Chapter 11
Connor?” she replied, startled. Her hand was frozen, inches from the switch. “What are you doing here? How’d you get into my house?”
There was a scrape of a chair leg in the darkness. Not aggressive; just the sound of someone shifting their weight after sitting too long in the same position. His breathing was uneven. Weary.
“Don’t turn the lights on,” he said again. Softer this time. “Please.”
Erin’s pulse spiked as her anger flared, hot and immediate. At the same time, there was a tension in his voice that was unmistakable.
“Connor,” she said, lowering her hand, but not relaxing. “I’m serious. What the hell are you doing in my house?”
He waited a beat before responding. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“That’s not an answer,” she sighed, exhaling. “And breaking into my place sure as hell isn’t a solution.”
“I didn’t break in,” he responded. “The lock on your back door hasn’t worked right since… well, since the last time I fixed it.”
The memory was annoying. Personal. Too familiar. As was his entering her house without permission. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here,” she snapped, the anger seeping back in.
Finally, he stood and stepped toward her.
As he picked up his glass from the table, she could hear the rattle of ice.
He’d been drinking. She had half a mind to throw him right out.
But then he got close enough that she could finally see him.
The once handsome Marine with his neatly kept brown hair and crisp green eyes looked terrible. Broken.
“Are you okay?” she asked, the harshness in her voice receding. “Did something happen to you?”
She was slipping into caregiver mode—something she had sworn she would never allow to happen again.
Connor Jameson wasn’t her fiancé anymore. It wasn’t her job to fix him. She had already been down that road. Repeatedly.
She had loved him deeply, but had come to realize that you couldn’t fix someone who actively chose not to get better. His PTSD was something she could handle. His choosing not to deal with it, however, had spelled the end of their relationship.
“Two men broke into my apartment last night,” he said, answering her question. “Two professionals.”
“Professional what?”
“Hitters.”
Her pale blue eyes narrowed. “Assassins?”
Jameson nodded. “Pistol suppressors, the works.”
Was she hearing him correctly? Was he even hearing himself? Or was this all happening in his head? Maybe this was nothing more than a worsening of his condition.
“I can prove it,” he replied, sensing her disbelief. He grabbed his laptop from his backpack and put it on the dining table, along with the key hard drive from his network attached storage device that acted as his personal cloud.
After attaching a series of cables, he powered everything up. As soon as he found the images of his assailants, he spun the laptop so that Erin could see for herself.
Right away, she recognized Connor’s apartment, but not the bloody corpses of the men on the floor. They looked real. That didn’t mean they were. Anyone could manipulate images these days.
She hated to think that of him, but he had grown more unstable over the last six months.
Their engagement had not only come to an end, but he’d been forced to resign from the Sentinel Foundation for National Security.
It was a hawkish, Washington, D.C.?based defense/foreign-policy think tank focused largely on China.
Sentinel had been happy to snap up the bright, combat-tested, U.S. Marine intelligence officer. His insights into China, Indo-Pacific military postures, PLA developments, U.S. readiness, and Taiwan contingencies had been top-notch. But after a while, his work began to suffer.
Connor had begun to exhibit erratic behavior. He had difficulty collaborating. There was friction with his supervisors and concerns about his judgment. They had tried to get him help, but he had refused, claiming he didn’t need any.
Eventually, he was encouraged to resign for mental health/performance issues. When he refused that as well, they quietly pushed him out, terminating his employment and banning him from the building.
It was a dramatic move for a business that was proudly pro-military and pro-vets, but such was the extent of the difficulties surrounding Connor’s issues.
Unable to sit still and believing he had a national security voice that needed to be heard, he reinvented himself as a military blogger.
Via a thin network of contacts he managed to maintain, he gathered and analyzed mostly “open source” intelligence and published it on his website.
It was a weekly deluge of hot takes, speculative analyses, China/Taiwan assessments, and criticisms of the current administration.
Jameson absolutely despised America’s new, young president and railed at him every chance he got.
There were many evenings, especially when alcohol was involved, that he had even turned that vitriol against Erin.
He had repeatedly called President Mitchell naive, isolationist, intellectually impaired, historically and economically ignorant, and a puppet of America’s enemies.
The worst of these alcohol-fueled rants were the ones where he went after Erin for working in the administration, calling into question not only her judgment, but also her patriotism. Despite his apologies, these accusations always cut the deepest and were the hardest for Erin to forgive.
But again and again, forgive them she did. At least she had tried—until Connor’s demons became too big and too dark for her to handle.
Like Hemingway had said about bankruptcy, the dissolution of their engagement had happened slowly at first, then all at once.
Connor had strip-mined every ounce of empathy from her, only to continue swinging at the barren walls of her soul with his rusty pickaxe.
It had been sad, exhausting, and incredibly painful.
She’d had no choice but to put an end to it.
Now here he was, standing in her dining room, claiming something that—despite D.C.’s crime stats—still sounded insane.
“Why would someone want you dead?” she asked.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “Even after those photos. You still don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that I—”
He held up his hand. “Don’t. I know you well enough to know that look.”
She wanted to deny it, but the words wouldn’t come. At least not fast enough.
He saw it.
Rubbing the back of his neck, he let out a humorless laugh. “I probably wouldn’t believe me either. I mean, who shows up at their ex’s house on a Saturday night—”
“You’ve been here since last night?” Erin interjected.
“I needed some place safe. This is safe. You’re safe.”
“Connor, you can’t just—”
“By the way,” he plowed on, “where have you been?”
“Camp David,” she stated. “Not that I owe you any sort of an explanation.”
“You were up there because of Taiwan, weren’t you?”
“A, that’s none of your business. And B, it’s classified.”
“The White House isn’t reading the PLA buildup as a training exercise, are they? You all actually think this is a precursor to an invasion—that China is about to cross the Strait, don’t you?”
“No comment,” she replied.
He shook his head. “You’re wrong. All of you. It’s a feint. A deception. The Soviets used to call these types of psyops maskirovka. Have you not gotten a single email or voicemail I’ve sent you?”
She had gotten them. All of them. But his conspiracy theories were not something she wanted to get into right now. “Things at the National Security Council have been a little busy.”
“That’s precisely my point. You’re all looking at Taiwan, but the Chinese movements don’t match a Taiwan strike window. Something else is happening under the noise.”
Erin tried to steer him back on course. “You were going to tell me why someone would want you dead.”
“Obviously, I figured out something I shouldn’t have,” he replied. “Or…,” he continued, his voice trailing off.
She was afraid to ask what the other possibility was, but her curiosity got the better of her. “Or what?” she asked.
“Or Mitchell has decided to start silencing his critics.”
It was such a ridiculous assertion that she couldn’t help but scoff. “You think President Jim Mitchell is dispatching hit teams to take out his critics?”
“The White House doesn’t like being contradicted. Especially not by someone who used to be in the system.”
“Connor, nobody in the administration is sending assassins after a blogger.”
“Why not?” Jameson protested. “Is it any less believable than a coup, launched by government insiders, to push him from power?”
As unstable and unpredictable as his PTSD had made him, there were still parts of his brilliant brain that operated logically. And when he could access those parts, he was able to make perfectly good, even winning arguments.
Over the summer, Mitchell’s administration had suffered an attempted coup. It had been launched by members of his own party who felt that he wasn’t living up to his campaign promises; that upon taking the oath of office, he had moderated too many of his positions.
Feeling that the political window was closing and that America would miss a once-in-a-generation chance at true structural reform, the plotters had launched a deadly, but in the end failed, campaign to push Mitchell from office.
The idea, however, that the President was now quarterbacking his own reverse Night of the Long Knives, was beyond nuts. She needed to tether her ex back to terra firma.
“I think you’re safe from Jim Mitchell,” she stated. “An extrajudicial hit list, much less one targeting his political detractors, isn’t his style.”
“Then it has to be the Chinese. They don’t like me calling their bluff on my blog and pointing out the holes in their alleged Taiwan buildup.”
Erin suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Either the President of the United States wanted to take him out or it was the Chinese government? He really did have a high opinion of himself. She’d have to check to see if delusions of grandeur were a known symptom associated with PTSD.
“I don’t think it’s the Chinese either.”
“You think I’m crazy,” he whispered, the fatigue evident in his voice. “But someone put two professionals in my apartment last night, Erin. Two. And they didn’t come to talk.”
She looked back at the photos of the dead men on his laptop. “I see their suppressed weapons. What were you shooting with?”
“My forty-five.”
“Jesus, Con,” Erin exclaimed. “The forty-five you’re not allowed to have? That gun’s supposed to be at your buddy’s farm in Virginia. You had an involuntary psychiatric admission last year—”
“Which was a misunderstanding—”
“Which,” she interrupted him right back, “makes you legally ineligible to possess a firearm in D.C. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that I might need it someday. And guess what?”
Erin was done guessing. If what he claimed to have happened did happen, it would be all over the news. But if it wasn’t, if this was another delusion, she needed to get him help. Retreating to the entry hall, she fished her phone out of her bag and powered it up.
Part of the NSC’s security protocol had been no personal phones at Camp David over the weekend. They didn’t want any digital signatures that could tip off the Chinese or the press as to what was going on.
It didn’t take her long to find the story.
“Double Shooting in Adams Morgan Area—Person of Interest at Large” the headline read.
She recognized Connor’s building immediately.
He hadn’t been named—at least not yet. Metropolitan Police were referring simply to a “tenant” whom they wanted to speak with in the hopes that they could gather more information.
There was no mention of pistol suppressors or professional assassins. But why would there be? The police normally held back important details from the public as they worked their leads.
Neighbors, however, had no such reason to exhibit restraint and plenty of Connor’s had spoken to the press. The one thing they were all in agreement on was that there had been a lot of shots fired.
Erin looked at a couple more sites, her jaw tight, then set her phone aside.
“Now do you believe me?” Connor asked.
But before she could answer, a knock sounded at her front door. Subdued, but deliberate. Not a cop. Not a neighbor.
Erin froze. Connor’s eyes shifted past her, narrowing on the entry hall and the glass panel beside the door.
She turned, peering through the darkened kitchen, and saw it—the silhouette of a large man standing outside.
Connor’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Erin, don’t move.”