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  one could have, but he did not have the necessary authorizations to get to where he believed he needed to go right now. One person who could give him that authority was Macklin Hayes. To get the man to cooperate entailed Knox both tricking the spy chief and outthinking him. The sweat under his armpits continued to spread even as the elevator hurtled him downward to where the temperature was a constant sixty-one degrees.

  A few seconds later, Knox was walking steadily toward his destination. Along the way he endured increasing scrutiny as stern-faced men checked him out from every angle before reluctantly passing him along. Apparently, spies didn’t even like fellow spies coming to visit them and going through their stuff. Knox had one advantage. He had a friend who worked here, Marshall Saunders. Knox sat in this man’s office a half hour after going through the identification gauntlet.

  “Been awhile, Joe,” Saunders said, rising from his desk and shaking his visitor’s hand. Everyone down here wore sweaters, and indeed Knox felt himself shivering despite his jacket.

  “You’ve gussied up the place from the last time I was here, Marsh,” Knox said.

  “Budget cuts have yet to come our way. Just lucky. I guess.”

  It was far more than a matter of mere luck, both men knew. You couldn’t cut what you never saw.

  “I won’t waste your time. I’m doing some under-the-radar work for Macklin Hayes.”

  “So I’ve been informed. How is the general by the way?”

  “The same.” Knox left his friend to interpret that remark however he wanted. Marshall, whom everyone called Marsh, had served three years directly under Hayes’ command. That meant if he ended up going to hell when he died, he would have a pretty good idea of how it would be.

  Knox told him what he wanted to look at and his friend’s features turned uncomfortable. “That’ll take a phone call to the man.”

  “I’m aware of that,” said Knox. “I actually just thought of it on the way over, or else I would’ve gotten the okay already. I don’t think it’ll be a problem.” He added with as big a smile as he could manage, “On the other hand, if I end up disappearing you’ll know I was wrong about that.”

  Marsh didn’t even grin at this crude joke and Knox felt his ass suddenly clinch.

  The call was made and the man passed the phone over to Knox.

  As though a distant rumble of thunder heralding the approaching storm, he heard Hayes bark, “What’s going on, Knox?”

  “Just thought of this new angle, sir, but I need to check out a couple more pieces.”

  “Explain this new angle. But tell Marsh to leave first.”

  Knox glanced at his friend who got the sign immediately, rose and left. If he felt any anger for being kicked out of his own office, the savvy agent was too smart to show it.

  Knox hunkered down, gripping the phone tightly. “I turned a lead that got me thinking about something in Carr’s past.”

  “Where exactly in his past?”

  Knox didn’t hesitate. “Triple Six days.”

  “Knox—”

  “I know what you said before, but here’s my theory. If Carr was with Triple Six and colleagues from his past were being killed—”

  “That’s out of bounds.”

  Knox said, “I know Finn and his back story are off-limits, but if I’m going to track Carr down, I need to understand where this guy came from.”

  “I don’t think that’s relevant—”

  Knox had anticipated this question and broke in. “With all due respect, if you’re deciding what’s relevant or not on this case, get somebody else to tackle it for you.”

  “I’m not trying—”

  “If you want results, General, then I need some control over my investigation. You called me in to do a job. Then let me do it!”

  Knox waited for the man’s response, trying to breathe normally. He was betting the farm that Hayes would react one way, but the truth was, Knox could just as easily go down hard for this insubordination. Real hard. As in his butt being catapulted to Afghanistan, where he could spend a little quality time in the mountains with Osama’s boys on the Pakistani border.

  “I’m listening.”

  Knox went on autopilot. “Carr knows we’re going to be on him. He’s been on the run for a long time now. He’s loyal to his friends like you said. He’d want to keep as far away from them as possible. But he still needs cover. He still needs help.” Knox paused here to allow the bait to sink in. He wanted Hayes to say it. The man had to say it.

  “You think he might turn to some old Triple Sixer for help?”

  Thank you, God. “Well, General, look at it from his point of view. He pops Gray and Simpson and makes his initial escape. He can’t go near his civilian friends. He knows the machine is on his ass, so he has to look somewhere for cover. These Triple Six guys would be retired by now and deep underground. If I can get a lead on any that Carr was close to and either shadow them or beat it out of them, we might turn this guy. It’s a shortcut, but it might just work. I know you don’t care how we get there, so long as we get there. You know as well as I do the longer Carr is out there, the greater the odds that he does something that will hurt us.”

  When Knox said us he of course meant you.

  He waited again. He could almost hear the former military man’s synapses firing off, weighing from virtually every conceivable angle what Knox had just proposed.

  Virtually every conceivable angle. Just hopefully not the real one.

  “It might be worth checking,” Hayes said finally.

  “And just so we’re clear, this will only be a tangential line of inquiry.” Knox wanted to feed the man a comfort bone, however disingenuous. “I’ll be following up other leads at the same time. We can only hope that one of them will pop for us.”

  “Put Marsh on the phone so I can give him the necessary authorizations.”

  “Thank you, General.” You bastard.

  Hayes did his thing with Marshall and twenty minutes later Knox was being led into one of the most secure areas of one of the most clandestine facilities the United States of America had.

  CHAPTER 36

  STONE HAD REJOINED Abby when Tyree burst into the emergency room.

  “How’s Danny?” he said when he spotted them.

  “Doctor just came out and said the x-rays look okay,” Abby said shakily. “And they don’t think there’s internal bleeding.”

  Tyree knelt down and held her hand. “Well, thank God for that. Have you talked to him any more?”

  “No.”

  Tyree looked over at Stone. “You seem to always be in the right place at the right time. First Willie and now Danny.”

  “Any leads on the guys who attacked him?”

  “I’m hoping to cut to the chase and get Danny to tell me. Any chance of me talking to him?”

  Stone pointed at a man in a white coat. “There’s the doctor over there.”

  Tyree hurried over to the man while Stone turned to Abby. “Do you want me to drive you home?”

  “No. I’m going to stay here. I’d just worry myself sick if I left.”

  “Then I’ll stay with you.”

  “You’ve done enough. You saved Danny’s life. Again. I really don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Abby, I talked to Willie a few minutes ago. He said Danny came to visit him yesterday. He talked about him and Willie heading out of town together. Going west.”

  “Did Willie know why anybody would want to hurt Danny?”

  “No, but I asked him about Debby Randolph. He said she and Danny dated some in high school, but it wasn’t serious.”

  “I’m not sure Danny can get serious with a girl. It’s all fun and games for him.”

  “But Willie doesn’t think that Debby committed suicide. You see, he’d asked her to marry him. And she’d said yes. He talked to her around eleven the night before she was found dead. She was in good spirits.”

  “I didn’t know he’d proposed.”

  “I guess t
hey were keeping it secret. So we have Willie in the hospital with an overdose of a drug he didn’t take. Debby killing herself for no reason, and now Danny nearly died. There has to be a connection.”

  “I can’t see one.”

  “Willie also said that his father was accidentally shot by Rory Peterson.”

  “But that was over two years ago.”

  “It could still be important.”

  “Can we go outside for a few minutes? I need some air.”

  They walked out in time to hear the thump-thump of the aircraft going over. Stone looked up.

  “Chopper?”

  She nodded, staring up too. “Going to Dead Rock. Prisoner transport.”

  “Why not just drive them?”

  “Most of the prisoners spending the rest of their lives up there come from pretty far away, lot of urban areas. Roads are pretty crappy around here and lots of places for ambush. Hard to bust your buddy out of jail thousands of feet up there.”

  “I can see that.”

  She turned to face him. “So what were you doing when you ran into Danny?”

  Stone stared over at Willie’s pickup truck where his bag was in the back. “I was heading out of town,” he said a bit guiltily.

  “Okay. Does this have something to do with Trimble wanting to write a story about you?”

  Stone tried hard to look surprised. “What are you talking about?”

  “Danny told me that you came along with him because a government car pulled into the town where you two got off the train.”

  “I think he made a mistake.”

  “If you’re in some kind of trouble—”

  “I’m in no trouble, Abby.”

  “I was going to say if you are in trouble, I want to help you.”

  “Why? You barely know me.”

  “You saved my son. And I can’t explain exactly why, but I feel like I’ve known you all my life.”

  Stone looked down, stubbed the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe. “I appreciate the offer, Abby, I really do.”

  “But you’re leaving anyway?”

  He shot her a glance. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you didn’t not say it either. Everybody’s got problems. You have no obligation to stay here and help us. Hell, it’s not your battle.”

  “Why don’t you just leave here? You’ve got plenty of money.”

  “Run out of my hometown? No thank you. I’m not built that way.”

  “But Danny left.”

  “He didn’t want to go. I made him.”

  Stone looked stunned. “What, why?”

  “This is no place for him. What’s he got here? Work in the mines or the prison?”

  “Is that all? Or how about the strange things happening here you mentioned?”

  “It’s not your fight, Ben. If you need to move on, you move on.” She hesitated. Stone thought she was going to say something else. “I better go back and check on Danny. And I’ll look in on Willie too.”

  She left him there. Stone sat down on a low brick wall. An hour later he was still there, trying desperately to make sense of what he should do.

  As he watched, the miner brigade began pulling in for their methadone pop. He checked his watch. Not even five in the morning yet. He continued to watch as the bone-thin men climbed out of their rides and straggled into the clinic before leaving to pull twelve hours in the pits of hell, contorting their bodies way past all sane levels. That only led to more pain, and more painkillers, and the cycle just kept on spinning.

  All so the lights remain on in this country.

  He looked on a few minutes later as the zombie-eyed men headed out in their dusty Chevys and Fords.

  I’m going to start using candles and cook my food over a fire.

  He was still sitting there when Tyree came out and reported that Danny had refused to say anything about who had attacked him.

  “Sheriff, I think I’ve seen one of the men before. But I just can’t remember where.”

  “Soon as you do remember, call me.”

  An hour after Tyree left, Abby finally came out, bleary-eyed and hunched over.

  “Danny’s going to be fine. They’re moving him to a room pretty soon. I think the one next to Willie’s.”

  “That’s great, Abby.”

  “He said you beat those men up pretty good.”

  “I got lucky.”

  “Lucky once, maybe. Lucky twice, I don’t think so.”

  “I guess the army did teach me a thing or two. Do you want me to drive you home?”

  “No, but you can follow me there. I’ll make us both some breakfast.”

  “Abby, you’ve been up all night. You don’t have to do that.”

  “Just follow me home, Ben, unless you want to head on out of town right now.”

  They eyed one another.

  Stone finally said, “I’ll be staying, at least for now.”

  CHAPTER 37

  AFTER HE FINISHED UP in Charlottesville Knox made a quick trip to downtown D.C., his mind spinning from all that he’d learned. John Carr had been a member of Triple Six. Three members of his team had been killed about six months ago. The case had not only remained unsolved but apparently abandoned too. Knox wondered if Harry Finn’s immunity was connected to that outcome somehow. However, he didn’t wonder about that for long. It was not his problem. He had enough of his own.

  There was nothing in the official record about Carr wanting out of Triple Six. Knox didn’t expect that there would be. Personal feelings, and certainly hostile personal feelings, would never be officially acknowledged. Carr had had a family, though. That sort of information had been duly noted in the records, if only for security and threat assessment purposes. Carr had been technically listed as MIA on a certain date over thirty years ago. Cross-referencing these records with other info he’d collected previously, Knox was able to piece together that only a few days later Sergeant John Carr somehow miraculously reenlisted in the army. He then quickly died under mysterious circumstances and had been laid to rest at Arlington Cemetery. It was amazing, really, how history could be effectively rewritten on both large and personal scales.

  Stone and Carr were one and the same. Long suspected, it was nice to have confirmation. Stone had fled Triple Six. A short time later an empty coffin had been put into the ground at Arlington with Carr’s name on the white marker.

  Later that morning Knox poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it at his kitchen counter as his gaze ran over the personal items in the room that had been his wife’s. He hadn’t changed it much after her death. The home had been both of theirs, but it had really been Patty’s. Knox had spent more time in other countries than he had his own. It just came with the job. This was her space. In a sense, after her passing, Knox felt he was merely renting it.

  The place he’d gone to in downtown D.C. was a news archive center maintained by the federal government. The feds burned a lot of money, without doubt, but some of what they purchased was actually useful. In his last days at Triple Six Carr had been assigned to a post in the Brunswick, Georgia, area with his official cover being that of an instructor at the then relatively new FLETC, or the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. From the daily logs that Knox had found, Carr was gone a lot from his post. On several occasions Knox had discovered that when Carr had been missing from FLETC, somewhere else in the world, a person of interest to the United States had died or disappeared.

  Knox had canvassed the archives looking for one item in particular. After an hours-long search, but aided by his knowing the week span he was looking for, he found it. An obscure item in the local Brunswick paper detailed the disappearance of a local couple and their two-year-old daughter. A grainy photo of a woman was identified as Claire Michaels. Her husband, John, and their daughter, Elizabeth, had also vanished. John Michaels had been employed as an instructor at FLETC, the article said. There were rumors that some local federal cop-haters might have been involved and had targeted the Michaelses b
ecause of John’s occupation. Knox searched for additional stories or any possible break in the case,