Shadow State


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Part I
 
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 
 
 Part II
 
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 Chapter 12
 
 
 Part III
 
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 
 
 Afterword
 Acknowledgments
 Author Biography
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Part I
 Chapter 1
 Afterword
 Acknowledgments
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Pagebreaks of the print version
 
 Cover Page
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 iv
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 SHADOW STATE
 A NOVEL
 FRANK SENNETT
 
 
 
 For Mary Doheny, who got me writing again.
 And for my Pop. Sorry I didn’t finish this in time for you to read it. Oh shucks, oh darn.
 
 
 
 I
 
 
 
 
 CHAPTER
 
 1
 FROM HIS POSITION in the parking lot seventy-five yards from Washington, DC’s Friendship Academy, Rafael Hendrix tracked his target’s brisk progress down the main entrance hall.
 The window wall provided a full view of the young woman through his scope, from her choppy black bob to a blue peacoat too bulky for her small frame to the smart white linen pants that clashed with a pair of neon-green running shoes engineered for flight.
 Her face, in profile, was a study in determination, thin lips pursed, eyes locked on the corridor ahead.
 Hendrix was ready to put the woman down before she reached the interior hallway leading to the classroom hosting the First Lady, and the one next door where his eleven-year-old daughter, Becca, was enjoying a free reading period with her classmates.
 “Situation is fluid,” the op commander said. “We have not confirmed she is acting alone. Do not take the shot. Repeat: Do not take the shot. Acknowledge.”
 Hendrix said nothing.
 Time slowed as he tugged his collar to wipe away the sweat trickling down his neck. The hot asphalt smell of the parking lot and the pew-pew calls of pissed-off starlings on the tree branch above him faded as his concentration sharpened. These were the trade’s most intimate moments, when the world was stripped down to sniper and target.
 He calmed his breathing, made sure his gun rest was solid, rechecked the sight. She was ten paces from the corner and ten more to where President Wyetta Johnson’s wife and forty-five of DC’s most privileged children remained oblivious to the grave danger this woman represented.
 “No shot. Acknowledge. Goddammit, Hendrix. No shot. No shot. There are—”
 He ripped away the earpiece, put the crosshairs on the woman, then moved them slightly to the right, leading her. She was two paces from disappearing.
 He took the shot.
 It was clean, just above her right ear. Instantaneous death.
 As the woman’s nervous system collapsed, her right hand released the triggering device. Less than a second later, her body and the wall of windows vaporized.
 The classrooms around the corner remained intact.
 Until the second bomber, the one emerging from the girls’ bathroom adjacent to Becca’s classroom, heard the blast, flung herself through the door, and detonated her suicide vest, engulfing twenty-three fifth graders and their teacher in a column of flame.
 Hendrix couldn’t see the carnage from the parking lot. But in the dream logic of his nightmare, he reached the classroom just as Becca turned to him, screaming, from inside the inferno. He couldn’t rescue his daughter, but he was sure she saw him, and blamed him.
 He awoke, heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his ears and the veins of his neck.
 Hendrix sat up, peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and mopped his face. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and rested for a few minutes in the desert quiet, head lowered, waiting for his nervous system to reset.
 He stood, stretched, then filled a tall glass with cloudy water from the kitchen tap and drank it down in three swift gulps. The wall clock read three AM, as it did after the nightmare pretty much any night he didn’t drink himself into a stupor.
 That meant he’d endured a straight month of nightmares since he’d cut out the tequila