Rules of Engagement

by Ken Fite

  “Walk with me,” I said as I put my hand on her back and ushered her through the crowd, turning back again to see the SAIC following me slowly while keeping a hand to her ear as she wrapped up with Landry.

  Harris had the same type of wireless earpiece as the SAIC wore. It hooked over his ear, and I saw that he was talking with someone on the line. “Simon,” I said when we reached the man’s cubicle. I looked at Jami briefly as she crossed her arms, stood back, and glared at me again. “Are you on with Morgan Lennox?”

  Simon didn’t respond. He just leaned back in his chair, pushed his glasses up onto his nose, and stared.

  “Let me talk to him,” I said and held my hand out.

  Harris looked at Jami, then back to me before removing his earpiece and handing it over to me.

  I hooked it over my ear as I heard Lennox on the other end of the line say, “Hello? Simon, did I lose you?”

  “Morgan, it’s Blake,” I said. “Five minutes before the explosion, there was a man on a motorcycle just outside the parking garage entrance. He made two passes before driving off. There was no other activity inside the garage.” I watched Jami take another step away from me and sensed that something was wrong. “There was a CCTV camera right across the street that I noticed as I pulled in. See if you can identify—”

  “Don’t move,” a woman said sharply, and I turned to see the SAIC standing behind me with two guards. The rest of the DDC agents and analysts were behind her, all staring at me as Jami stepped farther away.

  “You there, mate?” Morgan asked in my earpiece, but I didn’t answer him.

  “Who are you, how did you enter this building, and what exactly is your business here?” asked the woman.

  I looked to my right and watched as Jami fell in line and stood with the rest of her DDC counterparts and stared at me blankly. Realizing that I didn’t have her support, and understanding why, I turned my gaze back to the SAIC. “My name is Blake Jordan,” I said. “I work for the president on matters of domestic counterterrorism. Agent Reed asked me to meet him here to work with the Bureau on the cyberattack.”

  At the other end of the room, near the entrance, I heard the warble of police sirens growing louder as Bureau agents started to approach. I heard the sound of men on foot heading toward us from the garage.

  “Arrest him and place him in holding room A,” she ordered the two guards standing on both sides of her.

  “Please,” I said and backed up against the window as they approached. “I have information that can help.”

  “As far as I can tell,” the woman said sharply, “you were our only visitor today. No one else has been to this office all day.” She pointed to the lobby. “I have two men dead, and all of this happened after you arrived.” Then she pointed at me. “Mr. Jordan, you will be detained until we know what happened here.”

  I held my hands up and stared at the woman as one of the guards took the earpiece off and handed it back to Simon while the other walked me forward and put my hands behind my back before cuffing my wrists.

  I looked to my right and stared at Jami as she glared back at me. The guard snapped the cuffs tight and pushed me through the agency employees, who stared at me with contempt, while the second guard followed close behind. I looked over my shoulder and saw the SAIC walk quickly toward the lobby and meet the Bureau agents as they entered the field office. Her voice trailed off as I was moved farther away.

  The guards directed me down a long corridor, stopped in front of an unmarked room, and pushed me inside. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. All I could see was Jami walking away from me.

  SIXTEEN

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES later, I was still waiting inside the holding room. I could hear men shouting from down the hallway, and I imagined the Bureau agents working to secure the facility. Twice they passed the room I waited in and looked inside, making eye contact with me before shifting their eyes around the rest of the room, as if to confirm that there wasn’t anything inside that they should be double-checking.

  After the second time they passed by, I heard an entry code being punched in outside the holding room.

  The guard who had handcuffed me entered, told me to stand up from the table I was sitting at, and spun me around. I expected him to push me up against the wall and pat me down, something they had forgotten to do during the frenzy of the first few minutes after the attack when they brought me inside.

  Instead, I heard the rattling of keys being fished out of a pocket behind me and, looking over my shoulder, I watched as the guard grabbed my wrists and started to take the handcuffs off.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, but the guy didn’t acknowledge my question.

  Instead, he just tucked the cuffs into a compartment on his belt and placed a hand on my back. Gesturing toward the door, I noticed the other guard from earlier standing out in the hallway. “Go ahead and exit the room for me, Mr. Jordan,” he said with a nod of his head toward the empty corridor and the open door.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, but the guard refused to respond. Instead, he kept a hand outstretched and—after pausing a moment to think it through—I stepped out of the holding room and into the corridor.

  The other guard took over, and the two of us walked back down the long, dark hallway that I had traveled earlier as we turned to get back out onto the main floor where the DDC workstations were located. Looking to my right, I saw a mass of Bureau agents in the lobby area. I decided that they were still checking for additional explosive devices and making sure the building was secure and still operational.

  I kept moving, assuming that the guard would escort me over to the Hoover Building across the street. Instead, he pointed to the far side of the room, where I saw an identical set of corridors on the opposite side. “This way,” he grunted as I stepped back in line and walked with the man past the cubicle where Simon had been working and where I last saw Jami. Looking over the room, I saw that most of the staff had left.

  Through the next corridor, we slowed as we approached a closed door, and the guard gave two hard knocks before pushing it open and gesturing for me to enter. I took a long look at the man before peering inside.

  It was a large conference room with an oval table. The special agent in charge, her analyst Simon Harris, Jami, and the Bureau’s Bill Landry were seated. The SAIC stood as I entered, and the guard closed the door behind me. “My name is Lynne May,” the woman said, extending her hand as she approached to introduce herself and then pulled out a chair between Jami and Landry. “Please have a seat, Mr. Jordan.”

  “Am I being detained?” I asked, still standing as May went to the head of the table and looked back at me.

  She shot me a look, then briefly shifted her eyes over to Bill Landry as if to make sure that they were on the same page before her eyes returned to mine. “Agent Davis filled me in on who you are and what you do for the president,” she replied as she eased into the office chair. Once settled in, May rested her arms on the table in front of her, brought her hands together, and interlocked her fingers before continuing. “Executive Office of the President. A good enough cover, I suppose. Hiding in plain sight can be effective.”

  “I asked you a question,” I said, growing impatient with the woman. “Am I being detained—yes or no?”

  “You are not being detained, Mr. Jordan.” She paused as I pulled the chair out and reluctantly took a seat. “And I apologize that it took a while to clear you, but as a former special agent in charge, I’m sure you can understand the situation.” May turned to Simon. “Harris reviewed the footage of the garage before the blast.”

  Simon looked up from his laptop and glared at me. “Trust, but verify,” he said and kept his eyes on me.

  There was something about Simon that bothered me, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Landry leaned in and cocked his head toward me. “The Bureau’s taking point on the bombing while DDC stays focused on the ransomware attack.” He pointed toward the door. “My men swept the garag
e and the rest of the building.”

  I turned back to May. “Where’s the rest of your team?” I asked, trying to understand where they had gone.

  “Working from the Hoover Building,” replied May. “Bill has the space for us, and my team can connect directly to the DDC systems remotely. We decided that until we stop the cyberattack and we can figure out what happened here and why, it would be better to have our people work together and focus our efforts on keeping one building and the area around it secure.”

  I narrowed my eyes and shook my head slowly. “Lynne,” I began, trying to make sense of the situation, “what about the guy on the motorcycle?” I looked around the room. “Did you look into him?”

  May nodded to Jami, who answered, “Blake, right after the blast, you asked me to take you to Simon’s desk. Simon was talking to Morgan Lennox, and I heard you tell Morgan about the man on the bike that you said you saw outside the building when you arrived.” She turned from me to Harris. “I had Simon access the CCTV cameras across the street that you mentioned. We saw the man you were talking about.”

  “Then,” interrupted Landry, “Lynne asked Simon to access another camera and roll back the footage. We saw you approach the building. A car was following you. When you turned into DDC, the vehicle kept moving south past the Hoover Building. We pulled more footage farther back all the way to Alexandria.”

  I shook my head. “Are you telling me that someone followed me here all the way from my apartment?”

  “Well, it sure as hell looks like it,” snapped Landry. “Black Lincoln Town Car. Dark, tinted windows.”

  I leaned back in my chair and thought about Sammy and the call that I had made to my friend Charlie. Whoever was looking for me might not have known where I lived, but they knew where my SUV was parked and waited for me to use it. “We need to pull more footage, figure out where the car came from.”

  “I tried,” replied Simon. “There weren’t any other cameras to pull from. The footage starts in Alexandria.”

  “What about the guy on the motorcycle? We need to know where he went and figure out if he’s involved.”

  “Simon’s on it,” said May, shifting her eyes to Harris sitting next to her. “I’ve asked Morgan Lennox to focus on the ransomware attack with the Bureau’s Cyber Division while Simon tries to locate the biker.”

  “Where’s Chris Reed?” I asked, turning back to Landry. “I was supposed to meet him here to help him.”

  Bill Landry stood. “Lynne, I’ll let you fill him in on the rest. I’ll see you across the street in a few minutes.”

  May nodded as Landry left the room. “Mr. Jordan, the White House has made it clear that I am not to detain you. Seeing how you’ve apparently done nothing wrong, I won’t. However,” she glanced at Jami, “Agent Davis will take you to Reed and accompany you until this investigation is resolved. Understood?”

  I thought about it and realized that I’d better play ball with the SAIC. “Understood,” I replied and stood.

  SEVENTEEN

  AFTER LYNNE MAY dismissed Jami and me, she told Simon to pack up his things and be ready to leave in five minutes. She advised him that they would be going across the street to work out of the Hoover Building. Jami went back to her cubicle, closed the lid to her laptop, and stuffed it inside a thin laptop bag. Strapping it over her shoulder, Jami passed her boss’s office and asked Lynne May for a DDC loaner vehicle. May retrieved the keys to one of the SUVs parked on the ground floor and handed them to Jami.

  The Bureau guys cleared the way for us to exit and allowed me to grab my messenger bag from my SUV.

  Taking the stairs at the corner of the garage next to where I had parked my vehicle, we descended to the ground floor, and Jami pressed a button on the keychain as we approached a row of black, unmarked SUVs. We saw the parking lights illuminate on one of them as the doors unlocked, and we climbed inside.

  Jami grabbed her phone, searched for a message that she had received, and entered the address from the phone into the GPS system inside the vehicle. A woman’s voice announced the address in east DC and said that it would take fifteen minutes for us to arrive. I placed my messenger bag in between my feet, buckled the seatbelt, and held on tight as Jami threw the SUV into gear and navigated us out of the dark garage.

  I tried calling the White House, but Emma Ross didn’t answer her cell immediately, so I left a message for her to call me back. Turning to my left, I looked at Jami and said, “Fill me in, Jami. Where are we going?”

  She glared at me again before turning her attention back to the road. “The Bureau got wind of some information a little over an hour ago, right before the bomb went off at DDC. Simon and Morgan were making progress on the ransomware when Chris called and said that he wouldn’t be able to help us out.”

  “Why not?”

  “He said he had been reassigned by Landry. Metro Police got an anonymous tip that they passed on to the Bureau, and Landry called Reed and told him to meet up with Mark Reynolds at the place we’re going to.”

  “Landry has plenty of agents out in the field. Why call Chris if he was assigned to the ransomware attack?”

  “I guess because he needed his experience.”

  Narrowing my eyes, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jami shook her head. “All I know is that they found explosives. We’ll know more when we get there.”

  I turned back to watch the road. There was a sharpness to Jami’s voice, and I understood why it was there. Looking out the window at the passing buildings as we raced through the streets of Washington, I thought about the conversation with Lynne May a few minutes earlier. “You shouldn’t have told her.”

  “What?”

  “You shouldn’t have told May about what I do for Keller. That’s on a need-to-know basis, Jami.”

  “Blake, you showed up minutes before the field office was bombed. And I’m the one that let you inside. Besides,” she said and paused before making a sharp right turn, “if I hadn’t told her, Landry would have.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But knowing Landry, he would have done anything he could to keep me detained.”

  Jami stepped hard on the accelerator and reached up to flip on the overhead police lights. I held on tight as she swerved around traffic. I tried to calm myself down, but my heart was racing. I wasn’t sure if it was from the way Jami was driving or from being partnered with a woman I hadn’t thought I’d work with again.

  “If you were going to tell her, then why’d you let her detain me? Why didn’t you say something while I was standing at Simon’s desk?” I asked as she took another turn. “Instead, you just let her men take me away.”

  Jami looked to her left before turning again and starting to slow down as we approached the neighborhood we were headed to. Up ahead, I saw a cluster of police vehicles and a line of black SUVs and knew we had arrived. Jami took a deep breath before she finally answered me. “I wanted you to know how it felt.”

  I turned back. “How what felt?”

  “Having someone walk away from you,” she replied as she slowed to a stop and put the vehicle in park. “But you know what? At least I changed my mind. I made a bad decision, but I made up for it. I told May the truth, I told her that I let you in, and yes, I also told her about what you do for the president, Blake.”

  I kept my eyes on her. Jami’s glare was gone and she just looked me over with what felt like indifference. “Jami, I know you don’t understand why I walked away from us. I don’t expect you to. But the truth is—”

  “The truth?” interrupted Jami. “The truth is, what you did to me is unforgivable, Blake.” She paused, turned the police lights off, and unbuckled her seatbelt. “The truth is, you never really cared about me.”

  “That’s not true, Jami.”

  “Could have fooled me,” she said. “You don’t walk away from someone you care about, someone you love.”

  I removed my seatbelt and rested my hands in my lap. I felt the outline of the ri
ng in my pocket. The ring I had carried with me for six months now. The ring I had planned to give Jami underneath the fireworks at Navy Pier in Chicago on New Year’s Eve. I remembered what her sister, Kate, had told me—that I could have the girl or the job, but I couldn’t have both. She said that I was going to have to decide. And I had.

  Jami and I sat in silence for what felt like an eternity. I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to explain to her why I had walked away. But nothing came out. Jami shook her head slowly, and I could see the pain that she had lived through since that night. She finally looked away, reached for the handle, and pulled it.

  “Maybe when this is all over, we can—”

  “I’m busy that day,” she said sharply, then paused to regain her composure. Jami tucked a lock of brown hair behind an ear and dropped her gaze. “Sorry. I’m just stressed out over what happened at DDC.”

  “I know, we all are,” I replied and reached over to put a hand on Jami’s shoulder, but she pulled away from me. “One day you’ll understand,” I said and watched her slide out of the seat and stand at the door.

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “And by then, it won’t matter anymore, will it?” Jami paused and looked me over. “I’ve said what needed to be said, and I’m over it now. See you inside,” she said and slammed the door.

  I watched the afternoon sunlight hit her dark brown hair as she stepped across the street, spoke with a couple of Bureau guys standing at the door, and went inside to meet with Chris Reed and Mark Reynolds.

  I stepped out into the DC heat and jogged across the street to talk with the Bureau men so I could join her and the rest of the team. As I approached, I thought hard about what Jami had said, and my heart sank when I realized that she was right: by the time she understood, it wouldn’t matter anymore.