Chapter 9 - Until Verified
The instruction was dated two days after Bell had submitted her report. Beneath it, in a different pen, someone had written Verified with convoy medic. There was no signature next to that sentence.
Harlan agreed to speak with Nair. His explanation was incomplete but not implausible: reports arrived during a chaotic investigation, the medic was unavailable, and he didn't want to assign a lifesaving act to the wrong person before verifying the account.
“Then why wasn't it verified?” Nair asked.
Harlan looked at the photocopied note. “I assumed my deputy followed through.”
“Who was your deputy?”
“Captain Douglas Laird.”
Nair stopped writing. Harlan's deputy back then had been Captain Douglas Laird, who later founded Sentinel Passage. Laird had handled casualty summaries and could have seen Bell's report. It justified questions, not yet accusations.
This did not prove he had altered it. It did change what needed examining.
Keene asked to meet Harlan, and the colonel agreed. Hannah drove her father to a quiet diner. She would later tell me that they spent the first ten minutes talking about the weather because neither man could bear to begin.
Finally Keene said, “Martin, you knew I couldn't have carried Evan from the east span. My shoulder was dislocated.”
“I knew you'd been injured.”
“You visited me in the hospital. You saw the brace.”
Harlan pushed his coffee away. “I read the citation after the approval process had moved. I should have questioned it.”
“Why didn't you?”
“Because we were burying one soldier, and the unit needed something that looked like meaning.”
Keene shook his head. “Meaning isn't yours to assign.”
For a moment the two men looked more like exhausted old friends than officers. Then Hannah spoke.
“You have both allowed Avery Bell to pay for your comfort. Are you prepared to tell her that without asking her to forgive you?”
Neither man answered right away.
May you like
Owen found Beth's old authorization permitting Sentinel Passage to share her information. A paragraph naming a marketing partner appeared only in the PDF sent after she paid.
Beth's signature was real. But the paragraph describing the scope of that consent had been added after she paid her deposit, on a new version of the form.
