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Emily Parker.
    Parker and I had been on several high-profile cases together, including a series of kidnappings of rich kids up in New York. We’d come close a few times to romantic involvement. It never worked out, yet amazingly, we still liked and talked to each other.
    “No bag, I see. Just a briefcase. You pack light,” Emily said, after she gave me a hug of greeting.
    “Yeah, well, with all the warnings about the stonewalling I’m about to receive from Washington officials, I figured this might be a brief trip.”
    “Well, we’ll see about that, Mike. I’ve been asking around all morning. I actually have a few leads we can try.”
    “Has there ever been something like this before, to your knowledge?” I asked as Parker pulled out and cruised us down a busy avenue past the nearby Capitol.
    “Something like what?”
    “Somebody faking being killed in action, ending up actually alive?”
    “Not that I’ve ever heard of,” Emily said. “Desertions, sure, but walking away from a maybe deliberately downed fifty-million-dollar military aircraft? That’s a whole different ball of wax.”

Chapter 13
    I thought we were going to the Pentagon, across the Potomac, but instead we crossed east over the Anacostia River and headed toward Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
    Emily explained that our first visit would be with a senior officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Chris Milne, a former Marine. The DIA is the military’s version of the CIA. If anyone could help us figure out what the hell had happened on a classified Air Force mission, Emily said that Milne, who had done several tours in Iraq with Special Forces, was a pretty good place to start.
    Off the highway, we drove along a street lined with beautiful red brick colonial buildings to the checkpoint at the Air Force base visitor’s gate.
    “NYPD?” a young redheaded Air Force MP said when I flashed my shield. He was carrying an M4. “Let me guess. One of the generals racked himself up a whole lot of parking tickets again?”
    “Sorry, soldier. That’s classified,” I said, cracking a smile.
    “I’ll bet,” he said, letting us through.
    We navigated the base’s huge campus to reach a low glass corporate-looking building, off by itself near the water.
    After another, even more heavy-duty security checkpoint in its lobby, we found ourselves on the fourth floor, sitting in an austere, featureless office with a view. If you craned your neck to the right, you could just see the side of the Washington Monument’s towering obelisk across the river.
    I was doing just that when Milne walked in, carrying a big white coffee mug with a trailing tea bag tag.
    “Emily! Long time, no see,” said the tall, balding, Nordic-looking Milne. “How’s your daughter? Olivia, right?”
    “Olivia, yes. You remembered,” Emily said, smiling. “She’s fine. Eleven going on twenty. You know the drill. You have four girls, right?”
    “Actually, five now.”
    “Congratulations, Chris. That’s awesome. I’d like you to meet Mike Bennett, the detective I was telling you about.”
    “I have six girls,” I said, as we shook hands.
    Milne raised an eyebrow.
    “And four boys, too,” Emily said.
    “My goodness. Ten? Busy man. You win, Detective,” he said, smiling, as he finally put down his tea and sat. “So what can I do for you folks today?”
    It took me a few minutes to explain my crazy case to him. After I was done, he looked at me and then at Emily, and took a long, deliberate sip of his tea.
    “So there’s no way these prints are somebody else’s? No possible way?” he said after a beat.
    I shook my head.
    “We had three people look at them, including the FBI. It’s Eardley.”
    “Or his clone,” Emily said.
    “That’s simply incredible,” Milne said. “He dumps the plane on purpose and then just walks out of Iraq? Why? And nobody picks up on this? What the hell went wrong?”
    “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Chris,” Emily said.