“Dad? Look at me.”
Joe struggled to breathe, his body convulsing in short bursts, his eyes struggling to stay open.
“Please!” Mia cried out. “Oh, God, please don’t…”
The three guards looked at Joe, instantly assessing his condition. They formed a perimeter around the lieutenant and his daughter, guns aimed out, searching for the perpetrators, protecting Mia and her father in what they knew would be their final moments together.
Sirens blared in the distance as the soldiers spoke into their radios, but Mia heard none of it. All of her senses were focused on her father.
“Dad!” Mia pleaded as the tears poured down her face. “Please-”
His wheezing breaths grew shallow as every muscle in his body went limp.
Without a word, he looked up into Mia’s eyes, a world of emotions passing between them, and he died.
Joe Sullivan had fought in three wars, had been in countless battles and firefights, had spent his naval career in some of the most hostile locations on earth, only to be felled by a car bomb in his own country.
What was first thought to be an act of international terrorism turned out to have been committed by a small domestic group known as Peace for All whose members preached passivity while demanding the withdrawal of U.S. forces from all countries and the abolition of the U.S. military. After a one-week manhunt, the three American perpetrators were captured by the FBI, tried, and executed.
Mia’s world was shattered. Her father was everything to her. She felt adrift without his words of wisdom, his guidance in life, the sound of his voice as he arrived home at night after work. She couldn’t wipe the image of his dying in her arms from her nightmares. And while her mother comforted her, Patricia Sullivan was equally devastated, often lost in her own grief, unable to function.
Within six months, her mother moved on, falling for the FBI agent who had captured the killers of her husband. No one spoke of the Freudian influence on her heart.
Sam Norris took them in, adopting and embracing Mia as his own. Against her wishes, Mia’s mother made her change her name from Sullivan to Norris, explaining that she couldn’t go through the pain of explaining how her daughter had a different name, that it would force her to relive the agony all too often, never realizing the betrayal it caused for Mia.
They moved to Washington, where her stepfather was made deputy director of the FBI. A year later, he began serving three years as director. He retired and moved to New York to start a security consulting business, a firm where he could capitalize on his vast government connections.
As Sam Norris’s business expanded, their creature comforts grew. Mia’s mother embraced their large home, her fancy car, their life of privilege, but to Mia, none of that could replace her father. The money made her uncomfortable. It seemed to be a patina over the lack of love and affection in their new family.
And so she became focused on herself. Although Sam Norris hadn’t filled the vacancy left by her father’s death, he did offer a window into the FBI, entree into fighting people like the ones who killed her father. As she rose through the ranks, investigating and arresting criminals and terrorists, it was as if she was taking down her father’s killers again and again and again.
Jack would have liked her dad. They were alike in so many respects: wise, selfless, extremely athletic yet always modest and always believing nothing was ever out of reach.
Mia looked around the small room, locked away in who-knows-where, thinking of the impossibility of escape, and she relived that day of flying with her father and embraced his words, knowing them to be true.
Nothing is impossible.
CHAPTER 19
After finding out about the ominous warning on Jack’s arm, Frank, Jack, and Joy agreed that there was one thing that held the answers they needed. Whatever was in the evidence case had frightened Mia as if it were death come to claim her soul. Jack beat himself up for respecting her wishes and for not forcing her to tell him what she was involved in, the gift of hindsight condemning him. The three agreed that the answer to finding Mia was not in the tattoo on Jack’s arm; it was in the case.
It was just after 12:30 when Frank walked through the lobby of the Tombs. There was no need to flash his badge, as he was greeted by his first name at every checkpoint he went through.
“Your disappearance from the force was just a rumor, hey?” the skinny guard with washed-out skin said as he stood up from the central reception desk.
“Good to see you,” Frank said as he offered his hand, shaking Larry’s warmly.
“I knew you wouldn’t be gone for long. You’re here about sublevel five?”
Frank was shocked that the young guard would know where he was going. “As a matter of fact…”
“I hate when the feds go sniffing around in our business.”
Frank didn’t respond, although his mind was already spinning.
“Surprised they didn’t call you in earlier.” Larry flicked the button under his desk, releasing the security lock to his gate and allowing Frank to enter the central lobby.
Frank walked through and headed for the bank of elevators against the far wall, then turned back to Larry.
“Thanks, Larry.”
“I’m glad you’re back,” Larry said with a nod before returning to his post.
As Frank hit the elevator button, he knew that things were about to go far off track. If the feds were in sublevel five, the situation that couldn’t get worse was already well past that point.
As the elevator doors opened on sublevel five, Frank saw yellow police tape stretched the length of the small lobby. Several black rolling cases of various sizes sat in the corner as if someone was moving in. Two men in dark suits said nothing as they stepped into the cab, not waiting for Frank to disembark, and hit the button for the ground floor.
Frank walked out, shaking his head. He ducked under the tape and stepped to the glass window, pulling out and placing his ID flush with the glass, rapping on the window with his knuckles.
Charlie spun around in his desk chair, his usually cheery face awash in grief.
“Frank,” Charlie said with relief.
“Hey, Charlie.” Frank nodded.
“This is god-awful.” Charlie’s usually perfect tie was askew, his hair mussed, making him look like someone at the end of a forty-eight hour shift. But Charlie had just arrived. “Their poor kids, both parents, how do you tell a kid their mother and father aren’t coming back?”
Frank nodded, wishing he could wipe away the pain with the simple truth, but that was out of the question for the moment.
Charlie glanced at Frank’s ID and buzzed the door. Frank pulled open the steel security door as the release buzzer screamed in his ear and headed straight into Charlie’s small office.
“Police tape?” Frank said. “What the hell?”
“Feds are here, looking for an evidence case they say belongs to them.”
“And that would be down here because…”
“They say Jack Keeler hid it down here for his wife.”
“Did he?” Frank wasn’t sure how much Charlie was involved.
“They’re not going to find anything,” Charlie said in unspoken understanding. “They come down here thinking they’re smarter, that we’re just a bunch of cops out of a Keystone movie.”
“The feds are always so charming.”
“Yes, we are.”
Frank turned to see a tall man, thin and wiry, standing ramrod-straight in the doorway, his head seeming a little large for his body, what little hair he possessed buzz-cut short. The exhaustion in his eyes left no doubt that the man hadn’t slept in days; the dark circles and humorless expression were not what anyone was accustomed to seeing in Gene Tierney. The FBI’s assistant director in charge of the New York field office was known for his sense of humor, a dark, dry wit honed over a twenty-five-year career, which Frank had come across on several occasions. Frank would never consider Tierney to be a friend, but he respected him, which was something he could only say about one other FBI agent, and nobody knew where she was right now.