The Fix

David Baldacci's The Fix opens with Amos Decker witnessing a baffling murder on a Washington, D.C. sidewalk. Decker, a six-foot-five former NFL player on an FBI joint task force, has hyperthymesia (perfect recall) and synesthesia (a condition causing him to perceive death as the color blue) from a career-ending brain injury. Walking toward the J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, he watches Walter Dabney, a 61-year-old government contractor, shoot Anne Berkshire, a woman in her late fifties, in the back of the head. Decker draws his weapon, but Dabney smiles, places the gun under his own chin, and fires. Berkshire dies instantly; Dabney survives but doctors hold no hope for recovery.

The investigation falls to Decker's four-person task force: journalist-turned-investigator Alex Jamison, FBI Special Agent Ross Bogart, and agent Todd Milligan. Berkshire is identified as an unmarried substitute schoolteacher in Fairfax County, and Dabney is a married father of four who runs a classified contracting firm. A hospice stamp on Berkshire's hand leads Decker to Dominion Hospice, where she volunteered with terminally ill patients. Dabney's wife, Ellie, a tall, athletic woman, tells investigators she knew nothing of her husband's classified work, had never heard of Berkshire, and did not know he owned a gun. She mentions an unexplained trip he took about a month earlier, after which he seemed changed.

Berkshire's background raises deeper questions: She lived in a luxury penthouse and owned a barely driven Mercedes, all incongruous with a teacher's salary. The FBI finds no record of Anne Berkshire prior to 10 years ago, and her credentials appear planted in databases. Dabney briefly regains consciousness before dying, uttering words that seem nonsensical. His eldest daughter, Jules, reveals he recently mailed her a safe deposit box key, but the box is empty; bank video shows Dabney entered days earlier with an unidentified woman in a wig who carried away a small bag.

Decker and Jamison move into an apartment building in Anacostia purchased by Melvin Mars, Decker's closest friend and a formerly wrongfully imprisoned man whom Decker helped exonerate. Decker helps look after tenants, including Tomas Amaya and his 11-year-old son Danny, who face threats from a local gang. Mars arrives in D.C., and the situation culminates when Luis Alvarez, a gang-connected construction supervisor involved in the threats against the Amayas, kidnaps Decker and Jamison, and Jamison kills him.

Harper Brown, an agent from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), tells the team that Dabney sold classified secrets to pay off enormous gambling debts and orders the FBI to stand down. Decker refuses, and Bogart agrees to continue investigating. Brown later reveals that Russian mobsters threatened to kill the family of Dabney's youngest daughter, Natalie, unless a 10-million-dollar debt attributed to Natalie's husband, Corbett, was repaid, pushing Dabney to sell secrets.

A license plate check leads Decker to a farmhouse Berkshire used to swap between identities. He finds a flash drive in the basement, but a sniper ambushes them as they leave and an assailant steals the drive, confirming a sophisticated third party is involved. Decker theorizes this group blackmailed Dabney, who is terminally ill with brain cancer, into killing Berkshire by threatening to expose his espionage. Security footage shows a clown near the FBI building that morning, apparently a signal to Dabney.

Using a key hidden in Berkshire's condo, Decker and Brown locate a storage unit containing a DIA security badge with the name removed, a 1985 communication from the KGB (the Soviet Union's intelligence service), and a doll with a secret compartment. Brown translates the Russian document: It commends "Ahha Seryyzamok" for espionage. "Ahha" means "Anna," and "Seryyzamok" means "Greylock," the highest peak in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Anne Berkshire was a Russian spy.

Mars suggests Dabney may have confided in Natalie, with whom he had a special bond. Decker learns that a week before his death, Dabney remarked cryptically to Natalie that a person can think they know someone for years only to discover they never truly did. Decker discovers the gambling debts were actually Natalie's, not Corbett's. She confesses that a Russian operative paid off her debts in exchange for her feeding her father the fabricated story, knowing his only option would be to sell secrets.

Decker realizes Berkshire volunteered at the hospice not out of kindness but to pass stolen information. The Harry Potter book she read to 10-year-old patient Joey Scott contains coded intelligence visible only under specific light sources. Alvin Jenkins, the hospice's evening manager, decoded the messages and passed them along. Brown reveals the book held at least nine months of classified intelligence, including access to sensitive DIA databases, and that several overseas operatives have been killed as a result. The team traces the operation to Alfred and Julia Gorski, wealthy Polish immigrants who arranged Joey's placement at the hospice, but finds them executed in their mansion.

The crisis deepens when Decker's team is summoned to the White House, where the National Security Advisor reveals that intercepted chatter indicates an imminent attack on U.S. soil. Decker connects details about the Dabney family: Ellie's athletic build, her daughters' birth defects, and the family's chronic health problems point to Stasi program 14.25, a doping regime run by East Germany's secret police that administered steroids to young athletes, causing severe long-term consequences including birth defects in offspring. Decker finds dolls with secret compartments in each daughter's childhood bedroom, matching the spy doll from Berkshire's storage unit. The Dabneys gave identical dolls to housekeeper Cecilia Randall's daughter; Ellie loaded stolen secrets into the dolls, and Randall's daughter unwittingly carried them home, where Berkshire's operatives retrieved the contents. Shortly after speaking with Decker, Randall is murdered.

Confronted at her husband's grave, Ellie confesses. She was recruited as a young East German athlete into a joint Stasi-KGB program, given a fabricated American identity, and sent to the United States as a deep-cover spy. She married Walter for his access to classified information; Anne Berkshire was her handler. Ellie stopped spying years ago because she came to love her family, reaching a standoff with Berkshire based on mutual blackmail. When Natalie's crisis arose, Ellie contacted Berkshire, not knowing Berkshire had engineered the situation. Upon learning the truth, the terminally ill Walter insisted on killing Berkshire himself. Ellie, disguised as the clown, served as his signal. She is arrested for espionage and conspiracy to commit murder.

Brown reports the spy ring has gone rogue, operating as mercenaries. Berkshire's operatives kidnap Jamison, but Decker plants a tracker on their van and an FBI team rescues her. When intercepted chatter goes silent, Decker realizes Dabney's choice to kill Berkshire outside the FBI building was a wordless warning: The Hoover Building is the target. Dabney's consulting work gave him classified knowledge of the building's infrastructure, including underground gas lines. Terrorists have tunneled from across the street into utility passages beneath headquarters, compromised a gas line, and planted a bomb to collapse the structure while the President, the British Prime Minister, and the German Chancellor attend a ceremony inside.

Decker, Mars, and Brown follow the tunnel and find the bomb with a four-minute countdown. Brown, drawing on Army explosive ordnance disposal training, orders the others out and disarms it at four seconds but collapses from gas exposure. Decker and Mars revive her with CPR. Brown receives the National Intelligence Cross, and her name is added to the DIA's Torch Bearers Wall alongside her father's. Mars moves to D.C. to pursue a relationship with Brown. Decker, Mars, and Jamison visit Joey at the hospice, bringing a football signed by Peyton Manning. Afterward, Decker sits alone by the river contemplating his uncertain future until Jamison finds him and affirms their partnership, promising to stay with the FBI as long as he does.