“No I’m not,” Julian said.
“You’re on your computer every day checking out places where you think he might be hiding. You pick out men on the Internet who are about his age and description. You send fake coded messages to the ones you can’t eliminate by looking at their pictures.”
“Why would I do that? If it’s a fake code, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You and the old man both know how the game is played. You didn’t think he would tell you where he was. You wanted him to know where you are. You want him to realize it’s you, so he knows how to get in touch and arrange another meeting.”
“I didn’t pretend to quit the government,” Julian said. “I quit. It’s not my job to care where the old man is now.”
Mr. Ross frowned. “Quitting only means you’re not on the payroll. You don’t quit a war and go home to spend your life counting beakers and test tubes. I knew when you handed in your scrambled phone that you were still in. You just didn’t feel like taking orders anymore.”
“So you brought me his file.”
Mr. Ross nodded. “We brought you his file. This is the most highly classified set of documents you’ve ever touched. The file wasn’t in the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Since the giant screwup thirty-five years ago it’s been archived in a facility in the middle of the Air Force Intelligence installation at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. The building isn’t on any list of buildings or on maps of the base. The base perimeter is patrolled, and the building is guarded by people who don’t know what they’re guarding.”
“And you’re going to just hand it over to me.”
“You know better than that.”
“What, then?”
“The vice chancellor has given us exclusive access to a room on this campus that conforms to the security requirements for storing highly classified technical information. The room has one steel door and no windows,” Mr. Ross said. “The file will be locked in a safe except while you’re alone in there reading it for one hour a day. Then the file gets locked up again until you come back.”
“Why would I want to read it?”
Mr. Ross shrugged. “Because you want to know the truth.”
“And why do you want me to read it?”
“Because I think once you know everything about him, you’ll figure out how to find him. If you do, you’re the one he might talk to.”
Julian looked straight into Ross’s eyes. “I think he was framed.”
“That’s what you think now. Maybe when you know more about him you’ll think something different. But it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is that you can’t let this alone.”
Julian looked at the other two men. “How much is redacted?”
Mr. Ross said, “This isn’t some copy released under the Freedom of Information Act. This is the real thing. Nothing is redacted.”
36
Julian sat in the single folding chair at the folding table in the small utility room beneath the stands of the football stadium. A row of four-inch pipes that ran floor to ceiling was the only adornment to the windowless concrete walls. Each had a five-inch valve that looked like a little brass wheel. There was an overhead fluorescent light mounted on the concrete ceiling. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a safe. He opened the thick blue folder. It was the standard military personnel format with a thick sheaf of papers speared and held on the left and right by metal pieces folded down and secured. Julian began to read.
The old man’s last name was Kohler, first name Michael, middle name Isaac. He was born in Bay Village, Ohio, on July 10, sixty-one years ago. Julian looked up from the blue folder and thought. Bay Village sounded like a suburb of Cleveland on the shore of Lake Erie. He pictured it as one of those old places that had a park with a white wooden bandstand at its center and a ring of redbrick buildings that held stores and restaurants.
Michael Isaac Kohler graduated with a BA in economics and political science from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. That meant he had won a scholarship or that his parents had been rich, or nearly rich. Julian had never been able to place the old man’s accent because it conveyed only the north-central part of the country, and he used standard grammar. What had Kohler wanted to be, in those days when he came home after college? Whatever it was, he didn’t get to do it. He was drafted that summer, and sent through the machine—basic training, infantry school, advanced infantry with courses in hand-to-hand, sniper training, and survival school, and then off to Vietnam. Two tours, and then home. Why two? Why didn’t he take his discharge after surviving the first tour?