Her voice sounds strained and tired. “Lieutenant, I need for you to do something for me, straightaway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I need you to retrieve the investigative file on that prisoner you helped me interrogate at FOB Healy. The one named Mohammed.”

He tries a joke and fails. “They’re all called Mohammed, you know how it is.”

She ignores the attempt at humor. “The one who claimed he was a farmer. The one who ended up dead.”

“Ah, sure, ma’am, I remember that one,” he says, closing his eyes in frustration. Just a few seconds ago everything was falling into place—the promised large deposit into his checking account had come through, Mom had gotten a meeting set up for a long-term care facility for Dad, and now…this.

“Good,” she says. “I need you to get the investigative file and retrieve something for me. It’s vitally important. Can you get to the file? The sooner the better, Lieutenant.”

Preston looks at his desk. The thick file on Mohammed the farmer is sitting right there, because he knows there’s some sort of CID investigation going on with that death and wanted to be prepared when the interrogator arrived, whoever he or she might be.

Carefully he says, “I think I can get to it in a while. What do you need?”

He thinks he hears a tone of relief in her voice. “That’s great, Lieutenant. That’s great. Ah…when we first interrogated him, we found a business card in his belongings. There was an international phone number on the card, that’s all. The name of a company as well. Something Holdings. Begins with the letter M. Remember? The joke was that maybe it was the guy’s bail bondsman.”

“Sure, Captain, I remember that.”

“Good,” she says. “At the time the number was checked out and was found to be a fake…but I want you to recheck it, okay? Really dig into it, see what you can find.”

He reaches over to the thick file folder, opens it up, and like some talisman or sign, right on top is the creased and dirty business card in a plastic envelope.

“Ah, Captain?”

“Yes?” comes the same tired voice, but now impatient.

What to say to her?

He knows what his instructions are with his anonymous male caller—present certain information to him in exchange for financial assistance and tell him if Cornwall contacts him. The deal has been shaky, underhanded, and he is desperately afraid to get caught. But he knows his caller is in the military, having met him one night on base in a darkened Humvee, and is convinced that his actions aren’t going to hurt the country.

Preston is a trained intelligence officer and knows this isn’t how things are done, but the man convinced him that in certain times, regulations have to be ignored for the greater good. And although Preston has his doubts about Cornwall’s guilt in that farmer’s death, the man also showed him video evidence on an iPad that in a moment of fear months ago, Cornwall smoked an entire Afghan family with a Hellfire missile against orders.