More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Envision someone else, someone better than you. Stronger. Smarter. Tougher. Then do what that guy would do.
Evan knew where the bodies were buried; he’d put them in the ground.
Even if a hail of bullets shredded the puncture-resistant, run-flat, Kevlar-reinforced tires, the limo could still drive away on the steel rims beneath. The limo was designed to take a direct hit from a bazooka. Evan had a Dr Pepper Big Gulp.
He paused to slurp another oyster and took a sip of mint tea. It was a civilized way to conduct an assassination.
Before summoning his next meeting, Bennett took a deep breath and exhaled. The more lines he crossed, he’d discovered, the more he found necessary to cross. But this one in particular merited a respectful pause. Once you unleashed hell, it was goddamned hard getting it back on the leash again.
He thought about Mia and Peter, a single mother and a fatherless boy, and how if he were a better man with a better past, his missing pieces might fit with theirs.
He thought about a third-grader named Zeke getting pulled out of school by a social worker. What had the first few days of being orphaned been like for him? Was he racked with gut-searing grief? Or was he still lost in the concussive aftermath of shock, his mind mercifully holding reality at bay, letting it seep in a drop at a time? This would become his story now: When I was eight, my parents were murdered.
And after the promise he’d made to Trevon, he couldn’t get killed in D.C. That wouldn’t just be inconvenient. It would be inconsiderate.
The speed and deftness of the cover-up was particularly impressive—amazing what got done behind the scenes when the commander-in-chief was tugging the marionette strings. People who said the government was inefficient didn’t know the right parts of the government. The media was having a field day with the incident, calling it Watergate-gate.
“I’m not very good at this, am I?” “No. But you’re so bad that it actually makes you good.” “Pity factor?” “No,” she said. “More like shock-and-awe charm.”
And now this arctic freeze, the two of them riding ice floes drifting slowly apart. Was this the flip side of intimacy? You get closer and closer until you can no longer discern each other?
