Ellie frowned as she walked toward the door. She had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging outside, and the maids had already cleaned the room while she’d been at breakfast. She hoped it wasn’t hotel management stopping by to tell her that her work credit card had been declined again. Damn Agency accounts department had forgotten to top it up with funds a couple of days ago and it had taken her hours of cutting through bureaucratic bullshit to get it sorted out.
She opened the door.
A man stood in front of her and started talking immediately. “Ellie Hallowes. You don’t know me but I know you. Name’s Patrick. I’m Agency. Cochrane works for me and I’m here to help you ’cause you’re in danger.”
“What?”
“Immediate danger!” Patrick grabbed her arm, pulled her out of the room, kicked shut the door, and dragged her along the corridor.
“What’s going on?!”
“We’ve got to run! Sheridan’s coming for you because you read the Ferryman files.” The CIA officer yanked her thin arm. “Trust me! He’s on this floor. We gotta get out of here right now!”
Ellie looked over her shoulder, desperately trying to decide what to do. Trust this stranger? Was this a trap? Maybe this guy was working for Sheridan and he was tricking her so that he could lead her right to him.
But his eyes were imploring, his expression urgent.
She had to go on her gut feel.
“Okay. This way.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and sprinted alongside the man, who looked like he was in his fifties but seemed to have no problem running at the speed of a man two decades younger. They were moving away from the main lobby elevator that Sheridan would most likely take to her floor and heading toward the fire stairs. As they turned the corner into another corridor, Ellie wondered what they would do if they crashed into Sheridan, but there was no one there aside from maids, who were looking at them with bemused faces. Her breathing was fast and shallow, but adrenaline kept her moving.
Into the stairwell.
Down flights of stairs.
On the third flight down, Ellie tripped and nearly fell headfirst, but Patrick grabbed her and shouted, “Keep moving!”
Thank God she was wearing pants and boots, because otherwise she’d have snapped her neck by now.
Two more flights, taken at speed, hands grabbing rails, spinning around corners, jumping, and moving legs and feet faster than a line dancer on amphetamines. This was the lobby floor. Was this the best way to get out of the hotel?
Patrick read her thoughts. “Let’s get down to basement parking!”
Fifteen seconds later they were running across the garage, this time Patrick leading the way holding his car keys. They got into his sedan and Patrick immediately engaged gears and revved so hard that the car’s tires screeched in the vast basement parking lot. He thrust his prepaid parking ticket at the attendant as they reached the exit, and sped onto Connecticut Avenue NW. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he muttered, “Can’t see anything unusual. You?”
Ellie fixed her eyes on the side-view mirror. After ten seconds, she said, “Nothing unusual.”
Patrick inhaled deeply. “I saw Sheridan arrive almost the same time I did. He was seconds behind me when I knocked on your door.”
Ellie nodded. “I’m meeting him at three this afternoon.”
“Him?”
“Will Cochrane.”
Patrick turned onto Calvert Street NW. “I don’t want to know the location of the meeting.”
“Understood.”
“I’m going to drop you at a metro station. After that, you’re on your own.” The CIA officer glanced at Ellie. “I’m sorry, miss, nothing else I can do to help.”
“I know. Thank you for this.”
“Do me a favor. When you see Cochrane, tell him from me that he’s a pain in the fucking ass.”
Ellie smiled. “Sure.”
“Also, tell him there are people rooting for him. Admittedly, not many, though.”
Ellie nodded. “I’m surprised you haven’t asked me what I know about Ferryman. I didn’t see anyone named Patrick on the file clearance list.”
Patrick turned onto Columbia Road NW. “It won’t help me to know, because there’d be absolutely nothing I could do with that information. But there is one thing I want to understand: Is Cochrane doing the right thing? For that matter, are you doing the right thing?”
“I believe so. I think there’s something wrong with Project Ferryman.”
“Then that’s all I need to know.” He stopped the car adjacent to the Columbia Heights metro station, leaned across Ellie, and opened her car. “Time for you to go.”
She got out of the vehicle, shut the door, and started walking away.
“Ellie?”
She turned back and saw that Patrick had lowered the passenger window and was leaning toward her.
“Yes?”
“Unless Cochrane can deliver a miracle, you know your Agency days are over for you now, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Got a safe house? Someplace where you can vanish?”
“Of course.”
“Then good luck to you, girl.” Patrick gunned the car and sped off.
Momentarily, Ellie felt disconcerted. She had many sanctuaries, but all of them were places where she’d need to live alone. So far, she’d managed just fine with her solitary existence, but now was different because she was no longer a CIA operator working for a cause. She had no purpose beyond surviving. No, that wasn’t true; not yet, anyway. She still had one true goaclass="underline" to meet Will Cochrane and tell him what she’d read in the Ferryman files.
THIRTY
Come on! Come on! Come on!” Marsha Gage was striding down a corridor toward the FBI operations room. “There’s got to be a trail.”
One of her senior agents was on the end of the line. “So far the trail’s gone cold two blocks from Union.”
“He can’t have just disappeared. Somebody must have seen him escape.”
“We’ve dried up.”
“Dried up?!” Marsha made no effort to hide her exasperation. “We don’t dry up. It’s not what we do.”
“Yes, Agent Gage.”
“Run door-to-door again.”
“We were thorough the first time, so—”
“Just do it!”
FBI officers were staring at her with looks of fear and bemusement as she entered the ops room. The place was buzzing, with officers talking fast on phones, hunched over maps of D.C., typing fast on computer keyboards, and jogging back and forth between desks, swapping data with their colleagues. But Alistair, Patrick, and Sheridan were nowhere to be seen.
Marsha placed her hands on her hips, and shouted to everyone, “Where are the spooks?”
One of the agents answered, “Haven’t seen them for a couple of hours.”
Jesus. She’d spent days cooped up with the three old spies, listening to them bicker like cantankerous retirees in a nursing home, and watching Alistair and Patrick do nothing more productive than flicking screwed-up bits of paper at Sheridan, who in turn would flip them the finger. Now that she actually needed them, they’d disappeared.
She called Alistair, who informed her that he and Patrick were having a lovely cup of tea at a delightful restaurant. She told him that the Bureau had plenty of tea bags, that they were to get their asses back to HQ, and that if they saw Sheridan he was needed as well. She ended the call, thinking that child care was sometimes easier than what she had to put up with here.
As she surveyed the room and all activities within it, she decided that right now she had three options open to her to catch Will Cochrane.