“And you’re sure it wasn’t?”
“Not unless you categorize three guys with baseball bats doing you bodily harm an accident.”
“I’m heading over to talk to Danny. How’s Abby?”
Stone glanced at her. “She’s holding up.”
Stone passed back the phone. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee, you want one?”
She shook her head and tried to smile. “No thanks. I’m just going to stay planted here until they tell me Danny’s going to be okay.”
Stone walked off looking for a vending machine, stretching out his sore arm as he did so. Then the rather obvious occurred to him. Willie Coombs was still here.
Crack and pinpoint pupils. And now Danny beaten nearly to death. And a dead woman in the middle of it all.
The coffee could wait. He needed to talk to Willie.
CHAPTER 33
KNOX’S CELL PHONE BUZZED. The caller ID came up as blocked. He hesitated and then answered it.
“Hello?”
It took a second for Knox to place the caller’s voice. “Finn?”
“I thought about what you said and I thought you might want to know something.”
Knox snatched a small notebook off the kitchen island and uncapped a pen. “I’m listening.”
“I was at the Visitor Center with Stone. That won’t come as a surprise to the folks at CIA. Carter Gray was there too, as was Senator Simpson.”
“What were you all doing there? Having a pre-opening party?”
“We were doing an exchange. My son for Senator Simpson.”
Knox caught a breath. “CIA snatched your kid?”
“And we grabbed a U.S. senator in return.”
“Why Simpson?”
“He, Gray and Stone have a history. Not a good one.”
“I didn’t think they were all best buds.”
“Anyway, we did the exchange, gave Gray all he wanted, including a cell phone with a recording on it that Stone had.”
“What was the recording of?”
“Don’t know. But whatever it was, it’s the reason Gray resigned his post as intelligence czar.”
“Some dirt?”
“Seems to be.”
“I take it after the exchange was made they weren’t going to let you walk away?”
“You could say that Gray had a different idea as to how we were going to leave the place.”
Knox was writing fast and scribbling questions in the margins. “Let me ask something. Was Milton Farb a casualty in this little skirmish?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Stone was getting us all out on a prearranged route. He knew Gray would try and screw him so he had a backup plan. But while we were getting out of there, Milton was killed by one of Gray’s men. Stone didn’t leave after that. He went back in.” Finn paused. “I went with him.”
“Why?”
But it did.
It had come as no shock to Knox that his agency had less than clean hands. That was just the nature of the business. But though Knox was a veteran of the intelligence world, there was something in his gut—perhaps as deep as his soul—that had recoiled in anger with every fact that Finn had revealed about John Carr and how his country had repeatedly ripped the man’s life apart.
There was right and wrong, although those lines got blurred all the time. Justice and injustice too were often all over the place, he knew. There were no easy answers and whatever road you took, be it the high, low or more likely somewhere in between, half the people would hate the result and half would applaud. And the hell of the thing was in a way they’d both be right.
However, as Knox dwelled on all this, it seemed to him that John Carr, no matter what he might have done on that rainy, gray morning a few days ago, deserved to live out his life as a free man, but that was not Knox’s decision to make. His investigator mind told him to verify what he’d been told. Then he would just have to see.