“Pretty soon a captain from 1st Brigade, 1st Armored showed up and asked what the hell happened. Your dad was still kind of a zombie at that point, but he told the captain how we’d taken the payment to Ahmed, how someone had fired an RPG, how Ahmed and his men started shooting and we fired back. Yousef piped up and told him I’d shot the guy with the RPG on the roof. That impressed the captain more than anything. He asked what happened to the money, and your dad looked at me. We hadn’t talked about it really. I think Jimmy was probably still in shock when we were taking the bags down to the cars. I told the captain I’d put it all in the trunk and would take it back to the CPA. Showed him the trunk with the bag we’d brought, all shredded and bloody, on top of the others. He just nodded and I closed the trunk. And then your dad and I and Yousef drove off in the one car.

“It was your dad who came up with the idea of hiding the money in the water treatment plant. It was just outside the Green Zone, one of the construction projects sprouting up all over Iraq. And the contractor wasn’t doing a damn thing. He’d built four walls and part of a roof and installed a few pipes, and then he abandoned it. Still billed the CPA for it. That half-assed building was the perfect symbol for post-invasion Iraq. Anyway, there were lots of hiding places in there, and it would be pretty easy to go off base to get there if we needed to. We hid the duffels inside of a sewer pipe that wasn’t connected to anything.

“It was only meant to be temporary. The plan was that Jimmy would figure out how to get it all back to the States, and we’d split it five ways—a little over two million each for everyone in the room when the RPG hit. We’d take Cortez’s share and set up a fund for his baby girl. Jimmy had saved up some leave time, so he was going to go home and figure out how to best move the cash, and the rest of us would stay down-range and keep an eye on the money.

“The best part? We returned the bag of cash we’d taken to Ahmed. All of it accounted for. Some POG at the CPA actually gave us shit for being Boy Scouts. No one suspected anything.”

Finn pauses, then drinks from his bottle of water.

“And then?” I ask.