The coffee maker burbles and she inhales her favorite scent—percolating coffee. Then she looks at her husband. Okay, her second favorite scent. Her favorite scent is Leo. He smells like home.
Meanwhile he’s rolling his eyes. “Andy Mihalik, Mikhail Andrewski? I wouldn’t imagine Caleb would be that lazy.”
“Or he wasn’t being lazy at all,” she muses. “Maybe whoever fed him that outline wants Andrewski to know they know.”
He pulls down two mugs and fills them. “If he was fifty-four in 1992, he’s in his late eighties now.”
“So? Senior citizens can’t be criminals?”
He passes her a mug. “Just pointing it out.” He takes a sip of coffee. “It sounds like a false flag.”
“How so?”
“1992 was the end of the Cold War. The intelligence agencies were scrambling to reposition themselves and prove that they were still needed. Having infrastructure sabotage to pin on the Russians would have gone a long way.”
She raises her mug to her lips, then lowers it. “You think it was the CIA?”
“CIA, FBI, one of the innumerable shadow agencies. Heck, it could have been the Lighthouse.”
“Let’s not get carried away.” She takes a drink. Connelly makes the perfect cup of coffee, strong but not bitter.
They carry their coffee back to the dining room and stare down at the papers. “If it is someone in the U.S. intelligence community, they’ve been inside long enough to remember when we used to attack ourselves to prove a point.”
She grabs her notebook, draws a line under her notes, and starts a new section.
“If they buried the 1992 attack,” she says, “then all the operational details—methodology, timeline, team composition—should be locked away in a classified file.”
“Right.”
“So how do we figure out who did it? Because it’s clear Caleb truly is being used.”
“We have to find someone who was there,” he says. “Someone who remembers the truth.”
She suddenly jerks straight up. “Wait. Could the 1991 attack in Turkey have been a false flag, too?”
He groans.
“What?”
“Let’s just say the answer is a resounding yes. The Turkish Gendarmerie, which is a hybrid law enforcement/military entity, set up an intelligence and counter-terrorism unit sometime in the 1980s, called the JITEM. Turkey denied the existence of the JITEM for years, which was pretty convenient because the JITEM spent the entire decade from 1990 through 1999 more or less specializing in false flag operations.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. Huh.”
After a minute, she jerks her chin toward the pile of contracts. “Whoever hired him went through a trust to approach the publisher, and the publisher approached Biz, who signed the documents, including Caleb’s checks, on behalf of Archives Press.”
“Is that typical?”
“Not at all. But it’s also not illegal.”
He drains his coffee and rests the mug on top of the stack of bank statements. “I think we’ve made a lot of progress, and the false flag angle bears looking into. For now, though, let’s clean this stuff up.”
He starts stacking papers.
She blinks at him. “We’re on a roll.”
He keeps gathering documents.
