Sasha tilts her head. “Me, too. It was delivered to my office. No other information. Just the hardback.”
Leo eyes his old friend and mentor. “Are we starting a book club?”
Hank’s smile is thin. “Something like that. You both need to read it.”
“Why?”
Hank suddenly looks tired. He answers Leo’s question with one of his own. “Hear what happened in Turkey?”
“The attack on the Air Force base. Yeah.”
Hank turns his attention to Sasha. “You up to speed on it, too?”
“Someone poisoned the water supply. Ten dead, dozens in critical condition. No one has come forward to claim responsibility yet, but at least four or five separatist or extremist groups are likely contenders.”
Hank nods. “Right.”
“Where are you going with this?” Leo asks. “Protocol says the Air Force Office of Special Investigations should be primary with the FBI Legal Attaché’s Office and the Embassy and CIA coordinating with Turkish authorities on their investigation. How are we involved?”
“And what does it have to do with this book?” Sasha points her half-eaten cannoli at the book on Leo’s lap.
“The author is Caleb Rye, a twenty-six-year-old English teacher at Foggy Bottom Preparatory Academy. The Payback is his first novel,” Hank responds.
“Okay?”
Hank leans forward. “The Payback is an espionage thriller that starts off with the theft of potassium cyanide from a state-owned silver mine in western Turkey.”
Sasha goes still beside Leo. He lowers his chin. “And then what happens?”
“Guess.”
“They dump it in a water system.”
Hank nods. “I haven’t read the book, yet. But yes. They poison a military installation’s water system.”
“Who did it?” Sasha asks suddenly.
They both turn to look at her.
“The bad actors. In the novel,” she elaborates. “If this Rye guy got everything else right, maybe he got that right, too.”
“Oh. Maybe. But that’s not our concern,” Hank says.
“It’s not?” Her green eyes are wide.
“No. Like Leo said, the alphabet agencies are on it. They’ll figure out who’s responsible. Or not.”
“Then what are we doing?”
“The Lighthouse wants you to look into Rye. Is it a coincidence? Or did he know? If he knew ahead of time, how? Where’s the leak? And why would he publish it?”
Leo rubs his jaw. “Could it be the other way around? Maybe the bad actors were inspired by the book. Life imitating art, you know?”
Hank finishes off his cannoli and dusts powdered sugar off his fingers. “That’s also a possibility. Or maybe he orchestrated it.”
“A twenty-something high school English teacher in Foggy Bottom calling the shots for a Turkish terror cell? Doubt it.” Leo rarely dismisses a theory out of hand, but this one’s stretched so thin it’s see-through.
“I agree it’s unlikely. But Foggy Bottom Preparatory Academy is not an ordinary school.”
