RACHEL DROVE to Arlington holding down yawns and trying to focus her vision. An awkward night sitting up with Gregg and Mackenzie, then in the guest room with Ingrid and Clare, wasn’t conducive to any kind of rest, and only after Gregg left for the city in the morning was she able to catch a couple of hours’ sleep. When she came downstairs at nine, she found Mackenzie and Ingrid sitting with coffees, talking like old friends. Mackenzie was explaining that she had left her job when she married, so she could focus on the dream her own mother had had for her—raising a family. But after years of failing to conceive—and Mackenzie was the first to admit it—she’d developed a horror of returning to a nine-to-five life. She’d tried out some online businesses, but nothing had taken yet. Rachel poured herself a coffee and listened to the two of them speak as if nothing were strange in the world, as if both of them shared the same preoccupation with finding a satisfying career. Ingrid seemed to have shed her dogmatism, at least for now, and said nothing about wage slaves or the machinations of the ruling classes.
“I should be back in a few hours,” she told them.
“Something?” Ingrid asked.
“We’ll see.”
She stuck for as long as possible to the Beltway simply because it skirted the edges of DC. As if taking that highway meant Johnson and Vale would have no idea how to find her—which, given the state of surveillance technology, was ridiculous. Still, it made her feel a little better. Within a half hour she was parking among cute houses on Stuart Street and walking south to take the escalator down into the Orange Line’s Ballston-MU Station. This was Ashley’s station, five blocks from her rental duplex.
Once she’d descended into the cavernous space, the Metro’s famous grid arching overhead, Rachel wandered to the inbound platform. Along the edges of the station a concrete barricade rose to waist height, and she dragged her fingers along the back of it as she slowly made her way to the end of the platform. About halfway down, just past the dot-matrix sign telling her that the next train would arrive in nine minutes, her fingers ran into a stuffed envelope that had been glued against the back of the wall. She ripped it off and kept moving, her hand not leaving the wall. When she reached the far end, she turned back, slipping the bundle into her jacket pocket, and headed back to the exit as, ahead, commuters hurried down the escalator to catch the incoming train.
She didn’t look at the envelope until she had reached Stuart Street and was safely behind the wheel again. The outside was blank, torn where she’d ripped it off the wall, and inside were five sheets of printout, folded tightly to fit. It was a spreadsheet listing calls made to and from Benjamin Mittag’s phone, beginning June 18, 2017, the day Bishop and Mittag disappeared, and continuing until July 8, the day Bishop and then Mittag were killed. The calls were made to a total of three numbers, one of them—Janet Fordham’s, presumably—only once, on July 8. She concentrated on the coordinates of the other two numbers—longitudes and latitudes to the fourth decimal point. One of the two numbers bounced around the country, coordinates changing constantly. 30° to 50° N and 70° to 120° W. Martin Bishop, certainly, always in motion. Then there was the third number.
What she noticed was that this final number, with the exception of one call, remained around a single place—38° N and 77° W. While she only had an entry-level familiarity with map coordinates, she recognized this set: the DC area.
It took ten minutes to find an internet café in the rear of a tiny grocery, and in the darkened space she typed in the full DC coordinates: 38°53'40.7976", -077°01'30.0468".
Was she surprised by the result? No, not entirely, but it still hurt a little when she found herself looking at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, the Hoover Building. She sniffed, feeling a cold coming on, then checked the dates. There: July 8, a couple of hours after Bishop was killed. She typed in the coordinates of Mittag’s phone and found herself staring, bird’s-eye view, at a gas station around St. Paul, Nebraska.
Benjamin Mittag had made that call, but the other number wasn’t in or around the Hoover this time—the coordinates were completely different. She typed them in and found herself in central Chicago. She rubbed her temple, something nagging at her.
Yes: Rachel, I’m not stepping on anything here, don’t worry. I was in Chicago when Paulson called me, and I lucked out with one of those new Gulfstreams that fly like the wind.
On the same day he would later be killed, Mittag called Owen Jakes in Chicago.
She closed her eyes, pressed the bridge of her nose, and tried to work through it slowly. Tried to remember that last conversation Kevin had had with Benjamin in Watertown. After punching him and closing the bedroom door, Mittag had said, FBI, right? Who’s running you?
And then:
Man, you’ve really got it all wrong, don’t you? We’re on the same side. Or, we used to be.
Then she remembered more.