The elevator behind Grant dinged.
It was a soft, polite sound, entirely at odds with the violence that had just stained the sterile air of the maternity ward. The stainless-steel doors parted with a quiet mechanical hiss, revealing a tableau that would be burned into Grant Whitmore’s memory for the rest of his miserable life.
Four men stepped out of the elevator.
Three of them wore the dark, immaculately tailored suits of federal agents, their postures rigid, their eyes scanning the hallway with the cold, sweeping precision of predators locating prey. Their hands rested casually, yet deliberately, near their waistbands.
But it was the fourth man who made the oxygen vanish from the room.
Thomas Vance was sixty-two years old, with silver hair swept back from a face carved out of granite. He wore a charcoal trench coat over a three-piece suit, and he carried a thick, leather-bound file under his left arm. In his right hand, catching the harsh fluorescent light of the hospital corridor, dangled a pair of heavy steel handcuffs.