Free Truth or Die by James Patterson, Howard Roughan

dropped. “It’s my fault,” he said. “Everything.”
    “Claire would’ve been the first to tell you that isn’t true,” I said. “And I’d be the second.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I was with her before she went to meet you. This was her job, Owen. It’s what she did.”
    “So you knew about me?”
    I smiled. “No. Claire never discussed her sources. I don’t even know how she found you.”
    “She didn’t—I found her,” he said. “I knew her work. That’s why I called her.”
    “When was this?”
    “She and I spoke two days ago,” he said. “I was planning on coming up here next week.”
    “What changed?”
    He reached into his pocket, taking out his iPhone. After a few taps, he handed it to me. On the screen was an obituary from the online edition of the
Sun Gazette
down in Virginia. “Dr. Stephen Hellerman, 48, Leading Neurologist,” the headline read. A picture of a clean-cut, good-looking guy was underneath.
    “Who’s that?” I asked.
    “My boss.”
    I leaned in, squinting to read the first few sentences. “ ‘An early-morning home invasion’?”
    “That’s what it was made to look like. They shot him in the head. Then, last night, they almost got me, too.”
    “Who’s
they
?”
    “I’m not sure yet. I was hoping Claire could tell me.”
    Were we homing in, I wondered, or just going around in circles? “Why would she know?” I asked.
    “The piece she wrote last year about the CIA black site in Poland.”
    I knew the article well, if only because Claire was in Warsaw for two weeks researching it, and missed my birthday. “The secret jail?”
    “Yeah, in Stare Kiejkuty,” he said with a perfect Polish accent. Impressive.
    Stare Kiejkuty was a Polish intelligence-training site tucked away in a forest about two hours north of the capital. Claire got a guided tour of it from Polish officials, the key word being
guided
. As she described it, the whole purpose of the tour was to convince her the CIA wasn’t using a spare room or two to interrogate suspected Muslim terrorists outside the reach of US legal protections.
    “So you have actual proof that it’s a CIA black site?” I asked.
    The kid shook his head slowly. “No, what I have goes way beyond that,” he said.
“Way beyond.”

CHAPTER 27
    “DO YOU know the name Abdullah al-Hazim?” Owen asked.
    “No,” I said. “Should I?”
    “He was thought to be the number two guy in Al Qaeda,” he explained. “Of course, it’s pretty silly how we imagine terrorist groups to be structured like our own government, with a neatly organized line of succession. Let’s just say al-Hazim was one of the ringleaders based in Yemen.”
    “Was?”
    “About a year ago, the State Department announced he’d been killed by a drone attack in the Shabwah province,” Owen said. “If I’m not mistaken, the
Times
gave it two columns above the fold in the International section.”
    Two columns above the fold …
    “You sound like Claire,” I said. “There was the story, and then there was where the story was placed.”
    “In this case, though, the story was wrong.”
    “The guy’s still alive?”
    “No, al-Hazim is dead, all right. It just wasn’t a drone attack that killed him.”
    With that, Owen slid out of the booth and joined me on my side. I didn’t know what he was doing until he removed a small device from his pocket, attaching it to the Lightning dock on his iPhone. It was one of those tiny portable projectors. We were going to the movies.
    The backrest of the bench where he’d been sitting became the screen. The video was black-and-white and as grainy as the leather of the booth, but it was clear enough to see what was happening … and to whom.
    “That’s al-Hazim in the chair,” said Owen.
    The Middle Eastern man was probably in his late thirties, with a short beard and rimless glasses. I was hardly an expert on body language, but this was an easy read. Al-Hazim was trying to act defiant but was