The Death Trust

TWENTY-FOUR

I asked the man if I could see some identification.

He produced a wallet from his back pocket, and showed me the plastic window occupied by a CAC card. The name said Dante P. Ambrose, and the man standing opposite wore the face in the photo.

“Is there someplace we can talk to you, Mr. Ambrose?” asked Masters.

“Yeah,” he said, with a hint of the deep South in his voice. “Teddy — you mind holding the fort awhile?”

“You got it,” said Teddy with a bored wave.

The room Ambrose showed us into was a storeroom. Locked, khaki-painted steel gun cases were bolted and heavily chained to the wall. There was a desk, two chairs, a few columns of cardboard boxes, and a small fridge. It was hot and stuffy in the room. Ambrose turned on the air-con and I noticed he’d brought his rifle. My eyes followed it.

“Don’t let Marlene bug you, Special Agent; I sleep with her. Spend more than a week in this country and you’ll be doing likewise. Get you a drink? The heat will kill you. We got Dr Pepper or Diet Sprite. Take your pick.”

Masters and I went for a Sprite and a Dr Pepper respectively. I also asked for Tylenols, if there were any to spare. Ambrose called out to Teddy, who thankfully played requests, and I washed three down with the doctor. To break the ice, I said, “So, MaxRisk. What do you people do here?”

Ambrose gave us the sales pitch. “Mostly, we do CP — close protection — get paid to chew on a bullet for the people we watch over so that they can go about their business. We specialize in anti-hostage work. No one under MaxRisk’s CP has ever been taken by insurgents. That’s a record we’re pretty proud of. We’ve also had no deaths, no accidents recorded among staff or customers. At the moment, we’re contracted to the U.S. Army as well as an Australian company — water-treatment specialists.”

“You were pretty hard to find,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that’s a good thing.” He allowed himself a smile. “Might keep me alive a bit longer. Before we go any further…Reassure me you ain’t CIA.”

I was offended. CIA people had a certain look about them, like their mothers dressed them before they came to work. “No, we’re not CIA, nor are we after you for unpaid parking fines, Mr. Ambrose.”

Masters said, “You know why we’re here.”

“I know why you’re here, but I guarantee you have no idea why you’re here.”

“What do you mean by that?” Masters again.

“When are you going to start asking me about Peyton Scott?”

“Start at the beginning, Mr. Ambrose,” I said. “How well did you know him?”

Ambrose swallowed a mouthful of soda and said, “Scotty was my sergeant. I was his senior NCO. I met him before we left the States. We did a little house-to-house and room-to-room stuff — trained together with a bunch of Israelis before we landed here. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“Yeah. You get along?”

“Yeah, we got along. He was the son of a general and could have been an officer, but he wanted to soldier from the front line — get his white-boy hands dirty. He was good at it — a good soldier. The men liked him, respected him. I liked him. He knew what he was doing and none of our guys got a scratch while he was alive.”

“And after he was gone?” I knew the answer before I asked the question.

“Our unit got shredded. Within three months we’d lost seven guys to insurgents, booby traps, IEDs, and drive-bys. We went from the luckiest squad in Iraq to the unluckiest outfit in the whole fucking corps. Some guys left — got out — others went to new units, but the killing didn’t stop.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m saying that my men — all of us — were targeted. And it all started with Peyton. Even after the men left — went home — they kept on dying.”

Bishop had already confirmed as much about Peyton’s old squad when it was in-country, but what Ambrose was talking about smacked of something more sinister. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because everyone I’ve contacted has turned up dead. Three guys were snuffed out in fires; four in car crashes; there’ve been accidental electrocutions, drownings, boating accidents; one guy’s car fell on him — he was working under it in his garage. Some pretty weird shit has been going on, that’s for damn sure.”

The word “fire” rang alarm bells.

Masters asked, “And you think they’ve been murdered?”

“Not according to any police report I’ve seen. Every single damn one has been an accident.”

“How many accidents are we talking about?” I asked.

“Twenty-four,” said Ambrose.

I swallowed. Hard. I thought back to the other people who’d inadvertently come into the Scotts’ circle and ended up whacked — Alan Cobain, François Philippe…I hoped my insurance was up-to-date. I thought of the Whiteboard back at Ramstein with those names on it, and about adding twenty-four new ones. This picture mingled with another one — the gurneys lined up patiently for Captain Blood’s attention, loaded with human beings the shape of football bladders, and, despite the heat, a shiver began in my boots and rolled up my body. “You left the marines. What brought you back here?”

“Two thousand George Washingtons a day, plus benefits.”

“Besides the money.”

“I looked up a couple of the guys who lived in Mississippi. I arrived the day one of them was pulled out from under his daddy’s tractor. I stayed for the funeral and then went to check on the other. The man’s house was just a burned-out husk. You want the truth? I got scared. Here I can carry a gun out in the open. I hang out with badass warrior types. At MaxRisk, we got ex-Delta, ex-SAS; we’ve got the cream of the cream, as well as some real nasty motherfuckers from the island of Fiji. Basically, while I’m protecting people, my guys are also protecting me. But I know my day will come. Maybe today. So even with all the lunatics and crazies running around in this country, I still feel a damn sight safer here than I do back in my own.”

I took a long drink of soda and tried to get my thoughts in order. I had not expected to hear what Ambrose was telling me. I suddenly realized he was right: I had absolutely no idea why I was here — or, at least, what I expected to find here. The death of General Abraham Scott suddenly seemed almost trivial against the background of what was obviously murder on a mass scale. And yet, I had a feeling that finding out what happened to the old man, and why, were the keys to the slaughter.

Masters said, “Do you want to tell us what happened to Peyton Scott, Mr. Ambrose?”

“Call me Dante, Special Agent. And no, not really — not if I can avoid it. Can I avoid it?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I knew it,” he said, and those massive shoulders of his slumped. “We need to go for a drive — back to the spot.”

I thought it would be a good idea, but I checked it with Masters before agreeing. Accord was clearly part of our détente. She nodded. Permission granted.