Lock In (Lock In, #1)(63)

I rolled and looked up to see the man leaning up against the doorframe of my room, keeping his weight off his injured foot, lining up his shot. The knife was still in his foot and the skillet was behind me. There was no way I was going to stop him in time.

“Hey!” my father said, and the man turned just in time to take a shotgun blast in the side.

The shotgun blast took me by surprise, but probably less than it surprised my assassin. He flew straight out of the doorframe, spinning, landing facedown less than a foot from me. He didn’t groan or breathe.

He was dead.

“Chris!” Dad’s voice.

“I’m all right,” I called back. “Both of me. One more than the other.” I gathered my useless leg up behind me and sat up.

Mom ran up, flashlight in hand, flashing it in my eyes, blinding me. I dialed my eyes back to normal mode. “Throw me the flashlight,” I said.

She did. I ran it up and down the assassin. There was a gaping hole where a few of his ribs used to be. Dad got him at pretty close range.

“Is he dead?” Mom asked.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“Jesus,” Dad said. “I just killed a man.”

“Yeah, you did,” I said. I aimed my flashlight over at Dad. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you just ended your Senate run.”

Dad didn’t have anything to say to that. I think he might have been a little bit in shock.

I took the body and rolled it over. Whoever it was, he was young, dark-haired, and dark-eyed.

“Who is he?” Dad asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why would someone want to kill you?” Mom asked.

“I’m an FBI agent,” I said.

“It’s your third day on the job!”

“Fourth,” I said. I was feeling a little punchy myself. I’d had a long day. “Mom. Dad. I need you to do something for me. When the police come, the story needs to be that this was a house robbery gone wrong. Tell Jerry that’s the story too.”

“He’s in your room,” Dad said. “Your threep has been shot.”

“I came home for dinner with you two,” I said. “We heard noises. I insisted on taking point because I’m the FBI agent.”

Dad looked dubious. “Come on, Dad,” I said. “You’re one of the most famous men on the damn planet. I think you can sell that story.”

“Why do you need us to tell this story?” Mom asked.

I looked over at the dead man in the room. “Because I need the person who did this to believe I don’t know what he’s up to.”

“Chris,” Mom said. “The man who did this is dead.”

“That’s exactly what I want him to think,” I said.

Mom looked at me like I was nuts.

My field of vision lit up with something other than a maintenance alert. It was Klah Redhouse. I told my parents to hold on and I took the phone call.

“You okay?” Klah asked. My punchiness was apparently evident by voice alone.

“Ask me that tomorrow,” I said.

“I did what you asked and looked through the Nation’s medical records,” Redhouse said. “I got clearance from President Becenti.”

“What did you find?”

“There were two people who matched what you were looking for,” Redhouse said. “One of them was a woman, Annie Brigmann. She died three years ago. The man she was driving with fell asleep with her in the car and drove off the road. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The car rolled over her.”

“The other one?”

“His name is Bruce Skow,” Redhouse said. “I tried to look him up. He went missing from his home about three months ago.”

“Hold on a second,” I said. I looked over to my assassin, took a picture of his face, and sent it off to Redhouse. “Tell me if that’s him,” I said.

“That looks like him,” Redhouse said. “You know him?”

“He’s in my parents’ house right now,” I said. “Dead.”

“That can’t be coincidence,” Redhouse said.

“No,” I said. “No, it can’t.”

“What do you want me to do with this?” Redhouse asked.

“I need you to wait for me,” I said. “It won’t be long. I just need a little time.”

“You have earned credit,” Redhouse said. “You’ve got time.”

“Thanks,” I said, and disconnected. I could hear the sirens coming up the driveway.





Chapter Nineteen

AN HOUR WITH the Loudoun County sheriffs, who seemed delighted to buy into the “home robbery gone wrong” story. I left just as the media, and Dad’s media people, started to arrive. That was something they could handle. At some point I would need the FBI to take possession of Skow’s body, because I needed to confirm what was in his head. I would worry about that later.

My threep in D.C. was where I had left it, and had a police guard, although whether it was a guard or a cop waiting to arrest me wasn’t clear for the first couple of minutes. A diagnostic showed that the damage to the threep from the bullet into the back was worse than I originally thought, and I had a couple of hours before it locked up entirely. I reflected on the fact that in a single day I had managed to seriously damage three separate threeps.