through the pane nearest the door handle. It shattered in what seemed to Jack to be a thousand screaming pieces. If someone was listening, he’d heard him. He hoped the screams upstairs covered his entry.
Careful to avoid the glass, Jack reached through the now-empty rectangle and opened the door. He wasn’t worried about an alarm. Either the bad guys had disabled it and the rest of his entry would be quiet, or the alarm would sound, bringing the police. Either option was fine by him.
No alarm. He slid the door open enough to slip inside, then closed it. He heard one or two angry voices somewhere above him, and another short scream. They were on the second floor. Jack kept his gun in front of him as he moved through the house, clearing each room that he passed. A hallway led out of the den and past three or four other rooms — maid’s room, laundry room, downstairs office, before opening up into the biggest entryway Jack had ever seen. The floor looked like a single enormous piece of green marble filled with white swirls and gold specks. A chandelier as big as a Lexus hung down from a ceiling fifty feet above him. A circling stairway rose up to the next floor. Jack leaned out of the hallway, trying to see upward. All clear, as far as he could tell. He made for the stairs as an angry word and a sob filled him with urgency.
The stairs were carpeted so he went up fast and quietly. He reached the second floor and another long hallway, this one probably bedrooms and bathrooms.
“Sit there!” A harsh voice and more sobs, coming from the end of the hall. Jack crept down the hallway pressed against the wall, his eyes and his gun trained on the farthest doorway. He took his eyes away only long enough to glance into each room — empty, as far as he could tell, although some of them contained hallways stretching deeper into the house and out of sight.
He reached the end of the hallway and heard two voices talking to each other.
“Get her fucking feet, she keeps kicking.”
“Kick her back!”
He heard a thud and a squeal. Jack melted off the wall, “slicing the pie” as he rounded the corner so he could take in the whole room at once. His muzzle fell instantly on two men dressed in blue overalls who were kneeling over an old woman in a gray robe. They had bound her hands behind her back and were in the process of binding her feet. There were three others in the room — a woman and two men. One of the men was younger, and the others were the same age. Jack guessed: grandmother, husband, wife, and Ramin Rafizadeh.
“Federal agent! Get the fuck away from her!” Jack yelled, stepping fully into the room.
The two men in blue coveralls jumped like startled cats. They whirled around, reaching for guns that they’d laid to the side. “Don’t!” Jack yelled, firing a round into the couch an inch from one man’s hand. The people in the house shrieked at the sound of gunfire. Both men turned ghostly pale and froze. Jack recognized one of them from the Greater Nation meetings.
“Get down on your knees.”
The two men obeyed. Jack saw the entire room now. It was a library. Every wall space, right up to the door he’d just entered, was lined with bookshelves.
“Where is Frank Newhouse?” he asked. He didn’t know why he asked that, when Ramin and Ibrahim Rafizadeh should have been his immediate targets, but he went with the question.
“Fuck you,” one of the militia men said.
“You can say that to the friends you make in prison,” Jack growled. “Maybe you can finally get fucked by Brett Marks, because that’s where he’s at right—”
He saw it too late. One of the Greater Nation soldiers looked at him, then his eyes flicked over Jack’s shoulders for the briefest instant. Jack spun around, but it was the wrong move. He caught just a glimpse of the third militia man pushing with his arms, just before the book case came crashing down on top of him. Something heavy and sharp slammed into his forehead, and the world went dark.
Jessi Bandison skip-stepped up to Kelly’s office. She didn’t know why that man turned her on. She was twenty-five and fine by almost anyone’s standards, and her taste ran toward dark men with a little bit of street and a lot of education. But she was different — a black girl raised first in Amsterdam by diplomat parents who then moved to the United States when she was in middle school. She had dated every type, from thugs to jocks to Oreos. She’d maybe played around with a white boy now and then in college, just for fun, but only because college was for experimenting. None of them gave her that tingle in her belly. And she’d never dated an older man. So why this one?
But there she was, reaching the top of the stairs to his office just slightly breathless, and not from the climb. He was sitting in his chair, back straight, shoulders thrust out to the sides like the corners of a triangle that tapered down to the small of his back. The man wore fitted shirts, which was good, because for a forty-something white man he had a fine figure. His hair had a little gray on the sides, but it didn’t show much because he kept it short. It was only his face that showed his age, and he wore it well, with those wrinkles near his eyes that bunched up when he laughed.
“What do you need?” she asked. She was informal at his request. She’d have preferred it if he wanted to maintain the command structure — it would have been easier to mask her desire — but Kelly Sharpton didn’t stand much on ceremony as long as the job got done.
“Sit down,” he said, removing himself from the seat and offering it to her.
She took his place and looked at the computer. The screen showed a log-in page — for the Department of Justice.
“Okay, what?” she asked again.
“We’ve got an assignment. We need to run a fire drill on the Justice Department.”
“Fire drill” was Kelly’s nickname for fake hacks done on friendly networks to test their security apparatus. “We need to see if we can crack the Justice Department database and crawl inside their files.”
“Really?” Jessi said, genuinely surprised. “Doesn’t Justice have their own anti-hacking team for that?”
“Someone over there’s worried they’re getting stale. They want fresh eyes on the problem. We got picked, and I picked you. See if you can get me in.”
Jessi put her hands in her lap. “Well, I can tell you off the bat that I can’t do it. The encryption on the DOJ system is too strong. You’d need to be past the firewall, and we can’t even do that.You remember when someone came close to hacking the DOD system a few years ago? Since then, it’s impossible to get past the first layer, and then of course all the other layers are—”
“I can get you past the outer wall,” Kelly said. “My terminal’s already logged in, just like I did earlier when I wanted you to sort the FBI logs. It’s the outer ring, and we’re supposed to go a lot deeper, but it’s a start.” He smelt that jasmine smell on her again.
Jessi still didn’t touch the keys. “Kelly, I’m off shift in about a half hour. Can’t you have someone on the next crew do it?”
“No, I need you,” he said, placing special emphasis on each word. She felt her heart skip a beat. “Besides, the shift won’t be a problem. I need you to crack it in—” he checked the terminal’s clock—“fifteen and a half minutes.”
“You’re joking—”
“Fifteen minutes, twenty seconds…”
“Okay.” Finally, she put her fingers on the keys.
Guilt pinched his heart. But only for lying to her when he knew she liked him. He wasn’t exposing her to any trouble. It was his order, his terminal, and his access code.
His phone rang. “Debbie Dee again,” the operator announced, sending the call through.
“I’m on it,” he said without a hello.
In the half hour since they’d last spoken, Debrah Drexler had driven from her apartment to her San Francisco office, located across from City Hall. The office reminded her of the old days, when politics were simpler and the results clearer. She’d chosen a third-story office, rather than something higher, because when she gave interviews from her home state, her small conference room provided a backdrop of downtown San Francisco, which felt like “home” to her.
A news crew was there already, and two more were on their way up the elevator. She hadn’t called them, of course. They’d received a tip—“someone on her staff” was all anyone could say — that Senator Drexler had an important announcement to make, something big enough to rouse remote cam operators and still sleepy morning
