The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  “Depends on whose dirt it is,” I answered.

  Frowning, she seemed to consider that for a second or two before giving up. “Well,” she said, “you want a drink or not?”

  I was way past playing the puritan. “Single malt over ice,” I said.

  She studied me for a moment, then said, “Well, what do I look like? Your servant? Glasses are over there.” She gestured at the liquor cabinet with a tilt of her head. “You can get me a fresh glass and ice while you’re at it. I hate drinking from a dirty glass.”

  Yeah, I know.

  I went to the cabinet and organized a glass for myself and for Harmony, adding rocks to both. “When did you tell your husband?”

  “Tell him what?” she asked.

  “About Helen. That her death wasn’t an accident.”

  “You think you’re so goddamn clever.”

  That’s something I’ve always hated about rich people, though maybe hate is too strong a word. It’s the assumed superiority that seems to accompany a hefty bank balance. More money, more brains. No money? Well, you must be a half-wit. With Harmony Scott, this feeling had been refined. She oozed with the presumption that those without wealth and position were less than human—Neanderthal, maybe.

  “When did Abraham find out that, for most of his life, he’d been played?”

  Harmony’s reaction was to pour herself a couple of additional fingers and toss them down, and from a dirty glass. And then she began to cry. “They killed him,” she blubbered.

  “Who? Your husband?” I asked.

  “Wolfgang,” she said. “They killed my Wolfy.” She ripped out a tissue from the box and held it to her nose.

  That caught me by surprise. Had the target been von Koeppen and not Anna? Was Anna just collateral in the hit on the general? It had been his car. Somehow that made her death worse, like it was just bad fucking timing.

  “I loved him. I loved him and the bastard had him killed,” she sobbed.

  I wondered whether that love was genuinely reciprocated by von Koeppen. He supposedly had a preference for young women and, given his extracurricular interests, plenty of opportunity to have that particular thirst slaked. Perhaps he really did love her. He might have had the dream of uniting his vaguely royal German blood with that of a patrician American family. The man certainly had the ego for such a plan.

  Tears streaked Harmony Scott’s face. I’ve seen some bad shit in my life but, for some reason I’ll never understand, I’m not immune to a woman turning on the waterworks. I didn’t want to feel sorry for Harmony Scott, but that’s what I felt. I let her cry and poured myself a drink, supersizing it. Throughout this investigation, a mysterious “they” had often been referred to—the so-called Establishment. Harmony’s mention of “the bastard”—an individual—was a first. I pretty much knew who she was referring to although I thought I’d ask, if only to get her to say his name.

  “Who are you talking about, Mrs. Scott? Who had General von Koeppen killed?”

  That seemed to sober her up a little. Harmony Scott blew her nose, took another sip of her drink, put it down, and then wrung a wad of tissues between her fingers. In the ashtray, three cigarettes burned. This was someone under intense pressure. “Do you intend to charge me with anything?” she asked, dodging my questions. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  She was a civilian and, as such, outside the jurisdiction of the Uniform Military Code of Justice. Under civilian statutes, she could be charged with being an accessory to murder, or perhaps conspiracy to murder, but those were nuggets a civilian investigator would have to consider. And, besides, I was after a much bigger fish. “Whether you call a lawyer or not is up to you, Mrs. Scott, but, you being a civilian, there’s nothing I can charge you with. I’m just here to ask you some questions, clear up a few things—that’s all.”

  She nodded, her red, swollen eyes a long way off.

  I repeated my earlier question. “When did your husband realize that his first wife had been murdered?” I knew it was within the past sixteen months: That’s when those photographs had been removed from the workbench, and from Scott’s study.

  “Cooper, I’m going to give you some history. I’m only going to give it to you once. I’m also going to deny I told you anything. The only reason I’m speaking to you at all is that I want my own revenge, and not just for Wolfy’s death. I’ve been used my whole life. When I was in my twenties, I went to the White House to meet the Soviets, before their house of cards came down. There I met a handsome major, a widower with a young son. His wife had been killed in a car accident and I guess he was just about getting over the loss. Back then, I was considered beautiful. I was also promiscuous, and single. I seduced him. You know, we fucked in the Rose Garden. Can you believe that? Back then, surveillance wasn’t quite what it is today.

  “It was only years later I realized I’d been sent there to meet the man I would marry. I’d been preconditioned to be attracted to him. My father had told me about this young air force officer who would be at the party and how he was being groomed for great things, that I needed to be careful with him—protective—because of the tragic loss of his wife. I knew he was a fighter pilot. And, let’s face it, when you’re a twenty-something party animal, who would you rather meet, a war hero who could fuck all night, or a bunch of old Soviet drunks who spent their time in Washington bouncing between hookers and vodka?”

  I didn’t answer. Harmony lit another cigarette to join the others still smoldering in the ashtray, and stood, teetering like a building in a violent earthquake. She steadied herself against the armrest on the couch, then set off on a wobbly circuit of the room, bleeding cigarette smoke.

  “You might not believe it, but Abe and I got married because we were in love. And I loved his son, Peyton. We moved to Moscow, where Abe continued his tour at the U.S. Embassy there. Just as my father had said, my husband was being groomed for the top. Promotion followed promotion, Abe’s star hitched to his father-in-law’s wagon. When Peyton turned eighteen, he joined the marines. He went in at the bottom, against his father’s wishes. That he even wanted a military life went against my wishes.

  “As for Abraham and me, I don’t know when things began to fall apart, but it happened fast. We went from post to post and maybe the soda just went flat.”

  Yeah, I knew what she meant.

  “Some of the fault was mine. I got bored. By the time Abe received his fourth star and took command here, we were distant acquaintances living in the same house. And then things started to go seriously wrong between us. He said he’d come to the conclusion that his first wife had been killed to make way for me. He also said he was going to launch an investigation, that Ramstein was being used in a people-smuggling racket, and that he was going to find out who was responsible.”

  “And then Peyton was KIA,” I said.

  “Don’t interrupt,” she snapped. “Yes. Peyton was killed.”

  “Were you seeing von Koeppen by then?” I asked, ignoring the demand.

  She answered with her silent stare.

  I’d had about enough of Harmony’s fairy tale. She needed to know the facts.

  “Wolfgang von Koeppen was smuggling women from the East—countries like Russia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states—into western Europe,” I said. “He dealt in human misery, Mrs. Scott. Either your husband figured it out, or someone tried to enlist him in the scheme, possibly even von Koeppen himself.”

  “No.”

  “Your boyfriend dreamed up bogus missions in Riga, Latvia, and sent NATO C-one-thirties there. On the return flights, these aircraft brought back women. Many of them were subsequently sold into the European sex trade as slaves.”

  Harmony was shaking her head, as if she was trying to keep my voice from reaching her ears.

  I continued. “They were given ACUs and CAC cards on arrival at Ramstein and hustled off the base. Somehow, your husband found out about that. He threatened to have it stopped and was told to lay off, or else. He wouldn’t. And then
Peyton was KIA in Iraq. Only it was murder and your husband knew it was murder. He knew it because you told him.”

  “No.”

  “You were the messenger.”

  “Enough!”

  “How did you break the news to your husband that his son had been murdered, Mrs. Scott?”

  It suddenly dawned on me that she might have had some tangible proof.

  “You showed him the original autopsy report, didn’t you?” I said. The shame written on Harmony’s face told me I was right. An autopsy in accordance with U.S. Army practices in Iraq had indeed been performed on Peyton Scott’s remains. It had then been subsequently erased on the DoD’s system, despite Captain Blood’s assurance that such an action was impossible. But a hard copy of the report was in existence, and this woman had it.

  “Your husband had to be certain. There was no other way. He had to look into Peyton’s body bag.”

  She shook her head.

  “Was it worth it, Mrs. Scott? Was the love you shared with von Koeppen worth losing your humanity for?”

  “Peyton was dead. Nothing I could do would bring him back.”

  I could feel my own heart rate rising with anger, indignation, and a little fear. I was in the presence of someone who’d traded her soul with the devil for a relationship that was doomed.

  “General Scott went to Iraq, to the hospital there,” I said, “to talk to the men your stepson fought alongside, and to question the medical officer whose name appeared on the autopsy report that stated Peyton had been killed by a mine. And then he went to Washington, to see your father.”

  Harmony Scott pinned her trembling hands between her knees to get control of them. “I’m not saying anything more,” she insisted.

  “Fine. Happy to continue uninterrupted,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” Harmony replied, her eyes sliding in and out of focus, her fury ebbing and flowing.

  “Are you going to show it to me?” I asked.

  She replied, “Show you what?”

  “The autopsy report, the original one performed by someone who wasn’t already dead. The one documenting that Peyton Scott, sergeant, USMC, had been decapitated.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because you’re leaving now.”

  “I am?”

  Her eyes slid from me to the door behind me. I heard the slightest noise, or maybe it was the faint change in air pressure across the hairs on the back of my neck. She’d been on the phone. Who had she called? I turned and saw a man I recognized kneeling on the floor. He was wearing army ACUs, the European pattern. Against the brown walls, his camouflage made him stick out like a pork chop in a vegan’s soup bowl. The silenced M4 carbine he had aimed at my head made me decide to keep my mouth shut about the pork-chop thing. Four other men also armed with silenced M4s swarmed past him into the room. They checked it out quietly and efficiently and then came straight for me, and it was not to shake my hand. One of them gestured with a flick of his rifle that I should put my hands up. I obeyed and he cuff-locked them together, tight. The soldier who did this had a face that reminded me of a road still under construction. That’s what happens when you get hit with the ancient karate brick-in-the-kisser move, one of my personal favorites. I remembered the moment in Baghdad and savored it. Whenever I met these guys, they put me in the hospital. I knew that was a professional disappointment to them, on account of their intention having always been to put me in the morgue. I felt the rifle butt, then watched an explosion of white and orange fireballs inside my skull. Good night.

  FORTY-THREE

  No erotic dreams accompanied my return to consciousness this time, though I had a pain in the back of my head equal to the worst hangover of my life.

  I kept my eyes closed, none too eager to see what was on the other side of my eyelids until it was absolutely necessary. Whatever was going on, I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. The quality of the air, the occasional thump, the engine drone. I was in an airplane. The Pavlovian association of getting a rifle butt to the back of the head wasn’t going to help my flying phobia any, and just when I was getting used to flying again.

  There was a shift in engine noise and various gear whines somewhere under my feet. The plane lurched. I opened my eyes and mouth. Two men in suits were seated opposite, both staring at me. The one who cuffed me before the lights went out smiled. He held up his wrist and gave it a waggle. I recognized my watch. Or more accurately his watch, now definitely his again.

  “Nice fake,” I said, groggily. His smile faded. Fuck you, buddy. And thanks for giving me a look at the time. The man’s face was badly bruised where I’d smacked him with the brick, and a large bandage covered his nose.

  The little hand was past the eleven and the big hand was coming up to forty minutes past the hour. My mind was working slow, like a ten-year-old’s, so only slightly slower than usual, the unkind would have said. The sky was black beyond the porthole. That made it 2340 hours. Genius. First mystery of the day or, rather, night, solved.

  It hurt my brain to use it. I took in my situation in the hope of getting it kick-started.

  It was difficult to move. I glanced down and found out why. My hands were still cuff-locked together and I was strapped down tight into a comfortable, expensive leather chair, or it would have been a comfortable chair if I’d been sitting in it attended to by a pretty flight attendant with a beverage cart. The plane was small and expensive, an executive jet. I wondered whose.

  Apes dressed in Armani sat around me: two opposite, two in swivel chairs in what normally would’ve been the aisle, and one beside me. Another leaned against a bulkhead, looking at me with about as much expression on his face as a store dummy’s. So these were the asswipes who had jumped Masters and me in Baghdad, and then performed a little dentistry on me a day later outside the Pensione Freedom. I knew I’d meet up with them again. Someone break out a deck of cards; I felt like we were old friends.

  I wondered which of them knew their way around a Barrett 50 cal. I wanted to tell them that they were dud shots, but they would have known the bravado was hollow, given that it was me and not them who was the prisoner here, wearing a bump on the back of his head the size of a dodo’s egg. I was plainly at their mercy, theirs and the person funding their fashion sense.

  Where the fuck was I? Where was I being taken? How long had I been out? I decided to try to break the ice. “Have any of you guys got a mint?” I asked. “It’s either my breath or someone here needs a shower real bad. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s me,” I said, keeping it light. I got more response from the overhead locker. “So, where we headed?” One of the men reamed the inside of a nostril with his index finger and then flicked the harvest at me. He missed.

  Aside from that, I got no other reaction. Ten minutes later I was getting so bored I almost cracked and gave up everything I knew. But then the plane jumped as it hit a thick layer of cloud and I remembered that I was flying rather than competing in some world championship silence competition.

  I looked out the porthole, expecting to see the earth rushing up at some crazy, life-threatening angle, but all I got was more cloud, the wingtip strobe blinking metronomically as it sliced through the silver tufts. And then, just as I was about to look away, I saw the briefest flash of a city beneath. A big city. Again I wondered how long I’d been in the air. I also wondered why I was so threatening to these guys that they had to sit almost on top of me. I mean, it wasn’t likely that I was going anywhere or capable of doing anything very much, trussed as I was. I could maybe breathe at them aggressively, but that was about it in the retaliation stakes. It took me a while to realize the reason: I made them nervous, simple as that. I was a threat to these people and to whoever was pulling their strings. I was unpredictable. They’d tried to remove my piece from the board several times and failed. It was they who were scared of me. “Boo,” I said to test the theory. No reply. One of the men was asleep. Another yawned. On t
he other hand, maybe I was just blowing smoke up my own ass.

  I closed my eyes and tried to get my thoughts in order. My last memory, and a hazy one at that, was of Harmony Scott’s liquor. I should have realized that she would call someone when she saw me in the garage snooping around. Even now, I still wasn’t completely sure where exactly Harmony fit into things. She’d given me the picture of a woman who’d lost the man she loved, felt him drift away, hating the way their marriage had turned out. I also saw her as playing a starring role in the manipulation of her husband—either willingly or unwillingly—over many years. And, of course, when it came to Peyton, she had ultimately shown herself to be self-absorbed and utterly heartless.

  That brought me back to Abraham Scott. There’d been a lot of time between Peyton’s death, the taking of the body bag photograph, and his own “accidental” death in the glider. All up, a year. Why so long? Had the general discovered that the people-smuggling racket operating between Riga and Ramstein was not just about money used to finance Radakov’s separatists? I figured he’d discovered a bigger game, and he’d needed time to put it all together. So he kept a low profile, kept his nose clean. I was sure he’d uncovered the same cancer I had—the research into our trade with Japan and Russia were at least circumstantial proof of that.

  The descent became rocky. The clouds played a vigorous game of shuttlecock with the plane, batting it up and down and sideways. Windshear. Rain droplets smeared the porthole. It was a shitty night in wherever. I heard the flaps fully extend as the motion played havoc with my Eustachian tubes. I was vomiting before I knew it, too fast for my friend fond of flicking boogers about the place to avoid the projectile bile heading toward his lap. Oops. Better out than in, pal.