CHAPTER 3: The Call to the Pentagon
Sarah entered twelve digits entirely from memory. A synthetic voice responded. “Authentication required.” Sarah’s entire tone shifted.
“Echo Seven Tango Niner. Authorization code Black Sky Four. Priority Flash.” The booking room instantly became silent. Then a human voice came through the line. “National Military Command Center. Go ahead.”
Sarah stood completely still. “This is Brigadier General Sarah Hayes, United States Army. My encrypted communications device has been confiscated. I am currently being detained inside an unsecured local facility by law enforcement without legal cause. Trace my device, notify General Thomas Reed, and initiate extraction protocol.” The smirk vanished from Boyd’s face. Five minutes later, the department’s red emergency telephone rang for the first time in its entire history.
Then the floor beneath them began to tremble. And outside the windows, two black military helicopters descended through clouds of dust. He stood four feet beyond the steel uprights, staring down at his closed fist. The thermal paper from the dispatch terminal was crushed into a white plug between his knuckles. On the wall beside the booking counter, the red rotary telephone had fallen silent, its Bakelite bell cold again, but the mechanical shriek had left an acoustic stain in the room. Deputy Toby Miller had not moved back toward his computer station. He remained standing against the wooden supply lockers by the back door, holding his personal cell phone with both hands against his chest, his shoulders pulled up toward his ears like a man expecting masonry to drop from the ceiling. "Boyd," Miller whispered. The sound barely carried over the low exhaust drone from the parking lot. "The county switchboard is jammed. Mary texted from the administrative Annex. She says four incoming trunks lit up at once—two from the governor’s liaison office in Richmond, and two routed through the Department of Public Safety line out of Culpeper. They aren't asking for dispatch. They are asking for the officer who executed a warrantless felony stop on Highway 89."
Cleary did not turn around. His khaki shirt was soaked across the blades of his shoulders, the fabric clinging dark and limp to his skin. "Mary doesn't answer dispatch questions. Tell her to transfer them to the nighttime recording." "The nighttime recording doesn't take priority patches from the state executive desk," Miller said, his voice thinning out until it sounded entirely hollow. "They know her name. They had the vehicle identification number of the rental Malibu before I even finished the tag query. Boyd, look out the window. That isn't a forestry flight." Through the high, reinforced glass transom set into the west wall of the detention wing, the air pressure had already begun to shift. The glass didn't rattle from road traffic; it hummed with the rhythmic, low-frequency chop of twin Pratt & Whitney turbine engines running heavy pitch. Shadows swept across the corrugated metal siding of the adjacent grain elevator, broad and mechanical, flattening the dry dust weeds along the fence line. Two Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks, stripped of visible markings except for standard tail registration stencils and tactical antennas, had entered a tight holding pattern four hundred feet above the county courthouse square.