One of the agents says into the mic at his wrist, “He’s awake.”
They’re all miked, with small plastic receivers nested in their ears. Two of them have shotguns in hand. All of them are wearing their standard-issue Glocks on their belts. In appearance, they’re almost identical. Average height, medium-brown hair, beige trench coat, utterly forgettable. One of them works a toothpick between his teeth, but aside from that, they could be quadruplets.
I know enough to keep my mouth shut until their boss arrives. I busy myself by wiping the blood from my fingers onto the leg of my pants.
When the door opens a few minutes later, it’s the tall, iron-gray-hair dude who walks through it. He folds his arms over his chest and appraises me with an air of faint disappointment.
“Mr. Hughes—”
“Call me Connor. Where’ve you taken Tabitha West?”
Ignoring my interruption, he begins again. “Mr. Hughes, I’m Deputy Director Overton Downs.”
I wait for a second to see if he’s joking. When no one cracks a smile, I decide he’s not. “That’s a helluva name. Sounds more like a place. In England, maybe. ‘Come visit the spectacular gardens at Overton Downs,’ like that.”
Downs finds my humor lacking. His gray eyes take on a distinctive chill. He gestures to a chair. “Have a seat, Mr. Hughes.”
Guess we’re not gonna be on a first-name basis, then. Somehow I didn’t think we would be. Probably on account of that gun he shoved into my face.
I stand, cross to the chair he indicated, lower myself into it, and wait.
If he were going to arrest me, he’d have done it already, so this little meet and greet must be part of the debrief process. Most likely Ryan, Miranda, and everyone else have been separated and are getting raked over the coals as I’m about to be.
Deputy Director Downs—Overton? Really? What the fuck were his parents thinking?—pulls up a chair and straddles it backwards, very casual, very Mr. Government cool, very “we’re all just friends here.”
I’m not buying it for a second.
“I need to ask you a few questions, Mr. Hughes.”
His voice is clipped, precise as a scalpel. I peg him as an anal-retentive, by-the-book type, which won’t leave me much wiggle room to negotiate.
I nod. “I understand. Where is Tabitha West?”
His look sours. He reaches into the pocket of his trench coat, removes a travel-sized bottle of Tums, flips the cap open, shakes a few pale pink tablets into his mouth, and grinds them between his molars. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
Fighting the urge to curl my hands around his throat and choke the information out of him, I lean forward and rest my forearms on my knees.
“Look. I know how this works. You lunge, I parry. You thrust, I feint. We go round and round, rapiers clashing, until someone gets fatally stuck. Let’s just cut to the chase. You need information about what went down on this op and information about her. Anything you need to know about the op, I’ll tell you. Anything I’ve learned about S?ren Killgaard, I’ll tell you, with the exception of what’s not mine to tell. I was entrusted with certain things. I’m not gonna break that trust. And I’ll tell you right now that if you ask me how she did it, I don’t have a clue. But I do know it wasn’t an accident. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
Downs seems surprised. “So you admit she hacked the NSA’s database.”
I scoff, “She admitted it right to your face. And technically, I don’t know exactly what she did because I wasn’t watching, but I do know that you busted through the door screaming bloody murder about an NSA breach, so I think everyone in the room put two and two together without needing a fucking calculator. All that’s a sideshow, anyway. You’re missing the bigger picture.”
He crunches thoughtfully on his antacids. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s the bigger picture?”
“Why she did it.”
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
“I’m gonna have to spoon-feed this to you, aren’t I?”
“You’re saying she wanted to get caught.”
“I’m saying the woman does nothing without a good reason.”
Crunch. Crunch. “Hypothetically, why would she want to get caught?”
“So you’d take her wherever you took her. She anticipated that outcome.”
He looks dubious. Even his crunching stops. “Uh-huh.”
We stare at each other. The ticking of the clock on the wall is painfully loud. My patience—never my strong suit—is already growing thin. “You talk to Chan yet?”
Downs nods. “That we did.”
“And?”
“And I think he’s almost as in love with Tabitha West as you are.”
It’s a shot in the dark, but when my jaw tightens, he can see he’s hit his target. He crunches the last of the Tums, swallows, and runs his tongue over his teeth.
His tone turns philosophical. “You want to know the problem with love?”
I growl, “No.”
He taps his temple. “It messes with your head. Turns a sane man stupid. Take you, for example.”