The Death Trust

THIRTY-NINE

I don’t know how long I stood there at the newsstand reading that article, but it was long enough for the guy who owned the store to tap me on the shoulder and give me the “buy it or move along” eyeball. I bought it.

Also killed in the accident was the driver of the vehicle, USAF Special Agent Anna Masters. Anna, dead? A car accident? Brake failure? Where this case was concerned, there were no such things as accidents. They were planned and executed. General Scott’s first wife, Helen Wakely, died in a car accident caused by brake failure. I felt a pain in my heart and a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.

I hired a cab and headed for Ramstein. I had just over three hundred bucks remaining of the original sixteen-hundred-dollar float. I thought about what I was going to do next as the autobahn flashed past. Anna, dead? No, it wasn’t possible. I saw her face, the freckles sprinkled across her nose, those blue-green eyes and her luscious hair. In the picture in my mind, she was smiling that smile of hers that lit up the room. Somehow, the motivation for pursuing this investigation had evaporated and all that was left of it were overwhelming feelings of exhaustion, loss, and helplessness. The tears streamed down my face. I hadn’t done that for a very long time — cry. Contrary to what I’d heard, it didn’t make me feel better. Anna had finally received the attention she believed she deserved. Someone had taken her seriously enough to kill her. What a fucking waste. The cab driver passed back a box of tissues.

In my life, I have seen a lot of death, but I’d never lost anyone I’d been in love with. Yeah, I was in love with Anna, and it was only at this moment that I realized it.

I asked the driver if he knew any good hotels in Kaiserslautern. I didn’t want to go back to the Pensione Freedom in case it was being watched. In broken English, the driver told me he had a brother-in-law whose father had a share in a tourist hotel in K-town. I had him drive me there, paid the fare in cash, and then went to a hotel a block down the road from the one he’d recommended. No, I wasn’t being paranoid; I was being careful — careful is paranoia with cause. On the way, I bought two bottles of my old buddy, Glenkeith, for company. I had a hundred and twenty dollars left — a hotel room for three nights, or two nights with food. I didn’t intend to do much eating.

I got to the room, pulled the curtains, stood in the shower an eternity, and then sat on the bed, naked, with the two bottles of booze clinking together beside me on the mattress. The Establishment had killed Masters. Why? Was it a warning to me? Was this the price of the knowledge Radakov had given me? If so, why kill von Koeppen too? I hadn’t a shred of evidence. There was so much in this case I couldn’t fathom and yet, at the same time, I knew the answers were staring me in the face. Maybe, if I’d been a little more attuned to them, Masters would still be alive. And while I was beating myself up about this, it occurred to me that she’d also probably still be alive if I could’ve convinced her to accept close protection.

I cracked open the seal on the first bottle and didn’t bother with a glass. I drank a third of it in one hit. It didn’t taste as good as I remembered, most probably Glen’s way of punishing me for ignoring him. Well, never mind, I intended to reacquaint myself over the next day or so. The heat hit my empty stomach like the angry bulls that chase those idiots down the streets of Pamplona, goring them, and went to my brain with the same nasty intent. Just what I needed.

I don’t remember too much from there on. When I woke, I had no idea whether it was day or night. Nor did I care. I took another shower, drank another third to take away the headache, and lay back on the bed and gazed unseeing at a spider that had made its web in a corner of the ceiling. I felt nothing, which is a good thing to feel sometimes, even though I was aware that I had no career left, nowhere to go, and no one to go there with. I was so drunk I didn’t care. I drank the remainder of the second bottle and said good-bye to another day. Or was it night?

I was snarled in the sheets with the two empty bottles. There was a sourness in my gut and vomit on the pillow. I had enough sense to know there was nothing left to drink and almost nothing left to buy it with, unless I used a credit card. That was always an option — a solution in itself: “Hey, you fuckers, here I am. Come get me.”

I raised my head and took in the room. It was a small box with a window that opened onto a brick wall and a nest of pipes evacuating sewage from the upper floors. Beside the bed was my overnight bag, open, the contents spilled onto the linoleum. I focused on the cell phone. There’d be messages on it. I couldn’t hide from them forever. I sat up and felt the hammers in my head go to work on the back of my skull. I reached for the cell with my foot and toed it toward the bed. I picked it up and hit the power-up button. The screen illuminated briefly, then turned black. The battery was dead. I caught sight of the charger and recovered it, again with my foot. Anna had been right about it coming in handy. I plugged one end into the wall socket beside the bed and the other into the phone and tried turning it on again. Second time lucky. The thing started ringing almost immediately. I pressed the receive button and the automated voice informed me that I had seven messages. I hit the button to begin receiving them.

The first two were from General Gruyere. She sounded as if she had something red hot probing an unfortunate place.

Next, surprisingly, was a message from Arlen Wayne, my last remaining bud, back at Andrews. He wanted to know what was up. “Heard a bunch of bullcrap that you gone AWOL, boy,” he said. He went on to reaffirm that he didn’t believe it but recommended that I get my ass back to where it goddamn belonged. Yeah, I thought, in a sling. Thanks, Arlen. I knew he meant well and it was nice to know someone cared.

Brenda followed with a couple of urgent requests to call her back. She had news and didn’t want to leave it in a message, she said. Nothing new there. She’d already told me that in the last score of rants deposited.

The next message got me sitting up, which gave the hammers in my skull something to get seriously angry about. “Vin,” Anna said. “Something has turned up here. We’ve got a lead on Scott’s expenditure. We found a receipt in his files. It concerns that missing week. It seems he booked himself a flight to the U.S. — Washington, D.C. This is the weird part: He could have taken a C-5 any day of the week, but he chose to pay cash, maybe for the same reasons you did — to keep the fact that he was moving around hidden.” There was a smile in her voice. “I guess this solves one of our little mysteries. Call back in when you can. I…I miss you — who’d have thought? Bye.”

I’d bitten my bottom lip hard and tasted copper flooding into my mouth. I missed her, too. And now I’d be missing her for good. Hearing her voice…it was like the photo thing, seeing someone you knew was no longer among the living, smiling out at you as if they were sharing some private joke with a punch line you didn’t understand. Hearing her speak was a voice from beyond.

The messages kept coming and didn’t allow me time to stop and think, or get any more maudlin than I already was. Next I heard Bishop’s BBC voice, as formal as ever: “Special Agent Cooper, I believe Special Agent Masters has informed you of the movements of General Scott in the period after the death of his son, Peyton. We have the forensics report back on the bullet fragments recovered from the water barrels in Baghdad, and the helmet. We can confirm that the blood on the helmet and the hair and blood on the bullet fragments are from the same person. The blood type matches Peyton’s, but his was O positive, the most common blood type.

“From this evidence, sir, we can say with authority that the bullet went through the helmet and that the person wearing it received, in all likelihood, a fatal head shot. We just can’t be a hundred percent sure that the person in question was, in fact, Peyton, because we have nothing to compare the DNA sample with.”

“Hmm,” I said to Bishop’s voice. “Fair enough.” Given Dante Ambrose’s assertion that the helmet was Peyton’s, and that he’d seen the event in question, I was satisfied on that score — that Peyton had been shot in the head by the bullet whose fragments we had in our possession. Before DNA, this would have been enough to convince even the most cynical board. Bishop was just being careful and thorough, looking for loopholes, looking at the way an inquiry would consider the evidence.

“And something else has just now turned up, sir. We have a lead on one of General Scott’s downloads — those figures he’d been examining. We took a section of the numbers and got a few hours on a Cray computer to run a search on them. It seems they relate to the U.S. balance of trade with the Russian Federation over the last few years. Special Agent Masters believes he might have been looking for similarities with your — I mean, the U.S.’s — trading relationship with Japan in the thirties. As for the Dungeon, still no luck there, I’m afraid. The programmer concerned has not yet been located. That’s it for now, sir.”

Bishop must have called before Anna was — The computer voice informed me that I had one last message in the bank. “Cooper, I don’t know where you are or what you think you’re doing, but this is important. No doubt you’ve heard about General von Koeppen and Special Agent Masters. Things are happening that I can help you with. But only if you come in. Call now.”

Gruyere again, but, instead of ranting at me, she’d chosen a tone I’d never heard before in her voice. For starters, it contained not one swear word. Also, if I was not mistaken, Gruyere sounded scared. But was she scared for me, or of me? Interesting.

The voice informed me that there were no more messages and asked whether I wanted to hear them again, delete them, or save them. I deleted the messages from Arlen and Brenda, but saved the ones from Anna and Bishop, and that last troubled message from General Gruyere. Then I stared at the cell, and tried to get my hungover brain to think straight. After Peyton Scott was killed in Iraq, General Scott flew there to investigate his son’s death. He then went to Washington — obviously to see someone. The question now was, who? Then he went to Riga and made a deal with Radakov, the payment for which was the release of Varvara Kadyrov into his care. The blanks were filling in and I was starting to harden up a few theories of my own. The news about those figures representing recent U.S.-Russian trade was interesting, and scary. Was Anna’s hypothesis about them right? Were we setting up the Russians for something, manipulating them just like we did Japan nearly seventy years ago?

I replayed the messages in case there was anything I missed, or in case hearing them again might spark fresh thoughts, but I was incapable of either. All I got was the lump back in my throat when I heard Anna’s voice.

And then suddenly the cell jumped in my hand, vibrating and ringing and scaring the shit out of me. A phone number I wasn’t familiar with appeared on the screen. I considered not answering the call and screening instead through voice mail. For an instant, I even believed that it might be Anna. Maybe that’s why I thumbed the green button. “Hello?”

“Vince, is that you?” said a familiar voice.

My heart nearly blew a gasket. For an instant, I believed it really was Anna.

“Brenda,” I said, with far more enthusiasm than I intended — but I was still getting over the notion that the voice had been Anna’s. “What’s up?”

“Are you all right, Vince? I’ve had OSI all over me these last couple of days. All I could get from anyone was that you’d vanished.”

“Vanished? Nope, still here. Just out of curiosity, who gave you this number?”

“Arlen,” she said.

Arlen Wayne. I told myself to give him a big thank-you when I got home. If I got home.

“Where are you exactly?” Brenda persisted.

“Bren, you know better than that. Where are you calling from?”

“From home,” she said.

That would mean a landline. There was no doubt in my mind that it would be tapped by some particularly unpleasant people who were going to get a huge dose of bad karma coming back at them if there was any justice in the universe — shit, a couple of moments talking to the ex and I was thinking like a Deepak Chopra self-help tape again.

And then it occurred to me. They — whoever they were — wouldn’t need to tap the call; they could simply trace the cell on the network by triangulating the signal it emitted. In the U.S. that process took anywhere between eight and twenty minutes, depending on the size and strength of the network. What was the deal in Europe? How much time did I have? Did they also reach into the phone companies here? I’d been hit several times out of the blue while conducting this investigation. How had I been found, unless, of course, the mysterious they knew where to look? During those incidents, the cell I’d been given by Anna had been turned on only for brief periods — not long enough for the networks to get a fix. Had a GPS marker been placed in the cell to give an instantaneous fix when the unit was powered up? That could explain the rapid ability the bad guys had for picking up my scent. Or should I seriously think about changing my brand of deodorant? Anna had given me the charger along with the cell. The question I was now asking myself was whether that had been an innocent decision on her part. Or had she wanted me to keep the cell charged up so that it and the person holding it — me — could be located immediately?

And while I was thinking around in paranoid circles, I thought about Anna. She’d been killed in an accident with von Koeppen. I knew they’d been lovers. Had it really been over between them? Jesus, too many questions, not enough answers.

“Vince! Did you hear me?”

“I’m sorry, Brenda. What did you say? It’s a bad connection.” I had to end this call and get as far away from the cell as possible. And fast.

“No, Vincent. There’s nothing wrong with the connection, not the phone line’s connection, at least. You’ve always had a problem being in the here and now — with me.”

Here we go, I thought. “Brenda, you’ve caught me at a bad time. I have to go. What’s your news?”

“I just told you. You are unbelievable! You weren’t even listening!” A big all-suffering sigh followed. “I said, Lucas and I are getting married.”

Silence.

“So?” she said.

“So what? What do you want me to say?”

“So what do you think?”

“What do you think I’d think?” Both of us could see where this was leading. And now I could sense Brenda wanted out of the phone call as much as I did. Like I said, what did she think I’d think? She was marrying Colonel Lucas Blow Job, relationship counselor — the amoral fuck who was telling me I was a bad husband while he was boning her. The memory of that moment, walking in on them, brought back the anger.

“Vince, be happy for us. Be happy for me.”

“I’m ecstatic for you.”

She didn’t miss the sarcasm. “Vincent, you and I — we were over long before Lucas came on the scene. You know that. I just want to be happy. I loved you, Vince, when we met. Remember? And it’s because I remember how I felt about you that I want you to be happy, too.”

I closed my eyes. Yeah, I could remember those days, and she was right: We had been happy. But somewhere along the road the understanding between us had just…dissolved. And that was no one’s fault, was it? It just happened. The silence and the tension between us now had a life of their own, self-perpetuating. I realized that I was angry at her simply because I was angry at her and for no other reason that I could think of. Everyone had a right to happiness. Even Brenda.

“I love Lucas. He loves me. And we’re getting married. I just wanted to be the one to tell you rather than one of your jerk-off air force buddies.”

I didn’t know what to say to fill the silence that followed, so I didn’t say anything.

“You’ll meet someone, Vince. One day, you’ll meet that special someone and know we did the right thing.”

The right thing. The right thing? Once, not too long ago, a comment like that would have lit my short fuse. But now, all I was thinking about was Anna, because I’d met someone special, too, and now she was gone and I might never clear up the questions in my head. “Brenda, I have to go.”

“Okay, but can you do one thing for me?”

“What?”

“Wish me happiness.”

It was a good wish. As far as wishes went, happiness was the star at the top of the tree. Brenda had managed to catch me in a moment of susceptibility. So she wanted me to wish her happiness. It was a small thing, but I could also see that it was everything. Personally, I didn’t think she had — what was that unlucky guy’s name? Buckley? Yeah, I didn’t think she had Buckley’s chance of finding happiness with the colonel, but to each their own. And, all of a sudden, my anger was gone. “Yeah, I wish you happiness, Bren.”

“You mean that?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks. Bye, Vin. And Vin?”

“Yeah?”

“Be safe.”

“Thanks.”

Be safe—what the troops in Iraq said to each other before going out on a mission to get themselves ripped apart by IEDs. Kind of appropriate given what I had ahead of me. “You, too.” I hit the red button first, killing the call, then turned the cell off. I walked unsteadily to the toilet, vomited into the bowl, and then dropped the cell in after it. I didn’t know how much time I had, but valuable seconds were slipping away.

Civvies, or battle dress uniform? I threw on the ACU, the one Anna had found for me, before we went into Iraq. Minutes later I walked out of the hotel with my overnight bag, taking the emergency exit out the back. I walked around the block, across the street, and staked out the front of the hotel.

I didn’t have long to wait. An NCMP van wove through the traffic with its siren off but its blue light flashing and screeched to a dramatic stop opposite, outside the hotel. The doors flew open and four men jumped out. They sprinted into the hotel with their hands on the butts of the pistols on their hips.

I gave myself a small pat on the back for trusting my own instincts and walked down the street and around the block until I found what I was looking for — a bank of pay phones. I checked the number in my notebook, fed some loose change into the slot until the light went green, and dialed the number.

It picked up after a few rings and a familiar voice said, “Flight Lieutenant Bishop.”

“Peter. Vin Cooper,” I replied.

“Jesus, sir!” The Brit instantly switched to a whisper. “Everyone’s been worried. You’ve heard about…about—”

I cut him off. “Give me your cell number.”

“Sir?”

I repeated the request and got what I asked for. I wrote it down. “Can you get to a pay phone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long will it take you?”

“Five minutes, max,” he said.

“Go there now. Take your cell. I’ll call you again in six.” I ended the connection and glanced at my watch.

While I waited, I bought a pastry from a street vendor to feed the animal gnawing at my stomach wall and watched the mothers with strollers as they wheeled their newborns and toddlers about in the bright midday sunshine. These people breathed the same air, occupied the same sidewalks, but our worlds were a universe apart. Summer had arrived early, banishing the indecision of spring. Even the smog from the passing traffic had a fresh tang to it. It was a beautiful day, but there were black clouds boiling up on the horizon — at least, there were in my world.

The alcohol fog had lifted and Bishop’s earlier recorded message invaded my thoughts. Those figures, column after column of them, page after page. I still had a copy of them in my bag. So, they represented our balance of trade with Russia? What the hell was going on there? Was Scott really expecting to find a parallel between our relationship with Moscow in this new century and our behavior toward Imperial Japan in the last? From his notes, I gathered that Scott believed the U.S. deliberately got Japan hooked on oil and steel, the raw materials of war, allowing it to pursue its aims on the Chinese mainland. And then pulling the trade rug out from under the Rising Sun, forcing it to head down through Southeast Asia and seek raw materials there.

And why would we do that when it would cost so many American lives to put the genie back in its bottle? To raise the standard of living back home a couple of points?

Hmm…

Six minutes were up. I went back to the pay phone and dialed Bishop’s cell.

“Sir,” said Bishop. “I’m here.”

I was taking a risk with the Brit. Could I trust him? Could I trust anyone? What choice did I have? And, if Bishop was what he appeared to be, was I risking his life by contacting him? Again, I had no choice. He was probably a marked man, anyway. The only chance we both had lay in my ability to break open this case, and as fast as damn well possible, before anyone else got themselves murdered.

“Call back on this number,” I said, reading out the digits on the pay phone. I ended the call. A handful of seconds later, the phone under my hand bleated.

“What can you tell me about the crash? About Anna?” Somehow I succeeded in keeping my voice even.

“Special Agent, what’s going on? The word is you’ve deserted.”

In my best command tone, I said, “I have not deserted. As for what’s going on, I don’t exactly know.” Here, I faltered. I needed Bishop’s cooperation and I’d get more of it, and with more conviction and urgency, if he knew what I knew. So I told him. Not all of it. I withheld any mention of The Establishment — what did I really know about the organization, or even if there was an organization of this name? I still had no concrete evidence of its existence. I also avoided giving him the name of Radakov’s contact at Ramstein. But I gave him enough. When I’d finished, the line was silent. “You still with me?” I said.

“Sir, that’s…”

“Flight Lieutenant, I’ll say it again. You still with me?” My meaning was different the second time around, but Bishop got it.

“Yes, a hundred percent.”

“Okay. What can you tell me about Anna?”

“All I know is that she was killed in a car crash with General von Koeppen. The local civilian police force here in K-town is handling the investigation — it happened on their turf. I haven’t seen the report. It has been classified.”

Why was I not surprised? “Do you know why Anna was with von Koeppen at the time?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

“Can you give me a name of someone in the police I can talk to, and an address?”

He gave me the details and I scribbled them in my notebook.

“What about Scott’s hard drive? Any developments there?”

“No. The programmer of the final level’s proving difficult to track down. But I’m working on it.”

“Have you talked to Captain Aleveldt?”

“Yes. It’s as you suspected. He said von Koeppen asked him, as General Scott’s friend, to keep an eye on him after his son died, and to let him know how he was getting on. I believe Aleveldt. I don’t think there was any sinister intent there. Also, we tracked down the aircrews on those Riga flights, sir.”

“And?”

“Over the six-month period before Peyton’s death, there were sixty-three flights to Riga. All crews have been accounted for except for three who flew those six suspect flights. I don’t know how they did it, but the crews identified as having flown those flights never existed, sir.”

I wasn’t surprised — I’d expected as much. “Good work, Peter. So has a replacement stepped into von Koeppen’s shoes yet?” Small though they are, I neglected to add.

“We’ve got an RAF air vice marshal in temporary command of the base.”

“What about at OSI?”

“Oh, right. You wouldn’t have heard.”

“Heard what?”

“Your boss is here. I’ve heard you refer to her as ‘the big cheese’—”

“Gruyere?”

“Yes.”

“What’s she doing?”

“I’m not sure, but I think she’s preparing the handover.”

“The handover? To whom?”

“To another group of investigators.”

“From?”

“Rumor has it your DoD.”

Shit. Those fuckers. So much for the myth. I had seriously run out of time.