3

Sam walked slowly with the flow of foot traffic, lost in her thoughts. A cold drizzle settled over the city and she hunched her shoulders against the chill, but she kept moving. She had no destination. She was propelled only by a desire not to stop, as if stopping would allow everything to catch up with her again and crush her beneath its weight.

At some point, she became aware of her intention to walk to her meeting with Evan Kent, the director of Homeland Security. Kent was three or four levels above her in the gargantuan bureaucracy, and an entire world away in terms of his priorities. He was a political animal. Sam was an operator who caught spies. The animosity and mistrust was deep and endemic.

Meetings with the director were rarely routine, and this one promised to be especially inauspicious. He would place her on administrative leave, of course, pending the outcome of the formal investigation into the events of the preceding week, up to and including the death of Sarah Beth McCulley, five-year-old daughter of Frank McCulley, longtime chief of staff to Senator Oren Stanley.

Sam thought of resigning her position as the chief of the counterespionage branch, but she knew Kent would never have it. He would reserve the right to discipline her publicly, for the sake of the department, and he could only do that if she remained on the payroll. She might still offer her resignation, not because it might prove a properly politic gesture under the circumstances, but because she genuinely wondered whether she remained fit for duty in the aftermath of the girl’s death.

She had, without a doubt, misread the circumstances. As Agent in Charge, it had been her call to make, and she had followed her gut. She’d turned the details over and over in her mind a thousand times since the incident, looked at the circumstances from every angle she could imagine, but she still couldn’t convince herself that she’d have chosen any differently if she had it to do all over again.

Which was why she wondered if she could ever be trusted again.

Her instincts had rarely been wrong over her relatively long and reasonably distinguished career. She’d won more battles than she lost, caught far more spies and traitors and hit men than she’d let slip through her fingers, but her luck had clearly run out.

She had made mistakes before, sometimes lethal ones. It went with the territory. Sometimes she lost sleep and sometimes not. But nothing like this. This was a disaster. It had turned her life upside down in the blink of an eye. And it had destroyed the life of a beautiful little girl whose father worked for a powerful US senator. Being responsible for someone’s death was no picnic, but Sarah Beth McCulley’s death had amounted to a personal apocalypse.

Sam waited at a crosswalk for the light to change, her mind numb with exhaustion and grief. Her eyes rested on a short, chubby man in an ill-fitting suit across the street. His extra-large jacket fell at unusual angles in certain places and his gaze lingered on her for a moment before resuming his rendition of the ubiquitous DC scowl. At first Sam didn’t notice these things because she wasn’t thinking operationally, which was a clear violation of her favorite survival rule: always think operationally. But her instincts took over and it became clear to her a moment later: the man was carrying a concealed weapon, and he was watching her. The hairs on the back of her neck rose, but the light changed, the man walked on, and Sam’s mind resumed its self-flagellation.

She trudged south and east, navigating subconsciously while her mind and gut gnawed on each other, lost in her own fog. Homeland was not a small place, full as it was of roughly a billion bureaucrats to Sam’s reckoning, but she was surprised to look up at some point and find herself at its massive front door. She had evidently not taken conscious notice as the city blocks disappeared under her feet.

A surge of adrenaline hit her veins. Time to face the Man.

She opened the door to the lobby and was met by a mass of humanity queued up in front of some sort of scanner, waiting for their daily dose of dehumanization. She looked at her watch and cursed. She was going to be late. “What the hell is going on?” she muttered under her breath. It was shift change, but Sam had never seen so many people in the DHS lobby at six in the evening.

“New scanner,” someone replied to Sam’s mumbled question. “Picks up unauthorized electronics. Supposed to stop cyber-attacks.”

“Jesus H,” Sam huffed. Undoubtedly part of the knee-jerk response to the previous year’s economic terrorism incident. The government never learned, and they’d spent trillions closing the barn door in the twelve months since the horse left.

Sam pulled out her cell phone and called Director Kent’s office with her apologies. The secretary was sympathetic and sweet, which was out of character. She knows I’m about to be slaughtered, Sam thought with a grimace.

She noticed a voicemail from Brock and her heart leapt. She listened to his message. Air Force Colonel Brock James, keeper of her flame and her live-in consort of four amazing years, was stuck halfway around the globe helping Uncle Sam double down on all the ill-advised oil bets.

She hadn’t seen him for three months. Their all-too-brief conversations had grown strained. He was damn near superhuman, but the strain of loving someone in her line of work was starting to show. He was tired of wondering whether she would survive her next investigation and tired of playing second-fiddle to her insane work schedule.

They had talked about marriage, maybe even kids, though Sam thought they were both a little long in the tooth. She had been pondering a career change for quite some time—years, in fact, but for some reason she just couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Her job at Homeland filled some need of hers that she couldn’t readily identify, and she had a hard time getting Brock to understand. His tone on the subject had become angrier and more strident over the course of his most recent deployment to the Middle East, so they now avoided the subject in what amounted to an uneasy and unspoken truce.

Sam melted a little at the sound of Brock’s voice, but she couldn’t make out many of the words over the hisses, pops, and clicks in the message. She didn’t know where he was exactly, but it sounded like a perfect hellhole.

Her eyes moistened. A hug would do wonders, she thought, but it was evidently too much to ask of the federal government. Brock’s emergency leave request had been denied. He was stuck in some godforsaken desert somewhere full of goats and extremists, foreign and domestic, which left her to deal with the fallout from Sarah Beth McCulley’s death by herself.

Sam’s turn at the scanner came. She tossed her cell phone, badge, and keys into the tray, placed her coat and shoes on the conveyor belt, and did her best not to scowl at the lumpy security guard as he waved her forward.

A buzzer sounded.

“Ma’am, do you happen to be carrying any unauthorized electronics on you? Music player, non-government cell phone, beeper, garage door opener?”

Sam shook her head.

“Do you have any unauthorized electronics in your personal effects?”

“If so, it’s news to me,” Sam said, glancing toward a growing crowd of technicians huddled around the conveyor belt beyond the scanner, all of whom seemed enthralled by her raincoat.

“Are you sure, ma’am?”

“Is your question rhetorical?”

The guard’s tone became decidedly officious. “This way, ma’am.” He motioned for her to step out of line.

“I don’t have time for this,” Sam muttered.

A technician left the scrum of security people huddled around Sam’s coat and approached her. He held up his thumb and forefinger, displaying a small object clasped between them. “Do you recognize this?”

Sam squinted at his hand. “I’m no expert, but it appears to be a fabric button.”

“This object tripped our unauthorized electronics scan,” the security guard said.

“Congratulations. I’m sure we’re all much safer now,” Sam said.

“It was in your coat pocket, ma’am.”

“I don’t recognize it.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to confiscate the item, ma’am.”

“Knock yourself out.”

“I’ll have to ask you for some information as well.”

“Are you sure your new scanner isn’t malfunctioning?” she asked.

She could tell by the look on the security guard’s face that he wasn’t sure about the new machine, but he was duty-bound to follow procedure. Sam sighed and played along. Nearly two decades in federal service had taught her that some things couldn’t be fought.

The guard wanted her name, address, duty title, supervisor, office phone, personal phone, whereabouts during the last twenty-four hours . . . Sam felt like she was applying for a mortgage or taking a lie-detector test.

Thirty minutes later, her heart rate not yet recovered, she walked into Homeland Security Director Evan Kent’s office. It was a familiar place, as Sam had been there before. Once, in fact, a lengthy and deadly investigation had culminated in a tense showdown in the director’s office. She had apprehended the traitor and criminal at gunpoint. He was tried, convicted, and executed, but not by a jury of his peers. The man was handed over to the Central Intelligence Agency, who took care of things on their own terms.

The furniture had been replaced and the carpet redone, but the view of the DC skyline was as impressive as she remembered. The office was even larger than she recollected. Evan Kent rose from his desk, extended his hand, and put a sad smile on his face. He was tall, gaunt, hunched, gray, and wrinkled. “Thank you for coming, Sam,” he said, his voice low and gravelly from years of DC schmoozing over cigarettes and scotch.

Sam nodded but didn’t speak. What was there to say?

Kent gestured toward a sitting area situated between his desk and a large conference table. Four chairs upholstered in soft blue leather surrounded a low coffee table. Sam sat in the nearest chair and crossed her legs in front of her. She still wore her funeral attire. The drizzle had pasted her hair to her head. The tears had smeared her makeup even though it was supposed to be waterproof. She imagined she looked like hell, but she wasn’t in any mood to fuss over her appearance for Evan Kent’s sake.

Kent took the adjacent chair. Right out of the management handbook. Don’t deliver bad news across a table. Position yourself on a diagonal to the victim to reduce the odds of a confrontation. He got right to business. “It was admirable of you to attend Sarah Beth McCulley’s memorial,” he said.

Admirable? Sam didn’t know what to make of that comment. What else would anyone in her shoes have done? In what universe would it have been okay to miss the girl’s funeral?

Her confusion must have been evident. “I just mean that it must have been…uncomfortable for you,” Kent said. “Under the circumstances, I mean.”

Sam eyed him for a long moment. Was he goading her? Or was he just socially inept? “It wasn’t pleasant,” she said, working to keep the annoyance out of her voice.

Kent’s eyes were intense and blue, but shrouded behind an unruly brow. “Nobody is here to second-guess you,” he said.

A weary smile crossed Sam’s lips. “Mr. Kent,” she said, “there’s no need to patronize me. I’ve been in this business a long time and I know how this works.”

Kent sized her up. If he was embarrassed to have been caught in a lie, his features didn’t show it in the least. “In that case,” he said, “we should just get right to it.”

Kent nodded to someone standing behind Sam. She hadn’t heard anyone else enter the office, so she was surprised to see Homeland’s chief legal counsel, Hamilton Essex, appear from behind her shoulder. Essex handed her a glossy blue file folder with the Homeland logo emblazoned on its cover. He also handed her a Montblanc pen. Nice touch, douchebag, she thought.

Sam signed the suspension paperwork without reading it. She dropped it on the coffee table along with the lawyer’s overpriced pen and rose to her feet.

“Don’t you want a copy?” Essex asked.

Sam shook her head. “Drop one in the mail.”

“As of now you are on unpaid administrative leave,” Essex said. His voice had a grating, condescending quality that made Sam fantasize about breaking his nose.

“So I gathered,” Sam said.

Essex was unfazed. “Please exit the facility without delay,” he went on. “You’ll be summoned for questioning in the matter under investigation. Please make yourself available, but do not return to the premises until asked to do so. Please don’t leave the district until you’ve been cleared to do so. Do you have any questions at this time?”

Sam shook her head. She didn’t look at the lawyer. Instead, she looked at Evan Kent. The director kept his seat and held her gaze.

“Anything else?” Sam asked.

Kent shook his head and raised an arm toward the exit.

Sam held herself together all the way to the women’s room on the executive floor. There, she locked herself in a stall, buried her face in her hands, and cried.