Page 39 of Hawk on the Hunt

With three more steps, Dylan was at the door to the Speaker’s office and ripped it open. He almost collided with him. It appeared that the Speaker had heard the commotion in his ante office and was coming to investigate. Dylan instantly noticed that Johnson looked out of shape. No matter the training he’d previously had, he would be easy to defeat in hand-to-hand combat.

“What’s going on here?” Johnson asked with a raised voice. “Jennifer? What are these people doing here? Call security!”

“Not gonna happen,” Dylan said.

“Who are you?”

“He said his name was Smith-Bancroft,” the woman who’d confronted Dylan said from across the room.

Dylan looked straight at Johnson. “Yes, you’ve heard right, Polo. Smith-Bancroft. I know these names mean something to you. Or did you think that you could get away with this?”

Confused and annoyed, Johnson stared at him. “I’m the Speaker of the House, and I demand that you leave my office, or you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law! Damn it! Somebody call security!”

There’d been no sign of recognition in Johnson’s eyes when he’d dropped the three names: Polo, Bancroft, and Smith. Nobody could bluff that well. Nobody but a psychopath.

Dylan pushed him back with such force that Johnson tumbled against his desk. “Stay there! Where’s your cell phone?”

Intimidated, Johnson pointed to a spot behind him on the desk. Dylan spotted the cell phone there, and snatched it. “Unlock it.”

“How dare you?” Johnson spat.

Dylan went nose to nose with him. “I dare because I’m not gonna let you kill the president and the vice president so you can complete your evil plan!” He grunted in displeasure. “Now tell me how you’re triggering the bomb.”

Johnson gasped, and the people in the office behind him made similar sounds. “Bomb?” He motioned to the TV in his office. “There was a bomb on Marine One?”

Dylan drew back a few inches. The man was the best actor he’d ever seen, because the other possibility—that they had the wrong man—wasn’t acceptable. “Fine! You wanna play hardball. I’ll find the trigger myself.”

He pulled out his cell phone and navigated to the app that Fox had installed earlier and activated it. A low steady beeping sound came from his cell phone. “This will pick up any device sending or receiving a signal.” Then he called out toward the door, “Zara, Tiger, collect all cell phones and anything else that looks like it could be used to trigger a bomb.”

“On it,” Tiger answered.

Meanwhile, Dylan walked around the office, sweeping his cellphone over the desk, beneath it, inside of drawers, on the chairs, over the surfaces of every piece of furniture. He switched off the TV and unplugged it, then swept the area around the TV. The steady beeping sound continued.

He moved to the other side of the large room, where built-in closets framed a large painting, when the beeping sound suddenly intensified.

“Got something,” he called out to Tiger. Then he addressed the Speaker, “What’s in there?”

“Files.”

When Dylan reached for the cabinet door, Johnson complained, “That’s confidential records. Some of them are classified! You don’t have the clearance—”

Dylan ripped the cabinet open and froze. At the same time, alerted by footsteps, he whipped his head to find Johnson only a few feet away from him, outrage coloring his face. Within a milli-second, his facial expression turned to panic.

“Oh my God!” The Speaker stared at the contents of the closet. “Is that a bomb?”

“Yeah.”

And now that he was physically close to James Johnson, he realized something that he hadn’t noticed when he’d first encountered him, maybe because his nape had still been tingling due to Tiger being close to him. But now, Tiger was in another room with a wall between them, and all he could sense coming from the Speaker was—in fact—nothing at all. There was no familiar tingling identifying Speaker Johnson as a precognitive. He wasn’t Polo.

“Tiger,” Dylan called out toward the open door. “There’s a bomb in the Speaker’s office.”

“What?” Tiger replied, his voice full of disbelief. “Are you fucking with me?”

Tiger suddenly appeared in the door frame, and Dylan stepped aside so he could see the bomb hidden in the closet.

“Fuck!” Tiger hissed and looked over his shoulder. “You, Ma’am, call the bomb squad, now! And somebody call security to evacuate the Capitol.”

Scared shrieks came from the employees.