A Knife Edge

THIRTY-TWO

The woman behind the counter had lost her figure a long time ago and what was left had about as many curves as a desert road. Her gray eyes were blank and the airborne fat combined with her own perspiration to oil up the skin on her face, causing it to shine. She asked me what I wanted with a raise of her eyebrows.

“Coffee, thanks,” I said. “Black, no sugar.”

She ambled off and pressed the button on the machine after placing a cardboard cup under the nozzle. I surveyed the food behind the glass. I was hungry, but not hungry enough to risk eating what at least a thousand customers before me had decided to pass on, and for good reason by the look of it. I'm not a food snob — in the military, you can't be — but I don't eat what I can't identify. The woman put the coffee on my tray and turned what little attention she had left on the customer behind me. I took a Snickers bar, put it on the tray beside the cup, and moved one place closer to the cashier. The cafeteria was still crowded, despite it being after 1400 hours. I found a vacant table.

I didn't want to think about the briefing, but, at the same time, I found it impossible to think about anything else. MFF, Military Free Fall, jumping out of a plane at high altitude. Given my issues with flying, that was bad enough. Worse would be the reasons for being made to do the course. What was I good to go for, exactly? Obviously, it had something to do with Chalmers and Doc Spears and so there were clues right there. Worrying clues.

I ate the Snickers and watched people come and go. The guy I was hoping would turn up arrived, even before the coffee I bought to make occupying the table legit went cold. He stood in the line, ordered, and eventually found a table, maneuvering through the crowded area with some difficulty. He sat, and I made my way over. “How was Guam?” I said as I took the seat opposite.

I interrupted his lunch — light coffee, and something in a Styrofoam tray that looked like it had come from the sump of a blown engine. Chalmers looked across the table at me with flat lids drawn across his eyes. No Happy New Year from him, either. “Go fuck yourself, Cooper.”

“Do I look like a hermaphrodite?”

“What do you want?”

“How'd you break your leg?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

I took a breath and tried again. “Guam. I meant it. How did it go? You caught up with Al Cooke and ran him through his statement about the night Dr. Tanaka died, right?”

“This is how it went, asshole.” He tapped a crutch with his knife.

“You broke your leg on Guam?”

“Disappear, Cooper.”

“I'm sorry about your injury.”

“No, you're not.”

“Al Cooke — tell me about him,” I said, trying to break the cycle. In fact, I was interested in finding out how he broke his leg, but only because I wanted to know whether I could claim some credit for it.

“Why should I?”

“Because everyone keeps saying we're on the same team?”

“Jesus, Cooper,” he said, laughing sourly. “What goddamn shower did you come down in?”

“OK,” I said. “If you won't tell me what you know, I'll tell you what I think you found.”

“You sent me off on a fucking wild-goose chase, asshole,” he said, all the preppy Ivy League crap peeled back, revealing the genuine plastic core beneath.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“Put a dick in your ear.”

“You got to Guam and found Al Cooke gone.”

“What makes you think that?”

I ignored the question. “Did you check his bank account?”

Chalmers chewed and pointed to a cheek with his knife, indicating he wasn't going to speak with his mouth full.

“If you did, I'm guessing you'd have found a large unaccounted-for sum of money, recently deposited.”

He swallowed. “Why would we check the man's bank account? Cooke was a potential witness, not a suspect.”

“You did read his statement? The one I provided with my case notes, the one he provided over the phone, the one you went all the way over there to check? Didn't the statement strike you as odd?”

Chalmers shrugged and shoveled what appeared to be engine parts in brown grease into his face. “You got somewhere else to be, Cooper?” he said. “I can think of a few places, if you can't.”

“Does CIA want to know what happened to Tanaka, or not?” I said. I tried to ignore the tough-guy act. I had to remind myself that Chalmers was CIA, not a cop. Unless the subject wore a hand towel or a trench coat, he probably wouldn't know what to do.

“Not,” he said. “We're after bigger fish. What makes you think you know more now than you did before Christmas, Cooper?”

A reasonable question. “Because I've just been in a room with you and Dr. Spears and a whole bunch of brass. That tells me a few things right there. One of those things has to do with a certain DVD. It scared Spears bad enough to make her pass it on to me and then get the hell out of Moreton Genetics. She came to that decision after I interviewed her about the relationship between Boyle and Tanaka. I saw it in her face.”

“Did you read her palm as well?” Chalmers shook his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin, which he tossed into the remains of his lunch. “Now, if you don't mind, fuck off.” He pushed his chair back and made like he was going to stand up. “Are you finished? Because I am.”

I was banging my head against a wall with this guy. His mind had the flexibility of a retiree with rickets. “I'm going to take another guess,” I said.

“My food tray can hardly contain its excitement. It's going to sit there all afternoon and listen to your bullshit,” he said, pulling himself up onto his crutches.

“That wallet found at the Four Winds supposedly belonging to Professor Boyle — five will get you ten Forensics have said it wasn't burned in the same fire that torched everything else around it. And that calls into question not only the identification of the body it was found under as being Sean Boyle's, but also makes me wonder who planted it.”

The slight hesitation in Chalmers's determination to leave told me I was right. Professional pride wouldn't let him ask me where these conclusions of mine had come from. I stood and tucked my card into his top pocket. “Just in case you get stuck,” I said as I walked out.

As I reached the exit, the cell buzzed against my leg. I pulled it out and reviewed the number before answering. “Arlen.”

“Hey, Vin. Where are you?”

“On thin ice, skating.”

“Well, bud, when you've stopped playin' around, you need to pay us a visit over here.”

“Andrews?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Your orders came through.”

“Already?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“Your old boss brought them over personally.”

“Chip Schaeffer?”

“Yep.”

Schaeffer must have left the Pentagon meeting and gone straight there. “I need to go home and change.”

“Chip told me to tell you to get ready to deploy immediately.”

“You know where to?” I asked.

“The orders are SPECAT.”

“SPECAT…” Special Category — no names, no destinations, lots of secrecy. Obviously Arlen knew, but he wasn't saying. A bad sign.