WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 8:17 P.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
When Rena and Brooks left the Four Seasons hotel five hours ago, there was a message to call Hallie Jobe.
Walt Smolonsky, she said, had just called from the Netherlands. That’s where he had finally found one of the five men who had been working communications in the Barracks the night of the Oosay attack.
It had been a long journey finding him. Smolo had been trying for nearly two months. The men working the Barracks were military contractors, and the night of the Oosay attack they had been shipped off to Germany, kept under wraps, and finally left to scatter and told to disappear. Smolo had worked every old friend and loose contact he could think of to get their names. Finally, it had been Samantha Reese who had done it. She’d had a friend, a military contractor himself, who knew two men who worked the Oosay compound from time to time. No one had heard from them since early December. She gave the names to Smolonsky. He discovered one of the two men had effectively vanished, not returning to his home in Virginia. But the other man, a former navy communications officer named Emanuel Nariño, was now living in Amsterdam.
Smolo had gone off to Europe a week ago to find him. He had tracked Manny Nariño’s movements for days, identifying the club in the red-light district where Manny spent a lot of evenings. By then Smolo knew as much about Manny Nariño as he did about most of his own family. At the club, Smolo managed to buy a drink just as Nariño was ordering another round for himself. Hey, an American. An exchange of introductions. Your name’s Nariño? Whoa, Smolo lied, he knew a Sally Nariño in Modesto. No way, Nariño said. That’s my cousin. They toasted the coincidence, ordered another round, and began a club crawl that lasted till dawn. It was around 4:30 A.M. when Smolo had gotten out of Manny Nariño what he needed.
“Peter, now we know why Ross, Halleck, Phelps, and O’Dowd were in the wrong place,” Jobe said to Rena outside the hotel.
“We’ve waited long enough, Hallie. Why?”
“They were in the Barracks, all of them, even Roderick,” she said. “That’s what this guy told Smolo. Then, Roderick went back out there, back to the Manor House. After the attack had begun. Just him and Franks.”
Rena had halfway guessed something like this from talking to Shane.
“Hallie, tell Ellen, Arvid, and Maureen to print out everything we have about the Manor House. Everything. Bring it all to my place. Bring everyone with you. This might take all night.”
Now, five hours later, the papers are strewn across Rena’s den, on the tops of furniture, chairs, and the seat of his chocolate-brown Stickley leather sofa. On the floor, too, with little paths between the papers to walk through.
Nelson the cat wanders among the documents, getting in the way, rubbing his head against the investigators.
They’d gathered most of these documents weeks earlier when they first got the assignment. On his first trip to Oosay, Smolonsky had even paid a local fixer in country to go to the city’s hall of records, or what remained of it, and bribe someone to make copies of everything about the building. Sales history. Zoning documents.
Maureen Conner had dug up whatever there was at State. The U.S. government would have meticulously documented everything it had done to the Manor House since acquiring the property four years earlier.
But they had not looked at any of it before.
Rena feels like they have wasted time, been too methodical, stuck too long to their plan, to the Grid, to the idea of working from the bottom up. And they’d put too much faith in what Rena and Brooks had come to realize was a mistake: they’d believed that if they said they represented the president, people on his national security team who knew what had happened would help them.
But then they got the video. And now, thanks to Smolonsky, they knew part of what it showed.
Roderick had gone back to the Manor House. There was something there he needed. Something worth going back for after the fighting began—with only one man to protect him.
“What are we looking for?” Lupsa had asked when they had begun spreading the papers out across Rena’s town house hours earlier.
“We don’t know,” Rena had said.
“Anything odd. Or that you don’t understand,” Wiley had guessed.
“Exactly.”
It is a quarter past eight now.
Lupsa is poring over the documents from State. The old house was deteriorating when the United States bought it four years ago. The U.S. government had installed a new kitchen. Done structural work.
“What’s a Seef?”
“A what?” says Rena.
“A Seef.”
Lupsa spells it out. “S-C-I-F?”
“It’s pronounced skiff,” Rena says. “Like the small boat.”
“What does it mean, a small boat inside a room?” asks Lupsa.
Of course, a SCIF, Rena thinks. He glances at Brooks, who is thinking the same thing.
“A SCIF is a room, a place where you can have classified conversations, keep classified documents, and only certain people are allowed in,” Brooks explains to Lupsa.
“And it means I think I know what Roderick was doing in the Manor House, and why he was there alone. And maybe why he died,” Rena says.
He looks at Hallie Jobe. “Are you feeling charming tonight?”
“What plan are you cooking up for me now, Peter?”
“You know the man you disliked most in this whole mess? I want you to sweet-talk him.”
* * *
When Jobe arrives, Garrett Franks is sitting in the hanging swing on his front porch. He had needed some privacy, some time to think. He is worried about Adam O’Dowd. He has called O’Dowd back but now Adam’s phone is off.
Franks puts his weight onto the balls of his feet and pushes, then lifts his feet and lets the momentum swing him back and forth. The lightness makes him feel better, like he is floating, and he sees how many swings he can get each time until the floating stops, his feet touch, and he has to push again.
She comes up the walk slowly.
“You lost?”
“We need your help.”
“Then you have a problem.”
Jobe thinks Franks looked faded, like something that has been left outside in bad weather.
“Help us put this right, Garrett.”