The End Game

9

Boston, Massachusetts

Dr. Ralph Padley woke at seven, as he did every day since moving into the East Broadway brownstone seventeen years ago.

Until his body had turned on him, he had enjoyed starting his days there. The purchase had proved an exceptionally wise investment, as the area was now quite the equal of the Back Bay or South End-his meticulous research having, once again, paid off. As per his rigid habit, he showered, dressed, scraped a dusting of snow and a thin layer of ice from his windshield, then drove to the Starbucks at the corner of Beacon and Charles. Regardless of what he was going through, regardless of the aches and weaknesses, he would stick to his routine as long as he could. It would be his small revenge over what fate had decreed for him.

He walked under the string of Christmas lights hanging inside the faux-classical entrance and joined the short line. Beyond the Ionic columns that met the plaster-molded ceiling, there was a seasonal warmth, though Padley was entirely oblivious to the imminent holidays. More than ever, he vehemently believed that any feelings of joy generated inside retail outlets was nothing more than a cynical exercise in marketing.

Despite it all, Padley felt good today. Apprehensive, certainly. Fearful, even. But deep down, he felt hopeful. Today, he would trigger a sequence of events that, while highly dangerous, would-if successful-lay the foundation of his quest for salvation.

Handing his Harvard University travel mug to his regular morning barista, he ordered his regular morning drink-an Earl Grey Tea Latte-into which he poured a generous splash of cold half-and-half at the milk station. He noticed that the thermos was running rather low, but by good fortune held the exact amount of milk for his beverage.

Sipping his drink, he drove along Beacon and turned left into Clarendon, parking just before the intersection with Boylston Street. He took his gym bag from his car and walked the hundred yards to Boston Sports Club.

He entered the BSC-or at least attempted to-at the exact moment that a slim man wearing a fedora tried to do likewise. After the socially acceptable number of “sorrys” and an immaculately polite “no, excuse me,” the fedora-wearing man deferred and stepped aside, eventually following Padley inside the building.

This exchange caused Padley to wonder why men no longer wore hats as a matter of course. His grandfather had always worn a Homburg and had told the young Ralph that a man’s choice of hat said much about him, but as young Ralph had still been somewhat conflicted about what he wanted to say about himself, he had chosen not to wear a hat. He now had something to offer the world, something of which he could rightly be proud, and wondered whether it wasn’t the time to choose a form of headwear. As things stood, he favored an ivy cap, perhaps in corduroy or wool-anything but Harris Tweed, he mused, thinking it would definitely send out the wrong signal-though he reserved the right to change his mind and opt for something more flamboyant.

He changed, draining the final few drops of his latte as he placed his gym bag inside the locker, then headed straight for the basement pool, which was twenty-five meters long with three lap lanes. At this hour, on a weekday, there was plenty of space for him to swim a hundred lengths of the fluid, rhythmic crawl that had many younger men watching in admiration.

He slipped into the water.

He did a couple of lengths, enjoying the feel of the water sliding around him, feeling the adrenaline light up his body.

Then he felt something else.

A twanging sensation in his chest.

Having self-administered every possible test for heart function many times over, he dismissed this and powered on toward the end of another length.

As he came out of a perfectly executed flip turn, he felt a sharp pain in his left ventricle.

His ability to self-diagnose offered him a brief, albeit illusory, moment of control. But as he passed the ten-meter line, he realized with no little surprise that he was in ventricular fibrillation.

Impossible.

He couldn’t breathe, and gasping for air only made him inhale a lungful of chlorinated water. He was helpless. His entire body, including his head, was now under the surface.

At the edges of his perception, Padley felt the water being displaced as a lifeguard dived into the pool. Within seconds, he was being dragged toward the pool’s edge, where another lifeguard helped pull him out of the water.

The first lifeguard began CPR, but Padley had by now retreated into his oxygen-starved brain and was entirely unaware of what was going on around him. He knew he was now asystolic, which triggered the thought-absurd though it seemed-that the research he had entrusted to the CIA all those years ago had somehow come back to him with interest.

With his body now lost to him, his mind experienced a second moment of clarity as he at last realized that for several years now, his wife had been screwing his neighbor behind his back.

As his heart became still forever, its current, or the dearth of such, only “funny” now to an absurdist, Ralph Padley smiled inside at how beautifully circular was the nature of his death.

Indeed, if he had been able to tell anyone, he would have said he was quite convinced he saw his brother’s angelic face before everything went dark and he entirely forgot who he was and how he fitted into anything at all.

10

Times Square, New York City

One o’clock came and went, and no one turned up.

When I say no one, I don’t mean it literally. People were there. Tons of them. It seemed like nothing short of a serious hurricane could keep the hordes away from the chaotic maelstrom that was Times Square, anytime of day or night. But of all the people there, no one approached or made contact with me.

Which surprised me.

My instincts had been pulling for the guy to be real, either way: whether he was a deep throat, or bait. Either one could help me find out more about my dad and Corrigan. I’d somehow reached the conclusion that it was going to happen, and I was leaning toward him being the real deal and genuinely having some critical information to share with me. And if that was the case, and he hadn’t shown up, it would mean two things: either he got spooked, or someone got to him first.

I mean, I was there. I got there early, scoped the place out. It was packed, as always-in fact, more so. This close to Christmas, it gets even crazier than normal. The square, particularly that part of it, the pedestrianized area by the TKTS tickets booth, was like a condensed mini-Vegas, heaving with people, music, car horns, monster LED screens and neon lights, a relentless assault on the senses, which pretty much summed up most of Manhattan these days. I ended up standing there for over half an hour, scanning the area while my eyes and ears suffered its total onslaught. And in the midst of all that chaos, between the daze of wide-eyed tourists, harried locals, gawkers, hawkers, Elmos and Captain Americas and guitar-playing rhinestone cowboys, it was almost impossible to tell if anyone was watching me. Which was one of the reasons why Times Square was a favorite for unorthodox meetings like this. That, and the multiple routes through which to slip away.

I was annoyed. I wanted him to be here. I needed to hear what he had to say about my dad. Up until his call, all I’d had were my suspicions, based on seeing his initials in that file Corrigan was mentioned in, along with ‘Azorian’ on his desk. The coincidence was too big to ignore, but on the other hand, it would have been great to discover there was actually no connection between my dad and my bête noire.

The phone call had kind of nuked that possibility.

By one thirty, it was time to move on. I checked my phone yet again. Nothing. And it was a thirteen-block walk down to Penn Station, where Tess and our Acela fast train to DC were waiting for me.

Seated on the bleachers above the TKTS booth while feigning to surf through an iPad, Sandman observed the federal agent who was waiting for the meeting that wouldn’t happen.

The iPad was a great prop for this kind of surveillance. Despite the cold and despite the swarm of activity all around him, everyone there, it seemed, was lost in some kind of handheld device, teleported to some alternate social realm-even those who weren’t sitting alone. This new norm was actually quite a boon when it came to shadowing targets. It gave operatives like Sandman something to do with their hands, which, he knew, was something aspiring actors always worried about. Many years and many deaths ago, he’d taken an acting course. Not that he ever wanted to be an actor. He just knew it would help him be more convincing while in character. He’d inhabited many personas in the course of his work and, despite all those kills, he was still a faceless ghost that hadn’t appeared on a single police report or sketch artist’s portrait.

His attention focused on Reilly, he casually scrolled through the pages of The Huffington Post, his default site. It always gave him a perverse thrill to glance at the opinions of people who thought that what they expressed in blogs and comments had any impact on what actually happened. He knew the real power in the world was beyond the reach of these naïve souls. He had probably done more to affect the flow of recent history than all of the site’s bloggers combined.

Another of Sandman’s targets was about to fall asleep forever.

He’d altered his look for the occasion, as he frequently did. Today, he sported a short black beard, some thick-rimmed glasses, and a beige Gant cap over a thick navy blue reversible jacket and faded jeans. He knew how to pass unnoticed, how to keep changing positions while keeping an eye on his quarry. He was a master at surveillance, so much so that not even a well-trained, talented agent would spot him.

Reilly, he was sure, hadn’t.

No one had made contact with the FBI agent. No one slipped him anything, old-school style. There had been no dead drop, no manila envelope or memory stick passed to him by some slippery contact.

Which was good.

It meant Padley hadn’t reached out to Reilly from the grave. Not yet, anyway. From here on they’d need to make sure that if he did, whatever he’d intended to give Reilly wouldn’t see the light of day. Not that they had any reason to think Padley had anything to reach out with. Sandman had stuck around long enough to watch Padley’s wife hurry out of the house when the call about his drowning came in. He’d sneaked in and searched the doctor’s home office and come up empty-handed. He’d need to do the same at the doctor’s office, as soon as he got a chance. Their inside man at the NSA had already gone through Padley’s hard drives and found nothing.

He watched as Reilly checked his watch and scanned the busy square again.

Still nothing.

As he studied Reilly, he wondered how he would ultimately choose to terminate the man. The agent was young, fit, outwardly healthy-and attuned to outside threats. It was an interesting and challenging assignment, to be sure. Unlike Padley. That had been a cakewalk. Sure, the doctor was being careful. But he was old, and although he didn’t look it or act it, at death’s door. And the cancer would have killed him anyway. Not that he felt he needed any self-justification, but Sandman knew he was simply bringing forward the inevitable. Indeed, that was all he ever really did, for any of his victims-hasten the sleep from which one never wakes.

A job description that, curiously, fitted his code name, even though it wasn’t how it had originated.

His buddies had christened him Sandman when the heavy partying had kicked in back in junior high, which was when he first started putting his unusual characteristic to use: he hardly needed any sleep. Three or four hours a night were plenty for him, and he could easily stay awake for two or three days without flagging, all of which came in handy when it was time to juggle partying and exams. His ability to remain energetic and upbeat when all those around him were conking out amused and bewildered his friends, and so he became known as Sandman. It was a jokey, light-hearted nickname at first, and it stayed with him after he was recruited by the CIA and sent to their training facility at Camp Peary in Virginia, the place affectionately known as The Farm.

An unusual side-effect of the estimated one- to three-percent of the population who can thrive on just a minimal amount of sleep per night is that they enjoy a high tolerance for physical and psychological pain. They’re also generally “behaviorally activated” due to subclinical hypomania, meaning they exhibit a mild form of manic behavior that is also characterised by euphoria, optimism and-useful for his chosen calling-disinhibition. Beyond his considerable talents, these innate qualities also contributed to his success at the Farm, and it was from there that he was handpicked by Roos and Tomblin for their unique assignments.

It was after he demonstrated how effective he was as a killing machine out the field that his nickname took on an entirely different connotation. It was also a handy code name to have: it had many common associations in popular culture and parlance, which was useful in an age of ever-increasing keyword voice and data surveillance.

Sandman watched Reilly walk off and tucked in behind him.

It was time to find the right opportunity to execute the second part of his orders.

11

Arlington, Virginia

I left the rental on North Highland, to the east of Lyon Village Park, just south of the tennis courts where the trees provided almost total cover. The temperature had hit zero, but there was no snow on the ground or forecast for the next few days. Which was lucky. Any snow and the drive from Union Station to Kirby’s neighborhood would have been a hellish nightmare of unintended donuts and stalled Priuses.

I was as low-key as I could be without attracting undue attention in this upscale neighborhood. Underneath the wool cap and winter parka I could have been anyone as I followed the curve of Twentieth Street North and around Lyon Village Community House with its colonial-style bell tower. I could see the Lee Highway behind a low cluster of pristine apartment buildings. It was the tail end of the route I drove to get here.

Passing a small, well-maintained parking lot before skirting a small cluster of trees and bushes, I turned left onto North Harvard Street.

The houses were large here. Between four and six bedrooms, worth anything upward of one and a half million apiece, easy. But there was a strong atmosphere of tradition and neighborly feeling. Of course, there was as much moral compromise here as anywhere else. Had to be. It was just better concealed.

As I turned in to Twenty-first Street North, I could see the gabled roof of the three-story house that I knew belonged to Kirby. A Stars and Stripes hung from the flagpole that stuck out from the central gable, same as it did on the Google Maps Street View when I’d checked out Kirby’s address that morning.

There were lights on inside and I assumed his wife and kids were already back home. Kirby himself was due to arrive back in the next half hour, or so Kurt had concluded after a thorough trawl of the Kirby family’s recent credit card statements.

I stepped off the sidewalk and walked over to a group of trees at the edge of a large lawn. Standing within them, I was pretty much completely camouflaged. The lawn rolled up toward a large, Dutch-style house, which stood across the street and a couple of houses down from the gabled house.

My watch showed twenty after six. Not long now.

I did a quick three-sixty sweep.

The street was quiet apart from a young couple pushing a baby buggy back home after a bracing walk around the block-probably with the intention of sending the buggy’s inhabitant to sleep.

No security lights that I could see. No cameras either. The residents obviously trusted their neighbors to be vigilant.

It wasn’t long before a dark blue Lexus sedan pulled around the corner. As it turned right onto the driveway of the gabled house, the garage door started to swing open, its mechanism activated from inside the car.

The driver remained inside his vehicle for a moment.

I broke from behind the trees and started to walk briskly toward the open garage door.

Kirby finally climbed out of the Lexus, a shopping bag clutched in his left hand, his keys held between thumb and forefinger.

The garage door started to close.

Kirby opened the rear passenger door and leant in to retrieve something with his right hand.

I sprinted quietly to close the final few yards, ducked under the open garage door and dragged the first thing I saw, a plastic box of rollerblades, level with the frame, blocking the safety beam and ensuring the door could not close.

Kirby, his head inside the car, hadn’t heard me enter the garage. He ducked out of the passenger door and straightened, a bouquet of roses in his right hand.

When he saw me facing him all the blood drained from his face. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I gestured toward the flowers. “Making amends?”

I could see him wrestling with his instinct to blow up in my face. After a moment he seemed to relax, choosing level-headedness over righteous indignation.

“What are you doing here?” he hissed. “I told you I never wanted to see you again.”

The garage door had already tried to swing shut then opened again.

“I need you to do something else for me.”

From inside a navy blue Chevy Malibu parked less than twenty yards farther along the street, Sandman was listening through a long-range directional pipe microphone. Accompanying visuals were provided courtesy of a sniper’s scope.

He had been surveilling Reilly ever since the agent’s aborted meeting with Padley. The train journey from New York City to DC had been uneventful. As advised, there had been a car waiting for him at Union Station, its key in a magnetized case stuck to the underside of the chassis. The car had been parked in such a position as to allow Sandman to tail his target as he left the station.

The moment it was clear which house Reilly was interested in, he sent the address via encrypted email to one of his employers’ data geeks. The surprising response, less than a minute later, told him the house belonged to one of their co-workers, a career analyst at the CIA named Stan Kirby. The man had spent twenty-five years at Langley and was currently a senior intelligence analyst with Level 2-B clearance. Despite two disciplinary warnings for timekeeping, he still had full benefits and was due the company’s top-tier pension package.

Sandman focused on the sound coming through his earbuds as Kirby gave his reply.

“Something else? No. Fuck you. You said we were done last time.”

“I know, and that was what I’d hoped,” he heard Reilly say. “But something new came up, and I have no choice.”

“No choice, no choice,” the analyst mocked. “Don’t give me that crap again. You love doing this.”

I tensed up. This wasn’t going well. “I don’t. But I’m willing to do what I need to do to get answers.”

“Yeah, well, screw you. Screw. You. I’m done with this bullshit. You wanna tell my wife, go ahead. Hell, her sister was the best thing that happened to me-until you ruined it.”

I held his scowl, then shrugged and pulled out my phone. “Fine. That’s the way you want to play it.”

I feigned dialing a number, then brought the phone up to my ear.

Kirby’s face sank. “What are you doing?”

“Calling your wife. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

He dropped the flowers and shopping bag and leapt at me, his hands swatting at the phone. “Are you fucking nuts? Hang up. Kill the God damn call.”

I brought the phone down and stared him down.

“What is it this time?” he asked, beaten down and angry.

“My father. I want to know what the agency has on him.”

Sandman had already guessed at the history here. The agent had blackmailed someone inside the CIA. He had his own personal mole there. And that presented his superiors with a problem. If Reilly had been fed classified information relating to anything that involved them, he was a direct threat. Especially seeing as the call from Padley would have confirmed for the agent that there were layers he had yet to peel back.

“Your father?” Kirby said. “Who the hell is your father?”

“Colin Reilly. He’s dead. He died in 1980. There’s a mention of him in one of the Corrigan files you got me.”

Sandman shook his head at Reilly’s impetuous nature. In the morning, he fails to get hold of information he thinks might unlock an impenetrable mystery, and by the evening he’s attempting to reactivate a relationship of coercion from which he’d already got out completely clean. It was exactly the kind of reckless behavior that was liable to get you killed.

The reckless behavior that presented Sandman with an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

He hurriedly typed another encrypted message:

KIRBY FED CLASSIFIED FILES TO REILLY. FIND WHICH. REED CORRIGAN + COLIN REILLY NAMECHECKED.

He pressed send, pulled out the earbuds, placed the scope, mic and buds on the passenger seat and climbed out of the car, pocketing his handset as he straightened. He’d already thought out how to deal with Reilly while having Kirby at their mercy until they’d found out everything they needed to know. At that point, Stan Kirby would meet a tragic, but entirely accidental end.

Sandman walked toward the open garage.

I watched as Kirby racked his brains as he knelt down and picked the bouquet of flowers off the garage floor.

“I don’t remember seeing any mention of him.”

“It was only his initials, CR.” I said it louder than I meant to, my frustration boiling over.

“Pipe down, will you? She’ll hear us.” He set the flowers on his car.

I could hear the desperation in his voice and see the dread in his face as he pictured everything he thought he’d resolved about to unravel. I was in no mood to cut him any slack.

“Same exercise, different name,” I told him. “Get me everything on file about my dad and we’re done.”

He scoffed. “Why am I having a déjà vu here?”

There was the faintest sound behind me. I spun to find a gun pointed right at me. The man holding it wore a black unbadged baseball cap, which along with the thick-framed glasses he had on pretty much obscured his eyes. A short, but full dark beard covered the lower half of his face and his hands were sheathed by black leather gloves.

The guy was a pro.

I watched as he took in the entire situation in one sweep, then raised his left hand and pulled on a red plastic T-bar suspended from the garage door by a short rope, thus disengaging the door from the motor and ensuring he couldn’t be shut inside.

I glanced over at Kirby. He seemed thoroughly spooked. He didn’t know him.

The bearded man finally spoke, addressing me first and waving his gun as a conductor’s stick.

“Reilly, take out your gun and put it on the ground. Easy.”

So he knew who I was. That told me most of what I needed to know right now. I paused for a couple of seconds, assessing the immediate situation, then slowly took out my Glock and placed it carefully on the garage floor.

“Stan, bring it over to me. Pick it up from its barrel. Two fingers. Gently.”

Kirby complied and handed it over to him. The bearded man took it carefully, also from the edge of its barrel, then he moved his hand so he gripped it the right way around, but by the tip of his gloved fingers.

Like he didn’t want to wipe my prints off it.

“Stan, do you have a gun in the house?”

“Yes. In the bedroom. It’s in a lockbox.”

The man thought about it for a second. “Not very convenient, Stan. Not when the guy who’s blackmailed you before comes back to threaten you again. Comes to your own house and asks you to break the law and commit high treason. This armed motherfucker walks into your garage without invitation and waves his gun in your face to make you betray your country. What do you do, Stan? Do you just sit back and watch? Or do you do something about it?”

Kirby just stood there, nailed to his spot, like a silent pressure cooker on the verge of blowing.

“I’ll tell you what you do, Stan.”

The bearded man aimed my own gun at me.

“You jump the bastard and you kill him.”

12

“Makes sense, doesn’t it, Stan? Besides, I don’t see how you have a choice here. You’ve got a family to protect. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a supermax prison, do you?”

Kirby looked like he was about to have a full-blown heart attack. The bearded man kept my gun pointed directly at me, clearly having decided that Kirby represented zero threat.

“Take a breath and answer me, Stan, because in about ten seconds I’ll just shoot you both where you stand and let your friends at Langley worry about cleaning up this mess. The mess you put them in.”

Kirby’s eyes lit up. I could see him processing: the agency knew about everything. Somehow, they knew that he’d leaked the files to me, and there was something in them so dangerous that the leak had to be plugged indefinitely. But they were offering him a way out. A way to keep his job and his pension. All he had to do was kill me.

“They’ll kill you too,” I told him. “He’s already got the narrative they’re going with.”

Kirby glared at me. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? You see many choices here?”

The bearded man told Kirby, “So we’re good with how this is going to play out-?”

In the split second that his eyes flicked across to Kirby, in the heightened intensity of that instant that consumed everything else just before a kill, I launched myself at him.

No choice. I wasn’t going to just stand there and let them kill me at their leisure before polishing up their storyline and figured if I was going to get a bullet either way, anywhere in my torso would be preferable to my brain.

I had two guns to contend with, and aimed each of my hands at one of them. My right hand locked on his gun, my left hand on my Glock, my torso slamming into him in tandem with my head butting into his skull.

A shot exploded from his gun as he reeled back, my hands still locked on his. The noise jolted us both for a nanosecond, and I had no idea where it landed. We struggled as I tried to knee him, but he blocked it with his own leg and shoved me back, regaining the momentum. I had to keep him close, I couldn’t let him free himself and back away, not even with one gun, so I kept my hands firmly gripped around his and I tried to wrangle my gun out of his hand-

Which is when the second shot burst out, this one from my gun, and then it all went haywire. I managed to twist his wrist enough to loosen his grip on my Glock, and as it fell out, I heard Kirby grunt and thud down to the ground just as a scream of “Stan?” came from somewhere inside the house, a woman’s scream. In that frenzied moment, the distraction was just enough to allow the bearded man to pummel me across the temple with the grip of his own gun.

The blow hit me hard-real hard. I felt my teeth rattle against my jawbone as the blow connected. I struggled to stay on my feet, but I was weakened. We struggled some more, with me trying to muster any strength I had left to keep my grip locked on his gun hand and keep it aimed away from me. Then an alarm started blaring, the house’s alarm, I figured-Stan’s wife, hitting the panic button. It was like a tiny burst of smelling salts to my battered senses, and I used it to counter-attack and tried to headbutt him, only he saw it coming and avoided it. It was a gamble that left me exposed and he made full use of it, pounding me with a hook that connected squarely against my jaw. I blacked out for a second as my legs gave way under me and regained some partial sight just as I hit the ground, my unprotected skull cracking against the hard floor. I was at the edge of consciousness. I could feel the blood seeping out down my forehead from the first blow, and through foggy eyes, I caught sight of Kirby lying on the floor, a few feet away from me. The bullet had hit him through the cheekbone, and from the bloody mess at the back of his head, I could tell that it had gone straight through his brain.

I looked up and saw the bearded man pointing his gun down at me.

Then the woman yelled “Stan!” again.

Sandman heard it too and figured he had only seconds to get out.

His mind moved lightning-fast. He’d wanted Reilly dead, but he couldn’t shoot him with his own gun. He quickly scanned the floor around them looking for Reilly’s Glock, but before he could find it, his eyes locked on the casing from the shell fired from his own gun. The woman yelled ‘Stan’ again, her voice much closer this time. He had a second or two to get out of there if he wasn’t going to have to kill her too, an option he quickly discarded as too messy. He bent down and retrieved the casing. It wasn’t as clean as he wanted it-he didn’t have time to recover the stray bullet-but under the circumstances, it would have to do.

He then ducked through the open garage door and slipped away briskly, heading toward his car.

As the wail of the house alarm egged me back to consciousness, I felt my head. My beanie was soaked through on one side, courtesy of a fast-spreading patch of fresh blood. As I dragged myself onto my knees, the internal door to the house swung open and Kirby’s wife stepped into the garage, a handgun clutched in her hand. She screamed “Stan!” as she saw her husband lying dead on the floor, then looked at me and swung the gun at me, her hands shaking.

“What have you done? Stan! Oh my God, Stan?”

I was still on my knees, getting up slowly, my vision blurred, my head pounding, but I raised both hands as defensively as I could.

“Please, don’t shoot. It’s not what it looks like. Please, listen to me. I’m with the FBI.”

Sobs were heaving through her body as her face contorted and went from confusion and fear into wild rage-and I could see she was about to pull the trigger.

I was now on my feet and I faltered back a step, then another, hesitantly, my hands still way up and wide apart.

“Listen to me-”

She looked completely terrified, but one thing I knew was that an adrenalized shot with no aim at all was potentially far more lethal than a considered shot with a wayward aim.

She fired.

The bullet whizzed past my cheek, so close I was sure it took a few skin cells with it.

I wasn’t going to risk a second one. I turned and ducked as I bolted through the garage door, willing my legs back to life.

I staggered toward my car, but quickly had to stop-a neighbor had stepped out of his house and had a phone in his hand. Then I heard the first police siren-coming from the direction I’d parked my rental. The neighbor must have called 911.

I lurched right and changed tack.

I veered off the street and ducked up the driveway of a neighboring house, cutting through to its back yard. I crashed through some bushes and over a patch of grass, heading across two back gardens toward another house at the end of the street, all the windows of which were dark. Within minutes, there’d be a police chopper in the air above me with a search beam sweeping the neighborhood.

I had to get far from here, fast.

I remembered the apartment buildings behind the Lee Highway and the parking lot for the residents beside them. No gates or fences. By now, most of the residents would be home and not going anywhere until morning.

Left hand clutched to my head in a vain attempt to staunch the bleeding, I swerved around the house, hoping there weren’t any motion sensors on the property.

At the side of the house, I clambered over a fence, crashing to the ground on the other side as my legs gave way. My vision was still blurring from the concussion and there was blood running into my left eye. I rolled down a steep bank, plowing through seemingly endless lines of bushes as I careened downwards over a thick layer of wood chips, finally coming to a stop against a tree.

My recollection had been accurate. I was lying about a hundred yards from the unsecured parking lot beside the low apartment buildings behind the Lee Highway.

More sirens sounded, no more than a quarter mile away. I shook my head, pulled myself upright and staggered like a wounded animal toward the small lot, already scanning the vehicles for one old enough to be hot-wired.

13

Washington, DC

“Sean. Me again. Just a little heads up, baby-the car’s picking us up in ten minutes. Ten. Minutes. You do remember why we’re here, don’t you? That casual pizza evening at your buddy’s pad on Pennsylvania Avenue? At the… where was it, exactly? Oh, yes. I remember now. The White House!” The last three words were more yelled than said. Then, mock-cheerfully: “Call me, sweetie. This better be good. Historically good. Bye.”

She clicked off, stabbing the iPhone so hard to end the call that she almost cracked the screen with her nail.

It was the third message she’d left him.

She stared at herself in the hotel room mirror yet again, scrutinizing every inch of her appearance: the hair, the makeup, the jewelry, every fold of her dress, her shoes, right down to the pedicure on her toes.

Perfect. Immaculate. In her humble opinion.

Just one thing missing: her date for the big night.

It had happened before, sure. Maybe not on such a huge occasion. But he’d done a few no-shows. His job was like that. The unexpected had to be expected sometimes. She knew that.

But this felt different. Ever since the summer, ever since that whole affair in California and Mexico, he’d been keeping things from her. She knew that too. And it had worried her. She’d asked him about it, not too often, just when it felt like the right time to do so, when she felt he was a bit of a softer target than normal. And she’d failed. He’d kept insisting there was nothing going on. And now, this.

She was worried. There was no way to convince herself otherwise. You developed an instinct about these things; about the person you loved and were sharing your life with. And right now, her instincts were on the boil.

Where are you, Sean?

I saw my phone light up with Tess’s call, but I couldn’t bring himself to take it. I was still groggy, my brain still frazzled by the frenzy I’d just survived-and escaped.

I didn’t know what to say without worrying her, scaring her, implicating her-I had to think things through.

I knew she was probably already beyond worried. No call, on a night like this-she’d have gone through frustration, through fury, and on to worry.

I hated putting her through this. But I couldn’t do any better. Right now, I had to keep moving, and think.

Keeping my eyes on the road, I pulled the cover off the back of my phone and dug its battery out.

And kept heading north.

“Tess, it’s so lovely to meet you,” the First Lady said as an aide introduced them.

Tess shook hands with her before turning to President Yorke, who asked, “So where is that barnstorming man of yours then? We were expecting the two of you?”

She felt immensely awkward standing there, an awkwardness that had started long before she’d reached the Southeast Entrance. The setting alone was intimidating enough, in the best of circumstances: Christmas dinner at the White House, hosted by the most powerful man on the planet and his wife. Not exactly a casual cocktail party, by any means. Throw in the fact that you were turning up alone, without your partner-who was the reason for the invitation in the first place-and without being able to give any convincing answer for why he wasn’t there, and we’re talking Richter-scale jitters of unease.

Henry “Hank” Yorke was coming up to the end of his first term, but the prospect of a whole year of monster campaigning that was about to kick off within weeks didn’t seem to faze him. Tall and charismatic, he had just turned seventy-one, which, if he were re-elected, would make him the oldest person ever to be elected president. Still, he was in fine physical shape, his charisma and his energy intact, and with the country enjoying a period of economic stability and no bruising foreign wars, he seemed reasonably assured of a second term.

President Yorke and his wife Megan typically hosted a whole series of social events in the month that led to Christmas. Their social secretaries and their staff had been busy for weeks, planning the cocktail parties and dinners, cutting and pasting their way through the lists of donors, lobbyists, bloggers and reporters, government staffers and foreign diplomats and all kinds of supporters or notable achievers of every kind, making sure the guests lists were well balanced and well matched, vetting them again and again to make sure no personal slights or diplomatic faux pas would ensue. Tonight’s event, though, was no six hundred-guest whirlwind tour of the White House’s various reception rooms. This was a more intimate seated dinner in the State Dining Room-intimate, as in eighty people seated at eight tables of ten. Not as easy to get lost in the crowd or hide the embarrassing, empty seat at the table.

“Yes, where is he?” the First Lady asked.

Tess just smiled uncomfortably, and all she could think of saying was simply, “I honestly couldn’t tell you,” with an embarrassed, half-laugh.

I’m making excuses for Sean with the president! She shuddered inwardly.

“I was so looking forward to meeting him,” Megan Yorke said. “Hank’s told me so much about him, and we owe him so much, of course. I haven’t had the chance to thank him.” She turned to her husband. “I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me what really happened that night or that you’d met with him until after Agent Reilly was back home in New York. I mean, I was there, too, wasn’t I?”

Yorke gave her a practiced smile and nodded, expertly hiding any reaction to her gripe. “Sweetheart, we needed to make sure the threat was fully contained. I didn’t want you worrying unnecessarily.”

They both owed their lives to Reilly. No one could argue that. As Tess flicked a quick glance around the room, she wondered how many of the people around her had been there that night earlier this year, at the White House Correspondents Dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington, the night a rogue Russian agent came close to causing a historic bloodbath. Yorke and his wife, along with most of their senior staffers and a star-studded list of guests, were saved from a horrific death, which was why Reilly had been invited to this dinner. Tess had debated not coming at all if he didn’t show up, but she’d decided one of them showing up was marginally less rude than both.

“You know how it is,” Tess said, forcing a smile to crack her tensely locked facial muscles. “He’s probably out there chasing down some psycho while we’re sitting here enjoying this very lovely Merlot.”

“I don’t know how you can take it in your stride like that,” the First Lady said. “It’s so admirable of you, not even knowing where he is half the time, I imagine. At least when Hank here was still at the Agency, I gave up making any kind of social plans knowing how many times he’d stood me up, but at least I knew where he was and I knew he wasn’t in danger since he was a desk jockey,” she added with a small laugh and a sideways, playful glance at her husband. “Your life must be-well, I don’t envy you. It can’t be easy.”

The president, whose route to politics and the White House had begun in intelligence, where he ultimately ended up running the CIA, nodded calmly in agreement. “I’m sure whatever it is he’s doing, we’re probably lucky he’s doing it.” His expression turned a bit more serious and he seemed to be studying Tess more closely. “You know, a lot of people aren’t thrilled with his way of handling things-I’ve had more than a few calls about him-but I just tell them to back off. If anything, we need more guys like him. So whatever reason he can’t be here is fine with me. And at least, we got to meet you.”

She and Reilly had been placed at a table by the gingerbread White House, which she was told was something they crafted every year. It wasn’t long before the hosts and their guests were all seated and enjoying a first course of chanterelle mushroom soup with goat cheese fritters, Reilly’s empty seat staring at her from across the table. By the end of the meal, she felt like a wreck. Three times, she’d suffered the chastising eyes of the table companions who’d noticed her sneaking a glance at her phone under the table, but her screen was clear of any notifications. Reilly hadn’t called or messaged her.

A profound sense of worry was crippling her.

Where the hell are you, Sean?

14

Lower East Side, Manhattan

The cushioning on the armchair was about as soft as a bale of reclaimed metal, but I still felt like I was going to drift off any second.

My head was pounding-as much from overexertion due to grinding over the events and my options at this point as from the blow from my gun.

I checked my watch: five after two. My host was out late, even for a weekday, obviously enjoying having his life back after the circadian confusion of the past few weeks and no doubt busy converting the endless stream of Tinder matches into flesh-and-bone conquests. I just hoped he’d come back home instead of staying over with whatever buxom free spirit he’d graced with his fickle presence.

I’d hot-wired a vintage Honda Accord and driven it into the city, where I’d left it in a parking garage. Coincidentally, and weirdly, I found a dead ringer for Nick’s fur hat on the dash, which I “borrowed” -the warmth it offered my still-fragile head trumping its questionable aesthetics.

I’d walked the five blocks to the familiar apartment building. Imitating my partner’s gruff voice, I’d told a furious random resident via intercom that I’d had too much to drink and forgotten my house keys and after they’d reluctantly buzzed me in, I’d picked the lock of the rent-controlled sublet in which I was now squatting.

It was unlikely my host would be feeling particularly hospitable when he arrived home. Being either sound asleep or unconscious would in all likelihood make things even worse, so I forced myself to yet again methodically to go through everything that had led up this night. Even in my addled state, I knew that something might land differently, trigger a new memory or provoke the kind of tangential thought process that could lead to fresh insight. Two hours later I was drifting on a thick cloud of despair, exhaustion, throbbing pain and borderline concussion when I heard the apartment door squeal open.

I tried to stand, but my head felt like an anvil. I crashed back down into the armchair as Nick walked into the room and switched on the light.

His jaw dropped as he spotted me-the beaver still on my head, a thick stream of dried blood plastered to the side of my face and a fine coating of rock salt down the length of one trouser leg.

“What the fuck… Sean?”

“So you don’t know already?”

“What are you talking about?”

My voice was weak. “No, I just thought… they would have called you by now.”

He went to fish his work BlackBerry out of his pocket. “My phone’s on silent. It’s been a big night, I mean…” He hesitated a bit, like he was unsure about what to say, then added, “Tinder booty call, you know how it is-”

Then he saw the screen.

“Shit,” he grumbled. “Eleven missed calls.” He raised his eyes and studied me, then any remaining light dimmed right out of his expression. “What’s going on?”

“Sit down, man. Just… sit down.”

I finally told my partner everything.

The whole messed-up story, starting with my first encounter with Kirby. I didn’t give out Kurt’s name, though. I figured I owed him his anonymity, and Nick didn’t pick at it. Instead, he just sat there and listened, shaking his head but holding back his unspoken disapproval and saying nothing until I was done. Then he just sat there in silence for what felt like a hell of a long time.

He finally took a long, haggard breath, leaned forward, and looked me squarely in the eyes. “You need to hand yourself in, Sean. It’s the only way. Every second you’re not in custody just makes it look worse.”

“No. No way.” I was too burnt out to elaborate.

“It’s the only way. At least then, you have a chance they’ll believe you. You have to do it. Spill the whole story. The blackmail, the files. Everything. You know how it works. If everything you say is true, which we know it is, if it can all be verified, which I can make damn sure of, then maybe there’s something just north of a snowball’s chance in hell that your version of the past twenty-four hours will be believed as well. Or at least considered till evidence is found to support it.”

In my mind, the chances of that weren’t even worth considering.

“No,” I said. “Look, they’ve been protecting this Corrigan all along. For whatever reason, they don’t want him found. They’ll claim he never existed and bury me.” It sounded much worse now that I was voicing it. “I need to find him myself.”

“Right, because you’ve been so stunningly successful at it so far?”

I lost it. “What do you want from me, Nick? Look at me. I’m fucked. You want me to just serve them up my head on a platter?”

“Jesus, Sean,” he shot back. “Listen to yourself. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“We were struggling for the gun when it went off,” I yelled. “My prints are all over it. His wife saw me. Me-no one else. Just me.”

“There wouldn’t have been a struggle if the guy in the beard wasn’t there,” he yelled back. “It was self-defense-”

“Which is impossible to prove if I can’t wheel in the beard to back up my story.”

“You think you’re in any fit state to be doing anything? I mean, look at you. It’s a miracle you’re not laid out on a sidewalk somewhere.” He took a breath, studied me some more, then his tone calmed. “It’s got to stop, Sean. You’ve got to stop with the lone vigilante shit. I need my partner back. I need my buddy back. I’ve watched you get totally obsessed by this Reed Corrigan, and… you’ve changed, man. All these secrets… And your focus isn’t there any more. Your mind used to be one hundred percent on the job, but ever since last summer… You’re always disappearing off on your own, doing Christ knows what.”

“We got Daland, didn’t we?”

“We got Daland because however much your attention is elsewhere, you’re still a damn good agent. Nothing will ever change that. But look where it’s got you. I mean… Christ!”

I was too tired to argue, but I heard the edge of desperation in my own voice. “You think I’m enjoying it? You think I’m happy my partner is down on me the whole time? I can barely concentrate on anything without that bastard popping into my head? It’s the same thing at home. Alex may be OK-better, at any rate-but I’m still back there. Every time I look at him, I think about what they did to him, and it just… I can’t let go, Nick. And now there’s my dad, too…” I tailed off, took a couple of deep breaths. “I need to know what happened to him. And I have to do it alone. More than ever.”

“What if you find something you don’t like, something you were better off not knowing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if your dad was in bed with these guys and really did kill himself out of guilt?”

“‘Guilt?’”

“Maybe. Who knows. Maybe he was part of something nasty and he couldn’t live with that. I mean, what do you really know about him, Sean? Sometimes, some doors are best left unopened. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to know about everything my dad was up to after he left us.”

I was too incensed to even begin to answer him, but even in my worked-up state, I couldn’t dismiss his words entirely. All I could bring myself to say was, “He wasn’t part of anything nasty. He was a good guy.”

Nick shrugged, calmer now. “Yeah, well, I hope he was, buddy. I really do.” He sat there and just stared at me, nodding his head slowly, deep in thought.

“OK,” he said. He nodded again, to himself, solemnly, then pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll go make us some coffee.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes, eagerly anticipating the caffeine hit. I hadn’t been sure that Nick would see things my way, but I had to keep pushing. We were partners, after all.

I must have dozed off because I woke as Nick walked back into the living room, a steaming mug of coffee in each hand.

“Should have stayed the night with Rochelle.” He placed his mug-bearing the deeply ironic slogan “Husband of the Year”-on a low table in front of a battered sofa. “She offered, you know. But there I was thinking I needed a clean shirt for the morning. Big mistake, huh?”

He turned to hand me one of the black-and-white FBI mugs from The White House gift shop, a gift from yours truly.

“It’s been a night of big mistakes,” I muttered.

Then, just as I took the mug, he grabbed my wrist, cuffed it and pulled the other end down toward the metal arm of the chair. The mug smashed against the hardwood floor, splashing scalding hot coffee across us both.

Using his downward momentum against him, I tried to wrench his arm all the way toward the floor so I could lock my free arm around his neck and pull his gun with my cuffed hand, but he knew exactly what I would try and was already exerting counter pressure in an upward trajectory-enough to bring the open cuff level with the metal tube. He closed the cuff with his free hand and stepped back.

“What the hell, Nick? What are you doing?”

He looked straight at me-his expression tense and apprehensive as I did the obligatory struggling gesture with my cuffed hand. The cushioning may have been past its comfort date, but the metal frame was rock solid.

“Nick,” I blurted. “Don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry.” He was quite deliberately echoing my earlier reply.

“I’m getting closer,” I rasped. “The shooter who followed me to Kirby’s house must be working for Corrigan. And they don’t want me to find out the truth about my father. Why else would they act now? They could have killed me anytime.”

“Sean, listen to yourself. ‘CR’? That could be anyone.”

“What about Azorian? I told you. I saw it on his desk-”

Nick exploded. “That was a zillion years ago, for Christ’s sake! How can you possibly be sure you remember it right? And anyway, say there is this big conspiracy, say you find out something bad happened to your dad? What then? Then you have to find out who was involved. And why. And then you need to punish them. Just like with Alex. There’s no end to that journey, Sean. And you want to do it all by yourself. Without me, without the Bureau. On the sly. That’s just nuts, Sean. How in God’s name can you not see that?”

I was about ready to explode myself, but I took a breath and looked my partner right in the eye. The whole set up was so absurd that I’d resolved not to share it with anyone, but the time had come for full disclosure.

“Look, there’s… there’s something else. I didn’t tell you because he said not to tell anyone. So they don’t get killed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Some guy called me. I don’t know who. Electronic voice modulator, prepaid, the works. He told me he had information about my dad. He said he would tell me the truth. We arranged to meet but he didn’t show.”

“Are you actually hearing yourself? And this ‘deep throat’… you’re saying he didn’t show up. Meaning you went to the meet alone. Without me to back you up. And maybe grab the guy and bitch-slap the truth out of him. That’s just-that’s great, Sean. Just real clear thinking there.”

“I didn’t want to get you sucked into this.”

Nick raised his hands and shook the air with them. “So you decide to head down to DC to blackmail Kirby into getting you that information. Just like that. You see what I’m talking about, right? This isn’t an investigation, Sean. It’s one burnt-out, revenge-obsessed agent on a mission to self-destruct.” The veins popped on his neck as he yelled it. “So this is my intervention, OK? I’m not going to let you do it. Not for my sake-I mean, forget me. I’m irredeemable. But for Tess and Kim. And Alex. Hell, and for you, ’cause I love you, you dumb fuck.” He held my gaze, then plunked himself back down heavily on the sofa across the room from my armchair.

He pulled out his phone. “You’re going to hand yourself in.”

I shook my head. “No, Nick. Don’t…”

“You’re giving yourself up. Right now.”

I watched him unlock his phone. “No. Listen to me. You think I’ll be safe with the cops? These guys want me dead. Put me in some holding cell and they’ll get to me.”

“We’re not going to the cops. We’re keeping this in house. I’ll take you down to Federal Plaza. We’ll go over the whole thing with Gallo, step by step. Then we’ll decide what the hell we’re going to do.”

“They’ll get to me. Anywhere in the system and they’ll get to me.”

“Not on my watch.”

He took out his phone and hit dial. He waited for several seconds, then said, “Boss? Sorry to wake you. Yeah, it’s about Reilly.” A beat, then he rolled his eyes. “Let me get a God damn word in and I’ll tell you.”

I could hear his teeth grinding as he listened to the Assistant Director in Charge ream him out.

“He’s here, with me,” he finally put in. “He wants to hand himself in, but only if you can guarantee FBI custody.” A pause, then, “OK. We’ll be waiting.”

He ended the call.

I felt like someone had unloaded a cement mixer in the pit of my stomach. “What have you done, man?”

“I’m saving your life.”

I shook my head with despair. “You think Gallo, of all people, will honor that?”

“You’re one of his. I think the ADIC will do whatever it takes to give the Bureau a chance of containing this cluster fuck. And I’ll be here to make sure of it.”

“They won’t give us Corrigan. Without him, we’ve got nothing.”

“You saved the president’s life, Sean. Maybe it’s time we called in the big guns.”

“Even then, you’ll come up empty handed, trust me.”

“You should have a little faith, Sean.”

“I’m all out.”

There was nothing left to say. We just sat there in silence and waited for the callback from Gallo. We were both clearly running different scenarios through our rattled brains, because Nick then broke the silence and said, “If the Bureau doesn’t get anywhere, we go to the press.”

I shrugged. “If I’m not dead by then.”

“Let me worry about keeping you alive. You think about what you’re going to tell Tess.”

Her name hit me even harder than the pistol whipping. Everything frittered away as my head filled with images of my family. Maybe Nick was right. Maybe my resolve to find out what happened to my dad so I could let go of the past was stopping me from seeing what effect the present was having on Tess and our kids and putting our future at risk.

Either way, I’d be dealing with it from inside an FBI interview room.

Nick’s phone rang. He picked up, listened, then said, “OK. We’ll meet you there in an hour.”

He turned to me. “Gallo’s coming in.” He then reached over and handed me his phone. “You need to call Tess. Then you need to find yourself a good lawyer.”

15

Washington, DC

“Sean, what the hell’s going on? The FBI says you’re wanted for-”

I heard some shuffling movement on the other end of the line, like someone was taking the phone from her, then a male voice said, “Agent Reilly? This is Tom Murray. DC field office. Where are you?”

So they were there already.

I was fully expecting it, but still. It was an easy trail. My gun. My prints. My rental car, in my name. Train tickets bought together. A quick call, maybe to the house or to the office, would have shown us being in DC for the big dinner. A hotel check would have kicked up our reservation.

The dinner. I wondered when they’d got to Tess. Before, after or-ouch-during.

“I’m in FBI custody in New York. I’ve handed myself in to Special Agent Aparo. Can you please put Tess back on the phone?”

Saying it there and then-it felt odd that I couldn’t say what my instinct would have made me say, which was, “put my wife back on the phone.” I felt a small tug at the pit of my stomach about that. Maybe it was something I ought to fix. Assuming she wanted it. Assuming it would be still be relevant. Assuming we still had a life together to look forward to.

“You’ll pardon my being a bit of a stickler about this, but I’ll need some confirmation of that first.”

“Hang on.”

I passed the phone to Nick, told him what he needed to do. He spoke to Murray for a minute or so, explained the situation. Gave him the reassurance he needed. Then he handed it back to me.

“Sean?” It was Tess’s voice. “What’s going on?”

Hearing her like that, weary and worried-not easy.

“It’s… complicated.”

“Don’t give me that. What’s going on?”

I had to smile to myself. She was tough, and I needed to remind myself that, whatever happened, she’d be in my corner. “I’ll tell you the whole story when I see you. Long story short, someone got shot and they’ve made it look like I did it.”

“Which you didn’t, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“OK, so there’s nothing to worry about,” she said, maybe more to seek out some reassurance for herself.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “But until that’s sorted out, I thought-” and here, I glanced at Nick, who was watching-“it would be better if I handed myself in so no one got the wrong idea.”

She went quiet for a moment, probably realizing how out of character that was for me.

“Good,” she just said. “Hang on.”

I heard her ask the agent, “Are you charging me with anything, or am I free to go?”

“Go where?”

She was firm. “Where do you think?”

He demurred, then said, “Let me make a call.”

She came back on the line. “I’ll take the first flight up. I should be with you by eight.”

“No,” I told her. “Go to the house first. I’ll have Nick meet you there. They might want to send people over to have a look around and you should be there. I wouldn’t want your mom to have to deal with that on her own.”

“She can handle it, Sean.”

“I don’t doubt that,” I said. “But still… go home first. Then come into the city once they’re done.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, the prospect of having my own house searched by an ERT crew curdling my insides. “Tess, I’m-I’m really sorry about all this. I really am. But just… bear with me. We’ll ride it out, you’ll see. OK?”

“Of course,” she said. She paused, like she wanted to say more, but couldn’t.

“Get some sleep,” I finally said. “Tomorrow’s probably going to be a long day for us both.”

“I love you,” she said.

I echoed the feeling, then hung up.