that arguing on a wet shoulder at night with a man who had already lied about why he stopped her would not make her safer. It would only give him an excuse to escalate. She also knew something O'Grady did not know, something that changed the entire balance of the encounter even though she sat alone in a rented car with a flashlight in her eyes.
Her rental car was equipped with a state-of-the-art three-hundred-and-sixty-degree covert surveillance system installed by the Bureau's technical division. High-definition cameras were currently recording the cabin, the exterior, and O'Grady's every move, capturing his face and his hands and his voice with a clarity no dash camera on a cruiser could match. The feed was backing up, encrypted, directly to a secure server in Quantico, far from this highway and far from any local precinct where it might conveniently disappear. Every word O'Grady had spoken so far was already preserved. Every lie was already time-stamped. Every movement he was about to make would be preserved too.
She unbuckled her seatbelt slowly, keeping her hands visible, and stepped out into the freezing rain. The gravel shifted under her shoes. The cold hit her immediately, soaking through the shoulders of her blazer and running down her neck, and the wind pushed her hair across her face. She did not flinch. She stood beside the car with her back to the highway, the cruiser's lights strobing behind O'Grady, and waited for his next order.
“Face the car. Hands on the roof,” O'Grady ordered.
Cynthia complied. She turned, placed her palms flat on the wet roof of the Taurus, and felt the cold metal through her skin. Rain ran down her wrists and dripped from her elbows. She could hear her own breathing, steady and controlled, and she could hear O'Grady moving behind her, his boots loud on the gravel, his breathing heavier than hers.
She felt O'Grady's rough hands pat her down, a search that was far more aggressive than protocol dictated. His hands pressed hard against her blazer and her slacks, lingering where a professional search would have moved on, pushing and prodding as if he were trying to provoke a reaction. Cynthia did not give him one. She kept her hands on the roof and her eyes on the wet glass of the car window, where a distorted reflection of the scene played back at her: the cruiser, the lights, the officer behind her, the empty highway stretching away into the rain.
He found nothing but her cell phone and a tube of lipstick. He pulled them from her pockets, examined them as if they might conceal something, and then shoved them back toward her without comment, annoyed that the search had produced nothing he could use.