The Devil You Know

Nationally Bestselling Author of Deep StateThe Devil You KnowChris HautyA Hayley Chill Thriller Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.CLICK HERE TO SIGN UPAlready a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. For Brian Justice is indiscriminately due to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank.—JOHN JAY, THE FIRST CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES PROLOGUEWhen he walked into the living room, Martin Barnes’s roving gaze stopped abruptly on the exclamation point of blood splattered across the white tree skirt that never looked like snow anyway. He and his wife had purchased the condo one week after their wedding fifteen Christmases ago and augmented a collection of holiday decorations every year since. A Caribbean-themed crèche purchased in a Christiansted gift shop during their honeymoon on St. Croix. Red chili pepper string lights gifted to them by Marilyn’s brother in Austin. The brass angel chime Barnes inherited from his parents. The night before Christmas, these festive adornments were a painful reminder of what was missing from the home.Gone how long now?Memories of his wife and sons chased Barnes from the living room, but he found no respite in the condo’s narrow foyer. Dressed for work—blue business suit with a straight silhouette jacket that better concealed his service weapon—the US Supreme Court police officer paused to inspect a framed portrait hanging on the wall just inside the front door.The photograph captured a moment of unadulterated joy during a return last January to St. Croix: the family of four arm in arm on a sun-splashed beach at the Carambola Resort, the same accommodations where Barnes and his new wife had enjoyed their honeymoon. The twins, Jeffrey and Michael—twelve years old at the time—were clad in swim trunks and shirtless, just emerged from hours in the water snorkeling and bodysurfing. Wearing one of her husband’s white linen shirts over a one-piece swimsuit, a tanned and smiling Marilyn appeared to revel in the time off from work as a schoolteacher and spent with her family instead. The photo captured the mood of a joyful day perfectly, without a clue in their unclouded expressions of the nightmarish future that awaited them.Like many others in law enforcement, Martin Barnes was a military veteran with two tours in Iraq. Yet, of all the countless missions in that hellish conflict, one resided in his head like no other. In support of a presidential directive to kill or capture Iranian nationals in Iraq, Barnes and his fellow Army Rangers entered Sadr City in a failed attempt to apprehend a wanted Shia militia leader. More than forty insurgents died in the Rangers’ contested withdrawal, with zero US casualties.Barnes could recall every second of the protracted street battle. The deafening racket of combat. Smells of blood, sweat, and the sour odor of spent gunpowder. One image, however, most frequently haunted his waking thoughts and nightmares: two Iraqi boys in a blasted-out doorway gawking at the headless body of an insurgent, freshly killed by a burst from a Ranger’s M4.In his mind’s eye, Barnes saw his sons’ blood-misted faces superimposed on the two Sadr City boys. Then, in the next instant, more jarringly, he imagined the young Iraqis—covered with the insurgent’s gore—standing between him and Marilyn on the Caribbean beach instead of their own sons.Am I insane? Is this what it feels like to have lost one’s mind?Reaching for the doorknob, Barnes saw the tremor in his right hand. Sweat pricked his brow. His breathing erratic and heart rate accelerating, the plainclothes USSC police officer entertained a nagging doubt that he could accomplish the awful task demanded of him. The simple act of opening the condo’s front door seemed almost beyond his abilities.Barnes took a moment to breathe and compose himself.Focusing on the ground at his feet, he noticed a splatter of red across the floor and on the lowest section of the hallway wall to the left.Whose blood is this?Jeffrey, the more cerebral of the twins, would not have risked a dash for the front door to raise the alarm. Instead, a last-ditch effort to play the hero’s role would have been Michael’s impulse.Putting together the scenario in his head, a collage of supposition, recovered memory, and horror, Barnes decided the blood in the condo’s entryway must belong to Michael, the bolder of his twin boys.Nausea welled up within him.Martin Barnes arrived at the same conclusion he had repeatedly rejected in the interminable hours since receiving his instructions.He had no choice.Only by irrevocable damnation would he win salvation.Great Falls, in Fairfax County, Virginia, was twenty miles and a world away from the District of Columbia. Two-lane roads meandered through wooded hills sprinkled with multimillion-dollar estates. Ranked first by one prominent financial publication in its list of the nation’s “top-earning towns,” the unincorporated community was home to some of Washington’s most powerful figures, including associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Anthony Gibbons. As a member of the USSC police agency’s Dignitary Protection Unit, it was Martin Barnes’s responsibility to ensure the safety of Justice Gibbons for the next eight hours.Parking his Ford SUV inside the electronically controlled gate of the stately three-story mansion, he pulled in behind a similarly nondescript Ford SUV stopped to one side of the crushed granite driveway. Kathy Radulski, a relatively recent addition to the unit, exited the USSC-issued SUV and walked back to Barnes’s window.In her early thirties, Radulski served in Afghanistan a decade after Martin’s Iraq tours. The conservative pantsuit she wore concealed neither her service weapon nor the last trimester of her first pregnancy. Barnes had relieved her on a four-day-a-week shift change for three months now. Despite their easy familiarity