The Grid by Nick Cook

Author:Nick Cook [Cook, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473544338
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

31

‘ARE YOU PREPARED TO COOPERATE FULLY WITH ALL APPROPRIATE authorities in disclosing how you came to track down Duke Gapes?’

Graham lifts a buff-colored file from a pile of papers and places it next to the page he’s just read from, a transcript of my polygraph.

He invites me to take a look.

The first shot shows me standing on the stoop of Ted van Buren’s brownstone. In the second, I’m looking around, as if I know I’m being watched. In the third, I’m shaking TVB’s hand and being ushered into the doorway. It was the night Hetta and I met Christy.

Even to me, I appear guilty as hell.

When faced with a subpoena for a client’s medical records, it is a psychiatrist’s or a psychologist’s right to be able to claim privilege. Or at least it was. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, that is no longer an option, nor can any delay be made by the psychiatrist or psychologist to the execution of the warrant. In fact, almost all the options typically available to my profession are now illegal.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Section 215 also come with this beauty: a gag order prohibiting me from telling anyone I’ve received one, which means getting to speak to a lawyer is a luxury I can’t expect. I am in the room with the table, the camp bed and the two-way mirror.

‘Twenty-two minutes into your polygraph, Colonel Cain, you were asked the following question: Are there any reasons that might prevent you from legitimately fulfilling your duties as White House Medical Director? You provided a negative response. That was a lie, wasn’t it?’

I think back to our discussion in the tent. Graham knew about my drinking, and he knew about Hope’s pregnancy. Both these facts were containable – even the Secret Service’s suspicion that I’d been in a depressed mood state following my return from combat operations and had deliberately rammed the Kenworth.

But this changes things. If they’ve got TVB’s patient notes and transcripts of any conversations he and I have had in the past week, then they also know that halfway through Georgetown I had a full-on breakdown, which never made it as far as my medical notes, and was absent from my background security check and from the subsequent declarations I made when I agreed to become the President’s doctor. Even more damningly, it begs his next question: how did I get the job?

I wait, but it doesn’t come.

Instead, Graham produces one of the three images Hetta, Christy and I withheld from his investigation: the guy who looks like Napoleon. There are a limited number of ways the Service could have acquired this picture. The first is via Hetta, who took it on her iPhone. The second is via Christy, who received it from Lefortz. The third is almost unthinkable: from Lefortz himself.

‘Hart and I did not remove those images from the cabin,’ I tell him.

‘Then let me in on who did.’

‘They were there when we kicked down the door. The following day they’d been removed and replaced.

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