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ChapterTen
Reese
Now
Sheridan and I kick down the door to Clint Cross’s apartment forty-five minutes later.
“Secret Service!” I bellow, sliding inside and to the right. Sheridan goes left, and we clear the small apartment in thirty seconds.
“No one home,” I say after Sheridan calls the final clear from the tiny bedroom and bathroom.
Clint lives in Friendship Heights, an urban neighborhood in northwest Washington, twenty minutes out on the Metro. Another ten minutes on the train would put us in suburban Bethesda, where Henry lives—lived.
The immensity of this loss is too overwhelming. I can’t keep my tenses straight. I can’t even begin to accept that Henry is gone.
Clint’s cramped one-bedroom apartment is a den of filth: dirty clothes piled in corners, pizza boxes beneath the breakfast bar, a black garbage bag in a corner overflowing with empty Monster Energy and Mountain Dew cans. There’s barely any furniture: a beanbag mended with duct tape, a folding table and single chair, and in the bedroom, a twin mattress on the floor. Instead of a dresser, there are more piles of clothes. A handful of T-shirts hang in the closet next to a dust-covered suit in a style that went out in the late nineties. There’s still a Goodwill tag on the label.
The only item of substance in the apartment is a sixty-inch flat-screen mounted on the wall. The beanbag is plopped right in front of it with a PlayStation controller tossed on the grimy carpet. Empty frozen burrito wrappers and three cans of Mountain Dew complete the gamer’s nest.
The whole place smells like grunge, unwashed male, and a cloying attempt to cover everything up with Axe body spray. I cough as I flip over the trash next to Clint’s mattress, scatter clothes, check every electrical outlet in every room. Give me a cell phone charger, a laptop cord, a tablet, an e-reader. Anything that might lead us to a digital trail. Anything I can use to track Clint.
Sheridan stands amid the mess, disgust twisting his features.
“You know how to work that?” I point to the PlayStation.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get on it. Search his account and see what he plays. Judging by all this, that’s going to be the biggest key to his psychology.”
Sheridan flips through Clint’s stack of games, taking pictures of the titles with his cell phone. “Bunch of first-person shooters. He wants to pretend he’s an action hero.” He throws the games down and powers on the PlayStation.
Nothing so far on my search for Clint’s technological footprint. Other than the PlayStation, he seems unplugged.
Footsteps sound outside, and Sheridan and I grab our weapons and dive for cover. The steps pause at the front door. The doorknob turns. Sheridan’s huge eyes find mine across the living room—
“Friendly,” a gruff voice calls. “Agent Theriot?”
“Who the hell are you?”
No one should know we’re here.
“Director Liu. I’m coming in. I’m alone.”
Merde, what is the CIA director doing here? “Did Marshall tell you he was sending the director?” I mutter to Sheridan. He shakes his head.
Liu appears in the hallway, silhouetted in the kitchen lights. He, like all the directors in all the alphabet agencies, is on the older side of middle age. He’s fitter than his peers, with only a small belly, though his silver hair is going thin. Today, he’s sporting the most haggard expression I’ve seen on a politician in two decades. His shoulders are bowed, and he reeks of despair.
“Sir.” I don’t holster my weapon until I see he truly is alone. Sheridan follows my lead, albeit more slowly. “What are you doing here?” No time for niceties.
“The vice president called me. He told me you were investigating Clint.” Liu holds out a folder stuffed with loose papers and wrapped with a rubber band.
“What’s that?”
“Clint’s personnel record.”
Just taking that folder is a crime. CIA personnel records are classified.
Add it to the list of charges that I’m sure Congress—and Marshall—will be slapping me with.
