McGee couldn't move.
Her face had gone white — she could feel it, the blood leaving, the room tilting at the edges. Thomas. The mask on the table. Thomas. The voice from her kitchen that morning, saying good morning, my lady to her in an interrogation room. She opened her mouth and nothing came out. No words. There were no words.
The door burst open. Hannah — Hannah's hand on her arm, Hannah's voice low and urgent: "Come on. Come on, Miggy, out. Now."
She let herself be pulled. Her legs worked. That was all.
---
In the hallway, the fluorescent lights were too bright. Anderson was there, and agents, and the whole task force pressed around the glass — and McGee turned back toward the door.
"Let me back in."
"No." Anderson stepped into her path. "You can't go back in there."
"You don't get to—"
"I saw him yesterday, McGee." Anderson's voice was flat. "I saw him in our bullpen with coffee and cake, and I let him walk around. He's your —" He stopped. Started again. "You are compromised six ways from Sunday. You are not going back in that room."
"I need to—" She didn't know what she needed. To ask him. To hear him say it wasn't true. To hear him say it was.
"She's right," Hannah said quietly. "Miggy. You can't."
McGee looked at her best friend. Hannah's face was pale too, but her jaw was set. "Then who?"
Hannah glanced at the glass — at the man sitting calmly at the table, mask on the table beside him, waiting — and squared her shoulders.
"Me."
---
Through the glass, McGee watched him wait.
He sat with his cuffed hands folded, calm, patient — and then he looked up at the two-way mirror. His head kicked a little to the left, the tilt, and he just stared. At them. At her. Through the glass like it wasn't there.
Then he raised his cuffed hands — cuffed together, not to the desk — and adjusted his tie. Careful. Precise. The way he'd done it a hundred times on camera.
McGee's stomach turned over.
The door opened. Hannah walked in, sat down across from him, set a file on the table she didn't need.
"It's nice to see you again, Hannah," he said. Calm. Cool. Collected. Like they were old friends.
Hannah didn't flinch. "Why now?" she asked. "Why turn yourself in now?"
He smiled — the easy one, the Thomas one. "Well, Hannah — if you haven't noticed, the US is on fire. Pure chaos out there." He leaned back in the chair, the cuffs clinking softly. "It's only a matter of hours. Days, maybe. Before the world catches up."
Through the speaker, his voice was conversational. Reasonable. McGee pressed her fingers against the glass.
"So that was your plan all along," Hannah said. "Everything leading up to this."
He looked at her straight in the eyes. No tilt. No charm. Just the look.
"Sometimes," he said, "you just want to watch the world burn."
A beat. Then he smiled.
Hannah stared at him. McGee watched her best friend — the sharpest person she knew — run out of road. What did you ask a man who'd just told you the truth? Hannah believed him. McGee could see it in her shoulders, the way they dropped.
Hannah stood up. She didn't take the file. She walked out and closed the door behind her, and through the glass McGee saw him watching her go, still smiling.
---
In the hallway, Hannah looked at Anderson. Looked at McGee.
"In his mind," she said, "he's already won." Her voice was thin. "I don't know what else to say. I don't know what to ask him. The game's over." A beat. "He won."
McGee felt it hit like a wave — all of it at once, the morning, the eggs, his heartbeat under her cheek, the mask on the table, good morning, my lady — and her legs turned to jello. She went down to her knees right there in the hallway, and the weeping came up out of her like something breaking open, and she couldn't stop it. She didn't try.
Chapter 34