“I got my head turned around over that. I mean, they had a lot and I ain’t got nothing. But I should’ve just sucked it up. They didn’t owe me nothing. And he lost his daddy over that and all. I know how that feels.”

“I heard your father was killed in a hunting accident. Did he work in the mines too?”

“No, he was a guard up at Blue Spruce Prison. It was one of his best friends that accidentally shot him.”

“Who was that?”

“Rory Peterson.”

“Peterson? And then he ended up being murdered.”

“Yeah, but that was just recent. My daddy got killed over two years ago.”

Stone checked his watch and rose. “I need to get going.”

“Is Danny going to be okay?”

“I don’t know. They got him pretty bad. But you need to worry about yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If somebody tried to kill you by switching those pills, they’re likely to try again.”

Chapter 35

CHAPTER 35

KNOX MADE a late-night trip to Langley to talk to some folks he’d known for a long time. He trusted these people as much as he trusted anyone these days. And, more important, they had no love lost for Macklin Hayes. He asked the questions he needed to ask and got the answers. Some surprised him, some didn’t. It was only a start, but it was more than he’d had a few hours before.

The CIA had lost a human asset about the time that John Carr was disappearing. Nicknamed “Einstein” by his colleagues, Max Himmerling had been nearing retirement when he’d died in an overseas chopper accident, his body burned so badly it had been identified through dental records. The reason this interested Knox was because that sounded like a typical Carter Gray maneuver in disposing of an agent who had committed an unforgivable act. Himmerling was nearing seventy, with the physical ability of a cow and who’d been assigned stateside at Langley for the last thirty years. So his turning up in a flamed-out chopper somewhere in the Middle East did not make sense. Yet no one at CIA or the U.S. government dared question the circumstances of the man’s death. What Himmerling had done must have been particularly egregious because he’d been a valuable asset for the CIA and Carter Gray. And though no one would say it out loud, from what Knox was able to find out, that something might have to do with John Carr. And he’d found something else out. The records of the Triple Six Division hadn’t been destroyed, like he’d thought. The CIA, apparently loath to part with any documented part of its past, no matter how politically incorrect it might seem in hindsight, had moved those records somewhere.

And that led Knox to the next phase of his “parallel” investigation.