STONE SAT BACK in his seat. “I don’t know if you knew this, but I know Ed Rawls from Islesboro, where my Maine house is. We sort of worked together in solving a series of murders on the island.”

“I didn’t know that,” Will said, “but that could actually be helpful in all this.”

“All what? Let’s get back to your story.”

“Did you know that Ed Rawls was Kate’s mentor at the Agency?”

“I may have read that somewhere at the time she exposed him.”

“They were very close, and she was devastated when she found out what he’d been doing.”

“What, exactly, had Ed been doing?”

“He got caught in a honey trap—photographs and all—and the honey turned out to be a Soviet agent. He was near retirement, and the Soviets blackmailed him into giving them CIA secrets. Ed was smart enough not to give them anything damaging, but they kept a close rein on him, and one evening when two of our people who had become suspicious were following him, they rumbled his Soviet watchers, shots were exchanged, and our two people died. That, in the end, is what sent Ed to prison, even though he had no knowledge of either the Soviets or Americans following him. Except for that, he might never have been prosecuted. When I learned of the circumstances, it made it easier for me to pardon him.”

“I understand. How does all this affect what’s going on now?”

“While Ed was in prison he wrote an account of his years at the Agency, including the end of his career and how he surreptitiously helped Kate’s campaign. Apparently, he held nothing back, and his revelations could be explosive.”

“How explosive?”

“In the worst case, think nuclear. He named names—government officials, military commanders, top journalists, senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle, Agency personnel—and he related everything in intricate detail and backed it up with documentation.”

“How’d he do that in prison?”

“He wrote the book from memory and hid the manuscript on a computer disc in the prison library, where he worked. Then, after he was pardoned, he went back to his retreat in Maine, where he had cached thousands of documents, and finished it there.”

“I guess it wasn’t published, or I would have heard about it,” Stone said. “What happened to his work?”

“He gave the manuscript and all the backup documents to Joe Adams on computer discs.”

“And what did Joe do with it?”

“Nothing. He still has it.”

“Is he threatening to publish it?”

“Certainly not. Joe’s Alzheimer’s has progressed slowly, and I’m told by Sue, his wife, that he still has lucid intervals—hours or even days. During one of those, he told Sue he wants to give Ed’s documents to me, and Sue wants them out of the house.”

“Why you?”