Detective Danny Cavanaugh 01 - The Brink

ends. Taber wasn’t that dumb.
    Danny entered the lobby. It looked oddly deserted. He pictured Taber ripping through it, waving a gun. You see a gun, you take cover . “This is the police,” Danny announced to no one. “Did anyone see a man with a gun run through here?”
    “Yes.”
    Danny wheeled around and saw a young black girl in a hotel uniform peer out from behind the front desk. She pointed at the hotel’s revolving front door.
    Danny bolted through the lobby and churned through the revolving door. He leaped down the front stairs until he came to a stop underneath the stained-glass canopy. The regular cast of hotel characters that adorned the receiving area of a four-star hotel was nowhere to be found. Neither was Danny’s target.
    The stench of failure began choking him. Danny darted out into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. He could see for blocks in both directions. People and cars were moving at their normal paces. No one was running. No one fit Stefan Taber’s description.

Chapter 95
    Danny was nearly delirious from the marathon debriefing period. Six different agents, two from the Department of Homeland Security, two from the CIA, and two from the NSA, had grilled him all afternoon and late into the night. As soon as he woke up this morning, he endured more grilling from two State Department agents. His last meeting was with a couple FBI agents. They all wanted basically the same thing, for Danny to plot a near minute-by-minute timeline from the time he met Sydney in Mexico. They wanted to know why he was in Mexico in the first place. They wanted to know every detail about the smuggling sting and how much he knew about Rafael Espinoza’s operation. The FBI agents had been especially interested about how he ended up in a kill or be killed situation with a colleague of theirs, no matter how dirty Ripley was.
    “Did your people find more bombs in the capitol tunnels?” Danny asked the FBI agents as they had closed their notebooks and capped their pens.
    “We cannot answer that question,” the one agent answered.
    “Did they find anything in the tunnels?” Danny pressed.
    After a momentary silence, Danny answered his own question. “Let me guess, you can’t answer that question either.” The two agents exchanged looks. Not a word crossed their lips.
    “Can you at least tell me if they found the men that I encountered?”
    The one agent began giving the standard answer. “We cannot—”
    Danny slammed his fist on the table. “I almost get killed down there, and you can’t give me a fucking thing!”
    The second agent sighed. “The tunnels are connected to secret access points in every building along the mall. They could have escaped out through any one of them.”
    Great , Danny thought. Information he already knew. By the time the meeting was over, Danny was exhausted. He tried to clear his head touring the White House grounds.
    A crushed gravel path eventually led him to an elongated trellis wall covered in gnarled trumpet vines. It was impossible to see through it, but Danny heard the faint sound of human limbs cutting through water. He followed the wall until he came to a wrought iron gate. He unlatched the gate and walked through it, ready to confront the only person who could answer the questions that still loomed in his mind.
    Danny walked to the edge of the pool just as Sydney finished another lap. She flipped to start another one and then stopped, seeing him standing there. A dark blue swimmer’s cap with the official White House seal broke the water’s surface.
    Sydney smiled. “Good morning, Sergeant Cavanaugh.”
    Danny squatted next to her. “Ms. Dumas.”
    “Are they finally done interrogating you?”
    “For now. You?”
    She nodded. “For now.”
    “Anyone from the ICJ call to say they recognized you yet?” Danny was aware that while Sydney had been filmed on TV during their hostage stunt outside the White House, a good shot of her face was never captured. She was still referred to as an unidentified woman in the news about the incident.
    “No. Mr. Shilling already dispatched a team down to the monastery. They said they found two bodies. I’m sure it’s Joseph and that bastard Broederlam.”
    “I’m sure they’ll come up with something about why you aren’t with them.”
    Sydney nodded. “I am to consider myself a guest of the president until further notice.”
    “So you’re a prisoner of the White House?”
    Sydney looked around. “Is there a