The Death Trust

TWENTY-ONE

Special Agent Masters didn’t respond to my offer of a Jacuzzi ride, but I wasn’t expecting her to. I turned on the hot water faucet. A small spider scrambled from the waterspout when the pipes began to thrum. A dribble of brown water followed.

Suddenly an explosion, a big one, rumbled through the Al-Rasheed’s foundations. Before I knew it, Masters and I were taking the stairs four at a time. We hit the street and saw a rising column of black smoke half a mile away, beyond the wall. Servicemen and-women spilled out of the hotel and held their hands over their eyes, shielding them from the fierce glare of the sun to get a better look.

“Damn truck bomb,” said one marine sergeant, shaking his head slowly.

By the time we arrived at the hospital set up in one of Saddam’s palaces in the green zone, the dead and wounded were arriving. Humvees and ambulances were unloading casualties, and so were the helos landing somewhere behind the building. Inside, a parody of a Baghdad traffic jam was in full swing. A gridlock of gurneys was loaded with cut and broken people, exposed skin blackened with burns and soot, dark crimson blood flowing from ragged flaps of skin.

The white marble floor of the main entrance hall was slippery with blood and dirt. Medical staff crawled over each new arrival, their hands flitting over limbs, torsos, and heads searching for wounds, shouting instructions that were sometimes ignored because everyone in the place was already engaged in a pitched battle with death. The men and women cut to pieces when the truck loaded with scrap metal exploded beside their convoy were mostly quiet, some through force of will, others because they were in shock, others because it probably hurt more to scream, their faces melted and lungs seared. Some whimpered or moaned. Some called for their mothers. Occasionally, a screamer would come through making a sound like a wild animal, the veneer of civilization stripped away, the casualty reduced to a primitive state of raw and savage survival, frontal lobes bypassed and the reptile brain engaged in the fight for life.

Nurses wheeled around stands containing bags of fluids and blood, or hooked up IVs, or raced around on errands. Instructions kept being yelled as, here and there, patients flat-lined.

The smell of blood, urine, and feces was overwhelming, and so was the noise. I realized that getting sense from anyone here was going to be, as Brenda would have said in the lexicon of nineties’ positive-speak, a challenge.

Masters grabbed a passing lieutenant’s arm and shouted, “Do you know where we can find Colonel Dwyer?”

“There,” said the young man, gore caked on his arms up to the elbows, gesturing at a room off the hall with a nod of his head. A sign on the wall read “Trauma Room 2.”

Masters and I dodged medical staff rushing from patient to patient, careful not to slip on the slickened floor. A PFC was spreading sawdust around to soak up the blood and urine. Trauma Room 2 was similar in size and shape to the main hall, with a marble floor and a towering vaulted ceiling enclosing an enormous space. Giant mosaics of the former dictator illustrated well-documented moments in his life: firing an AK-47 from a balcony, playing the avuncular leader to his troops, being the kindhearted parent to a child perched on his knee. Smiles all round. Stained-glass windows set with blue, red, and green glass in complicated geometric patterns threw technicolor light onto the upper walls. The intricate interplay of shapes took the eyeballs on a journey to the ceiling, where golden stars twinkled happily in a cobalt blue universe. In all, a nice place to die.

The wounded in this room had been separated from the others. They were the ones with shattered limbs being triaged for surgery. The medical staff wore scrubs over their ACUs, obscuring rank. I asked a passing nurse to point out Colonel Dwyer. He indicated a man close to fifty and as black and shiny as a new tire.

“Colonel Dwyer,” I said. “Special Agent Cooper, and this is Special Agent Masters, OSI. I called you this morning?” The colonel looked up from a compound fracture he was assessing. I’d broken with my habit of not calling ahead because it would have been just a tad inconvenient for us if the colonel hadn’t been around, given that we’d come all the way from Germany for his assistance.

“Yeah. To be honest, I forgot you were coming,” said the surgeon. “Can’t it wait?”

I didn’t want to be insensitive but we were also pressed for time. “Till when, sir?”

The CO of the hospital sighed deeply, realizing we weren’t going to just go away, and then returned to the task at hand. “Just remind me. You’re investigating a murder, right?” he said as he probed around a white stick of bone protruding from his patient’s quadricep.

“That’s right, sir.”

“One murder?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve come all the way from Europe to find the killer of just one man?”

“Correct, sir.”

The colonel bent down and spoke softly to the unconscious soldier under his fingertips. “You’re a lucky woman, Captain. No vascular damage — nothing we can’t fix, anyway.” He murmured something to an assistant, then pulled off his rubber gloves with a slap. “In the context of what’s going on around here, Special Agent, have you any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”

I stayed silent. I didn’t think the colonel was really looking for an answer.

“What’s so important about this murder victim?” he continued.

“Aside from his rank, sir?”

“Yes, you told me on the phone. A four-star. Wouldn’t it be far more beneficial if you and your department could find the individual responsible for all this?” he said with a sweep of his arm, gesturing at the carnage piling up in the room and outside. “You see what I’m getting at, Special Agent?”

“Yes, sir.” Actually, I agreed with him. In this hospital alone, where death was being serviced with all the alacrity of a conveyor belt, the preoccupation with one killing among so many did seem puerile. But agreeing with the colonel was one thing and being able to do anything about it was something else entirely. We both had our jobs. I knew that, and so did the colonel.

“Forget it,” Dwyer said after a big sigh. “How can I help you guys?”

“This is Captain Blood,” said Colonel Dwyer. “Captain, this is Special Agent Cooper and Special Agent Masters, OSI. Please afford them every assistance. They’re investigating a matter of national security. They’re interested in knowing how we process the KIAs.”

“Yes, sir,” said the captain, standing beside his computer monitor.

“Come and see me if there’s anything else I can do for you.” The colonel gave us both a nod and then departed, diving his hands into a pair of rubber gloves held out by a nurse.

“So, Captain Blood,” I said, searching around for something witty to say about the appropriateness of his name.

“Yes, sir?” Blood was tall, with pale red hair and skin the color of a bleached bedsheet. He reminded me of C-3PO. I saw the length of the line forming at the captain’s door and decided against being a wiseass. No one in the line seemed impatient to get processed. They had all the time in the world — an eternity, in fact.

“What can you show us?” I asked.

“The best way, I think, is to take you through the procedure. Step by step,” the captain said. “Are you squeamish?” He looked first at me, and then Masters. We both shook our heads. He moved to the nearest body with short steps, arms bent at the elbows like a robot, and pulled back an opaque plastic sheet, revealing a black female missing her leg and genitals. Her head sat on her neck in a way that would not have been possible if she were living. The captain moved the head and revealed a gaping wound the size of an English muffin at the base; the spine in that area had been completely and neatly cored out. Her eyelids remained parted slightly as if she’d been photographed in the middle of the act of blinking. This human being had been alive less than an hour ago. I wondered who loved her, who her friends and family were, who she’d left behind. I also wondered about the circumstances of her death. Why these wounds? Why her and not someone else? I felt I should be asking these questions on her behalf, regardless of the fact that she was completely beyond caring one way or the other.

Captain Blood slapped on a pair of gloves and took a scanner from his pocket. He waved it down her arm until the device found the small chip inserted there. “First, we have to ID the body. As you saw, her tags are missing, most probably removed by the shrapnel that took out the back of her neck. An embedded chip helps enormously. Not every soldier has one yet, but it’s only a matter of time.” The captain connected the scanner to his PC and the two devices exchanged data. A spreadsheet suddenly appeared on screen. The fields for name, rank, serial number, next of kin, and various addresses were all filled in, the scanner having interrogated the chip. There was also a photo. The soldier had the rank of specialist. She was pretty in life, but not anymore. Death doesn’t flatter many people.

“Makes things a damn sight easier,” said Blood.

The morgue was filling fast. Six other doctors, each with assistants, were in the room processing the victims of the truck bomb. The bodies looked misshapen, like human bladders, their insides virtually liquefied and then poured back into their skins. The room stank of punctured intestines. “With the identification of the soldier confirmed, an autopsy is conducted to determine the cause of death, and then a death certificate is issued. The information goes into the central database at the DoD, and then various government departments and agencies are informed electronically.”

“Who performs the autopsy?” asked Masters, aware that, so far, Blood hadn’t told us anything we didn’t already know.

“I do, or any one of ten others here certified to do the job,” he answered.

Beyond the morgue, chaplains and rabbis were moving among the dead, invoking various rites, the religious equivalent of straightening the tie and slicking down the hair prior to an important interview.

I smoothed a photocopy of Peyton Scott’s autopsy out on the tabletop. “Was this performed here?”

Captain Blood cast an eye over it. “Looks like one of ours, and says so right here.” He pointed at the box into which had been keyed U.S. Army 28th Combat Support Hospital. “That’s also our seal on it.”

“Do you recognize the name of the person who performed the autopsy?” Masters asked.

“Hmm…Captain Homer Veitch. It doesn’t ring a bell, but that doesn’t mean much. The date on this autopsy is around a year ago. I’ve only been here ten months.”

“Can you tell us whether Veitch has performed other autopsies here or anywhere else?” asked Masters.

“Yes, ma’am. It will be in our records.”

Captain Blood’s fingers did a one-two, buckle-my-shoe across the keyboard. The cursor cursed, flashing rhythmically. Nothing. I wasn’t expecting anything different from the last time we searched Veitch’s name, but I was interested in Blood’s reactions. And I was rewarded.

“That’s odd.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Well, this Peyton Scott is the only entry under Veitch’s name. It’s not likely the doctor would have performed just one autopsy…”

I didn’t tell Blood it wasn’t likely he’d done even one, given that he was three months in the grave by the time Scott died.

“How does the system know who performed the autopsy?” asked Masters.

“The doctor’s name comes up automatically when he logs in.”

Masters sat, hitching a cheek on the desk’s corner. “How do you do that — log in?”

“I use a swipe card and key in a PIC, a personal ident code. The computer then knows who’s operating and fills in the necessary blanks.”

“Could you show me your card?” I asked.

Blood shrugged and pulled it from a slot in the side of the keyboard. A screen saver showing the crest of the U.S. Army immediately appeared on the monitor, which was, I guessed, the on-line equivalent of a steel door slamming down. No swipe card, no entry. I took the card, examined it quickly, and passed it to Masters. There was nothing special about it — it reminded me of the card I used to gain entry into the OSI offices back at Ramstein. The color of that one was plain white, but this one was red. Both had magnetic strips on one side.

“Ever lost one of these?” Masters inquired.

“Yeah. Had my wallet stolen once, but not here — back in the States.”

“How difficult was it to get a new one?” Masters waggled the card between thumb and forefinger.

Blood shrugged. “Filled in a form, waited a couple of days…”

“Can this card be used from any terminal?” I asked, glancing at Masters. She gave me an imperceptible nod, obviously on the same wavelength.

“No,” said Blood. “It has to be a Department of Defense terminal.”

“Does the DoD system know where you’re accessing it from?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Nothing.” Actually, it was something, but not for Blood’s ears. I continued, “What happens after an autopsy is completed?”

“The body is then bagged and refrigerated, ready for transportation back home.”

“Via Ramstein,” I said.

“Yes. Mostly, sir.”

“Is there any reason why a planeload of body bags heading for the U.S. would be unloaded at Ramstein?”

“I don’t know, sir; I’m not a pilot.”

“I mean, are there medical or processing reasons why they’d need to be taken off the flight?”

“Occasionally there are circumstances that prevent us from doing autopsies here, but it’s rare. In those instances, we’ve sent bodies to Ramstein to be processed.”

Lamont, the Chief Medical Officer back at Ramstein had said much the same thing.

Captain Blood’s work was piling up. Literally. The gurneys were needed elsewhere. On a couple of them, several corpses had been stacked one atop the other. “Is there anything else I can help you with, sir, ma’am?” he asked, looking over our shoulders at his growing workload.

“No,” I said and turned to Masters. “Special Agent?”

She shook her head.

“Thanks for your time, Captain,” I said. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

“No problem,” he said, returning to his screen and logging back into the system.

We retreated to the main hallway, making our way around the perimeter, trying to stay out of the way. “So why would those body bags that appeared in The Washington Post picture have been unloaded for no reason?” Masters said, getting in before me.

“Because there was a very good reason,” I said.

“Like what?”

“I think General Scott had them unloaded especially to put them on show.”

“For the photographer who took the shot?”

“Yeah. Look at it this way — what if Alan Cobain and The Washington Post were just the messengers?”

“You’re suggesting Scott might have been sending a warning to someone with the publication of that photo? Why would he do that? He must have known Washington — the White House — would go ballistic.”

“Yeah, he must’ve.” Jefferson Cutter’s chilly letter to Scott sprang to mind. Something had driven Abraham Scott to do something that went against his training, his loyalty to the air force.

“While we’re poking around these unanswered questions,” said Masters, troubled, “can we talk through the moment when Scott opened his son’s body bag?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Well, put yourself in his shoes. If you were a father — I take it you’re not, by the way—”

“No, I’m not, but I think I know where you’re going. Would I, or wouldn’t I?”

“Yeah, would you want to look in that bag, or would you want to remember what your son looked like—”

“Rather than live with the image of your boy ripped up by high explosives and shrapnel?” Masters’s point was a good one. People who had died as the result of battlefield trauma didn’t usually leave a particularly photogenic corpse, which is why they are usually buried or cremated in closed caskets. Unlike most fathers, Abraham Scott would have had a lot of experience with badly shattered human bodies. All the more reason, perhaps, why he wouldn’t want to look inside the bag…unless…“Oh, shit,” I said, as the dime dropped. “There’s only one possible reason.”

“And that would be…?”

“Someone told Scott his son had been murdered. And the proof was the discrepancy between the autopsy and the condition of the boy’s body. General Scott had to look in that bag.”

“Wha—”

“What if Peyton Scott had been decapitated as some kind of warning to his father?”

“Hmm…Do you remember the date the ‘Death Row’ article appeared?”

“Not to the day.”

“Me, neither, but it was around six weeks after Peyton Scott’s death. That can’t have been coincidental.”

“What if the message General Scott was sending was intended not so much for the American public, but for his son’s murderers?”

Masters chewed the nail on her thumb.

Was it so unlikely? This case was getting stranger and more complex. Either that or we were letting our imaginations get the better of our judgment.

“What was all that about computer terminals?” asked Masters as we approached the exit.

“If you had a swipe card, a PIC, and access to the appropriate terminal, you could get into the DoD system anywhere — not necessarily here at the hospital. But you could make it appear that you were working on KIAs here.”

Masters nodded, her face grim.

Had Peyton Scott been autopsied legitimately by Captain Blood’s department? Or had the report been wiped from a remote location and another autopsy altogether logged in its place? I remembered Lamont saying the DoD database was a closed system and that once the autopsy had been completed and saved it couldn’t be altered. But a computer that couldn’t be penetrated was about as likely as a twenty-year-old virgin in Las Vegas, wasn’t it?

We had reached the exit, and things had quieted down somewhat at the hospital. All the guests invited by fate to this particular shindig had arrived and were being seen to by their hosts. There were well over fifty wounded by the IED. Down this end of the stick, the war was a sad, inglorious business paid for in the flesh and blood of the young. And, although the goods were spoiled permanently, none of it could be returned. As the cliché said, it was the first day of the rest of their lives, but for many of the injured it would be a life without limbs, or an existence spent in a wheelchair, or staring at the ceiling enduring an eternity of immobility, turned on a timer to ease the bedsores, wondering why they’d been chosen for this hell.

“Excuse me, are you Special Agent Masters, ma’am?” It was a nurse in surgical scrubs.

“Yes,” Masters answered.

“This just came in for you,” she said. “From Germany.”

Masters took the paper. The nurse’s bloody glove print was smeared across it.

“What’s up?” I asked, resisting the urge to read the note over her shoulder.

“It’s from Bishop. Peyton Scott’s unit is still in-country, but he says there are no original members. About half were KIA — must have been one hell of an unlucky unit — and the rest were rotated home. He says he has located one man, Peyton’s senior NCO, Dante Ambrose, but he’s left the corps.”

“Let me guess, he’s moved to the island of Bali, where he now owns a bar on a beach. And now we’re just going to have to go there to interview him.”

“No. Actually, he’s here in Baghdad.”

“Just our luck. Doing what?”

“Works for a private security company. Bishop’s sent us the address. Oh, yeah. And there’s something else.”

“What?”

“Your accommodating friend, Ms. Varvara? It seems she’s wanted by the police.”

“What for?”

“Arson.”