Masters and I didn’t have a lot of time. I stuffed the postcard in a back pocket and headed down the hall to the room next door. I thumped on the thin door panel, loud enough for the noise I made not to sound like part of the racket being played on the other side. The volume went down and someone called out, “Who is it?”
“Your neighbor.”
Something bumped against the door and then a voice said, “Oh, sorry, dude—we’ll turn it down.”
“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to thank you.”
The door opened. I recognized one of the young men I’d seen, what seemed an eternity ago, staggering drunk and laughing hysterically under the weight of his pack. “Hey, you’re the army dude, right?” he said.
“Air Force,” I said.
“Sweet. We just wanted to help, you know?”
“Yeah, thanks a lot. I’m glad you came along when you did. It was a close call. Hey, is that weed you’re smoking in there?” I said, cutting to the chase.
“Um, no, it’s um…”
“It’s okay, man. Me and my lady friend wondered if we could buy some, you know.”
The Canadian was young, tall, and thin, and was suffering from an acute case of pillow hair. Fragments of chips had gathered at either corner of his wide mouth. He was in the grip of the munchies, obviously. “Surely, dude. It’s totally wicked pot. We’ve got plenty—came down from Holland, man. It’s like so cool there, you know? You can just walk in off the street, have a cup of coffee, buy some ganja…” He patted the front pocket of his shirt slowly, his motor reflexes inhibited by the cannabis, and produced a packet of Marlboros. He flipped the top, extracted a large prerolled joint, and handed it to me.
I said, “Sweet, dude. Totally awesome.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying, let alone what I was doing. “What do we owe you?”
“You can have it, dude. Consider it like a present to a fellow traveler in the cosmos.”
“Thanks. Got a light?” I asked.
“Sure, man.”
The Canadian sparked it up with a disposable butane lighter. “Thanks,” I said again, turning away in a hurry.
“Dude, careful with the fire alarm,” I heard him say to my back as Masters closed the door behind me. The volume next door returned to the permanent-brain-damage range.
“What are you doing?” demanded Masters.
“With any luck, giving the frau downstairs a headache.” I glanced out the window. The NCMPs were stopping across from the pensione’s front steps to give a big “fuck you”—or whatever they say in German—to the traffic jam that would build up behind them. The Humvee’s doors swung open while the vehicle was still in motion and I watched a man hit the pavement at a run. The rear door followed and another man jumped out and bolted after the first. These boys were a little too keen to follow orders for my liking.
I took a massive drag on the joint and blew it at the ceiling. Nothing. I took a second drag and repeated the action. The smoke detector suddenly began to warble. The device was wired to a central alarm and the air was filled with an electronic scream, an earsplitting noise similar to the one I heard in Varvara’s apartment building.
I snatched my bag along with Masters’s hand and pulled her out the door and into the hall, the adrenaline charging through my system, overwhelming my fatigue and the injuries, and headed for the fire escape, a narrow chasm of a stairwell beside the elevator. As we passed the elevator, I saw that it had stopped mid-floor. The power to it had been automatically cut, temporarily imprisoning the occupants. With any luck, both MPs would be inside it, encased in darkness. I was thinking this as a middle-aged man came puffing around the corner of the stairwell, dressed in the uniform of an NCMP, a sergeant. No time to think. I dropped my right shoulder into his solar plexus. I hit him so hard the air hissed out of him like a slashed tire. He was not a big man and the encounter caught him by surprise. He sank to the floor, winded, his eyes wide with shock and his mouth open, gasping, hoping to find air but failing.
His partner coming around the corner had a little more time to react and was in the process of raising his pistol when I drove my elbow down into his chin. The shock wave generated by the blow rolled through his jawbone and exploded in the part of his brain that controls consciousness. His eyes rolled back in their sockets to look at stars and tweetie birds and he collapsed where he stood, his tongue lolling. I caught him by the front of the shirt as he went down so that he wouldn’t smack the back of his head on the concrete. I wanted him out cold, not dead.
I heard other doors opening into the fire escape as people began to make their way out of the building. The NCMPs would be found within half a minute. Three flights of stairs later, Masters and I opened the exit door out onto the narrow side lane where I’d been jumped the night before. “Where’s your car?” I asked.
“Blocked in.”
“What do you mean, blocked in?”
“The NCMPs. They’ve blocked me in.” Masters pointed at her Mercedes and the NCMP vehicle stopped beside it, the revolving electric blue light washing over its roof.
We started to walk quickly in the opposite direction, away from the pensione, as dazed and bewildered guests began spilling onto the street. A few hundred yards down the road, a pair of fire trucks peeled out of a side street, their sirens wailing. All the flashing and revolving lights danced over the vehicles and buildings and gave the impression that an emergency-services outdoor nightclub was in full swing. Meanwhile, the traffic situation was turning ugly as drivers stopped to gawk, no doubt expecting that the show might be improved upon at any moment by the appearance of naked flames suddenly leaping from upper-story windows or, better yet, people.
We kept walking, but not fast enough to attract attention. There must have been four MPs. The two I had seen jump from the Humvee before it stopped had taken the elevator; their pals had followed a beat later up the stairs. I didn’t feel good about putting two of our own people away, but it was necessary.
“What now?” said Masters.
“Where’s the nearest international airport?”
“Why? Where are we going?”
“Not we. Anna, this time you’re staying here. You’ve got to bring the German police up to speed and get those phone records. And we need surveillance on Harmony and Himmler…”
“Who?”
“Von Koeppen.”
“Okay, let’s assume for just a moment that I am staying here. Where exactly are you going, Cooper?”
“To check on the going rate for sex slaves.”
THIRTY-THREE
Masters and I argued for a couple of minutes about whether she should come with me, and then, once she agreed to stay behind, whether or not she should stay in close company with a protection squad. She insisted she didn’t want to give the impression that she’d been intimidated. And, as the violence seemed to have been centered on me, it was a no to close protection. But she could see why we needed to split the team. Begrudgingly. There was plenty to get on with back at the ranch.
I was pleased I wasn’t operating a vehicle, rental or otherwise. Not driving around in something with my name all over it made me feel like a smaller target. Cabs would do just fine. Part of me felt I was being overly paranoid; the other half—the half that had been shot at and mugged by the Rolex gang—thought the half that wasn’t paranoid needed to have its head examined. It also occurred to me that I might possibly have the same mind-set General Scott had had after his son was murdered. Was I not on exactly the same road to the same destination, and going possibly to ask the same questions?
Masters interrupted my thoughts. “You’ll need cash. And you’d better take this.”
“What is it?”
“A charger for the cell. You’ll need it.”
I opened my bag and she dropped it in. Then I cupped my hands and she filled them with assorted small-denomination notes and coins.
“That cleans me out, I’m afraid. A little over a hundred euros, plus change. Don’t spend it all
at once,” she said playfully. I hailed a cab. As it pulled up beside us, I squeezed her arm and promised I’d be back in a couple of days. I climbed in and closed the door. I wanted to kiss her, bury my nose in the soft chocolate folds of her hair, but I was way too tough for that. Actually, more truthfully, I was afraid of rejection, afraid that we’d had our moment and that it had passed, never to return. I looked back as the cab pulled away and saw her wave at me, the image filtering through a film of dirt across the rear window. I knew damn well I should have kissed her, taken the risk.
“Stuttgart Airport, thanks,” I told the driver.
“Stuttgart Airport?”
“Yeah, Stuttgart Airport, Stuttgart. It’s a little town about ten klicks south of Heidelberg.” I knew that because Anna had told me where to go, and how far.
“I know vere it is,” he said. “A long vay. At least sewenty kilometers.”
“Can we stop at an ATM somewhere? I’ll need to get some money.”
“You don’ need cash. I take credit.”
“I hate credit,” I said.
The driver shrugged. I opened the window to get some air.
He drove a block and a half and stopped in front of a building made from huge black granite blocks, no doubt intended as a metaphor for the bank’s permanence. The street in front of the bank was empty except for a tall, skinny kid with a grimy face and elaborate tattoos up his forearms, who I doubted was one of its customers. He wore a fluorescent T-shirt and pushed a broom with a small roll of grit and paper in front of it. He didn’t look up as I crossed his path. I accessed the hole in the wall and cleaned out my savings account, which amounted to the sum total of twelve hundred euros. I had thirteen hundred euros altogether—a little over sixteen hundred U.S. dollars. It wasn’t a lot, but it would have to do.
The NCMP guys I thumped in the stairwell would be making a report right about now. A soldier gone AWOL wasn’t exactly a fugitive, but this case was weirding me out some. How energetically would I be pursued? I didn’t want anyone except Masters knowing where I was going, and credit cards would leave a trail. Masters was sure no one had seen her come up to my room—the frau had apparently not been in attendance in the lobby—and I was sure no one had seen her leave with me. She was in the clear, although, being my partner, some mud would undoubtedly stick. Her Mercedes was outside, but she could always claim I’d borrowed it.
I climbed back into the cab. A short while later we were on the autobahn heading east. Signs flashed by announcing the distances to Ramstein AB, Worms, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Stuttgart. I reached into my bag and dug around for the cell phone. I found it and turned it off. I didn’t want another call from Gruyere. And there was also the risk that Brenda would start phoning again—and that I could definitely do without.
The adrenaline was leaching out of my muscles, leaving them and me even more exhausted than we’d all been before. But I didn’t want to go to sleep, not yet. I wanted to store up the fatigue till I got on the plane. I wondered what I’d managed to pack before the hasty exit. Placing the phone on the seat beside me, I turned on the ceiling light and dug around in the bag. I found a toothbrush, two pairs of underpants—both of them dirty—a clean ACU and one pair of dirty socks. I’d have to buy some clothes. There was also the folder of printed material. I sorted through the contents. There was the printout detailing U.S. exports to Imperial Japan prior to WWII; a similar set of figures yet to be identified; a fat file on the new range of weapons our government was currently developing; a breakdown on U.S. military spending and the overview of defense-industry payments to senators and congressmen; a report on the sex-slave trade; a one-hundred-page brief on the history of the recent wars Moscow had waged with secessionist Chechnya; the OSI report on the theft of three hundred CAC cards; and a black-and-white laser print of the body bags lined up behind a C-130. At the bottom of the pile was a photo of the OSI Whiteboard at Ramstein on which we’d written thirty-two names, most of them united by an untimely death. I stared at the list headed by the title The Establishment. The question running through my head pretty much said it all: What the fuck was going on here?
It suddenly occurred to me that Abraham Scott, being a four-star, pretty much had the highest security clearance possible, yet most of his information had been downloaded from the Internet. From that, I drew three conclusions. One: Scott didn’t believe he was getting the whole truth in the official assessments he received. Two: he didn’t want anyone to know he had an interest in the topics he was researching. Three: a combination of points one and two.
I picked up the print of Scott’s photo of the body bags and examined it again under the ceiling light as we sped down the autobahn. “This must have really pissed you off,” I said quietly. By you, I was referring not to Abraham Scott but to his father-in-law, the VP, Jefferson Cutter, who’d written to the general about the photo’s appearance in The Washington Post. Cutter knew enough about me to recommend me to Gruyere as the lead investigator into the death of his daughter’s husband. So…how much did Cutter really know about me? He must have known that I’d been shooting myself in the foot so much over the past year that I was practically walking on stumps. Was it possible that I’d been chosen because he thought I’d fail? I looked up and blinked a couple of times. Was that possible? Did Jeff the Cutter pick me because he wanted what the record suggested I was: a broken-down fuckup who would pretty much guarantee the murder of his son-in-law would end up in the freezer with all the other cold cases? For some reason, that line of logic seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense than the other possibility—that the Vice President thought I was a fine, outstanding special agent whose impeccable record showed him to be a loyal, dedicated, and tenacious investigator who wouldn’t give up till the truth was uncovered. Actually, I knew guys like that. With the occasional exception, they were poor investigators. My theory here was that they were unable to see the flaws in themselves and so were unable to recognize them in others. They investigated cases by the book and took too much of what they found at face value. But then again, having flaws, I would think that.
It made sense, on the surface at least, that a wife would want to see her husband’s killers brought to justice. Yet that picture didn’t fit my image of Harmony Scott. Was she her father’s daughter? Were father and daughter two peas in a pod? It’s not often a major gets to feel sorry for a four-star general but, surrounded by laser printouts and dirty underwear, that’s exactly how I felt as I tore down the autobahn at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour.
I am one of the world’s rare human beings who can read without getting carsick, which was just as well because I had a lot of it to do. Seventy kilometers later I knew pretty much everything there was to know about those super-smart weapons systems Scott had been checking out, the ones making a big hole in that $2.3 trillion expenditure on the military. I knew about the new Boeing AH-64D Apache Longbow helo and how it can detect and classify one hundred and twenty-eight more targets and hit four hundred percent more of them than the AH-64A. I also knew about the new Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66, the first helo to employ stealth technology; about the F-22 Raptor, the new aircraft that makes obsolete every other fighter jet deployed by every other air force in the world; I knew about the new day/night version of the Harrier Jump Jet, the II Plus (AV-8B). I was brought up to speed on the new Joint Strike Fighter, as well as on the new A-10 Thunderbolt II, the new Tomahawk missile, and the new ABL YAL-1A Attack Laser mounted on the nose of a modified Boeing 747-400. I read up on the new Predator unmanned aerial vehicle that can stay aloft over a battlefield for sixteen hours before having to land and refuel, and I caught up on the new C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane, the troubled Tiltrotor V-22 Osprey, the new Sea Shadow Stealth destroyer, the new Javelin shoulder-launched missile, the new M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank, the new M6 Bradley Linebacker fighting vehicle, and the new nonlethal Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System that fires a beam of electromagnetic energy at people, causing them extreme pain. I also boned up on the
new Line-of-Sight Anti-Tank missile, a radical kinetic energy missile with no warhead, that does the job simply because it slams into its target at five thousand feet per second. New. New. New. New. All of it cutting-edge, high-tech stuff. And, of course, all of it hugely expensive.
The thrust of the material Scott had downloaded was that the funding of these programs was the result of pressure on Congress applied by the giant defense conglomerates—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and others—combined with the willingness of individual senators and congressmen to keep the weapons’ production lines in their own states humming along with new products coming down the pipe. So, military technology is big business—tell me something I don’t know, I said to myself. Still, the facts and figures made fascinating reading. I dug around for the paragraph that had stuck in my mind:
The U.S. accounts for more than 34% of the world’s military spending. The next biggest spender is NATO, one of the biggest customers of U.S. military technology and getting bigger as it absorbs new members, all of whom must then make their military contribution to the whole.
And from whom did they buy the military hardware with which to make this contribution? Uncle Sam, of course.
Interesting as the report was, I still had no idea why General Scott found it so. I watched the passing lights whip past, the illumination from the glowing white and orange balls diffused by water vapor condensed on the taxi’s window. I wondered what Masters was doing. If she had any sense, she’d be tucked up in bed. If I had any sense, I’d be tucked up beside her. Or on top of her. The cab’s headlights lit up the overhead sign and the suggestion that the left lane should be taken for Stuttgart Airport. The driver flicked the turn signal.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in a largely vacant airport. I went to the Lufthansa counter, it being the only one still staffed at this hour. I asked about the next flight for Riga and was told it departed at 0700 the following day. I must have looked beat because the next bit of helpful information volunteered was that I could get a room at the nearby F1 Hotel. Rolex time said 2300 hours. Sleep was the best suggestion I’d heard in a while. I said thanks and went off to find another cab to take me to the hotel. A short while later, I rented a small box on the ground floor. I brushed my teeth and then stripped. The bump on my head had gone down but the dressing on the wound in my arm was crusty and black with coagulated blood. I removed it and found that I’d pulled a couple of stitches out, but the others had held and the bleeding had stopped. It looked ugly, but I’d live. I climbed between the sheets and closed my eyes.
The Death Trust Page 27
