Out of the Dark

58 What’s Not There

With its open-spandrel, concrete-and-steel design, the Key Bridge is the oldest surviving bridge to cross the Potomac. Evan had driven from Georgetown to the Arlington side, where he’d pulled off and parked, letting the six lanes of traffic stream by.

Somewhere miles and miles ahead as the crow flew, twin stone pillars marked a sloping dirt road that cut through an oak forest, leading to the apron of cleared land upon which Jack’s two-story farmhouse sat.

That was the home Evan had grown up in from the age of twelve. An old-fashioned porch and shuttered windows. Plush brown corduroy couches in the living room, pots hanging from a brass rack in the kitchen. A fireplace in the study casting an orange glow on the bookshelves, on the framed photograph of Jack’s dear departed wife, on the faces of Jack and nineteen-year-old Evan as they massaged his first operational alias into place, wrapping it around him like a second skin.

Now he sat and stared at taillights and office buildings cloaked in a haze of car exhaust.

This was the closest he’d come to home since that bleak gray morning in 1997 when Jack had driven him to Dulles International and dropped him at Departures.

Though he was expecting the call, he didn’t fully register the RoamZone until the second ring. He answered sluggishly, “Yeah?”

“What’s wrong?” Joey said.

He cleared his throat, lowered his eyes from the horizon. “Nothing. What do you have?”

“As usual, you’re asking the wrong question.”

“Just spit it out, Joey.”

“You’ve been looking at what’s there. You need to look at what’s not there. Agent Templeton understood that better than you. And I understand it better than her.”

“Which means?”

“Early this morning Templeton pulled in all the information on Secret Service schedules — the Presidential Protective Detail in particular. But she’s looking to see when they worked off-hours, say, or logged an unusual outing that didn’t line up with the official schedule. But the thing is, she’s underestimating our target. He’s DoD-trained, deep, deep black protocols. Which means if he did take an extracurricular outing, he would ensure that his PPD agents didn’t log any time at all. So. Among the cadre of inner agents, I looked at workday absences. Sure enough, a pair of his men had missing half days that correlated. They took the same two mornings off, once in October of last year, once last month. Those mornings also happen to align precisely with gaps in the target’s official schedule.”

Evan could sense his pulse quicken ever so slightly. “So he ducked out without the detail. Just two agents and a sedan.”

“Looks that way,” Joey said. “Next, I hacked into the iCals of the agents’ wives. No family vacay, no medical appointments listed, no kids’ soccer games. Both had an entry that their husbands were gone for the day. Too much of a coincidence.”

“So they snuck the target out.”

“More like he snuck them out,” Joey said. “The agents just had to play chauffeur. No knowledge of what they were participating in, no official record — technically they weren’t even working those mornings.”

“How can we figure out where they went?”

“Each Service vehicle has GPS,” Joey said. “Both days, same location. A house in Bethesda.” She rattled off the address, then paused. “You’ll never guess who it belongs to.”

She told him.

After a moment she said, “You still there?”

“I am.”

“I saw a picture,” she said. “It’s him.”

He waited for his inner disturbance to still. It wasn’t turmoil he felt, not precisely, more like a vibration of his cells. A trip wire that stretched back nearly three decades had been plucked like a guitar string, and the bone-deep resonance refused to recede.

He’d follow it, the trip wire, no matter the course, no matter the cost.

It would lead to the answers he sought.

Hanging up, he pulled out into traffic and pointed the car for Bethesda.