Again the special agents pressed their lips together.
“I’m serious here. This is specific to my finding this guy, which is why you’re here, right?” Gabriel knew these men were diligently holding their cards close to their chests. It was an ongoing irritation. He didn’t want specifics of cases—he most certainly didn’t want specifics ofthiscase.
Rigid parameters defined his job. He was a geolocation specialist. Hand him an image, and he could, more often than not, pinpoint it on a map.
Gabriel didn’t want to know anything about the guy in the video; the whys and hows were outside of his scope. But narrowing down the country, that would certainly speed things along. “You need his location.”
“Exactly,” Walsh said. “We need to know where the person was standing when they recorded our guy getting captured and how and why the witness could hear screaming.”
“From this height, through the thickness of this glass, I guess it’s possible.” Gabriel squinted at the screen. “But if the victim was screaming, it was either before or after this clip. With the streets empty like that? If there were screaming, there would be phone calls to 9-1-1. It’s more likely the witness realized something bad was going to happen to the agent, so they added the last bit to make whoever saw that email feel a sense of urgency. The question is when? By my first look at the scene, it's morning just before dawn, so it’s possible it was today.”
“Not last night at dusk?” Hinton asked.
“I’d show you how I know it’s morning, but right now, I’m more interested in understanding the jacket. Obviously, he’s not working undercover. When do you wear a jacket?” Gabriel ticked off on his fingers, “When you’re at an active scene, when there are multiple agencies at work, so they know what team you’re playing on, something where you need your agent to be immediately identifiable, right?”
Neither man answered.
“How would it be possible that an FBI agent in a jacket with a logo was out and about and yet you called him ‘our guy.’ How is it that you haven’t got his name, and you don’t know what he was working on?”
“Investigators are working on that now. There’s a major push to figure it out. We thought that since you figure out locations from images, you could give us an address, which would narrow things down. We can’t put out a call for everyone to check in.”
“Why not?” He wasn’t being flip; that was a real question. The agent wasn’t undercover. He was wearing an FBI jacket.
“Because some people can’t check in.”
“They can if they’re public enough to wear their logo on a dark street.” Gabriel let his eyes rest on the image, looking to see if it was clue-rich. “Again, you don’t know when the video was taken. It could be years old.”
The agents shifted in their seats.
“Look, one of our own is out there with a gun at the head,” Walsh said. “No man left behind, right?”
“Absolutely. No man is ever left behind.” This was getting him nowhere, and time was ticking. Gabriel lifted his chin. “I have work to do.”
Their mouths curved into deep frowns.
“If you leave me your business cards, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”
Both men stood then waddled sideways to get out of the narrow space and left. Hinton pulled the door shut behind him.
Chater Five
Gabriel
“Let’s start here,” Gabriel told Whiskey. “I need to put my feet under my desk, so we need to figure something else out for you.”
He started by stacking one of his guest chairs on top of the other to free up some floor space, then lifted the trench coat from the hook on the back of the door and opened it wide. The winter lining still in place, Gabriel had worn it back from a work trip up to Maine two weeks ago, where it snowed at night, and he came back home to warm air filled with cherry blossoms.
Gabriel laid the coat on the cold terrazzo flooring, bunching it up on the edges to make a nest, then called Whiskey over.
Whiskey settled and seemed both satisfied and tired. It had been a busy day, and it was getting late.
“Whiskey, I’m going to turn off the lights now. I focus best on the details when I’m in the dark.”
With the light off and his door locked, Gabriel sat down and took a few breaths to clear his mind and shift his focus.
Gabriel played the video through three times.
This video was a distraction, though. The posture of the man who scrambled for safety and was brought up short with the barrel of a gun at the nape of his neck was a gut punch.
