Chương 2
“So far,” she added, “you’re asking the wrong questions.”
Ruiz glanced at her.
Ortega did not.
“What should I be asking?”
Rachel looked at the gray cell door.
Its metal still trembled faintly from David’s kick.
“Who authorized my detention. Why the authorization on my visitor pass was ignored. Who received the release order. Who deleted it. And whether this is the first time.”
David said, “This is getting completely out of—”
Ortega raised one hand.
David stopped talking.
It was the first time Rachel had seen anyone silence him without raising their voice.
Ruiz stepped toward Ethan.
“Corporal, give me the keys.”
Ethan did.
His face had gone pale beneath the fluorescent lighting.
Ruiz said, “Do not access the security workstation. Do not use the incident portal. Do not call anyone involved in this case unless I direct you to. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Mr. Mercer.”
David straightened.
“You will surrender your access card and installation phone.”
“I need to speak with my director.”
“You may speak with your director after I preserve the devices.”
“You don’t have authority to seize my personal—”
“I said installation phone.”
David looked down at the black device clipped to his belt.
For an instant, the smugness returned—not in full, but enough to show Rachel what had probably kept him employed through earlier complaints. He was good at finding the edge of a rule and standing exactly on it.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “She entered a controlled corridor without an escort.”
Rachel said nothing.
Ruiz looked at her.
David saw that silence as an opening.
“She refused instructions. She became argumentative. I had a legitimate security concern.”
“You kicked the cell door,” Ethan said.
Everyone looked at him.
Ethan seemed startled that the words had come from his own mouth.
David’s eyes hardened. “Careful.”
Ethan’s face changed.
It was a small thing: his shoulders lowered.
Rachel knew what that meant too.
Fear becoming anger.
Ruiz said, “Corporal, don’t engage.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Ortega turned to Rachel. “We have a conference room upstairs. We can take your statement there.”
“I’m not leaving this corridor yet.”
David gave a short humorless laugh. “Of course not.”
Rachel ignored him.
She pointed toward the camera dome above the holding-cell sign.
“Is that recording?”
Ruiz looked up.
“It should be.”
“Should be?”
“I’ll verify.”
“The camera outside visitor processing?”
“Also should be.”
“And the camera at the east service entrance?”
Ruiz’s attention sharpened.
“You came through the east service entrance?”
“I came out of it.”
David said, “There. She admits it.”
Rachel finally looked at him.
“No. I admit I came out of a door a staff sergeant held open for me after the fire alarm panel forced everyone out of the lobby. What you are going to have to explain is why you told Corporal Cole I forced the door.”
Ethan closed his eyes briefly.
Ruiz saw.
“What did he tell you, Corporal?”
Ethan opened them.
David said, “Do not answer until—”
Ortega stepped between them.
Not dramatically. He simply moved one pace to his left.
David was no longer in Ethan’s line of sight.
Ethan stared at Ortega’s shoulder.
“He said she bypassed access control,” Ethan said.
“Did you see her do that?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did anyone tell you they saw her do that?”
Ethan hesitated.
Rachel could almost hear him working through every person who had been present.
“No, ma’am.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw Mr. Mercer bring her into visitor processing. He told me she had entered a restricted service corridor and refused to identify herself.”
Rachel’s mouth tightened.
She had handed David a driver’s license, a printed visitor authorization, and a Department of Defense retiree dependent card she still carried mostly because she had never gotten around to removing it from her wallet.
Ruiz said, “Did she identify herself?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
David muttered something under his breath.
Ortega said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Good choice.”
Rachel looked at Ethan.
“What happened to my purse?”
Ethan’s face went blank.
It was the wrong expression.
Rachel felt her pulse shift.
“Corporal.”
He looked at Ruiz instead of her.
“It was logged.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Ruiz said, “Where is it?”
Ethan swallowed. “Security office.”
“My phone?”
“Inside the purse.”
“Did anyone access it?”
“No, ma’am. Not that I saw.”
Not that I saw.
Rachel folded her arms.
The morning had begun with a plastic cup of bad coffee, a malfunctioning alarm panel, and her own impatience.
Now her son’s command sergeant major was standing in a holding corridor preserving devices.
The speed of the change frightened her.
Power did that. It moved fastest when everyone suddenly understood who was connected to whom.
That was exactly what she had spent most of Nathan’s career trying not to exploit.
David saw something in her face and mistook it.
“You know what this looks like,” he said.
Rachel turned to him.
He had recovered enough to be dangerous again.
“A civilian gets detained for a security violation,” he continued. “Then it turns out she’s the commander’s mother, and suddenly half the command is down here. You think that helps your complaint?”
Ortega said, “You need to stop talking.”
But Rachel lifted a hand.
“No. Let him finish.”
David did.
That surprised him.
He looked at her, then at Ortega, then back.
“You had special access,” he said. “You had a pass from the command group. You expected everybody to recognize the name. When I didn’t, you got offended.”
Rachel almost smiled.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was close enough to something she feared about herself to hurt.
“I didn’t expect you to recognize anything,” she said.
“You told me to call the commanding general’s office.”
“I told you to verify the authorization code.”
“You said your son could clear it up.”
“No. I said, ‘My son will know where I am if you call the number printed on the page.’”
David’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re splitting hairs.”
May you like
“That is often where facts live.”
Ortega looked away for a moment. Rachel suspected he was hiding either annoyance or a smile.
