“Once I get your agreement, I’ll go to the attorney general. He’s on our side.” He hesitates. “So is the President. He can’t afford to alienate the members of his own party pushing for this, not with an election year coming up, but he’s a good politician and the strike team gives him air cover. If the network is dismantled and retasked and a bunch of ten year-old girls get killed because the locals were inept …” He shrugs. “The President can say he opposed it from the beginning and that he had the strike team formed to shore up the loss.”
“I’m talking about logistics, sir. I have a child, a fiance. I have my team.”
“We could keep you based in Los Angeles for now. Other than getting your name in the news whenever possible, you won’t have any political interface. You’d start out directly under me.”
“And later?”
“No promises. Ideally you’ll end up centrally located at Quantico, but we’ll have to see.”
“And my team?”
“Oh, we’d uproot them with you. They’d form the strike team.” He nods at Rachael Hinson. “Rachael’s done a pretty intensive workup on what’s behind your success. It’s her opinion that your existing team is as vital as you are.”
“She’s right,” I say, looking at his number two with newfound respect.
“Functionally, your purview would be nationwide. Since we currently still have our network functioning, you’d be called out only on the most high-profile crimes. If the worst-case scenario comes to pass …” He shrugs again.
“We’ll be juggling murder across fifty states.”
His silence is my answer.
“What do you mean exactly by ‘getting my name in the news whenever possible’?”
“Well, there are two points to creating this team. The primary—and largest—one is pragmatic. If they dismantle your function within the field offices, we’ll still have a way to put boots on the ground. The second is to create goodwill and general awareness of how vital it is for the FBI to have such a team. We highlight your story and past successes. We do the same with future successes. Self-preservation of the team would be the first goal of that kind of PR. A hopeful third would be to lay a foundation for later reconstitution of the network.” He smiles, and for the first time it looks tired. A few less teeth are flashed. “Of course, as I said, perhaps we’ll be lucky and none of it will come to pass.”
“If it doesn’t? What happens to the strike team?”
“We’ll cross that bridge then.”
I sit back and consider everything. It’s too much to answer sitting here and now, of course, but the idea itself … It makes me look at the director with new eyes. Maybe there’s more than just a nice suit sitting across from me.
I run a hand through my hair. “How long do I have to give you an answer?”
“Twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Seventy-two on the outside.” I gape at him. “That’s nuts. All due respect, sir.” He nods again, looking tired again. Perhaps more irritated now. “You’re right. But it’s the way it is.”
“Why?” I venture, a final question.
“Because everything in this town takes too much damn time, Agent Barrett. Because both the President and I have our share of political enemies, and we need as much of a head start as we can get. Because I said so!”
He stops there; his good humor is gone. There are times to challenge your boss, and there are times to let it go. “I’ll let you know, sir.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I ride the elevator back down to my office and find James, Alan, and Callie there. Callie is out of her wedding dress, but both James and Alan are still wearing their tuxedos.
“Where have you been, honey-love?” Callie asks.
“AD Jones’s office.”
I guess I look preoccupied. “Heavy stuff?” Alan asks.
“The heaviest. Where do we stand on our Jane Doe?” I’m not ready to open this can of worms with them yet. I need a few minutes to recover from my own shock before passing it along.
“I got her printed,” Callie says. “I’m going to go down to the lab, where I’ll take digital photographs of the prints and feed them into the system. I’ll have a search going in the next hour and then I’m going to head home, assuming that’s okay.”
“That’s fine. Alan?”
“Jane Doe woke up and had to be sedated again. She shows signs of vitamin D deficiency and calcium loss, probably attributable to a long-term lack of sunlight and milk. The doctor says she has scabs on her arms, legs, and skull from picking and scratching at herself. It’s a behavior you see in meth addicts or the mentally ill.” He lifts the ends of his lips in a bare nod to a smile. “Same difference. She’s missing some teeth, and most of the rest are looser than they should be.”
“Why?”
“He’s only guessing, since he’s no dentist, but he figures bone loss. Apparently vitamin D is needed for proper calcium absorption by the body.”
“Jesus,” I say, processing the ramifications.
“Yeah.” He consults his notepad. “We already know about the whipping. Doc also confirmed the evidence of electrical scarring. The perp shocked her, probably with a car battery or something like it.
James frowns. “What does that mean?”
“He went for areas of concentrated nerve endings or areas that would cause psychological trauma. Nowhere else, and nothing too severe.”
“Punishment,” I murmur. James glances at me, absorbing this.
“Go on,” I tell Alan.
“No drugs found in her system. No other identifying marks, no tattoos. He estimates her age at early to mid- forties. No broken bones, though she does have some old calcification on her left wrist and a couple of left ribs. He says she probably broke them when she was a child.”
“That will help with an ID,” Callie observes.
“We hope.” He closes the notepad. “One strange thing. She has good muscle tone.”
“Which means?” I ask.
“Her captor probably made her exercise.”
“This is starting to sound like purposeful imprisonment,” I say. “No evidence of sexual abuse—though we’ll have to hear from her to be certain about that. Torture, but not excessive. He fed her, made her exercise. He kept her alive.”
“Which begs the question,” Alan says. “Why let her go now? And why us?”
We’re all silent. No one has an answer.
“First goal is to identify her,” I say. “He took her for a reason, however he treated her. Knowing who she is might be the key to figuring out what that was.” I take a breath. Prepare myself. “Now. Let me tell you about my meeting with AD Jones and Director Rathbun.”
I give them a detailed account, explaining everything. They’re quiet, taking it in. When I finish, only Callie has any immediate comment.
“What a curveball day it’s been. I don’t think I’ll have trouble remembering my anniversary date.”
Alan sighs. “So let me get this straight. The powers that be, in all their wisdom, have decided we spend too much money and personnel on catching criminals instead of terrorists?”
“Essentially.”
“So they’re tossing around the idea of centralizing everything? Doing away with the NCAVC coordinator postings in all the field offices?”
“That’s right.”
“Fucking idiots,” he mumbles.
