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“What do you have?”
Ahn takes another photo before tucking the camera into her chest pocket. She pulls out a pencil and a notepad and shows me a full-page sketch of the open passenger door beside us.
“Do you see the honeycomb pattern of the burn damage?” Ahn points first to her sketch, then to the interior of the door. “That’s the ballistic shielding. It’s stronger than Kevlar, and it has a much higher flash point. For us to see this extensive burn damage in the shielding, we’re looking at an extremely high-temp fire, one that was almost certainly caused by accelerants.”
Accelerants. Bordel de merde.
“What we don’t know is whether those accelerants were accidentally or purposely introduced. Ammunition or incendiaries already present could have cooked off or detonated during an initial, smaller fire before growing into this.”
“We keep our SUVs stocked with over three thousand rounds of ammunition and six thermite grenades.”
“That could be the culprit. We’ll know more once we’ve processed the vehicle in our lab. Now—” Ahn points her pencil at the fire-cracked hip bone of the skeleton, then at one of the ash-filled honeycombs and a dark smudge in the middle of a hundred other smudges. “Take a look right here.”
There’s a reason I didn’t go into forensics. I can’t see anything, and if I stay down here much longer, I’m going to fucking lose it. I’m hanging on to this earth by a thread, the fastenings of my sanity fraying into tatters. My soul is flaming out, and all I want is to crawl into a hole I’ll never come out of. Scream myself raw, until my heart gives up and what’s left of me can merge with what’s left of Brennan.
“What am I supposed to see?”
“There’s a bullet hole, sir. A bullet traveled through this body and embedded in the interior panel of the passenger door.”
Ahn found this from a single smudge and the scorched pelvis eight inches from my face. “Is the bullet recoverable?”
“Yes, sir. I can see the base of the projectile. It looks significantly deformed, and I won’t know until I examine it whether that’s from being discharged or from the fire.”
“Could this be a stray round that cooked off?”
Ahn points to the melted dashboard, the windshield frame, the destroyed center console. “I’ve found ammunition cook-off in these locations, but none in the door.”
Sheridan is breathing over my shoulder. Mud clings to the knees and elbows of his suit. He peers at the smoke-hidden bullet hole, his eyes huge. “If a shot was fired inside the SUV…” His voice trails off.
Puzzle pieces are coming together. Burnout marks on the roadway above us and a bullet embedded within the president’s—my lover’s—SUV.
This is something that scares the CIA director, Brennan had said when he asked me to put together this clandestine excursion. No one can know about this meeting. No one at all.
I can count on my fingers the people who knew Brennan’s movements tonight. We kept the circle small.
Not small enough, apparently.
Someone knew where Brennan was going.
And someone knew why he was going to meet the CIA director in the middle of the night.
Someone has murdered—
I am going to hunt them to the ends of the earth, and the last thing they see will be my face and the barrel of my gun.
“There’s one more thing.” Ahn lowers her voice. Her eyes dart to Sheridan, then back to me, asking a question. Whatever she wants to tell me, she’s nervous about it.
“Sheridan is on my command team. He knows everything I know.”
Ahn’s mask sucks inward as she takes a deep breath, and her gaze flicks to the melted passenger compartment. To Brennan’s seat.
I’m not ready for this. I’ll never be ready for this. The world sharpens: the still-cooling metal groaning beside me, the squish-slick footfalls of the forensic techs. Voices speaking softly. And the smell, God, the smell.
For a moment, I can make out Brennan’s cologne, laid on the tender skin of his neck beneath the curve of his jaw. I kissed him there, months ago, right over his pulse. He’d looked at me with so much hunger, so much yearning, so much terror—
“This is only a preliminary determination…”
Ahn is trying to brace me for the truth, though I already know no one could have survived this inferno. How many agents have lost the president on their watch?
