Instead of bolting awake and scowling at him by the glow of the alarm clock, she kept breathing in the same relaxed rhythm. She’d initially been reluctant to get the head studs but now told anyone who would listen that it was the smartest thing she’d ever done. Dresner’s Merge really was a miracle.

The encrypted text displayed in the phone’s window was typically brief and ambiguous: “At your convenience.”

Whitfield slipped on a bathrobe and navigated the dark hallway by memory, entering his small office and closing the door behind him. A gentle tap on his keyboard woke the computer and he put on a headset before bringing up a heavily secured link to the man who had contacted him.

“Sorry to bother you at this hour, sir.”

Unlike his wife, Whitfield had spent the night staring at the ceiling, running through endless—and pointless—worst-case scenarios relating to the Smith-Russell situation. If there was relevant information to be had, this would be a very welcome interruption.

“Do you have something on the helicopter, Captain?”

“Yes sir. If you hadn’t called in the surveillance planes, we would have lost it. And even so we were the beneficiaries of a lot of luck.”

“You were able to track it then?”

“We were. It landed on a vacant farm in West Virginia.”

“Owned by whom?”

“A maze of offshore corporations that I can almost guarantee you will lead nowhere.”

“A CIA safe house?”

“Not according to our sources, sir.”

Whitfield didn’t immediately respond. It wasn’t military intelligence and it wasn’t the Agency. Who else would have a property like this available for an army physician and a CIA operative normally stationed overseas?

“Go on, Captain.”

“The helicopter left the farm and landed in a clearing in the mountains, where it was met by a single four-wheel-drive vehicle. It was on the ground for a short period of time before it took off again and returned to the farmhouse.”

“What was the purpose of the flight to the mountains?”

“To unload cargo.”

“What cargo?”

“Our men. They were buried in extremely well-camouflaged sites. Two were shot and one died of a knife wound to the back of the neck. We’ve extracted their bodies and transported them to the crematorium.”

Whitfield took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When dedicated, talented men died in the field, it wasn’t their failure. It was a failure of leadership. In this case, his leadership.

“I assume provisions are being made for their families?”

“Yes sir. Through the normal charities.”

“Cover stories?”

“In process. There won’t be any problems.”

There won’t be any problems, Whitfield repeated in his mind. More and more, it seemed that’s all there were.

“What happened at the farmhouse in West Virginia?”