Chapter 12: Day One

The study was the one room in his house I had never entered.

On my first night he had said, "Every door is open to you but that one."

I had said, "Fine," and meant it.

I stood in the hall in his shirt with a glass of water in my hand.

I told myself the aide had left the lamp on.

I told myself it was none of my business.

Then I pushed the door open with one finger.

The room was small and dark-paneled, with a desk and a green lamp and a wall of locked file cabinets.

Nobody was in it.

A gray folder lay open on the blotter with a pen across it.

Someone had been called away in the middle of a sentence.

I should have turned around.

I put the water down on the desk, and I looked.

The first page was a toxicology report from a military lab, dated eleven months ago.

It listed a compound in the general's blood that the lab could not name.

Beneath it someone had written, in a clear square hand, a later note.

The compound has been identified.

It is TX-9, a nerve agent developed in a private lab.

Source: Thornbury Defense Systems, Lab 4, Norfolk.

I read it three times.

TX-9.

I knew that name.

I had seen it on the cover of my mother's first notebook.

She had written it in her small upright hand and drawn a line under it twice.

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