The Book of Fate: Brad Metzler

This book follows the life of a president's aid, Wes Holloway. The aid blames himself for inviting another of the president's aids, and his best friend, into the car when the president was attending a Nascar race. The other friend, Ron Boyle is killed by an assassin at the event and Wes's face is permanently injured from a stray bullet. Wes lives the rest of his life with regret and blames himself for his friend's death. The assassination also ruins the president's chance at re-election. Eight years after the event, the former president is giving a speech in Asia when Wes goes back to the dressing rooms and finds a man he believes to be Ron Boyle, but with plastic surgery. Wes chases after him, but the man disappears. He files a report and is then questioned and followed by the FBI once he gets back to the states. Wes starts an investigation of his own and finds someone is using known code names to access files created during the time of their presidency. He then gets a call from Boyle telling him to back down, this isn't his fight and he is putting himself in danger. Wes then begins to realize the innocent crossword puzzles the president used to do actually have codes of meaning in them. The codes were old Mason symbols invented by Thomas Jefferson. Wes believes there was a team of 4 people that were selling intel to the government, they were then going to come up with some bogus info and ask an absorbiant fee so they could all retire on the fraud money. Wes and Boyle find out the 4th person was actually the president's wife. Boyle went into hiding faking his own death because the 3 other people in the plan were recruiting him and he feared for his family's lives. His death was able to keep everyone safe.