“Nobody move!” a deep voice yells as the door whips into the wall and half a dozen suit-and-tie Secret Service agents flood the room, guns drawn.
“Let’s go!” a beefy agent with a thin yellow tie says as he grabs Dreidel by the shoulder and shoves him toward the door. “Out. Now!”
“Get off me!”
“You too!” another says to Lisbeth as she follows right behind. “Go!”
The rest of the agents swarm inside, but to my surprise, run right past me, fanning out in onion-peel formation as they circle through the room. This isn’t an attack; it’s a sweep.
The only thing that’s odd is none of these guys look familiar. I know everyone on our detail. Maybe we got a bomb threat and they called in local—
“Both of you, move!” the yellow-tie agent barks at Dreidel and Lisbeth. I assume he doesn’t see me — Lisbeth’s still in front of me near the table, but as I shoot out of my seat and follow them toward the door, I feel a sharp tug on the back of my jacket.
“Hey, what’re you—?”
“You’re with me,” Yellow Tie insists, yanking me backward as my tie digs into my neck. With a hard shove to the left, he sends me stumbling toward the far corner of the room. We’re moving so fast, I can barely keep my balance.
“Wes!” Lisbeth calls out.
“He’s fine,” an agent with bad acne insists, grabbing her elbow and tugging her to the door. He says something else to her, but I can’t hear it.
Looking back to me over her shoulder, Lisbeth is still off balance as she staggers toward the doorway’s white rectangle of light. With one last wrench, she disappears. When the first agent grabbed her, she was pissed. But now… the last look I see before the door slams behind her… the way her eyes go wide… whatever the agent said to her, she’s terrified.
“Let go — I’m a friendly!” I insist, fighting to get to my ID.
Yellow Tie doesn’t care. “Keep moving!” he tells me, practically holding me up by my collar. The last time the Service moved this fast was when Boyle was— No. I stop myself, refusing to replay it. Don’t panic. Get the facts.
“Is Manning okay?” I ask.
“Just move!” he insists as we rush toward the corner of the room, where I spot a carpeted, almost hidden door.
“C’mon!” Yellow Tie says, undoing a latch and ramming me into the door to shove it open. Unlike the door that Lisbeth and Dreidel went through, this one doesn’t dump us in the lobby. The ceiling rises up, and the concrete hallway is gray and narrow. Loose wires, grimy fire extinguishers, and some random white pipes are the only things on the walls. Maintenance corridor from the ammonia smell of it.
I try to break free, but we’re moving too fast. “If you don’t tell me where the hell we’re going, I’ll personally make sure you’re—”
“Here,” Yellow Tie says, stopping at the first door on my right. A red and white sign reads Storage Only. He reaches the door with his free hand, revealing a room that’s bigger than my office. With one final shove, he lets go of my collar and flings me inside like the evening’s trash.
My shoes slide against the floor as I fight for balance, but it’s not until I spot two other sets of black shiny shoes that I realize I’m not alone.
“All yours,” Yellow Tie calls out as I hear the door slam behind me.
My skidding stops as my funny bone bangs into a metal utility rack. A hiccup of sawdust belches into the air.
“Busy day, huh?” the man in the U.S. Open hat says, arms folded across his chest. His partner scratches at the nick of skin missing from his ear. O’Shea and Micah. The FBI agents from this morning.
“What the hell’s going on?” I demand.
“Nico Hadrian escaped from St. Elizabeths about an hour and a half ago. What we wanna know is, why was your name in the hospital’s log as his last visitor?”
33
It was easy for Nico to get the jeans and the blue button-down shirt from the dryer in the Laundromat. Same with the Baltimore Orioles baseball cap he took from a dumpster. But once he made his way into Carmel’s Irish Pub, it took a full nine minutes before an older black man, nursing whiskey and a runny nose, hobbled over to the restroom and left his faded army jacket sagging like a corpse on the seat of his bar-stool. Approaching the stool, Nico was calm. The Lord would always provide.
It was the same thought swirling through his head right now as he stood on the gravelly shoulder of I-95 and an eighteen-wheel truck ferociously blew by, kicking up a trail of tiny pebbles and chocolate-brown slush. Shielding his eyes, Nico squinted through the instant hurricane as the pull of wind sent him reeling to the right. One hand was pressed down on his head to keep his Orioles hat from blowing away, while the other gripped his cardboard sign that flapped like a kite in the truck’s backdraft. As the truck disappeared and the wind died, the sign went limp, brushing against Nico’s right leg. Calmly as ever, Nico raised his hand and put out his thumb.
He was already in Richmond, well out of the thirty-mile radius that the FBI and D.C. Police were currently combing near St. Elizabeths. The first driver took him up South Capitol Street. The second helped him navigate I-295. And the third took him down I-95, all the way to Richmond.
Without question, Nico knew he couldn’t afford to be standing out in the open for long. With the nightly news approaching, his picture would be everywhere. Still, there wasn’t much he could do. From a statistical standpoint, the odds of a fourth driver picking him up in the next few minutes were already low. Anyone else would be panicking. Not Nico. As with anything in life, statistics meant nothing if you believed in fate.
Spotting the pair of owl-eyed headlights in the distance, he calmly stepped toward the road and once again held up his handmade sign with the big block letters: Fellow Christian Looking for a Ride.
A piercing screech knifed through the night as the driver of a beat-up flatbed hit his brakes, and all ten wheels clenched and skidded along the ice on the shoulder of the road. Even now, as the semi rumbled to a stop fifty yards to his right, Nico relished the belches, shrieks, and hisses of the outside world. He’d been locked away too long.
Tucking his sign under his armpit, he strolled to the side of the main cab just as the door to the passenger side flew open, and a faint light within the cab poured outward. “God bless you for stopping,” Nico called out. In his pocket, he fingered the trigger of his gun. Just in case.
“Where you need to get at?” a man with a blond mustache and beard asked.
“Florida,” Nico replied, mentally replaying Revelation 13:1. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast. It was all coming together. Heed the Book. Finish God’s will. Finish Wes, and in his blood, he’d find the Beast. “Palm Beach, to be exact.”
“Sick of the cold, eh? Tallahassee good enough?”
Nico didn’t say a word as he stared up at the olive wood rosary and silver cross that dangled from the man’s rearview. “That’d be perfect,” Nico said. Reaching for the grab handle, he tugged himself up into the main cab.
With a lurch and a few more belches from the transmission, the oversize flatbed grumbled back onto I-95.
“So you got family down in Florida?” the driver asked, shifting into gear.
“Naw…” Nico said, his eyes still on the wooden cross as it swayed like a child’s swing. “Just going to see an old friend.”