Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [93]
Samantha Hawes finally delivered Carroll to a library-style carrel beside a silent row of gray metal copiers. The desk was completely covered with thick stacks of reports.
Carroll’s heart nearly stalled as he gazed at the mountainous stacks. Each report looked like any other. How was he supposed to find something unusual in this great, yawning heap of history?
He walked around the table, sizing up his task. Hidden among all these folders were connections between men— the tracks, the spoor they laid down; the events they lived through during and after Viet Nam. Somewhere, surely, tracks would crisscross, correspondences would have been made, relationships established.
“I have more. Do you want to see them now? Or is this enough to hold you for a while?” Samantha Hawes asked.
“Oh, I think this will do me pretty well. I didn’t know we collected this much dirt on everybody down here.”
Agent Hawes grinned. “You should see your file.”
“Did you?”
“I’ll be back over there, working in the stacks. You just holler if you need any more light reading, Mr. Carroll.”
The FBI agent started to turn away, then she suddenly turned back. Samantha Hawes seemed to be a very contemporary Southern woman, pretty, very confident, genteel and proper Southern from her looks, anyway. In days of old, Carroll couldn’t help thinking, she would already have been a young mother of two or three tucked away in Alexandria. She would have been a Sam, too.
“There is something else.” Her face was suddenly quite serious and concerned. “I don’t know exactly what this all means. Maybe it’s just me. But when I went through these files yesterday evening… I had the distinct feeling that some of them had been tampered with …”
A very unpleasant warning rang in Carroll’s head. “Who would tamper with them?”
Samantha Hawes shook her head. “Any number of people have access to them. I don’t know the answer.”
“What do you mean when you say they’ve been tampered with, Samantha?”
The agent looked straight at Carroll. “I mean, that I think documents are missing from certain files.”
Carroll reached out and lightly grasped her wrist. He was excited by this information because it meant that certain files, in some ways, were already different from the rest. They stood out.
Someone else had looked at them.
Someone had possibly pilfered documents from them.
Why? Which files?
He saw a strange look crossing her face, as if she were asking herself about the precise nature of this unorthodox man who’d been admitted into FBI headquarters.
“Can you remember which files?”
“Of course I can.” She moved toward the work table and began sifting. She picked out five thick files, dropping them in front of Carroll, saying, “This one … and this … this … this one… this one.”
He gazed quickly at the names on the files.
Barreiro, Joseph.
Doud, Michael.
Freedman, Harold Lee.
Melindez, Pauly.
Hudson, David.
“Why these five?” he asked.
“They served together in Viet Nam, according to their documents. That’s one good reason.”
Carroll sat down. He still expected to come away from Washington empty-handed. He expected that the faint sense of anticipation he felt now would turn out to be nothing more than a false alarm. Five men on the FBI computer list of “subversives”—a term he knew was next to meaningless, at least the way the FBI used it.
He checked his own printouts, and his heart suddenly clutched.
Barreiro and Doud had been explosives experts.
And David Hudson had been a colonel, who, according to the brief note on the printout, had been active in the organization of veterans groups and veterans rights after Viet Nam.
Five men who had served together in the war.
Five men who were on both his list, and the FBI’s.