Rain slid down his face.
“And now he has them.”
Ava shook her head.
“You knew he would come here.”
“I suspected.”
“So you used us to draw him out.”
He did not deny it.
Brooke looked devastated.
“You let us think you were dead.”
“I disappeared to keep you alive.”
“You do not get to say that after tonight.”
He absorbed the words without defense.
Then he looked at me.
“Mr. Marshall, Julian will release the forged evidence before sunrise.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that is what I trained him to do.”
Ava stared at him.
“You trained Julian?”
“Years ago.”
“For what?”
Her father looked toward the road where the black sedan had vanished.
“To replace me.”
No one spoke.
The rain softened.
An officer removed Ava’s cuffs after her father gave a small nod.
She rubbed her wrists but did not move toward him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He looked at both daughters.
“Not the man you remember.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the only safe one.”
He turned toward the unmarked SUV.
I stepped in front of him.
“You don’t leave until you tell me why my name has been used for years.”
His eyes met mine.
“Your name was not chosen at random.”
“Why?”
“Because your father once worked with us.”
My breath stopped.
“My father repaired industrial equipment.”
“Publicly.”
I almost laughed.
Every ordinary parent in our lives apparently had another life hidden beneath the one used for family dinners.
But Ava’s father removed a photograph from his jacket.
Two young men stood beside a military transport plane.
One was him.
The other was my father.
On the back, a date had been written twenty-eight years earlier.
Below it were the initials RJM.
“My father’s initials,” I said.
Robert James Marshall.
The same as mine.
“The accounts were not opened under your identity,” Ava’s father said. “They were inherited by it.”
“Why?”
“Because your father tried to expose the network.”
“My father died from cancer.”
“Yes.”
“So stop speaking like someone killed him.”
“I didn’t say someone did.”
The careful wording chilled me.
“What did he know?”
“Enough to create a contingency.”
“What contingency?”
“You.”
Ava looked at me.
Her father continued.
“He placed you near the kind of records that would eventually lead you back to what he could not finish. Ordinary enough to be ignored. Careful enough to notice.”
“That is manipulation.”
“Yes.”
The honesty gave me nowhere to put my anger.
“He expected me to spend my life investigating this?”
“He hoped you never would.”
“But I did.”
“Yes.”
He looked toward the house.
“And now Julian knows the contingency is active.”
A phone rang inside the SUV.
One officer answered, listened, then approached Ava’s father.
“Sir, the first release went out.”
He handed him the phone.
Ava’s father read the screen.
His expression did not change.
“What was released?” I asked.