Daniel had gotten used to the jibes about his age. It didn’t help that his part-Korean/part–African American heritage made him look younger than his twenty-eight years. It was also why the people he encountered in law enforcement were skeptical when they learned he already had a couple of years under his belt. Their assumptions that he was barely out of college often led to even more incredulousness when they discovered he’d put in four years with the Marine Corps before earning his degree from Stanford and joining the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

“I’m going to grab a shower.” He went over to the galley kitchen and set the bag from Franklin’s on the counter. “I brought back barbecue for dinner tonight. It’s a lot, so help yourself.”

“I was told if I do not show up to dinner tonight that I shouldn’t bother showing up at all,” Quentin said as he closed his laptop and slipped it into a leather messenger bag. “Which means I’m having dinner with my wife. But thanks for the offer.” He gathered the papers that were scattered around the sofa, stuffed them in with the computer, and stood. “I’ll see you on Wednesday at the earliest. Good luck getting into that database at Trendsetters.”

Daniel nodded toward him. “You too. Whatever’s going down in San Antonio, be sure to watch your back.”

“I always do.” Quentin gave him a casual salute, hoisting the bag strap onto his shoulder as he left the apartment. He had his own key, even though he used the space here only sparingly as he worked on the Department of Homeland Security’s aspect of the case.

Daniel stepped into the apartment’s compact bathroom for a quick shower. He pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants and a Phillies T-shirt, then twisted open a bottled water and took it into the second bedroom—Quentin’s room, if, on the off-chance, anyone asked. Unlikely, since the only people who’d ever stepped foot inside this apartment were himself, Quentin, and a Grubhub driver who had gone the extra mile by delivering the Thai he’d ordered a few nights ago to the little two-person table shoved against the wall in the living room.

The second bedroom served as command central. They’d managed to squeeze two L-shaped desks into the eight-by-ten-foot space, along with a separate folding table, a filing cabinet, and a portable air-conditioning unit that ran twenty-four/seven to cool the computer equipment. Four twenty-seven-inch monitors rimmed the rear periphery of the desks. A fifth stood off to the side, its connection perpetually linked with a monitor fifteen hundred miles away, in a large room in a nondescript building in Vienna, Virginia.