At the bottom is a circled handwritten notation: Pros are the source!

  True. But whose pros? Foreign? Domestic? Combination of both?

  Not random, he had said. Not random.

  But nothing in the papers on his desk suggests who the source was or why it wasn’t random.

  I think back to the day Alex was shot. He was carrying his briefcase when he was cut down. Was the evidence in there? And where is that briefcase now? In the evidence room at police headquarters or stolen by one of those taking part in these terrorist attacks?

  I know how Alex works. He’d have a nice, prepared report, but that nice work would be based on lots of earlier work and drafts and—

  I move my big left foot. Hit a wastebasket. Bend over and pull it out from underneath the desk. It’s filled with scribbled notes, printouts of Google maps, arrows and numbers and lines connecting names.

  I spread out on his desk the three most important crumpled sheets of paper.

  There it is.

  There it is.

  Chapter

  104

  To Jannie, Bree calmly says, “You’ve got your cell on you?”

  “Yes, Bree,” she says, voice slightly quavering.

  “Then dial 911 and tell the police a home invasion is under way at this address. Don’t explain, just speak clearly and slowly, then hang up.”

  Bree walks deliberately out of the living room to the bottom of the grand stairs. She calls, “Willow? Can you hear me, Willow?”

  She waits a minute or two and hears the quick trot-trot-trot of the girl’s seven-year-old feet on the upstairs floor. A pajamaed Willow appears at the top of the stairs. “Yes, Auntie Bree?”

  Bree says, “We’re going to play a little game. I want you to go into the bedroom you’re using, close and lock the door, then go in the bathroom and hide in the bathtub. Okay?”

  Willow looks confused. “What kind of game is this, Auntie Bree?”

  “Willow!” Bree snaps. “Just do it. Now.”

  Willow looks hurt, but she leaves, and Bree turns around and sees Jannie.

  “Bree, I can’t dial out,” Jannie says. “I keep getting a busy signal. I can’t get through.”

  Bree goes to her purse and pulls out her own iPhone. Yes, Jannie is right.

  Beep-beep-beep.

  Shit, Bree thinks, and she feels a deep thud of guilt at her own stupidity hit her chest. She could have had a car outside with Bluestone Group personnel in it, but this neighborhood being what it is, it would have meant a stream of calls to the local police about a suspicious-looking parked car. So she had turned down that offer, as well as Bluestone’s offer to have men inside the house. The Balantics were gracious hosts, but the place was full enough with the Cross family stuffed inside.

  Bree walks into the kitchen. Nana Mama is standing in front of the stove stirring something in a large black cast-iron pot. Bree goes up to her, turns off the stove.

  Nana Mama turns, surprised. She’s holding a wooden spoon in her hand. “Bree?”

  “There’s trouble out there,” she says. “Men are coming to attack us.”

  “How many?”

  “Don’t know,” she says. “We’ve tried calling the police but our calls are being blocked. Jannie, turn off all the lights,” she says to her stepdaughter. “Make sure the doors are locked. Then you and Nana Mama go upstairs to the main bathroom, lock the doors, and crawl into the bathtub.” She goes back to her purse, removes her nine-millimeter Glock. She has two spare magazines.

  Bree looks at her laptop. She suddenly sits down.

  She checks her connection to the Bluestone Group’s corporate cloud. The heavy-duty high-tech laptop from the Bluestone Group isn’t being jammed. She still has internet access.

  Make a Skype call to the local police? Or send an e-mail?

  And how long before someone can get here?

  Someone squeezes her shoulder. It’s Nana Mama, holding a large and shiny knife in her hand. “Jannie’s gone upstairs, child,” she says, her voice strong. “But I’m not leaving your side.”

  “Nana Mama, please.”

  The hand on her shoulder squeezes harder. “Bree, I went through things you can’t even imagine when Jim Crow ruled the land. I’m staying. We’ll get through this together. What are you going to do?”

  Bree’s fingers start flying across the keyboard. “Work smarter, not harder,” she says.

  Nana Mama smiles. “Make it faster, too, if there’s bad men out there.”

  Chapter

  105

  I stuff the folded sheets of evidence in my jacket pocket and slowly walk out of Alex’s home. It’s so empty and quiet.

  It’s not right. This home should be filled with laughter, arguments, voices from the TV, smells coming from the kitchen, Nana Mama’s firm voice cutting through everything.

  It’s not right.

  Time to make it right.

  I go out of the house and lock the door behind me, then cross the small yard to the sidewalk. It’s either late at night or early in the morning. Even with the streetlights and headlights of passing cars, I still feel like I’m in utter darkness.

  I walk to my stolen car. What now?

  I’ll go to the only person I trust at the moment, Ned Mahoney of the FBI. I’ll tell him what I’ve found, and things will start moving.

  If it isn’t too late.

  God, Billie, please don’t let us be too late.

  A dark blue Mercedes-Benz comes to a sudden halt next to me. I turn.

  The passenger door pops open.

  The driver is leaning over the fine leather seats pointing a pistol at me.

  “Get in, John,” Elizabeth Deacon says. “We don’t have much time.”

  Chapter

  106

  The man leading the squad is moving slowly and confidently in the woods behind the target house. The four of them have come to the edge of the woods where the finely manicured lawn begins, and he looks at the rear of the house, taking it all in. Usually ops like this require lots of planning and prep, but Maynard told him earlier that there was no time.

  “Just snatch the girl and let me know when she’s secured,” Maynard said. “Then we’ll tell John Sampson we have the little brat and if he wants to see her again, he’ll go sit on a park bench in Lafayette Square for twenty-four hours and do absolutely nothing. No phone calls, no messages, no visits. Then he’ll get her back.”

  “Alive?”

  Maynard said, “Don’t go putting words in my mouth. Get the job done.”

  Seems like a pretty straightforward task. The house is two stories high and has a small deck with sliding doors. At the rear there are three windows on the ground floor and four on the second.

  Strange. No lights are on, even though there were a few lights on just a couple of minutes ago when they drove by.

  Have the targets left?

  The other three operators are lined up by the trees, preparing.

  He starts to lower his night-vision goggles when it all goes wrong all at once.

  Willow doesn’t like being in the tub, doesn’t like being alone, doesn’t like Aunt Bree snapping at her, and she misses her dad. She gets out of the tub, unlocks the door, and goes into the bedroom. The only nice part about this whole thing is that she has this room to herself and doesn’t have to share it with her cousin Ali, who stays up late playing with his iPhone and giggling and farting like a boy.

  She hears Aunt Bree and Nana Mama talking seriously downstairs, and they sound scared.

  If they’re scared, then so is she.

  A shadow comes across the window.

  The squad leader hears the chiming, the music, the voices, and he realizes that all the cell phones in this little squad are announcing incoming calls, even though their phones were powered off an hour ago!

  What the hell?

  He pulls his cell out of his back pocket to see what in the world is going on. He has an incoming text:

  Dear trespassers:

  You four are currently being targeted by infrared lasers centered on your foreheads. Due to their unique frequency shifting, the lasers will remain invisible no matter what gear you possess.

  Sounds high-tech, but if you think I’m bluffing, recall how all four of your cell phones were activated remotely.

  You have fifteen seconds to reverse course and depart. If you don’t, your brains and fragments of your skulls will be scattered all over this backyard. Restore our communications and go.

  He waits, heart racing, and then he lifts his right arm and makes the retreat motion, and the four of them go back into the woods.

  Bree looks at her laptop screen with deep satisfaction at how she successfully negotiated with the Bluestone Group operations center. After some serious give-and-take, they released a classified stealth drone that had been doing contract work for Homeland Security.

  The drone easily located the four gunmen moving through the woods, and through additional help from her employer’s operations center, she managed to trigger their four cell phones and pass on her text message.

  She watches the four men retreat, the drone keeping pace with them, their thermal images visible through the trees and foliage.

  The part about special infrared spotting lasers is so much bullshit, but it seems to be working. Well done, she thinks, a thought she carries for only a few seconds.

  “Bree?” Jannie’s voice is trembling. “Willow is gone.”

  Chapter

  107

  I stare at Elizabeth Deacon, frozen with shock. She waves her pistol at me.

  “In,” she says. “Now. We’ve got to get going.”

  A lot of thoughts are racing through my mind, but now is the time for action, not for standing speechless on a sidewalk. And I won’t waste time asking her how she found me.

  Finding people is her job.

  I open the door wider, get in, and as I sit down and shut the door, I slip out my Glock. I turn and press it against her abdomen. “If you remember your training, Liz, this is what’s called a Mexican standoff,” I say. “Not particularly PC, but it is what it is.”

  “I guess so,” she says, still pointing her pistol at me. “What now?”

  “You put yours away, and I’ll do the same.”

  “Why should I go first?” she says, pistol not moving.

  “Because you started it,” I say.

  We stare at each other, then she lowers her pistol to her side.

  I lower mine too.

  She puts the Mercedes in drive, and we get on the road.

  We travel in silence for a few minutes. I decide to work my way through my list of questions and start with “You left me behind in Tajikistan. Why?”

  Deacon says, “No, I didn’t.”

  “You weren’t at the base when I got there.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “But there was still transportation waiting for you.”

  “But you weren’t there,” I say. “What was the rush?”

  She turns right onto Virginia Avenue. The horizon to the east begins to turn gray as a new day approaches.

  Deacon says, “I had to make a decision. I had to get back to the States as fast as I could, and no offense, John, but half a dozen attackers were gunning for you. The odds weren’t in your favor. At least I made sure you had a ride back if you survived.” She accelerates as we approach an on-ramp to I-695 West. “You could say thanks, you know.”

  “Maybe later,” I say. “What now?”

  “Now?” she asks. “Now we’re off to meet a traitor.”

  Chapter

  108

  Bree gets up from her laptop and goes up the stairs; Jannie and Nana Mama follow.

  “Willow!” Bree calls. “Are you hiding up here?” She walks into Willow’s room, and Jannie and Nana Mama go down the hall to check the other bedrooms. Bree sees Willow’s toys, knapsack, and stuffed animals, but no Willow. She enters the bathroom.

  Empty.

  “Willow! This isn’t funny!”

  Nana Mama and Jannie return. “We checked all the rooms and the closets. She’s not there,” Jannie says, her eyes red.

  Bree gets on her knees, looks under the bed. Nothing.

  She stands up, feels a draft.

  From the window.

  The window is partially open. “We must have missed another operator,” she says, thinking, Damn it, you were so focused on those four gunmen by the trees that you overlooked the rest of the scene. “Jannie, if the phones are working, dial 911 and report a kidnapping.”

  Nana Mama still has the knife in her hand. “Let’s go outside, Bree. They might not have gotten far. That little girl will be putting up one hell of a fight.”

  Bree runs down the stairs, taking them two at a time. She doesn’t want to shatter Nana Mama’s illusions, but she knows that it doesn’t matter to kidnappers how young or strong their victim is. They know how to snatch a person and go.

  But still…

  With her pistol in her hand, she tears through the living room and the spacious kitchen. She stops at the door leading to the rear yard. There’s a row of light switches, and she palms them on all at once, and the yard lights up like it’s high noon.

  Bree opens the door with one hand, the other one holding her Glock. In her fear and desperation, she thinks of only one thing: John, oh, John, you trusted me with your daughter and I screwed up. Big-time. The bad guys got her and I don’t know what to do next.

  She steps outside. Nana Mama follows her and yells, “Willow! Are you out here, girl?”

  Bree bites her tongue, wanting to tell Nana Mama to stop wasting her breath, then hears someone saying…something. What the hell?

  “A pie. I’m a pie.”

  Jannie comes out, carrying a flashlight. “I’ve called the cops. They’re on their way.”

  “Listen,” Bree says. “I think I heard something.”

  The voice comes again: “A pie.”

  Nana Mama says, “Up that tree. Jannie, shine that light up the tree.”

  Bree tilts her head and follows the flashlight beam as it goes higher and higher. It stops at a large branch that brushes the house.

  Lighting up seven-year-old Willow Sampson.

  The girl calls out again, her voice frightened, and now Bree understands what she’s saying: “I’m up high. I’m up high!”

  Bree nearly sobs with relief. “You sure are, hon, you sure are! Hold on, we’ll come up and get you.”

  Chapter

  109

  The alarm on his clock radio is set for six a.m., but as usual, Maynard gets up a couple of minutes beforehand. A habit he picked up in the NYPD and a habit that’s saved his life at least twice when he got up before armed operators broke into his place to kill him.

  He dresses and emerges from the guest bedroom of this house they’ve been using for the past two weeks as an operational base. He smells coffee and meets up with Willis, a sweet-looking woman who was with the Army Rangers before she joined the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and applied her killing talents overseas.

  She’s dressed as a U.S. Park Police officer, and she hands over a coffee mug that says WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA and walks out the open sliding glass door to the rear deck.

  Maynard follows her and takes a sip of the coffee, and she says, “Gorgeous morning.”

  It is a gorgeous morning. This Virginia estate that’s owned by a mortgage company has a large rear lawn, where mist is shrouding a grove of trees. Maynard sees movement, and then three deer cross the distant yard.

  Not a bad start to the day, even though he’s now seen the text messages informing him that the mission to snatch John Sampson’s girl didn’t succeed last night. Which is fine, he thinks, because on a battlefield you never get a 100 percent success rate. You just strive to do so all the time.

  “Certainly is,” Maynard says, but he’s distracted, thinking that at this moment, scores of vehicles—Amazon delivery vans, UPS and FedEx trucks, unmarked white vans—are on the move, closing in on the District of Columbia, ready to use this beautiful day to make history.

  “You know your history?” Willis asks.

  “Of course,” Maynard says.

  She says, “Remember what Ben Franklin said when the Constitutional Convention was winding down in Philadelphia?”

  “Sure,” Maynard says. “A woman came up to him and said, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’”

  Willis finishes the quote. “‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ Franklin told her. What do you think the good doctor would have said about what’s going to happen today?”

  Maynard sips his coffee. “Probably ‘Nothing lasts forever.’”

  Chapter

  110

  Deacon drives expertly through the busy lanes of traffic on I-695. I keep my pistol in my lap, still not trusting her.

  “Do you have that circuit board with the serial number I gave you?” I ask.

  Deacon makes an abrupt lane change; horns blare behind us.

  “Elizabeth? Do you still have it?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Where is it? At Langley, being analyzed and traced?”

  “No,” she says, going even faster.

  “Where is it, then?” I ask, losing my patience with her.

  She gives me a glance. “It’s back in Afghanistan. In pieces.”

  I stare at her in disbelief.

  “I destroyed it, John.”

  Chapter

  111

  Bree holds her breath as Jannie climbs down the oak tree with Willow’s arms around her neck. Nana Mama is standing next to Bree and she realizes they have been holding each other’s hands in fear.