anything, Tot shoots me a look to stay quiet, then motions down to the real reason he came looking for me: the thick accordion file that’s tucked under his arm. The flap says:

Gyrich, Dustin

The man who’s been checking out documents for over a hundred and fifty years.

"How’s my car?” Tot asks.

“How’d you get Khazei to back down like that?” I challenge.

“How’s my car?”

“Tot…”

He refuses to turn around, shuffling as he leads us past dusty bookshelf after dusty bookshelf on the eighteenth floor of the stacks. He’s not fast, but he knows where he’s going. And right now, as the automatic lights flick on as we pass, he’s got me and Clementine following. “Khazei doesn’t want a fight,” he explains. “He wants what you found in the SCIF.”

“I agree, but… how do you know?”

“Why didn’t he push back? If Orlando’s death is really his top concern, why hasn’t Khazei thrown you to the FBI, who’re really in charge of this investigation… or even to the Secret Service, who by the way, have been picking apart the SCIF all morning and afternoon? You’ve got every acronym working quietly on this case, but for some reason, Khazei’s not handing over the best pieces of dynamite, namely the two of you,” Tot says as another spotlight flicks on. I search the corner of the ceiling. The stacks of the Archives are too vast to have cameras in every aisle. But near as I can tell, Tot has us weaving so perfectly, we haven’t passed a single one. “Now tell me how my car is,” he says.

“Your car’s nice,” Clementine offers, still trying to make up for the rage parade she just put on. “I’m Clementine, by the way.”

For the second time, Tot doesn’t look back. He doesn’t answer either.

He wants nothing to do with Clementine. As he said this morning, he doesn’t know her, doesn’t trust her. But once she got grabbed by Khazei, he also knows he can’t just chuck her aside. For better or worse, she was in that SCIF-she was there with Orlando-and that means her butt’s in just as much of the fire as mine.

“Your car’s fine,” I add as we make a final sharp left. “Clemmi, this is Tot.”

A spotlight blinks awake, and I’m hit with a blast of cold air from a nearby eye-level vent. Our documents are so fragile, the only way to preserve them is to keep the temperature dry and cool. That means intense air conditioning.

Tot hits the brakes at a wall of bookcases that’re packed tight with dusty green archival boxes. At waist height, the bookcase is empty, except for a narrow wooden table that’s tucked where the shelves should be. Years ago, the archivists actually had their offices in these dungeony stacks. Today, we all have cubicles. But that doesn’t mean Tot didn’t save a few private places for himself.

The spines of the boxes tell me we’re in navy deck logs and muster rolls from the mid-1800s. But as Tot tosses the fat file folder on the desk, and a mushroom cloud of dust swirls upward, I know we’re gonna be far more focused on…

“Dustin Gyrich,” Tot announces.

“That’s the guy you think did this, right?” Clementine asks. “The guy who’s been checking out books for a hundred and fifty years. How’s that even possible?”

“It’s not,” Tot says coldly. “That’s why we’re up here whispering about it.”

“So every time President Wallace comes here on his reading visits,” I add, “this man Gyrich requests a copy of Entick’s Dictionary …”

“Just odd, right?” Tot asks. “I started sifting through the older pull slips… seeing how far back it went. The more pull slips I looked at, the more requests from Dustin Gyrich I found: from this administration, to the one before, and before… There were eleven requests during Obama’s administration… three during George W. Bush’s… five more during Clinton’s and the previous Bush. And then I just started digging from there: Reagan, Carter, all the way back to LBJ… throughout the term of every President-except, oddly, Nixon-Dustin Gyrich came in and requested this dictionary. But the real break came when I tried to figure out if there were any other books that were pulled for him.”