“Perhaps they mistook us for allies.”
Kennedy almost smiled. “They lack the personnel or the floor space. They’re more worried about one of us communicating with the other prisoner. Either way, this is a rogue op. It’s small time.” His voice was now barely audible. “And as for the other thing...”
Lightholler stared at him questioningly.
The floor was dusty. Kennedy etched the outline of a circle in the dust and started to sketch a series of spokes coming out from beneath it. His crude rendition of the carapace. Lightholler stopped him at the seventh line. He nodded. Kennedy swept the image away. Lightholler mouthed, “Red Rock”.
Kennedy smiled. His voice was the soft est whisper. “They don’t know.”
He rose from the bunk, stretching. He let out a yawn and saw the agent looking at him. He winked back.
How had Patricia been dragged into this? She’d worked Evidence Response, sorted through forensics and surveillance photography. She’d worked the cold crime scenes where tapered yellow ribbon announced “Police line” and “Do not cross”. She didn’t pound sidewalks. She didn’t carry a weapon. So what was she doing here?
It might have been a year since he’d last seen her. Her purposeful, hurried steps had taken her away from the Houston Bureau offices. He’d wanted to call out to her, but had instead remained silent, craning his neck to prolong the vision.
And this morning, seeing her in the cell, he’d felt the same thing that he’d felt then. That swift movement in his chest, a sense of something being snared and released, and then just a dull grey ache that slowly faded to less than nothing. He wondered what was worse: her involvement, or the fact that her presence evoked a world he’d long thought lost.
She knew he had a third camp, but she didn’t know why.
He’d had to stop himself from commenting, from reaching out a hand to touch the side of her face.
Yesterday, emerging from the ambush site, Agent Reid had said, “Aren’t you at least going to tell her she’s looking good?”
Kennedy had said, “You’re looking good, Patricia.”
Then Reid had slapped on the cuffs and secured the blindfold. Kennedy’s last vision had been of a rueful smile playing across her face.
They were bundled into the back of the van and driven for what might have been half an hour. From there they had been transferred to an aircraft. They’d taken off and landed and been shifted to another vehicle. It had been done reasonably well. They’d been driven around for another hour or so before being led down a series of corridors to this cell.
Another prisoner had accompanied them for the last leg of the journey. He was now being held in the adjacent cell. Kennedy had whispered the name Shine, but received no response. Now all he could hear was the occasional sound of movement from next door.
The tactical agent rose from his chair. He sauntered over to the cell till his face was an inch away from the thick black bars. He eyed Kennedy casually and said, “Mazatlan, huh?”
“Among other things.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Kennedy smiled with the lower half of his face.
The agent reached through. He grabbed Kennedy’s shirt and forced him up against the bars, hard. Kennedy’s wound peeled open at the edge. The agent bared his teeth. “This is as pleasant as it’s going to be from now on, Major.”
“Hey.” Reid’s voice was a shout from the other end of the room. “Hey.”
The agent released him and Kennedy fell back with a stumble. The agent wiped a bloodstained hand against his trousers and walked back to his desk.
“You’ll have to excuse him, Major Kennedy.” Reid stepped up to the bars. “You killed his brother in New York.”
Kennedy went to the basin and ran the water. He checked his wound in the mirror and wiped at it with a damp towel. He said, “I haven’t killed anyone in weeks.”
“What about Nashville?”
Kennedy stared back at him vacantly. “Nashville?”
Reid snorted. He said, “This is going to be fun.”
Lightholler was out of his bunk. “When do I get to see an attorney?”
“Attorney?” Reid laughed outright. “Who’d represent you? The best deal you’re going to get is a blindfold to go with your bullet.”
Kennedy said, “What are you waiting for, Reid? What’s holding you back?”
Reid walked past the bars, his fingers a staccato caress against the metal. He moved out of view to stand before the adjacent cell. There was no sound from the other prisoner.
He reappeared after a moment and said, “I’m pacing myself.” He gave them both a mock salute before leaving the room.
Kennedy turned to Lightholler triumphantly. “They don’t know a thing.”
Lightholler’s face was drawn and pale. He said, “Where’s the journal?”
V
A rudimentary search of the room yielded no obvious recording device. She’d expected as much from the small prison, but the last few days had taught her that there was no such thing as “undue” caution.
There was a table and three chairs. A curtain was drawn over the two-way, and someone had left a magazine open on the table, but neither gesture convinced her that this was anything other than another interrogation room. She tried to picture Joseph seated across from her, one hand cuffed to the table, and her thoughts swept back to their earlier encounter in the cell. He was unshaven, wounded, he’d dyed his hair. He reeked of a variety of unpleasant odours. What had he become?
I’ll show you, Patricia.
What, Joseph? What could you possibly show me that might justify all of this?
He looked vulnerable. Mortal.
Captain Lightholler had undergone a startling metamorphosis himself. He’d shaved his head and looked more gaunt than any photograph had suggested. Aristocrat to thug in the space of a week.
These two men were the bane of the Confederacy?
She pulled the folder from her bag. As she placed it on the table, her eyes caught the various accessories she’d brought with her from city to city. Her fingers brushed the purse spray and the lipstick, the nail file and her house keys. She picked up her compact and examined it curiously, as if it were some artefact recovered from an archaeological dig. She flipped it open and looked at her reflection, angling the image this way and that.
She closed it, closed the bag and placed it on an adjacent chair. She opened the folder and sat down.
Here were the notes she had made back in Houston, the punch cards and the documents she had taken from her office. Her notes on Morning Star and the ENIAC print-outs. Here was her new life.
She thought about Joseph and the look on his face; about Reid agitating for her to make the call to Houston while the tac agent stood in a far corner of the room, smoking. She shook her head, wishing it all away.
Reid’s now-familiar step coursed down the hallway. She hastily slid her notes into the folder and placed it closed upon the table. She was already standing when the door flew open. She composed her face and said, “What is it, Agent?”
“Kennedy knows we haven’t told the director.”
“He can’t know that.”
“He knows.”
Reid scanned the room. His glance took in the two-way, the table, her folder; a stern expression crossed his face. He softened it and made his tone placatory as he continued. “You did great in Morning Star, Agent Malcolm, but this is going way too far.”
“I want a decent shot at him, and I want it without that tac agent breathing down my neck.”
“There’s only so much protocol I’m prepared to ignore. No more unsupervised communication with the prisoners.” Reid began pacing the room. “What the hell were you thinking anyway?”
“I’m close.”
“You’re too damn close. This ain’t your field and you know it. I call Webster and we have specialised interrogators down here in two hours. Hell, I should be doing it myself.”
“You wouldn’t know wha
t to ask.”
She returned to her seat without looking back at him and reached for the folder.
“And just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“That there’s something else going on here. Something that runs deeper than Camelot.”
“I’ve been saying that all along.” Reid’s face was a twisted scowl. “What I don’t want are any more unscheduled interviews. Tell me what you’ve got. I’ve held off calling the director, but my balls are on the line here.”
“You paint a pretty picture.”
Reid’s smile was a polite curl of the lips. “You’re not interviewing him alone. He’ll run rings around you. If you don’t want the tac agent, you’re stuck with me, and if you’re stuck with me I need to have some idea of what we’re looking for.”
“Fine.” She opened the folder and removed her notes. She began sorting through them, shuffling them like a deck of cards. He watched hungrily. She asked, “Did you ever hear anything about Director Webster’s involvement in Kennedy’s presidential campaign?”
“Just rumours, never proven.”
She tapped an envelope that lay on the desk beside her folder.
His eyes widened marginally. He shrugged it off and said, “Ancient history. What does it have to do with Camelot?”
“Motive.”
She handed him the files. She watched as he scanned the top page, a frown forming on his face.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked finally.
“As sure as I can be,” she replied. “There’s a third camp.”
Reid replaced her notes on the desk. He slid into a vacant chair. “Okay, so there’s a third camp.”
She eyed him incredulously.
“What?”
“A third camp, Reid. You went to Bravo, Carter’s at Alpha—why weren’t we told about the third one?”
“It might have been Kennedy’s deal on the side. Black ops. We’ve got Kennedy now, so we can deal with it.”
“These are from the director’s files. He authorised the transactions, not Joseph. An ancillary payroll index, but the names correspond to the codes from Camelot’s database.”
“Give me those.” Reid snatched back the notes.
She said, “A sample list of the personnel is on page six.”
“Arson, armed robbery, manslaughter, rape, murder one. Nice.”
“A thousand of them. They all rotated through 4th Mech-Cav, but none of them appear to have received any Special Forces training.”
“You went through all the records?” he asked coldly.
“I couldn’t check them all,” she replied. “I didn’t want to leave an obvious trail on the ENIAC.” She’d made herself as clear as she dared. The only person authorised to observe her computer search was the director himself. “Back in Savannah you told me, and I quote, ‘Those Alpha boys are a scary bunch of fuckers.’”
Reid smiled.
“What the hell do you call these guys then?” she asked.
“All of the instincts with none of the refinement,” Reid mused. His eyes, still on the list, narrowed. “They ain’t choirboys.”
“The camp was established within six months of Alpha and Bravo. No mention of any location. No memorandum issued from any office. All I have are the names and the numbers.”
“What did Kennedy say when you confronted him?”
“The allegation took him completely by surprise. Then ... he offered to take me to the site.”
“What more do you need? They were in it together.”
Malcolm thought she noticed the slightest tremor as he reached for his cigarettes. She said, “Here’s how I see it. Alpha and Bravo were training saboteurs and assassins. The third camp, let’s call it Omega, trains killers.”
“Semantics,” Reid replied, lighting up.
“Perhaps, but at first I thought the same as you, that Omega was an ace in the hole created by the director and Major Kennedy. I couldn’t determine their agenda, but I suspected that they were the only ones in the hierarchy who knew about it. When the major turned rogue, its existence became a liability justifying the director’s obsession with hunting him down. So the director builds a case against him on one side, assigns Wetworks on the other.”
“I can see how that might work.”
“That’s why I didn’t want the director to know we had him. Not yet at least.”
Reid’s curious expression soured under her gaze. “You didn’t want Kennedy to suffer an ‘accident’ before coming to trial.”
“That’s what would happen, isn’t it?”
“It’s in the cards,” he replied. “But every moment you keep this from Webster, you drag us down with Kennedy, and I can’t have that. So I’m going to ask you again: what the hell were you thinking?”
Half a minute earlier and she wouldn’t have been able to reply. It was a question she’d been asking herself all morning, fostered by the new intelligence that Joseph had unknowingly given her.
“I wanted the final print matches from Savannah. I wanted the major’s story.” Her words seemed to come from some other source, as if channelled. “Then I was going to contact the President’s Office, the Executive Department. Let them deal with the Bureau’s recent activities.”
Reid gave a low whistle. “Every time I come close to thinking I’ve got your number, you pull the rug out from under me...” His voice faded into thoughtful reflection. He drew deeply on the cigarette and said, “At first you thought the same as me. What did you mean by that?”
“I thought they were both in it together.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Major Kennedy doesn’t know about Omega.”
“Didn’t you just tell me that he offered to show you the site. What am I missing here?”
“I know him well enough to know that he had no idea what I was talking about. Whatever he’s up to, it has nothing to do with a camp of hired killers.”
“What was he offering to show you then?”
She thought about the desperate look on her prisoners’ faces. She thought about the money Joseph had skimmed and siphoned into a number of disparate charities. Call it guilt, call it blood money, call it insurance. She thought about Berlin and said, “I don’t dare imagine.”
Reid flicked his cigarette to the floor. “We have reasonable evidence that Kennedy was working with the japs, we have circumstantial evidence linking him to the Germans, and we have his own admission of the existence of a secret installation. We also have ballistics and prints placing him at the location of at least two murders in Osakatown. If you’re right about this—and, let’s face it, all we have here are a few names and your instincts—but if you are right, Omega camp is Webster’s baby and both of them have been running black ops. We’re screwed.”
Hearing him echo her fears gave them horrifying substance. She took the notes from his yielding fingers. “We never had this conversation.”
She felt ill. She’d hoped that sharing her burden might have brought some comfort, an end to her dread. Perhaps she had counted on some startling refutation, a lucid analysis that would have rendered all her theories useless. Instead, Reid had his face in his hands.
“Make your call,” she said. “Let’s just finish this.”
“Ballistics placed Kennedy at the two murders,” Reid repeated, looking up at her slowly. “Right?”
Malcolm nodded distractedly.
“Where are the rest of your notes? Where’s your stuff on Osakatown?”
“I’ve got that here.” Perplexed now, she reached for her folder and passed him the relevant pages. “I’m still waiting on the prints though,” she added, trying to muster some enthusiasm.
“I know.” He examined the documents carefully, running a fingernail down the scrawled lines. He asked, “Where’s your inventory on what we seized in Morning Star?”
“It’s all in lockup.”
“Not the stuff,” Reid replied gruffly. “The paperwork. Kennedy and Lightholler had two guns on the
m, didn’t they?”
“A Mauser and a Shingen.”
“Not a common handgun, the Mauser,” he murmured.
“Major Kennedy seems to favour them.”
“He does, doesn’t he.” Reid was becoming more animated. “Where did you record the serial numbers?”
She walked over to his side of the table, leafed through her notes, and pointed to where she’d documented her findings. He placed the page next to the Osakatown ballistics report. The serial numbers were identical. She looked back at him and said, “That’s impossible.”
“Could you have copied one from the other by mistake?” he asked.
She checked the dates. “No way. This is the first time I’ve looked at these notes in days. Maybe...” Her voice failed her.
“Jesus.” Reid shook his head. “Anyone who found Kennedy was screwed.” He chuckled softly. “It’s been a set-up from the word go. We never had a chance.”
“How could I not have seen this?”
“No one’s supposed to see it. The frame-up’s too obvious. There aren’t too many people who could engrave an existing serial number onto a new gun and plant it at a major crime scene.”
“Joseph never murdered anyone.”
“Not in Osakatown, at any rate,” Reid muttered.
Malcolm felt something shift deep within her; a growing sense of horror at the enormity of the director’s crime, counterbalanced by some new shred of relief. In this matter, at least, Joseph’s hands were clean. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to speak Webster’s name. “He ordered the deaths of eight agents, just to make certain the major was put away?”
“It’s starting to look that way.” Reid’s burst of vigour ebbed rapidly. “I wonder if he’d lose sleep over a couple more?”
She rested her hands on the table, leaning forwards next to him. “What can we do now?”
Reid pressed his palms together and put the fingertips to his lips. “I see three options.” He turned so he could see her face. “Hear me out. I’m just thinking out loud, okay?”
“Okay.”
“First option: we kill all three prisoners and deny ever finding the weapon. Come up with some sort of cover story.”
She told herself Reid was being pragmatic. She formulated a response and the coldness of her words astonished her. “The tac agents know what really happened here. We would never be able to sustain the story.”
The Company of the Dead Page 40
