“But you changed your mind?” said Morgan.
“I did. Not that I got a good feeling about this guy, but then again, I’m not one to go by my gut on this kind of thing. What changed my mind was that he was handing me intel. It was real, solid stuff. Checked out. And it pointed to the existence of a mole within the CIA. Someone high-level.”
“Did you think it might be a smokescreen of some kind? To get you to give up what you had?” interjected Morgan.
“Yeah, I thought it might be, but it checked out, Morgan. Everything checked out. And meanwhile, they didn’t ask for anything in return. And then they made their proposition—the mission in Afghanistan. Plante would help arrange for me to go undercover. The mission, as far as the CIA knew, would be to terminate a local drug lord. But I was also there to look into Acevedo. A deception within a deception. I got a tip about a plane that was going to be loaded with opium. I took the chance, recruited Zalmay to help me get in, and took those pictures in the memory card.”
Morgan nodded. “Do you think this organization of yours will be able to help us?”
“I do, if I knew how to contact them!” said Conley. “But I have no idea who they are, much less where I might find them. They came to me. That’s how it always worked.”
Morgan nodded and said, after a pause, “But there’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did you reach out to me, of all people, to come and make the meet with Zalmay?”
“That was never part of the plan. I wasn’t going to turn him over to CIA custody, where I was sure he’d turn up dead, a ‘suicide’ or the victim of an unfortunate accident. I didn’t know how deep the rot in the Agency might be. So I was going to bring him over myself and defend him with my life if I had to.” His tone was suffused with bitter sadness.
“What happened?”
“I guess I got spotted doing recon with Zalmay. I was ambushed. They knew where to find me—someone in the CIA had ratted me out. But it got worse. I was making contact with this shadow group by handing off written notes to a runner who was on Flower Street at 2:00 P.M. every day. Never talked, never made eye contact, just passed the note. The day after Zalmay and I managed to take those photographs, the runner never showed up. The next day, he didn’t, either, and I was attacked.
“I would have trusted Plante to retrieve Zalmay, but we couldn’t communicate privately between ourselves or in a way that others in the Agency wouldn’t understand, too. There was just one person I trusted completely and to whom I could communicate a message without the possibility of anyone else understanding it.”
Morgan nodded. “Any idea who the traitor is?”
“I don’t have any evidence that points strongly to anyone in particular. I just know it’s got to be someone with a pretty high security clearance. But . . .”
“But?”
“I have a hunch,” said Conley, lowering his voice. “Kline. He’s an outsider, the bureaucratic type, and a micromanager. He’s into everything in the NCS, and he has top-level security access.”
Morgan stirred his coffee. “I never liked that asshole,” he said. “And I believe he’s capable of it. But he hasn’t got the brains or the guts to mastermind an operation like this. If he’s in it, he’s got a boss.” He paused, then asked, “What about this Hodges guy, from Plante’s file?”
“He’s definitely in elbow deep,” said Conley.
“Do you think he might be the guy behind it all?” Morgan asked.
“I think it goes farther up than that,” said Conley. “No way he’s doing all this without the higher-ups taking notice. But he’s a solid lead.”
“Good,” said Morgan. “So we go after him. We get Jenny and Alex someplace safe, and we go after him hard. Then we find out who he’s working for, and we go after him. We get to the bottom of this, no matter what it costs, Peter. Because we can’t back out now. This is the only way we’ll ever get out of this alive.”
Morgan looked over his shoulder at his wife and daughter, who were talking quietly but intensely at the counter. Alex was sniffing and blowing her nose, her eyes red. “I need to do this, Peter. For them. Jenny and Alex. I couldn’t stand the thought of them getting hurt because of this. We already came too close.”
Morgan looked at his friend, who was gazing back at him sympathetically. But Morgan thought he saw something else there, a sad sort of relief. And he understood. Conley had never had a family of his own. He had never had a lack of lovers; Morgan used to joke that Conley had a woman in every city in the world. But he had not gotten married and settled down, and did not have any plans to. It made him a great spook. He had nothing holding him back and tying him down. Morgan imagined that it would be a lot easier, not having to worry about what might happen to his family. But at the same time, it was a sadder, emptier existence. As he looked at Jenny and Alex at the counter, he was filled with love. More than anything, they gave his life meaning, they gave his actions weight. He could not imagine giving that up for anything.