EPILOGUE
Midnight, and the parking lot behind HQ had gone down to a handful of cars and the orange wash of the sodium lamps.
Ella stood by the passenger door of Ripley’s car with her arms folded against the cold and the bandage on her brow pulling at her hairline every time she moved her face.
She’d come here because she needed something – a replacement.
‘Vernon’s still up there,’ Ripley said eventually. ‘Dever too. I saw the lights on the fourth floor when we pulled in. They’re not going home tonight.’
‘At this hour?’
‘They’re standing up the search. Doyle’s real now. They’ve got an agent who fought her, and a giant in a hospital bed who’s going to talk somehow. They’ve finally got something to chase. So no, they’re not sleeping. It’s the first time I’ve ever been glad Dever doesn’t know when to quit.’
‘Great.’ Ella pushed herself off the wall. Her ribs filed a complaint and she ignored them. ‘Then I get to go up there and have the conversation I’ve been dreading since the basement.’
‘Which conversation’s that?’
‘The one where I walk into Slick Rick’s office at midnight and ask him, very nicely, for another gun.’ Ella tipped her coffee into the planter by the door. ‘Because Lindsey Doyle stole mine.’
She’d taken two steps toward the doors before she registered that Ripley hadn’t moved.
She’d taken a third before she registered why.
Ella stopped.
She turned around.
Ripley was looking at her, and the tiredness had gone clean out of the older woman’s face, and what had come into it instead was the look of someone watching a thing fall into place that should have fallen into place an hour ago.
‘Dark,’ Ripley said. ‘Your gun. Your Glock 19.’
And then Ella heard it too, heard her own voice from a meeting room a few days ago.
Miss Dark, would you like to be a guinea pig?
‘Oh shit! The prototype!’
‘Doyle ran out of that basement carrying a homing beacon. We need to track it right now. Let’s go.’
***
Ella hit the door without knocking and Ripley came in behind her, and Vernon popped out of his chair like a man who’d been goosed.
‘Jesus Christ.’ He had a hand flat on his chest. ‘You don’t – you do not ambush federal supervisors at midnight. If Adams was in here, you’d have been shot.’
‘Shut up, Rick.’ Ripley shut the door behind her. ‘Trace Ella’s gun.’
‘Trace her-’ He looked between them, and the color came back into his face, and a frown arrived with it. ‘Why would I trace her gun?’
‘Because I lost it,’ Ella said.
‘You lost it. After all that stuff you gave me the other day about lost guns not being-’
‘I was wrong! Just trace it!’
Vernon stayed standing with one hand still on his chest, and Ella watched him decide whether this was the night to ask the forty questions he was entitled to ask.
How do you lose a service weapon? Where?
To whom? What in God’s name happened in that basement that I’m going to read about at six tomorrow morning?
She could see all of it queuing up behind his teeth.
‘Doyle has it,’ Ripley said.
‘What? You’re kidding?’
‘No, we’re not! Stop wasting time and trace the bastard thing!’
Vernon went back to his computer and hammered the keyboard like a man possessed.
‘It’s a closed system,’ he said, half to himself, pulling up a login, then another behind it.
‘Pilot program. Six units in the field. Nobody’s ever had to actually-’ A map bloomed across his monitor, grey streets and the dark wandering line of the river.
‘There. That’s the beacon. Give it a second to fix. ’
Ella came around the desk. Ripley came with her, and the two of them crowded in at Vernon’s shoulder, and somewhere under the dread Ella registered a strange small thing: in all her years at the Bureau she had never once stood on this side of the Director’s desk, never seen the room from the chair that ran it.
The map was a road map of the D.C. Metro and the country around it. The lines of the roads came up first, then the names of the towns. Then a single pinpoint, a small blue circle that pulsed twice and held.
The circle was not in Beltsville.
The circle was on the I-95, north of the Beltway.
Ella’s hand closed on the back of Vernon’s chair.
‘There it is,’ Vernon said. ‘That’s your weapon. Ten, eleven miles out. That’s not far at all, that’s-’
The point moved.
It slid a fraction along a grey line, stopped, slid again, and the three of them watched it go, none of them breathing, a small blue dot tracking south through the sleeping city at the speed of a car that knew exactly where it was going.
Lindsey Doyle was on the move.
And for the first time in nine months, Ella Dark knew precisely where she was.