Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

What Dyer had the hardest time adjusting to was the added familiarity here, between the agents and the focus of their work-Richard Garner. The poker games seemed a little out of line. No protocols were broken, of course-the agents playing the game were always off duty at the time, while the standard minimum of six on-duty agents remained in the watch-room. Still, it wasn't the sort of thing that would've happened in the White House, off-duty or otherwise.

Dyer was getting a feel for it, though. It was just a different fit, that was all. These were still the most professional and disciplined security personnel in the world, and he got on well with them. He got on well with Garner, too. He just didn't plan to sit in on the poker games anytime soon.

It was 6:44 in the evening. Sunlight shone through the west-side windows in long, tinted shafts. The watch-room-actually a good-sized suite of rooms-occupied the southwest quadrant of the building's floor, including the stairs and elevator accesses. From the terminal at his desk, Dyer could cycle through the feeds from every security camera in and around Garner's residence. Protocol allowed for respecting the man's privacy, however, which meant that the residence's interior feeds were set aside in a separate batch and ignored under normal circumstances.

Every fifteen minutes Dyer clicked through all of the other feeds: those covering the corridors, elevators, stairwells, and even a few angles looking across the outer face of the building at this height-even the remote possibility of someone rappelling down from the rooftop had to be allowed for.

Dyer's watched ticked to 6:45.

He opened the camera feeds. Skipped through them with precise keystrokes. Studied each one for exactly three seconds. Corridors clear. Elevators clear. Stairwells clear.

On the third exterior feed, which looked across the east side of the building past the windows of Garner's den, he stopped.

There was a young woman sitting in a chair a few feet in from the windows. Dark hair and eyes. Maybe thirty. Very attractive. Garner himself was just visible at the edge of the frame, sitting at his desk chair. Looking casual. Staring off through the window at nothing.

Who was the woman?

Dyer minimized the feed and clicked open the logbook for the security checkpoint. No one could enter or exit the residence-not even Garner himself-without passing through it and being logged with a time stamp.

There was no entry in the file for anyone coming or going today.

Or yesterday.

The day before that, Garner had logged out to have lunch with the governor in Midtown, and logged back in three hours later, alone.

Dyer quickly skipped through the past five days' entries. Nothing but Garner coming and going by himself.

He minimized the logbook and opened the exterior feed again. The woman was still sitting there.

How the hell had she gotten in without it being noted?

Dyer could think of only one explanation. He hated to believe it. But what else was there?

He looked around. One other agent had a desk in this room. The other four were stationed elsewhere in the suite, the better to rush Garner's residence from multiple angles if the need arose.

The other agent in the room wasn't looking Dyer's way.

Dyer took out his cell phone, set it in its dock next to the terminal and waited for it to sync up. When it did, he captured a single frame of the video feed, clearly showing the woman's face, and sent it to the phone. He took it back out of the dock, then stood and left the room.

He stepped into the bathroom across the hall, turned on the vent fan and the water for masking noise, and dialed a number on his phone. It was answered on the second ring.

"Greer."

"It's Dyer. Do you have a minute?"

"Sure."

Dyer explained about the woman, and sent the image to Greer's phone. He also relayed his hunch. Greer didn't like it any more than he did.

"I find that very, very hard to believe," Greer said.

"I'd prefer another theory myself," Dyer said. "Got one?"

The line was silent for a moment.

"I don't get the motive," Greer said. "Garner's a single man. If he wants to entertain a guest, it's his business. Why would he feel the need to hide it?"

"Maybe she wants to hide it. Maybe she's somebody. Or somebody's wife."

Another silence on the line.

Then Greer said, "If Garner's asking these guys to keep someone out of the logbook, and they're actually doing it, their balls are gonna be hanging from the director's trailer hitch before the week's out."

"Which is why I called you," Dyer said. "I'd rather keep mine hanging where they are."

Greer was quiet again. Dyer could hear a pen or pencil tapping on his desk. A fast, tense rhythm.

"Fuck," Greer said. "All right. Let me run it up to a few guys at the top, and a couple friends at Justice. See if there's a precedent for handling something like this. And I'll see if anyone recognizes her. I'll get back to you."

Garner spent the rest of the evening compiling a list of names, drawn from records on his computer as well as paper documents. He came up with close to a hundred, and then began going through them systematically, using his computer to pull up detailed information on each of them. To Travis they appeared to be mostly military and FBI personnel. Garner made shorthand marks next to some of the names. Others he simply crossed out.

Bethany offered to help. Garner looked puzzled as to what she could do. She rattled off her credentials in about thirty seconds, and he told her to pull up a chair.

Night settled on the city. The skyline lit up in random bits and fragments until the whole thing was blazing. Travis stood at the living-room windows and looked down over the park. From beneath the forested expanses, warm light from footpaths streamed up into the darkness.

Paige came up beside him. They stood there for a while, silent.

"Never been here before," Travis said.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"My mom lived here for a long time when I was a kid," Paige said. "That building right over there. The brick one with the blue light on the roof." She pointed across the park. Leaned against him so he could sight down her arm.

He felt her skin against his. After a second she seemed to notice it too. Seemed to notice that he noticed. She didn't say anything, just shifted back to her own balance, putting a few inches between them.

It occurred to him that they hadn't been alone with each other at any point since she'd stepped through the iris from Finn's office yesterday. It'd been the three of them, hardly more than an arm's length from one another, every minute of the way. Until now.

The silence was suddenly harder to take.

"So you spent a lot of time here?" he said.

"Yeah. Every summer. And Thanksgiving or Christmas, every other year, that kind of thing."

"That must've been fun. Hanging out here as a kid."

She shrugged. "I liked it. Plenty to do."

It felt like talking to someone's sister-in-law at a graduation party. Like he didn't know that she liked to sleep on her side, naked, and that she preferred someone's shoulder to a pillow. Like he didn't know what her earlobes tasted like, among other things. Like none of it had ever happened.

It would've been better if it hadn't. The past two years would've been easier. He would've gotten more sleep.

She turned from the window. Met his eyes. Looked away again.

"Obviously, this won't take anything like four months to resolve," she said.

Travis nodded.

"A few weeks at most," Paige said. "Finn might have a lot of the top people, but Garner will get everyone else. However it shakes out after that, whatever it looks like on the news, that'll be the end of it. I'm sure Tangent will be involved, but as far as the three of us shouldering the whole thing… I guess that's over with, now."