57

Amherst, Massachusetts

One day past Halloween and the decorations still reigned in the shops and houses surrounding Amherst West Cemetery: wiggly white skeletons, cotton cobwebs, black plastic spiders, gigantic blow-up lawn ornaments in the shape of ghosts and witches. Clancy Johnson was raised in the wide, flat bowl of Wyoming. He’d already grown tired of Massachusetts without the added ornamentation.

It almost felt like claustrophobia, what he was experiencing. The buildings were too close to each other, the trees crowding for attention like five-year-olds at show and tell. It didn’t help that he had a twitchy feeling he was out of the loop on this one. One of his three phones buzzed. It wasn’t the one his wife and kids called him on, which he kept in his breast pocket. The vibration also wasn’t coming from the Android taken from the women killed in Minneapolis, sent to Clancy via the Hermitage. It was coming from his work phone, which he kept looped on his belt. He tugged it out of his pocket.

“Clancy Johnson.”

The instructions were clear, terse, and set Clancy back on his ass as hot as a punch. “Tell me again,” he said. It was a reflex, a way to buy time while he figured this out. The instructions were even more succinct the second time.

He hung up without a good-bye and whistled, low and surprised. “You still got eyes on Odegaard and Wiley?”

Stone had the binoculars firm to his eyes. “Yup.”

“Good. Cuz I just received a phone call from the SAC saying we have to take them in. They’re wanted for conspiring to assassinate Senator Gina Hayes.”