He poked the nose bridge of his glasses with his forefinger. “A friend of mine called me from West Virginia,” he said, following a shiver from the booze. “He works in a place called the Hilltop Manor Resort. It’s one of those fancy, high-dollar hotels where mobsters used to stay. Anyway, my buddy—his name is Rick Kau-flin—told me there’s been a constant stream of traffic into the hotel tonight, and that it’s all been way after hours.”

He took another pull on the bottle.

“Don’t get shit-faced before you can finish your story,” Sally said.

“Oh, you have no idea how much I want to.”

“You know you’re not making any sense yet, right?”

Todd took a huge breath and let it go through his nose. He put the tequila bottle on the coffee table, then thought better and picked it up again. “The thing is, why are a bunch of people flooding into the hotel at this hour, and why have they shut down a big part of the place to any of the employees?”

“Wait,” Sally said. “Did they do that? Shut down a big part of the hotel?”

“Yes, Sals. Jeez, pay attention. They won’t allow any employees into, like, a whole section of the place, and they even kicked people out of occupied rooms in that section. Why would they do that?”

“Why would I know the answer?” Sally said.

“And why would the people who are arriving all be people from Capitol Hill? Speaker Glendale one of them?”

Sally felt a chill. “You mean Penn Glendale? Speaker of the House of Representatives?”

“Yeah, that one. Do you know another Speaker Glendale? And others, too.”

Sally was leaning into the conversation now. “Who else?”

“I don’t know. We got cut off before he could tell me. Just click and he was gone. I tried calling him back and couldn’t get through. I tried calling the front desk of the hotel and just got an error code. Then I called my cell carrier and they told me that the cell towers out there are all down, and they don’t know why.”

Sally’s news sense was piqued, but she knew she was still missing a huge piece of the puzzle. “It’s late, Todd. Connect the dots for me, will you?”

“Not yet.” Another pull. “Five or ten years ago, another friend of mine—a guy I knew in college before he flunked out and went into the Army—told me that he worked on a supersecret project out in West Virginia. I bought him a couple of drinks, and he told me on deep background that if there was a war, official Washington would be evacuated to a bunker out in the middle of the mountains.”

“Was the bunker at this Hillcrest place?”