Chapter Fifty

AT SUNRISE, NICK went to the second-floor bathroom in the Inn by the Sea, stepped up onto the toilet, and popped open the access into the crawl space beneath Neddy Ives’s room. Effie was on watch across the hall. He was sure he’d heard Clay Spears’s lumbering gait somewhere on the lower floors. If there was anyone else in the house, they seemed to be asleep.

Nick reached into the dark and dragged the old duffel bag across a beam to himself, then sat on the edge of the bathtub with it. He could still hear those choppers. He remembered showing members of Bravo 5 through to the room in the goat farmer’s house with the empty pit in it. Nothing here when we arrived. Just a hole in the ground.

Probably drugs,someone guessed.

Nick unzipped the duffel bag and looked at the cash. His cut. Just under a million, so he was told. He hadn’t spent a single dime. Hadn’t unzipped the bag once since he’d retrieved it from an airport locker Dorrich had given him the code to, a month and a half after he returned from his last tour. It had been Masters’s job to retrieve the bags from where they’d been stashed on the night of the massacre, not far from the farmhouse, in the desert, and get them safely into the US, hidden in the engine well of a broken-down troop carrier.

Dorrich’s intel had been sound. Months later, as they sat side by side in a hall at some processing center in Arizona, waiting to describe the massacre to an inquiring committee, Dorrich had told Nick about the farmer he and Master had come across while walking by the side of the road to Kabul. He and Master had been on a supply run. They’d stopped and talked to the guy because they were bored. Dorrich told Nick about the nervous chitchat the man had engaged in with them, the suggestion that ghost money was being funneled through a nearby valley. It had taken months of research, Dorrich said. Months of lies, secret rendezvous outside the base; bribes to farmers, roadmen, bandits; sorting the rumors from the lies from the cover stories. Dorrich said he had wanted to bring Nick and Breecher in on the plan from the beginning. But it was Master who didn’t trust them to go through with it. Nick was a soft touch, and convincing Breecher to risk her body like that would have been a hard sell.

Easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission,Dorrich theorized, and a million dollars bought a whole lot of forgiveness.

Nick zipped up the bag and took out his phone. His thumb hovered over the green dial button below the name of his latest therapist. He put the phone down, bit his fist to try to stop the tears. He googled the tip line for the New York Times, tapped through to the blue-highlighted phone numbers, and again let his thumb tremble over the screen without dialing, playing the tape through to the end in his mind and trying to find something positive to latch on to.

But there was only darkness ahead.

And shame. Terrible, terrible shame.

He swiped the search page away and opened the phone’s camera, turned it on himself. The phone gave a little musical sigh as he began recording.

“My name is Nick Jones,” he said. “I’m a specialist E-4 veteran with the United States Army. I have something to report.”