The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  “Scott figured that with Radakov, and probably others like him, Moscow had infiltrated the Chechen leadership. So what about the massacre in Beslan’s School Number One a few years back, the one where all those children were killed. Was that really a Chechen operation? Or was it a Russian job just made to look like the separatists’ work?”

  Cutter sat behind his enormous desk, the seal of the Vice President of the United States of America on the wall behind his head. He was nodding. The Beretta, I noticed, had made a reappearance. I’d hit a nerve. It was motionless, aimed at the middle of my chest.

  “As you’ve deduced,” said Cutter, “we are helping the Kremlin and the Kremlin is helping us. As I said, a grave threat to a state’s security is actually a politically stabilizing factor. The ongoing fight with the Chechens allows the Russian president to be strong, to centralize power and hold the Federation together. That’s in our interest. We don’t want a collection of autonomous independent states in that part of the world, running amok with their own agendas and foreign policies. And then there’s the important factor of economic stability. As I’ve explained, the military-industrial complex requires a threat equal to its output, and Russia’s needs in this vital area are the same as ours. Properly directed, the Chechen separatist movement is the one stone that kills both birds.”

  I didn’t care who he was or what organizations he belonged to. Jefferson Cutter was operating way outside the law—civilian and/or military. At least, the laws of my country.

  I thought about the players. Radakov needed to show his rebel buddies that the cash for their fight was coming from somewhere other than Moscow. That’s where von Koeppen came in. The people-smuggling was the perfect front, until Scott came along and threatened to put an end to it. So they—they being Cutter and von Koeppen—murdered Scott’s son as a warning. And, when they discovered that he’d refused to heed it, they killed him.

  Radakov wasn’t in on it. Scott had come to some kind of arrangement with him. Radakov wanted out of the deal with Cutter and von Koeppen, and Scott wanted Varvara. It was a fair trade, quid pro quo. This deal forced cracks between Cutter, von Koeppen, and Radakov that killing Scott couldn’t smooth over, and each realized his vulnerability. The sick bond holding them together was broken. Von Koeppen thought he could protect himself from Cutter by getting close to the VP’s daughter. Wrong. Cutter thought he could remove the threat to himself by having a washed-up investigator put on the case of his son-in-law’s death. Wrong. What about Radakov? He had to believe that Cutter would get to him sooner rather than later, especially after von Koeppen was removed from the picture. Now I knew why the Russian had allowed me to leave Chechnya when he could so easily have wasted me. I was his attack dog. Radakov couldn’t get to Cutter, but he knew I could. Wrong again. I looked down the black eye of Cutter’s Beretta. Something told me my attack-dog days were over.

  Other things fell into place. I thought about the men who’d brought me here from Germany, the same bunch who’d hit Masters and me in Baghdad and subsequently mugged me outside my hotel. I’d pegged them as Special Forces and they were. Only they weren’t ours. They had to be Spetsnatz, or maybe FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, the current incarnation of the KGB. That also explained why they’d said not one word to me on the plane trip across the Atlantic, ignoring all my attempts to while away the flight with witty conversation. They couldn’t understand a word I was saying.

  I continued. “So your son-in-law threatened to bring everything down on your head. Then he demonstrated his determination to do just that by photographing the lineup of body bags from Iraq and leaking the photo to the media.”

  “Yes, right again, Vincent. Congratulations.” Cutter’s aim wavered slightly as his thumb searched for the handgun’s safety. “I should never have enlightened Scott about the First Convention. Up till that moment, he believed our troops in Iraq were there for reasons that had nothing to do with the reality—the necessity—of testing new weapons systems so that they could be sold to our armed forces and hence to other nations and, of course, NATO. He threatened to do whatever it took to get our people back home. As you said, we miscalculated with Abraham. Have you any idea what damage a man in his position, a serving four-star general, could do to America’s notion of itself if he revealed the truth?”

  “The miscalculation was yours,” I said. “You killed his son, the only thing in this world he truly loved. You sent General Scott to war.”

  I had one question outstanding, but it wasn’t one that Cutter could or would answer. Our time was up. I brightened and said, “So, where do I sign?”

  “Sign what?” Cutter stood and took half a step back to steady himself.

  “You know, the membership papers? The Establishment? You’ve sold me. I’d love to join. With all that money, you guys must have great resort facilities, member housing loans, that sort of thing.”

  Cutter informed me that I wouldn’t be joining. “There’ll be two gunshot wounds. One here,” he said, grabbing a handful of fat on the side of his belly. “The second shot will be fatal. For you. You threatened me, I pulled my gun to defend myself, there was a struggle. You had the upper hand at first and shot me, but you lost your balance and I got lucky.”

  Cutter had worked it all out. He could so easily concoct a believable story about why he had granted me this late-night interview. Special Agent Cooper had been investigating the death of my beloved son-in-law before mysteriously going AWOL. Then he suddenly turned up here in D.C. and claimed to have news…At the very least, I owed it to my daughter to hear him out and, of course, to keep a weapon handy just in case things turned sour… After all, I was, as everyone knew, “unpredictable.”

  “You had me brought here to kill me.” I tried to appear relaxed about stating the obvious and put my feet up on the edge of his desk to demonstrate it.

  “Well, you know, if you want something done right…” He displayed his expensive bridgework. Or was it a smile? I wasn’t sure.

  “I have a copy of Scott’s hard drive. If you kill me, I’ve left instructions for it to be forwarded to the media.” It was an oldie but a goodie.

  “I didn’t give you enough time to make those arrangements. I expected more from you, Vincent. You really think I’d fall for that old ploy?”

  Shit! “Believe what you want.”

  Cutter raised the Beretta. I’d already assessed the distances, the angles, and the potential force required. I was waiting for the opening, but it was clear Cutter wasn’t going to give me one. I had half a second left. I shoved the desk toward him with my legs as hard as I could. The damn thing was heavier than I expected. My chair shot backward, but not before his precious hundred-year-old bottle of XO teetered.

  Cutter wavered as he watched the bottle fall, his concentration on me breaking for the briefest instant while he considered catching it. I launched myself at him, flying over his laptop as the bottle smashed on the marble floor. I drove into his gut with the point of my shoulder and he slammed into the wall with an animal grunt. We both dropped to the deck, rolling into the puddle of XO and smashed glass. He had the gun, but I had his wrist pinned to the floor. Blood was everywhere. The Beretta went off. Whatever the slug hit, it wasn’t me. The gun fired a second time. Plaster dust drifted down from the small hole in the ceiling. Cutter was a strong fuck, despite his age. Our hands were interlocked and we both shook with effort as we battled each other’s grip. He was attempting to turn the weapon on me. I was trying to prevent that from happening.

  I drove my head down into his face. I missed his nose and instead heard his cheekbone crack like a Styrofoam coffee cup underfoot. Cutter released the Beretta as his bloody hands flew to his face.

  I stood over him, swaying, blood pumping from deep cuts to my lower legs and arms, but I had the gun, which meant I’d won. Then the door burst open. The Secret Service guys rushed in, Glocks raised. It all happened in slow motion. It was like an out-of-body experience, and I knew how it was going to end: b
adly—for me. Here I was, standing over the Vice President of the United States, a man these two Secret Service types had sworn to protect with their lives if need be. Their boss was down, there was blood spattered on the floor, the walls, his desk. The weapon in my hand had discharged—I noticed the neat bullet hole in the door for the first time. That first shot. It must have been what had brought them in. Their training took over. They had no choice but to do what they had sworn to do. I swung away, bringing my hands up in front of my face as I turned. “No!” I yelled as they fired into me at point-blank range.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I’m not sure exactly when I realized I wasn’t dead. It might have been when I tried to play my harp and found I couldn’t move my arm. Either that or I didn’t have an arm. Nevertheless, I felt no panic. Morphine is like that. It’s like a heavy, warm blanket thrown over the senses, similar to that period of sleep just before awakening, when the bed is the most supremely comfortable place in the universe. I could get used to morphine, except for the vomiting.

  I floated for I don’t know how long. Could have been hours or minutes. The previous month came back to me in bits and pieces and not, I suspected, in chronological order. I remembered Anna, for instance, but not that she’d been killed. That came later. Being shot myself was also a late arrival, but I eventually remembered Cutter and those scorpions with their knives on top of the mountain in Afghanistan. Was that part of this investigation? My memory was a bunch of jumbled fragments. Gradually, though, I sifted out the salient points and strung them together into some kind of order.

  The reality wasn’t great.

  The beeping sound was familiar and so was the smell. I sensed a presence hovering over me. I opened my eyes and waited for the recognition. It was male, pushing fifty, with pattern baldness. A stranger.

  “Take it easy, soldier,” he said. “You’re in the hospital. Let’s have a listen to your lungs.”

  “Which hospital?” I managed to say.

  “Andrews AFB. Base hospital,” he said, maneuvering the stethoscope inside my hospital gown.

  “Breathe,” he said.

  I breathed.

  “Again.”

  I breathed again. We went on like that for several breaths until I got seriously light-headed.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “Considering.”

  Considering what?

  “How do you feel, Special Agent?” he asked.

  “Light-headed and thirsty,” I said. “Aside from that, I haven’t a clue.”

  “Good. Means the morphine’s working.”

  “What’s the damage, Doc?” I asked. By now I knew I’d been shot. I just wasn’t exactly sure where because, like he said, the morphine was working.

  “We believe a gun you were holding in your hand deflected the first bullet. That explains the broken fingers. You were lucky. The second bullet entered your arm here,” he said, pointing to the muscle under his upper arm, “entered your bloodstream, and traveled to your heart. We had to remove it.”

  “My heart or the bullet?”

  “What? Oh, right. Funny.” He wasn’t smiling.

  A joke popped into my mind. I had the feeling the doctor wouldn’t be amused, but I launched into it anyway, slurring because of the morphine. I said, “A patient says to his doctor, ‘Doc, if I give up drinking, smoking, loose women, and fast cars, will I live to be a hundred?’”

  The doctor, looking down on me, said, “No, but it’ll seem like it.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard it,” I said.

  “I’m a doctor. I’ve heard every doctor-patient joke in the book.” He tapped an IV line. “You’ve lost quite a lot of blood. We removed several large slivers of glass from your legs. They severed a few veins, but no arteries. Good luck there, too.”

  All this good luck. Too much more of it would kill me.

  He poured me a cup of water from a jug beside the bed and held it to my lips while I drank. I’d never tasted anything as good and as sweet as that water.

  “I’ve reduced the morphine dose a little, but if the pain gets uncomfortable, just squeeze this ball and you’ll get a small release of morphine.” He placed the ball in my hand.

  “What day is it?” I muttered. I closed my eyes and let my head sink into the pillow.

  “You’ve been here fifteen hours. It’s Monday afternoon, just after five P.M.”

  “Thanks,” I said, eyes still closed. Along with the blood, I’d lost a lot of time.

  “Do you feel up to visitors, Special Agent?” he asked.

  “Who is it?” I replied.

  “Only me,” came a familiar voice from behind the curtain separating my bed from the others in the room.

  It was Gruyere.

  The doctor had a brief whispered chat with the general, none of which I could hear. I guessed he was probably telling her not to stress me out. If that’s what he was saying, he was too late. I glanced at the monitor wired up to my heart. It was registering a hundred and fifteen beats per minute and climbing. For the first time I noticed I was connected up to a spaghetti of tubes and wires. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was sick. When I looked back at Gruyere, the doctor had gone. The general was holding up a copy of a newspaper so that I could read the front page. At first I had no idea why. Then the headline in large black letters beneath the masthead swam into focus. It read, “CONSPIRACY.” A smaller headline said, “Military’s ‘Quality Guarantee’ Delivers War Every 15 Years.”

  “Was this fucking necessary, Special Agent Cooper?” said Gruyere, giving me her angry grandmother routine.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, not feeling up for games.

  Bishop. I’d given him instructions to pass the details of the First Convention to The Washington Post. If the press pulled that thread, the whole mess would unravel. I’d called Bishop just before I went to interview Harmony. He was to contact the paper if I failed to call him within eight hours. It was supposed to be my insurance policy. And it might have worked had Cutter believed in “that old ploy.” Cutter and I both had a lesson to learn: he for being too clever, me for being too unimaginative.

  Gruyere seemed to accept my answer, and I was surprised by that. She folded the paper and let it fall on the end of my bed. “Been putting your body on the line again, I see.”

  “I thought you were at Ramstein, ma’am,” I said.

  “I was, but now I’m here.”

  “Because I’m here?”

  “Among other reasons,” she said. She stood beside the bed, arms folded, scowling. “You gave us a few scares, Cooper. You’re a most unorthodox investigator.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  The big cheese shrugged and said ambiguously, “It is what it is.”

  “When do you want my report, ma’am?”

  “Plenty of time for that. Besides, Anna Masters gave me a full update before the crash. And I’ve already read Flight Lieutenant Bishop’s report. Forensics have cleared you of manslaughter, by the way.”

  “Manslaughter?” As far as I was aware, I hadn’t killed anyone. Not recently, anyway.

  “Jefferson Cutter.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You shot the Vice President in the temple, Cooper. A ricochet.”

  “I what?”

  She nodded. “Officially, it is being called an accident—cleaning his gun when it went off, apparently. Happens all the time.”

  Yeah, but not to vice presidents.

  “Secret Service have been debriefed. Harmony Scott has been arrested and charged with conspiracy relating to the murder of her husband. We searched her house and found this.” Gruyere pulled an evidence bag from her briefcase and put it on my stomach. Inside was an official form. I had a good idea what it was even before I saw “U.S. Army Autopsy Report” in large black letters at the top of the page. It was the very first autopsy performed on Peyton Scott’s remains, the one subsequently wiped from the DoD’s computer in Washington. I caught the words “massive trauma” and “decapitation” in the “ca
use of death” section.

  “There is some consideration being given to charging her with various acts of treason. I say consideration because we believe any good lawyer would get her off those charges, and we know she’ll be hiring the best.”

  “What about the suicide note?” I asked.

  “Forensics came back clean. We suspect von Koeppen had it forged and hid it in the book. Harmony went along for the ride. Who else would you like an update on?”

  “Radakov,” I said.

  “You’ll find a small piece on him on page five.” Gruyere nodded at the newspaper. “There wasn’t much left of him to bury. Seems someone told his Chechen friends that he was former KGB.”

  I wondered who that someone was. I didn’t believe it was Cutter—at the end, he was more concerned about me than about Radakov.

  Gruyere continued. “Now, as for the case, I think you know already that the DoD and the FBI have taken over. This is out of our hands now. Smuggling humans is a serious crime. You’ve done a fucking great job here, Cooper.”

  I might have been doped to the gills but I wasn’t in la-la land. This whole speech was carefully worded for my benefit. I doubted there’d be much of an investigation. And, with Radakov dead, there was no one left who knew the whole story. Except maybe me, but, as my file suggested, I was easily discredited. “My cell was bugged with a homing device, ma’am. You knew where I was most of the time.”

  “Yes, I did. It was important for us to know where this case was taking you.”

  “Was Anna in on it?” I asked. Anna Masters gave me a full update before the crash.

  “Anna knew more than you about certain things.”

  “Such as?”

  “She knew von Koeppen was up to something illegal—as it turns out we just had no idea what. Masters was working the case. Von Koeppen probably thought he was pretty clever, dating someone from OSI. I can tell you it wasn’t something she enjoyed.”

  I took my mind back to the moment in Anna’s Mercedes when I’d asked her about von Koeppen. I wished she’d confided in me then. The German might not have passed under my radar for as long as he did if she had. Things might have turned out differently if I’d known what he was capable of from the beginning. Maybe she’d still be alive. “Why didn’t you brief me on von Koeppen?” I asked.