Divine Justice

Book 0: Camel Club Series

by David Baldacci

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Spy Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

Known by his alias, "Oliver Stone," John Carr is the most wanted man in America. With two pulls of the trigger, the men who destroyed Stone's life and kept him in the shadows were finally silenced.

But his freedom comes at a steep price: The assassinations he carried out prompt the highest levels of the U. S. government to unleash a massive manhunt. Yet behind the scenes, master spy Macklin Hayes is playing a very personal game of cat and mouse. He, more than anyone else, wants Stone dead.

With their friend and unofficial leader in hiding, the members of the Camel Club risk everything to save him. Now, as the hunters close in, Stone's flight from the demons of his past will take him from the power corridors of Washington, D.C., to the small, isolated coal-mining town of Divine, Virginia-and into a world every bit as bloody and lethal as the one he left behind.


From the Compact Disc edition.

Release date: October 17, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 560

Sample

CHAPTER 1

THE CHESAPEAKE BAY is America’s largest estuary. Nearly two hundred miles long, its watershed covers an area of sixty-five thousand utopian square miles with more than a hundred and fifty rivers and streams barreling into it. It’s also the home of myriad bird and aquatic life, and a haven for legions of recreational boaters. The bay is indeed a creation of remarkable beauty, except when you happen to be swimming in the middle of the damn thing during a thunderstorm in the veiled darkness of early morning.

Oliver Stone cracked the surface of the water and gulped in the thick salty air, a thirsty man in the center of a trillion-ton ocean. The long dive had caused him to go farther down than was particularly healthy. Yet when you throw yourself off a thirty-foot cliff into an angry ocean, you should be thankful just to have a heartbeat. As he treaded water he looked around to gauge his bearings. Nothing he saw was too appealing right now. With each streak of lightning sparking to earth, he eyed the three-story-high cliff he’d been standing on. He’d been in the bay less than a minute yet the chill was already drizzling into his bones despite the full-body wet suit he wore underneath his clothes. He stripped off his waterlogged pants, shirt and shoes and then kicked off swimming east. He didn’t have much time to get this done.

Twenty minutes later he cut toward shore, all four limbs cement. He used to be able to swim all day, but he wasn’t twenty anymore. Hell, he wasn’t even fifty anymore. Now he just wanted land; he was tired of impersonating a fish.

He pointed himself at a cleft in the rock and shot toward it. He slogged free of the breakers and jogged toward a large boulder where he snagged the cloth bag he’d previously hidden. Tugging off his wet suit, he toweled dry and changed into fresh clothes and a pair of tennis shoes. The sodden articles were pushed into the bag, tied to a rock and hurled into the storm-swept bay where they’d join his decades-old sniper rifle and long-range scope. He was officially retired from the killing profession. He hoped he would live to enjoy the experience. Right now it was barely even money on that score.

Stone carefully picked his way up the rocky path to a dirt trail. Ten minutes later he reached a fringe of woods where shallow-rooted pines leaned away from the punishing sea wind. A twenty-minute jog after that carried him to the batch of ramshackle buildings, most closer to falling down than not. The cloud-encrusted light was just beginning to topple the darkness as he slid through the window of the smallest hut. It was no more than a lean-to, really, though it did have such luxuries as a door and a floor. He checked his watch. He had ten minutes at most. Already dog-tired, he once more pulled off his clothes then slipped into the tiny shower with rusted piping that only delivered a thin stream of lukewarm water, like a fountain on its last dying spurt. Still, he scrubbed hard, wiping away the stink and briny clutch of the angry bay—wiping away evidence, actually. He was on auto now, his mind too numb to lead the way. That would change. The head games were about to start. He could already envision the boots coming for him.

Stone was listening for the knock on the door; it came as he was dressing.

“Hey man, you ready?” called the voice. It shot through the thin plywood door like a cat’s paw into a mouse hole.

In answer Stone smacked one hand hard against the ragged plank floor as he slipped on his shoes, shrugged into a frayed coat, tugged a John Deere cap low over his head and put on his thick glasses. He ran a hand over the bristly gray beard he’d grown over the past six months, then opened the door and nodded at the short, squat man facing him. The fellow had a beer keg frame and a lazy right eye along with teeth yellowed by too many Winstons and double-pop Maxwell House coffees. This was clearly not café latte land. The top of his head was covered by a Green Bay Packers knit cap. He wore faded farmer’s bibs, dirty work boots and a threadbare, grease-stained coat along with an easy smile.

“Cold one this morning,” the man said, rubbing his chunky nose and slipping a lit cigarette from between his lips.

Tell me about it, Stone thought.

“But it’s supposed to warm up.” He drank from an official NASCAR tankard of java, letting some dribble down his chin when he pulled it back.

Stone nodded as his bearded face drooped and his normally attentive eyes grew vacant behind the smudged lenses. As he walked behind the other man Stone’s left leg bent outward with a chicken-wing limp that stooped him into being several inches shorter.

They were loading an old banged-up, bald-tired Ford F-150 with firewood when the police car and black sedans slid into the driveway, propelling pebbly gravel in all directions like fired BBs. The trim, muscled men who climbed out of the rides wore blue slickers with “FBI” stenciled on the back in gold lettering and pistols with fourteen-round clips in their belt holsters. Three of them walked up to Stone and his buddy, while a chubby uniformed sheriff with polished black boots and a Stetson hustled to catch up.

“What’s the deal, Virgil?” Green Bay asked the uniform. “Some sonofabitch break outta prison again? I’m telling you, you boys oughta start shooting to kill again and screw the pissant liberals.”

Virgil shook his head, worry lines rising on his forehead. “No prison. Man’s dead, Leroy.”

“What man?”

One of the FBI slickers snapped, “Let me see some ID.”

Another said, “Where were you and your friend an hour ago?”

Leroy looked from one Fibbie to the next. Then he stared over at the uniform. “Virgil, what the hell’s going on?”

“Like I said, a man’s dead. Important man. His name’s—”

With a slash of his hand, a slicker cut him off. “ID. Now!”

Leroy quickly slid a thin wallet out of his bib’s pocket and handed over his license. While one of the agents punched the number into a handheld computer he’d slipped from his windbreaker, another agent held out his hand to Stone.

Stone didn’t move. He just stared back with a vacuous expression, his lips gumming and his bum leg doing an exaggerated deep knee bend. He looked confused, which was all part of the act.

“He ain’t got no license,” Leroy said. “He ain’t got nothing of nothing. Hell, can’t even talk, just grunts.”

The FBI agents closed around Stone. “He work for you?”

“Yessir. Four months now. Good worker, strong back. Don’t ask for much money—room and board is all, really. But he got a bad leg and not too much upstairs. He’s mostly what you call unemployable.”

The agents looked down at the protruding angle of Stone’s leg then back up at his bespectacled face and bushy beard.

One of them asked, “What’s your name?”

Stone grunted and made several jerky motions with his hand, like he was showing off a bastardized martial art for the federal men.

“Sign language, least I think it is, or some such,” Leroy volunteered wearily. “Don’t know sign language myself so’s I don’t know his real name. Just call him ‘Hey man.’ Then I show him what needs doing. That seems to work. It ain’t like we’re doing heart surgery up here, just throwing shit in a truck mostly.”

A slicker said, “Tell him to lift up his pants leg on his bum wheel.”

“What for?”

“Just tell him!”

Leroy motioned to Stone to do so by drawing up his own pants leg.

Stone bent down and, with improvised difficulty, mimicked Leroy’s action.

The men all stared down at the ugly scar marching across the kneecap.

“Damn!” said Leroy. “No wonder he can’t walk good.”

The same FBI slicker motioned with his hand for Stone to roll his pants leg back down. “Okay, fine.”

Stone never thought he’d be thankful for the old bayonet wound a North Vietnamese soldier had given him. It looked a lot worse than it actually was because the surgeon had had to fix Stone up on the floor of the jungle in the middle of an artillery barrage. Understandably the doctor’s hands had not been at their steadiest.

Sheriff Virgil said, “Leroy and me grew up here together. He was the center and I was the quarterback on the high school football team that won the county championship forty years ago. He’s not riding around killing anybody. And that feller there, easy to see he’s not the sharpshooting type.”

The FBI agent tossed back Leroy’s license and looked at his fellow feds. “Clean,” he muttered in a disappointed tone.

“Where you headed?” another slicker said as he glanced at the half-loaded truck.

“Same place I’m always headed this time of the morning this time of the year. We take us some wood down to folks who ain’t got time to chop their own, and sell it before the cold weather sets in. Then we get down to the marina and work on the boat. Maybe take it out if the seas clear up.”

“You got a boat?” one agent said sharply.

Leroy looked over at Virgil with a comical expression. “Yeah, got me a big-ass yacht.” He pointed behind him. “We like to take us a ride in that there Chesapeake Bay and maybe catch us a few crabs. I hear tell they like that shit round these parts.”

“Cut the crap, Leroy, before you get yourself in trouble,” Virgil said quickly. “This is serious.”

“I believe it is,” Leroy shot back. “But if a man’s dead, you best not waste any more time jawing with us. ’Cause we ain’t know nuthin’ ’bout nuthin’.”

“You see anybody pass this way this morning?”

“Not one car till you folks come tearing up. And we both been up before full light.”

Stone limped over to the truck and started throwing wood in the cargo bed.

The agents looked at each other. One of them mumbled, “Let’s roll.”

A few seconds later they were gone.

Leroy walked over to the truck and started tossing wood in. “Wonder what man be dead?” he said, really to himself. “Important man, they say. Lot of important men in this world. But they die just like the rest of us. God’s way of making life fair.”

Stone let out a long, loud grunt.

Leroy looked over at him and grinned. “Hey man, now that’s the smartest thing I heard all damn morning.”

When the day’s work was over, Stone pantomimed to Leroy that he was heading on. Leroy seemed to take it well. “Surprised you lasted long as you did. Good luck.” He peeled off a few faded twenties and handed them over. Stone took the money, patted the man’s back and limped off.

After packing his duffel, Stone set out on foot and hitchhiked to D.C. in the back of a truck, the driver unwilling to let the scruffy Stone ride with him in the warmth of the truck’s cab. Stone didn’t mind. It would give him time to think. And he had a lot to think about. He had just killed two of the most prominent men in the country on the same day, literally hours apart, using the rifle he’d earlier chucked into the ocean before taking the dive off the cliffs.

The truck dropped him off near the Foggy Bottom area of the capital and Stone set out for his old home at Mt. Zion Cemetery.

He had a letter to deliver.

And something to pick up.

And then it would be time to hit the road.

His alter ego John Carr was finally dead.

And the odds were awfully good that Oliver Stone might be right behind him.

CHAPTER 2

THE COTTAGE WAS DARK, the cemetery darker still. The only thing visible was the mist of Stone’s exhaled breath as it mingled with cool air. His gaze penetrated to every square inch of the cemetery because he could not afford any screwups now. It was stupid coming here, but loyalty was not a choice he felt, it was a duty. And it was who he was. At least they couldn’t take that away from him.

He’d waited nearby for about a half hour to see if anything looked strange. His place had been watched for a couple months after he’d abandoned it. He knew this because he’d been watching the watchers. However, after four months of him not being around, they’d given up their sentinel and moved on. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t come back. And after the events of this morning, they probably would. All cops would tell you that every violently ended life was worth the same level of investigation. Yet the reality was, the more important the victim the more diligent the hunt. And based on that maxim they would be bringing an army on this one.

Finally satisfied, he crawled underneath the fence at the back of the cemetery and crept to a large headstone. He yanked it over, revealing underneath the small compartment scooped out of the dirt. He took the box hidden there and put it in his duffel bag, then set the stone back in place. He patted the grave marker affectionately. The name of the deceased who lay here had long since been worn away by time. But Stone had researched the people who’d been buried at Mt. Zion and knew that this was the final resting place of one Samuel Washington, a freed slave who’d given his life to help others like him to freedom. He felt a certain kinship with the fellow because in a way Stone knew just what it was like to not be free.

He eyed the cottage in a dusk rushing headfirst to nightfall. He knew Annabelle Conroy had been staying there. Her rental was parked at the front gate. And he’d been inside the cottage when she’d been absent from it a couple months ago. The place looked far better than when he’d lived there. Yet he knew he could never reside at Mt. Zion again unless it was in a supine position approximately six feet underground. With the two early morning pulls of the trigger he’d become the most wanted man in America.

He wondered where she was tonight. Hopefully, out enjoying life, although since the news of the two murders was everywhere, he knew that his friends would easily deduce what had happened. He hoped they didn’t think less of him. That actually was the real reason he was here tonight.

He didn’t want to leave his friends hanging out there for him. The feds weren’t incompetent. They would be coming this way eventually. Stone wished with all his heart he could do more for the Camel Club, after all they had done for him. He had thought of simply turning himself in. But there was such a core of survivor mentality built into his psyche that his essentially walking to his own execution was not an option. He could not let them win that way. They would have to work a little harder.

The letter he held was carefully worded. It was not a confession because that would put his friends in an even greater dilemma. Granted, Stone was caught in a classic catch-22, but he owed them something. He should have known that with the life he’d led there was only one possible conclusion.

This.

He slipped the letter from his pocket and rolled it around the hilt of a knife he pulled from another pocket, securing it with string. He took aim from the darkness of the side yard and let fly. The knife stuck into the porch column.

“Good-bye.”

He had one more place to visit.

A few moments later he was crawling back under the fence. He walked to the Foggy Bottom Metro station and climbed on the train. Later, a thirty-minute walk brought him to yet another cemetery.

Why was it he was more comfortable with the dead than the living? The answer was relatively simple. The dead conveniently never asked questions.

Even in the darkness he quickly found the grave he was looking for. He knelt down, brushed some leaves away and gazed at the tombstone.

Here lay Milton Farb, the other member of the Camel Club, and the only deceased one. Yet even dead, Milton would forever be part of that informal band of conspiracy theorists who’d insisted on only one thing: the truth.

Too bad their leader hadn’t honored that principle.

The only reason his beloved friend was dead was because of Stone.

My fault.

Because of him, the brilliant if quirky Milton was resting here for all time now, a large-caliber round having ended his life underneath the United States Capitol. It nearly equaled the grief Stone felt for the death of his poor wife decades ago.

Stone’s eyes moistened as he remembered that final, awful night at the Capitol Visitor Center. How Milton had looked at him after the bullet struck; those wide, pleading, innocent eyes. The memory of his friend’s last seconds of life would remain with Stone until his dying day. And there had been nothing Stone could do, except avenge his friend. And he had. He’d killed many heavily armed, expertly trained men in close confines that night, and he hardly remembered doing any of it, so overshadowed was it all by that one stunningly improbable death. Yet it hadn’t come close to making up for the loss. That was what the killings this morning had been about, at least partly. And neither of them had made up for losing Milton either. Or his wife. Or his daughter.

He very carefully cut out a chunk of grass and dirt on top of his friend’s grave, laid the box in it, and put the grass back on top, pushing it down firmly with a shove from his foot. He removed all evidence that the ground had been disturbed and then stood very erect and saluted his dead friend.

A few moments later Stone slowly walked back to the Metro and rode it to Union Station, where he bought a train ticket south with most of his remaining cash. There were a few police and plainclothes officers around and Stone duly noted the location of each one. No doubt the heavy artillery was at the three local airports doing their best to nab the killer of a well-known U.S. senator and the nation’s intelligence chief. The lowly American train system obviously didn’t warrant such a level of scrutiny, as though assassins wouldn’t deign to ride the decrepit rails.

Thirty minutes later he climbed on the Amtrak Crescent, destination New Orleans; it was a spur-of-the-moment decision as he had looked up at the marquee. The train was a few hours late leaving, otherwise he would’ve not been able to take it. Not a naturally superstitious man, he had considered that an omen. He jammed himself into a small bathroom, trimmed off the beard and removed his glasses before going to his seat.

He’d heard construction jobs were still plentiful in New Orleans after Katrina. And people, desperate for workers, didn’t ask for tricky things like Social Security numbers and permanent addresses. At this point in his life Stone did not like questions or numbers that would lead anyone to know who he really was. His plan was to lose himself in a mass of humanity trying to rebuild from a nightmare not of its own making. He could relate to that very well, because he was basically trying to do the very same thing. Except for those two final shots. Those he’d intended with every pulsating nerve of anger and sense of justice denied he possessed.

As the train bumped along in the darkness Stone sat in his chair and stared out the window. In the reflection he studied the young woman who sat next to him holding a baby, her feet perched on a battered duffel bag and a pillowcase crammed with what looked to be bottles, diapers and changes of clothes for the infant. They were both asleep; the child’s chest nestled against its mother’s swollen bosom. Stone turned to look at the child with its triple chins and doughy fists. The baby suddenly opened its eyes and stared at him. Surprisingly it didn’t cry; it didn’t make one sound, in fact.

Across the aisle a rail-thin man was eating a cheeseburger he’d bought in the station, a bottle of Heineken cradled between bony knees covered by patched denim. Next to him was a young, tall, good-looking man with brown, tousled hair and a few days’ worth of stubble on his unmarked face. He had the lean, lanky build and confident moves of a former high school quarterback not yet run to fat. This was not exactly a guess on Stone’s part, because the kid was wearing his high school varsity jacket dripping with medals, letters and ribbons. The year stitched on the jacket told Stone that the kid had been out of high school for a few years. Long time to be holding on to the glory days, Stone thought, but maybe that was all the kid had.

To Stone’s eye the young man also had the look of someone who was certain that the world owed him everything and had never bothered paying its bill. As Stone watched, he rose, climbed over the cheeseburger man and headed to the rear of the car and through the door into the next train car.

Stone reached over and gently touched the baby’s fist, receiving a barely audible coo in return. While the infant’s life was all in front of him, Stone’s was drawing closer to the end.

Well, they would have to find him first. He owed that to an authority that was often callous to the people who served it with the greatest loyalty, with the most quietly suffered sacrifice.

He leaned back in his seat and watched Washington disappear as the train rattled on.

CHAPTER 3

JOE KNOX HAD BEEN READING in the small library of his town house in northern Virginia when the phone rang. The speaker was economical with his words and Knox, from long experience, did not interrupt. He hung up the phone, laid aside his novel, pulled on his raincoat and boots, grabbed the keys to his scuffed up ten-year-old Range Rover and headed out into the foul weather for an equally foul task.

An inch over six feet with the thick, muscular build of the undersized linebacker he had once been in college, Knox was in his fifties with thinning hair that he still had barber-shop cut and then slicked back. He also possessed a pair of pale green eyes that were the human equivalent of an MRI: they missed nothing. He gripped the wheel of the Rover with long fingers that had pulled just about every trigger there was while in service to his country. From his secluded, forested neighborhood he turned on to Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Virginia. The traffic would still be heavy on the Beltway this time of morning. Actually, there was really no longer a time when the asphalt noose around the capital city’s neck wasn’t strangled with cars. He pointed his SUV toward the District and backtracked his way to eastern Maryland from there. Eventually he smelled the sea, and with it he envisioned the murder scene. All in a day’s work.

Three hours later he was walking around the truck as fat raindrops pelted down. Carter Gray still sat in his seat-belt harness, his head destroyed and his life ended by what appeared to be a long-range rifle round, although the postmortem would confirm that. While police, FBI and forensic teams buzzed everywhere like bluebottle flies, looking for some place to land and do their business, Joe Knox squatted in front of the white grave marker and small American flag planted in front of it by the side of the road. It was on a curve. The motorcade would have slowed here. A curious Gray had obviously seen these two items and rolled down his window—a fatal mistake.

Grave marker and American flag. Just like at Arlington National. An interesting and perhaps telling choice.

The fact that the windows rolled down showed Knox that the vehicle wasn’t armored. Such vehicles’ windows were phone-book thick and did not move. Gray had made his second mistake there.

Should’ve asked for the armor, Carter. You were important enough.

This wasn’t baseball, Knox knew. In his business, it never took more than two strikes to finish you.

Knox looked off into the distance, tracing in his mind the trajectory of the lethal round. None of the protection detail had seen any sign of a shooter, so he had to cast the potential flight path out farther where the optic and muzzle signatures would be nearly invisible to the naked eye.

Thousand yards? Fifteen hundred? To a target inside a vehicle revealed only through a barely two-by-two-foot opening in the dark and drizzle. And planted the bullet right in the brain.

Remarkable shot any way you look at it. No luck there. A pro.

Revealing again.

He rose and nodded at one of the uniforms. Knox wore his ID badge on a lanyard around his neck. When everyone had seen what his official ties were they had been deferential and also given him a wide berth, like he had an incurable and contagious disease.

And maybe I do.

The cop opened the door of the Escalade and Knox peered inside. The shot had hit dead center of the right temple. There was no exit wound. The round was still in the brain. The postmortem would dig it out. Not that he needed the autopsy report to tell him what had killed the man. Blood and bits of flesh and skull had embedded in parts of the SUV’s interior. Knox doubted the government would be reusing this ride. It would probably go the way of JFK’s limo. It was bad luck, bad karma, call it what you would, but no other VIP would want to rest his butt in the dead man’s seat, sterilized or not.

Gray didn’t appear as though he were sleeping. He simply looked dead. No one had bothered to close the man’s eyes. His glasses had been blown off on impact from the kinetically energized round. The result had Gray perpetually staring at whoever looked back at him.

Knox lifted one of his gloved hands and shut the eyelids. It was out of respect. He’d known Gray well. He hadn’t always agreed with the man or his methods, but he’d respected him. If their positions were reversed, he hoped Gray would’ve done the same for him.

The briefing papers Gray had been reading had been collected already by the CIA. National security trumped even homicide. Knox highly doubted that whatever the CIA chief had been reading at the moment of his death would be connected to his murder, but one never knew.

Yet if they could have read the man’s mind in his last moments of life? When he stared out at that grave marker and that flag?

Knox’s gut was telling him that Gray knew exactly who had killed him. And maybe others at the Agency did too. If so, they were letting him go through the motions on his own. He wondered why for a second and then stopped. It was tricky business trying to figure out what the hell went on behind closed doors at Langley. The only thing you could count on as the real truth was as convoluted as anything you’d find in popular fiction.

He left the corpse and mentally processed the facts as he stared off toward the Atlantic.

Gray’s home had been blown up over six months ago, the man barely escaping with his life. Knox had been briefed via secure phone on the drive over. Any suspects involved in that matter were not to be considered to be involved in Gray’s murder, he’d been told. This directive had come from the highest levels and he had no choice but to defer to it. Yet, still, he filed that away in the back of his head. For him the truth should not come with qualifiers or conditions, if for no other reason than that he might need it as ammo to cover his own ass at some point.

He drove to Gray’s home, made a brief inspection of the interior, found nothing of interest there, and then walked toward the cliff at the rear of the property. He stared down at the thrashing water of the bay below before glancing out at the fully formed storm front that was not making the nearby murder investigation any easier. Knox eyed the fringe of woods that ran by the right side of the house. He walked through the trees and quickly calculated that a path through here would take one up to the gravel road that Gray’s motorcade had used.

He looked back at the cliffs.

And wondered if it was possible.

With the right man there was only one answer to that question.

Yes.

He climbed back in his Rover and headed to the second murder scene.

Roger Simpson.

The great state of Alabama was suddenly one senator short.

And without even seeing the circumstances of Simpson’s death, Knox instinctively knew he was looking for only one killer.

Just one.

CHAPTER 4

AS SOON AS ANNABELLE stepped on the front porch she saw it. Alex Ford did too. They’d just gotten back from dinner at Nathan’s in Georgetown. It had become a favorite haunt of theirs.

She pulled the knife free, unfolded the letter and then glanced around, as though she expected the person who’d delivered it to still be nearby.

She and Alex sat in front of the empty fireplace while she read it. She finished and passed it across to him, waiting in silence while he read it through.

“He says for you to pack up and move. That people would be coming to ask questions. You can stay at my place, if you want.”

“I guess we knew it was him, didn’t we?” she added.

Alex looked at the letter. “‘I’ve had many regrets in my life,’” he said, reading from it. “‘And I’ve lived with them all. But Milton’s death was my fault alone. I did what I had to do. To punish those who needed to be. But I will never be able to punish myself enough. At least John Carr is finally dead. And good riddance.’” He looked up. “Sounds like a man who did what he believed needed to be done.”

“He asked us to tell Reuben and Caleb.”

“I’ll do it.”

“They deserved it, you know. From all that Finn told us that happened that night.”

“Nothing gives someone the right to murder someone, Annabelle,” he said firmly. “That’s vigilantism. That’s wrong.”

“Under any circumstances?”

“One exception destroys that rule for good.”

“So you say.”

“Burn the letter, Annabelle,” Alex said suddenly.

“What?”

“Burn it now, before I change my mind.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a confession but it’s still evidence. And I can’t believe I’m saying this. Burn it. Now!”

She grabbed a match, lit the paper and tossed it into the fireplace. They watched