The Last Good Man

The Unofficial Story

Alex is already home when True arrives. The shotgun is out. “Just in case,” he says, but he doesn’t look worried. He pours her a glass of wine and they sit down to high-end Italian takeout that he picked up on the way home. For a few minutes life feels almost normal.

True is pouring more wine when the intrusion alarm goes off: a shiver-inducing bleat that emanates from Alex’s phone on the dining table and from her tablet, left on the kitchen counter.

She gets up, furious. “Get me a location on it,” she tells Alex as she scoops up the shotgun and heads for the mudroom.

“Hold on,” he says, phone in hand as he rises from his chair. “It’s not our robotic stalker. There’s a car at the gate.”

“A car?” she asks suspiciously, because no one ever stops by their house without calling first.

“Looks like Brooke Kanegawa.”

Courier mode: that’s what Brooke calls it. “When information is so sensitive it can’t be conveyed electronically for fear it will be intercepted.”

“So you came in person,” True says wonderingly. She’s also a little afraid.

“Let’s go downstairs,” Brooke says, “into the basement. Leave all your electronics here.”

Lights come on automatically when Alex opens the door. The three of them tramp down the hardwood stairs. The basement is finished but unfurnished. A few forgotten boxes are stacked in a corner. There’s not much else.

Brooke looks around. She’s still not satisfied, so she heads for the furnace room. “In here,” she says, opening the door. The furnace is running, providing white noise, though True doesn’t think that will defeat any truly sophisticated listening device.

They squeeze in. Alex closes the door behind them.

Brooke is a couple of years older than True—a compact woman, only five-foot-two—still attractive, with a soft, round figure, frosty blond hair, and blue-gray eyes that project a no-nonsense attitude. Those eyes are bright as she looks up at True and says, “I don’t have any proof of what I’m about to tell you, but it was told to me by someone I trust, someone in a position to know. And maybe it involves Diego. That’s the reason I came.”

True nods. Brooke knew Diego as a ten-year-old, that year in DC. “We understand,” she says, grateful for Alex’s presence beside her.

Brooke leans closer, eyeing both of them. “There’s a suspicion our Chinese allies knew our men had been taken to Nungsan—but they failed to share that intelligence.”

Below the surface, True feels the stir of an old, familiar panic, a metabolic rush, the demand that she do something. Stiff knuckles resist the tight squeeze of her fist.

Brooke continues, “Diego was held overnight before he was executed. There might have been time enough to go in after him, if we knew where he was. If the Chinese had shared that knowledge with us, but they did not. Worse, they diverted our forces away from Nungsan.”

“But why?” True interrupts in a plaintive tone. “Why would they do that? The hunt for Saomong was a cooperative action. We weren’t at odds. We were sharing intelligence. Both sides wanted them taken out.”

Brooke raises her hand, requesting patience. “You know the official story. The story that was worked out afterward. Right? That no one knew an American prisoner was being held at Nungsan. So when Chinese forces received intel that a Saomong warlord on their hit list was in the village—and that the civilians had fled—they took unilateral action and eliminated Nungsan with a missile strike. In their position we might have done the same.”

Alex says, “I thought this had to do with Diego. He was murdered days before that happened.”

“The unofficial story is different,” Brooke says. “It’s now believed that the warlord, if he existed at all, was an excuse, a cover story for the real goal. The Chinese wanted that village erased along with everyone in it—militants and prisoners.”

This is such a departure from True’s understanding of the Burma operation that she struggles to make sense of it. “You’re saying the Chinese wanted Shaw dead?”

“And Diego. And everyone else.”

“Why?”

“No one knows.”

Alex says, “Someone knows.”

True thinks about it. She has a feeling Jon Helm could tell them why.