My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 581 Moving Gears In Action (2)

The arrests came in sequence across a six-hour window. By 6 AM, all five were in custody. By 7 AM, all five were in separate federal holding rooms and all five had asked for their phones.

***

Senator Howard Pierce had represented Virginia for nineteen years. He had sat on Armed Services, Intelligence, and Judiciary simultaneously at his peak. He had shaped legislation, buried legislation, and on three separate occasions had made calls that ended careers before breakfast.

He communicated all of this to the arresting agents before they reached the vehicle.

"Do you have any idea who I am?" His voice was steady. "Do you understand the relationships you're disrupting? The people I can reach before this vehicle leaves my driveway?"

The lead agent opened the rear door. "Watch your head, Senator."

Pierce watched his head and got in, still talking.

"I want Director Reeves directly. Not a deputy but Reeves herself. And I want my attorney in that room before anyone says another word to me."

Nobody said another word to him.

He spent the rest of the drive running through names in his head — who owed him, who feared him, who had enough to lose that a single call would move them. The list was long. It had always been long. It was the thing he had built his entire career on top of.

He started making the mental calls before the vehicle had left his neighborhood.

***

Representative Linda Cross had opened the door herself.

She had looked at the agents, looked at their credentials, looked at the vehicle behind them, and said: "Give me a moment."

She came back with her coat on and her hands open and walked to the vehicle without being directed.

She got in, say down and closed her eyes and stayed like that for the duration of the entire drive.

***

Alan Brookner had been the loudest before they reached him and he stayed the loudest after.

The pre-dawn execution had found him in his bathrobe and he had come downstairs to four federal agents in his kitchen, and he had not lowered his voice once in the forty minutes since.

"You are making the single most catastrophic mistake of your careers. Do you understand what I manage? Do you understand the contracts, the relationships, what happens when you pull something like this without understanding the chain attached to it?" He was still in the bathrobe as nobody had given him time to change. "I want Briggs. I want someone from the NSC. I want anyone in this city with the clearance to understand what I represent and what gets disturbed when you move on me."

The agent closed the vehicle door and Brookner knocked on the window, but the agent walked around to the driver's side.

Brookner kept knocking.

***

Paul Danner from Treasury had seen it coming, thanks to a missed call at 3 AM from someone whose number he recognized.

He had sat on the edge of his bed in the dark for ninety seconds, doing the math, and had his attorney on the phone when the knock came.

He opened the door with the phone still at his ear. "They're here."

He was cooperative in the way that communicated he was not afraid. He asked no loud questions.

***

Cynthia Reaves gave a short, genuine sound, when she saw the agents at her door.

"Alright," she said, to the agents at her door. She looked at their faces one at a time. "Alright. Let me get my shoes."

She got her shoes, came out. She didn't ask for her phone or her attorney or anyone above anyone's pay grade. She walked to the vehicle like she was going somewhere she had already decided to go.

***

By nine in the morning all five were in the same federal holding facility, in separate rooms, and the requests had started immediately.

Pierce had demanded his attorney four times and been told each time that counsel would arrive within the hour. He had then requested a phone, been denied, and had sat down with the fury of a man who had never in nineteen years been in a room where no one was listening to him.

Brookner had not stopped talking. The facility staff had stopped responding around the forty-minute mark and he was talking to the walls.

Cross had asked once for a phone, been told it wasn't possible, and hadn't asked again. She sat with her hands folded and her eyes on the middle distance.

Danner was still looking at his hands.

Reaves had asked if there was coffee, been told there wasn't, said that was a shame, and said nothing since.

The door at the end of the corridor opened.

Calloway walked in and moved without hurry, stopping at each room's observation window for a moment before continuing. When he had looked at all five, he stopped in the center of the corridor.

"Open the rooms," he said to the supervisor. "Leave the doors open."

The five interview room doors swung open.

Calloway didn't move from the center of the corridor. He spoke at a normal volume and it carried across without effort.

"I'll say this once. You've all been asking the same questions since you arrived. I'm going to answer them."

He paused.

"The documentation is complete. Every transaction, every call, every arrangement, going back further than any of you would prefer. It has been verified against public and classified records. The cases are built and they are not going to fall apart, because whoever put them together did not do it carelessly."

Pierce's voice came from the first room. "I want to know who assembled them."

"You don't," Calloway said.

"I have a right—"

"Senator." Calloway said without a rise in his voice. "The calls your allies have been making since this morning are not producing results. The relationships you've spent nineteen years building are looking at the same documentation the Bureau has and making their own calculations. That's the room you're in now."

Silence filled the five rooms.

Brookner's voice came from the third room. "This is targeted. This is political. There are people who will—"

"Mr. Brookner. The defense contracts section of your file runs forty pages. Specific figures, specific dates, specific communications. You're welcome to call it political in court tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Danner said. Flat.

"Tomorrow," Calloway said. "All five of you. Counsel arrives at ten. I'd use the time."

He turned to go.