Chapter 3 #2
“Wait.” She pulled her CIA laptop from her document bag and went through the Agency’s authentication.
The session window blinked into existence with the familiar header.
Caldwell’s name was in Vance’s papers, which meant her job authorized her to confirm whether the name was cleared for inclusion in the public archive or whether it required redaction.
The search was procedural. It wouldn’t raise a flag.
She typed in the name. The Agency’s record loaded.
“Okay,” she said. “Official record matches your public one. Caldwell, Matthew Andrew. State transfer in ’93, left government in ’96, no additional postings.”
“Then he’s not the angle.”
“Before we move on.” She picked Vance’s memo back up and read aloud the second paragraph.
“Caldwell to handle the follow-up traffic on the November debrief, including the secondary asset interview at the safe location in September. He performs well under that kind of duress and the asset trusts him from the prior engagement.”
Jasper went still.
“Date of the memo,” she continued, “is September eighteenth, 1995. Vance is assigning Caldwell to a follow-up in November, with a backward reference to a prior engagement.”
Jasper’s thumb tapped against the edge of his laptop as he referenced everything they’d found so far about the man. “That’s eighteen months after Caldwell supposedly transferred to State and a year after the Agency’s record shows him out of any operational role.”
Katherine’s pulse quickened. “The official record says he was a State officer doing State things in September ’95. Vance, in private correspondence at the time, describes him running an asset interview for the Agency.”
“A definite timeline discrepancy.”
“The official record could be wrong, or it’s been edited. Or the State transfer in ’93 was a cover that the official file later forgot to revise. Whichever it is, this letter knows something the database doesn’t.”
Jasper eyed the letter, then his laptop, then her. “Huh.”
“Huh?” She grinned. “That’s all you’ve got to say about a printed document versus a digital trail?”
His barely-there smile was lazy. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Ms. Archivist?”
“I am, Mr. Computer Expert. Quietly, though. I’m a professional, you know.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled, making him more devastating than he had a right to be.
“This,” she said, tapping the letter through her glove, “is why print isn’t dead. Why archives still matter.”
“I’ve never argued with that.”
“Technology people usually do.”
“I’m a technology person who learned to read in a small public library in Bremerton, Washington.
My mother ran the reference desk there for twenty-six years.
She raised me on the conviction that information lived in books and reference material before it lived anywhere else.
That the people taking care of those materials were taking care of memory itself. ”
“Your mother was a librarian?”
“Yeah.”
“I love that.” She cleared her throat and tried to stuff the unprofessional outburst back where it belonged. “I owe a lot to librarians.”
He tilted his head. “How so?”
She set down the letter and pulled the cotton gloves a little higher on her wrists, her fingers trembling under his scrutiny.
“I was an Army brat. We moved every two or three years. By the time I was eleven, I had stopped trying to make friends. The cost of leaving them was higher than the cost of not having them.”
She hadn’t planned to say that. She hadn’t admitted it to anyone besides Emma. “So I read,” she went on. “Every base, every new town, the library was the first place I found, and the books grounded me, became my friends.”
Jasper was quiet for a moment. “That’s a lot of moves for a kid.”
Most of them had blurred together. “My mother made it bearable. She read to my sister, Emma, and me every night, no matter where we were. The three of us shared everything, including books. She passed down the conviction like an heirloom that the written word was the one thing that didn’t move when everything else did. ”
“She sounds like a good mom. Do you see her often?”
The old grief made her chest ache. “She passed a few years ago. What about you? Does your mother live around here?”
His gaze dropped to the table. His voice came out raw, as if he, too, were still choking on grief. “She had a stroke last year.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Like your mom, she read to me all the time, until I got to be six. Then I started reading to her.”
His smile was sad. Katherine wanted to reach over and squeeze his hand.
She didn’t. “I bet she loved that. And your father? Is he still around?”
He drew in a breath, still didn’t look at her. “He was a Navy man, killed in action when I was only two. I never knew him.”
Now she did reach for him, laying her hand over his. “Oh, Jasper. I’m so sorry. Your mother didn’t remarry?”
He tensed slightly at her touch, and she quickly drew it back. “No,” he said, staring at his hand where she’d rested hers. He cleared his throat and sat forward. “We should get back to work.”
Katherine silently cursed herself for being so bold, even though the heat of his skin seemed to linger on her palm, even through the glove. “Yes, of course,” she said, focusing on another letter.
They worked through the afternoon. Barely anyone came in, or maybe Katherine just didn’t notice them.
The Caldwell thread became a list of follow-ups Jasper could chase on the digital side.
She moved to the next box, which contained Vance’s late nineties material, and pulled out a folder of handwritten notes that turned out to be the man’s travel itineraries, cross-referenced against an internal calendar of Agency briefings he had attended.
Three of the trips had no apparent purpose. Vance had flown to Frankfurt in March of ’98, to Istanbul in July of ’99, to Buenos Aires in February of 2000. There were no briefing references, no corresponding mission codes. Just dates and destinations, written in his own hand.
She read them out. Jasper ran them. Forty minutes later, he sat back and told her none of the three trips were attached to any public Agency event, any embassy function, any flagged operation in the open-source databases he could reach. The trips had happened, but there was no record of why.
Katherine set her pen down on the burgundy notebook and let her shoulders drop. “More absence as data.”
His voice took on that teasing tone again. “Your favorite.”
“It’s not my favorite.”
“It’s practically your love language at this point.
” He said it without looking up from the screen.
“A woman walks into a room, asks me to spend the day finding her empty information boxes, and falls in love with each new empty box. I’m beginning to think the boxes are the point and you’re using me to enable a dependency. ”
She laughed—a short, surprised, fully bodied laugh that startled her so much she pressed her fingers to her mouth as if she could put it back. It had been months since she’d laughed like this. Possibly a full year.
What crossed Jasper’s face was a slow, real smile. It changed his face, and she saw the surprise behind his eyes.
“Sorry,” she said. “You’re a funny man.”
“I try not to be.” But he was still smiling, and didn’t that make certain parts of her anatomy sit up and pay attention.
“It’s not appropriate to a working relationship,” she said, trying and failing for all due seriousness.
“Correct.”
“We should resume.”
“We should.”
Neither of them moved for a beat. Then she opened the next folder, and he tabbed back to his screen, and they resumed, both of them still smiling.
It was just past five when Jasper closed the laptop. The library had gone fully dark outside the windows of the meeting room.
“I have enough to work with overnight,” he said. “I’ll have results in the morning, including on Caldwell.”
“That would be great.”
He slid the laptop into the bag, then slung the bag over his shoulder. “Do you want to grab dinner?”
Startled, she looked up from the burgundy notebook.
She felt heat climb up her throat and tried to suppress it before it reached her face.
“Oh.” Her voice came out crisper than normal.
“I shouldn’t. I have the rest of this folder to finish, and I want to write up my notes before I forget the cross-references. Thank you, though.”
“Okay.”
“Another time, perhaps?”
He nodded once, neutral, no read on what he thought of the refusal. “Goodnight, Katherine.”
“Goodnight, Jasper.”
He left. She stayed unmoving until she heard the side door click shut, then released a long, slow breath.