“The Washington Massacre.” Joe lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Okay. When it happened I was in ICU. I didn’t even hear about it until a couple of weeks after. Still, I think I know what everyone knows. Terrorist attack. Killed almost a thousand people. The electricity grid was attacked too so there was a three-day blackout. “

“Those people who were killed included Isabel’s entire family. Parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins. It was a close-knit extended family by all accounts, and they were wiped out.”

“Shit.” Joe turned to Metal. “Al Qaeda was responsible, right? It was another 9/11, on a slightly smaller scale.”

“Nobody really knows who was responsible.” Metal bounced a fist off his knee. “There were very few survivors. Isabel was one, though I never thought to make the connection. Word was she was in a coma for a while and as far as I know, was never interviewed afterward.”

“It was bad for us, wasn’t it?” he asked Metal.

“The worst.” Metal held up a hand and ticked off the points on his fingers. “First—this was an attack on a gathering of the president’s political party, meeting at the hotel closest to the White House. Practically on the White House’s doorstep. The attack occurred during an event celebrating the announcement of a presidential run by a scion one of America’s top political families. In effect, it took out the man who would probably have been president in a year and a half. The closest thing possible to a presidential assassination without being a presidential assassination. And it took out a good section of the nation’s political elite. There were a lot of undersecretaries and heads of agencies and political journalists. And then the blackout. That scared the shit out of everybody. Images of a dark Washington, DC in the moonlight spooked the entire country. Looked like what would happen after the zombie apocalypse.”

“You think they calculated that? The photo op?”

Metal shot him a shrewd glance. “Yeah. One photo especially was seen all over the world.”

The sounds of tapping and Felicity turned her monitor toward him. It was striking and one he’d never seen before. The iconic view of the Mall and the Washington Monument, in total darkness, a full moon rising behind the monument. The top third of the Monument was sheared off. In the background, shades of red as a section of the city was on fire.

Metal was right. “Looks like a snapshot of the apocalypse,” Joe said quietly.

“It nearly was.” Metal clenched his jaw. “The city went dark, all the cell phones in the area were jammed. The president was hustled into Marine Force One and taken to an undisclosed location. The VP was in the bunker. For about half an hour we were at DEFCON 2.”

DEFCON 2. DEFCON 1 was imminent nuclear attack. The last time the country had been at DEFCON 2 had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even 9/11 had been DEFCON 3.

“And I slept through that.” Joe shook his head.

“You were blown up. You’d died a couple of times. You’re excused.”

“So...Al Qaeda, huh? They’ve regrouped?”

Metal shrugged. “That’s the story. Some obscure group based in Yemen no one has heard of claimed it. JIAP. Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula. Loosely connected to AQAP.”

“We bomb anyone?”

“Yeah. In Yemen. I think mostly we reduced boulders to rocks.”

Felicity cleared her voice delicately. “Not everyone believes it was JIAP. Or even AQAP. Some believe it was closer to home.”

Metal sighed and glanced at Joe. “She’s Russian. She sees conspiracies everywhere. It’s in her blood.”

They’d clearly had this discussion before because Felicity didn’t bat an eyelash. “Did you know that the next day over three trillion dollars disappeared from the American economy?”

“What? No.” Metal raised his eyebrows, a big reaction for him.

“Oh yes. Someone—and we have no idea who—made a killing in the market. Sold a ton of shares short. The darknet talks of nothing else.”

“Christ.” This was the first Joe had heard of it, too. He’d learned about the Massacre weeks after the fact, when the lights were back on in Washington and the funerals were over and it had been shoved off the talking head shows in favor of Russia invading Ukraine. “Is there a way to read up on that?”

Her fingers blurred again. “I’ll send you stuff, but I’ll send it encrypted and leave you the encryption code. Delete everything you read. I mean it, Joe. Get rid of this stuff from your laptop because some of this stuff is incendiary. There’s a whole meme on the CIA being behind the Massacre.”

“Fuck,” Metal breathed.

“Yeah.” Joe shook himself. “I just got shivers down my spine and I don’t scare easy.” He met Metal’s eyes. “Let’s hope it’s not true because otherwise...” His voice trailed off.

“Otherwise we’re fucked,” Metal said. “Big-time.”

“Okay.” Felicity stood. “Now that I’ve given you nightmares about your foremost intel gathering institution actively plotting murder and mayhem, I’ll leave. I’ve got some work to do at home.”

Metal rose with her and Joe walked them to the door.

Felicity turned to kiss him on the cheek. “Read that stuff I sent you on the Massacre. Isabel’s been through a lot. Be kind to her.”

“No need to worry, honey.” Metal put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think there’s any way Joe would hurt her.” Metal met Joe’s eyes. Felicity had taken Isabel under her wing and anything that bothered Felicity bothered Metal.

Joe met his gaze steadily. Fuck no, he wasn’t going to hurt Isabel. He was going to protect her, just as the anonymous emailer asked.

It was dark when Metal and Felicity left and he closed up the house for the night. He wasn’t going out, he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d read every single word of the Massacre reports and the darknet conspiracy theories.

He carefully put the ziti—though it still looked like overgrown spaghetti to him—in the freezer and heated up the beef stew that was left. He mopped up the sauce with some bread Isabel had made that had olives and sunflower seeds in it and drank a beer.

Then he opened his laptop and started reading.

It was fascinating stuff. He looked at the attack from a specops point of view. If he was going to attack the country’s best and finest in a fancy hotel across the street from the White House, how would he go about it?

Well, more or less exactly as the terrorists had done, except they used some tech tricks that weren’t in his arsenal. 9/11 had been low-tech, the flyers counting on the fact that no one could even remotely imagine people would fly fuel-laden jets into office towers. But it hadn’t been a precision attack, based on special intel or weaponry. Basically it had taken box cutters and men willing to die and take thousands of other people with them.

This had the stink of a specops operation all over it. Starting from knowing where all the security cameras were and blanking them out before the massacre.

Whoever had planned it had the right event. After Alex Delvaux had declared his candidacy, he would have been surrounded by secret service agents. They weren’t the best of the best, in Joe’s book. They weren’t as hardened as SEALs but that was because they operated mainly in the USA and not in hellholes the way SEALs did. But they would have certainly supplied better security than had been on hand at the Burrard Hotel.

Which had been, essentially, zilch. It wasn’t stated specifically but Joe knew how to read after-action reports. There had been the hotel security, which was pitiful, and ten agents from a private company. Joe checked the company out and he’d never heard of it. He’d heard of more or less every single important security company in the US and most operating throughout the world. The fact that he hadn’t heard of the outfit meant that it was either a super elite one or rank amateurs. Joe opted for door number two.