Dark Zone

21

The smell of strong coffee woke Dean early the next morning, but when he went downstairs he found no one around. He followed his nose to a room toward the back of the large house. A silver pot filled with fresh, hot coffee sat on a round wooden table in the middle of the room; he took one of the cups next to it and fixed himself a cup.

The room was fitted out like a library, with upholstered chairs scattered in front of a wall of shelves. He began to browse, starting with the leather-covered tomes in the shelves nearest the coffee, moving through Thackeray and Dickens to George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. After the novels he came to a history section, where leather-bound classics gave way to newer hardcovers. The books were not grouped in any particular order; Wmston Churchill’s history of the Second World War sat next to Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Next to them was Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die, an account of the U.S. Marines during World War I.

Dean picked it out of the bookcase. The first pages caught his attention — especially the picture that showed a Marine as a young man after the war. He was still a kid but squinted toward the camera with some deep knowledge in his eyes. The book was written simply, but every word jumped off the page at Dean, pure truth and emotion.

When Tommy Karr found him nearly an hour later he was forty-something pages deep, riveted by the account of a burial detail and the horrors of burying bodies several days after the battle.

“Looking to score points with the hosts?” Karr asked, pouring himself a cup of what was by now cold coffee.

“Reading about U.S. Marines,” said Dean.

“U.S. Marines?” Karr bent down and took a look at the book. “Hey, my great-grandfather was there.”

“He was a Marine?”

“Belleau Wood, right?”

“You had a great-grandfather in the Marines?”

“Gee, Charlie, why do you say it like that?”

“Just asking.”

“Fifth Marines, Fourth Brigade.” Karr smiled, then chugged the coffee and poured himself another cup.

“I thought you were Swedish.”

“Or something. Half. Decent coffee,” added Karr. “Probably better when it was hot, right?”

“When are they coming to interview us?” Dean asked.

“They’re not. They gave up,” said Karr cheerfully. “The coffee is their way of telling us to sod off.”

Karr put his finger to his lips, then held it up and twirled it around. “Back to London for us.”

“How?”

“Chris left us a pair of bikes. Come on. You can take the book, as long as there are no bugs in it. Mail it back when you’re done. I doubt they’ll miss it.”

Karr wasn’t kidding about the bicycles, but they were meant to be ridden only as far as the train station, which was two miles away. Once they got there, Karr took out his PDA and scanned both the platform area and their things for bugs — and was so suspicious when he didn’t find any that he scanned again.

“Maybe they trust us,” said Dean. “We are allies.”

“Nah. That’s a reason not to trust us,” said Karr. He pointed to the belt that activated the communications system and shook his head. Dean was only too happy not to bother turning on the system.

They didn’t speak again until after they arrived in London nearly an hour later. Karr scanned the restroom in the train station and then slapped on all of the faucets.

“Your plane leaves at five from Heathrow,” Karr told Dean.

“We’re splitting up?”

“Rubens has loaned me to the State Department.” Karr chuckled. “I get to play crossing guard.”

Dean waited for the explanation, but none came.

“Get to Heathrow by three if you can,” Karr said. “I should be back in the States in a few days. As far as I can tell, we’re not being followed and there are no bugs in here. Outside in the station, they have a regular surveillance system. You can turn your communications gear back on whenever you want.”

Dean nodded, then went over to use one of the stalls. By the time he finished, Karr was gone.

Dean circled around the train station, then went out on the street, checking to see if he was being followed. Finally he decided that he hadn’t been and turned on the communications device.

“Charlie, where have you been?” asked Telach immediately.

“Somewhere out in the country. I just came out of Paddington train station.”

“I know where you are,” said the Art Room supervisor. “Why haven’t you signed onto the communications system?”

“Tommy thought we were being followed.”

Telach made an exasperated sound and turned him over to Lief Johnson, who had taken over for Rockman as his runner.

“There’s an express train from Paddington to the airport,” said Johnson. “You have to go back into the station and turn left.”

“I know where the train is,” said Dean. “My flight isn’t until five tonight.”

“We may be able to get you something earlier.”

“Don’t bother,” said Dean, spotting a taxi.

Chief Inspector Lang looked as if he’d neither slept nor changed since Charlie had last seen him — but then again, the same could be said for Charlie.

“I’m on my way to the airport. I came to give you my phone number,” said Dean. “And to get yours.”

“You know why the man was murdered?”

Dean shook his head. “I assume it had something to do with us, but we don’t even know who he was.”

“You don’t know, or you’re not allowed to say?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I’d be allowed to say if I did, but I don’t know.”

“The hotel room was registered to Gordon Kensworth.”

“It was an alias. It doesn’t check out. The room was reserved with a different name and account. Vefoures. I assume you know that by now….”

Lang didn’t answer. Dean had dealt with American cops occasionally as a gas station owner. They always were skeptical when you first met them. If you got past that, they could be fairly cooperative, often helpful, and even once in a while sympathetic — but it sometimes took a lot to get past that first hurdle.

Dean glanced at his watch. He wasn’t sure how long it would take to get to the airport, and it was now past two o’clock.

“When I know more, I’ll give you a call,” he told the chief inspector. “I don’t have to work through the channels, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Are you interested in finding out who he really was?”

“Yes,” said Dean.

“Come along then.”

“Charlie, you have an airplane,” said his runner over the communications system as he started down the steps.

“I’ll take a later flight.”

Lang turned around.

“Talking to myself,” said Dean. “Bad habit.”

“Do it myself,” said the detective. “No one talks back at least.”

“I wouldn’t listen if they did,” said Dean, trotting up behind him.

Outside, the detective paused to light a cigarette.

“Want one?” he asked Dean.

“No thanks.”

“I didn’t think you were a smoker.”

“I don’t hold it against anyone.”

“Neither do I.”

Lang led Dean to his car, a five-year-old compact with a dent in the door. As they drove, Lang told him that a missing persons report had been filed that answered the murder victim’s general description. He had a hunch that this was their man and was going to find out.

“Family member is over in Brixton. Do you know where that is?”

“Couldn’t guess.”

Brixton was in London, but it wasn’t a place most tourists visited. The area mixed immigrants and hard-luck old-timers with a few dollops of working-class families trying to make ends meet. The flat they went to belonged to one of the latter, a Rose Pierce, who lived with her three tots. Her older brother Gordon Pierce, who had been staying in the room at the front for the past three months, hadn’t come home the night before.

Rose’s lip began to quiver as soon as the chief inspector showed his credentials. She led them back to the kitchen, hands trembling as she poured water into a kettle for tea. Dean took the pot from her and put it on the stove, then sat down at the small table. It was made of metal, the sides chipped and dented.

“I sent my kids around to my neighbor Eileen so’s we could talk,” said the woman.

“If you could tell us about your brother,” said Lang, his voice soft and gentle, “it might help.”

“Have you found him?”

“We don’t know.” He had a picture in his pocket, but it wasn’t particularly nice, and Dean guessed that Lang wanted to spare the woman the heartache of seeing it if he could. “It’s possible.”

Fighting back tears, Rose told them that her brother had been out of steady work for most of his adult life; he’d been a miner in Cornwall years ago, been hurt and unable to work. The story of his accident was elaborate and hard to follow — he’d been bonked on the head, but the doctors were unable to find any real damage, not even enough to qualify for what the woman called a proper pension. Lang took notes dutifully, though Dean could see he didn’t believe the brother had been disabled.

“He’d been a housepainter, on and off. At his age, not too many employers would take a chance. And he looks older than he was. That doesn’t sit well.”

“How old was he?” asked Lang.

“Fifty next month. The years wore him down. A few days ago he said he had a new job, something he couldn’t discuss,” continued the woman. “He left. He was gone for a whole night, didn’t see him the next day, yesterday, or last night.”

Lang frowned as if he didn’t quite believe this, either, and asked her for details. But she didn’t have any. Dean fit the missing time neatly into a sequence — the man was hired for the job, taken to France, then reintroduced into London.

“He came home from the pub that night, the last I saw him, and he had a few quid on him. He gave me a ten-pound note and said there’d be more. Bloody hell, that was unlike him. Not the generosity — Gordy was always a generous man. But to have money. That was mighty odd.”

The detective took a few notes, changed the subject to ask about her brother’s schooling, and then came back to the job he’d spoken of, making it seem as if it were an afterthought.

“Do you think someone hired him at the pub?” asked the detective.

“The pub? No. He got odd jobs sometimes in the morning.”

“Would he have gotten paid in advance for an odd job?”

“Not usually.”

“Which pub?” asked Dean.

The woman looked at him, surprised by Dean’s accent.

“I’m an observer from America. Learning,” he added.

“Kind of old to learn,” she said.

“Never too old to learn something useful,” said Dean.

“It was the Golden Goose, around the corner and down the block.”

“Would you happen to have a photo of him?” asked the detective.

The woman’s lower lip began quivering again as she got up from the table. The picture showed Kensworth — in life, Gordon Pierce — ten years before, hair already white, face well lined.

“It might be good if you could come over to the station with me,” Lang told her.

She nodded once, then burst into tears.