Neika, meanwhile, sat underfoot, relaxed and oblivious. Jenny was keeping busy adding the first woman’s touch the cabin had known, rearranging the sparse furniture, throwing out a chair that had rotted through, and confining a large deer-antler lamp with its long-ago-burned-out bulb to a corner of the room. Morgan knew this was Jenny’s way of coping with her daughter’s absence. He had half a mind himself to get into the car, find Alex, and bring her back, but Jenny had been right. Alex needed her space.
Meanwhile, the file that his old handler had compiled was plenty to keep him occupied. It was thick with papers, printouts that, Morgan presumed, Plante had prepared to give to him when they met. It seemed that Plante had been conducting his own investigation into Acevedo International. He must have had reams of documents to compile this kind of data. Clearly, he had been at this for months. There were copies of flight manifests for supposedly empty Acevedo cargo planes flying out of Kandahar, and yet there were fueling logs showing they couldn’t possibly have been empty. Another packet of papers was devoted to the connection between Acevedo and the CIA, but the evidence Plante had dug up linking the two was nebulous and uncertain. It consisted mainly of suspiciously convenient occurrences, like investigations that had been called off, inquiries that had led to dead ends, informants who had wound up dead. But there was nothing definite to tie Acevedo to any of it.
Morgan waded through stacks of financial documents. A calculation in the margin of one of the last pages added up all the money unaccounted for and still came up short of the billion-dollar profits Acevedo should be making from the drug trade. Plante had scribbled, in a hasty, frustrated hand, Where is the money going?
Morgan turned the page to find a profile of Lester Hodges, head of something called the Special Projects division at Acevedo. The attached head shot showed a tough-looking man with the square face of a bulldog. Morgan recognized him as the man who had been talking to T in Zalmay’s photos. Behind the profile page was a single document, signed by Hodges, authorizing transportation of materials to Kandahar. In a corporation shrouded in secrecy, this seemed to be Plante’s only solid lead.
Was anyone at the Agency aware of any of this? It seemed unlikely. If any of the higher-ups knew, the investigation wouldn’t have fallen to Eric Plante alone. Maybe, like Morgan, Plante had suspected a mole. He again lamented his old friend’s death, and especially now that he knew that, if Eric were still alive, he would have had a faithful ally in all this. As it was, he couldn’t trust anyone.
He had to decide what his next move was going to be. Careful consideration wasn’t usually his style. He would rather throw a wrench into the works and see what happened. But he wasn’t going to gamble where Alex and Jenny were involved. He needed to be cautious.
He couldn’t go to the CIA, of course. Any other government agency might help him, but they would be all too happy to screw the CIA, along with him, in the process. What about the media? He could expose the whole thing to the world—but he couldn’t go to the press without exposing himself and, along with that, revealing a dozen state secrets. He felt that shining the light of public scrutiny on this would do far more harm than good.
No. He would have to find out who was behind this, and he had to do it alone. He would go after Lester Hodges and follow the evidence all the way to the top, wherever it led him.
He waited for Jenny to move into the bedroom, then gathered up Plante’s documents and placed them, along with the memory card Zalmay had given him, in a white shopping bag, which he hid discreetly under a loose floorboard in a corner of the cabin.
He sat back down on the hard wooden chair and stared at the wall, and as the first outlines of a plan formed in his mind, he heard light footsteps outside, approaching the door. His hand automatically moved to rest on the rifle. The door opened. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Alex at the door, standing against the encroaching darkness outside. Jenny rushed past him to hug her.
“Where were you?” said Jenny. “We were worried sick!”
“Around. I needed to think, so I just walked along the road until I reached the highway.”
“Well, I’m just glad you’re back,” said Jenny.
Morgan looked at his child with relief, but it was still painful to be reminded of the things she had said.
Hesitantly, she spoke. “Look, Dad . . . I took some time to think and . . . I’m not saying everything’s okay, or that I forgive you. But I don’t want to do this right now. I don’t want to hate you. I don’t want to be angry.” She was picking up steam, speaking louder and faster. “Maybe we can fight later, have it out and everything. But not right now. Right now I need things to be okay, at least until this is all over.” He began to speak, but she interrupted. “I’m not done yet, so let me finish. So we don’t fight for now, okay? And even when we do fight . . . Damn it, you’re my dad, you know? Even if I’m compromising my ground just by saying this . . . I don’t know. I love you, and nothing, not even this, is going to change that.” She finished, nearly breathless, as if getting it all out had been an enormous effort.