TWENTY-THREE

•   •   •

When Jack arrived at his apartment at 4 a.m., he found the door ajar. He’d stopped by to grab some clean clothes, food, and his personal laptop. What he found was an apartment that had been ransacked. Furniture lay toppled and busted, papers scattered like debris, cabinets and drawers emptied, dishes broken. The place looked like some of those Iraqi villages after the Air Force got done with them.

Jack sat on the sofa, his heart beating hard behind his ribs, his forehead and upper lip suddenly wet with sweat. Anger tightened his chest, burned in his cheeks. This was unnecessary. He knew how these guys worked, how they thought, what drove them. They weren’t looking for anything; they were sending a message. Shouting at him.

He needed to get back to his office. He could call the police and file a report, but they would ask too many questions. Where was he last night? Why didn’t he come home until 4 a.m.? Who would want to do this? What were they looking for? And if he declined answering them, it would move the suspicion to him. He didn’t need that, so he grabbed some clothes from the floor, some granola bars from the pantry, and left the apartment as it was. He’d get back to it at a later time. Right now, he needed to decide what he was going to do, how he was going to protect the vice president.

•   •   •

“. . . Connelly is the enemy.”

Jed snapped awake, his mind clear, his body shivering uncontrollably. The temperature in the concrete room had dropped at least twenty degrees. Karen’s voice was in his head, echoing into the silence that now dominated his thoughts. He pushed himself to a sitting position and hugged his knees tight against his chest. His head still hurt, throbbed, and the ache intensified along the right side of his skull, but the severity of the pain had diminished greatly. It no longer blurred his vision, no longer left him incapacitated.

He had no idea how long he’d slept. There was no way to gauge time in this room. It could have been minutes, hours, or even days. It felt like days. He was still tired, but the gears in his head turned more smoothly now. Coherent thoughts came with less coercion needed.

The room was no longer as black as tar. Dim light emanated from some unknown source and cast a deep-gray hue over the space. Jed could make out the corners of the room, the line where ceiling and walls met. He could just barely see the faint outline of the door and . . .

“Good morning, Patrick.”

Murphy again. There, beside the door, the weakest outline of a man’s figure. It did not move and for all Jed knew, it could be a cardboard cutout. The voice had said it was morning, but it meant nothing to Jed. Which morning? How long had he been here? And was it really morning? He couldn’t possibly know if Murphy was being truthful or not.

“I’m sorry about the temperature,” Murphy said. “We’re having some mechanical problems.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“We’re working on getting it fixed as quickly as possible.” There was a long pause, but during the time of silence the figure across the room never moved, never shifted its weight, never repositioned a hand or a foot or turned its head. “Patrick, we need to work together. We need each other. Connelly is out of control and getting more powerful every day.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“I’ll prove it to you in time. You’ll get all the information you want. Proof that is inarguable.”

“Is Karen okay? Why won’t you let me see Lilly?”

“You will in time.”

“When?”

“In time.”

“If what you’re saying is true, then we don’t have time. I need to see her now. And what about Karen?”

“In time, Patrick. Your family will be okay. Right now we have more important matters on the table.”

“Nothing is more important than my family.”

Murphy paused. “This is. This is bigger than any of us.”

The door opened and a breath of warm air slithered into the room and wrapped itself around Jed.

“We need you, Patrick. Your family needs you. Your country needs you. From what I can see, the world needs you.”