I felt something brush my hand. It was the weasel. He’d managed to dock a syringe into the cannula on the back of my hand. He smiled. I shuddered. And then the lights went ou—
THIRTY-EIGHT
I was dreaming one of those dreams, the kind you never want to wake up from because this sort of thing never happens in reality. I dreamed I was lying in a warm bed in a dark room with sheets that were cool and crisp and smelled vaguely of soap. Masters was also in the bed, naked. I smelled her perfume and felt the warmth of her skin on mine. She stroked the sensitive spot behind my scrotum lightly with her fingertips, as her mouth moved rhythmically on me. I reached down and ran my hand through the softness of her hair, and tried not to come. This was our first time together and I wanted to hold on—I didn’t want to blow it, as they say.
I was aware that it was the Midazolam—had to be. Hadn’t Radakov said erotic dreams were a side effect of the drug? Yeah, he had said something like that. This was the kind of side effect I could get into. I remembered the cannula, the hideous smile, and, in drug-induced euphoria, I didn’t even cringe at the memory. That was all a bad dream. This was a good dream. I pushed the bad thoughts away. Anna was being very determined about bringing the situation between my legs to a conclusion. It was getting to the point where I wouldn’t be able to hold back. I started to get concerned about coming in her mouth and was about to say as much when…damn, too late. I opened my eyes.
Reality.
The last thing I remembered was the smell in the back of the truck and looking at—
“Hmm, so you like Katarinya now?” said a voice under the sheets.
I froze.
A head popped up from under the covers and a warm body climbed on top of me. She straddled me and I entered her involuntarily as her legs wrapped around me and she began to move her hips. “My turn,” she said.
Katarinya? The girl from The Bump! Jesus!
I pulled her off me and turned her so that she landed heavily on the bed beside me. After a moment’s hesitation, she said, “So you like it rough, yes? I can—”
“Shhh!” I said, putting my hand over her mouth. This was not what I wanted or, rather, who I wanted. I was completely disoriented. Had everything been a dream? The raid on the farmhouse, those bloody stumps where fingers used to be, the climb through the hills, the young girls bought and sold? I raced through my memory. How much time had passed? “What day is it?” I demanded. I looked at the face under my hand. Katarinya’s eyes were wide. I was scaring her. I didn’t care. This woman was part of Radakov’s bullshit. I hadn’t dreamed any of it, except maybe the part about Anna…
The last time this stripper had been in my room, Radakov’s thugs had come through the door, shot crap into my veins, and abducted me. That was not going to happen again.
The body in the bed beside me was getting nervous. She kicked me in the groin. My knee deflected most of the force of the blow, but enough of it connected to make me go fetal. I released her, dimly aware of her backing out of the bed and grabbing her clothes off the floor. Her ass flashed white in the darkness as she went through the door, slamming it behind her.
“Bye,” I groaned.
I waited for Radakov’s men to make an encore appearance, charging through the other room, but it remained dark and quiet. I snatched a glance at the clock radio. 0500 hours. I had no idea what day it was. How much time had I lost? The pain in my balls subsided to a dull ache and I could see straight again. In my mind, I apologized to Katarinya and Anna for the mix-up. I was innocent. If there was a guilty party here it was Radakov, or maybe it was inequality that was the real villain. Katarinya was probably no different from the two girls who had made the trip out of Grozny in the stinking truck. She’d probably left nothing behind in a small, dirt-poor rural town, only to have an empty life elsewhere—here.
The glow of the city beyond the window formed a thin blue halo around the drapes. It was the same room I’d checked into. I rolled out of bed and found my bag. Everything had been pulled out, but I couldn’t spot anything missing. I still had the general’s downloads, but that was all printouts, anyway—there were no originals, nothing worth stealing. I reached for my cell. I was tempted to turn it on. Anna would have left a message for sure, along with Brenda, Gruyere, and the fuck knew who else. I tossed it back in my bag. I’d connect when I returned to Germany.
I crawled across the carpet, cupping my testicles, and made it to the bathroom. I turned on the hot water and five minutes later slipped into a steaming bath. I lay there until the sunlight deposed the infiltrating neon of the street, mentally retracing my steps over the past week and a half.
I still had the Russian cab driver’s phone number, so I called it from a public phone in the hotel foyer. Fifteen minutes later, I opened the car door and climbed into a miasma of cigarette smoke. “You were right about The Bump,” I said, fastening the seat belt. “It sucked.”
“You Americans never listen. Where are we going?” he asked as we pulled into the traffic.
“The airport,” I said.
“Here,” he said, passing me a pink plastic drink bottle. “You look like you need this. Real Russian vodka. Better than the shit we export to the West. You can still taste the soil on the potatoes.” We swerved around a horse and cart and the former Red Army translator said something loud and no doubt unpleasant out his window at the ensemble.
“No, thanks,” I said, declining the offer of a drink. Aside from the fact that it was barely 0800 hours, I hadn’t eaten anything, and the nozzle on the bottle was chewed and unappealing. Ordinarily, though, none of this would’ve bothered me. I’d have taken a mouthful or two, and big ones, the reason being I had a plane flight ahead. But this time, I’d made the decision to face it without a crutch. I’d been flying a lot lately, and I’d noticed that not one of those aircraft had fallen out of the sky. The episode in the C-47 in Afghanistan, the flashing knives on the mountaintop, and the scorpions in my dreams were not so much receding as being replaced by more recent events. The reality of the suffering of the Chechen villager, his fingers ground into pulp and fed to him, was proving a powerful purge.
“Next time you come to Riga, you call. I show you real nightlife—even in the daytime,” promised my driver.
“Deal,” I said, although I knew I’d never be coming back to this place. I looked out the window and watched the city flash past in the rain. The weather was still cold and gray. It suited my mood. I wondered why Radakov had given me so much information. I was sure his original plan had been to kill me, but, for whatever reason, he’d decided not to go through with it. Instead, I’d been given facts enough to put some heavy people in front of a jury and seriously embarrass NATO. Was that why—because he had something against NATO? Or was it simply that Radakov admired and liked General Scott and was angry about what had happened to him? I knew his decision to let me go was connected to something else—this mysterious organization that kept cropping up: The Establishment.
Was it real, or the figment of a collective imagination, like the bogeyman or UFOs? At least I now knew who to question about it: my favorite widow. I’d asked Harmony Scott before about The Establishment, and gotten nowhere. Now, however, thanks to Radakov, I had new insight and my questions would have more bite.
The Russian slammed the brakes on at the drop-off zone at Riga International. “You sure?” he said, holding up the drink bottle and giving it a waggle. “You look like you need it.”
“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “Next time. What do I owe you?” We settled on an amount in euros, as I didn’t have any local cash. I retrieved a few notes, including a generous tip, from the crinkled ball in my pocket. I was getting low on funds, but it didn’t matter—I had enough to complete the job. I said good-bye and watched the Russian narrowly avoid an accident as he accelerated into the traffic flow, careless of anyone’s safety, including his own.
I didn’t have to wait long for a flight. The takeoff was tense, but when we didn’t stall and
plunge into the ground, I managed to loosen up a little—enough to skim through the general’s notes again and go over what I did know. When I got back to Ramstein, I’d be dropping a bombshell on the place and I wanted to make sure it hit the bull’s-eye.
I slept dreamlessly for an hour of the three-and-a-half-hour flight and woke up when the screws under my seat whined, signaling that the flaps were being deployed. I tried not to think about crash statistics that say the takeoff and landing phases of flight are the most dangerous, that altitude is a plane’s best friend and that we were fast losing ours. But we landed without incident and, twenty minutes later, I was walking through customs and into the terminal at Frankfurt International.
I passed a newsstand and stopped. From a poster for Der Standard, Germany’s equivalent of The Washington Post, a familiar face smiled out at me. It was Heinrich Himmler—my good buddy Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen. I picked up a paper and his face was all over it, and I recognized some of the photos from the wall of the Melting Pot. Damn, I thought, I was too late. The media had somehow run down the story. I couldn’t read German, so I picked up a copy of the Herald Tribune to see if they also carried the scandal.
I found it on page three. The headline read: “NATO General Dies in Car Accident.”
What?
The photo from the Der Standard poster ran alongside the article in the Trib. It was von Koeppen’s official head-and-shoulders shot; the general wore a comfortable, easy smile. It reminded me of the photo of General Scott. Both smiling, both very dead, neither smiling now. I read the brief accompanying paragraphs.
German Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen, acting commander of Ramstein Air Base, the vast NATO facility in southwest Germany, was killed two days ago when the car he was in slammed into a wall.
Witnesses to the crash said the vehicle failed to make a sharp turn and hit a roadside retaining wall head-on.
Police crash investigators have attributed the accident to brake failure.
The commander of Ramstein Air Base, USAF General Abraham Scott, died in a glider accident one month ago.
Also killed in the accident was the driver of the vehicle, USAF Special Agent Anna Masters.
THIRTY-NINE
I don’t know how long I stood there at the newsstand reading that article, but it was long enough for the guy who owned the store to tap me on the shoulder and give me the “buy it or move along” eyeball. I bought it.
Also killed in the accident was the driver of the vehicle, USAF Special Agent Anna Masters. Anna, dead? A car accident? Brake failure? Where this case was concerned, there were no such things as accidents. They were planned and executed. General Scott’s first wife, Helen Wakely, died in a car accident caused by brake failure. I felt a pain in my heart and a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.
I hired a cab and headed for Ramstein. I had just over three hundred bucks remaining of the original sixteen-hundred-dollar float. I thought about what I was going to do next as the autobahn flashed past. Anna, dead? No, it wasn’t possible. I saw her face, the freckles sprinkled across her nose, those blue-green eyes and her luscious hair. In the picture in my mind, she was smiling that smile of hers that lit up the room. Somehow, the motivation for pursuing this investigation had evaporated and all that was left of it were overwhelming feelings of exhaustion, loss, and helplessness. The tears streamed down my face. I hadn’t done that for a very long time—cry. Contrary to what I’d heard, it didn’t make me feel better. Anna had finally received the attention she believed she deserved. Someone had taken her seriously enough to kill her. What a fucking waste. The cab driver passed back a box of tissues.
In my life, I have seen a lot of death, but I’d never lost anyone I’d been in love with. Yeah, I was in love with Anna, and it was only at this moment that I realized it.
I asked the driver if he knew any good hotels in Kaiserslautern. I didn’t want to go back to the Pensione Freedom in case it was being watched. In broken English, the driver told me he had a brother-in-law whose father had a share in a tourist hotel in K-town. I had him drive me there, paid the fare in cash, and then went to a hotel a block down the road from the one he’d recommended. No, I wasn’t being paranoid; I was being careful—careful is paranoia with cause. On the way, I bought two bottles of my old buddy, Glenkeith, for company. I had a hundred and twenty dollars left—a hotel room for three nights, or two nights with food. I didn’t intend to do much eating.
I got to the room, pulled the curtains, stood in the shower an eternity, and then sat on the bed, naked, with the two bottles of booze clinking together beside me on the mattress. The Establishment had killed Masters. Why? Was it a warning to me? Was this the price of the knowledge Radakov had given me? If so, why kill von Koeppen too? I hadn’t a shred of evidence. There was so much in this case I couldn’t fathom and yet, at the same time, I knew the answers were staring me in the face. Maybe, if I’d been a little more attuned to them, Masters would still be alive. And while I was beating myself up about this, it occurred to me that she’d also probably still be alive if I could’ve convinced her to accept close protection.
I cracked open the seal on the first bottle and didn’t bother with a glass. I drank a third of it in one hit. It didn’t taste as good as I remembered, most probably Glen’s way of punishing me for ignoring him. Well, never mind, I intended to reacquaint myself over the next day or so. The heat hit my empty stomach like the angry bulls that chase those idiots down the streets of Pamplona, goring them, and went to my brain with the same nasty intent. Just what I needed.
I don’t remember too much from there on. When I woke, I had no idea whether it was day or night. Nor did I care. I took another shower, drank another third to take away the headache, and lay back on the bed and gazed unseeing at a spider that had made its web in a corner of the ceiling. I felt nothing, which is a good thing to feel sometimes, even though I was aware that I had no career left, nowhere to go, and no one to go there with. I was so drunk I didn’t care. I drank the remainder of the second bottle and said good-bye to another day. Or was it night?
I was snarled in the sheets with the two empty bottles. There was a sourness in my gut and vomit on the pillow. I had enough sense to know there was nothing left to drink and almost nothing left to buy it with, unless I used a credit card. That was always an option—a solution in itself: “Hey, you fuckers, here I am. Come get me.”
I raised my head and took in the room. It was a small box with a window that opened onto a brick wall and a nest of pipes evacuating sewage from the upper floors. Beside the bed was my overnight bag, open, the contents spilled onto the linoleum. I focused on the cell phone. There’d be messages on it. I couldn’t hide from them forever. I sat up and felt the hammers in my head go to work on the back of my skull. I reached for the cell with my foot and toed it toward the bed. I picked it up and hit the power-up button. The screen illuminated briefly, then turned black. The battery was dead. I caught sight of the charger and recovered it, again with my foot. Anna had been right about it coming in handy. I plugged one end into the wall socket beside the bed and the other into the phone and tried turning it on again. Second time lucky. The thing started ringing almost immediately. I pressed the receive button and the automated voice informed me that I had seven messages. I hit the button to begin receiving them.
The first two were from General Gruyere. She sounded as if she had something red hot probing an unfortunate place.
Next, surprisingly, was a message from Arlen Wayne, my last remaining bud, back at Andrews. He wanted to know what was up. “Heard a bunch of bullcrap that you gone AWOL, boy,” he said. He went on to reaffirm that he didn’t believe it but recommended that I get my ass back to where it goddamn belonged. Yeah, I thought, in a sling. Thanks, Arlen. I knew he meant well and it was nice to know someone cared.
Brenda followed with a couple of urgent requests to call her back. She had news and didn’t want to leave it in a message, she said. Nothing new there. S
he’d already told me that in the last score of rants deposited.
The next message got me sitting up, which gave the hammers in my skull something to get seriously angry about. “Vin,” Anna said. “Something has turned up here. We’ve got a lead on Scott’s expenditure. We found a receipt in his files. It concerns that missing week. It seems he booked himself a flight to the U.S.—Washington, D.C. This is the weird part: He could have taken a C-5 any day of the week, but he chose to pay cash, maybe for the same reasons you did—to keep the fact that he was moving around hidden.” There was a smile in her voice. “I guess this solves one of our little mysteries. Call back in when you can. I…I miss you—who’d have thought? Bye.”
I’d bitten my bottom lip hard and tasted copper flooding into my mouth. I missed her, too. And now I’d be missing her for good. Hearing her voice…it was like the photo thing, seeing someone you knew was no longer among the living, smiling out at you as if they were sharing some private joke with a punch line you didn’t understand. Hearing her speak was a voice from beyond.
The Death Trust Page 31
