She’s never been prouder of her stepdaughter than she is right now, watching her bring young Willow down from high up in the oak tree in the early morning light. Bree had wanted to find a ladder somewhere in this big house and attached garage, but Jannie said, “Bree, there’s no time. Willow might slip and fall while we’re looking for it.”

  Bree holds her breath as Jannie gets closer, closer. Jannie slides down so her hands are grasping the lowest limb and says, “Okay, Willow, hang on tight, we’re gonna make a little drop. Keep your eyes closed.”

  Willow’s eyes are indeed closed. Jannie drops to the ground, Willow yelps, Bree and Nana Mama rush over, and there are hugs, kisses, and loving words. Bree kneels down and holds Willow by her thin shoulders.

  “Girl, what were you doing so high up in that tree?” Bree asks.

  Willow is both crying and laughing. “Daddy…Daddy always told me that if there were bad men, I should…I should climb up high. Daddy said I should go up high because…because the bad guys don’t look up most times.”

  With awe in her voice, Bree says, “You mean you opened up that bedroom window and crawled out onto that tree limb?”

  Willow sniffles and rubs her nose on her pajama sleeve. “Did I do right, Aunt Bree?”

  Bree hugs Willow so hard, she’s afraid she might bruise her. “Yes, Willow, you did right. Your daddy would be so proud of you.”

  Willow presses her face against Bree’s shoulder. “I want my daddy! I don’t want to be scared anymore. I want to go home!”

  Bree strokes her hair. “Me too, sweetie. Me too.”

  Chapter

  112

  After hearing Deacon say she destroyed that vital piece of evidence back in Afghanistan, I almost bring my pistol up and jam it into her abdomen again.

  Instead, I take a deep breath. “Elizabeth, why in the hell did you do that?”

  The traffic up ahead starts to slow, and Deacon curses and hits the brakes. She turns to me, angry. “What did you think, that I was going to go back to the States with that in my possession? Get swept and interrogated once I landed, have to explain why I had that piece of circuit board with that serial number in my belongings and announce where I found it?”

  “Who in hell was going to sweep you?”

  The traffic ahead starts moving.

  We don’t.

  She says, “Why do you think I’m just a consultant, John?”

  A horn behind us blares. She whispers an obscenity and resumes driving, weaving through the traffic.

  I recognize the way she’s driving. She’s trying to avoid any tails that might be back there. I say, “So you can do your work without being accountable.”

  “Partially true,” she says. “Being a consultant means never having to say you’re sorry. Which means I have a long, long leash to go where I have to go and ask the right questions. Problem is, certain people are watching me. This sickness and rot out there that’s causing all these attacks—don’t think the Company is immune. I couldn’t risk coming back with that kind of physical evidence.”

  “These people watching you,” I say, “does that include your ex-husband, General Gerrold Mason?”

  That gets her attention, and she looks at me long enough that there’s another honk of horns as she almost sideswipes a UPS delivery truck.

  I go on. “Currently a vice president of operational development at Global Security Services, correct? A worldwide defense organization that specializes in industrial security and espionage and high-tech military systems, including—”

  I stop.

  She looks at me. Nods.

  She slows the car as the traffic backs up again.

  I continue: “Including unmanned aerial vehicles and combat drones that can dominate a battlefield and destroy anything in their path. The serial number on that circuit board…”

  “I left the board behind in the ’Stan, John, but I memorized the serial number.”

  “And it matched a weapons system belonging to your ex-husband’s company.”

  Elizabeth nods. “Of course it did. Why do you think I picked you up?”

  “For muscle?”

  “Among other things,” she says. “We’re off for a visit to his office in Crystal City, and if this goddamn traffic lightens up, we should get there before everything here in DC goes to shit.”

  Chapter

  113

  General Wayne Grissom is in his spartan office at the Pentagon, today dressed in plain BDUs, waiting. The office is large with couches, bookcases, and photos of past JCS chairmen, but there’s not much in the way of personal possessions or souvenirs. In years past, climbing up the slippery ladder of command, he often saw officers who plastered the walls of their offices with Look at me! plaques, trophies, and photos.

  Not him—not now, not ever. It seems too silly, too presumptuous.

  There’s an untouched cup of coffee on his clean desk, brought in earlier by his assistant, Colonel Kendricks.

  He folds his hands in his lap, looks at his one personal photo. Of his son and his wife. Nathan and Janice at West Point on the day their son graduated, both smiling widely, arms around each other’s shoulders. Beautiful blond Janice, handsome and lean Nathan.

  A familiar ache starts in his chest.

  Their golden boy, Nathan, who was going places, who never gave up, never stopped, and who was blown to pieces by an IED on an unnamed dirt road outside a forgotten village in Afghanistan.

  His loving wife, Janice, who put up with his late hours, his tours, the many moves over his career, and who, on the one-year anniversary of Nathan’s death, when Grissom was at NATO headquarters in Brussels, drank a fifth of vodka, swallowed a fistful of Percocet, went to bed, and never woke up.

  He hears loud voices in his outer office, and his phone starts ringing, and he thinks, Is it coming? Is it now?

  Grissom slides open the right-hand desk drawer, revealing an army-issue SIG Sauer M17.

  Chapter

  114

  Deacon continues her fast driving, weaving back and forth, constantly looking in the rearview and side-view mirrors.

  I say, “So two years back, in Tajikistan, what were you saying to dear hubby?”

  “He wasn’t my dear hubby then,” she says. “He was my soon-to-be-divorced hubby, and I was telling him that he shouldn’t be working at Global Security Services. Even though they sponsored programming on NPR, they had the blood of innocents on their hands.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Lizzie, we all have blood on our hands. The only difference is that now I’ll be making ten times as much working for Global Security Services and I won’t have to wear this goddamn uniform.’ God, I hated when he called me Lizzie.”

  I say, “Any idea why that village was destroyed by his company?”

  “That, my friend, is what we’re going to find out,” she says as we cross over the Francis Case Memorial Bridge, which spans the Washington Channel. To the right I can barely make out the Jefferson Memorial.

  Deacon says, “My turn for questions.”

  “Go for it,” I say.

  “Why were you in Alex Cross’s house?”

  “Looking for evidence on who’s behind the shootings and bombings,” I say. “Before Alex was shot in front of police headquarters in DC, he told me that he had found something out about the randomness of the attacks.”

  “Which was?”

  “That they weren’t random,” I say. “He was going to tell me more, but then the shooting happened. And that’s why I was in his office. I found his notes. Now I know what he meant. The first attacks weren’t random. They were planned. And when the planners knew they weren’t going to get caught, they spread out the attacks’ techniques and locations.”

  “Go on,” she says.

  “The first one,” I say. “Sniper attack in downtown Columbus, Georgia. Six killed, fourteen wounded. Last April.”

  “I remember.”

  “Columbus is a short drive from Fort Benning. Where the U.S. Army sniper school is located. The second attack was also a sniper, in DC. Fourteen dead, thirty wounded. Within easy driving range of Marine Base Quantico, where the Marines’ sniper school is located.”

  “Could just be coincidence,” she says.

  I say, “The notes I found in Alex’s office go on. St. Louis, Missouri, and Kansas City, Missouri. Both car bombs in the downtown sections, both caused deaths, horrific injuries, and property damage. Elizabeth, both cities are within easy reach of Fort Leonard in Missouri.”

  Deacon keeps quiet.

  “That’s where army combat engineers are trained. Among other skills, they learn the ins and outs of all types of explosives.”

  We’ve finished crossing the Potomac River, and now we’re in Virginia.

  “Are you saying the army’s behind all of this?”

  “No,” I say. “The next attack after the ones in Missouri was the dirty bomb that fizzled out. Birmingham, Alabama.”

  “That near an army base?”

  Traffic is coming to a crawl as we leave I-395 and merge onto Route 1, which will bring us to Crystal City and the answers we’re so desperately seeking.

  I say, “No, Elizabeth. It’s near FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness in Anniston, Alabama. It’s part of Homeland Security’s weapons of mass destruction training center. And Alex dug deeper. The sniper and explosives schools…they all have students that come from Homeland Security.”

  Chapter

  115

  At the command post for the U.S. Secret Service’s Uniformed Division—which protects the buildings and grounds of the White House—Captain Jennifer Webster is grimly going through the schedule sheets for next week, knowing she’s going to have to ask her overworked officers to put in overtime yet again.

  As she looks at the schedule on her computer screen, she remembers that a few years ago, the Secret Service ranked last in job satisfaction among federal law enforcement agencies.

  Well, she thinks, it sure as hell hasn’t improved since then. Budget cuts, outdated equipment, poor leadership, and inadequate staffing make this a miserable place to work, despite the supposed glamour. If anything, the staffing has gotten worse. The GAO is currently conducting an audit of just how understaffed the Uniformed Division is and how much of the surveillance and protective equipment here is in serious need of replacing. Hell, nothing much has changed since she was a rookie officer and a guy had climbed the fence and actually entered the White House before he was brought down.

  That time, it was a nut with a knife. Next time, it could be someone with canisters of nerve gas.

  There’s a quiet knock on her open door and she looks up and nods. Lieutenant Jimmy Scopes comes in, looking concerned. “What’s up, Jimmy?” she asks, leaning back in her chair and stretching, for, like so many others, she’s working a double today.

  “Zone two and zone three alarms are offline again,” he says. “That means we don’t have—”

  “Yeah, yeah, Jimmy, I know. We don’t have the defense in depth that’s required around the West Wing.”

  “More bad news,” he says. “Protocol is to call in extra staff to beef up coverage, but people are dodging phone calls and texts. You can’t really blame them.”

  “No, you can’t,” she says, tired of it all, rubbing the back of her neck. “Okay, shift around as best you can, and let’s just hope that the Post and the Times don’t find out about it.”

  He offers her a warm smile. “When my uncle was serving in the Secret Service, he said the worst day of his career was when Secret Service was pulled from Treasury and given to Homeland Security. Things were never the same after that.”

  The captain goes back to her computer. “Preach it, brother.”

  “I do,” he says, turning to leave. “But nobody listens. Or cares.”

  Chapter

  116

  The door to General Wayne Grissom’s office flies open and a female captain he doesn’t know bursts into the room. His assistant, Colonel Kendricks, is right behind her, and her usually placid face is twisted in anger.

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but she pushed past me and—”

  Grissom holds up a hand. “All right, Colonel. All right, Captain, what’s going on?”

  The captain is slim with short black hair and a bad complexion; she’s wearing black-rimmed glasses and holding a sheaf of papers. She swallows hard and says, “General Grissom, I’m sorry, but I had to see you. It’s an emergency.”

  “And you are?” he asks, voice cold.

  “Captain Hillary Cardinal,” she says. “Defense Intelligence Agency, sir.”

  His voice is sharp when he says, “And you violated good order and discipline and jumped over your chain of command to come here?”

  “It’s important, General,” she says, stepping closer to his desk. “I drove over here as fast as I could from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. I mean, it’s only about a fifteen-minute drive, but I was afraid I might get pulled over for speeding, because I was really speeding, but once I finished our analysis, I—”

  “Our?” he says.

  She nods, takes a chair without being invited to. “Yes. I’ve got a cousin who works for the CIA and another one at the NSA, and last month, we were in Tessie’s hot tub, me and Paula, having some wine, and we started talking about the terrorist attacks and…”

  A hot tub, he thinks. A damn hot tub. “Go on.”

  She smiles, taps a finger on the papers she brought. The nail has been chewed down to the quick. “We were all working on finding the sourcing and funding for the attacks, and we realized that each of us just had a part of the problem. We should have gone to our respective supervisors, but we didn’t think there was enough time. Plus, the bureaucracy and paperwork and the permissions…well, we, um, sort of took it into our own hands. Sir.”

  Grissom says, “And what did you find out?”

  Another nod. “We realized the scope of our work, our individual investigations, was too narrow. All we knew was that the various groups were getting support, funding, and orders via pop-up sites on the dark web. The information was being transmitted on data packets using various VPNs, and the traces were gone before we could find them.”

  “But you did find something.”

  “Yes, sir, we did,” she says. “That’s what we meant by expanding the scope of our investigation. Instead of just relying on our own intelligence agencies, we took it a step further.”

  He feels a sense of horror at what he’s hearing. “You brought in foreign intelligence services?”

  “Not exactly, sir,” she says. “We knew that the Chinese, the Russians, the British, the Israelis, they all had to be doing similar investigations. We sent in a highly sophisticated phishing program called Pitbull—it’s called Pitbull because once this program snaps up the intelligence you’re looking for, it won’t let it go. We got bits of intelligence from those overseas agencies, then compared and contrasted it to what each of our agencies—the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA—had found, and we cracked it. We know where all of it—the funding and the operational orders to the groups and individuals to commence their attacks—comes from.”

  Grissom is speechless for a moment. “Then give it up, Captain Cardinal. Please.”

  Her face flushes. “At first we didn’t believe it, but it checked out. You see, sir, one thing that Congress doesn’t know is that each cabinet department has its own discretionary funds to spend at the request of that department’s secretary. Some departments have more funds than others, although all of this is kept quiet and close to the vest. But once we started going down the trail, it was reasonably easy to nail it down.”

  “Captain Cardinal, what did you find out? Now, if you please.”

  “Oh, yes, General, so sorry,” she says, licking her chapped lips. She takes a breath, taps the papers once again.

  “It’s the Department of Homeland Security,” she says. “We’ve been doing it to ourselves these past months.”

  Chapter

  117

  Sylvester is driving the bright red two-axle Mack integrated tow truck—big enough to haul a tractor-trailer and its load without breaking a sweat—northeast on I-395. As he approaches Washington, DC, traffic slows down, and he sees flashing lights.

  His passenger, Casey, says, “Problem?”

  Sylvester downshifts; the truck sighs and grumbles. “I don’t think so,” he says.

  “Good. I don’t have to tell you we’re on a tight schedule.”

  “We’ll be all right.”

  “Better be,” Casey says. “Maynard is depending on us.”

  Sylvester just shakes his head, slows down more, then comes to a halt. He’s been on the road with a quiet Casey for the past three hours. Between them is a folded copy of that day’s USA Today, a McDonald’s bag still holding two Egg McMuffin sandwiches, and a couple of other important items. There’s a fender bender up ahead involving a white Volvo and a dark blue Range Rover, and a Virginia State Police cruiser is pulled behind the two vehicles. A trooper is coming their way, holding up his hand.

  Casey says, “Looks like the poh-lice.”

  Sylvester says, “I got it, don’t worry.”

  “You’d better.”

  The trooper makes a rolling motion; Sylvester lowers his window. The trooper pulls himself up, looks in, and says, “Jesus, this is one big rig you got. When I was in college, I used to work for a repo company, and that truck was a Matchbox car compared to this.”

  “I’m sure,” Sylvester says.

  The trooper peers at the back of the rig and says, “Lots of chains you got there.”

  “We like to be prepared, sir.”