The Death Trust

THIRTY-TWO

Bishop said, “I’ll pull it up for you.” On the screen between us was a ring of interlocking blue bars warbling with electricity generated by the computer’s graphics card. Bishop reached between us and his fingers tripped over the keyboard. Suddenly, a number of the interlocking bars circling on screen slowly detached themselves, revolved ninety degrees, and then broke away. The entire graphic was then gobbled up by the animated electricity. The door of the Dungeon had apparently been opened, revealing three folders on the otherwise clean desktop of the laptop. “Click the one on the left, sir.”

I did as the flight lieutenant suggested. The folder opened; inside it were half a dozen JPEGs. I double-clicked on one of them. A digital photo filled the screen.

“Shit,” Masters said quietly.

Yeah, I thought, make that a double shit. Bishop was right: I wouldn’t have believed it.

I clicked on the other JPEGs and different views of the same scene were revealed. I was familiar with the image, but I’d only seen it in black and white — or, more accurately, in the black and yellow of old newspaper print.

“Does this mean what I think it means?” said Masters.

“Yeah, I’d say it does,” I said. General Scott’s reflection was caught in the window of a nearby vehicle, a camera to his face and those body bags lined up on the tarmac. He’d snapped a photo of himself snapping a particularly sensitive photo.

I studied the photos. An unidentified U.S. Army soldier — a PFC — kneeled over one of the bags while two others were doing a head count, or a zipper count, or whatever is done to make sure the same number of corpses loaded on to the transport plane in Baghdad had been carried off at the other end.

“So now we’ve got General Scott taking photos and passing them along to a journalist, knowing full well he’s going to send the White House into a spin,” said Masters.

“And the journalist subsequently ends up dead,” I added. “What else have we got here?” I double-clicked on the second folder. Inside was one unnamed PDF file. “Any idea what this is all about?” I asked Bishop.

“No, sir.” He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to get into the next level.”

I double-clicked it. Another surprise. It was a report on OSI letterhead made some sixteen months ago. I scanned the cover sheet and summary. The investigating special agent was a Captain Toby Sumner, also stationed at Andrews. The case involved the theft of a batch of three hundred CAC cards. There were no charges brought, no arrests. “Can you print copies?”

“Sure,” Bishop said.

I skimmed the report again. What the fuck did all this have to do with anything? I’d been wrong about the case having reached its extremities — this was one goddamn universe that kept expanding. I clicked on the third file and found two Word files. I skimmed them. One appeared to be an overview of the various military development programs presently being funded. The other was information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, documenting the legitimate payments made by various armaments companies to practically every senator and congressman from New England to New Mexico.

“I’ll get you copies of these, too, sir,” said Bishop. I barely heard him. I hobbled to the Whiteboard, touched the print button, and ran off a copy of what had been written up. Then I wiped the board clean and said, “Okay, this is what we’ve got. Fourteen months ago, General Scott notices that there are several unauthorized flights shuttling to and from Riga, Latvia, and goes there to check them out. A couple of months later, Peyton Scott is murdered in Baghdad by a sniper. The autopsy is performed by someone who couldn’t possibly have done the job, and the reason given for the cause of death is a lie. The body arrives here at Ramstein. It’s reasonable to assume the general has been tipped off that something is wrong with it because he insists upon looking inside the body bag. He orders another autopsy to be performed in secret on Peyton’s body. The guy who does it dies soon after.

“Meanwhile, Scott heads to Baghdad to find out what really happened to his son. After that, he disappears for a couple of days. Then he surfaces in Riga.

“When the general arrives back at Ramstein, he’s a changed man by all accounts. He also has a new girlfriend with him, a Latvian, most probably traveling on false documents — a German passport. In the meantime, his wife, Harmony, is having an affair with his second-in-command, General von Koeppen.

“Things are falling apart for General Scott. He spends all his time gliding, mourning the death of his boy, Peyton, and he embarks on an Internet research program across a range of seemingly unrelated topics. He takes a highly sensitive photo of a row of body bags and gets it published in The Washington Post, which earns him a stern reprimand from his daddy-in-law, Vice President Cutter. Within a couple of months, he’s turned into a hearty stew when his glider forgets how to fly. I arrive, a murder investigation begins, and then his widow turns up with a ‘good-bye, cruel world’ note from the general that we all think is a fake. All the while we’re being ambushed, shot at, rocketed, and mugged, while too many people are dropping like flies in all kinds of convenient accidents.” I looked at the Whiteboard. It looked as if a four-year-old with ADD and a handful of pens had gone to work on it. But that was okay. Going through what we knew, piece by piece, had a crystallizing effect. At least, I hoped it would. “Have I missed anything?”

“Alu Radakov,” said Masters. “The Chechen people-smuggler. The man who sold Varvara to General Scott as a sex slave. Where does Radakov fit into all of this?”

I caught Flight Lieutenant Bishop raising an eyebrow. Four-star generals didn’t normally purchase people for sex — or any other reason, for that matter.

“Yeah, you’re right. I must be going soft. There’s the whole World War Two thing as well,” I said. Where the hell did that connect? There were also the payments made by the military-industrial complex to U.S. politicians — campaign donations, most likely — along with the list of new weapons currently under development. And now there was the business of this CAC card theft. Was any of this relevant to the general’s death?

My mind was a little like the Whiteboard — a mess. I glanced at the Rolex on my wrist and it reminded me of the ambushes in Baghdad and K-town. Whoever these people were, they’d made a mistake. Masters and I had survived. If we’d been killed in Baghdad, our deaths would’ve been written off as unfortunate strokes of fate. The attack on me outside the pensione could also have been seen as a mugging, just a random attack. I was still certain the people involved in these attacks on us were former Special Forces. If not for a little good fortune, we’d have joined Alan Cobain, François Philippe, and all the rest. Was this hit squad part of The Establishment?

“It’s time to call it a day, folks. I’m not thinking straight,” I said, realizing my thoughts were jumping all over the place. Any minute now, I was going to get flippant. Concussion always has that effect on me. It was getting late, and the mere thought of getting horizontal was making me giddy with happiness, but the egg on the side of my head left by the assailant with the pipe might also have had something to do with it.

Another random thought struck me. “Given that von Koeppen and Harmony aren’t U.S. military personnel, we’re going to need to bring the German police in on this if we’re going to get a look at their phone records.”

“We’ve worked with a couple of the local cops before,” said Masters. “They’ll be happy to play ball.”

I said, “Yeah, but will they cooperate?”

Special Agent Masters gave me The Look.

I cleared my throat and said, “Great. And Peter — if you get some time tomorrow, go have a talk with Captain Aleveldt. Ask him about those calls to von Koeppen. And take a peek into General Scott’s financials. In particular, dig around and see if he used a credit card to book any flights in the weeks after Peyton was killed. We’ve also got the widow’s permission to pick up General Scott’s computer and his files. Let’s get onto it first thing.”

“Yes, sir,” said the flight lieutenant, taking notes. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, there is. Go back through the air-traffic-control records. Look at all the flights to Riga in the six months before Peyton Scott’s death. See where the crews that flew those missions are now. If they’re not on the base, find out where they are and give them a call.”

“What do you want to know?” Bishop asked.

“Whether they’re still alive.”

An hour later, as the sun went down, Masters parked her purple Mercedes across the road from the Pensione Freedom. Life had returned to the street with the sudden burst of warmer weather. The skirts were seriously short. I could get used to Germany.

“How’re you feeling?” Masters asked.

“Fabulous,” I lied.

“Well, see you tomorrow.” She gave me a smile tinged with concern. “Sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, thanks. Tomorrow…” I said as I slid out. I stood on the sidewalk and waited for her to drive off. She motioned at me to go inside. We were concerned about each other’s safety. I told myself the danger had passed like an afternoon thunderstorm and that from here on things would be fine and sunny. The alternative would be to have a close-protection squad around us 24/7. But that would make investigating the case difficult, to say the least. Danger came with the territory, for both of us. I gestured at Masters to go, and watched her taillights join the line cruising the strip.

The aromas of various cooked meats drifted on the light breeze from the restaurants sprinkled along the road. My stomach growled, fought a minor skirmish with my head, and lost. What I needed more than food was sleep. I walked zombielike up the steps of the pensione. The frau was signing in a couple of customers at the front desk and didn’t look up from the paperwork as I shuffled by. I walked straight into the open elevator and listened to the whine of electric motors as it took me to my floor. It jerked to a stop and the doors wheezed open.

I made it to my room and lay down on the bed in my clothes, careful of the wound in my arm, breathing a loud sigh. The bed seemed to absorb me like water into a sponge. I thought about kicking off my shoes but I didn’t have the energy. In the room next to mine, the Canadian backpackers were playing music that sounded like a bunch of instruments being thrown down a stairwell. It pounded into my room laced with a whiff of marijuana. I didn’t mind the smell, although I wondered why the smoke detectors hadn’t picked it up and sounded the alarm. The music wasn’t so bad — it wouldn’t keep me awake. But there was an insistent banging at my door, and that would stop me from sleeping. “Okay, okay,” I said as I stood up. “Who is it?”

“It’s Anna.”

I opened the door. “I thought you might want this,” Masters said as she walked inside.

“What?” I said.

She handed me a folder. “I forgot to give it to you. Copies of all the general’s files — just in case you wake up and want something to read. Oh, yeah, and I also thought you might like a drink.” In her other hand was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two tumblers. “I never trust the glasses you get in these places. People spit into them. Got any ice?”

I was too tired to protest. And a drink would be good. I felt I’d earned it. I absolved myself of keeping the pact. “Yeah, I think so.” There was a small bar fridge tucked under a bench with one tray of ice cubes some thoughtful prior guest had organized. I took the Jack and the glasses and set them on the bench.

“Just rocks, thanks,” said Masters, settling against the windowsill as I cracked the bottle’s seal. “So what did Varvara tempt you with when she came to your room?”

“Scrabble,” I said. “Is that why you’re here? To tempt me?” I handed her a drink.

“We started off on the wrong foot, and I thought it would be good to have a drink and just talk, you know?”

I lifted the glass. The bourbon was cold but it went down warm. It invaded my stomach and the warmth spread, chasing a shiver into my arms. I liked that sensation, the feeling of the first drink. The only trouble was, for the last year or so, I hadn’t been able to say no to the next drink and the one after that and the one after that, until I forgot that saying no would be a good idea and I woke up not knowing what I’d said or done or who I’d fought and whether or not there’d be charges. My last drink had been with Arlen; a lifetime ago, it seemed.

“Feel good?” Masters said, holding up the glass.

“I’ll let you know in an hour,” I replied.

Masters put her drink down on the bedside table, took mine out of my hand, then set it down beside hers. “Fuck the talking,” she said in a whisper.

She took a step toward me. I smelled her perfume and felt her breath against my cheek. Yeah, I liked this woman, possibly all the more because we’d been through so much in such a short time. We’d compressed a year’s worth of living into a handful of days, faced down death together, and I, at least, had rediscovered what it meant to live. In some ways, I realized, I’d been in a state of waking sleep for a year. Her eyelids closed like butterfly wings as her lips brushed mine. She pulled herself close, running her hands gently up my back. Her lips touched mine again, this time welcoming my tongue, and I tasted cool Jack Daniel’s and the chill of the ice on it. My breathing shortened as we tried to climb into each other through our mouths. The kiss got more desperate, and I became like a drowning man gasping for breath. I wondered if she could feel me harden against her stomach. I think the answer was yes, because Masters lifted her shirt from out of her pants, and began undoing the buttons. I got the hint and took over.

The cell in my pocket began ringing.

Masters released the bra clasp and my hands cupped her breasts. They were warm, larger than I’d thought. My fingers bounced across the firmness of her nipples, the flesh crimped and bunched around them with excitement.

The cell kept ringing.

“Jesus,” I hissed.

“Don’t answer it,” Masters whispered.

I had no problem with that.

The ringing stopped.

And then it started up again. Whoever was on the other end was one persistent motherfucker.

“Shit,” said Masters. “It’s not going to stop, is it?”

We both knew the answer to that. “Have I told you how much I hate these damn things?” I said. I took the cell out and hit the green button.

“What?” I snapped.

“Cooper! Is that you? Damn it to hell. What in the name of dry fucking are you doing?”

“General Gruyere!” I said. For an instant I believed the big cheese might have had a camera secreted in the room.

“I just got a call from General von Koeppen and I can tell you it wasn’t a social call. He said you accused him and Harmony Scott of murdering her husband. You’d better be damned sure of yourself, Special Agent.”

I wasn’t.

“Well? I’m waiting.”

“Ma’am. Mrs. Scott and General von Koeppen are involved in an intimate relationship with each other. I also believe it’s possible that they are involved in, at the very least, the murder of General Scott.”

“How? You got anything in the way of evidence to back your assertion?”

After a pause, I said, “No, ma’am.” It was hard to say, but there was no other answer.

“Cooper, you know damn well your intu-fucking-ition won’t cut it in a court-martial. And furthermore…Furthermore, I don’t know where to fucking furthermore…”

I pictured General Gruyere leaning over her desk, clutching the handset away from her face and yelling straight at it, the veins in her forehead pumping like fire hoses. She was not happy. I couldn’t give her an executive summary of the case as we knew it — there were too many extraneous appendages. “I’m going to need another week,” I said.

“You are crazy, Cooper. Asking me for another week proves it. You are so out of time; it’s yesterday for you — do you understand me?”

I’d kind of picked that up already. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You are done and fucking gone on this case. The DoD investigators are on their way with the FBI. You are hereby officially replaced.”

The DoD investigative service was rumored to be made up of no more than two hundred agents. They worked exclusively and directly for the Secretary of Defense and handled, so rumor had it, only the biggest, most secret cases. I’d never met any of these DoD guys. They had reached almost mythical status.

There was not much I could say, so I said nothing. I knew Gruyere was aware of what had happened to me both in Iraq and in the attack in Kaiserslautern. I also knew she wouldn’t give a lab rat’s pink puckering anus.

“You were a good investigator, Cooper, and the past tense is no accident. But for reasons beyond me — and against my better judgment — the Vice President himself personally picked you to look into the death of his son-in-law.”

I believe my mouth opened at that news, and the change in pressure over the mouthpiece gave rise to an electrical roar in the speaker against my ear. What had she said back at Andrews that first morning? Someone up there likes you… Yeah, that’s right. That had vaguely puzzled me at the time. So that someone was Jeff the Cutter, Vice President of the United States of America!

“I have been asked by von Koeppen to have you escorted out of Germany. If I were you, I’d get my bags packed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. A blue light flickered dimly against the wall. I made my way to the window and pulled back the edge of the lace curtain with a couple of fingers. Half a mile up the road, an NCMP vehicle was driving too fast down the wrong side of the street, playing chicken with the oncoming traffic. The urgency couldn’t be a coincidence. Von Koeppen, Harmony, and now General Gruyere wanted me out of Germany, and fast.

“I want you standing in front of my desk, with all your notes on this case, tomorrow morning D.C. time,” said Gruyere. “Are you clear on that?”

Crystal. “Yes, General,” I said. Gruyere terminated the call. I didn’t need to tell Masters that our moment of intimacy was gone. She was fully dressed, and the dreamy look in those astonishing blue-green eyes of hers that I now decided reminded me of a tropical sea was replaced with concern and uncertainty.

Masters said, “Was that as bad as it sounded?”

“We have to leave right now,” I replied.

“That would be a yes, then,” she said.

I grabbed my bag off the floor and began stuffing things into it, starting with the folder Masters had brought over. I could go quietly, or I could decide to take leave — starting immediately and without telling anyone or filling in the required forms and waiting for Gruyere to grant it whenever she damn well felt like it — and it’d be the end of my career in the OSI. Either way, I was fucked. But maybe I’d be less fucked, I reasoned, if I could make a few more connections in this case to make sense of it. Or maybe my reasoning powers had been addled by concussion coupled with a nasty bout of coitus interruptus. I was convinced I, or rather we — Masters and I — were close to something. I thought I could feel the knowledge, the certainty, coalescing, taking shape. And that shape was ugly. I grabbed the postcard of the Eiffel Tower off the counter and flicked it into the open bag. I hesitated, took it out, and read the name on the flip side.

Masters and I didn’t have a lot of time. I stuffed the postcard in a back pocket and headed down the hall to the room next door. I thumped on the thin door panel, loud enough for the noise I made not to sound like part of the racket being played on the other side. The volume went down and someone called out, “Who is it?”

“Your neighbor.”

Something bumped against the door and then a voice said, “Oh, sorry, dude — we’ll turn it down.”

“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to thank you.”

The door opened. I recognized one of the young men I’d seen, what seemed an eternity ago, staggering drunk and laughing hysterically under the weight of his pack. “Hey, you’re the army dude, right?” he said.

“Air Force,” I said.

“Sweet. We just wanted to help, you know?”

“Yeah, thanks a lot. I’m glad you came along when you did. It was a close call. Hey, is that weed you’re smoking in there?” I said, cutting to the chase.

“Um, no, it’s um…”

“It’s okay, man. Me and my lady friend wondered if we could buy some, you know.”

The Canadian was young, tall, and thin, and was suffering from an acute case of pillow hair. Fragments of chips had gathered at either corner of his wide mouth. He was in the grip of the munchies, obviously. “Surely, dude. It’s totally wicked pot. We’ve got plenty — came down from Holland, man. It’s like so cool there, you know? You can just walk in off the street, have a cup of coffee, buy some ganja…” He patted the front pocket of his shirt slowly, his motor reflexes inhibited by the cannabis, and produced a packet of Marlboros. He flipped the top, extracted a large prerolled joint, and handed it to me.

I said, “Sweet, dude. Totally awesome.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying, let alone what I was doing. “What do we owe you?”

“You can have it, dude. Consider it like a present to a fellow traveler in the cosmos.”

“Thanks. Got a light?” I asked.

“Sure, man.”

The Canadian sparked it up with a disposable butane lighter. “Thanks,” I said again, turning away in a hurry.

“Dude, careful with the fire alarm,” I heard him say to my back as Masters closed the door behind me. The volume next door returned to the permanent-brain-damage range.

“What are you doing?” demanded Masters.

“With any luck, giving the frau downstairs a headache.” I glanced out the window. The NCMPs were stopping across from the pensione’s front steps to give a big “fuck you”—or whatever they say in German — to the traffic jam that would build up behind them. The Humvee’s doors swung open while the vehicle was still in motion and I watched a man hit the pavement at a run. The rear door followed and another man jumped out and bolted after the first. These boys were a little too keen to follow orders for my liking.

I took a massive drag on the joint and blew it at the ceiling. Nothing. I took a second drag and repeated the action. The smoke detector suddenly began to warble. The device was wired to a central alarm and the air was filled with an electronic scream, an earsplitting noise similar to the one I heard in Varvara’s apartment building.

I snatched my bag along with Masters’s hand and pulled her out the door and into the hall, the adrenaline charging through my system, overwhelming my fatigue and the injuries, and headed for the fire escape, a narrow chasm of a stairwell beside the elevator. As we passed the elevator, I saw that it had stopped mid-floor. The power to it had been automatically cut, temporarily imprisoning the occupants. With any luck, both MPs would be inside it, encased in darkness. I was thinking this as a middle-aged man came puffing around the corner of the stairwell, dressed in the uniform of an NCMP, a sergeant. No time to think. I dropped my right shoulder into his solar plexus. I hit him so hard the air hissed out of him like a slashed tire. He was not a big man and the encounter caught him by surprise. He sank to the floor, winded, his eyes wide with shock and his mouth open, gasping, hoping to find air but failing.

His partner coming around the corner had a little more time to react and was in the process of raising his pistol when I drove my elbow down into his chin. The shock wave generated by the blow rolled through his jawbone and exploded in the part of his brain that controls consciousness. His eyes rolled back in their sockets to look at stars and tweetie birds and he collapsed where he stood, his tongue lolling. I caught him by the front of the shirt as he went down so that he wouldn’t smack the back of his head on the concrete. I wanted him out cold, not dead.

I heard other doors opening into the fire escape as people began to make their way out of the building. The NCMPs would be found within half a minute. Three flights of stairs later, Masters and I opened the exit door out onto the narrow side lane where I’d been jumped the night before. “Where’s your car?” I asked.

“Blocked in.”

“What do you mean, blocked in?”

“The NCMPs. They’ve blocked me in.” Masters pointed at her Mercedes and the NCMP vehicle stopped beside it, the revolving electric blue light washing over its roof.

We started to walk quickly in the opposite direction, away from the pensione, as dazed and bewildered guests began spilling onto the street. A few hundred yards down the road, a pair of fire trucks peeled out of a side street, their sirens wailing. All the flashing and revolving lights danced over the vehicles and buildings and gave the impression that an emergency-services outdoor nightclub was in full swing. Meanwhile, the traffic situation was turning ugly as drivers stopped to gawk, no doubt expecting that the show might be improved upon at any moment by the appearance of naked flames suddenly leaping from upper-story windows or, better yet, people.

We kept walking, but not fast enough to attract attention. There must have been four MPs. The two I had seen jump from the Humvee before it stopped had taken the elevator; their pals had followed a beat later up the stairs. I didn’t feel good about putting two of our own people away, but it was necessary.

“What now?” said Masters.

“Where’s the nearest international airport?”

“Why? Where are we going?”

“Not we. Anna, this time you’re staying here. You’ve got to bring the German police up to speed and get those phone records. And we need surveillance on Harmony and Himmler…”

“Who?”

“Von Koeppen.”

“Okay, let’s assume for just a moment that I am staying here. Where exactly are you going, Cooper?”

“To check on the going rate for sex slaves.”