A DECORATED SEAL BROKE MY RIBS IN A FULL MESS HALL — THEN MY DEAD MOTHER’S VOICE CAME THROUGH THE PHONE

Chapter 20

We put Bramwell in the trooper’s car with the heat on and a blanket, and I called Pike from the shoulder of Route 17 and told him to get me everything he could on Dean Halloway — medical records, leave records, disciplinary history, the last ten years of anything with his initials on it.

Then I called Douglas Reeve.

He answered on the first ring, which told me he had been holding the phone since I left the vault.

“Elena.”

“Halloway is the sixth man on the Lantern team,” I said. “He’s been running the paper side for forty-one years. He processed the packet that changed my orders, and he told the duty officer to sit on the discrepancy, and he left base this morning and hasn’t come back.”

Silence.

“Douglas.”

“I hear you.”

“You knew.”

“I suspected.” His voice had gone very thin. “Fourteen years ago, when I took this command, the personnel file that came up with the senior chief’s billet had three pages missing from the middle. I asked about it. I was told there had been a fire at the records annex.”

“And you let it go.”

“I let it go because the alternative was opening an investigation into the man who runs training in my own building on the word of a missing page.” A pause. “Which is what he was counting on. It always is.”

“Where is he now?”

“He has a residence in Chesapeake. I’ve had a car outside it since six p.m. It’s empty.”

“Of course it is.” I looked at the dark road. “He’s not running. Running is what guilty men do. He’s repositioning.”

“To where?”

That was the question.

“Reeve,” I said. “The video. The one with my mother in it. Somebody put a corrupted file on your secure terminal at four-oh-six this evening, while we were standing in the vault. That’s not a person with remote access. That’s a person who was already inside your network when we got there.”

“I know.”

“Which means Halloway wasn’t the only one planted in that building.”

“I know, Elena.”

“Then why are you still there?”

There was a pause long enough to hear the truth forming in it.

“Because if I leave,” Reeve said, “I’m a retired admiral with an allegation and no command. And if I stay, I’m a target that everyone can see, which means for tonight, everybody inside that fence knows where I am and nobody has to guess.”

“That’s a terrible plan.”

“It’s the plan I have.”

I closed my eyes. “Where’s Thorne?”

“Officially, in the brig for assaulting a superior officer.”

“And unofficially?”

“Unofficially,” Reeve said, “he’s standing in my office right now with a sidearm and no rank insignia, and he has informed me that he is not on my staff, not on the roster, and not obligated to follow a single order I give him.”

I laughed — a real one, this time, small and surprised.

“Put him on.”

The phone changed hands.

“Commander.”

“Thorne. Twelve hours ago you put me on the floor of a mess hall.”

“I did.” No excuse. No softening. I gave him credit for it.

“Tonight I need someone who can be in two places at once and doesn’t care whose orders he’s ignoring.”

“Give me the two places.”

“First: my father’s house. My father is there alone with a woman who has been officially dead since 2009, and if Halloway’s network knows she came out of hiding, that house is now the most dangerous address in Virginia.”

“I’ll take the truck.” A pause. “Second place?”

“The Chesapeake residence. Whoever cleaned it out did it tonight, which means whoever cleaned it out is within an hour of it and probably frightened. I want the trash. Receipts, paper, anything they left behind. Not the house — the cans.”

Thorne was quiet for a second, and when he spoke again his voice had something in it I hadn’t heard from him before.

“You’re giving me the details.”

“You’re the one who walks toward the thing everyone else fears,” I said. “Or was that just mess hall talk?”

“Ma’am,” Thorne said, “that was the truth.”

I hung up.

My mother had come to stand beside me during the call. She was looking out at the fields, the way she used to look out at the ocean when we went to the shore in August — chin up, hands behind her back, entirely still.

“You’ve built yourself a good head,” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“Your father always said you would.” She was quiet for a moment. “He used to say it in letters.”

“Letters?”

“To me.” She glanced sideways at me, and there it was again, that crooked, broken, exhausted smile. “Seven years of them. He found a channel. It worked exactly twice a year and he never once wrote about anything except you. What you were doing. What you were reading. The time you called him at three in the morning because you were worried about a promotion board and he drove four hours to sit in a parking lot outside your apartment and didn’t knock because he didn’t want you to think he’d come to interfere.”

I had been twenty-six. I had sat in that parking lot with him until dawn and eaten a gas station sandwich and gone into work without sleeping and gotten the promotion.

I had never told anyone about that night.

“He said he wouldn’t,” I said.

“He said he’d try not to.” My mother turned to face me properly, and her voice steadied. “Ellie. There’s something I need to tell you before tomorrow, because tomorrow there may not be a room for it.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow you’re going to do what you were trained to do, and you’re going to take a base apart, and there’s every chance that when it’s done I go back into a box under a different name.” She said it without any self-pity at all, which somehow made it worse. “So tonight, the two things you don’t know.”

I waited.

“The first is that I’m not the one who came back to protect you.” She looked at the dark road. “I came back because Halloway finally made a mistake, and the mistake was you. He moved your orders. He used your name. He put your face on a woman in his own hallway because he needed everyone on that base to see you arrive in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Why?”

“Because the Shepherd Index has one gap in it.” She looked at me. “Yours. They built a file on every child of every Lantern member except one, because the one file they needed was written before you were born, and it’s the only record in the world that can name the man who built the network.”

I stared at her.

“That’s what I meant,” she said, “when I said you were protected because of what happened before you were born. Not a person, Ellie. A page.”