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

Chapter 22

I stopped the car forty yards short of the house.

My mother had a hand on the door handle and her whole body had changed — no tremor now, no weariness, nothing of the woman who had spent an hour telling me about a page written in 1985.

“Who is he,” I said.

“Get down.”

“Answer the question.”

“Get down, Elena.”

I got out of the car instead.

The man on the porch stood up. He was maybe forty, compact, with the careful posture of somebody who has spent his life around people who notice posture. He set the paper cup down on the step and put both hands where I could see them, palms out, in a gesture so practiced that I knew it had been rehearsed.

“Commander Vance,” he said. “I’m not armed.”

“Neither am I.”

A pause.

“You’re wearing a sidearm on your right hip,” I said, “and you’ve adjusted it twice since I stopped the car. Both times toward your belt buckle.”

His hands came down slowly. The expression on his face wasn’t anger.

It was something closer to respect, and a little closer to grief.

“You really are her daughter,” he said.

Behind me, the car door opened. My mother stood in the gravel with the wind coming across the fields, and she said a name I had never heard in my life.

“Daniel.”

The man on the porch looked at her and went very still.

“Mrs. Vance.”

“You’re dead.”

“I know.” He came down one step. “So are you.”

And I stood in the middle of my father’s gravel driveway, with a hand moving very slowly toward my hip, and said, “Somebody start explaining, or I’m going to start with the handcuffs.”

The man — Daniel — stopped at the bottom of the steps.

“Sergeant Daniel Okafor,” he said. “Naval Criminal Investigative Service, until four days ago. I’m the son of Dana Okafor, who died in 2014 outside Norfolk. And I have been inside the Shepherd Index for six years.”

My mother moved past me — actually past me, her shoulder brushing mine — and stopped six feet from him.

“Six years.”

“Six years and eleven days.” He swallowed. “They recruited me the month after I buried her. I let them, because the man who did the recruiting was the same man who signed my mother’s death certificate, and I wanted to be close enough to hear him breathe.”

“You’ve been working alone.”

“I’ve been working alone and I’ve been working badly,” he said, and there was real self-contempt in it. “I got one thing. One. And I’ve spent two of those years trying to find a way to hand it to someone without dying.”

“What one thing?”

He looked at me.

“I know which page was written before Commander Vance was born,” he said. “And I know the name on it. And tonight Halloway is in a room thirty miles from here with a case that came out of your vault, and tomorrow morning he is going to burn every bit of it, and I cannot stop him alone.”

The wind moved through the soybean fields.

“Then stop him with us,” I said.

He looked at me the way a man looks at a door he had given up on finding.

“Commander,” he said, “I’ve been trying to find you for two days. I got to your father’s house before your mother did. I’ve been sitting on this porch for four hours waiting for somebody to come home who could use me.”

My father appeared in the doorway behind him, holding a flashlight he didn’t need and looking, for the first time in my life, genuinely furious.

“Elena,” he said. “This young man told me he was a plumber.”