I WOKE UP to a text on my Blackberry the next morning. It had been sent by Peter Lindley’s office assistant: “8:30 AM Liberty Crossing, vital meeting with AD Lindley. Pls confirm.”

The last thing I wanted now was to be pulled back out to LX1. I’d tripled the surveillance on Rodney Glass and had three teams keeping an eye on him around the clock in eight-hour shifts. If he made any more odd moves, I wanted to be close by when they happened.

So I was feeling more than a little anxious by the time I got all the way out to Langley. What I expected was a full meeting of our CIA work group, but when I came into the conference room, it was just Lindley and half a dozen of his own case agents and team leaders. Two stories below, through the glass wall, I could see the command center bullpen, buzzing away.

“You’re here. Good,” Lindley said, waving me inside. It looked like the rest of them had been at it for a while. Ties were loose, sleeves were rolled up, and the table was littered with files. Most of those had the Bureau’s seal stamped on the front.

“First of all, we’ve got a credible line on another accomplice to the kidnapping,” Lindley said.

One of the agents dropped a file in front of me.

I opened it to see a small photocopy of a mug shot, bulldog-clipped to what looked like several arrest reports. The name on the photo was Deshawn Watkins.

“What about him?” I asked. “Who is he?”

“His girlfriend came in through one of the hotlines,” Lindley said. “One of a million calls, of course, but she had a few interesting things to say. Namely, that Mr. Watkins was recruited online and paid five hundred dollars for his services, plus a hit of some kind of high-grade smack.”

“Just like our van driver, Mr. Pinkney,” I said.

“Our first van driver,” Lindley said. “It seems now that maybe there were two.”

I started flipping through the file. Watkins had a mile-long record of misdemeanors and a few felonies, including some jail time for armed robbery when he was sixteen. He’d also done a couple of court-ordered stints in rehab.

“The girlfriend says Watkins was instructed to pick up a vehicle on the morning of the kidnapping, then back it up to the groundskeeping shed at Branaff and wait for some kind of package to be delivered. After that, she says, he drove it out to Reagan National, long-term parking, and walked away. The back of the van was locked from both

sides, and he never got a look at what he was transporting.”

“Or who put this ‘package’ into the van,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Smart. Jesus.”

It was starting to add up … to how Rodney Glass could have gotten Ethan and Zoe off campus and still be around for the aftermath. Then all he’d have to do was drive out to the airport, maybe stop to sedate the kids again, and continue on to wherever he wanted to take them. If anything had gone wrong in the meantime, Glass had a fire wall of anonymity for himself. Pinkney and Watkins couldn’t finger him if they wanted to. They had no idea who he was. None at all.

“Where’s Watkins now?” I asked.

I saw a few smirks around the table. “That’s what the girlfriend wants to know,” one of the case agents told me.

“Apparently, Watkins skipped town two nights ago — along with this woman’s younger sister. Sounds like she ran out of reasons for protecting him. She came in with a lawyer this morning and struck up a pretty quick deal.”

“We’ve got his name out on WALES, and every field office in the country’s looking for him,” Lindley said. “But quite honestly, Deshawn Watkins is not our number one concern right now.”

I looked up from the file. Lindley was just picking up a steel briefcase from the floor.

He set it down in front of him with his hands on the double combination lock. Then he nodded to the half-dozen other staff around the table.

“Excuse me, everyone. Could we have the room, please?”

AS SOON AS we were alone, Lindley opened the case. The Toughbook inside powered up automatically, and he entered a long string of characters to access whatever it was he wanted to show me in private.

“What you’re about to see is a video that came into the Richmond field office this morning. A copy, anyway. The drive it came on is at the lab, but the First Lady asked personally for you to see this.”

That might have explained why I was the only non-FBI personnel here. Mrs. Coyle trusted me, for better or worse. So far, I felt like I was letting her down.

Lindley turned the case around so the screen was facing me, then hit the space bar to start the video.

At first, it didn’t look like anything was happening. Then I noticed some kind of vague movement, like someone was carrying a camera through a dark room.

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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