7:15 am
Rob McShay’s office
FBI Headquarters
Rob just walked into his office and set his coffee cup on his desk and before he made it around the desk to his chair, he heard a ringtone that he hadn’t heard in several months and it stopped him in his tracks. He quickly moved to his credenza where the phone was plugged in and snatched it up and answered, “Simon?”
There was a long pause and then Rob heard an intake of breath, “It’s Nikki, she’s in the hospital in a coma…” Simon paused.
“What happened, is the baby ok?” Rob fired back
“I’m not sure what happened, I think someone rigged my car. I haven’t driven in several months and Nikki went to take the car and when she clicked the fob to open the door, it blew. If she would have been any closer when it did, she wouldn’t have made it. They still aren’t sure she will….” Simon paused, trying to reign in the emotion that was building within before continuing. “They did an emergency C section and our daughter is in the NICU in an incubator right now.”
Rob was reeling, “Oh my God, I am so sorry. What can I do?” He asked, already slamming fingers at his keyboard to see if there was anything out there about the explosion. Simon cleared his throat,
“I need to know they are safe while I figure out who is after us. I have been at the hospital all night and I can’t continue to stay here. I need to make arrangements for both of them, they can’t stay in a public hospital under their own identities. I am pretty sure I was the target, but I don’t want to take the chance that they were after Nikki. If I was the target, whoever is after me is going to want leverage against me and I can’t take that chance. I already redacted the hospital’s records to eliminate any trace of my daughter, but there is no way to do that with Nikki.”
Rob was leaning back in his chair staring at the ceiling tiles, thinking. “There is a private long term care facility that we have used in the past outside of Charlottesville. I could get Nikki moved there, but they don’t have the facilities to care for an infant…”
Simon cut him off before he could say anything else, “Just Nikki, there is only 1 place I trust my daughter will be safe until we figure all of this out…”
Knowing better than to argue with Simon, Rob agreed that he would make the arrangements to have Nikki transported to the new facility within the next 2 hours and Simon would take care of erasing any digital trail from the hospital’s records. They hung up and Rob immediately placed a call to the director of the hospital and made sure they had security set up that would rival anything the Secret Service could provide. He then called an emergency meeting of his task force knowing that sooner or later, he would need to deploy them once Simon found out who attacked them.