The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  He flashed a pencil light in my left eye and then my right. He told me to look up, then down, left and right, and asked me how many fingers he was holding up. I must have guessed right because he moved on to check my ears and throat. Masters appeared beside him while he continued the examination. She was wearing her best smile. Everyone was smiling at me. I must be in a bad way, I thought.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You took a hit,” Masters said.

  “How bad?”

  The doctor, having concluded his cursory examination, said, “You’re lucky, Major.”

  “Lucky” was a word I’d been hearing quite a bit, lately. It was the sort of word I grouped with winning the lottery, not with being mugged. “How lucky, exactly?”

  “Severe concussion, heavy contusions, you’ve lost a tooth, but—”

  “Lost a tooth?” I scanned my mouth with my tongue and, lo, the offending molar was gone. In its place was a space big enough to park a Winnebago.

  “The root was infected and the tooth probably needed to come out anyway. I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s amazing what they can do with replacements these days.”

  I could barely contain my excitement. The doctor was right. This was luck. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t. My arm was heavily bandaged and strapped against my chest and every muscle and joint protested loudly.

  “You’ve suffered pretty extensive bruising, but nothing’s broken. As I said, you’re lucky.”

  “You’re damn right, Doc,” I agreed. “Have you any idea how hard I’ve been trying to get that damn tooth taken out?”

  All things considered, I actually felt terrific. And I was almost giddy with relief at the thought of being free of toothache. “What about the guys who attacked me? I’d like to buy them a drink,” I said. I remembered the fight, the rain, and that something else.

  Masters said, “There were a couple of backpackers staying at your hotel, Vin. You owe them big-time. They were in a taxi, saw the fight, got the driver to flash his lights, honk the horn. Your attackers ran off.”

  “A couple of Canadian backpackers? Two males? Drunk?”

  “Yes to all three, as a matter of fact. How did you know?”

  “Just a guess. How long have I been out?”

  “Thirty-six hours, thereabouts.”

  “What?”

  Masters nodded.

  “You were hit pretty hard,” said the doctor. “We had you sedated for a while, but, for the last fifteen hours or so, you’ve been sleeping. Your body must have needed it.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “What have I missed?”

  “Plenty,” said Masters.

  “Could you help me sit up?”

  The doctor touched a button and the bed changed shape, bending in the middle, lifting my shoulders and head higher. The change in altitude made my brain throb.

  A nurse popped her head in, requiring the doctor’s assistance elsewhere. He told Masters he’d look in later and departed.

  I looked past the nurse and recognized an NCMP armed with an HK in the hallway—the bearded French refrigerator guy.

  “What’s with the guard?”

  “Guards—two men, round the clock.” Masters pulled a plastic bag from her briefcase and put it on the sheet over me. “Recognize this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We found it at the scene. As the man said, you are lucky, Cooper. That’s a Special Forces dagger. It wasn’t a random attack, and they weren’t after your wallet.”

  “I know. I also know who they were.”

  Masters raised her eyebrows. I had her attention.

  “They were the same men who attacked us in Iraq.”

  “What?”

  “One of them had a large white watch mark on his wrist. He’d lost his Rolex. Maybe someone told him I’d sold it on the black market in Baghdad and he was out for revenge.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sell it? No, of course not. But it did cross my mind.”

  Masters lit up the room with another smile, and then a thought occurred to her. “Could you identify them?”

  I tried to picture what they looked like—even just one of them—but couldn’t. I shook my head. “Be on the lookout for guys wearing ski masks.”

  “Is there any other way we could trace them? To get back here so quick—there are only so many flights in and out of Iraq…”

  “Yeah, but there are a lot of them and they’re full of soldiers, DoD contractors, private security personnel, diplomats.” That road led to nowhere. “It’s a dead end. What have you been up to?”

  “Lots,” she said. “Mrs. Scott’s back from the funeral. I’ve been trying to get her permission to have another look at the general’s records, but she’s not cooperating. She’s packing the house up for a permanent move back to the States. Also, I’ve been tracking down the people in Peyton’s squad. Ambrose was right. So far, they’ve all turned up dead.”

  We would catch up with the widow Scott later. “Tell me about Peyton’s men.”

  “You’ve never seen so many accidents. And because they’re scattered around the country, no connection has been made between them all. And Ambrose hadn’t made any noise about it.”

  “Who could blame him?”

  “Oh, and another thing. Abraham Scott’s first wife. Her name was Helen Wakeley. Died in a car crash.”

  “I was guessing house fire.”

  “Peyton was three years old at the time. He survived the crash.”

  “What? He was in the car?”

  “A bystander pulled him out as it caught fire.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Any investigation into the crash?”

  “No, but an eyewitness account suggested brake failure. The car went through an intersection, hit a truck, and caught on fire.”

  “This isn’t looking very good, is it?” I said.

  “For whom?”

  “Well, it could look as though Harmony Scott is involved in some kind of conspiracy involving the U.S. military that has been bubbling along for a very long time.”

  “And General Scott?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was about to let the cat out of the bag.” I pulled the covers off my legs with my good arm.

  “Where are you going?” asked Masters.

  “Back to work. Do you know where my clothes are?”

  “Yeah.” She opened up a cupboard and placed a clean, pressed ACU on the bed.

  “Anything gone from the minibar? What’s the checking-out procedure?”

  “Already signed you out, Special Agent.”

  “Am I that predictable?”

  “Yes.”

  The door swung open and the doctor came in. “Where are you going?”

  “I have a game of tennis.”

  He looked at me for a moment and decided against a protest. “Then I’d better get a nurse to cut away some of those bandages.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Doc.”

  The phone rang.

  Masters picked up. From the intensity of her expression, I gathered someone was telling her something exciting. She put the phone down.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “That was Bishop. He’s cracked into General Scott’s hard drive.”

  THIRTY

  The extended sleep had done me a world of good. I was sore in places I never knew I had places, but the exhaustion was gone. My brain was sharp and I was keen to kick some investigative butt. Whoever these assholes were, they’d had two cracks at us—me, in particular. It was clear that someone out there wanted me removed from the picture. In a way, that was reassuring. If Masters and I were heading down a blind alley on this investigation, no one would bother with us. But now we were on the clock, and it was ticking. Maybe next time there’d be no drunken Canadian backpackers wandering past to save my ass.

  I pulled the visor down and took a look at the face in the mirror. I barely recognized the person staring back at me. There was a deep purple-and-black shiner around my left eye, fadi
ng to sickly yellow around the other eye and cheek. The whites of both eyes, the left in particular, were flecked with blood. I peeled the dressing off the left side of my face. The skin was bruised, swollen, and split—mashed—but the injury was already beginning to scab over nicely. My face was also covered in small cuts and a suture or two. Anyone could see I’d been playing hard. I decided to leave the bandage off and let the wound breathe.

  I flipped up the visor. It was a gorgeous day. The fluffy clouds were back, pasted onto that baby blue sky. Ramstein looked as if it’d been washed and scrubbed clean. This being Germany, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it had been. The sun was out and behaving nice, saving its worst for Iraq, no doubt. I was real pleased to be back here, in this place, even if it wasn’t home, and that made me feel guilty. I could leave Iraq, but over a hundred thousand Americans there didn’t have that kind of freedom, unless they were zippered into a bag.

  A phalanx of U.S. Marines—a couple of platoons—jogged by in the opposite direction, their white T-shirts gray with sweat, a large black man chanting out a rap-style cadence. According to the man, they were basically off to “teach those Eye-rakis a motherfuckin’ lesson, ’cause it be the You-Ess Marines gonna do the messin’.” We drove past slowly. I couldn’t help feeling that young warriors have been going off to war like that since the Battle of Troy, convinced of their own bravery, invincibility, sense of purpose, and righteousness. I also couldn’t help feeling that Iraq would beat that piss and wind out of them pretty hard. They might have been some of the best-trained fighting men the world had ever seen, as their sergeant proclaimed, but Iraq was probably not what they were expecting. I wondered which of these men the Reaper had marked as his cut. Even the men who did manage to walk out would be changed in some deep and permanent way. Kosovo and Afghanistan had taught me that war rarely brings out a man’s best. Mostly, it brings out the worst, and, no matter how good you are, you find out that you have the bad in you. If you’re lucky, you discover that the balance between the two is about equal. But, whatever the ratio, the memories and the self-knowledge stay with you, poisoning your sleep with memories you wish you’d never had. I suddenly realized that Masters had been talking. “Sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”

  “I said, I’m a bit insulted that no one has tried to whack me.”

  “What…?”

  “As I said, I’m working this case, too. Why you while I’m apparently ignored?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Well…yes and no.”

  “Have you had a good look at me lately, Anna? Happy to swap if you like.”

  “Look, I am half serious about this, Cooper. All I ever wanted to be was an investigator in the military. That’s an offbeat ambition, I know, but that was always my dream. So now I’m here. What do I have to do to be taken seriously?”

  “You sure as hell don’t have to be shot or mugged,” I said. I turned to face her against my body’s better judgment, every muscle, sinew, and joint screaming at me to give them a break. “Okay, all bullshit aside, you are doing a great job. You ask good questions. You cut through the crap and you get to the heart of the problem damn quick. You did your job in Iraq when we were under fire. And you’ve made some fearless decisions when plenty of others would have turned chickenshit. You marched into Harmony Scott’s house and secured those records. I wouldn’t have done that. You’ve got balls, lady. You got this case off the ground.”

  We drove in silence for a minute or two. And then Masters said, “Thanks, Cooper.”

  “Now can we go find that Jacuzzi?” I said. I realized how far Masters and I had come when her smile didn’t fade.

  “So, have you spoken with General Gruyere while I’ve been sleeping in?” That was a call I was dreading having to make, but the boss was due an update.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” Masters said. “Is she as tough as she sounds?”

  “How did she sound?”

  “Like, like—”

  “Like she smokes cigars in bed?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “She’s a tough old buzzard, but I like her. More important, I respect her.”

  “Well, she said, basically, that you were a fuckup and that the minute you got back home she was going to pack you off to Eielson AFB, Alaska, to change traffic-light bulbs.”

  “We have a special relationship. Did she say when she wanted me home? Are there orders on the way?”

  “No, I updated her on the case. But she wants you to call when you’ve recovered sufficiently.”

  I nodded. That gave me plenty of room for interpretation. I could probably stretch it out to twenty-four, maybe even thirty-six hours.

  “Your cell’s in the console, by the way, if you want to check your messages.” Masters tapped the box between our seats.

  I hesitated. Who’d be calling? I ran my tongue in and out of the expanse left by my dearly departed molar. I’d handed out a few business cards. Could be a whole range of people, two in particular. What the hell. I took it out and fired it up. A few seconds after the thing made a connection, it began to chime. Once, twice, three times—four, five, six…I had half a dozen text messages and twice as many recorded messages. Several minutes later, I had ascertained that Brenda, my former wife, wanted to talk. Urgently. She didn’t want to say about what in a recorded message. No one else had called. I was secretly hoping one of the messages would be Varvara dropping me a line for old times’ sake, even though I’d told her to disappear but good. Number two on that list of fantasy calls was Fischer, von Koeppen’s PA. But no, every single one was Brenda. Twelve times. There was nothing I wanted to say to her that I hadn’t already said, and I couldn’t think of anything she could say to me that I’d want to hear. We were done. Finished. Over. Kaput, as I think they say in this country. At the very least, she could wait. I turned the phone off and dropped it back into the console as we pulled into the OSI block’s car spaces.

  “Everything okay?” inquired Masters as we came to a stop.

  “Yeah. The messages are from my ex.”

  “All of them?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You want some privacy to call her back?”

  “No.”

  “No, you don’t want privacy, or no, you’re not going to call her back?”

  Was it my imagination here or was Masters giving me a hard time? “No to both.”

  “A bit childish, don’t you think?”

  “Actually, I think it’s adolescent, which is a rung above childish.”

  Masters fixed me with a look, the one that says I’m placing you on the scales, buddy, and I’m thinking that you’re not measuring up right at this moment.

  “Special Agent, it’s all too close and the memories are fresh. And please, don’t tell me I have to let go of my anger, or any such New Age mumbo jumbo. I want to stay good and angry for a while longer.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” Masters said cheerfully.

  I got out of the vehicle, ending the conversation, moving with the athleticism of a tin man left out in the rain. The NCMPs standing guard on the front door saluted as we approached. Others, I noted, were patrolling the building’s exterior. I thought maybe the security was a bit over the top given that we were in the middle of Ramstein Air Base, but that was Masters’s call. I saluted back, trying not to wince with the discomfort the action induced.

  We walked into the room Masters had set aside for the investigation. It was more ordered than I remembered. The names I’d written up on the Whiteboard were untouched, but Masters had added substantially to the list, as well as setting out in bullet points the facts as we knew them. It felt like years since I’d been here, but it’d been days. Several people I didn’t recognize were hunkered over keyboards or speaking down phone lines. I recognized only one of them, Flight Lieutenant Peter Bishop, and his cheeks still reminded me of hamburger buns. He glanced up, snapped to attention in his seat—if that’s possible—hastily ended his phone call, and came o
ver.

  “Special Agent Cooper, welcome back,” he said, his eyes shifting to the various cuts, bruises, and abrasions on my face. “You’re looking a bit fragile. Can I get you a seat?”

  I wavered momentarily between the resentments of being treated like an old man, and feeling like an old man. In fact, I did want to sit, on account of I was a bit light-headed, and I consoled myself with the knowledge that having your brain pretty much batted out of your skull would do that to just about anyone. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Sit here,” he said, pulling a chair across, “and I’ll take you through what I’ve found.”

  I sat, making a supreme effort not to grunt like an old man as the weight came off my bones.

  “I’ve debriefed the team on what we uncovered in Iraq.” Masters motioned at the Whiteboard. Headlining the list was The Establishment.

  “Okay, as the computer program’s name suggests,” Bishop began, “Dungeon is a prison, but, in this instance, it’s a prison for information—the stuff you want to lock up and then throw away the key. Imagine concentric circles, a circle within a circle, each circle made up of fire walls.”

  I nodded.

  “As you get further in toward the center, the fire walls get thicker, more impregnable. It’s hard enough breaking into the first wall, let alone the subsequent walls of encryption. And, of course, to get into the center you need to break through all of the walls. These defenses take up a lot of hard-disk space. Dungeon is roughly five megs in size but the cells in this virtual prison are small—”

  Masters interrupted, perhaps for my benefit. “Which means…?”

  “Not a lot of room inside for information, ma’am. Also, the advantage of Dungeon, aside from each of its cells being almost impossible to break into, is that it can’t be wiped out or erased. The hard disk actually has to be physically removed from the hardware and destroyed. The information is kept safe, locked away from prying eyes and secured against all but the most determined attempts to see it or destroy it.”

  “No offense, Flight Lieutenant. If Dungeon’s so impregnable, how come you managed to break in?” I said.

  “None taken. I went to school with one of the chaps who wrote part of the program. He was most helpful.”