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“Yeah, well, I figured out that I couldn’t. So I got back into it.”
Garrett finally turned around. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
A long pause followed.
“It’s not good for you, Alex. To keep everything so fresh in your mind. It’s unhealthy—isn’t that what the psychiatrist tells you?”
Garrett knew about Alex’s therapy sessions. The psychiatric therapy was not court ordered, but was highly recommended by the judge who’d awarded Alex the $8 million verdict. Part of the compensation awarded was earmarked for therapy, and she was encouraged to participate in it.
“Dr. Moralis and I don’t agree on everything.”
“Sometimes it’s good to let go of the past,” Garrett said. “Not everything. Not the good stuff. But some of it.”
“Well, the bad stuff is just part of me. I’ve tried to let it go, but that doesn’t work for me. Looking, not necessarily finding anything, but looking... it makes me feel like I’m not forgetting about them. And since I don’t want to forget about them, I’ll never stop looking.”
There was another long pause.
“Are we going to dinner?” Alex asked.
Garrett nodded. “Yeah. Pizza?”
CHAPTER 27
Washington, D.C. Monday, April 10, 2023 7:48 p.m.
AT FIFTY-SIX YEARS OLD, ANNETTE PACKARD MAINTAINED HER ATHLETIC build through a combination of Pilates and swimming. Pilates was new to middle age; swimming was in her blood. As a teenager she had dreams of, and a legitimate shot at, swimming for the US Olympic team. But a labrum tear stole half a second from her 400-meter butterfly, and with that fraction went her swimming career. Despite an early retirement from competitive swimming, and like many who grew up in the sport, she never left the water. It helped that the J. Edgar Hoover Building housed an Olympic-sized pool. Home to FBI headquarters, the Hoover building was dubbed the ugliest building in Washington, and the pool paid homage to the building’s moniker. Located on Underground Level 2, the aquatics center was a dilapidated mess of missing tiles and badly patched concrete. The voluminous space was without windows or natural light and was shadowed by poorly functioning overhead fluorescents in perpetual need of replacement. But when Annette was working late, as she was this night, the pool’s twenty-four-hour access came in handy. She was a member at a private health club in the suburbs, but the pool hours ended at 7:00 p.m. and her current project rarely allowed her freedom at that time of night.
She walked from the showers in the staging area between the women’s locker room and the pool, happy to see only one of the six lanes occupied. An older gentleman was kicking his way through the water in some hybrid of breaststroke and doggy paddle. His name was Len Palmer, an eighty-year-old retired special agent who was recovering from hip replacement. Annette knew the man’s life story from their conversation the week before when the pool was full and she was forced to share a lane with him. Tonight, she headed to the opposite side from where Len splashed.
Annette Packard had worked for the FBI for twenty-five years. Breaking in as a field agent, she quickly deduced that toting a gun and chasing bad guys was not her calling. After a year she was transferred to surveillance, and two years later she was tasked with doing preliminary research on a district attorney with political aspirations for the governor’s mansion. It was on that task force that Annette, as a thirty-four-year-old disillusioned FBI agent, had found her calling. Sometimes, she learned, talents were discovered without cultivating them, and goals reached without pursuing them—or even knowing they existed.
Thrown onto a task force in her midthirties, Annette Packard cultivated a knack for probing into people’s personal affairs. Over the years, she proved damn good at it. Ruthless might better describe her ability to pry the lid off one’s life and root for worrisome tidbits. For the past many years, when a prominent political figure went through the vetting process, it was Annette Packard who got the call to do the digging. The bureau still required her to carry a firearm at all times, but instead of chasing bad guys, she sniffed out the secrets politicians tried to bury and hide.
She tucked a few remaining strands of hair underneath her swimming cap and jumped into the pool. With her arms wrapped around her chest, she speared feetfirst to the bottom. The cold water was like an embrace from an old friend. Many complained about the pool’s frigid temperature, but Annette preferred it on the icier side. The cool water prevented her from overheating and jolted her mind into a sharp state of concentration. She flexed her knees when her feet hit the bottom, then pushed upward, releasing air from her lungs until she broke the surface. Positioning herself against the wall, she took a deep breath and pushed hard off the crumbling tile, kicking underwater for half the length of the pool before starting into a freestyle stroke.
After three laps she found her rhythm and kept a steady pace for thirty minutes, barely noticing her increasing heart rate. This many decades in the water, it took a lot to gas her. She had to push herself if she wanted a cardiovascular workout, which at times she did. Mostly, though, she preferred a slow and steady fat burn. It kept the weight off, and her muscles toned. It also helped keep her thoughts organized—something her position inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded.
After forty minutes, she decided to burn her remaining energy on a hundred-meter sprint. She flipped at the wall and dug long strokes into the water, kicking what energy she had left into the wake behind her. As she approached the final turn, she felt a presence above the water—someone was standing at the edge of the pool watching her. She aborted her flip halfway through her underwater turn and broke the surface, then peeled her goggles off and rested them on her forehead.
“James,” she said to her assistant, and the number two agent involved with the vetting of Lawrence Chadwick. “What’s up?”
“We’ve got a situation,” James said.
They were three months into the Chadwick vet and had hit no significant potholes, a comforting yet worrisome situation. Annette’s occupation bred suspicion, not confidence, the longer she went without finding dirt on the subject she was vetting. Annette always found dirt, and when she didn’t it usually meant they were hiding it.
“What kind of situation?” Annette asked in a heavy breath of exertion.
“A bad one. We need you upstairs right away.”
“How bad?” Annette wiped the chlorine water from her eyes. “A course correction or engine failure?”
Over the years, Annette’s team had taken to describing problems that arose during their vets in terms of traveling the ocean on a cruise line. Course corrections were common and manageable. They meant something minor had come up and they needed to pivot and regroup to get around it. An engine failure came up less frequently but could usually be handled if caught early enough.
“Uh, I’d classify this more of an iceberg in our direct path.”
“Shit,” Annette said, peeling her swim cap off her head. “How big?”
