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Flynn?”
    “Yes.”
    “Be good to her.”
    There was so much meaning in what she said, so many layers to it that I could not respond. It felt like there was a lump in my throat the size of a fist. However, Violin nodded to herself as if I had replied.
    As she walked away I felt a weird ache inside. Almost a premonition, like maybe I’d never see her again. But that was stupid.
    I sat there and took over the job of petting Ghost, who stared at Violin’s retreating back. “Mother Night,” I said aloud.
    Ghost whined softly.

 
    Chapter Seven
    The Warehouse
    DMS Field Office
    Baltimore, Maryland
    Friday, May 20, 7:55 p.m.
    Mother Night surfaced again later that month.
    It went like this.
    The interrogation team finished with Reggie. They’d squeezed him like a Florida orange, and when they were sure he had no juice left, they gave him back to me to transport him to the witness protection program. Or, rather, our version of it. The one run by the U.S. Marshals is good, but in an age where computer hacking has become the most feared WMD, the protected witnesses aren’t all that secure. The Marshal Service is a government agency, which means it needs to keep records, transfer information, and receive reports from the field. All of that goes through computers. Last year, nine protected witnesses who were set to testify against a coalition of Mexican cartels were targeted and killed. Five of them had families, and each witness had on-site marshals as watchdogs. There were no survivors. Forensic computer analysis proved that the system had been hacked.
    We didn’t want to turn Reggie Boyd over to the marshals. We trusted the agents but not their computers. The world of law enforcement is changing. A couple of keystrokes are more powerful than a bullet.
    The DMS has gone old-school with its version of witness protection. Nothing goes onto any computer except MindReader. Even then, information is protected by 28-bit encryption and self-erase counterintrusion programs. There are missile codes with less security.
    So, Reggie had been a guest at the new Warehouse, the DMS field office in Baltimore. My office.
    Everyone I worked with still called it “new” even though we’d been in residence here for months. However, whenever someone spoke of the Warehouse, without the “new” prefix, everyone knew they weren’t talking about here. Once upon a time we’d been in a different building four blocks away. That building was now a hole in the world and everything that had been in it had been vaporized by a terrorist bomb. A hundred and sixty-nine people had gone up with it. Friends, colleagues, brothers-in-arms. Gone. On some level those of us who’d escaped that catastrophe felt it was disrespectful to simply call this the Warehouse.
    The new building was bigger and it was crammed with every kind of interior and exterior surveillance and detection equipment. A sparrow couldn’t take a crap on a rain gutter without an alarm ringing somewhere. Paranoid? Sure, but as the saying goes, sometimes they really are out to get you.
    Ghost and I came to get Reggie a few minutes before eight on a rainy Friday. Reggie’s “cell” was actually an office that had been converted into an apartment about as big as a good-sized dorm room. He had a flat-screen TV, cable with lots of premium channels, a Netflix account, and a tall stack of Blu-Ray DVDs. When I came in, he was in sweats and sneakers, and was sprawled on his couch watching an old episode of Game of Thrones.
    “It’s almost over,” he said. “Can you give me a sec?”
    “Sure.”
    I perched on the end of the couch for a few minutes, watching it with him. It was from the second season, the siege of Kings Landing. Good stuff.
    Ghost climbed up between us, and while the armies clashed on the screen, Reggie stroked Ghost’s fur. Their relationship had changed a bit. Not that Ghost wouldn’t kill him if I ordered it, but over the last month we’d all developed an odd fondness