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Like Sheridan’s, the room has been tossed. His dresser is knocked on its front, and his nightstand is busted into pieces. Unlike Sheridan, Henry has a stash of porn magazines. They’re shredded and scattered on the carpet. The only thing untouched is a Marine Corps flag pinned high on the wall over his bed.
Also unlike Sheridan, Henry hasn’t hidden anything in his mattress. I check twice.
Downstairs, Sheridan is trying to search the piles of destruction without touching anything. I veer into the kitchen before joining him. Every dish is broken. The pots and pans are all on the floor. Everything from the fridge has been dumped. Milk and yogurt and eggs have congealed into a rancid jelly on the tile.
I flip the kitchen light switch with the back of my hand, and the overhead lights pop to life. Interesting.
Sheridan has calmed down by the time I join him. He rubs his forehead with his wrist. “I’m sorry.” He’s embarrassed. Mortified, actually. “I shouldn’t have gone off like that.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
He doesn’t look at me when he asks, “Did you find anything?”
I wait, and watch him stare at the wall. “No.”
He doesn’t say a word, just keeps poking at the ruined bookshelf and broken picture frames in the corner where he’s squatting.
“When were you last here, Sheridan?”
“Yesterday morning, before my shift.”
He had the second shift yesterday. I met him before he went on duty, and we had lunch together. I remember how happy he looked when we walked down I Street. How carefree.
That man is a million miles away from the one in front of me now.
“When exactly?”
“Ten… no, ten thirty. I took the ten-forty Metro downtown.”
That leaves a twenty-four-hour window between him leaving and us arriving.
“Can you tell if anything is missing?”
He takes another look around the room. “I don’t think so. The only thing that was really valuable was his TV.” He jerks his head at the shattered flat-screen. “We’d watch Netflix or play PlayStation together—” His voice breaks, and he doesn’t finish.
“Where’s the PlayStation?”
“Over there. Someone took a hammer to it. It’s fucked.”
“Grab it. We’re taking it with us.”
He gives me a watery smile.
I don’t care about Henry and Sheridan’s saved games, and I’m not bringing it out of sentimentality because they used to build memories together late at night. Even though Henry didn’t keep a computer in his home, he apparently couldn’t say no to a video game console.
It’s something we learn in the Service, and something Sheridan is about to learn, too. Every internet-connected device is another access point.
The White House fights off attempted hacks every second of every day. Its defenses are the best in the world, but if a hacker were to turn that kind of a brute force attack onto one of the thousands of White House workers, how long would we last under an onslaught?
Maybe something crawled up the pipe and slid into Henry’s PlayStation. What would a hacker learn if they had an open mic inside the house where two Secret Service agents on the presidential protective detail lived?
Nothing in my apartment is connected to the internet. I don’t have a smart fridge, smart coffee maker, smart photo frame, or voice-activated anything. My laptop is a steel brick encased in a Faraday cage. It hard connects to the Secret Service network in the White House or at headquarters. Never, ever the internet.
The only time I broke that rule was with a burner phone I bought in Anacostia, but I smashed that and threw the pieces into the Potomac the morning after I shattered Brennan’s heart.
Sheridan winds the cord around the broken case and tucks the PlayStation under his arm. “Can I grab some clothes?”
The memory card is molten in my pocket. Is he trying to go back for it? “Be quick.”
