Chapter 10 : THE OTHER INVESTIGATOR
[PETER SUTHERLAND]
The call log printed to four pages.
Peter fed the last sheet through the secure printer and laid them side by side on the Night Action desk, which was technically his desk, the desk where he was supposed to have been sitting at 11:17 PM two nights ago when the phone rang for the first time in three years.
He'd been in a briefing he hadn't requested, added to the attendance list by Okafor, who'd told him the coordination office had flagged Night Action representation as necessary for a security review of the Metro memorial event. Peter had gone because the request came through proper channels and proper channels were the only kind he trusted. He'd spent two hours in a room discussing crowd control logistics and blast perimeter assessments and had gotten back to level four at 11:52 PM to find the phone room door ajar, the indicator light green, and the receiver sitting in its cradle at a slightly different angle than he'd left it.
The log showed a pickup at 11:17 PM.
The log showed a badge swipe on the 4-E corridor door at 11:16 PM — one minute before the pickup. Not a tier-four badge. A tier-two badge, which gave corridor access but not room access through the primary reader.
Except the secondary access door. The one with the emergency authorization code in the shared drive. The one anybody with two hours and a passing interest in the facility layout could have found.
Peter looked at the badge number. Cross-referenced it against the personnel directory.
BRADFORD, CLINT M. — FBI LIAISON ANALYST — LEVEL 3 BULLPEN — CLEARANCE TIER 2.
He stared at the name for a long moment.
Then he pulled Bradford's file.
The file was three pages and a photograph. The photograph showed a man in his late twenties with a jaw that looked like it had taken a recent hit — a bruise fading yellow at the left temple, the residual look of someone still catching up to being upright. Dark circles. The specific expression of someone trying to make their face do nothing.
Standard evaluations across the board. Six months in the White House rotation, assigned to security assessment functions, consistently rated adequate. One supervisor comment from a month ago: "Bradford meets minimum requirements." One from last week — submitted the day of the phone call: "Exceptional work on the Henderson assessment — thorough, analytical, a significant improvement."
Peter read that twice.
Significant improvement. On the day he answered the most classified phone in the building.
He uncapped a highlighter and drew a line through that sentence.
---
The Campbell report took forty minutes to locate because whoever had processed the scene had been thorough about burying it. Not deleting — deleting left traces. Burying: the incident number routed to a holding file under a non-standard classification code that wouldn't surface in routine queries. Peter found it by running the street address, not the incident type.
Emma and Henry Campbell. Address in Virginia suburbs. Reported as a residential gas incident, medical emergency pending further assessment. No suspects identified. Scene processed by a private security contractor Peter had never heard of, with a Fairfax County law enforcement liaison attached who had signed off on the classification routing within four hours of the initial call.
Four hours. Someone had been standing by waiting to sign.
He sat back in the chair and looked at the ceiling.
Emma Campbell. FBI veteran. Henry Campbell. Former military intelligence. Both carrying Night Agent credentials in a personnel file he'd pulled from a classification level he probably wasn't supposed to access, using a badge-swipe code he'd leveraged from the facility security office by implying he had authorization that technically existed somewhere in the approval chain even if no one had explicitly signed the form.
The Campbells were dead. Someone in Fairfax County law enforcement had buried the report in four hours. And a junior analyst with a six-month record of mediocre work had answered the Night Action phone seventeen minutes before Peter would have arrived.
Peter opened a fresh legal pad and wrote one word at the top.
Bradford.
He underlined it twice.
The bullpen downstairs would be empty at this hour — it was past 6 PM and the level-three analysts kept office hours. Bradford's desk would be there: the sticky tab with his name on the monitor, the standard-issue equipment, whatever personal effects he'd accumulated in six months of showing up and filing adequate assessments. Nothing there yet — he needed more before he started touching evidence.
What he needed was Bradford's movements on the night of the phone call. What he needed was whatever Bradford had said on that call. What he needed was to find out where Bradford was right now, because Bradford had left the building at 5 PM on the day of the call and hadn't badged back in since.
Peter checked his watch. 6:22 PM.
He picked up his phone and called the security office.
"I need a vehicle trace on a government employee. Level-two clearance, White House rotation." He gave Bradford's name. "Registered vehicle, plate, last confirmed parking structure entry and exit."
He waited.
The vehicle was a dark grey Ford, last logged in the White House parking structure at 7:48 AM on Day 2 and not returned.
A car that hadn't come back.
Peter wrote down the plate number and sat very still for a moment, the way he sat when a thing that had been building in the background resolved into a clear shape. The shape here was: something happened on that phone call. Bradford took it and then Bradford disappeared, and two Night Agents were dead and buried, and someone in the building had already started managing the narrative.
He didn't know yet whether Bradford was complicit in that management or running from it.
Either way, Bradford was the thread.
---
[CLINT BRADFORD]
The Fredericksburg motel had a parking lot lit by two functioning lights out of four, and the vacancy sign had a dead letter — VACAN Y — that gave the whole front face a slightly uncertain character, like a building unsure of its own status.
Rose had found it from the bus window when we transferred in Warrenton, pointing at the sign as the regional connector pulled past the commercial strip.
"Cash motel."
"Yes."
"Looks like it takes cash."
"Exactly."
We'd stopped at the Fairfax storage unit first — the code worked on the second try after Rose recalibrated the Fibonacci sequence for the current week — and the unit held exactly what Emma's off-book infrastructure suggested a thorough Night Agent would keep: a pre-packed go-bag, two sets of secondary identity documents in different names, and twelve hundred dollars in mixed bills rubber-banded in a waterproof case. No vehicle. Emma had kept the vehicle at the Maryland farmhouse instead, which Rose found noted in pencil on the inside of the go-bag's front pocket.
"Emma's resources are running deeper than anything the show depicted."
The secondary identity Rose used at the motel check-in read clean. Gut Read on the desk clerk: low-level boredom, genuine tiredness, the specific flat affect of someone four hours into a night shift that still had four more to go. Zero deception, zero alertness. We were furniture to her.
I set my briefcase on the table beside the bed and took stock.
We'd been running for three days on Bradford's clothes, vending machine food, and forward momentum. The go-bag had a change of clothes that almost fit — Emma had been built closer to Rose's dimensions than mine, but the spare shirt was better than four days of the same one. I put it on in the bathroom, stood in front of the mirror, and Bradford's face looked back at me looking more like someone who'd been living in a car than someone who worked in the White House. The bruise at the temple had faded completely. At least there was that.
[Gut Read — Passive. Ambient scan: no active targets in range. Area threat level: Low.]
"Low."
I stood with that for a second. Low wasn't none. And the Gut Read was running at 60% accuracy against untrained subjects with no baseline — against Dale and Ellen, both of whom I'd now confirmed were operationally active in Virginia, "low" was about as reassuring as a slightly quieter alarm.
Something was building. Not the system — the system was quiet. Just a sense of pressure at the edges, the way a change in weather announces itself through the ears before you can name what you're feeling.
I went back into the room. Rose had Emma's documents spread across the bed in a semicircle, the laptop open, a pencil in her right hand she wasn't currently using but hadn't set down. Three hundred miles north, a man named Peter Sutherland was probably in the White House basement right now, doing the same thing Rose was doing — tracing threads back to their source.
Bradford's name was one of those threads.
I didn't know how fast Peter moved. The show had never depicted this particular sequence because Peter had been the one answering the phone, not the one investigating who had answered it. This version was unscripted. All I could do was stay ahead of the threads and hope Peter's instinct was to investigate rather than immediately escalate.
"It's Peter Sutherland," I thought. "He'll absolutely investigate solo before escalating. That's the man's entire character."
Rose made a sound — not a word, just the specific sound of someone who has found what they were looking for and needed a second before saying it aloud.
"There's a cipher," she said.
She held up the recipe card. Emma's handwriting on both sides — measurements and temperatures on the front, what looked like a random sequence of letters in the margins.
"She used a substitution key embedded in the card's original text. The address is in rural Maryland. It's not indexed anywhere I can find."
I looked at the address she'd written on the scratch paper.
"Not in any database. Not in the show."
"Emma's bolt-hole," I said.
"She never told me about it." Rose set the recipe card down carefully, face up. "She told me about the cipher algorithm when I was nineteen. I thought it was a weird hobby." She paused. "It wasn't a hobby."
I turned off the motel room light at 11:45 PM and lay down on the floor — the bed was single, Rose was already on it, and the floor was fine. The pressure at the edges was still there, directionless, unnamed.
Three hundred miles north, a desk lamp came on in the White House basement.
To supporting Me in Pateron.
with exclusive access to more chapters (based on tiers more chapters for each tiers) on my Patreon, you get more chapters if you ask for more (in few days), plus new fanfic every week! Your support starting at just $6/month helps me keep crafting the stories you love across epic universes.
By joining, you're not just getting more chapters—you're helping me bring new worlds, twists, and adventures to life. Every pledge makes a huge difference!
Join now at patreon.com/TheFinex5 and start reading today!