58

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA

For Paige, there was nothing quite like running the Cape Henry Trail at First Landing State Park early in the morning. One of the perks of being self-employed was that she could come back to her apartment sweaty and take her time starting her work.

In many ways, her morning run was the most important part of her workday. It gave her a chance to think, the endorphins triggering an ability to focus and be creative in ways that she found impossible when sitting behind her desk.

Paige was running hard, lost in her thoughts, her playlist pushing her forward, when she noticed a man in her peripheral vision. He startled her. Instead of running by, he fell into stride.

“Good morning,” he said.

Paige left her earbuds in and nodded. She hadn’t seen another runner in several minutes, and she was alone in the middle of a large swampy park with a strange man whom she could clearly not outrun. Her heart started beating faster, and she picked up the pace.

“Mind if I run with you for a bit?”

She glanced over and immediately recognized him. Handsome face, short dark hair, a strong jawline, and dark-brown eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt that was too tight only around the arms, showing off biceps and a V-shaped torso.

Daniel Reese.

“This is a pretty mean pace,” he said. “About seven and a half?”

Paige took her earbuds out. What was he doing here?

“Something like that,” she said. “Why are you following me?”

“I thought this might be a good place to talk. Someplace where we wouldn’t be seen.”

“Seems like a phone could have done the trick,” Paige said. Her breath was coming in short, labored bursts.

“Can we walk awhile?” Reese asked. “I think if you let me explain, you’ll understand why I chose to do it this way.”

Paige shook her head and looked down at her watch as if she were gunning for a personal record. These military guys sure loved the cloak-and-dagger stuff. But she still didn’t know what to make of Reese. The sooner they got to the end of the trail, the better she would feel. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Reese. If it’s all the same to you, you can talk while we’re running.”

“Okay,” Reese said. “But please call me Daniel.”

Paige decided she would push the pace as much as she could and at least get Daniel breathing hard. If he wanted to talk, he would have to do it while running these 7:30 miles.

Over the next few minutes, she found that he was entirely up to the task. He stayed step for step with her for the next mile while telling her more about his lifelong dream of being a Navy SEAL and how he had served four tours in Iraq. Then he had met Admiral Towers and was assigned administrative responsibilities, eventually becoming chief of staff. He missed the combat missions but felt a real sense of purpose serving his country.

He admired Patrick Quillen and the other members of SEAL Team Six, an elite team that he had never qualified for himself. “Everybody loved and respected Q,” Reese said. “He was cut from a different cloth.”

By the time they reached the large pavilion at the end of the trail, Paige felt more comfortable with her new running partner. Nevertheless, as she turned to head back, running another three miles to her car, she decided to push the pace even more.

Reese kept up and continued to talk. He told Paige that at first her lawsuit had made him angry. He thought it was a publicity stunt and a money grab by Wyatt Jackson. But the more he watched Paige and Wyatt, the more he became convinced that they might actually have a chance. At the very least, he knew they weren’t going down without a fight, and he wanted to help.

Paige immediately thought about the Patriot and wondered if she was perhaps running next to him at that very moment. The Patriot had expressed the same kind of thoughts. But Reese had turned against them with his affidavit. “You’ve got a strange way of helping,” she said.

“I know. But everything I said in that affidavit is true, and they could have proven it a thousand other ways. I had to earn their trust.”

Paige didn’t know if she believed him. Maybe he had been sent by the CIA to gain inside information about her case. There was so much misdirection going on. She decided she wouldn’t give anything away. Besides, she didn’t have the breath to talk much right now.

“I’m about to tell you some things that could get me in a lot of trouble,” Reese said. “I’m doing this for Q and the rest of his team. But I need you to understand that we never had this conversation unless the case goes to trial. If you get that far, I’ll come in and testify to everything I’m about to tell you even though it will put my career at risk.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in and to catch his breath. “I won’t share classified information, but I can point you in the right direction to get everything you need.”

Paige took off her sunglasses, wiped the sweat from her eyes with her shirt, and kept running. She put her shades back on. “I can keep a secret. And I could really use the help.”

Reese began by confirming the news accounts about the night of the raid. He had been on video conference with the Situation Room. Towers and President Hamilton had always had a rocky relationship, but that night it exploded.

“I’m not telling you anything that hasn’t already been reported,” Reese emphasized. “Towers wanted to send in the Quick Response Force to extract the bodies of the SEALs after the mission went south, but the president wouldn’t let him. There was a tense standoff, and she removed him from command the next day. Now he’s in an administrative position at the Pentagon.”

Paige could hear the frustration in Reese’s voice. Every SEAL and former SEAL knew the mantra: Nobody left behind.

“Admiral Towers is a good man, one of the most honorable people I’ve ever known. He deserves better,” Reese said.

They passed a runner coming from the opposite direction, and they both ran in silence for a few minutes. The only sounds were their running shoes hitting hard-packed dirt and their heavy breathing. To her satisfaction, Paige noticed that Reese was starting to have a harder time catching his breath as he talked.

“Is there any chance you could slow this down to a mere sprint?” he asked.

Paige suppressed a smile and backed off just a tad. “Thought you were a SEAL,” she said.

“A SEAL. Not a track star.”

They talked for nearly sixty minutes—thirty while running, five while gasping for breath afterward, and another twenty-five on a long walk. Reese had a disarming manner that relaxed Paige, and she found herself letting down her guard.

“You’re lucky I didn’t have a can of pepper spray,” she said after he apologized again for running up beside her earlier that morning.

“You didn’t seem like a pepper-spray kind of girl,” he said.

He helped Paige understand the relationship between the military and the CIA and how things generally worked on a mission like Operation Exodus. He reiterated that he would be willing to testify for Paige at trial “within lawful parameters.” Primarily, he said, he wanted to meet with Paige and see if there was anything informal he could do to help—any questions he might be able to answer.

Paige asked a bunch of questions, but the main one she had—about the president’s and Director Marcano’s knowledge of whether the operation had been compromised—he couldn’t help her on. Still, she was starting to trust this guy. He was giving her too much information for it to be a setup.

“I’ve received a couple of phone calls from a drone pilot,” Paige told him just before they parted ways. “Claimed the CIA asked him to lie about how long they had conducted drone surveillance before a certain drone strike.”

This definitely piqued Reese’s interest. “Lie to whom?”

“Anybody who asked about it,” Paige said. She gave Reese the details of the phone calls. “If I gave you copies of the recorded calls, could you find out who it is?”

Reese said that he would try. They arranged a place where Paige would drop off a thumb drive later that morning.

She thanked him and they shook hands.

That’s when she asked him, watching carefully for the slightest flicker of recognition.

“Have you ever heard of a person nicknamed the Patriot?”

Reese didn’t blink, though he took a second to respond. “No. Who is that?”

“Good question,” Paige said. She turned and headed for her car. “See you in a couple of hours.”

Paige gave Reese the thumb drive later that morning and only then called Wellington to let him know what she had done. She knew Wellington would report to Wyatt, and she didn’t want the two men trying to talk her out of it.

The gamble paid off two days later when Paige received a call at nine o’clock at night.

“My name is Brandon Lawrence,” the man said. “I’m a drone pilot in the U.S. Air Force.” He hesitated and took a deep breath. “I’m the one who’s been calling you.”