Chapter 3: Georgetown, Dead Drop, Forty-Eight Hours After Burial

The phone was not his.

He discovered this on the morning after the burial, pulling on the charcoal overcoat he had worn to the Capitol — the good one, retrieved from a suit bag he hadn't opened since a state dinner in Vienna the previous spring — and finding a weight in the left interior pocket that should not have been there. He wore that coat to three things in his life: funerals, dinners at foreign ministries, and occasions when someone expected the Ellison name to walk into a room ahead of him. None of those occasions required a phone beyond the one already in his right pocket, the scratched personal model with a Georgetown sticker half-peeled from its case.

He held the unfamiliar phone in his hand for a moment. A flat black handset. No case. A brand he didn't recognize — a generic smartphone chassis that could have been assembled from components sourced to twelve different countries and probably was.