Director Marsh straightened.
“How do you know that?”
“Because the person I called is the one who drove him there.”
“Thomas—”
“His name is Ray Kowalski.
He was a courier for the program.
Semi-retired.
Victor called him before he called you, because Victor trusted him more.” Dad looked at her steadily.
“That should tell you something.”
A beat of silence.
“He doesn’t trust us,” Director Marsh said.
“He doesn’t trust whoever has been asking questions about him for the past six months.
He doesn’t know if that’s you or someone else using your channels.” Dad leaned forward slightly.
“Someone has been running searches on program personnel names through federal databases.
Quiet searches.
The kind that don’t trigger alerts unless you know what to look for.”
“We’ve seen the same anomaly.
We haven’t identified the source.”
“Victor has a theory.”
“What theory?”
Dad picked up the photograph of Victor Hale again.
He turned it over.
On the back, someone had written four words in blue ink.
He held it up so Director Marsh could read it.
Her face went still.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“It was in the folder you brought in.
On the back of the photograph.” He set it down.
“You didn’t write it.”
“No.”
“Then someone put it there before you walked into this room.”
Director Marsh stood up.
She went to the door, opened it, and spoke quietly to someone outside.
When she came back, her expression was controlled but her hands were not entirely steady.
“I need to know what those four words mean to you,” she said to Dad.
“They’re a name,” he said.
“A code name.
From the program.
Someone who was never supposed to exist in any file.”
“Whose code name?”
Dad was quiet for a moment.
“Mine,” he said.
“My operational name.
The one even the other operatives didn’t know.”
I looked at the photograph on the table.
I couldn’t read the handwriting from where I sat.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Dad looked at me.
“It says: *The Shepherd is here.*”
Director Marsh sat back down slowly.
“Someone in this building,” she said, “knows your father is in this airport.
And they wanted us to know they know.”
The water cooler hummed.
Director Marsh made three calls in the next ten minutes.
I sat in the corner and watched my father.
He wasn’t agitated.
That was the thing I couldn’t stop noticing.
He was calm in a way that wasn’t passive — it was the calm of someone who had been in rooms like this before, who knew that panic cost more than it bought.
He sat with his cane across his knees and his eyes moving slowly around the room, and I understood, for the first time, that the slowness I had always read as age was something else entirely.
It was patience.
It had always been patience.
“You’re staring,” he said, without looking at me.
“I’m allowed.
You just told a federal director that someone in this airport is using your secret code name to send you a message.”
“I told her someone put a note in her folder.
I don’t know who’s in this airport.”
“Does that distinction comfort you?”
“A little.” He almost smiled.
“It should comfort you too.”
Director Marsh ended her third call and came back to the table.
“I have a car.
We can be at the Pittsburgh field office in four hours.”
“We’re not going to the field office,” Dad said.
“Thomas—”
“Victor won’t come out for a field office.
He’ll come out for me.” He looked at her.
“Ray gave me an address.
A diner.
Victor will be there at six o’clock if I call Ray back and confirm.”
“That’s six hours from now.”
“Yes.”
“We can’t stay in this airport for six hours if someone here knows who you are.”
“We’re not staying in the airport.” Dad looked at me.
