A carry-on bag over one shoulder.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“His name is Victor Hale,” Director Marsh said.
“He was the program’s logistics coordinator from 1983 to 1989.
He was the one who arranged safe passage for your father’s family when there was a credible threat in 1987.”
“I didn’t know about any threat in 1987,” I said.
“No,” Dad said.
“You weren’t supposed to.”
“Dad—”
“You were four years old, sweetheart.”
I sat back.
Director Marsh tapped the photograph.
“Three weeks ago, Victor Hale contacted our office.
He said he had documentation — physical records from the program that were never officially surrendered.
He said some of those records contained names.
Operatives who were listed as ground crew in the official files but whose real designations were never destroyed.”
“Names like my father’s.”
“Yes.”
“And where is Victor Hale now?”
Director Marsh looked at my father, not at me.
“That’s why we need Thomas,” she said.
Dad picked up the photograph.
He looked at it for a long time.
“Victor wouldn’t contact you unless he was scared,” he said.
“He spent thirty years being careful.
If he reached out, something changed.”
“Something did,” Director Marsh said.
“He reached out on a Tuesday.
By Thursday, he’d stopped answering his phone.”
Dad set the photograph down.
“How long has he been missing?”
“Eleven days.”
The younger pilot near the door shifted his weight.
Captain Reeves looked at the table.
I looked at my father — this man I had driven to the airport this morning, this man I had promised to stay beside, this man who made pancakes on Sundays and moved slowly with a cane — and I watched him sit up straighter than I had seen him sit in years.
“I need to make a phone call,” he said.
“To whom?” Director Marsh asked.
“To my granddaughter,” he said.
“To tell her I may be a day late to her wedding.”
He looked at me then, and his eyes were steady and clear and asking me something he wouldn’t say out loud.
I looked back at him.
Dad stepped into the hallway with Captain Reeves.
Director Marsh stayed at the table.
She poured two cups of water from a jug near the cooler and pushed one toward me without asking.
“How long have you known?” I asked.
“That your father was alive and well in Millbrook?
About six years.
We found him through a property tax record.
We made a decision not to approach him.” She looked at her cup.
“He’d earned the right to his pancakes.”
“Then why now?”
“Because Victor Hale’s records, if they fall into the wrong hands, don’t just expose your father.
They expose every person your father ever protected.
Safe houses.
Informants.
Families who were relocated.
People who have been living quietly for thirty years under the assumption that their names were gone.”
I thought about that.
“How many people?”
“Forty-three families.
Roughly two hundred individuals.”
The door opened and Dad came back in.
He sat down.
He didn’t look at either of us right away.
“I reached someone,” he said finally.
“Who?” Director Marsh asked.
“Someone who still owes me a favor from 1988.” He set his phone on the table.
“Victor isn’t missing.
He went to ground on his own.
He’s in Pittsburgh.
He has the documents with him.”
