Beech sneered at her. “Yeah, that never crossed our mind.” He took a deep breath and said, “We’ve been working with the Secret Service looking for Sullivan since 9:00 a.m. yesterday morning when he missed a briefing with his Chief of Staff.”

And they didn’t have a single lead on his disappearance until nearly twenty hours later when Ingrid called her contact at the FBI and reported the President’s kidnapping.

“Can you bring me up to speed on what the FBI has done so far?”

Reluctantly, Beech spent the next ten minutes detailing the actions the FBI had taken since the President was declared missing. Nearly every FBI agent in the United States was working the case, as well as over twenty thousand other law enforcement officers. The interstate and all airports within a one-hundred-mile radius were shut down. Every airport in the US was on Severe Alert and passengers were being advised to arrive five hours before their flights to make sure they made it through the increased security. All private and chartered flights were on a seventy-two-hour flight restriction. Every interstate and highway in America was covered in checkpoints. The borders, both north and south, were closed. All ports, closed. It was an unprecedented, near nationwide shutdown of travel and commerce.

It was one thing to kidnap the President; it was another thing to get him out of the country.

And as of 6:00 a.m., an APB for three Arab men went out. Already five hundred men had been detained for questioning.

The door to the van opened and a gentleman and a woman entered. The man was dressed impeccably in a dark suit and an even darker coat; the woman was clad in jeans, a red parka, and a matching beanie.

“About time,” spat Beech.

“Yeah,” said the woman. Ingrid guessed her to be in her late thirties. Her skin was caramel brown, and she reminded Ingrid of the character Olivia Pope from her favorite TV show. “I’m second-guessing buying that Prius now.”

The woman introduced herself.

Tasha Reeves.

The man was Greg Cooper.

Though Ingrid had never seen either of them, she knew them by reputation. Cooper was the SAC, Special Agent in Charge, of the FBI Field Office in DC, and Tasha worked out of the Baltimore field office, heading up the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit.

“Has anyone been over the crime scene yet?” Cooper asked, rubbing his fingers through a well-kept goatee that was a couple shades darker than his wavy brown hair.

The goatee reminded Ingrid of Cal, her partner before Billy. Cal was no longer alive, having eaten a bullet at the hands of Red over a year and a half earlier.

She thought about Red.

Lying on the ground, two bullet holes in his chest.

Then she thought about Billy.

Where was he?

Was he still alive?

“No one has been inside yet,” Beech said. “We get one shot at this and we don’t need a bunch of idiots mucking up the scene. Bad enough there was a wedding there last night.”