“I’ll bet,” he said, letting us through.
We navigated the base’s huge campus to reach a low glass corporate-looking building, off by itself near the water.
After another, even more heavy-duty security checkpoint in its lobby, we found ourselves on the fourth floor, sitting in an austere, featureless office with a view. If you craned your neck to the right, you could just see the side of the Washington Monument’s towering obelisk across the river.
I was doing just that when Milne walked in, carrying a big white coffee mug with a trailing tea bag tag.
“Emily! Long time, no see,” said the tall, balding, Nordic-looking Milne. “How’s your daughter? Olivia, right?”
“Olivia, yes. You remembered,” Emily said, smiling. “She’s fine. Eleven going on twenty. You know the drill. You have four girls, right?”
“Actually, five now.”
“Congratulations, Chris. That’s awesome. I’d like you to meet Mike Bennett, the detective I was telling you about.”
“I have six girls,” I said, as we shook hands.
Milne raised an eyebrow.
“And four boys, too,” Emily said.
“My goodness. Ten? Busy man. You win, Detective,” he said, smiling, as he finally put down his tea and sat. “So what can I do for you folks today?”
It took me a few minutes to explain my crazy case to him. After I was done, he looked at me and then at Emily, and took a long, deliberate sip of his tea.
“So there’s no way these prints are somebody else’s? No possible way?” he said after a beat.
I shook my head.
“We had three people look at them, including the FBI. It’s Eardley.”
“Or his clone,” Emily said.
“That’s simply incredible,” Milne said. “He dumps the plane on purpose and then just walks out of Iraq? Why? And nobody picks up on this? What the hell went wrong?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Chris,” Emily said. “See, Eardley’s mission was classified. Even the FBI can’t access the info. Could you maybe inquire about it for us discreetly?”
“Gee, Emily. I don’t know. In ’07, a lot of crazy stuff was happening, all directed very sloppily, in my opinion, by the folks at Langley. Something this cuckoo has Foggy Bottom written all over it. I do mostly recruiting now, to be perfectly honest. All this is definitely above my pay grade.”
“Foggy Bottom?” I said.
“The State Department, the CIA,” Emily said.
“Ah,” I said.
“‘Ah’ is right,” Milne said, lifting his mug again. “The CIA means politics.”
Poli-tricks, I thought, as the crime scene tech said when I first found Eardley’s body.
“We’re not looking to jeopardize anybody, of course. We just need a lead here, Chris,” Emily said.
“Because actually, Chris, it gets worse,” I said, as I took out the video stills of the two guys who were in the bathroom at the hotel. “I don’t think Eardley’s death was a suicide. I think he was thrown off that hotel. Right before he was about to meet up with a reporter about a government cover-up.”
Milne shook his head as he looked at the photos. Then he put down his tea and took a deep breath. After another beat, he let out a low whistle.
“Alrightee, then,” he said dismally. “I’ll make some phone calls. I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter 14