The image paused.
Van Zandt said, “Novak took two in the back. Lost a kidney and his spleen, but your tax dollars patched him up. The phone to detonate the bomb was inside his backpack. According to our people, the first bad guy who was shot in the stomach could’ve survived with quick medical intervention. The bad guy with a hole in his head obviously died at the scene. No bodies were found dumped in a twenty-mile radius. No hospitals reported gunshot victims fitting the description. We have no idea who these accomplices are. Novak didn’t crack under questioning.”
He didn’t crack because he wasn’t the average bank robber. Most of those idiots got arrested before they could count their money. The FBI had basically been invented to stop people from robbing banks. Their solve rate was north of 75 percent. It was a stupid crime with a high chance of failure and a mandatory twenty-five-year sentence, and that was just for walking up to a teller and passing a note saying you would like to rob the bank, please. Waving a gun, making threats, shooting people—that was the rest of your life in Big Boy prison, assuming you didn’t get a needle in your arm.
“So . . .” The marshal was back. He clapped together his hands. He was a real hand-clapper, this guy. “Let’s talk about what happened in the video.”
Faith checked her Apple Watch for messages, praying for a family emergency that would pull her out of this never-ending nightmare.
No luck.
She groaned at the time.
1:37 p.m.
She pulled up her texts. Will had no idea how lucky he was to be skipping this stupid meeting. She sent him a clown with a water gun to its head. Then a knife. Then a hammer. She was going to send him an avocado because they both despised avocados, but her finger slipped on the tiny screen and she accidentally sent him a yam.
“Let’s look at this next chart.” The marshal had pulled up another image, this one a flow chart detailing all the various agencies involved in the transport. Atlanta Police. Fulton County Police. Fulton County Sheriff’s office. US Marshals Service. The FBI. The ATF. The who-the-fuck-cares because Faith had two hours of folding laundry ahead of her, six if her precious daughter insisted on helping.
She checked to see if Will had texted back. He hadn’t. He was probably working on his car or doing push-ups or whatever else he did on the days he managed to get out of hideously long meetings.
He was probably still in bed with Sara.
Faith stared out the window. She let out a long sigh.
Will was a missed opportunity. She could see that now. Faith hadn’t been particularly attracted to him when they’d first met, but Sara had Pygmalioned his ass. She’d dragged him to a real hair salon instead of the weird guy in the morgue who traded haircuts for sandwiches. She had talked him into getting his suits tailored so he’d gone from looking like the sale rack at a Big and Tall Warehouse to the mannequin in the window of a Hugo Boss store. He was standing up straighter, more confident. Less awkward.
Then there was his sweet side.
He marked his calendar with a star on the days Sara got her hair done so he would remember to compliment her. He was constantly finding ways to say her name. He listened to her, respected her, thought she was smarter than he was, which was true, because she was a doctor, but what man admitted that? He was constantly regaling Faith with the ancient wisdoms that Sara had passed on to him:
Did you know that men can use lotion for dry skin, too?
Did you know that you’re supposed to eat the lettuce and tomato on a hamburger?
Did you know that frozen orange juice has a lot of sugar?
Faith was diabetic. Of course she knew about sugar. The question was, how did Will not know? And wasn’t it commonly understood that eating the lettuce and tomato meant you could order the fries? She knew Will had been raised feral, but Faith had lived with two teenage boys, first her older brother and then her son. She hadn’t been able to leave a bottle of Jergens unmolested on the bathroom counter until she was in her thirties.
How the hell did Will not know about lotion?
“Thank you, Marshal.” Major Maggie Grant had taken the floor.
Faith sat up in her seat, trying to look like a good student. Maggie was her spirit animal, a woman who had worked her way up the Atlanta Police Department food chain from crossing guard to Commander of Special Operations without turning into a testicle-gnarling bitch.
Maggie said, “I’ll briefly run down the SWAT Bible on transport from the APD perspective. We’re all following the Active Shooter Doctrine. No negotiation. Just pop and drop. From a tactical standpoint, we’ll maintain a hollow square around the pris—the high-value prisoner—at all times.”
Only Faith and Amanda laughed. There were exactly three women in the room. The rest were men who had probably not let a woman speak uninterrupted for this long since elementary school.
“Ma’am?” a hand shot up. So much for uninterrupted. “Concerning emergency egress for the prisoner—”
Faith looked at the clock.
1:44 p.m.
She opened Notes on her laptop and tried to trim down the grocery list she’d dictated to Siri this morning: Eggs, bread, juice, peanut butter, diapers, no, Emma, no, for fuck sakes, Emma don’t, oh Christ please stop, candy.
Technology had finally caught up with her bad parenting.
Had she always been like this? By the time Jeremy was in the first grade, Faith was twenty-two years old and working out of a squad car. Her parenting skills fell somewhere between Charlotte’s Web and Lord of the Flies. Jeremy still teased her about the note she’d once left in his lunch box: The bread is stale. This is what happens when you don’t close the bag.
She had vowed to be a better mother to Emma, but what did that mean, exactly?
Not creating a Mount Vesuvius of unfolded laundry on the living room couch? Not letting carpet fuzz build up in the vacuum so that it smelled like burned rubber every time she turned it on? Not realizing until exactly three-twelve this morning that the reason the toy box smelled like rotten fruit roll-ups was because Emma had been hiding all of her fruit roll-ups in the bottom?
Toddlers were such fucking assholes.
“I’m Deputy Director Amanda Wagner with the GBI.”
Faith jerked back to attention. She had gone into a fugue state from the heat and boredom. She said a silent prayer thanking Jesus, because Amanda was the last speaker.
She leaned on the desk in the front of the room and waited for everyone’s undivided attention. “We’ve had six months to prepare for this transfer. Any failures to secure the prisoner are down to human error. You people in this room are the humans who could make that error. Put your hand down.”
The guy in the front put his hand down.
Amanda looked at her watch. “It’s five past two. We’ve got the room until three. Take a ten-minute break, then come back and review your books. No papers are allowed to leave the room. No files on your laptops. If you have any questions, submit them in writing to your immediate supervisor.” Amanda smiled at Faith, the only agent in the room that she was in charge of supervising. “Thank you, gentlemen.”
The door opened. Faith could see the hallway. She weighed the consequences of pretending to go to the bathroom and slipping out the back door.
“Faith.” Amanda was walking toward her. Trapping her. “Wait up a minute.”
Faith closed her laptop. “Are we going to talk about why no one is mentioning the fact that our high-value prisoner thinks he’s going to overthrow the deep state like Katniss from The Hunger Games?”
Amanda’s brow furrowed. “I thought Katniss was the hero?”
“I have a problem with women in authority.”
Amanda shook her head. “Look, Will needs his ego massaged.”
Faith was momentarily without a response. The request was surprising on two levels. First, Will bristled at any kind of handholding and second, Amanda lived to crush egos.
Amanda said, “He’s smarting over not being picked for this task force.”
“Picked?” Faith had lost half a dozen Sundays to this tedium. “I thought this was a punishment for—” She wasn’t stupid enough to make a list. “For punishing me.”
Amanda kept shaking her head. “Faith, these men in the room—they’re going to be in charge of everything one day. You need them to get used to your being part of the conversation. You know—network.”
“Network?” Faith tried not to say the word as an explicative. Her motto had always been Why go big when I can go home?
Amanda said, “These are your prime earning years. Have you thought about the fact that you’ll be eligible for Medicare by the time Emma’s in college?”
Faith felt a stabbing pain in her chest.
“You can’t stay in the field forever.”