After taking her home, putting her to bed, and making sure the nice old woman who rented her the attic space would look in on her, Jack went back to the boat and began editing the footage they’d shot over the last several days, retooling it to focus on Drabinsky himself. Nothing she had shot at the blast site had survived, but in the end it wasn’t needed. The money shot was not the explosion, it was the proud, smiling face of the fallen warrior.

It took Jack most of the day to assemble it, and when he was done he realized he had something special. He also knew he could make anywhere from fifty to a hundred grand with the package, but decided to offer it to the networks free of charge. His entire reason for becoming a journalist was not to sleep on silk but to sleep well, knowing he had done the right thing.

This was the right thing.

Jack had known Tony Antiniori for a little over a year, but the moment he’d met the guy they’d felt an immediate kinship. And that was the kind of compliment he didn’t hand out often.

A former Green Beret paratrooper, Tony had done three tours in Vietnam, had cross-trained as both a medic and a rifleman, and was still active in the National Guard, teaching combat medicine to young recruits headed to Afghanistan.

He was sixty-nine and still teaching field medicine to the young recruits. Maybe that was part of what kept him young, having to shame the know-it-all out of kids less than half his age. The other part was staying in shape. He was solidly built, more muscle than fat, but at first glance you’d never know that he was career military. He looked like a fugitive from a Fellini movie, his thick head of shoe-polish-black movie-star hair framing a tanned, creased, bearded face and wise but playful eyes. He kept his lanky, six-foot-four-inch frame in shape with a brisk morning flurry of push-ups, jumping jacks, and crunches every other day. Nothing high impact; just enough to get his heart rate up and help keep his cholesterol down. He dressed younger, too-casual, mostly turtlenecks and corduroys. And he dyed his white hair black, his one concession to vanity. If he squinted, he could still find and sometimes talk to the twenty-year-old who always wanted to be where he ended up.