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  Bell pulls his own MP7 from where it’s been riding by his leg, looks at O’Day.

  “Well,” Bell says. “That was exciting.”

  Chapter Eleven

  IN SEVENTEEN YEARS with the Loudoun County sheriff’s department, Deputy Martin Loughridge had never, not once, seen anything like it.

  Which is not to say he’d never seen a corpse before, or even corpses made that way through violent means. It wasn’t to say he hadn’t rolled up on his fair share of MVAs in the past, either, seen the damage a drunk driver could do, seen the fates of teenagers who’d thought their seat belts were only an option. He still carried memories of the three-car accident he’d been first on the scene to, four dead, including a little girl all of three.

  That had been heartbreak.

  This was akin to horror.

  He’d been pouring himself coffee from his Thermos, just seated in his ride outside the Old Lucketts Store, window rolled down and facing south, toward the community center, waiting for dawn and the end of the shift. Summer nights and kids staying out late, and there’d been some recent vandalism reported in the area, so he’d finished his latest circuit and figured he’d take his break here, just keep an eye on things. In another hour, the hamlet would begin to rouse itself, and shortly thereafter he’d roll back to base and clock out to allow the morning shift to come on and deal with the commuters, the fender benders. Like most nights in his patrol sector, Loughridge’s was a preventative presence rather than a reactive one.

  “Unit twelve, we’ve got a report of gunshots out by Christ Church on Stumptown Road.”

  He shifted his coffee, almost spilling it, took the handset. “Responding.”

  “Ten-four.”

  He rolled without siren but with his lights, took it fast, heading west out of Lucketts, trying to keep an open mind. He wasn’t worried, and he wasn’t particularly anxious, because he wasn’t expecting to find anything. Reports of gunfire were more common than people thought, especially in the summer, when a string of firecrackers could be mistaken for the sound of a weapon by those who couldn’t tell the difference. And there was nothing, but nothing, out by Christ Church except, well, Christ Church and a couple of farms. Long, broad stretches of fields broken by stands of trees, exactly the kind of place kids would end up when they stayed out too late and got up to some mischief.

  So it was mischief he was expecting when his cruiser flattened out of the bend, coming down the very easy slope of Stumptown Road toward the intersection with 663. Then his lights hit the cars in the middle of the road, and he saw the figures and the damage. The car in the front was a Ford, its windshield all but missing, a puddle of radiator fluid and the last wisps of smoke or steam rising from its front end. Where his headlights hit it, he could see a hole the size of a man’s fist through the car’s grille.

  There were three men that he could see, one of them on his knees, doing something on the ground, the two others standing over him, and they were holding weapons, they were holding fucking submachine guns. Loughridge stomped his brakes, sent his remaining coffee sloshing, and stared at them for a second as they seemed to stare back. Then he grabbed the radio.

  “This is unit twelve, intersection of Stumptown and six sixty-three. I have an MVA and three armed suspects. Need backup.”

  “Marty, what?”

  “Three of them, they’ve got submachine guns.”

  Then he was out of his car and drawing his own weapon. Abstractly, he knew it wasn’t a very smart thing to do, to match his Glock against two, maybe three, submachine guns, but after the fact he understood it had been intuition telling him he’d be safe. The two on their feet, yes, they’d had their weapons to hand, but neither had made a move other than to watch his approach, and some part of him understood that he was safe with them.

  “Loudoun County sheriff’s department,” Loughridge said behind his weapon. “Hold it right there. Drop your weapons.”

  The one closest to him, the taller of the two standing, raised one empty hand and with his other set his submachine gun on the furrowed hood of the Ford. Loughridge took another half dozen steps forward, and as he did he cleared enough angle on the Ford to see what the third man, the one he thought had been kneeling or praying, was actually doing.

  That was when he nearly threw up.

  The third one was doing CPR on a fourth, and there clearly wasn’t any point. The body was literally missing pieces. Large pieces. That the man kneeling on the ground had even been attempting CPR was nothing less than folly, because it looked like there were chunks of head missing. The blood was everywhere, shining black in the dawn, dripping from the open rear door of the Ford. When Loughridge looked in the car, he felt his gorge rise again. Gore and bone had been blown against the seat and the shattered rear window as if by a hurricane. Specks of meat mixed with tufts of upholstery. The scent was overwhelming. A trail ran from the backseat to the asphalt, showing where the body had been moved from the vehicle to the ground in an attempt to resuscitate him. Loughridge thought more of the body remained in the car than had been taken outside of it.

  The tall man, the one who’d set aside his submachine gun, spoke.

  “My name is Jacoby,” he said. “United States Army. This is a military operation that’s been compromised. I have contacted my command, and military police are en route.”

  Loughridge looked at him, dumbfounded. He could hear sirens, faint, the approach of the nearest unit responding. It would be Hollister, in sector 11.

  “The situation,” Jacoby said, “is under control.”

  Loughridge found his voice. “I need to see some ID.”

  “This is a military operation that has been compromised,” Jacoby repeated. “There are MPs en route.”

  “I need to see some ID.”

  Jacoby reached into his coat, removed a billfold, opened it one-handed, and offered it to Loughridge, who took it, holstering his weapon. He brought out his Mini Maglite and flashed it on the card, and it confirmed what Jacoby was saying, his name, that he was a sergeant, that he was military intelligence. Loughridge handed it back.

  “I need to see their IDs.”

  “No, Officer,” Jacoby said. “You don’t.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “This is a crime scene, sir. You’re out of your jurisdiction. I’m taking you into custody. You, move away from the body.”

  The one who’d been doing CPR slowed, then stopped his efforts, looked up at Jacoby. Blood smeared his front, covered his hands. He was slender, blond, whereas Jacoby’s hair was black. The third one, the shortest, just ignored him. They were all dressed pretty much alike, Loughridge realized. Windbreakers, jeans, different shirts, of course. They didn’t really look military, though, their haircuts all outside the high and tight, and the one who’d been doing CPR actually had a ponytail.

  “I’m taking you into custody,” Loughridge said. “You’re all under arrest.”

  Jacoby seemed to give this some thought. Then he shrugged, and the other two set their submachine guns aside and all of them moved to stand by the Ford.

  Loughridge steeled himself, took another look at the body, then back to Jacoby.

  “Who’s he?”

  “You don’t need to know that, either,” Jacoby said.

  Hollister arrived within a minute, and then Dole two minutes later, from sector 9, and they put cuffs on the three men and put one of them each in the back of their cruisers. None of them resisted, and none of them said anything except Jacoby, and that was during the pat down.

  “We are armed, Officer.”

  They sure as hell were, too, and all high-speed stuff. Each of them with a .45—the short one was also carrying a SIG—and each of them with a knife, a real knife, not a for-show combat thing, but Mel Pardue blades, and they looked genuine, not like licensed replicas. Jacoby was the only one carrying ID of any sort at all.

  “What the fuck do you think happened here?” Dole as
ked after they’d gotten all of them secured in the cars.

  “I think somebody murdered the hell out of whoever it was they were transporting,” Loughridge said.

  “Spook stuff,” Hollister said.

  “Spook stuff,” Dole agreed.

  Loughridge checked over his shoulder, looking to his car, to where Jacoby had been placed on the rear bench. The man was just sitting there, watching them, and there was nothing to find in his expression. There wasn’t any malice, there wasn’t any regret, there wasn’t even any anxiety.

  “I don’t think they’re military intelligence,” Loughridge said. “I think they’re something else.”

  From there, it turned pure clusterfuck as far as Loughridge was concerned. Another three units arrived over the next five minutes, and Loughridge, being first on the scene, was now responsible for securing said scene. They’d just gotten started measuring the skid marks and trying to fix the angles when Lieutenant Lucas showed up, leading the parade of detectives and technicians who would be spending the next six hours or so of their lives here. The chatter over their radios became nearly constant.

  “They say they’re with military intelligence,” Loughridge told Lucas, showing him Jacoby’s badge and ID. The badge said that Jacoby was a special agent.

  “Yeah, well, they’re not on a base and there’s nothing special about him.” Lucas stormed to the cruiser, opened the door. “You Jacoby? That’s you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “These other guys, they’re with you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And the dead guy? Who’s the dead guy?”

  Loughridge found himself mouthing the words as Jacoby said them. Lucas, predictably, exploded.

  “The fuck you are telling me I don’t need to know that? Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  “I’m with army intelligence. There’s been an incident. MPs are en route.”

  “They have no jurisdiction.”

  “I can give you a number to call—”

  “You can give me answers. These your men? Who’re these other guys?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  Lucas spun around, pointed at Loughridge. “Take them in. You take them all in, you book them on suspicion of murder.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The fuck he thinks he is, telling me what I need to know and what I don’t need to know. Military intelligence. Fucking contradiction in terms. What’s that called? A contradiction in terms.”

  “An oxymoron.”

  “That’s right, fucking oxymoron. You run these oxymorons in, you charge them and put them in separate fucking cells, and then we’ll see what they think I need to know and what I don’t.”

  Loughridge led the procession, Jacoby in the back, with Hollister and the short one, then Dole and the tall, ponytailed one, following, heading south into Leesburg. Jacoby just sat there, in the backseat in his cuffs, eyes closed, head tilted back. By the time they were halfway there, Loughridge was sure the man wasn’t faking it.

  He really was asleep.

  You’re not military intelligence, Loughridge thought.

  It was after eight by the time all three were booked and processed and put into their separate cells for holding. The last Loughridge saw of Jacoby was as he was being escorted down the hall, past the security door. Then it clanged closed, and that was that, and Loughridge went to get changed out of his uniform and to call his wife, to explain why he was late. She was very understanding, the way she always was, and Loughridge once again found himself thinking how lucky he was to have found her, that she had consented to marry him.

  He got home and had a light snack, then showered, changed into his pajamas, and spent an hour reading the novel he was working his way through. It was a thriller, about a CIA-trained killer who had gone rogue to hunt down terrorists and who could apparently take multiple rounds without ever being hit in the vitals. Bullets didn’t seem to slow him down. In fact, they seemed to speed him up. Loughridge found himself wondering what kind of bullet could do the damage he’d seen that morning. Something big, he knew. Something that could kill a car as easily as a man. Fifty-caliber, probably.

  He was tired, but now he was curious, and he couldn’t get the image of the dead man out of his mind. It was changing, though, becoming less painful, less obscene. He went into the sewing room that also served as his home office, booted up the desktop, then did a Google search for .50-caliber sniper rifles. The very first hit was for the Barrett M82, and Wikipedia told him that it was an antimateriel weapon and in service with the military. There were a couple of YouTube videos, people test-firing the gun, and in one of them, a man fired off a whole clip in less than two seconds. He learned that it had an effective range of two thousand yards and could punch through half an inch of steel at the end of its trip.

  Loughridge yawned, shut down his computer, and headed for bed. His last thought before drifting off was that there was no way—no way—those guys were from military intelligence.

  Dole and Hollister were already in when Loughridge showed up for work at eleven that night.

  “Get this,” Dole said. “Those three guys?”

  “From this morning?”

  Hollister nodded.

  “About an hour after you left, guy comes in from the army, full uniform, wearing eagles.”

  “A colonel,” Hollister said.

  “A colonel, he comes in, he’s got three MPs with him, he walks up to Rivera at the desk, and he says he needs the guys we brought in released into their custody.”

  “For real,” Hollister said.

  “So Rivera calls Lucas, and Lucas blows a fuse at the colonel. Swearing up and down, insulting him, making a big stink about jurisdiction and how the military has no leg to stand on here, like that. And the colonel just takes it, doesn’t say anything except pull out his cell phone and dial a number, and then as soon as Lucas has to stop and catch his breath, this guy just hands him the phone. So Lucas takes it, right? And he starts in on the phone and then he stops, and Rivera swears he just loses all his color. He doesn’t say anything. Just listens for, like, five seconds.”

  “And?” Loughridge asked.

  “And then,” Dole said, “he apologizes. He apologizes. You believe that?”

  Loughridge shook his head. “Who was he talking to? Who was on the phone?”

  “No fucking clue. Lucas just hands the phone back to the colonel, he turns to Rivera, and he tells him to give the colonel anything he wants. Then he goes back into his office and stays in there for the rest of the shift.”

  “And the three guys? Jacoby and those guys?”

  “The MPs cuff them, and they all walk out with the colonel leading ten minutes later.” Dole grinned. “What do you think about that?”

  “Yeah,” Loughridge said. “Yeah, you know what?”

  “What?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He thought about four men in two cars driving deserted back roads in the predawn of a summer morning. He thought about an antimateriel rifle that could go from full to empty in less than two seconds and maybe faster if the sniper using it really knew what he was doing. He thought about .50-caliber rounds that could turn a man from alive into Jell-O.

  He thought about Jacoby, the man’s patience and manners and manner, too. Jacoby, not Loughridge, not Lucas, not any of them, had been in control of the whole situation the entire time.

  He thought about the one thing Jacoby kept repeating.

  Dole and Hollister were waiting.

  “Never mind,” Loughridge said.

  Chapter Twelve

  BROCK GETS THE news during the early morning brief at the Pentagon, and even though the operation is referred to by code name and the asset in question referred to as just that, an “asset,” he knows they’re talking about Tohir, and he finds himself both angered and relieved at the same time. Angered because, as far as he’s concerned, the Architect has gotten impatient and was unwi
lling to wait for Brock to do what he has been asked to do, and angered all the more because this means the Architect has his own assets on the ground capable of performing the assassination. Relieved because it means Brock won’t have to arrange it, a problem he’s been wrestling with for the past three days and that has stymied him more than he cares to admit. If it had been anything else, he could’ve tasked an operator to it, maybe even dressed it up as a proper action, but as it stood he’d been looking at options outside of his purview, and he hadn’t yet found any he liked.

  So yes, it is a relief, but it is also troubling. Never mind the fact that he can’t be sure yet that it is Tohir who’s been killed. Details are sketchy at the briefing; he learns there’s been a compromised operation outside of Leesburg, and that the detail responsible for the movement was detained by the Loudoun County sheriff’s department and is now under arrest at Fort Detrick, ostensibly for dereliction of duty. He learns that the whole thing has been an unmitigated disaster, and that there is going to be hell to pay. That’s the extent of it, but it isn’t enough.

  Brock needs to be sure.

  Calling Danny Ruiz is out of the question; he has no oversight of Task Force Indigo, just as Ruiz has no reason to interact with Bravo-Interdict. Direct contact just to ask what happened would be so inappropriate as to beg suspicion, something Brock is careful to avoid. This leads him to Heath, and that makes more and more sense as he considers it; part one, Heatdish was their asset, they’ve got a horse in this race, so interest is justified. Part two, and perhaps more compelling, if the Architect has a shooter or even shooters on the ground, it’s not impossible that he’s uncovered Blackfriars’s part in Heatdish’s capture. This could put Blackfriars at risk, and if there’s one thing that Emmet Brock is certain of, it’s that Abigail Heath will mama-bear to shreds anyone or anything that threatens one of her operators. Casting it as concern for Chief Petra Nessuno will not only make it palatable, it’ll give it all urgency.