Free The Midnight House by Alex Berenson

also? ” Shafer said. “Or anyone on our side? ”
    “Not directly.”
    “What does that mean, Vinny? ”
    “We saw the take after the army.”
    “Even though you had guys on the squad? ” Wells said.
    “That’s right.”
    Wells didn’t get it, and then he did. “You didn’t like this squad. But you wanted to be sure you were involved, just in case they wound up with something good. You put a couple guys in, nobody important, protected yourself from whatever it was they were doing, but made sure you had a hand in the game.”
    Duto was silent and Wells saw he’d scored.
    “Always so clever, Vinny. Always playing both sides.”
    “Guess you never broke the rules the last few years, John. Always please and thank you. May I go on, or you have more ethics lessons? ”
    Wells laid his hands on the smooth polished wood of the table. He stared at Duto, and Duto stared back. The triple-thick windows and carpeted floors of the seventh floor swallowed conversations. Only Tonka’s panting spoiled the room’s silence.
    “Vinny,” Shafer said. “You might take a different tone. Since it’s possible none of us would be here without John.” A reference to the bomb that Wells had stopped a year earlier.
    “We would have found it,” Duto said, without any conviction. “We were close.” He tugged his tie loose, opened his briefcase, pulled out a folder, a physical effort to put the conversation back on track. “Like I said, 673 reported to the army, but we got their take.” Duto opened the folder, slid across a sheet with ten names on it. “Anybody on there ring a bell? ”
    One name jumped at Wells. Jeremiah M. Williams, a soldier he’d met at Ranger training fifteen years before. “Jerry Williams,” Wells said. “I knew him a long time ago. Nice guy. Quiet. My ex-wife said something funny about him once. I can’t remember when it happened. But I remember her telling me he was built like a Greek god. You know, we’d just gotten married, so it was sort of a funny thing for her to say, but she was right. He was. Like a black Greek god. I’ll never forget it.”
    “Your wife met him; you were friends with him.”
    “Friendly.” Williams was tough to get close to. Or maybe Wells hadn’t tried.
    “But you didn’t stay in touch.”
    “When I started here, I didn’t stay in touch with anyone from the army.”
    Wells wasn’t sure why he was going into so much detail about his non-relationship with Jeremiah Marquis Williams. Maybe to explain to himself how he’d gotten to this point in his life with so few people he could trust.
    “He was a good man, Jerry. The type of guy who made training easier. Always pulled more than his weight.” Even as Wells said the words, he realized they sounded like a eulogy.
    “He’s the only name you recognize? ”
    “At first glance. Where is Jerry these days? ”
    “Missing.”
    “Jerry’s missing? All those guys are missing? ”
    “Jerry’s missing. Presumed dead. The other six names with the asterisks, they’re dead for sure.”
    Now Wells wished he hadn’t jerked Duto’s chain by bringing the dog. Headquarters brought out the worst in him. Acid rose in his throat. Another good soldier dead.
    “How? ”
    “In order. Rachel Callar killed herself in San Diego ten months ago. Overdose.”
    Duto handed over two photographs. The first showed Callar in her army dress uniform. She was pretty and trim, her brown hair cut in bangs that covered her forehead. A practical-looking woman, freckles and a wide chin.
    “Six-seven-three had a woman? ”
    “She was the squad doctor. A psychiatrist.”
    The second photo had been taken by the San Diego police at the scene of Callar’s suicide, a plastic bag pulled tight over her head. Wells passed the photos to Shafer without comment.
    “Husband found her,” Duto said. “No note, but no reason at the time to believe it was anything but suicide. She was in the army reserve. Had done a couple of tours in Iraq, counseling