Chapter 4
Behind him, the officers who had come in with him went still in the way people go still when the senior officer's register has shifted without warning.
I held his gaze. "You recognize it."
"That patch belonged to Crimson Dagger," he said. "That unit vanished twelve years ago."
"Eleven months, three weeks, and four days ago," I said, "I started trying to find out why."
I pulled the folder free from my vest and held it in both hands. Bishop looked at it. He looked at me. He was running a calculation I could see on his face, and the calculation was taking longer than it should have, which told me that something in the room was already more complicated than he had expected.
"My father was in Crimson Dagger," I said. "Lieutenant Aaron Stone."
The general's expression changed. Not the recalculation of a man encountering new information. The expression of a man encountering information that is not new to him, that has been sitting somewhere he has been trying not to look for twelve years.
"Aaron died a hero," he said.
"Aaron died after reporting a traitor," I said. "The report didn't go where he sent it."
The warehouse went quiet in the way spaces go quiet when a sentence has introduced something that changes the structural arrangement of everything that was said before it.
I opened the folder.
The photograph was on top. I had put it there deliberately, in the order I had rehearsed. My father and Bishop, twelve years younger, standing in front of a building I recognized from the base records as the original Crimson Dagger operations center. They were looking at each other with the ease of men who trusted each other completely. On the back of the photograph, in my father's handwriting — the same handwriting from the notebooks he kept, the same handwriting I had seen in every letter he ever sent — was a message he had left for a moment he had apparently believed might arrive long after he was gone.
If my daughter ever finds this, tell Bishop the traitor wore his ring.
I turned the photograph face down and held it toward him.
May you like
Bishop took it. He turned it over. He read it once. He read it again.
Then he looked at his hand.
