He didn’t want to leave his friends hanging out there for him. The feds weren’t incompetent. They would be coming this way eventually. Stone wished with all his heart he could do more for the Camel Club, after all they had done for him. He had thought of simply turning himself in. But there was such a core of survivor mentality built into his psyche that his essentially walking to his own execution was not an option. He could not let them win that way. They would have to work a little harder.

The letter he held was carefully worded. It was not a confession because that would put his friends in an even greater dilemma. Granted, Stone was caught in a classic catch-22, but he owed them something. He should have known that with the life he’d led there was only one possible conclusion.

This.

He slipped the letter from his pocket and rolled it around the hilt of a knife he pulled from another pocket, securing it with string. He took aim from the darkness of the side yard and let fly. The knife stuck into the porch column.

“Good-bye.”

He had one more place to visit.

A few moments later he was crawling back under the fence. He walked to the Foggy Bottom Metro station and climbed on the train. Later, a thirty-minute walk brought him to yet another cemetery.

Why was it he was more comfortable with the dead than the living? The answer was relatively simple. The dead conveniently never asked questions.

Even in the darkness he quickly found the grave he was looking for. He knelt down, brushed some leaves away and gazed at the tombstone.

Here lay Milton Farb, the other member of the Camel Club, and the only deceased one. Yet even dead, Milton would forever be part of that informal band of conspiracy theorists who’d insisted on only one thing: the truth.

Too bad their leader hadn’t honored that principle.

The only reason his beloved friend was dead was because of Stone.

My fault.

Because of him, the brilliant if quirky Milton was resting here for all time now, a large-caliber round having ended his life underneath the United States Capitol. It nearly equaled the grief Stone felt for the death of his poor wife decades ago.