The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  Without looking up, the man used his chins to point me in the direction of Sergeant Fritz Bohme. Bohme. Bishop had given me the officer’s name. The detective was about forty, thin except for the basketball-shaped paunch pushing against the edge of his desk, with a badly chipped front tooth and a mouth that frowned so much it had lines at each corner giving gravity a helping hand like they were pulling it down. He was hunched over a laptop, the keys stained brown with use, stabbing at them with his “fuck you” fingers.

  “Sergeant Bohme?” I asked.

  He looked up from the keyboard, lifting an eyebrow. My ACU had the Stars and Stripes stitched to the shoulders and this told him not to bother speaking German. “Ja? Unt you are?”

  “United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations.” I badged him and moved right along, avoiding specifics such as my name and star sign. I wasn’t keen to give details, just in case they set off some kind of alarm. “I believe you’re heading up the investigation into the crash that killed one of our people, Special Agent Anna Masters, as well as the acting commander of Ramstein, Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen.”

  Bohme looked up at me and stroked his chin as if he had a beard, which he didn’t. “Correct,” he said, breaking the word into three syllables. Corr-ek-t. “You haff seen my report?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Like hell.

  “Unt how can I help you?” His manner suggested he’d rather I turn around and keep walking till I found the elevator and the front door shortly thereafter.

  The phone rang. He answered it. I looked around the floor while he chatted to someone in German. There was the usual collection of wanted posters pinned to the low gray cubical walls, mixed with portraits of wives and children. Pins for the bad guys, frames for the loved ones. Nests of used coffee cups were gathered on most desks along with paper, folders, the usual detritus of police work. Nothing to see here, people; move along. The sergeant hung up the handset as he chortled to himself. The call had changed his mood for the better. “My daughter,” he explained. “Getting married. To an accountant.”

  I felt like telling him that marriage was no laughing matter, but I let it go. The framed portrait photo of the woman on his desk told me he was married himself and therefore probably already aware of that. So instead, by way of polite preamble, I said, “Good choice. Those guys run the world.”

  “You vould like to haff a look at the wehicle?” he asked, standing up, now full of cooperation. Bohme wasn’t especially tall but he was thin, which gave the impression of height. In this job, some guys eat, some guys drink. He looked like he took all his meals in a tumbler with ice.

  “You read my mind,” I said. I hadn’t known exactly what I wanted to see when I came here. I was flying blind now, without support, checking my six for bogeys, as I’ve heard fighter jocks say. Maybe I just needed to see Masters’s purple Mercedes squashed into half its previous size before I believed that she had really gone. Yeah. It would be difficult, but I felt I had to do it, see it—just like Scott had to look inside the bag.

  “Follow me,” he said, weaving a path for me to follow through the open-plan wasteland. The elevator was busy so we took the stairs.

  “How did you know I wanted to look at the vehicle?” I asked as we passed a couple of overweight detectives—eaters—wheezing up the stairs, carrying cartons of takeout coffee and pastries.

  “I haff had many of you people here already vanting to see the wehicle. You’d sink your special agent and our general vere royalty, even Hollywood stars.”

  “He was,” I said.

  “Voz wot?”

  “Royalty. Von Koeppen was royalty. He was a count or something.” I couldn’t remember the details, except that Fischer, his secretary, had called him “a vain, supercilious cocksucker.” At least that had stuck. Fischer was a fine judge of character; although, in von Koeppen’s case, she was perhaps a little too reserved in her judgment.

  We walked out the building, down to the end of the street, and threaded our way through the traffic to the other side, heading toward a compound secured by cyclone mesh and razor wire. Inside were a large number of vehicles—cars, trucks, motorcycles, and even a yacht. Not all of these were smashed up, though most were.

  “Ve haff had an American general here, amongst others,” said Bohme as he signed us in. “Vot did you say your name vass?” he asked, pen poised over a space on the form.

  I knew this moment would come around sooner or later. I hadn’t given him my name. The question was, would I risk doing so now? If it came to it, I was confident of putting Fritz here away, but I’d be trapped inside this compound. There was only one way in and out. “Special Agent Vincent Cooper,” I said, risking it. He didn’t seem to react as I watched him scratch down my details with the ballpoint tethered to the clipboard by a length of dirty string.

  “That general who came here. Was it a woman?” I asked.

  “Ja. You know her?”

  “My boss.” So Gruyere was snooping around. What was she looking for? And on whose behalf? “Who else has come to see you about the vehicle?”

  He handed me the clipboard. I flicked through the entries made over the past couple of days, looking for names I recognized. Bohme’s had been entered on four separate occasions, and he’d been accompanied on each of those by officers whose names meant nothing to me. I smelled the DoD. I handed the log back to Bohme, who passed it on to the security officer sitting behind the window.

  The sergeant stepped onto the asphalt of the compound. I followed him as he walked around a badly mangled truck. Behind it was a vehicle I recognized. But it wasn’t the one I thought I’d be seeing. It wasn’t Masters’s purple Merc, but von Koeppen’s BMW sitting there squashed like a bug on a windscreen, the front end buckled under, the engine punched through the firewall into the space previously occupied by the front seats. The Beemer was unrecognizable scrap. No one could have survived such an impact. The lump in my throat returned. I hoped Anna had died quickly.

  “And you believe brake failure was the cause?” This was a new BMW. New BMWs did not have brake failure.

  Bohme caught my drift into skepticism and shrugged. “Yes. Zere vere no skid marks, no uzzer traffic inwolwed. The car failed to take a corner at speed. It crashed srough a vall, ran down a hill and hit a tree. No skid marks from either the BMW or other vehicles to indicate a collision or near collision.”

  “Were the brakes tampered with?” I asked.

  “Vee haff sent ze brake fluid avay to be analyzed, and ze brake master cylinder to BMW for tests. Ve vill know for sure in a veek. But I sink ze tests vill come back negatiff. As a policeman—one policeman to another—you get a nose for zese sings. My nose tells me zey vere lovers. I sink maybe she was giving him some love vith her mouth at ze time. It happens. Especially on ze autobahns here.” He added a knowing wink to this insight into Anna Masters’s last moments on earth. Bohme was telling me that Anna was no different from my ex. Was it that hard to swallow? Anna and von Koeppen had been lovers once. Maybe they’d decided to stoke up the fires. Had they gone for a little drive, for old times’ sake? The detective must have read something in my face, perhaps a reluctance to accept his hypothesis, because he added, “Accidents are accidents, vhere ze improbable meets ze probable.”

  The philosophy sounded like the sort you get from a fortune cookie. “When did it happen?”

  “Some time after four P.M.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “None.”

  Given the time of day, that was a bit odd, but who comes forward to help the cops these days? A sign of the times. “Have autopsies been performed on the occupants?” I said, keeping my voice devoid of emotion.

  “Yes, I belief so. Ze general who came to see me had ze bodies removed to Ramstein for zis.”

  I nodded as I fought the X-rated show playing out in my head. There could have been reasons why Masters was in von Koeppen’s vehicle other than Bohme’s theory.

  And then something occurred to me
. “The newspaper article I read said that Special Agent Masters was the driver of the vehicle.” This meant, of course, that her head couldn’t possibly have been below the dashboard making von Koeppen’s day.

  “Don’t beliff everysing you read, Special Agent.”

  Good advice. It also reminded me not to believe everything I was told.

  My mind fast-forwarded to Masters, laid out on a stainless-steel tray down in the bowels of the Landstuhl Medical Center, her fluids draining away, like the guy who’d been squashed by a tank, impervious now to Major Pierre Lamont’s good cheer. I was tempted to try to see her, and for the same reason that brought me here to view the wreck. Balanced against that, though, was the desire to remember Anna Masters as she was—the arguments for and against were familiar territory. The decisive factor was that I knew I wouldn’t get closer to the morgue than the front gate. The word was out that I was back in town. The Humvee’s arrival at my hotel earlier in the day proved that. No doubt the security posts had a photo of me next to bin Laden’s under a laser-printed headline that went something like, If you see these men, shoot first. And, of course, said photo would be pinned, not framed. No, going anywhere near Ramstein would be bad for my health-care provider.

  “Anything else, Special Agent?” asked Bohme, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Not for the moment, Sarge,” I said.

  “Vhere do I reach you iff somesing turns up?”

  I gave him my number so that he could contact my cell, which by now was bobbing around in the bowels of the local sewage works. Anything he could tell me later was too late. I didn’t have much time left before I began looking at life through a bunch of vertical bars. A day if I was lucky. An hour or two if I wasn’t.

  I signed myself out at the front gate and said good-bye to the sergeant and wished him luck with his daughter’s wedding, neglecting to add that I hoped she would beat the divorce statistics. I heard a gunned motor and scream of tires nearby. Suddenly a blue NCMP Humvee slid to a stop in a spray of loose gravel just beyond the gate, its rooftop blue emergency lights spinning. Time to go. I turned to run, but I knew it was hopeless. I was cut off from escape, unless I wanted to try my luck on the razor wire.

  The passenger door opened and a familiar officer jumped down. It was Flight Lieutenant Bishop, a satchel tucked under his arm. His feet hit the ground running. The security guard in his hut stuck his head out the door to see what all the noise was about.

  “Sir,” said Bishop before he reached me, puffing. “Cracked it.”

  “Cracked what?”

  “The Dungeon, sir. Level four. I figured you’d want to see what I found ASAP, if not sooner.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Damn right, Flight Lieutenant,” I said, walking toward him, my heart pounding now for a different reason. “Let’s take it back to the vehicle. You trust the driver?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Whatever Bishop had uncovered on General Scott’s hard drive I had no intention of sharing with Bohme, who was nosing around.

  I recognized the man behind the wheel of the NCMP Humvee. It was the French guy, the refrigerator with the five o’clock shadow. He gave me a nod. Yeah, I could trust him.

  Bishop climbed in the back. I followed. “Drive,” I said. We merged into the traffic.

  “What you got?” I said as Bishop booted up the Toshiba.

  “I haven’t looked. I wanted to get to you as quickly as possible. Keep in mind this last Dungeon level is the smallest cell of the lot. There’s not much in it.”

  I nodded: “Bishop?”

  “Sir?”

  “Win, lose, or draw, I just want to say that you’ve redeemed your countrymen.”

  “Thank you. I think…”

  The screen came to life. Bishop double-clicked on the small castle icon and the screen fluttered, revealing the familiar pulsing bars alive with electric light. He mentioned something about algorithms with a fuzzy logic base while he tapped away at a succession of keys. Suddenly, the animated electrical pulse vanished and the bars fell away, revealing two small icons marked “File A” and “File B.”

  I clicked on File A, which caused Acrobat Reader to load, and then the file itself. It was a JPEG of a passport, a Russian passport. I read the name. It was unfamiliar: Petrov Andreiovic. I recognized the face, though, and the recognition was like a slap across my own. “Jesus,” I said. Then I clicked on File B, which loaded another JPEG. The type was small, so I enlarged it. It was a paragraph in what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting. The paragraph was labeled “The First Convention.” I read the text, and, by the time I finished, I knew I was feeling the same dismay Scott felt when he read it. This was a betrayal of everything I believed in. No, worse than that. It was a betrayal of the only thing I believed in.

  “Sir. You okay?” asked Bishop.

  I must have looked like I was in shock. I sure as hell felt as if I was in it.

  “Yeah,” I said. The experiences of the past month were beginning to make a crazy kind of sense. I now knew why there’d been so much killing, and why I had to keep myself alive long enough to pass this shit on to someone I could trust. The trouble was, right at that moment and with the exception of the people in the Humvee, I couldn’t think of anyone.

  “Bishop, you have to drop me somewhere,” I said.

  I was now familiar with the street, the way it curved languidly through manicured gardens and fountains. For more than sixty years, since the end of WWII, American officers and our NATO brethren had rented these homes embedded within expansive, genteel gardens. It was an affluent neighborhood. A power neighborhood. I wished I had a tank-mounted flamethrower so that I could burn it all to the ground. At the very least, I was going to bring one household crashing down. If not for myself, then for Anna. And for General Scott and his son, Peyton, and for all the others…

  The Humvee pulled up at the head of the cinder footpath that led up to the familiar fountain. I noticed that it was dry today, like my throat. I cleared it—my throat—and got out. I gave Bishop some instructions, what to do with himself and the laptop and so on, then shook his hand. This was good-bye. He had to get a long way away from me—that is, if he wanted to keep on breathing.

  I strolled up the path toward the fountain. The bronze dolphins and the warrior figures were wearing crowns of bird shit. I noticed that the once immaculate grounds were untended, a weed or two among the flowers. Decay had begun to move in here, happy to share the place with its other resident. I glanced across at the garage. The doors were open. If my theory was right, I expected to find something in there that I’d overlooked.

  I slid between the doors, into the darkness beyond, and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust. It was cold in here, and dry. I smelled Scott’s Mustang: grease, leather, and age.

  I knew what I was looking for, but I wasn’t at all sure where I’d find them, or even if I’d find them. I made my way across to the workbench to where I’d seen the photos that charted Peyton’s relationship with his father. Abraham Scott and his son, Peyton. One growing old, the other growing up. The pictures told their own story, but not necessarily the one I’d originally thought. When I’d first seen these pictures, something about them had bothered me. Eventually I’d worked out what that something was. I’d been satisfied with the revelation at the time, but only because I hadn’t then known what to look for. But now I did.

  I went on a hunt for a trash can and eventually found several of them in the shadows, tucked under the far end of the workbench. I pulled out the first one and dragged it across into a shaft of pale afternoon light falling through a side window. I dug through the papers, sawdust, and various empty plastic bottles until I reached the bottom. Nothing. The same result with the second trash can. What I was hoping to find lay in the bottom of the third. I felt around with my fingers until they brushed it, and then I pulled it out. I wiped away the sawdust and saw a photo of a young Harmony Scott with a four-year-old Peyton, lying together on a carpeted floor with a model car
between their smiling faces. I recovered seven more framed photos from the trash, moments in the life of a once happy family—Abraham, Harmony, and Peyton—that had at one time sat up on the workbench. Abraham Scott had, for some reason, purged them from the lineup of the other Kodak moments. I believed I knew what that reason was. In fact, finding these pictures, as I thought I would, confirmed a lot, and none of it was pleasant. I scoped the house across the lawn and saw Harmony Scott looking down on me from a second-story window, talking into a portable phone.

  FORTY-TWO

  I banged the eagle-and-deer knocker several times and heard the resounding boom roll through the hallway behind the solid wood door. I waited impatiently for the sound of Harmony’s footsteps to follow. She knew I was waiting out here on her front step. I also knew she could care less. I tried the doorknob on the off chance that it was unlocked and was rewarded by the heavy door swinging inward on its hinges. I smelled Harmony’s perfume mixed with her brand of cigarettes and followed them to their source.

  The surroundings were familiar, the seventeenth-century gloom with its dark paneled walls and the stuffed shirts looking down from their heavy gilt frames. I found Harmony where I thought she’d be: close to the liquor cabinet. Indeed, she was seated on one of the Chesterfields, several glass tumblers on the low table in front of her along with a couple of bottles of Glenkeith, my brand, and a pile of used tissues. Dressed again in black and without makeup, she looked like an extra from a zombie movie. Her eyes were red from tears, alcohol, or cigarettes—I wasn’t sure which, although three packets of Salems were scattered on the table in front of her. Two of them were empty. A glass ashtray piled high with butts sat between the packets. She peeled the wrapping off the third pack, pinched out a cigarette, and lit it using the dying embers clinging to the filter smoldering between her lips. “I hate drinking out of dirty glasses. Don’t you?” she said, slurring her words, turning the d in drinking to a j. She dropped the butt in the ashtray and sucked on the fresh cigarette, pulling the smoke down into her toes, and blowing a blue cloud at the ceiling. Then she picked up her drink and polished it off.