“I don’t understand,” I say, even though deep down, I do.
I can see that he blames me. He knows this is my fault, even if he doesn’t understand how, or why.
I glance away. On the TV, the camera’s zoomed in. It’s Halliday. He’s yelling about something, his face pinched, furious.
“We can fight this,” I tell Scott quietly. “Together.”
He stills, but doesn’t turn.
“I’ll tell you everything,” I bargain.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know what you got yourself into. Who’s responsible for this. But I have kids to think about, too.”
He lifts the box, steps past me, conversation over. On the television screen, Halliday’s smiling now. Relaxed, happy. Like a totally different person.
“Get out of here, Steph.”
Chapter 32
I make it back to headquarters blindly, by rote. As I walk into the office, the bullpen goes quiet. A few of my agents pretend to be working; Parker glances in my direction and then is suddenly engrossed by something on his computer screen. Others don’t hide their curiosity—Garcia leans back in her chair and watches me, unabashedly.
I get to my desk and boot up my computer, and minutes later there’s a knock on my door. Garcia opens it before I say a word, steps inside. She’s holding a file folder at her side.
“What do you need, Garcia?” I snap.
“It’s about this case….”
“Which?” She’s working two at the moment. Or is it three?
“Pitowski. You know, the mortgage fraud one?”
“Right. What about it?”
She flops down into the chair across from my desk, and my mind flashes back to Hanson, the day this all started. I have a family. A wife, kids. A mortgage.
Then, just as quickly, my thoughts turn to Scott. What’s going to happen to his mortgage? His house? His family?
“Boss?”
I blink. Garcia’s waiting for me to respond. I didn’t hear a word she’d said. I have no idea what she asked me.
“So do you think I should talk to the DA?” she repeats, slowly.
“Do it.”
She opens her mouth to say something else, but thankfully shuts it again, gets to her feet.
When the door closes behind her, I face my computer screen. Dylan Taylor. Taylor is connected to this, somehow.
I run a background check, jot down notes. Dylan’s a waiter, employed by a company that provides surge staffing for special events, mostly at hotels. His mother died of throat cancer when he was sixteen; his father two years later, in a skiing accident. He graduated from the best high school in the area, near the bottom of his class; no college. No criminal record. Nothing noteworthy.
I spend the next hour searching for anything I can find on the parents, Bruce and Anne Taylor. They were both physicians, seemed to live a quiet existence. I can’t find any red flags. But I’m not willing to give up. I have an address, the home where they used to live, where Dylan grew up. And since that’s about all I have, that’s where I go.
* * *
—
The house is a two-story colonial in a middle-class neighborhood, on the end of a cul-de-sac, flanked by large bare oak trees. There are blue shutters on all the windows, a long, shaded porch. A minivan sits in the driveway; a new family’s living there, one that probably never knew the Taylors. But the neighbors—they might have.
I park on the street and walk up the steps to the front porch of the home next door. There are two white Adirondack chairs on one side of the porch, a swing on the other. Large flowerpots are on either side of the door; the soil is dry, the flowers long wilted. I ring the doorbell, and I hear footsteps a few seconds later. The woman standing there is in her sixties, probably. She’s staring at me, frowning, wearing a drab gray dress and a bright red sweater.
“Steph Maddox, FBI.” I flash my badge. “I’m hoping I can talk to you about some former neighbors of yours. Bruce and Anne Taylor.”
Some sort of emotion passes across her face. Suspicion? Sadness?
“Did you know them?” I press, when she doesn’t answer.
“Quite well.” She blinks, touches the cross at her throat. “We lived next door to each other for twenty years.”
“So you knew their son?”
“Dylan? Of course.” Her body tenses. “Is Dylan in trouble?”
I answer her question with another. “What can you tell me about him?”
She stares at me, touching the little silver cross again. After a moment, she says, “He’s a good kid. Was a good kid, at least, when I knew him, poor thing. I tried to keep up with him after Bruce passed. Anne would have wanted it, you know? But I lost track of him.”
“Did you know him to be involved with anything illegal?”
“Dylan? No. He wasn’t like that.”
“No drugs, anything like that?”
“No.”
“Didn’t fall in with the wrong crowd?”
“No. Why? Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“Anyone who might have wanted to get back at him for anything?”
Surprise flares in her eyes. “I can’t imagine that.” She says it firmly, daring me to contradict her.
I nod. I hesitate, because I’m not sure how to ask the next questions, how to get the answers I have to have. “Do you know if the family spent any time in Chicago?”
“Chicago? Not that I’m aware of.”
“Any connections to Congress?”
Confusion clouds her features.
“Did Dylan ever work on the Hill, intern there, anything like that?”
“I don’t think so. But Anne and Bruce did, back in the day. That’s where they met.”
“Do you know who they worked for?”
“I have no idea.”
Her voice has gone cold. She’s shutting down. More questions at this point seem futile. “I appreciate your time, Ms….”
“O’Connell. Mary O’Connell.”
“Ms. O’Connell.” I reach for a business card, hand it to her. “Call me if you think of anything else, okay?”
She looks down at the card, then back at me. “He’s a good kid, Agent Maddox.”
So’s my Zachary. “Thanks for your time.”
In the car, I thump the steering wheel, frustrated. I didn’t learn anything useful. There’s no reason to think Dylan has a connection to those men from my past. Or to Zachary. How does he fit in?
None of this makes sense. And I don’t know what to do next. Maybe it’s time to confront Torrino. But is that the right move? Would I risk spooking him into making things even worse for Zachary?
And what if I’m wrong? What if someone else is pulling these strings?
I’m halfway back to the office when my phone trills. I reach for it, look at the screen. Zachary. “Hi, honey.”
“Mom?” His voice sounds unsteady and my heart quickens.
“What is it, honey?”
“I did some more digging into that forum. The encrypted one.”
“And?”
“Mom—we need to talk.”
Chapter 33
We meet at a park on the banks of the Potomac, a large expanse of land with a brightly colored playground, a handful of soccer and baseball fields, a popular wooded walking trail. I haven’t been here in years, but it’s a place I once knew well. I used to bring Zachary to the playground when he was young, back when the equipment was still gray. Soccer after that, and Little League, all those Saturday morning games. Then the games switched to evenings, and my memories of the park taper off.
Today it’s nearly empty. There’s a toddler on the playground, bundled in a thick red coat. His mother’s hovering near, with a younger sibling wrapped in a carrier close to her chest. The fields are deserted, a far cr
y from the Saturday morning bustle I remember.
The park’s an easy place to spot a tail; that’s why I picked it, when Zachary said we needed to talk. But no one’s followed me here today. No one’s listening.
I sit on a bench overlooking the playground and watch the toddler climb the ladder to the slide, very carefully, then struggle to seat himself at the top. He sits, then freezes. His mother moves around to the bottom of the slide, motions for him to let go, slide down.
The crunch of footsteps on dry leaves draws my attention away. Zachary’s approaching, hands jammed in his jacket pockets. I’d seen him pull up; the Taurus is the only other car in the lot, besides mine and the minivan that belongs to the family on the slide. There’s a look on his face I don’t like, one that’s stressed, uncertain. He slumps down beside me.
“What’d you find?” I ask.
He stares straight ahead, his jaw working. And a shattering sense of panic runs through me. He was going to look into whether other users had seen the slides. If he’s this troubled, that means someone else has seen them.
“Zachary?”
“The users…the people on the forum…”
“They saw the slides?”
“Yeah, but it’s not that.”
“What is it, then?”
“The activity…the account setups…” He trails off again. I’ve never seen him look so uncomfortable. He’s scaring me.
“What, Zachary?”
“I don’t think they’re real people.”
Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this.
“I mean, some of them are. But some of them…I think they’re bots.”
“Bots,” I repeat. Fake users. My mind is spinning, failing to make sense of this.
“Hundreds of them.” He shakes his head. He looks confused, and scared.
And how could he not be?
Bots. Hundreds of them.
I blink at the playground, realize the mom and her kids are gone.
Someone created a forum full of fake users. Someone planted evidence there that makes it look like Zachary’s part of a terrorist plot.
“Who would do something like that?” I ask urgently. A rhetorical question, really. “And why?”
“I’ve never seen something like that before,” Zachary says. “It’s like…” He gives his head another shake.
I finish the thought, softly. “It’s like something the Russians would do.”
Chapter 34
That day sticks in my mind; everything about it. It was almost two years ago, in May. The morning started as any other. I was in my office at the Washington Field Office, reviewing reports. My agents were in the bullpen, researching and writing.
All of a sudden, the office was buzzing. There was that charge in the air, the one that runs through the office when something’s happened, almost like an electrical current. I saw the chatter between my agents, the excitement on their faces. Something had happened. Something big.
I walked out of my office, into the bullpen. The door to our wing was propped open, and there was commotion in the hall, agents on the move, gathering gear.
“What’s going on?” I asked. And then I heard pounding footsteps in the hall, looked up to see two agents run past the door, down the hall.
Ginny Meyer, one of my agents at the time, answered. “Won’t even sound real if I say it.” She sounded dazed.
I heard the crackle of a radio in the hallway, caught just a smattering of words. “…two dead in the residence. One is a CIA officer….”
“Were our agents involved?” I asked Meyer.
“Oh yeah.”
It was all I needed to hear. Something big had happened. Two were dead, including a CIA officer. There’d be a thorough investigation, no doubt about it. My squad would be involved—we had a mandate to investigate any potential criminal wrongdoing by agents in the field office. And as the squad’s supervisory special agent, I’d be leading the charge. I wanted to get ahead of this. I had to be sure our agents acted appropriately, that protocols were followed.
I needed to go to the crime scene and see it for myself.
I arrived a short time later at a row house on a tree-lined residential street in Northwest D.C., one that was now teeming with police cars, marked and unmarked, lights flashing. Uniformed police and plainclothes agents were filing into and out of the residence. Curious neighbors were standing on stoops in nervous huddles, casting anxious glances at the house with the blue door.
I pulled on a raid jacket, FBI emblazoned on the back, and hung my badge around my neck. Made my way quickly past the crime tape, through the front door. The row house was a small place, with far too many people inside. I stood in the hall and looked around, tried to evaluate the scene, make sense of it. Two bodies covered in white sheets, one on the floor, another in a chair. A dozen or so bullet casings scattered around the carpet.
I’d heard the basics already, on the way to the crime scene. Three of our agents had been surveilling a counterintelligence target, a CIA officer. The agents heard a shot, entered the residence, found one victim, bound to a chair, deceased; a female, who appeared unarmed; and the target, who was armed. After a brief exchange, the armed man had raised his weapon, and our agents had fired.
I walked deeper into the residence. In the kitchen, two of our agents stood talking to a uniformed officer, who was taking notes. Both had that stricken look, so familiar in crime scenes. I didn’t see the third agent. Or the witness, the female.
I saw an agent I recognized, a supervisor who looked like he knew what was going on, like he might have been one of the early responders. He saw me approach, gave me a tense nod. “Maddox,” he said.
“Wood.” I gestured toward the kitchen. “Those are the responding agents?”
He glanced in that direction. “Two of them, yeah. Daniels and Kidd.”
“Where’s the third?”
Wood pointed mutely toward the living room. I followed his hand, toward the couch. From where we stood, I could see the backs of two heads; one male, one female, clearly deep in conversation. “That guy right there. Jackson.”
I recognized the name. Counterintelligence agent, Washington Field Office. “And the woman? Is she the witness?”
“Yeah. CIA, apparently.”
“What’s her story? Why was she here?”
“Wish I knew. Jackson won’t let anyone else near her.”
The back of my neck was starting to tingle, that sixth sense that something was wrong.
Wood shot me a quick glance, then shrugged. “They’re old friends. She’s understandably shaken up. I’m sure he’s getting more out of her than we could.”
That tingle kept coursing through me, growing stronger. Won’t let anyone else near her. Those words echoed in my brain. That behavior wasn’t normal, certainly not under circumstances like this. Standard procedure would have been a debrief, one that involved at least two agents.
I was vaguely aware that Wood had moved on, deeper into the apartment. I walked over to the couch, almost like my legs had a mind of their own. I was there before I thought of what to say. Both looked up as I approached. Jackson wore jeans and a raid jacket, stretched tight across his large frame. His expression was cold, unfriendly.
“Could I speak with you for a moment?” I said to the woman.
It was Jackson who answered. “This is under control, Agent…”
“Maddox,” I supplied, turning to him. “I’m sure it is.” I deliberately turned my attention back to the woman. She was tall and fair, with hair that cascaded over her shoulders in loose waves. “But I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
She nodded, ever so slightly. Her eyes were a clear, intense blue.
“Alone,” I added, giving Jackson a pointed look.
There was a stretch of silence, of stillness, and
then he stood abruptly, not bothering to hide his reluctance, and stalked a short distance away, over to the window.
“Are you okay?” I asked the woman. I could feel him watching us.
“No,” she replied softly, honestly. She didn’t look away, kept her eyes locked on mine.
“What is it?”
Her lips thinned.
“You can tell me.”
She gave her head a shake, a small one.
I leaned forward, lowered my voice. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll believe you.”
She gave me a searching look, and I thought for a moment she might actually say something. Then I watched her gaze shift up, and her expression close down. I could feel a presence behind me.
“We need to be getting you home,” came Jackson’s voice.
I ignored him, kept my eyes on the woman. “I will,” I told her again. I will believe you.
“Let’s go,” Jackson urged.
The woman held my gaze and I shivered involuntarily. I recognized the haunted look in her eyes. Then she stood. I saw Jackson put his hand firmly on her back, guide her, almost pushing her, toward the door. My eyes focused on the hand, bathed in flashing red and blue lights from the cars outside.
I saw him pause, lean down, whisper something in her ear. She went still. They continued on toward the door, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the hand, the way it rested on the small of her back, like he knew he was completely in control.
And then just as they reached the door, he turned, ever so slightly, and his eyes went straight to mine, like he could feel me watching him, like he knew I was there.
He smiled at me, and something in his expression sent a chill through me. It was as if he could see through me.
And then I was walking.
Forward, toward her, toward him.
The door opened, and she slipped out. It closed behind her.
I was going after her. I was going to talk to her, make sure she was okay. I had just reached for the doorknob when a hand grabbed my arm.
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