Page 67 of The Night Of
“Yes. You know I trust you.” He turned, his broken eyes a reflection of his shattered heart. “Steven trusted you, too.”
I held out my hand to him. “Then we have to go. Now.”
Sixteen
Nguyen’s voicecrackled over my radio. “Okay, I’m clear. Go now, Sean.”
I slammed the gas and my car jumped forward, the little sewing-machine engine chewing asphalt as it burst out of the alley behind the parking garage. “I’m clear.”
“I’ll circle the long way around and try to pull any tails off of you.”
“Thanks. I owe you.”
“Yeah, you do. You owe me a vacation and a six-pack, at least.”
I owed Nguyen more than that. He’d just helped me smuggle Jonathan out of the White House without the rest of the Secret Service, or the FBI, or anyone else at all, knowing.
We were free, flying down the highway, and Nguyen was in my old SUV, driving north toward Maryland as if he were us. We’d pulled a car swap, Jonathan and me ditching the SUV in a parking garage before making our way down to the basement and out to an alley across the street from where we’d entered.
Nguyen had left a sedan for us and helped with the swap after only a few minutes of bitching, which had dried up completely when I showed him the evidence I had collected. After that, he hadn’t wasted any time.
Jonathan lay on the floorboard in the back, covered in a blanket stolen from the Secret Service bunk room.
“Almost there,” I said over my shoulder.
I turned the car down an old, weary side street in Anacostia and pulled into the driveway of a sagging house in the middle of a block of worn concrete homes. The lawns were overgrown. There was cardboard and plywood over the windows. Graffiti tags littered the sidewalk.
The garage door was broken, mechanical assembly long since busted. Nguyen had told me I’d have to pull it open myself, then drop it down behind me.
I got it open, keeping one eye on the beaten-up sedan with the president huddled on the floor. How the fuck had Nguyen made this trip? How had he kept Jonathan hidden? I didn’t want to fucking know.
We parked, and I helped Jonathan out of the footwell. He brushed his pants off, dusted his hands down his shirt. “What are we doing here?”
“Picking up what Rose left for you to give to President Baker.”
Jonathan frowned. “I already picked up the gun.”
“He left something else. It’s why he was back in Anacostia that night, and it’s why Baker was calling him from Camp David. Where did you guys leave the things you needed to exchange?”
“Inside the AC unit, behind the central filter. It’s a rusted piece of junk now. All the valuable parts were stolen long ago.”
I gestured to the door. “Lead the way.”
We walked in through the water-warped door, stepping into a dust-strewn, bedraggled time warp. Post–World War II décor crumbled around us, mixed with a few updated elements from the 1970s. Burned shag carpet, like someone had dropped a cigarette in the corner of the living room. Tired linoleum, wrinkled and worn through in spots.
The place had been trashed, too, beyond the decay and degradation of time. Jonathan stopped short when he walked in, and I bumped into his back. Broken furniture had been tossed left and right. Fresh holes had been ripped in the walls, spilling fiberglass insulation and what looked like asbestos all over the floor. “It wasn’t like this the last time I was here.”
I had a good idea why that was.
Jonathan led me through the kitchen and to the old utility closet. The AC unit inside tilted to the right and was caked in decades worth of grime. Frayed wires stuck out of the top and the sides, and all the piping and tubing was long gone. Jonathan open the rusted filter housing, exposing the inside of the unit. The hinges screamed bloody murder.
A manila envelope waited for us. Jonathan pulled it out. I stood beside him, my hand on his back. He opened the top and pulled out two sheets of paper.
He frowned. Flicked from one to the other and back. “Sean…” He shook his head. “I don’t— I don’t understand…”
“I do.” I sighed.It all goes back to Belgium.I pulled out my cell and called Director Silva.
“Agent Avery? You’re early. It’s not six p.m. yet.”
