The pine trees grew taller and thicker. They passed a big body of water. Schrader thought it might be Lake Tapps, but he’d lost track of where they were heading.
They turned onto a twisting gravel road and stopped at a gate. McBride got out and unlocked and opened it. Robinson drove through, then waited while McBride relocked the gate and got back in the car.
Robinson turned off the music. Schrader hadn’t liked it, but the silence that replaced it was much worse. Thump thump, thump thump.
They came to a two-story green house. It had a pair of white garage doors in front. One of the doors opened. But no one in the car had pressed a button. Someone inside must have been waiting. Watching.
They pulled inside. The wipers stopped. The garage door closed behind them with a loud mechanical rumble and a thud. For a moment, they sat there in the dark and the quiet. Schrader didn’t know where they were. Or what was happening. All he knew was that it was very bad. He tried to hold in his pee, and all at once he couldn’t.
A man came out. He flipped on a light. He was wearing jeans and a fleece jacket. He didn’t look like an FBI agent.
The man opened the rear passenger-side door and pulled Schrader out. “Jesus,” he said, looking at Schrader’s wet prison jumpsuit. “You guys couldn’t pull over and let him take a leak?”
McBride came out and looked. “Oh, come on.” He looked at Robinson. “I am not cleaning that up.”
Robinson came around and looked, too. “Oh, hell. Whatever. We’ll throw some towels over it. Keep the smell down.”
Schrader stood there, ashamed and humiliated. He realized he was still peeing. There was nothing he could do. He started crying again.
“Why’d you gag him?” the new man said. “He could have choked.” It didn’t sound like he cared about Schrader. It sounded like he cared about . . . something else.
“Hey,” McBride said. “You want to take the gag off, go for it. Good luck finding another way to shut him up.”
The new man chuckled and patted Schrader on the back. “Well, we don’t want to shut him up, do we?” He looked Schrader up and down, as though measuring him for something. “We want to hear everything he has to say.”
chapter
twenty-nine
KANEZAKI
When Kanezaki’s admin told him the DCI wanted to see him immediately, he wondered if it was connected to DNI Pierce Devereaux’s presence in the building. The word was, Devereaux had come to see Rispel, and her admin had heard shouting from behind Rispel’s closed office door. When it came to gossip, at least, in an intelligence agency there were no secrets.
He was actually glad Rispel had summoned him. From what he’d seen on the news, Seattle was boiling over, and Dox, Larison, and Manus were flying blind without him. A meeting with Rispel would be a chance at more intel, or at least more insight. Beyond which, the anxiety of wondering how she was going to play it with him had been an unpleasant distraction. Best to get past it.
No cozy seat in the corner this time. Rispel didn’t even get up from behind her desk when the admin let him in. Or say anything after the admin had left and closed the door. Kanezaki sat, suppressing the urge to speak. You go first, he thought. You’re the one who wanted the meeting.
“I’ve just received some quite disturbing news from DNI Devereaux,” Rispel said after a moment. “About Seattle.”
Well, he’d been right. It was about both Devereaux and Seattle. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid that, through no fault of my own, I’ve put you in a bad position.”
That, he hadn’t been expecting. “Yes?”
“This . . . Manus matter. I was given to understand it was a payback operation, as I told you. It seems in fact it was related to Andrew Schrader, who as I’m sure you’ve seen on the news has been waltzed out of his prison cell by mysterious forces.”