“I actually looked this up,” Kramer said. “As of whenever the last survey was taken, there were, like, twenty-three thousand public high schools in America, and over seven thousand private ones. That’s thirty thousand, overall. Of which ours is only one.”
Jonathan cocked his head. He wasn’t sure where the chief was going with this.
“What I’m saying,” Doug said, “is it’s stupid for everybody to be wrapped so tight, but given the wall-to-wall coverage—”
“You’ve got to do something.”
“Exactly.” He punctuated his word with a forefinger pointed at Jonathan’s nose, then sipped his coffee again. “You asked how my business was going.”
“So I did.” Jonathan likewise sipped. “Well? What’s your plan?”
“I have no idea. Nobody wants to cancel Friday night football, and it’s not practical—maybe not even possible—to lock everything down whenever there’s a game.”
“Plus, there’s the precedent,” Jonathan agreed. “For all anyone knows, those attacks were a one-off. And if that’s the case, it was pretty much the perfect act of terror. Nobody’s been caught, right?”
“Not so far as I know. The shooters just evaporated.”
“And if there’s another incident in the planning, there’s no guarantee that it will be another high school. Or even a school at all. It’s pretty much impossible to protect against snipers for an extended period.”
Kramer cradled his cup in both hands. “One lady actually told me that if it was the president who was at risk, we could make something happen.”
“True enough,” Jonathan said. “All you need is a couple hundred people devoted to every community member.”
The absurdity of it made both of them laugh. Then Kramer turned serious. “You’ve been up against snipers before, haven’t you?”
Jonathan’s days in the Unit were a secret to no one. “Only in a military environment, and most of those times we had countersnipers deployed. In a civilian environment, there’s no practical defense.”
Kramer reared back. “So, we just let ourselves be victims?”
Jonathan considered before answering. “For the first shot? Yeah. That’s the bad guy’s call. The shooter always has the upper hand for the first shot. Now, you can have plans in place to take cover and fire back, but without advance intel, the first shot is his.”
Kramer fell silent, contemplative.
“This can’t be a surprise to you,” Jonathan said.
Kramer inhaled deeply through his nose. “No, it’s not a surprise. I guess I was hoping you’d have some advanced, wizardly solutions.”
“I can help with training responders,” Jonathan offered. “In fact, I’d be happy to.” His cell phone buzzed in the pocket of his shorts. “Excuse me.” As he produced the phone, he checked the caller ID and smiled. “It’s Dom.” He pressed the connect button. “Morning, Padre. I’m having breakfast at Jimmy’s with Doug Kramer. Want to join us?”
Dom D’Angelo had been Jonathan’s roommate all through college and now was the pastor of St. Kate’s, just up the hill from Jimmy’s. “Love to, but I can’t,” Dom said. “And you have to leave.”
Jonathan scowled. “Where am I going?”
“To Location Bravo,” Dom said. “Just got off the phone with Wolverine. She said she needs to see you as soon as you can get there.”
Jonathan resisted the urge to cast a glance at Kramer. Wolverine was Jonathan’s name for Irene Rivers, the director of the FBI. His head swam with questions, but now was not the time. Not here. “Okay, then,” he said.
“Just you,” Dom added. “She was very specific about that. She doesn’t want to draw attention with a crowd. And no, I have no idea what this is about.”
After a quick good-bye, Jonathan clicked off and stood. “Duty calls, I’m afraid.” He pulled a small wad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a ten. “Tell Irma I’m good for the rest if this doesn’t cover it.”
* * *
Among the panoply of Catholic cathedrals throughout the world, Jonathan Grave always thought that the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington, DC, was an architectural lightweight. The Episcopalians got the high ground—literally—a few miles away, and they pulled a real coup when they grabbed the name Washington National Cathedral. When people thought of the DC equivalent of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the National Cathedral was what they envisioned. Jonathan found the dull redbrick edifice of Saint Matthew’s to be entirely uninspiring.
Once the doors opened, however, the God Palace competition was on, and the Catholics could beat the Episcopalians walking away. The mosaic work throughout St. Matthew’s reminded Jonathan of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, Italy.
Not that any of that mattered today.
As Jonathan stepped through the huge doors from the chilly morning sunlight into the dankness of the narthex, he waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. He scanned for the towering men he’d come to think of as the Tweedle brothers—Dee and Dum—and he found them just where he’d anticipated, flanking the entry to Our Lady’s Chapel, an enclave built into the cathedral’s northern wall in honor of the Virgin Mary. His appointment would be waiting for him there.
Jonathan knew this spot as Location Bravo, one of five preordained sites where Wolverine could meet with people and harbor no fear of being overheard.
As FBI director, Irene had access to all manner of SCIFs—sensitive compartmented information facilities—at government offices, but none were as secure as Location Bravo, because only a handful of people in the world knew that it existed. DC was a town built around information and deception. Just because a SCIF protected a conversation from being overheard by foreign actors didn’t mean that it wasn’t overheard by the sponsoring agencies’ own paranoid security teams. Everybody listened to everybody else in Washington.
Using funds that were largely unaccounted for, Wolverine had commissioned the project to make the chapel secure several years ago, while the entire cathedral was being renovated. She’d used her own contractors, posing as regular workers, to install jamming transmitters that rendered all electronic equipment useless, and she had the space swept and recertified on a regular cycle that she’d never shared with Jonathan.
Jonathan smiled as he approached the Tweedles and gave a little finger wave, this time using four more fingers than he often did. “Morning, gents,” he said. “I presume the boss is in her usual spot?”
They glared at him. In unison. It occurred to him that they looked like Christmas Nutcrackers, but dressed in ill-fitting business suits.
“Are you armed?” Dum asked.
“Yep,” Jonathan said. “As always. High on my right hip. A Colt Commander. Sweet shooter, too. Thanks for asking.”
He continued past the security team and smiled when he heard Dee ask Dum, “Why do you always give him that kind of power?” At least these two were better than some of the others Irene had dragged around in the past. Apparently, the cream of the federal law enforcement crop does not aspire to standing security details.
Irene Rivers sat upright in an uncomfortable-looking cane-backed chair in front of the chapel’s altar, her head bowed. Her back was turned to him, and from this angle, he thought he might have caught her in a moment of prayer. But then, as he got closer, he saw the folder full of papers on her lap and the cheap government-issued pen in her hand.
“Good morning, Wolfie,” he said as he approached.
She didn’t look up. “Pull up a chair,” she said. “I just need to finish this note and pray my assistant will be able to read my handwriting.”
“If only someone hadn’t turned the place into a Faraday cage,” Jonathan quipped as he planted himself in the chair three down on her left. “You could send an email.” He turned sideways and tucked his right calf under his left thigh.
“It’s the price we must pay for privacy,” she said. She clicked her pen and closed the cover of the manila folder. “
Welcome to the snake pit.”
Jonathan waited for her to get to the point.
“I need your help, Dig.”
“I figured as much. Dom made you sound agitated.” Because of the nature of their relationship, Jonathan and Irene always contacted each other through Father Dom. Given her position, every person she visited and every phone call she made were legally discoverable to anyone with a subpoena and an agenda. But even the FBI director got to be off the record when she spoke to her priest.
“Agitated is the wrong word,” Irene said. “I’ll give you pissed. And very concerned.”
“Sounds like somebody downrange is going to have a bad day.”
“Your lips to God’s ear,” she said. “What do you know about the Black Friday shootings?”
“Just what I’ve heard on the infotainment pages.” Jonathan had long ago lost faith in what passed for news these days.
“Is that all?” Irene pressed. “Just public access? Nothing from your own rumor mill?”
His shields came up. For years—for a career—Jonathan had been a part of the Unit, the very tip of Uncle Sam’s spear, and, of course, he’d kept in touch with the other players. But what he knew and from whom was none of Wolverine’s business.
Irene rolled her eyes. “Oh, for crying out loud, Dig, I don’t need sources and methods. I just need to know if there are rumblings out there. I promise that after you answer, I’ll tell you why I need to know.”
“I’m not trying to be obtuse,” Jonathan said. “There’s always a ton of chatter about a lot of things. Give me a clue what you’re looking for.”
“Anything about who the shooters might be.”
Jonathan leaned forward. “I need more than that,” he said. “The big winners are Islamists, but they’re always the easy pick.”
Irene’s scowl deepened.
“Look, Wolfie,” Jonathan said, “I sense that you’re turning yourself inside out trying not to tell me something. Just let it out.” He’d rarely seen her this uncomfortable. The Irene Rivers he knew was a between-the-eyes kind of gal.
“Fair enough. I have reason to believe that you might know at least one of the shooters.”
He hid behind his best poker face, waiting for the rest.
“I say that because we have a guy in custody who told us that.”
“Who is he?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“You have a guy in custody who says he knows me? By name? How the hell did that even come up in conversation?”
“Well, not you, specifically,” she hedged. “Not by name, anyway, but he indicated that your old teammates have turned terrorist.”
“Bullshit.”
“I thought you’d say that. And remember, you’re in church. Watch your language.”
“God’s been listening to me cuss for a long time,” Jonathan said. “I don’t think he pays attention to the venue. Now, if I’m being accused, I have a right to know—” A piece fell into place. “Wait a second. I heard one of your minions on television just this morning saying that you had no suspects and no one in custody.”
Irene looked away. “Yeah, well, we kind of lied about that.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a lot we don’t want the bad guys to know.”
“Okay, but now I know,” Jonathan said. “What’s his name?”
“Logan Masterson.”
Jonathan tasted the name, got nothing. “Don’t know him. Look, Wolfie, you need to start dealing off the top of the deck. What aren’t you telling me?”
She prepared herself with a deep breath. “You remember that Stepahin business a while back?”
“All too well,” Jonathan said. “But you can’t tell me he’s back. I saw his brain on the pavement.”
“No, he’s still dead, as far as I know. But you remember the prison program I told you about?”
Jonathan felt a flutter in his stomach. “The secret ones? The illegal ones? You told me you shut that program down.”
“We did,” Irene said. “The program is dead. But the facilities are still there. On Black Friday, Masterson was one of the shooters at the Nebraska incident. I should say at least one of them. A Good Samaritan was able to wing him. By the time he woke, up, we had him.”
Jonathan’s bullshit bell clanged. “You skipped a part. You say you have him, but nobody knows you have him. That’s a hard detail to hide.”
Irene cocked her head. All of this was making her progressively more uncomfortable. “The administration wants justice on this one,” she said, “so when we found out there was a suspected shooter in custody, we took control immediately and made him disappear.”
“What about the locals? Aren’t they going to reveal the secret?”
“We swore them to secrecy. National security and all that. If they do, we’ll just deny it. Everybody trusts the FBI.” She smiled and winked on that last part.
“I’m going to guess that there’s no arrest warrant for him?”
Irene laughed. She didn’t even honor the question with an answer.
“You’ll never be able to prosecute,” Jonathan said.
“Don’t try to out-lawyer the lawyer,” Irene said. “We’re not interested in prosecuting him.”
Jonathan reared back at that one. “What, you’re just gonna kill him?”
“Haven’t really thought that far out,” Irene said. “In the near term, we’re going to make him miserable and squeeze him for information.”
“You’re going to torture him.”
“The FBI does not torture people,” Irene said, but Jonathan couldn’t tell if she was being ironic.
He let it go. “Okay, so why did you summon me?”
“Masterson said that Black Friday was part of a larger plan and that the key players were all Special Forces types. All American.”
“Well, I’m not a part of the plot, if that was what—”
“Oh, God no. Never thought that for a second. I want you to talk to him.”
“Why me? Don’t you have, like, thirty thousand people working for you?”
“Discoverability,” she said. “We’re breaking more than a few laws here. I can’t trust sworn agents to take care of details like this. The entire population of people who know about Masterson is fewer than twenty.”
“Plus someone in the White House? You mentioned that the administration wanted justice on this.”
“I have exactly one trusted source in the White House,” Irene said. “You have no need to know his or her name, but they’re trustworthy and they tell me things. President Darmond is unhinged over all this. There’s a lot of pressure on my people to come up with answers. If we go the normal habeas corpus route with Masterson, he’ll lawyer up, the press will get involved, and we’ll all go into damage control mode. That will slow things tremendously.”
“So, you’re just going to torture a guy off the books?”
“The FBI does not torture people.” There was that weird tone again.
“Well, neither do I,” Jonathan said. “I hate that shit.”
“I want information, Dig. I need details that will get us out in front of this, and I don’t care how I get it.”
Jonathan wanted to stand and pace, but resisted. “Look, Wolfie, this is just not the kind of work I do.”
“Talk to him. That’s all I’m asking.”
“And what’s the next step after that?” Jonathan pressed. “Say I get a juicy tidbit. Where do we go from there? You can’t use it. It’ll be fruit from the poisonous tree.”
“If you get that far, I’ll take it from there,” Irene said.
Jonathan had never been adept at saying no to Irene Rivers, but he would have taken about any excuse right then. “How are we going to get past the guards at the secret prison, wherever the hell that is?”
“We?”
“I haven’t said yes yet, but if I can’t work with my team, it’s a hard no. Not negotiable.”
Irene’s eyes took on a sparkle, an
d a tiny smile began to grow.
Jonathan scowled. “Did I just walk into a trap?”
Irene reached into her bag and produced four boxes, each about the size of a paperback novel and bearing the official seal of the FBI. “Welcome to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she said. “You’ll find badges and credentials for you, Big Guy, Gunslinger, and Mother Hen. The identities will hold up to all but the most rigorous background check, at which point your identity disappears, anyway.”
Then she handed him a thumb drive. “Don’t lose this,” she explained, “and destroy it when you’re done. It’s all the background on your aliases.”
Jonathan took the boxes and turned them over in his hands. “You’re going to want us to track down what we find, aren’t you?”
“I am,” she said. “My entire agency will be focused on the Constitutional methods of investigation, while you wander the back roads.” She stood. The meeting was over.
“I didn’t say yes yet,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, you did. I wish I could be there when you tell your team.”
Chapter Three
“Why did you lie to her?”
The question took Jonathan off guard, and the fact that it came from Boxers, his longtime friend and right hand, startled him. “Excuse me?”
Boxers’ real name was Brian Van de Muelebroecke, and he was built like a sequoia. “To Wolverine,” he said. “Why did you lie about knowing Logan Masterson?” He and Jonathan had served in the Unit together and had been a fighting team for many years.
Jonathan looked to the rest of his team. Gail Bonneville and Venice (Ven-EE-chay) Alexander stared back at him from their positions around the massive teak conference table in the War Room, the operations command center for the covert side of Security Solutions. “Do y’all know what he’s talking about?”
Venice and Gail exchanged glances. “Should we?” Gail asked.
“We served with him, Dig,” Boxers insisted. “Not for long. I think it was Scarlet Tendril, that snatch-and-grab outside of Kandahar, toward the end. He looked like Opie Taylor, down to the freckles and red hair.”
Jonathan scoured his brain for something but couldn’t pull it up.
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