CHAPTER
79
IT WAS ONE in the morning when Puller found himself in Afghanistan again, in the middle of the firefight that he would win every time, even if he couldn’t bring home the men he’d lost. He woke from the dream slowly, calmly. But he woke with something else.
An idea.
There had been a hole. A lead he had not followed up. While he’d been killing Afghanis in the desert, his mind had finally fixated on that hole. And he didn’t have much time to get it done. He rose, dressed, and left the house as quietly as he had moved through foot patrols in the Middle East. He had paused only to check on Cole. She was asleep in her bed, a single sheet over her in deference to the heat outside. He left her a note on the fridge, made sure her front door was securely locked, rolled his car out of the driveway and partway down the street before starting it up. And then he was off.
Thirty minutes later he eyed the bleak concrete-block building. There was no security system. He’d already noted that on his last visit here.
He scanned the area one more time and then moved forward. The front door lock took all of thirty seconds.
He moved through the interior. He hadn’t used his flashlight yet because he had memorized the interior from his earlier visit. Down the hall, fifteen strides, door on the left. He used a penlight to illuminate the lock while he used his tools to pick it.
Twenty seconds later he was on the other side of the door and had closed it behind him. He stared over at the other door. He tried the knob. Surprisingly, it wasn’t locked. He opened it with his gloved hand. The large freestanding safe stared back at him. This would be the trickier one. But he’d brought with him several elements that could be used to defeat it.
He shone his light on the metal face of the safe. It was old but sturdy. He inserted his tools in the lock. He worked with a practiced hand for five minutes. There was a low click, and he tugged on the locking mechanism arm and pulled the door open. It took him ten minutes of searching before he found what he was pretty sure he had been looking for.
He unfolded the blueprints and placed them on the desk. He shone his light over them, going page by page. Then he took pictures of each page, folded the plans back up, replaced them in the safe, cranked the door closed, and made sure it locked properly. Five minutes later he was driving off in his Malibu. He reached Cole’s house, carried the camera in, and sat on his bed going through each frame. When he was finished he sat back and thought about it, trying to put things in order. Strauss had had this in his safe. Eric Treadwell and Molly Bitner had designed a plan to get this out of the safe and make copies of it. If he needed any confirmation that they had done so, he had it.
He had brought with him fingerprint cards of both Treadwell and Bitner. Both of them must have been sweating when they’d pulled their little raid at Strauss’s office, because the moisture along with their prints had been transferred perfectly to the paper. And it was the sort of paper that would carry latent prints pretty much forever. The matches had been perfect for both Treadwell and Bitner.
This is what they had risked so much for. This was ultimately what they had sacrificed their lives for. The one piece he had not followed up on.
Until now.
Now the question was: Did he tell Cole?
The answer was clearer and more immediate than he expected.
He looked at his watch: 0400.
Ironic. He was going to wake her up early again.