Page 192 of Whisper

His hands trailed over documents boxes, spines of notebooks, bound folders wrapped with string. Canisters of microfilm. He counted down the numbers, the dates, until he got to what he was looking for.

Afghanistan, 2008. Camp Carson. Hamid Operation

Three file boxes. That’s what the fulcrum of his life was to the CIA. Three file boxes, two of which contained the Congressional inquiry’s findings and evidence. Had it been up to the CIA, there would be no file boxes, he was certain.

Kris dragged all three to the floor and flipped the lids. Start from the beginning, the very beginning. He slid to his knees and pulled the first file—

David’s personnel folder fell open in his lap. His picture was stapled to the front corner, taken just before their deployment to Camp Carson. At the bottom of the photo, David’s left hand was just visible, a gold ring glittering on his finger.

He ripped the photo from the file. Crumpled it, gasping, bending over at the waist as he breathed in, the smells of Afghanistan flooding him from the files, the smells of death and waste. His eyes closed.

Why did you never reach out? Why did you stay dead? Why didn’t you doeverythingyou could to come back to me?

I thought you were dead,David had said. He’d repeated it, like a robot, like a ghost. But ghosts and robots didn’t feel warm, and they didn’t leach sorrow like it was the only thing inside of them. He could still see David’s gaze from across the bathroom. A thousand regrets wreathed in a bottomless, aching pain.

Slowly, Kris uncrumpled the photo and set it on the nearest shelf. Propped it against the files so David could watch over him. “I’ll figure it out,” Kris whispered. “You know I will.”

He turned back to the files. Somewhere, there was a truth, a real truth, and Kris was going to find it.

September 8

1430 hours

“Kris?”

He opened his eyes. Fuzzy shapes appeared before him. Shoes. He followed the shoes up, to ankles, pants, legs. He rolled over. A paper stuck to his cheek.

Damn it, he’d passed out sometime between reading the Congressional inquiry and cross-checking the team’s findings in the mosque with David’s autopsy. He lay on the floor of the archives, in between the stacks, in a pile of folders and scattered papers.

He was a fucking mess. His clothes were ruined. Rumpled, with coffee stains and ink all over them. He could smell himself, the stink of his adrenaline, his desperation. How many hours had it been since he’d been home?

“Kris?” Dan crouched in front of him. Beyond Dan, three techs from archives hovered at the end of the aisle, blatantly staring. “You didn’t come home.”

Fuck. He was supposed to go to Dan’s. They were supposed to—

Jesus fucking Christ, how could he start a relationship with Dan? When David was alive, was actually fucking alive, living and breathing and walking somewhere out there in DC? When Kris had felt him, felt his skin? Heard his voice.

If David was alive, wasn’t he still married?Couldhe be married to a legal ghost? David was dead, according to the law.

“Fuck, Dan,” Kris moaned. He pulled the paper from his cheek and sat up. Everything in him ached, his bones, his muscles. He fucked up his sparring partners every other week, spoiled for fights with Russian GRU agents in seedy bars, but this was too much. He was pushing on the door of forty. He wasn’t a young man anymore. “What time is it?”

“Fourteen-forty. September eighth.” Dan swallowed, and his gaze wandered over the files Kris had spread like toys on the floor. “What are you doing?”

Kris rubbed his hands over his face. How could he possibly explain this? Where did he even start? He couldn’t tell Dan about David, not yet. David was a ghost, still, for a reason. Kris had to know why.

But bringing Dan into his quest for the truth about David just stung in all the wrong ways. Kris had done many things he wasn’t proud of in his life. But he just couldn’t do that to Dan. Or to David.

“What if we missed something, Dan?” he whispered. “What if we missed something that day?”

“What do you mean?”

Kris swallowed. “What if David wasn’t killed? What if he survived?”

“Oh Kris…” It was Dan’s turn to cover his face. Kris watched his shoulders shudder, heard his deep breaths behind his hands. “Kris,don’t. Don’t do this to yourself.”

“I have to know. I didn’t— I’ve never looked at the files. I’ve never looked at what actually happened.”

“Kris…”