Too stunned to speak, she simply stared. Her brain clicked into stall mode as she attempted to process his words.
“You sonofabitch.” Mike glared at him. “You almost got her killed.”
Davis shifted his attention to Mike, repentant but not cowed. “I know. Mr. Jones told me everything.” He wiped a hand over his jaw. “I didn’t see that coming. Believe me. I’m sorry.”
“What did you think was going to happen when you gave her that file? And why her?” Mike rushed on, not giving Davis a chance to respond. “Why not come to me or Taggart or Cooper?”
“Mike.” Eva placed a hand on Mike’s arm to settle him. “Let him talk. He didn’t have to agree to meet with us.”
“It’s all right. In his shoes, I’d be angry, too.” Davis faced Mike again, looked him in the eye. “If I could have found you, I might have contacted you. And what would you have done with the information?”
For a long moment, the two men locked eyes. They both knew exactly what Mike would have done. Nothing.
“How do you know my father?” Eva asked, effectively defusing the anger simmering between them. Davis gave Mike a final glare, then turned back to her. “I was active duty until five years ago. Several years before that, one of the enlisted men in my unit had need of a JAG attorney. Your father was assigned to his case. Since I was the aide to the base commander, much of the communication went through me. Your father and I became casual friends. He’s a good man.”
He smiled tightly, then went on. “A little over a month ago, we had a chance encounter at the funeral of a mutual friend. We caught up. He told me about you. He was very proud that you became an attorney. And he told me you’d lost your husband eight years ago in Afghanistan.”
Again he stopped, then drew a bracing breath. “I was in Afghanistan eight years ago. I was General Brewster’s aide.”
Mike went stone-cold still beside her, then erupted with anger. “You knew? All these years, you knew he sabotaged Operation Slam Dunk?”
Davis squared his shoulders. “Not at first, no. But I suspected something was off. Again, I’m sorry.”
“In the interest of time and my patience, leave out the ‘sorrys,’ okay? Just cut to the chase.”
Davis cut Mike a hard look, then addressed Eva again. “Brewster ran a tight ship. He was making end rows against the resistance. The One-Eyed Jacks were kicking some serious Taliban ass. Then this guy started showing up.”
“Lawson,” Mike speculated.
Davis nodded. “Didn’t know who he was—not right away. I just knew there was something off about him.”
“Other than the fact that he was an asshole?”
A small smile lifted one corner of Davis’s mouth. “Yeah. Other than that. The day he showed up, Brewster started making decisions that didn’t make sense.”
“What kind of decisions?” Eva wanted to know.
“Deployment of resources, mission strategies, calls that undermined the progress his Spec Ops teams had made. Then Operation Slam Dunk went down.”
He whipped a hand over his face again. “I knew some of those guys. They were straight shooters. Good men.”
He paused again, then met Mike’s glare. “I was there the night Brewster made the call to stand down. I’ll never forget it. I’d heard your radio transmissions. I knew what was going down out there. And I didn’t understand Brewster’s orders until several days later, when he gave me a stack of files and told me to shred them immediately. Before I could get to it, we got hit by an artillery strike. I ducked and covered, and when the smoke cleared, the files were scattered all over the floor.”
“Let me guess. One of those files was Brewster’s after-action report on OSD.” Mike leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped together in front of him.
“Yeah. He’d filed that report himself—hadn’t dictated it to me, so I didn’t know what was in it until I started reading. From the first word, I knew it was all bogus. I knew the op hadn’t gone down the way he’d recorded it.”
“Back up,” Eva said. “Was it protocol to shred official reports?”
“After they’d been transferred to electronic documents and encrypted, yes.”
A waitress stopped by the table then with their coffee, and everyone stopped talking until she was out of earshot again.
“And as his aide, you had access to the encrypted files,” Eva concluded.
“Limited access. Brewster changed his access code weekly. As soon as I read the paper copy, I knew I was sitting on a potential land mine—so I accessed his computer files and copied the report onto a flash drive before he could change his code and lock me out.”
“Why didn’t you do something with it?” Mike cut him no slack.
“What could I do? I was an aide. Who was going to believe me over a two star? And I’d basically stolen the file. It scared the shit out of me. So I sat on it until I could figure out what to do. In the meantime, I filed the paperwork to get transferred out of Brewster’s unit.”
He looked down at his legs, at the chair, breathed deep, and faced Eva again. “Soon after, I caught some action and ended up in this chair. And for too many years to count, I wallowed around in a big pile of self-pity.”
For the first time, Eva saw a softening in Mike’s eyes. He couldn’t relate to Davis’s lie of omission, but he could relate to what the man had been through. He knew all about how easy it was to get caught in a self-destructive cycle. And about sacrificing for your country.
“But I finally got myself together.” Davis glanced toward the table where the woman with the kind eyes waited. She smiled at him and he nodded, then turned back to Eva. “And I knew I had to bring this to someone’s attention. So I started researching Brewster. Did you know he was in the Office of the Under Secretary at DOD?”
Mike swore.
“And while I wasn’t sure where I was going with the file, I did some research on Lawson. I couldn’t get that guy out of my head, you know? Ran across a story about him and this extremist survivalist group, and a lightbulb went on. There was no question in my mind that Brewster and Lawson had been in some unholy alliance in Afghanistan. And no question that someone needed to find out what really happened that night.”
“So you picked Eva.”
“And I stand by my decision. She was the right choice. She had a vested interest. And a reputation for having a cool head. I knew that if she was anything like her father, she’d work through it the right way.”
“So you gave it to her anonymously and your conscience was cleared. Nice, neat, and tidy for you. Deadly for her.”
“Do you think I saw things coming down this way?”
“I think you should have.”
Davis nodded slowly. “Probably. Wasn’t the first mistake I’ve made. And next to sitting on the file for eight years, it’s the one I regret the most.”
38
“This is legit?” Mike frowned at Gabe, then darted a quick glance at Taggart and Cooper to check their reactions to the offer Gabe had just laid on the table.
He saw surprise, followed by keen interest, followed by skepticism. The same things he felt.
Gabe tipped up his beer, then, squinting against the charcoal smoke, went to work flipping the steaks. “It’s legit.” He glanced over his shoulder and chuckled at their slack-jawed expressions. “You guys need some privacy to talk it over?”
“What I need is another beer.” Looking like he’d been hit with a stun gun, Taggart walked over to the cooler.
“Based out of Langley?” Cooper considered Gabe through deeply veed brows.