Hard Rain

Twenty-seven

There was a stillness in the office like it was holding its breath. ‘You want to fill me in?’ I said, finally, if only to get the room’s diaphragm working again. At least the reason for Masters’ sullen demeanour was now out in the open. A knock on the doorframe distracted me.

‘Ah, the sleuths are in…’ It was Ambassador Burnbaum, back from Ankara. He was beaming, dressed in an immaculate tailored Italian suit, white cotton shirt, red silk tie, a Stars and Stripes pin in one lapel.

An entourage of male aftershave and body scents rushed forward from him, hooked their fingers into my nose and clamped onto my epiglottis. The guy had gone for a swim in Calvin Klein. I figured he was on his way out to some function, ambassadors being, generally speaking, happy to roll up to the opening of a clamshell.

‘The New York City Ballet Company is in town. I’m off to the preview,’ he announced. ‘Just let me know if you want tickets, okay?’

‘Thank you, Mr Ambassador. I might take you up on that,’ I said, though I doubted it — men in tights only doing it for me when one of them is Mel Brooks. ‘In the meantime, do you have a moment, sir? We’d like to bring you up to speed on the investigation, and maybe ask you a few more questions.’

Burnbaum checked his Breitling for permission. ‘Well, yes, I suppose, as long as you keep it brief.’

‘Do our best, sir,’ I said as he took a seat on the couch and crossed his legs.

Masters got up, walked to my desk and leaned against it.

‘To start with, Mr Ambassador,’ I began, ‘we don’t think Colonel Portman was the victim of a serial killer. We believe he was assassinated by a hit squad, possibly one with military or special forces training.’

Burnbaum’s mouth dropped open. He eventually got control of it. ‘But what about the other killings…?’

‘We believe they were a false trail, designed to lead us away from the real reason that Colonel Portman was murdered.’

‘Do you have any evidence to support this theory?’ Burnbaum asked, his face a conglomerate of disbelief, tragedy and concern.

‘No, nothing hard,’ I said, but maybe that would change tomorrow at Ephesus. I took the crinkled email from ‘B’ off my desk and passed it to him.

‘What’s this?’

‘We believe Colonel Portman was involved in some way in an infrastructure project at a place called Kumayt, down in southern Iraq. Would you know anything about that?’

Burnbaum shook his head slowly, frowning, thinking hard on the question. ‘No, no. I don’t… Where did you say? Iraq’s not exactly my turf.’

‘You don’t know who this B could be, sir?’

‘Well, it’s certainly not from me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Frankly, I have no idea. Where did you get it?’ He handed back the ragged sheet of paper.

I filled him in on its discovery.

‘That was a stroke of luck,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Ambassador, I’ve spent a fair bit of time going through Portman’s correspondence and I can’t find the rest of it. Or, in fact, any email that refers to events or projects he might have been involved in.’

‘So what are you suggesting, Special Agent? That Portman’s email folders have been tampered with?’

‘Is that possible?’ I asked, putting it back on him.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’ The Ambassador stood. ‘I don’t have to tell you both that your allegations are grave.’

He was right — he didn’t have to tell us that.

‘Do you yet have any suspects for these murders?’ he asked.

‘We’re looking at a few people.’

‘Are they part of my mission?’

‘No,’ I said, telling him what he wanted to hear.

‘That’s something at least.’ He shook his head, dismayed.

‘That’s all we’ve got for the moment, sir,’ I said. ‘We’ve been hoping to catch you and bring you up to speed.’

‘I appreciate the heads-up, Special Agents. You’re both doing great work here. Now, if you don’t mind?’

‘Just one thing, Mr Ambassador — would you know if Harvey Stringer’s in the building?’ I asked.

‘I think Harvey’s still in the States.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Well, keep up the good work,’ he said, giving us a few more words of motivation. They weren’t necessary, nailing up the bad guys being the fun part of the job. He gave us both a nod and departed.

And after he was gone, I was back where I started: circling Masters for an opening. ‘You want to play twenty questions?’ I asked.

Masters returned to the couch and sat heavily.

I tried some small talk to loosen her up a little. ‘What did you make of Burnbaum?’

She shrugged. ‘I think he’s about ready for retirement.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, sitting beside her. ‘So, here we are… a little spot called Kumayt.’

‘Maybe you’ll understand how difficult this is for me once I’ve told you.’

‘Just tell me what you know before I go get a crowbar and jimmy it out of you,’ I replied. Nothing but silence for another few seconds. I sighed and looked around the room. ‘Something tells me this is going to be a long night.’

Masters turned to glare at me. Her anger magnified the palette of her eyes and they flashed like opals. ‘Richard asked me to help compile his case for the DoD,’ she began, ‘which meant I got to see a lot of sensitive material — facts, figures, depositions. The arguments and counterarguments about aerosolised DU oxide and its effects on the human body aren’t neatly balanced. For every scientist or expert who’s anti DU, there are half-a-dozen who are pro.’

I nodded. That wasn’t so surprising.

‘But if you dig around, what you find is pretty ominous. When Richard came over this afternoon, he spent most of the time in the bath…’

I chose that moment to tactically retie a shoelace.

‘And I know I shouldn’t have, but while he was out of the room, I went through his notes.’

‘Is that why you’re upset? You feeling guilty?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m feeling. I’m upset because I’m betraying a trust.’

I wasn’t going to argue with her.

‘I wrote down some stuff,’ said Masters, opening her notebook and reading. ‘Twenty-eight per cent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems loosely called “Gulf War Syndrome”. That’s more than five times the rate of Nam vets.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She referred back to her notebook. ‘How about this: over seven thousand soldiers were reported as having been wounded in Gulf War I. But over half-a-million vets have received disability compensation. That makes the number of vets disabled since that war finished seventy times the number wounded in the conflict itself.’

‘Shit… all because of DU?’

‘That’s what this class action’s all about — the people sitting on the other side of the courtroom from Richard believe it’s a big part of the reason why they’re sick, and that it’s being covered up. And then there’s Capstone. The full title was The Capstone Depleted Uranium Aerosols Study & Human Health Risk Assessment. The report cost six million dollars and was prepared for Washington by a company called Battelle. Battelle is a major nuclear contractor to the US government, by the way.’

‘Call me cynical, but a company like that is hardly going to bite the hand that feeds it.’

‘It’s unlikely,’ Masters agreed. ‘From what I can make out, one of the main arguments against the claims that DU is harmful is that there are no results from tests done into the long-term effects of exposure. Could be that the people with the money to spend on that kind of research… well, they don’t want it done.’

‘You sound like you’ve changed teams.’

‘Plenty of questions have been asked about the validity of the report’s findings and yet so far there haven’t been a lot of answers. It makes you think.’

It did. It made me think about the way Tyler had slowly wasted away and the fight he’d put up — and the anger I felt about this was rising into my temples.

‘So anyway,’ she continued, ‘back in 1979, this same company that now proclaims depleted uranium is harmless found that more than thirty per cent of those aerosolised DU particles remained airborne until inhaled or rained out. And Battelle can’t claim ignorance about how easily and effectively aerosolised DU can penetrate the human body, because it has a subsidiary that develops aerosol devices to deliver medications through the lungs. When they get into your body, these small particles emit alpha radiation that penetrates the cells around them, wreaking damage all the way down to the DNA level.’

‘Must have been a long bath,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You’ve become an overnight expert.’

‘I’m an investigator, remember? I had questions — these are some of the answers.’

‘So what happens to those rained-out particles?’

‘My understanding is that they end up in the ground water or the food chain, or both. From there, it’s only a short trip to your kidneys, which get necrotised — die, basically. And you know, at the end of the report, there’s a disclaimer. I wrote it down because it made me laugh. Well, maybe not laugh, exactly…’ Masters flipped backwards and forwards through a few pages until she found it, and started reading. ‘Neither the US government nor Battelle is responsible for the accuracy, adequacy or applicability of the contents, or any consequences of any use, misuse, inability to use or reliance upon the information.’

‘Sounds like a sidestep written by someone like your fiancé.’

‘Whether you like it or not, Richard’s just doing his job.’

I sucked something out from between a couple of teeth. Of course he was. ‘Dick’s not going to be real happy when he finds out you’ve been doing yours amongst his case notes.’

‘He already found out, because I told him,’ she replied.

‘How’d he take it?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’

‘Suit yourself. You still haven’t told me what any of this has to do with Kumayt.’

‘I found a register amongst Richard’s notes,’ Masters continued. ‘During both Gulf wars there were sites established to dispose of wreckage contaminated by DU — trucks, armour, et cetera. There’s a rumour that Kumayt is one of the places where a dump is located, where they buried wrecks from the Highway of Death. They trucked them up there, dug a big hole, and pushed the lot into it. According to what I’ve heard, that wreckage was over a hundred times more radioactive than the background radiation.’

The Highway of Death. It was before my time in the military but I remembered the pictures. The road out of Kuwait heading to Basra where, on a Sunday night early in ’91, mile after mile of the retreating Iraqi army was charred beyond recognition, shot up by DU fired from Coalition aircraft back when DU was just a whispered half-secret. I sat back and exhaled. Kumayt, the Highway of Death, the unresolved issues circling the use and effects of depleted uranium… ‘So what exactly have we got here now? A series of savage murders linked to a radioactive trash heap?’