O'Grady leaned closer, invading her personal space, his face inches from the open window. The smell of cheap, stale coffee and stale tobacco wafted into the car, mixed with the damp wool of his uniform and the rubber of his rain slicker. He studied her the way a man studies a problem he has already decided how to solve, his eyes moving from her face to her blazer to the interior of the car behind her.
“Work. Right,” he said, and the words carried a sneer he did not bother to hide. “You know why I pulled you over?”
“I have no idea, Officer O'Grady,” Cynthia said.
“You were swerving,” O'Grady said, as if he were reciting a line he had used many times before. “Crossed the yellow line twice back near the exit.”
It was a blatant lie. Cynthia had not shifted from the center of her lane for the last five miles. She knew it because she had been watching the road with the focus of a driver alone in heavy rain, and she knew it because the car's own systems, and her own memory, would agree with her. The Taurus had tracked straight through the rain, the steering wheel steady under her hands, the lane markings sliding past on either side without once crossing her tires. She filed the lie away without reacting to it, the way she had filed a thousand lies away in interview rooms, letting the person speaking believe he was in control of the story while she waited for him to add details that would later trap him.
“I apologize if it appeared that way,” Cynthia said. “The rain is quite heavy.”
O'Grady did not care about the rain. His eyes were already darting around the interior of the Taurus, looking for probable cause, scanning the seats and the floor and the console and the back seat as if he expected to find something incriminating simply by looking hard enough. He peered past her shoulder into the rear of the car. He glanced at the cup holder. He glanced at the phone. He seemed disappointed by how clean and ordinary everything was, and that disappointment hardened his expression rather than softening it.
“Step out of the vehicle,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Cynthia asked, her tone hardening just a fraction. “For an alleged traffic violation?”
“I said step out of the vehicle,” O'Grady barked, his hand dropping to rest on the butt of his service weapon. The gesture was not casual. It was deliberate, a reminder that he was armed and she was not, that the rain and the darkness and the empty highway were on his side.
Now, Cynthia did not panic. She did not argue. She did not raise her voice or demand a supervisor or invoke a title she had every right to invoke. As the director of the FBI, she knew exactly how this game was played, and she knew