This was his first time back in the building since Daniel’s death. He’d been working remotely. So all of this was expected and correct. It would die down.
In the hall, he saw his friend Steve Finley walking his way. “Hey, you’ve got two agents waiting in your office, and they're chewing their nails down to the quick.”
Finley gave Gabriel space by not looking at his face. Finley had been an Army Ranger like Gabriel, and he’d seen his fair share of the aftermath of war.
“Looky here. You’ve brought Whiskey to see what we do.” Finley crouched in front of Whiskey. “Hey there, sweet girl. Are you taking the tour? Are you thinking that you might like a job with the Bureau finding the bad guys?” Finley scratched under Whiskey’s chin, and her tail thumped with gratitude.
Finley pressed into his heels as he stood. “You’ve got this,” he said, reaching out a hand for the shake, and Gabriel wasn’t sure if he meant that as encouragement for the high-stakes case waiting for him, or if he meant that to bolster Gabriel, who was still in and out of shock over Daniel.
Probably both.
Gabriel started back up the hall, looking at his dress shoes, lest any other kind heart wanted to express their sympathy. Now was not the time.
“Gabriel Atworth,” he said, rounding into his office.
Two agents sat in the worn rolling chairs that Gabriel had found one day when he took something to the garbage room, and he’d wheeled them up the hall so that if anyone squeezed into his office, they’d be rewarded with somewhere to sit. The two men had been watching a video on their laptop.
Gabriel pulled out his chair and signaled Whiskey into the space under his desk.
Whiskey had rolled in the grass when Gabriel stopped by a tree in case she needed to pee. Now she smelled wet and musky, and it was a heavy scent in such a small office.
The size of his office was fine. It was all he really needed in his day-to-day life. It had no window, which was what he requested so he could turn off the lights and focus every bit of his brain cells and energy on whatever image needed his attention.
But with a wet dog and three big men, it was claustrophobic, and it was made that much worse when the guy closest to the door swung it closed.
“I’m Hinton. This is Walsh.”
“What’ve you got for me?” Gabriel asked. The chair let out its usual protesting squeak as he sat.
“Someone sent us a video this morning.” Walsh’s shoulder brushed against the wall as he turned the laptop toward Gabriel.
Gabriel didn’t look at it. He wanted context first, so he maintained Walsh’s gaze.
“The person has some IT knowledge. They stripped away any identifying information. They sent it to us from a temporary email generator so there’s no way to reach back out to the sender to ask for more information.”
“Why’d someone open it?” Gabriel asked.
“The subject line said, “FBI - Someone grabbed your boy, and he’s screaming.”
That would do it.
Gabriel dragged the laptop over to him. It was paused on the image of a man and looked as if it had been shot from high above. The guy was crouched at the knees and tipped slightly forward, enough that the FBI emblazoned on a blue windbreaker was legible. “Not AI?”
“Not AI,” Hinton confirmed. “Real deal. We don’t know who, and we don’t know where. We need you to hand us the address.”
“America?” Gabriel asked.
Hinton glanced at his partner before saying, “Probably.”
“How is it ‘probably?’” Gabriel asked, looking up. “Do we wear FBI jackets in foreign countries?”
The agents pressed their lips together.
“That’s a serious question.Weoperate all over the world, but I don’t. I’m here at the Hoover Building. AndIdon’t wear anything with the FBI logo. I wear business attire to court and business casual to the office. And my jackets have nothing emblazoned on the back.”
“We do when we’re out of the country if we’re there at the request of a foreign government to come and lend technical support.”
“But when you have people in the field, wearing their jackets, you don’t keep track of them?”
