“Wait!” Brittany said.
The window stopped with a few-inch gap at the top.
“How can I contact you?” she asked.
There was a long pause. Brittany thought they weren’t going to answer, but just as the window started to climb again, someone said in a low voice, “You can’t. I’ll contact you.”
The car pulled away before the window even had a chance to fully close. Despite the effort her contact had made to conceal their identity, Brittany was fairly certain it had been a woman.
She tried to make out the plates as the car drove off, but it was too dark. She flipped on her headlights just in time to see the government plates with a D followed by a few numbers she couldn’t read and either a 25 or 26 at the end. She was pretty sure “D” stood for “Department of Defense.”
Jackpot! This had to be legit. She pressed the overhead button for the interior light and practically ripped open the envelope.
It was a thin stack—only about four or five pages—but any initial disappointment in size slipped away as she started to flip through.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my Godkept running through her head as she saw the satellite images, heavily redacted deployment order, and news article about a large explosion in the Northern Urals near the border of Siberia picked up by our satellites last May, which the Russians had claimed was a missile test. She recalled seeing it, but as Russians testing weapons these days was not exactly unusual, she hadn’t paid it much mind.
She was looking at the redacted deployment order forsomething called “Naval Warfare Special Deployment Group” (which must be the official name for Team Nine), when the sound of a very loud muffler reminded her where she was.
She had that horrible moment when she turned the key and the car didn’t start right away.Oh God, please tell me I didn’t kill the battery with the AC!But fortunately, on the second try, the engine roared to life, and she whipped a U-ey to retrace her steps out of here.
Anxious to study the docs in more detail, she headed downtown to her office rather than the hovel she called an apartment across town. Her office was actually more of a cubicle, and the fact that it was less depressing than her home spoke volumes about their relative importance in her life.
She was so excited and busy trying to order the thoughts racing through her mind that it took her a while to realize someone was following her.
•••
Brittany noticed the car behind her when she exited the interstate onto Massachusetts Ave, heading toward the downtown headquarters of the DC News Organization (DCNO), which included her present employer, theDC Chronicle, among other media holdings.
There weren’t many cars on the road, which was why she noticed the headlights pulling off behind her. But it wasn’t until she squeaked through the yellow light at Seventh by the Carnegie Library and the car sped through behind her that she felt the distinctive prickle at her neck.
Her heart took an extra beat or two as her eyes darted between the road and her rearview mirror. She couldn’t tell the make and model of the car, but she’d guess an American sedan similar to those used by the police.
Could it be an undercover cop? But why would theybe following her?Wassomeone following her, or was she just being paranoid?
Telling herself to calm down, she switched lanes and flipped on her signal, indicating that she was going to take a left at the next block.
The car behind her did the same.
A spike of adrenaline shot through her. She waited for a car approaching in the opposite direction to pass and made her turn. She was about to take an immediate left again into the circular driveway of a big hotel, when the car behind her suddenly moved out of the turn lane and continued straight.
She let out a long breath, not realizing she’d been holding it. Good God, the meeting earlier tonight must have gotten to her more than she’d realized. She was now officially imagining things.
The heavy pounding of her heart slowed as she continued down the street a few blocks, turned right, and then took another right into the parking lot underneath the nondescript office building.
In the old days a paper like theChroniclewould have had their offices in an important stately building. But with the advent of the Internet and online news, those days were long gone. Similar to many papers in this country, theChroniclewas fighting to hang on.
They were alike in that regard.
It might not be the most prestigious paper in DC, or the most widely circulated, but it was respected, and coming from where Brittany had been, that was enough.
She found a space near one of the stairwells on the lower level of the garage and pulled in to park. The elevators in the building took forever, but she liked to take the stairs for the exercise.
She’d been slacking off in the workout arena since she’d moved back to DC and started at theChroniclein January. At five foot threeish and... what had her friendcalled it? “Athletically curvy”?... with not a lot of time to cook and taste buds that belonged to a teenage boy, she didn’t have a lot of room to mess around and needed all the staircases she could get.
Sliding the manila envelope into the nylon messenger bag that she used as a briefcase and purse—she’d had it since college (thus the Georgetown Tigers black and orange) and it was not only low-profile but basically indestructible—she slung it over her shoulder as she got out of the car. There were only a few cars left in the garage at this time of night, and the door closed with a slam that echoed in the cement cavern.
She fumbled with the key fob to lock the doors and swore. She’d left her phone inside. Opening the door, she reached back inside to grab the phone. Before shutting the door again, she decided to toss the lightweight sweater she wore over her sleeveless top in the backseat.
