Peyton had a terrified look on her face as she processed the information.
“So where is this bag?” she asked.
“The Army packed all of Zachary’s household goods and shipped them back from Hawaii when he was killed… when they thought he was killed. We put it all in the barn.”
They looked at the barn and began moving quickly in that direction.
Inside the barn, Matt climbed a wooden ladder. He remembered watching Karen and Blake stack all of Zachary’s personal effects in the loft.
Peyton was directly behind him as he started sifting through the boxes.
“Start over there. Look through that stack,” he said, directing her to the back corner.
After fifteen minutes of ripping open boxes, he found a dusty old green backpack in the bottom of a box containing other military equipment.
“Got it!” he said.
Peyton moved toward Matt where he was holding up a grimy, oil-stained backpack with barely noticeable Arabic writing on the side.
“Well, open it,” she said impatiently.
Matt slowly unzipped the bag, opening the mouth of the zipper, and whiffed the musty aroma of old, unkempt things. He pawed lightly through its contents, extracting a small copy of the Koran and held it up to the light.
“This is a Koran. It has got to be Ballantine’s backpack.”
He continued to dig and found a small, single-bladed knife in a leather sheath. It had an Arabic inscription on the blade. Further on, he found a pair of socks and a brown undershirt.
“Do you find anything scary about going through Ballantine’s bags, like he might actually be looking for this thing and be pissed knowing that we’re going through his stuff?” Peyton asked.
“I think that’s a possibility… that he might be pissed and that he might be looking for this, if indeed it does hold something relevant.”
“Why would he take something so important into battle?” she wondered aloud. The warming spring sun caused some expansion in the wooden slats of the barn’s roof, which emitted an audible squeak. Matt looked up, remembering the incident in Sheldon Springs and then returned to the grimy backpack.
“Maybe he thought there was no one else he could trust to watch it.”
“Or maybe it had value, like currency, and he thought it could help him after the war,” she said.
Matt looked at her. “If he was captured.”
“It’s a possibility.”
His hand found a small, tin lock box secured by a tiny padlock.
“Okay, this has got to be it.” Matt held the lock box up to her.
“Be careful,” she said, taking a step back.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen this kind of thing before with the IRA. It could be booby-trapped.”
He held the small box in both hands, studying the padlock.
“Hand me that hammer,” he said, pointing across the loft at a sawhorse where they had been doing some minor repairs.
“No, don’t do it. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced we should turn this over to docex,” she protested. Docex was the acronym for the document and media exploitation teams that interpreted capture tomes, most meaningless, and computers, which held infinitely more value.
This was a small tape that could point to a conspiracy 12 years ago and possibly to one today. Further, Matt thought, he did not know who he could trust, including the alluring woman standing directly before him in her form-fitting sweater, flattering jeans, and wafting Givenchy. Just like Meredith, he thought.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Matt argued, as he moved toward the sawhorse. He laid the box down and, grabbing the hammer, lifted it high above his head. Then he brought it down hard on the lock, sending it spinning across the floor next to Peyton’s feet.
“If this blows up, I’ll kill you,” she said.
“Now there’s a point worth debating.” He gave her a thin smile and flipped the lid off the lock box. Matt stared inside the container, getting a view not only of its contents, but of the world of Jacques Ballantine.
There was a small framed picture of a man and woman — Ballantine’s parents, Matt guessed — and two boys standing near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They were all smiles and, Matt thought, very atypical of the average American’s perception of a Muslim family. The gold frame was tarnished and spotted, the glass cover cracked. Beneath the picture were a few pages torn from a book, most likely the small Koran he had just tossed to Peyton. Some coins littered the bottom of the box, surrounding a small cassette tape, the type found in an answering machine or handheld recorder.
“Bingo,” he said.
“You got it? You found the tape?” Peyton asked.
“Yes, the tape. Let’s go listen to it.”
They stuffed everything into the backpack, and Matt jammed the tape into his pants pocket. Once back at the house, he found an old tape player he had once used to record lectures in college. Sitting at the kitchen table, he popped the tape into the small, battery-powered machine and pressed play.
The voices sounded like geese squawking but were understandable.
Male voice: Hello, May. How are you?
Female voice: Fine, fine. Things are heating up here a bit, though. Do we have any guidance?
Male voice: Just got done talking to the secretary.
Female voice: Really? This is good. Finally getting some guidance on the build up of Iraqi forces on the Kuwaiti border?
Male voice: He wanted me to relay to you that we are staying out of this.
Female voice: You mean, staying out, like it’s okay if they attack Kuwait? You know that’s what he’s talking about doing — taking the Rumallah oil fields and maybe even the entire country?
Male voice: Yeah, we know. If you look back at history, those oil fields all the way down into Saudi Arabia really belong to Iraq.
Female voice: What about the cost of oil and gas. Won’t it skyrocket if Iraq takes these fields? Aren’t we concerned about the economy?
Male voice: Yeah, yeah, we are. We don’t think he’s going past Rumallah, so it doesn’t matter. Keeping Hussein on our team against Iran is more important than protecting some minor kingdom.
Female voice: Do you need me to talk to the secretary about this?
Male voice: No. He specifically asked me to relay this to you.
Female voice: Did the president clear this? Does he know?
Male voice: Indirectly.
Female voice: Indirectly? What the hell does that mean?
Male voice: You know exactly what it means.
Female voice: Sounds like I might be left holding this bag…
The sound became a static buzz, then resumed.
Matt looked at Peyton, whose eyes were the size of saucers and the color of the Caribbean Sea.
Male voice: Just make sure you communicate as clearly as possible to Hussein that we will not oppose him or take issue with any action he takes in the region.
Female voice: Okay, I understand.
The tape went blank, and Matt hit the stop button.
He stared at Peyton for a long time before either of them said anything.
“So, who are they?” he asked.