Target

“Who raced by me in the dark?”

“A prisoner trying to escape. Name’s Roscoe Dupree.”

The guy watched her intently as he said the name. As if it was supposed to mean something to her. In fact, it did tickle at the edge of her memory. She’d heard that name somewhere before. “Did he get away?” she asked curiously.

“Unfortunately, yes. But I have every confidence we’ll pick him up soon. And what did you say brought you here today?”

Her mind snapped back to business. “I’m here to speak to Richard Dunst. It’s a matter of great urgency. While I realize you’ve just had an escape and things are crazy around here, I still really need to speak to him.”

“That would be difficult, Captain. Roscoe Dupree is Richard Dunst.”

Memory flooded her. Of course. Roscoe Dupree was yet another name for the man known as Dunst. He’d used the Dupree identity in Berzhaan when he’d dealt with a Berzhaani rebel group that was trying to overthrow the government there. He’d worked under the Dunst name when he obtained a bomb and gave it to the Q-group to use to kill Gabe Monihan in Chicago. And he’d escaped? Today of all days? Could Dunst, a trained killer, be involved in the plan to assassinate the next President of the United States on this, his inauguration day? Surely that was no coincidence. Not good. Not good at all.

“What can you tell me about how he escaped?” she asked the agent urgently.

Flaherty shrugged. “We don’t know for sure.”

She took a calming breath. No sense making this guy any more suspicious than he already was. “I’d like to hear your best guess,” she asked quietly. “It’s important. National security important.”

He looked her in the eye and she held his gaze for a long moment. She saw him weighing her words. Weighing her. This guy smelled like FBI all the way. And clearly, he didn’t trust her completely. But she saw with relief the instant when he decided for reasons of his own to answer her question. Frankly, she didn’t care what game he was playing as long as she got what she needed.

“Dupree—Dunst—got a knife and a disguise—presumably to wear once he got out of here—from somewhere. Overpowered a guard in the hallway while en route to the interview with you. Took the guard’s gun and ran down this hallway, briefly impeded by you.”

“How’d the power go out? Doesn’t this place have emergency power of some sort?”

Flaherty’s jaw rippled. “We don’t know yet how both the primary and backup power systems went down.”

“How did Dunst get out the door? Surely it fails to a locked mode in a facility like this.”

An outright clench tensed Flaherty’s jaw this time. He gritted out, “The lockdown mode on the exit Dunst used never engaged properly. He ran up, pulled the damn door open and shot his way out.”

“How’d he egress the area? Surely you’d have caught him by now if he were on foot. How did a getaway car get through the front gate?”

“Good question. We’ve got film but the license plate was intentionally obscured.”

Just like the car the guy who broke into her house used. She asked sharply, “Did they use a black plastic garbage bag over the plate? Drive a late model silver sedan? Four doors? Foreign make?”

The guy lurched to his feet. Paced a lap of the tiny space and came back to the table, planting his palms on it and leaning toward her aggressively. “And just how in the hell did you know that? Are you working with Dunst? It’s pretty damned convenient that you showed up at this ungodly hour, insisting that Dunst be dragged out of his cell and brought out here.”

She reared back in shock. “I am not working with Richard Dunst! I’m here because I believe he’s involved in a conspiracy to kill Gabe Monihan. I want to nail this bastard!”

Flaherty stared at her in silence. She knew the technique. Guilt makes people babble to fill the silence. She used the moment to think hard. Flaherty was right about one thing. Dunst must have had inside help to slip him the weapon. He also needed technologically advanced help from outside to hack into the building’s electrical system. How else would both systems have failed at once? This building was undoubtedly hooked into the DOD power grid, which was hardened against all manner of attacks from without. It was a favorite target of hackers, and a damned hard one to get into.

Inside help. High-level hacking. Getaway car in place. Prison locks tampered with. And the whole thing precisely timed and executed. Not the work of a few radical yahoos. Somebody smart, powerful and knowledgeable planned and executed Dunst’s escape. She seriously needed to run all this through Oracle’s analysis program.

Flaherty’s cell phone rang, and he listened briefly before pocketing it again. “The getaway car was just found. It was abandoned down by the river. Apparently our man got away by boat.”

Damn. Dunst was free. She looked up at the agent. “Am I free to go, now? This escape just increased my workload for today dramatically.”

“Not a chance, lady.”

She winced. Time was the one thing she couldn’t spare right now. But she also couldn’t afford to get combative with this guy if she wanted to get out of here anytime soon.

He fired a question at her aggressively. “How long have you been working for the Q-group?”

She lurched. “Q-group? Me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Answer the question,” he snapped.

How was she supposed to respond to an absurd accusation like that? It was a Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet sort of question. “I do not work for the Q-group,” she stated emphatically.

“Then why is your e-mail address plastered all over the Q-group chat room?”

She stared in undisguised shock. Who was this guy? How in the world did he even know what her e-mail address was, let alone that she’d been visiting Q-group hangouts online? And how was it that he was here, now, at an obscure prisoner facility, questioning her? Alarm bells clanged wildly in her gut.

Flaherty commented smoothly, “Army pay doesn’t go too far in an expensive town like this, does it? A nice car, a nice house, nice clothes—” he eyed her sleek suede pants pointedly “—they all cost big bucks. How does a girl like you do it?”

He was accusing her of going over to the enemy for money? Betraying her country in the name of designer fashion? She answered the guy’s slimy innuendo through gritted teeth. “I have a trust fund. A big, fat one from my grandfather.”

The agent crossed his arms. “Ah, yes. Joseph Lockworth. Former director of the CIA. Pretty handy to be related to someone like that who can hide the family skeletons.”

A memory surged forward in her brain, unbidden.

Crouching at the top of the stairs in her flannel nightgown, clutching Lammy, her precious stuffed lamb. She’d hauled that poor toy with her everywhere in those first days after The Incident.

Something bad had happened to Mommy. One day she was her laughing, smiling, soft-smelling self and gave the best hugs in the world. And the next day, she got all sad and had a funny look in her eyes all the time. And stopped hugging.

Men in suits kept coming to the door. Daddy tried at first to make them go away, but they never did. They yelled at Mommy sometimes and asked her questions that made her cry. One time, Gramps came over and yelled at Mommy, but he stopped after a while. He said he supposed every family had a skeleton in the closet. He said he’d do his best to cover up this one.

For weeks after that, she’d been terrified of closets. She kept expecting a dead, bony body to jump out of one at her. Her big sister, Josie, was terribly brave and didn’t mind opening closet doors, which was the only way she ever got clean clothes to wear. Daddy was too sad to notice whether or not she wore the same thing to school three days in a row.

“How much is Q-group paying you?” Flaherty barked.

She enunciated each word clearly. “I…do…not…work…for…Q-group. I work for Army Intelligence and I’m trying to apprehend those bastards. Now, are you going to charge me with something or may I get out of here and go try to track down the killer you just let escape before he kills someone?”

“You do not have jurisdiction to pursue an escaped fugitive, Captain. You get near the Dunst investigation and screw it up, and I’ll hang you from the highest tree I can find. You got that?”

She glared at him. “Yeah, I got it. And here’s one for you. You get in the way of my investigation of Q-group and a possible plot to assassinate the President-elect, and I’ll see you hanged. You got that?”

Flaherty met her glare for several long seconds. He curled his lip in an ugly sneer. “Get out of here. And don’t even think about leaving town.”

7:00 A.M.

She wasted no time getting the hell out of Dodge before Flaherty changed his mind and decided to hold her indefinitely under the Homeland Security Act or some such loophole-ridden law.

She pulled away from the building in her car and fumbled in her purse for her cell phone. With shaking hands, she started to dial the emergency phone number to Delphi. And as she did so, the gray-white bulk of DIA headquarters, with its bristling array of antennae and satellite dishes on the roof, loomed in her windshield. She didn’t dare make the call from here and risk having it intercepted. Delphi was adamant that his or her existence must never be revealed to anyone.

She guided her car off base and relaxed a bit when Bolling’s guard shack disappeared from her rearview mirror. She headed south on the Anacostia Parkway for a few minutes, then turned onto a random side street and stopped in the first parking lot she came to. The apartment complex around her was disreputable looking at best and a multibuilding crack den at worst. She locked her car door and dialed Delphi’s phone number.