The Death Trust

FORTY-ONE

Damn right, Flight Lieutenant,” I said, walking toward him, my heart pounding now for a different reason. “Let’s take it back to the vehicle. You trust the driver?”

“Yes, sir.”

Whatever Bishop had uncovered on General Scott’s hard drive I had no intention of sharing with Bohme, who was nosing around.

I recognized the man behind the wheel of the NCMP Humvee. It was the French guy, the refrigerator with the five o’clock shadow. He gave me a nod. Yeah, I could trust him.

Bishop climbed in the back. I followed. “Drive,” I said. We merged into the traffic.

“What you got?” I said as Bishop booted up the Toshiba.

“I haven’t looked. I wanted to get to you as quickly as possible. Keep in mind this last Dungeon level is the smallest cell of the lot. There’s not much in it.”

I nodded: “Bishop?”

“Sir?”

“Win, lose, or draw, I just want to say that you’ve redeemed your countrymen.”

“Thank you. I think…”

The screen came to life. Bishop double-clicked on the small castle icon and the screen fluttered, revealing the familiar pulsing bars alive with electric light. He mentioned something about algorithms with a fuzzy logic base while he tapped away at a succession of keys. Suddenly, the animated electrical pulse vanished and the bars fell away, revealing two small icons marked “File A” and “File B.”

I clicked on File A, which caused Acrobat Reader to load, and then the file itself. It was a JPEG of a passport, a Russian passport. I read the name. It was unfamiliar: Petrov Andreiovic. I recognized the face, though, and the recognition was like a slap across my own. “Jesus,” I said. Then I clicked on File B, which loaded another JPEG. The type was small, so I enlarged it. It was a paragraph in what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting. The paragraph was labeled “The First Convention.” I read the text, and, by the time I finished, I knew I was feeling the same dismay Scott felt when he read it. This was a betrayal of everything I believed in. No, worse than that. It was a betrayal of the only thing I believed in.

“Sir. You okay?” asked Bishop.

I must have looked like I was in shock. I sure as hell felt as if I was in it.

“Yeah,” I said. The experiences of the past month were beginning to make a crazy kind of sense. I now knew why there’d been so much killing, and why I had to keep myself alive long enough to pass this shit on to someone I could trust. The trouble was, right at that moment and with the exception of the people in the Humvee, I couldn’t think of anyone.

“Bishop, you have to drop me somewhere,” I said.

I was now familiar with the street, the way it curved languidly through manicured gardens and fountains. For more than sixty years, since the end of WWII, American officers and our NATO brethren had rented these homes embedded within expansive, genteel gardens. It was an affluent neighborhood. A power neighborhood. I wished I had a tank-mounted flamethrower so that I could burn it all to the ground. At the very least, I was going to bring one household crashing down. If not for myself, then for Anna. And for General Scott and his son, Peyton, and for all the others…

The Humvee pulled up at the head of the cinder footpath that led up to the familiar fountain. I noticed that it was dry today, like my throat. I cleared it — my throat — and got out. I gave Bishop some instructions, what to do with himself and the laptop and so on, then shook his hand. This was good-bye. He had to get a long way away from me — that is, if he wanted to keep on breathing.

I strolled up the path toward the fountain. The bronze dolphins and the warrior figures were wearing crowns of bird shit. I noticed that the once immaculate grounds were untended, a weed or two among the flowers. Decay had begun to move in here, happy to share the place with its other resident. I glanced across at the garage. The doors were open. If my theory was right, I expected to find something in there that I’d overlooked.

I slid between the doors, into the darkness beyond, and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust. It was cold in here, and dry. I smelled Scott’s Mustang: grease, leather, and age.

I knew what I was looking for, but I wasn’t at all sure where I’d find them, or even if I’d find them. I made my way across to the workbench to where I’d seen the photos that charted Peyton’s relationship with his father. Abraham Scott and his son, Peyton. One growing old, the other growing up. The pictures told their own story, but not necessarily the one I’d originally thought. When I’d first seen these pictures, something about them had bothered me. Eventually I’d worked out what that something was. I’d been satisfied with the revelation at the time, but only because I hadn’t then known what to look for. But now I did.

I went on a hunt for a trash can and eventually found several of them in the shadows, tucked under the far end of the workbench. I pulled out the first one and dragged it across into a shaft of pale afternoon light falling through a side window. I dug through the papers, sawdust, and various empty plastic bottles until I reached the bottom. Nothing. The same result with the second trash can. What I was hoping to find lay in the bottom of the third. I felt around with my fingers until they brushed it, and then I pulled it out. I wiped away the sawdust and saw a photo of a young Harmony Scott with a four-year-old Peyton, lying together on a carpeted floor with a model car between their smiling faces. I recovered seven more framed photos from the trash, moments in the life of a once happy family — Abraham, Harmony, and Peyton — that had at one time sat up on the workbench. Abraham Scott had, for some reason, purged them from the lineup of the other Kodak moments. I believed I knew what that reason was. In fact, finding these pictures, as I thought I would, confirmed a lot, and none of it was pleasant. I scoped the house across the lawn and saw Harmony Scott looking down on me from a second-story window, talking into a portable phone.