The Death Trust

FORTY-THREE

No erotic dreams accompanied my return to consciousness this time, though I had a pain in the back of my head equal to the worst hangover of my life.

I kept my eyes closed, none too eager to see what was on the other side of my eyelids until it was absolutely necessary. Whatever was going on, I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. The quality of the air, the occasional thump, the engine drone. I was in an airplane. The Pavlovian association of getting a rifle butt to the back of the head wasn’t going to help my flying phobia any, and just when I was getting used to flying again.

There was a shift in engine noise and various gear whines somewhere under my feet. The plane lurched. I opened my eyes and mouth. Two men in suits were seated opposite, both staring at me. The one who cuffed me before the lights went out smiled. He held up his wrist and gave it a waggle. I recognized my watch. Or more accurately his watch, now definitely his again.

“Nice fake,” I said, groggily. His smile faded. Fuck you, buddy. And thanks for giving me a look at the time. The man’s face was badly bruised where I’d smacked him with the brick, and a large bandage covered his nose.

The little hand was past the eleven and the big hand was coming up to forty minutes past the hour. My mind was working slow, like a ten-year-old’s, so only slightly slower than usual, the unkind would have said. The sky was black beyond the porthole. That made it 2340 hours. Genius. First mystery of the day or, rather, night, solved.

It hurt my brain to use it. I took in my situation in the hope of getting it kick-started.

It was difficult to move. I glanced down and found out why. My hands were still cuff-locked together and I was strapped down tight into a comfortable, expensive leather chair, or it would have been a comfortable chair if I’d been sitting in it attended to by a pretty flight attendant with a beverage cart. The plane was small and expensive, an executive jet. I wondered whose.

Apes dressed in Armani sat around me: two opposite, two in swivel chairs in what normally would’ve been the aisle, and one beside me. Another leaned against a bulkhead, looking at me with about as much expression on his face as a store dummy’s. So these were the asswipes who had jumped Masters and me in Baghdad, and then performed a little dentistry on me a day later outside the Pensione Freedom. I knew I’d meet up with them again. Someone break out a deck of cards; I felt like we were old friends.

I wondered which of them knew their way around a Barrett 50 cal. I wanted to tell them that they were dud shots, but they would have known the bravado was hollow, given that it was me and not them who was the prisoner here, wearing a bump on the back of his head the size of a dodo’s egg. I was plainly at their mercy, theirs and the person funding their fashion sense.

Where the fuck was I? Where was I being taken? How long had I been out? I decided to try to break the ice. “Have any of you guys got a mint?” I asked. “It’s either my breath or someone here needs a shower real bad. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s me,” I said, keeping it light. I got more response from the overhead locker. “So, where we headed?” One of the men reamed the inside of a nostril with his index finger and then flicked the harvest at me. He missed.

Aside from that, I got no other reaction. Ten minutes later I was getting so bored I almost cracked and gave up everything I knew. But then the plane jumped as it hit a thick layer of cloud and I remembered that I was flying rather than competing in some world championship silence competition.

I looked out the porthole, expecting to see the earth rushing up at some crazy, life-threatening angle, but all I got was more cloud, the wingtip strobe blinking metronomically as it sliced through the silver tufts. And then, just as I was about to look away, I saw the briefest flash of a city beneath. A big city. Again I wondered how long I’d been in the air. I also wondered why I was so threatening to these guys that they had to sit almost on top of me. I mean, it wasn’t likely that I was going anywhere or capable of doing anything very much, trussed as I was. I could maybe breathe at them aggressively, but that was about it in the retaliation stakes. It took me a while to realize the reason: I made them nervous, simple as that. I was a threat to these people and to whoever was pulling their strings. I was unpredictable. They’d tried to remove my piece from the board several times and failed. It was they who were scared of me. “Boo,” I said to test the theory. No reply. One of the men was asleep. Another yawned. On the other hand, maybe I was just blowing smoke up my own ass.

I closed my eyes and tried to get my thoughts in order. My last memory, and a hazy one at that, was of Harmony Scott’s liquor. I should have realized that she would call someone when she saw me in the garage snooping around. Even now, I still wasn’t completely sure where exactly Harmony fit into things. She’d given me the picture of a woman who’d lost the man she loved, felt him drift away, hating the way their marriage had turned out. I also saw her as playing a starring role in the manipulation of her husband — either willingly or unwillingly — over many years. And, of course, when it came to Peyton, she had ultimately shown herself to be self-absorbed and utterly heartless.

That brought me back to Abraham Scott. There’d been a lot of time between Peyton’s death, the taking of the body bag photograph, and his own “accidental” death in the glider. All up, a year. Why so long? Had the general discovered that the people-smuggling racket operating between Riga and Ramstein was not just about money used to finance Radakov’s separatists? I figured he’d discovered a bigger game, and he’d needed time to put it all together. So he kept a low profile, kept his nose clean. I was sure he’d uncovered the same cancer I had — the research into our trade with Japan and Russia were at least circumstantial proof of that.

The descent became rocky. The clouds played a vigorous game of shuttlecock with the plane, batting it up and down and sideways. Windshear. Rain droplets smeared the porthole. It was a shitty night in wherever. I heard the flaps fully extend as the motion played havoc with my Eustachian tubes. I was vomiting before I knew it, too fast for my friend fond of flicking boogers about the place to avoid the projectile bile heading toward his lap. Oops. Better out than in, pal.

An instant later, my face was stinging from a backhanded strike. I was tempted to explain that I didn’t mean it but I knew I wouldn’t be believed: Lies need conviction to stick.

I turned away. We were coming in low over the city. Air traffic control took us on a sightseeing tour. I could see a bunch of lights through the cloud, but the effect was like a sock on a bank robber’s face and I still couldn’t recognize the place through it. Suddenly a patch of clear night sky opened up below the wingtip. I looked down and saw clearly where I was. Familiar monuments lit up stark and white instantly nailed this city of empire. Christ, Washington, D.C.

Mystery number two cracked.

My heart began to pound. I felt it muscle up against my ribs, wrestling for space. D.C. That meant I had a very good chance of cleaning up this mess. Though, of course, shortly thereafter I would be dead.