“Terrorists?”

“Yeah, they were dressed like those ISIS guys: fatigues, long black shirts, and black hoods. The only thing you could see were their eyes. One had a long black beard.”

With only an hour a day, I didn’t keep up much on current events, and I knew almost nothing with respect to ISIS, but even I’d heard about the attacks in Paris.

“The one with the beard started yelling in Arabic and pointing to the ground,” Ingrid continues. “Red and Marshall wouldn’t go down. Marshall made a go for one of the terrorists. Red tried to stop him, but it was too late. They shot Marshall twice in the chest, then turned the gun on Red and shot him too. They had silencers, no way any of the neighbors could have heard. Then they zip-tied and duct-taped everyone, confiscated all cell phones, watches, jewelry — they even took the video camera — then they forced us downstairs and put us in the boiler room.”

I look down at her hand. The four-carat diamond ring I bought her, the one I slipped on her finger twenty-four hours earlier after saying “I do,” is gone.

I shake away the thought, then say, “And Billy and Sullivan never made it down?”

“Nope.”

Billy and Ingrid had grown very close since she was paired with the rookie detective a year and a half earlier. He was the little brother she never had. At least once a week, she would update me on whatever woman Billy was dating — he was something of a playboy and had slowly worked his way through the Alexandria Police Department — and she would do it with a smile threatening to leap off her face. It was Billy, not Sullivan, who would keep Ingrid sharp, who would keep her from letting her emotions get the better of her.

I let out a long exhale, then add, “And nobody was looking for any of you because of the blizzard.”

She nodded. “Isabel and Jorge had a babysitter, but the sitter probably just figured that they got caught in the storm. And if friends or family were trying to contact any of the others, they would have figured the same. No one would have suspected foul play, and I doubt anyone was declared missing.”

“Except for Sullivan.”

He never made it back into bed next to the First Lady. So when she woke up and no one could find him, shit hit the fan.

“Right,” Ingrid said. “Except for Sullivan.”

Ingrid pulls my Samsung Galaxy out of her pocket and shows me the top news story.

President Sullivan Missing!

Underneath the main headline is the second lead story: Snowpocalypse hits DC!

I shake my head in awe, then say, “And when this gets out, tomorrow’s headline is going to read ‘President Sullivan Kidnapped by Terrorists.’”

“Can you imagine?”

It would, undoubtedly, be one of the biggest stories in the history of the world.