A Knife Edge

FORTY-TWO

A little after 1500 hours, a group of parachute riggers from U.S. Army Special Forces arrived and readied the Ski-Doos for the drop. They rigged them onto aluminum platforms with a sandwich of paper honeycomb to absorb the landing shock. Dortmund supervised the loading. I heard one of the Army guys say, “We've hooked ‘em up to G-12D cargo chutes. These babies have sixty-four-foot canopies, so your toys will fall like snowflakes.”

I went back inside and repacked my gear yet again — anything to keep the flight and the night drop out of my head. I had something to eat, and tried to get some sleep. I woke several hours later with an ominous feeling in my gut, my watch alarm beeping, and Chalmers standing over me on his crutches.

“Yeah? Can I help you with something?” I said, sitting up, wiping the crud from my eyes.

“NSA passed this to me. Some OSI lieutenant colonel back at Andrews seems to think it's relevant to the mission. I want to know why.”

Chalmers passed me a couple of sheets of printout on OSI letterhead. I glanced at the familiar signature at the bottom of the page. The lieutenant colonel Chalmers referred to was Arlen Wayne. I gave the contents a quick scan and said, “You mean, how.”

“How, what?”

“How it's relevant, not why.”

“You ever stop being an asshole, Cooper?”

“Most important organ in the body, Chalmers. Don't believe me, have yours sewn shut and see what happens.”

Chalmers looked confused. “Hurry, ass — dipshit. The train leaves the station in twenty minutes. Maybe I'll see you in Kabul. Or better still, maybe not.” Chalmers hopped away on his sticks, the look of victory on his face, leaving me with the printout. I lay back for a moment until all my gears meshed, wondering what the hell Chalmers was doing here anyway. What use to anyone was he on crutches, unless it was to keep an eye on things, or maybe just to supervise me? He'd said as much. I'd thought he was just indulging in a little unfriendly banter; perhaps I should be taking him at his word. Whatever. Chalmers was in the wrong job. He was even too much of a shit-head for CIA. I could see him working out just fine with Wu and De Silver over in the GAO, which gave me an idea. Maybe the three of them should meet up. If I did make it back in one piece, I decided I'd do a little matchmaking.

I read Arlen's note and a choir of internal alarms went into meltdown. Clare Selwyn had come through. She'd filled in some of the holes I'd left behind in the Ruben Wright investigation. Phone company records revealed Amy McDonough and Ruben's lawyer, Juan Demelian, had been calling each other regularly before Ruben died. Why would they be doing that? Demelian wasn't her lawyer and they weren't friends. All they had in common was Ruben. Moreover, both insisted to me that only one call had been made to the other, and that was after Ruben had died. The reason for these calls, according to what Demelian had told Clare after she leaned on him, was that he had been trolling for business. He'd simply forgotten that he'd made the calls. Yeah, right.

I pieced the case together with this new information and the how went something like this: Ruben found out about McDonough and Butler, and called Demelian telling him he intended to change his will. Demelian stalled him and immediately informed McDonough of Ruben's intentions. Demelian told her he couldn't put Ruben off indefinitely. I wondered who had the idea first to kill Ruben. It didn't matter. Demelian's payment for betraying his client was for Amy to agree to cut him in on Ruben's estate. Her side of the deal was to come up with a method of doing the deed that wouldn't incriminate anyone. Enter Staff Sergeant Chris Butler. All three obviously knew about Ruben's MS, and also knew how important it was for him to keep it a secret.

Butler stuck his head in the door. I flinched like I'd been caught in the act of something distasteful. He said, “Let's go, then, guv.”

“Yeah,” I mumbled. “One minute.”

“Hurry,” said Butler, disappearing.

I reread the last page. Clare had also obtained a search warrant for Amy McDonough's home, including the sewerage pipes. She'd had the lines at Ruben Wright's accommodation checked out, too. While Ruben's came up clean, old tree roots clogging McDonough's pipes had snagged a range of medicines used to control the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. Clare had cross-checked the list of meds with Dr. Mooney and was of the opinion Ruben kept only a small portion of his pharmacopeia at McDonough's — a backup emergency supply, perhaps. In a statement to police, Amy said she'd tried to get rid of the drugs after he died — in fact, right after she'd returned home from identifying him at the morgue. She said that when she discovered them she was worried no one would believe her story about her not knowing a thing about Ruben's condition, and that this might somehow connect her with his murder. Damn right. There was no way to check she wasn't lying about the timing, but she'd lied about practically everything else, so why not this? I was convinced that McDonough had simply flushed the drugs down the head on the day Ruben died.

I recalled the trip to her house and the stump of what must once have been a very big tree in her front yard. I wondered whether its roots had been the ones responsible for clogging her drains. If so, its revenge for being turned into firewood had been sweet.

The search of Amy McDonough's home also turned up a spare key to Ruben's on-base accommodation — the quarters I'd been occupying. Amy could quite easily have gained access to the base with someone carrying a DoD ID — someone like Butler, for example — and not have had her name recorded at the base's entrance security checkpoint. No one would have raised so much as an eyebrow.

While it was pure speculation on my part, I was convinced Amy had planted that single pill under the fridge after Ruben's death, knowing it would eventually be found when the investigation got under way. The discovery would lead to the fact that he had MS, then to Dr. Mooney, on to Ruben's therapist, Judith Churcher, from there straight to a plausible theory that Ruben Wright had been unstable enough to take his own life. I asked myself why had it been important for Amy to lie about her knowledge of Ruben's condition. The plan had been to give the impression that Ruben was depressed and secretive, cut off and alone — suicidal — and it had worked, at least up till now. Her ignorance allowed her to play dumb on the question of his condition, which reinforced her assertion that her relationship with Ruben was over.

I dragged myself off the cot and scratched my head. So what about the other theory, the one that had Ruben killing himself and making it appear that Butler had done the job? Aside from the fact that I knew for sure Amy and Butler had been lying from the start, what did I have? Nothing concrete, though I now had a solid lump in my gut telling me that when Ruben jumped out of the aircraft with Butler and his men that night, he had every expectation of walking away from the landing.

I took a breath and stared up at the cracked and peeling ceiling plaster, looking for something. Maybe it was for a way out. I couldn't see one.