“This is no normal murder case, Mr. Avery. I invoked the Patriot Act three months ago when I started investigating the Double Eagles. When Snake Knox knocked down our plane in December, we lost new evidence in the JFK assassination. That’s as big as it gets. And after all the deaths we had—Glenn Morehouse, Sleepy Johnston, Henry Sexton, Brody Royal—I’ve had some serious Bureau oversight on me. They almost pulled me out of here when we lost that plane. So you can imagine what keeping your client under protective custody cost me in political capital. Now, I’m sorry it’s come to this, but we are here now.”

The tension in Kaiser’s voice brings back a flood of memories from three months ago. The heated conversations with Kaiser and Dwight Stone about the Working Group and their assassination theory about mobster Carlos Marcello. It’s been weeks since I’ve thought of what was lost in that FBI plane crash: a handwritten letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to his wife, Marina; rifles taken from Brody Royal’s trophy gun cabinet, one of which was supposedly the weapon Frank Knox used to shoot John Kennedy from the Dal-Tex building—

“I understand all that,” Quentin says with some gratitude in his voice. “But has this tape restoration technique ever been used in a civilian trial on American soil? Criminal or civil?”

“I doubt it. The whole technology is classified.”

“Then what the hell are we talking about it for? We might as well be discussing using a laser defense system.”

“You’re wrong,” I tell Quentin. “At this point, the bureaucrats in D.C. will do just about anything to atone for the mess they’ve made of the Double Eagle investigation. Forty years of chasing somebody is too long. If the FBI can’t nail Snake Knox, how the hell can anyone believe they’ll ever apprehend top foreign terrorists?”

Kaiser nods grimly. “As per instructions, I went to Shad and told him we’d like to take a look at those tapes in our crime lab.”

“Nothing more?” I ask. “No hint that the Bureau might succeed where Sony failed?”

“Shad wouldn’t need anything more,” Quentin says dejectedly.

Kaiser looks down at his hands, then wipes them as though trying to remove some invisible residue. “I was prepared to wait until Dr. Cage’s trial was over to request the tapes. But it’s out of my hands now. Shad called one of his Harvard Law classmates, who happens to work for the attorney general. Those tapes are going to D.C. today on an FBI plane.”

“Goddamn it!” Quentin bellows. “I thought those tapes were behind us.”

“You can’t outrun the past,” I mutter.

“It’s far from certain that the lab can restore those tapes,” Kaiser says, trying to offer us hope. “They might get only a partial restoration, or even none at all.”