They had a merry little lunch. Duncan and his wife told Condley all about their three children and where each one of them was working now that they had finished college. They talked about their assignments over the course of Duncan’s long career, the tours at the Pentagon and at Camp Lejeune, the years on the NATO staff in Europe, his unaccompanied deployments to Okinawa and the Mediterranean, and his most recent tour back on Okinawa as commanding general. They asked Condley about his lost decades in east Asia, glancing secretly at each other when he tried to make sense of his wanderings and to justify his panorama of bad choices, their faces tight with a pathos that informed him that he had indeed been the subject of many conversations. Brandon Condley, said the general to his wife through the flecking of his eyes and the small lift of their brows, could have been a great one. But he had cared too much, tried too hard, and in the end had lost not only the bubble but his very future.

Sort of like the way I look at Dzung, he decided, not happy with the analogy but accepting that it was probably true.

Finally lunch was over. Maureen stood, her face now warm with what he knew was a fond familiarity and a sweet kind of sadness, and delicately shook his hand.

“Brandon, it’s been great to meet you after all these years. Unfortunately, I have an officers’ wives’ reception that I’m hosting this afternoon, so I need to go.”

And then it was just him and Duncan sitting at the little table, chewing on fresh-baked cookies and drinking tea. The general was gathering himself, Condley could tell as he watched Duncan take in a deep, preparatory breath. Then he stood, motioning toward the nearby sitting area.

“Come on over here. I’ve got something to show you.”

As Condley moved to the black, soft-leather sofa, the general walked back to the front entrance and retrieved a manila envelope from where he had left it on a table near the door. Then Duncan eased into a leather chair just next to him, plopping the manila envelope onto the coffee table in front of them.

“I’ve been following the message traffic on this—what the hell do you call it? It’s not a body, and I don’t want to just say it’s a skeleton, because that sounds like Halloween. The dead guy you found out in Quang Nam Province.”

“Why don’t we just call him the deserter,” said Condley acidly.

“Right,” said the general. “How about the dead deserter?”

“How about—” Condley was going to trump the general with the perfect epithet for the dead scumbag he had found in Ninh Phuoc, but for some reason he lost interest in the middle of a thought. Who cared? “Never mind. It was a long time ago. And he’s dead.”