I nodded. “So is Bree. And she has a gun.”

“Still, it’s paid off. Boy, has it ever. I’ve got somebody I want you to meet. His name is Aubrey Lee Johnson. He lives down in Alabama, but he’s got a custom fly reel business that brings him up to Virginia a lot.”

Ned downed the last of his coffee, and I slid mine over to his side of the table. Some of the usual rev was coming back into him already. “This guy’s got a story he thinks might be important. And guess what, Alex. It is.”

Chapter 105

THERE WAS NO way Mahoney could get travel status for this. Even if it were his case, which it wasn’t, the Bureau watches out for our tax dollars by requiring agents to use the local field offices for out-of-state interviews. Ned had already traded a few electronic communications with the Mobile office, but in the end, we decided to fly to Alabama on our own nickel.

We arrived at Mobile Regional Airport late the next morning and rented a car from there.

Aubrey Johnson lived on Dauphin Island, about an hour south. It was a sleepy little village, at least this time of year, and we had no trouble finding his store—Big Daddy’s Fishing Tackle, on Cadillac Avenue.

“This is why we’re here? Big Daddy’s Fishing Tackle?” I said to Ned.

“Odd as it may seem, this is it, the end of the road. The conspiracy gets tripped up here. If we’re lucky, that is.”

“So let’s start getting lucky.”

Johnson was a tall, gregarious guy in his midfifties, and he ushered us in like a couple of old friends, just before he double-locked up behind us.

Ned had already questioned him on the phone, but Johnson repeated his story for me—how he’d been driving late one night on Route 33 in Virginia about a month ago, when a beautiful girl in a negligee stumbled out of the woods in front of his truck.

“Truth be told, I thought it was my lucky night,” he said, “until I saw what kind of terrible shape she was in. Any bigger caliber on that slug in her back and she would have been dead.”

Even so, the girl had insisted that Johnson keep driving, at least until they were across the state line. He finally got her to an ER just outside Winston-Salem.

“Still, Annie wasn’t hanging around for any cops to show up,” he went on. “She told me she was either leaving there on foot or in my truck, so I drove her. Probably shouldn’t have, but what’s done is done. My wife and I have been looking after her ever since.”

“Her name is Annie?” I asked.

“I’ll get to that part,” Johnson said.

“Why did she come forward when she did?” I asked them. All I knew was that the contact between Mr. Johnson and Mahoney had started before the names Constantine Bowie and Zeus had ever made it into the headlines.