Crack.
Underneath his left foot, just a tiny twig, but it was enough. Morgan caught the fleeting glimpse of a man darting into the cabin, narrowly escaping twin bursts from Morgan’s weapon. Well, no point in subtlety now, thought Morgan, and he fired twice into the cabin, shattering the glass in a front-facing window.
Morgan ceased fire and crouched behind his GTO, checking his ammo. One more bullet. He looked around and found that he could see the reflection of the light streaming out of the cabin on the window of the stranger’s sedan. He raised his weapon, lying in wait. He could normally hit a fly at this range. But he only had one bullet. He’d have to make it count.
The silhouette of the man at the door appeared in the reflection. Morgan breathed deeply. He’d have one chance at this.
He shot up and swiveled in one quick motion, taking aim and ready to shoot.
And then he saw the man’s face. He gasped in surprise and lowered the weapon. His hairline had receded, making his already high forehead, now wrinkled, look even higher. New lines marked the face, and his hair had been dyed dirty blond, but he was as familiar as ever.
Standing at the door of the cabin was Peter Conley.
CHAPTER 29
“Damn it, Peter, I need to know,” said Morgan. “How the hell did you escape Afghanistan? And whose body did they find at your apartment?”
Morgan, Jenny, and Conley were sitting at a booth in an old and dingy roadside diner. They were sharing the cramped eatery with only Alex, at the counter, and two solitary truckers who wore blank stares of exhaustion and listlessly shoveled food from heaping plates into their mouths. A corpulent woman with a wrinkled face and a dirty apron filled their coffee mugs and tossed three peeling menus onto the table. Morgan picked one up and found that it was crusted with mustard.
“I tried to transfer the photographs electronically,” said Conley. “They never went through. Acevedo controls key Internet infrastructure in the Kandahar region, and my guess is, they were watching Internet traffic very closely. That, I think, is how they found me out.”
“The body,” he continued, “belonged to a man who tried to ambush me in my apartment. But I was ready for him.” He took a sip of his coffee. Jenny watched him intently as he spoke, hanging on every word, her soft, intelligent eyes slightly widened in interest. “When I went out that morning, I had left two hairs stuck between the door and the jamb. It’s an old trick, but it works. When I came back, they were gone. In this line of business,” he added, “it pays to be paranoid.”
Morgan looked outside to the far corner of the parking lot, where the GTO and Conley’s car were parked in the dark under a dead lamppost. They had driven separately, Morgan with his family and Conley on his own. When they were three hours into New York State, far enough to elude any possible search perimeter, they had stopped for the night. They had paid cash for two motel rooms—which would be easier to defend than the more comfortable three—and they had the management unlock the adjoining door, opening it wide. Morgan and Conley bunked together in a double room to avoid any awkward pairings.
Alex was still having trouble dealing with what she had witnessed at the cabin and had perched on a stool across the diner from them, her elbow on the bar, nursing a glass of Coke, looking distraught and making a point of keeping her back to them. She had wanted to stay behind in the motel room, but Morgan refused to let her out of his sight.
“So then, I had a choice to make,” continued Conley. “I had no gun on me, only a knife, and I had the money and the papers to walk away and get out of the country. But I had left the memory card—that memory card”—he pointed to Morgan, who was absentmindedly fiddling with the little plastic chip as he listened—“hidden inside the apartment. So I decided to go in. I took off my shoes, walked right past my door, down the hall, and came back as quietly as I could. Then I crouched next to the door, and I listened hard until I heard the bastard inside cough. He was standing close, waiting for me right behind the door.
“It wasn’t really much of a contest,” Conley bragged. “I unlocked the door like I was coming home, and once it was open, I slammed it hard against him. He stumbled back just long enough for me to disarm him and slash his throat.
“He was smart enough not to have any ID on him, but I knew he was from Acevedo. I got the memory card from right where I’d left it behind a loose brick hidden behind the bed. I put my watch on him, I messed up his face, and then I torched the apartment. Then I raised the alarm and got the hell out of there. After that, I went straight to Zalmay’s, and once I sent him on his way to Kabul with the memory card. I couldn’t trust the CIA with it, not after seeing T there. I didn’t know who else might be compromised. I couldn’t contact you electronically, for fear that the message might never make it to you. So I left the letter at the dead drop, addressed to you, and trusted that, even if the chain of communications had been compromised, they would want to know what the letter said, hoping it might lead them to Zalmay.”