“There are parts of it I still don’t get,” Dryden said. “Pierce told us he made a deal with the military, back in ’89. No punishment for Lauren’s murder, or for anything else, if he gave them Rigel.” He turned from the window. “Have the investigators confirmed that?”

Grace was quiet for a moment. He glanced down at his hands, resting on the plywood. “Yes. The deal happened. Rigel for clemency.”

Danica shook her head. “There’s no way an agreement like that could have been official. Or legal.”

“No,” Grace said. “But the people overseeing Ashland weren’t exactly sticklers for the law. And they were very, very interested in acquiring that weapon.”

“But that’s the part that doesn’t tie together,” Dryden said. “The military made the deal to get Rigel … but they didn’t get Rigel. Last fall, when you were still trying to find out what that project was about, the Pentagon didn’t even have it in their computers. Nobody there had ever heard of it.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Grace said.

Dryden waited for him to go on.

Grace finished his beer and leaned back in his chair.

“When the accident happened in 1989, the government moved pretty fast to shut Ashland down. All the risk, all the potential embarrassment—they wanted it sealed up and buried and forgotten. The people they put in charge of doing that were the same people who’d been running the place all along—who else were they going to use? And we’re not talking about a huge group, either. It wasn’t the rank and file, the people who’d lived and worked in Ashland. It was just the senior controllers, a handful on-site and another handful in D.C. That’s who was in charge of buttoning it all down. The government wanted the smallest group that could still get the job done—we think it was no more than a dozen people. Everyone below them was following blind orders, and everyone above them wanted deniability. It’s your mess, you clean it up, I don’t want to know the details. And that skeleton crew in charge … that’s who Ellis Pierce made his offer to.”

“Oh shit,” Danica said softly.

She looked at Dryden. He nodded; he could see where it was going.

“Yeah,” Grace said. “It was kind of a perfect storm. These were high-ranking, well-connected people who’d spent their lives dealing in dangerous military secrets. And on the night they were ordered to shut down the place they’d built their careers on … one of its ghosts walked in and said, Let’s make a deal.”

“So these guys set up, what, some kind of side business?” Dryden asked. “They kept Pierce’s name out of the reports, kept him tucked away safe somewhere, and he gave them Rigel? What were they going to do, sell it on the black market?”