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“What the hell are you doin’ here?” Buck asked her.
“Beth said she had evidence that you were off the ranch for more than forty-eight hours,” Six-pack answered for her.
“Evidence? What kind of evidence?”
“Well…” stammered Six-pack. “That you weren’t here.”
“As you can see, I am very much here.” Buck stretched his arms out on each side. “And as you can also see, you interrupted my time with my lady. If there’s nothing else…”
He didn’t wait for either of them to answer before slamming the door in their face.
39
Buck
“We could’ve waited a day,” I said when the plane that would take us from Gunnison back to New York City was about to take off.
“I want this over with, and so do you,” said Stella. “If, and I’m saying if this time, everything goes as planned, we’ll be back in Colorado before midnight.”
Six hours later, we were back in the air, on our way to the place Stella and I had started calling home. Both of us were too stunned to speak as we lay on the bed in the stateroom and read through the hundreds of pages of notes Barb had handwritten.
“It looks like whoever took her computer, didn’t get much,” I muttered, turning another sheet over.
“It makes sense she wouldn’t have kept anything on it. I mean, remember how cryptic her emails to me were? How would she have put all this into ‘Barb code’?”
Most of what I read was circumstantial with a lot of conjecture thrown in on Barb’s part. That didn’t matter. There was more than enough here for the CIA to pursue a deeper investigation into Operation Argead, most likely with the help of the Invincibles and maybe K19 too.
“Decker will be there when we get back, right?” asked Stella.
“He will be. I also have a hunch Burns might be too.”
“Really?”
“We’ll need him eventually just to help us figure out what some of this stuff means, even not written in Barb code.”
“Most of this points a finger at Kerr, along with Donofrio from the CIA, and Moreau from French intelligence. There’s nothing in it about Byrne, Antonov, Fisk, or even Kim, who is really Chen. Are Donofrio and Moreau even still alive?”
“I believe both are, and with Fisk in custody, I predict it won’t be long before we can bring this whole operation down.”
“Kerr made it sound like he ruled the fucking world,” Stella spat as she flipped one piece of paper over. “He was exactly the way Burns said he’d be—arrogant, a misogynist, boastful—God, he was such an asshole.”
“That reminds me, Decker asked me to tell you that he heard from Z. Sally Hennessey was found dead in the flat she shared with Kerr. An apparent suicide.”
“I hope that’s being investigated. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kerr arranged for his own wife’s death.”
Stella stopped reading, flopped on her back, and closed her eyes. “Do you really think there’s enough here to take them down?”
“I do, Stella. I also know that Decker, Cope, and Irish won’t stop until they do.”
“What about you?”
I knew that question was coming and had already given it a lot of thought. “We won’t make any decisions until next year.”
She opened her eyes and turned her head toward me. “We?”
“That’s right. I’m not doing anything else to jeopardize my brothers and sister inheriting the Roaring Fork.”
> “Okay, but you said ‘we.’”
