It was Danny. He was badly beaten but still breathing. And then Stone looked up. The truck had stopped. As he watched it turned and headed toward him, stopping a few feet from where he knelt next to Danny. Three men climbed out and each one carried a baseball bat.

Chapter 31

CHAPTER 31

JOE KNOX SAT in his town house having a cup of coffee and pondering his next move. The idiot Agency artist he’d requested to do a composite had gotten lost on the way to Leroy’s place. And when he’d gotten there Leroy had gone off on his damn boat. Leroy didn’t have a phone so the best Knox could do was send another agent up there to try and pin the man down. Until he had a picture to show around, Knox was at a standstill in his investigation. And if Leroy had been involved and was now on the run after Knox had conveniently warned him?

There will be no way to explain such a junior mistake to Hayes.

He decided to run through again what he’d learned at the military records center, in case it might suggest something. A half hour later he was no further along. Maybe he should go back to the records center and go through some more documents. The attendant had been able to easily find the other boxes for him. It probably wouldn’t take—

Knox slowly set down his coffee cup. The next moment he was racing to the phone. He got the number for the records center and punched it in. A minute later, after being forwarded along to several extensions, he heard the voice of the man who’d helped him before. Knox identified himself and then asked the question.

“How did you find what I wanted so easily? It was like the boxes were already out.”

“Well, actually they were,” the man replied a bit sheepishly. “I mean, they’d been checked out some months back. Maybe six months or so, and I’m a little embarrassed to say that no one had filed them away yet. And we’ve been a bit shorthanded as of late,” he added quickly, as though suspecting that Knox might actually be some sort of military archives inspector trying to pull a slick one.

“So someone else was looking at those records?” Knox said slowly. “Can you tell me who?”

The man excused himself for a minute. When he came back on the line he said, “Guy named Harry Finn. Says here on the sign-in log he used to be with the Navy SEALs. He had the credentials and top secret clearances to get access to the boxes you looked at. That help you any?”

“That helps me a lot, thanks.” Knox clicked off and spent the next hour tracking down Harry Finn, former SEAL.