Divine Justice by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online

some embarrassing revelations. Officially, Knox had followed the company line and been upset that the press had ferreted out some of this skullduggery. Personally, he’d never had much use for that side of the Agency. While it was true that the United States was better off with certain people dead, Knox had felt the CIA’s best use of resources was in intelligence gathering, not authorized murder or stringing people up by their toes or making them believe they were drowning to induce them to talk. His experience had been that tortured people would tell you anything to make the pain stop. There were far more effective ways to get to the truth.
    Gray had apparently concluded that several retired Triple Six assassins had been murdered. Whether these deaths were tied to the unauthorized mission in the former Soviet Union he had no way of knowing. According to one of Gray’s bodyguards, the former intelligence head had met with a man at Gray’s home on the very night it had been blown up. That man worked in a cemetery in Washington, D.C., and had been questioned by the FBI in connection with Gray’s believed murder. And it was this man—the one Macklin Hayes had alluded to—who had suggested the bomber of Gray’s home might’ve jumped off the cliff into the Chesapeake Bay.
    Knox smiled grimly as he thought of the name the man had given the FBI agents.
    Oliver Stone.
    Was he a lunatic or something else? Since Carter Gray was not known to summon mentally unstable people to his home, Knox opted for the latter. Oliver Stone had been accompanied by a Secret Service agent when he’d visited Gray’s demolished house. That too was interesting. He would have to get acquainted with Agent Alex Ford.
    The last bit of interesting information had to do with a recent disinterment at Arlington National Cemetery. The grave of a man named John Carr had been dug up on orders from Gray. The coffin had been taken to CIA headquarters. Knox did not know the results of that action or actually who had ended up being in the coffin. He had seen some of Carr’s confidential military record, and it was an exemplary one. Yet then the man had simply disappeared.
    Knox’s instincts told him that a man like Carr, with proven killing skills, would’ve made a productive member of Triple Six. Many of their members had come from the military. And right around the time Carr had vanished from public record was when Triple Six had been at the height of its activity. That had raised more questions than answers.
    He reached his house and pulled into the garage. A moment later his daughter, Melanie, opened the door to the kitchen. She’d earlier phoned him to say she was coming over to take him to dinner. After he’d gotten the summons from Macklin Hayes he’d called her back saying he couldn’t make it, so he was surprised to see her.
    The aroma of a cooked meal reached him from the kitchen. She gave him a hug and ushered him in, taking off his coat and hanging it up.
    He said, “I didn’t think busy lawyers in private practice had time to cook for themselves, much less anybody else.”
    “Reserve your judgment until after you’ve eaten it. I don’t watch the Food Network and I don’t hold myself out as any sort of cook. But the intent was honorable.”
    Melanie had taken more after Knox’s deceased wife, Patty, than she had her father. She was tall and lithe with reddish hair that she usually wore pulled back. She was a graduate of UVA Law School and a rapidly rising young star at a D.C. powerhouse legal firm. The older of his two children—his son, Kenny, was currently in Iraq with his fellow Marines—Melanie had taken it on herself to make sure her father did not starve or wallow in pity over the recent death of her mother and his wife of thirty years.
    The meal was eaten in the sunroom where they shared a bottle of Amarone and Melanie filled him in on the latest case she was handling. Over the years his children had quickly learned that their