“Jim,” Wisson said, interrupting.

“Everything all right?” Dad asked. His attention had finally returned to our end of the table.

“Everything’s fine, Dad,” I said. “But I think Jim has a couple of questions that might be best asked to you directly. If Carole doesn’t mind swapping seats with him for a bit that would be lovely.”

“Of course not,” Lamb said.

“Excellent,” I said, and looked over to Buchold, hoping he would take the hint, or at least be grateful to me for some face time with Dad. He nodded curtly, stood up, and swapped seats.

Hubbard leaned in. “Nice save,” he said, very quietly.

I nodded, and then rubbed my jaw. The pain was coming back. I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of my molar.

My internal phone went up. I answered it with my inside voice. “Yeah,” I said.

“Shane,” Vann said. “How far are you from Leesburg right now?”

“About ten miles,” I said. “Why?”

“You’ve heard of Loudoun Pharma?”

“In fact I’m having dinner with its CEO and his husband,” I said. “Why?”

“It just blew up,” Vann said.

“What?” I looked over at Buchold, who was speaking close in and animatedly at my dad.

“It just blew up,” Vann repeated. “And it looks like a Haden was involved.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I was, because then I’d be getting laid instead of heading your direction,” Vann said. “Get out there now. Start mapping the place and getting data. I’ll be there in about forty minutes.”

“What do I tell Jim Buchold?” I asked.

“He the CEO?”

“Yeah,” I said. Then I noticed Buchold reaching into his suit pocket for his phone. “Hold on, I think he may be finding out.”

Buchold leaped up and ran out of the room, phone still up to his ear. Rick Wisson watched him leave, confused.

“Yup,” I said. “He knows.”

Chapter Eight

THE LOUDOUN PHARMA campus consisted of two main buildings. One held the offices for the C-suite, middle management and support staff, local reps and the company’s lobbyists for D.C. and Richmond. The other contained the labs, which housed the scientists, the IT people, and their respective support staffs.

The office building was a wreck. Every window on the east side of the structure was shattered and had fallen out of the walls. Most of the rest of the windows were in various stages of damage. Paperwork wafted out of holes, fluttering in the air before coming to rest in the shady boulevard that separated the two buildings from each other.

The labs were mostly gone.

Fire engines from every corner of Loudoun County surrounded the rubble, and firemen looked for something to put out. There was very little to put out. The explosion had collapsed the building on itself, smothering any incipient fire before it could catch. EMTs circled the collapsed building, using scanners to locate RFID-equipped personnel badges the Loudoun Pharma staff used.

There were six badges pinging, all for janitorial staff. The EMT deployed roach and snake bots to scurry through the wreckage toward the badges to see if they were still attached to anyone alive.

They were not.

“Here’s what the security guards saw,” I said, to Vann. We were in her car and I was porting the images to her dash. She was sucking like a demon on one of her cigarettes. It might have been a side effect of sexual frustration, but now was not the moment to ask. I kept the door on my side open to vent the smoke.

In the dash, we were treated to a guard-post camera view of an SUV accelerating into the parking lot and then ramming through the gate, snapping it off as it drove through.

“Back it up and pause it just before the snap,” Vann said. I did. She pointed. “License plate and face,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “Neither of which match the RFID badge that pinged when the SUV rammed through, though.”

“Who does the badge belong to?”

“Karl Baer,” I said. “He’s a geneticist. Works in the lab. He’s also a Haden, which is why we were pinged.”

“That’s not a threep driving the SUV,” Vann said. “So whoever this is stole Baer’s ID. But why would they do that and then just ram the goddamn gate?”

“They needed the ID to access the parking garage under the labs,” I said. “Staff parking is in the garages. Visitor parking outside.”

“And an SUV full of explosives is much more effective under the building than next to it.”

“I imagine that’s the thinking, yes.”

“So if it’s a stolen ID, do we need to be here?” Vann asked. “Still?”

I paused for a second, wondering why she would ask me that, then remembered it was still my first day with her, unbelievable as it was at this point. She was still testing me.

“Yeah, we do,” I said. “One, we need to check in on Baer to make sure the ID was stolen. Two”—I pointed back to the image of the SUV about to ram the gate—“there’s the fact that this SUV is registered to Jay Kearney.”

“Am I supposed to know who Jay Kearney is?”

“You might,” I said. “He’s an Integrator. Or was.”

Vann took a final suck on her cigarette and put it out on her window glass. “Show me a clean picture of Kearney,” she said.

I loaded his Integrator license picture into the dash and placed it next to the image of the person driving the car. Vann leaned in and peered.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Could be. Could be,” she said. She glanced up over the dash toward the collapsed building and the flashing lights of the cops, firemen, and EMTs. “Have they found him yet?”

“I don’t think they’re looking for him,” I said. “They’re looking for the janitors. And anyway if he was in the SUV when it went up then he’s a fine coat of ash all over that parking garage.”

“You share this with anyone yet?”

“No one here is interested in talking to me,” I said. “I’m Haden affairs, not terrorism.” As I said this the distant sound of a helicopter became loud and got louder.

“That’s probably terrorism right now,” Vann said. “They like to make an entrance.”

I motioned back at the image. “I got this from security the same time the Leesburg cops and the Loudoun sheriffs did but I don’t think they’ve looked at it yet.”

“All right,” Vann said. She wiped the images off her screen. “Where are you parked?”

“I’m not,” I said. “I caught a ride with Jim Buchold, the CEO. He’s over yelling at the Leesburg cops.”

“Good,” Vann said. She started her car.

“Where are we going?” I closed the door on my side.

“We’re going to visit Karl Baer,” Vann said. “Pull up his address, please.”

“Do we need a warrant?” I asked, as I did it.

“I want to talk to him, not arrest him,” Vann said. “But you might see if you can get a warrant for Kearney’s records. I want to know who he was integrating with. See if you can pull Nicholas Bell’s records too. Two Integrators possibly tied up with murder in a single day is a little much for me.”

*   *   *

Karl Baer’s apartment was in a little gray apartment complex in Leesburg, next to a supermarket and an International House of Pancakes. He was in a bottom corner apartment, tucked underneath a stairwell. There was no response when we knocked.

“He is a Haden,” I pointed out.

“If he’s living here he’s got a threep,” Vann said. “If he’s got a damn employee badge at Loudoun Pharma then he’s got a threep. He can answer the door.” She knocked again.

“I’ll go around back and see if I can see in a window,” I said, after a minute.

“Yeah, okay,” Vann said. “No, wait.” She tried the doorknob. It turned all the way.

“You really going to do this?” I asked, looking at the doorknob.

“The door was open,” Vann said.

“The door was closed,” I said. “Just unlocked.”

“Are you recording?”

“Right now? No.”

Vann pushed the door open. “Look, it’s open,” she said.

“You’re just a beacon of safe constitutional practices, Vann,” I said, echoing her from earlier in the day.