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“Anatoly, are there any Russian-flagged cargo ships docked in ports on the Eastern Seaboard?”
He takes his laptop back as I look up the FAA’s website on my BlackBerry. No way could Brennan be smuggled out of the country on any commercial flight. Which leaves cargo flights, private flights, or—
“There is a Malaysian-flagged carrier that departed from Philadelphia yesterday,” Anatoly says, frowning at his laptop. “One of its stops is Kaliningrad. Other than that—”
“They’re not on a ship.” My chair clatters behind me as I jump to my feet. “There’s an Iranian diplomatic flight on the tarmac at Dulles right now. They scheduled a refuel in Moscow on the way to Tehran. Supposedly, they just came down from the Iranian office at the UN in Manhattan.”
There aren’t any official diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States. Instead, Russia sometimes serves as Iran’s power in Washington, and a single Iranian diplomat works at the UN and sometimes at the Russian embassy in New York.
In an entire year, there are maybe three or four Iranian diplomatic flights. Maybe.
And now, today, there is an Iranian-flagged plane at Dulles, ready to take off, with a flight plan that goes through Moscow. There haven’t been any direct US flights to Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine. But this flight is scheduled to depart in less than an hour.
We need fifteen hours.
Henry is on that plane, with Brennan.
I race to the stairs and climb them three at a time, almost bear crawling I’m moving so fast. “Sheridan!” I roar. “Sheridan!” I fly through the bathroom door and bounce off the wall, grab the sink and the window frame to stop my momentum.
Sheridan is on his knees, straining at his cuffs. His tears have dried into salt tracks on his cheeks, and his shirt is wet with his blood. He stares up at me with wide eyes, and, damn it, he’s still so painfully open, so agonizingly eager to help me.
My hands shake as I pull out my handcuff keys. They fall to the floor between us.
If Sheridan were the traitor I accused him of being, he’d lunge for them, headbutt me, swing his legs around and get me in a headlock before snapping my neck. He’d make his escape. I just handed it to him.
Instead, he waits, watching as I fall to my knees at his side.
“Reese, what is it? What’s happening?”
“I know where Brennan is.”
“I swear, I didn’t have anything to do with—”
“I know.” I grab the keys and reach behind him to undo the cuffs. My hair brushes his cheek. “He set you up. He framed you. Merde, he’s been framing you all along. I fell for it, and I’m sorry, Sheridan. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Sheridan sags against me as soon as I free him. I hold him up, wrap my arms around him. He buries his face against my neck with his hands on my waist until he has the strength to pull back.
“Who? Who framed me? Who has the president?”
This is going to destroy him.
His wrists are black and blue and swollen from my handcuffs, and I take them into my hands and try to rub the blood back in with my thumbs. Shit, he might not believe me. Ten minutes ago, I would have said he and Henry were closer than brothers. I would have said they would die for each other.
There’s no way to soften this for him, so I look him dead in the eye as I say it. “Henry. He betrayed all of us.”
He searches me, and I let him see my own agony, my heartbreak, my desperate wish that this weren’t true. But it is, it fucking is.
He curls forward, his head bowed almost to the ground, and the roar that tears out of his throat is the sound of a heart wrenching in two. I hold on to him, and he clings to me. If I let go, he might shatter. Or I might. I don’t know which of us is holding the other up anymore.
“They’re at the airport. There’s a diplomatic flight to Moscow taking off in an hour. Henry has Brennan, and they’re on it.” I hold out his weapon. “We’ve got to stop them.”
That darkness I only ever saw echoes of explodes out of Sheridan. His eyes are bottomless black holes as he takes his pistol back and slides it into his holster. “Let’s go.”
