It just wasn't all of it.
* * *
He was supposed to go to Arizona. That was the plan Briggs's people had built for him, a small house in a small town an hour from his mother, a job at a marina on a reservoir, a life so quiet and so far from the sea that nobody would ever think to look for him there.
He went to Virginia Beach instead.
It was March 2008, a year almost to the day. He drove there from the airport in Norfolk in a rented Ford with his new license in his pocket and a beard he'd grown to hide behind, and he parked across the street from a small brick house in a neighborhood of small brick houses near Oceana and sat in the car for three hours, watching the front door.
A woman came out at a little after four, pushing a stroller. She was small and dark-haired and walked fast, as if she were late for something, though there was nowhere in that neighborhood to be late for. She went to the end of the block and back, twice, and the second time, as she came up the walk, she stopped and looked straight across the street at the rented Ford and the bearded man sitting in it, and Carter understood that she had been watching him for at least as long as he had been watching her.
She left the stroller on the porch. She came down the walk and across the street and knocked on the passenger window with one knuckle, and he rolled it down.
"I've got a phone in my pocket," Elena Chardi said, "and I've already dialed nine and one. Who are you?"
He had planned what he would say for months. He didn't say any of it.
"I was with Mike," he said. "At the end. I was with him."
She looked at him for a long moment. Something moved behind her face, and then went still.
"There was nobody with Mike at the end," she said. "There were four men lost in that hold. All four of them. They told me. The Navy sat in my living room and told me."