Chapter 8: What Hargrove Built and What It Cost Him
Colonel Hargrove arrived at the Meridian building at 7:14 in the morning.
He came alone, which told Lisa everything she needed to know about how the next hour would go.
A man who arrives alone to a situation like this is not arriving to negotiate.
He is arriving to assess how much damage has already been done.
She met him in the lobby.
He was sixty-three, silver-haired, with the posture of someone who had spent decades being the most important person in every room he entered.
He looked at Lisa the way people look at a problem they underestimated.
"Ms.
Bennett," he said.
"Colonel."
"I think there's been a significant misunderstanding about my role in — "
"The documents were received by the FBI at six forty-one this morning," Lisa said.
"I have delivery confirmation.
I also have a forty-minute audio recording of a conversation that took place in my home earlier this morning, in which your name appears twice in connection with the charity routing accounts." She paused.
"Would you like to come upstairs, or would you prefer to have this conversation in the lobby?"
He came upstairs.
They sat in the conference room adjacent to her office.
Ryan stood near the door.
Daniel sat at the far end of the table and said nothing, but his presence in the room clearly unsettled Hargrove in a way that the Colonel worked hard not to show.
"The charity accounts were a sanctioned operation," Hargrove said.
"Sanctioned at a level above my rank.
I was a facilitator, not an architect."
"The dec\*ased soldiers whose accounts were used — were they sanctioned too?" Lisa asked.
"That decision was made before I was brought in."
"And my brother's disappearance?"
Hargrove's jaw tightened.
"I had no operational role in that."
"But you knew about it."
Silence.
"You knew," Lisa said, "and you contacted me eight months ago about the charity, not to investigate it — but to find out how much I already knew.
To see if Daniel had made contact."
"That is a significant accusation."
"It's a documented one." Lisa slid a single sheet across the table.
"This is a transcript of the call you made to my office eight months ago.
Alongside it is a record of a call made from your personal cell phone to the logistics company in Reston forty minutes after our conversation ended." She let him look at it.
"You were checking whether I was a threat.
And then you reported back."
Hargrove looked at the paper for a long time.
Daniel spoke for the first time since they had sat down.
"There were four of us," he said.
"Four witnesses to what happened in that forward operating base in 2003.
Two of us d\*ed in the following year under circumstances that were ruled accidental.
One of us disappeared." He looked at Hargrove.
"You were the fourth."
The room was very quiet.
"You didn't arrange what happened," Daniel said.
"But you let it happen.
And then you spent twenty years making sure no one with the right clearance ever looked too closely at the right records."
Hargrove set the paper down.
He looked at Lisa.
"What do you want?"
"I want you to make a phone call," Lisa said.
"Right now.
In this room.
To whoever is above you in this.
And I want you to tell them it's over."
"If I do that — "
"If you don't," Lisa said, "the journalist at the Post publishes what she has by end of business today.
If you do, there may be room for a conversation about cooperation." She folded her hands on the table.
"That's the only offer I'm making."
Hargrove looked at Ryan.
Then at Daniel.
May you like
Then back at Lisa.
He reached into his jacket and took out his phone.
