The heavy, rhythmic drumming of the rain against the window of the Joint Task Force Hotel seemed to emphasize the melancholy of the documents spread across Ambrose Ward’s desk. In the flickering light of the storm, the black-and-white photograph of a young Gerald Gaines felt like a ghost from a different world. It was a portrait of a hero—eyes bright with an unshakeable institutional loyalty, shoulders squared against the weight of a world he was determined to protect.
But as Ambrose looked at the file, he felt a bitter, cold weight in his chest. That hero was dead. He hadn't died on the operating table twenty years ago; he had died slowly, cell by cell, in the decades that followed. The blood-stained jacket of a savior had been replaced by the tailored white shirt of a two-faced conspira
