by David Rich
“Middleman.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my first novel. I needed plenty of help and I got it.
Howard Blum went above and beyond the call of friendship. I would not have started without his steady encouragement, and would not have finished without the benefit of his shrewd advice and acute insight. I owe him.
P. J. Morrell generously provided Spanish vernacular translation. Peter Keeler, gunsmith, tutored me on weapons. Jack Barthell, Alan Holleb, Neil Steiner, and Clay Frohman, all always gracious, housed and fed me on the West Coast.
Guy Prevost, Mack Reid, and Margy and Norman Bernstein tirelessly listened, critiqued, and proofed without complaint or delay. Paul Bracken let me view the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through his unique lens. I never came out of a conversation with him the same as when I went in. Geoff Baere spotted the hidden quicksand in the story and posted warning signs. Avoiding those traps kept me laughing the whole way through.
Kim Witherspoon, refreshingly direct, said what she was going to do and then did it. Rare.
Ben Sevier took the chance, and, along with Jess Horvath, has made it all so easy, smooth, and fun.
I thank them all.
Don’t miss the next Lieutenant Rollie Waters novel by David Rich,
MIDDLE MAN
Now available from Dutton
1.
Snowflakes appeared in Havre, Montana, then disappeared when they hit the ground. The headstone had been pulled out of the ground and laid faceup. It said: ETHAN WILLIAMS 1979–2004. He had been a father, a husband, a son, but none of that was mentioned even though the Army would have paid for the listing. The headstone was probably going to become obsolete as soon as we opened the coffin, but the family might not get a chance at a replacement: My job was to find the money, not the bodies.
A police cruiser pulled up to the curb near the cemetery entrance. The cop did not get out. Our car was parked on the opposite side of the small cemetery, near the exit.
Sergeant Will Panos shrugged. “Had to notify them.” He shifted his gaze across the grave. “Who’s the smoker?”
The family was clumped together, with one exception. “Must be the father. Met all the others.”
“They all keep looking at you.”
“It’s the uniform.” We wore our service uniforms; this wasn’t an occasion for dress blues, according to Sergeant Panos.
“Got my eye on the widow. Does that make me a bad guy?”
“That isn’t what makes you a bad guy, Will.” We had been working together for weeks, traveling around the country and to Iraq, and I had not discovered too much about him that was bad. He was the only one who thought he was a bad guy. I figured he was the expert. Sergeant Will Panos had a fleshy face and saggy eyes. His skin was pockmarked, dark and rough. His nose was crooked from fighting. It was the face of a tough guy, a slob, a bruiser. His face lied: Will Panos was a refined, meticulous, careful man who navigated Marine regulations so precisely that I wondered if he had written them himself.
The widow, Kristen, was a pretty woman, wary, about thirty, short, with her dark roots pushing the blond hair away. Her parents and a sister and the sister’s husband huddled together in their winter coats near the foot of the grave. I had met them last night at Kristen’s house. She had papers to sign. We had waited thirty minutes for Ethan Williams’s father, but he never showed up, and no one found that noteworthy.
The smoker stood alone, smoked his cigarette to the stub, tossed it down and lit another. I walked over and introduced myself. Up close, he looked ragged. Random patches of his beard had evaded the razor. He was too young to look like that. “Marine Lieutenant Rollie Waters, sir.” He didn’t reply, so I said, “Are you Specialist Williams’s father?”
His eyes narrowed and he seemed to hiss. “You don’t fool me,” he said.
“I’m sorry we have to do this.” I just wanted to get away from him. The smell of liquor cut through the tobacco on his breath. Watery film covered his eyes and he could not hold my gaze.
“You’ve never been sorry for nothing,” he said.
Kristen stepped in close to intervene. “I realize I didn’t introduce you two. Lieutenant Waters, this is Ethan’s father, Jim.” The father pointed at me and said, “That oughta be you in that grave and we both know it.” His right hand turned up and I saw something black in it, and a second later the blade popped out the side.
Kristen said, “Jim! I’m over here.” He looked at her. “Put the knife away, Jim. There’s no danger.” She moved closer to him.
“Mrs. Williams . . .”
She was half his size and the blade looked like it would go all the way through her even with the puffy down coat she wore. Jim noticed me again and his eyes narrowed like they were going to take over the hissing, but they wavered. He was afraid. Kristen put up one hand to stop me from making a move, and put the other on Jim’s shoulder. I stood still.
“Jim, give me the knife. This’ll be over soon.” Her voice was soft and understanding, as if they had been partners in some harrowing experience. She put out her hand. He retracted the blade and put the knife back in his pocket. He was back in this world. Kristen checked with me and I nodded that I was okay with that.
Jim spat on the ground next to me, then shuffled a few feet away. Kristen waited for my reaction.
“Usually people wait until they get to know me before they do that.”
“He’s just . . . it’s been hard,” she said. She stood silently beside me for a while. “How many of these have you done so far, Lieutenant?”
“I’ve lost count.” I glanced toward Will. He was watching us jealously.
“Lots of tears? Fainting?”
“Some.”
“The sergeant is acting as if I’m going to fall to pieces.”
“He’s seen what happens. . . . He’s a good man.” I waited too long to give the recommendation and it sounded forced to me, but she ignored it.
“This one will be different,” she said in a way that made me believe her.
I wanted to believe her. This job, my first for SHADE, had cloaked me in respectability. The families treated me like a black-swaddled Keeper of Some Holy Secrets; they feared and resented me. Being mistaken for someone I’m not has always been a private pleasure and I always enjoyed feeding the misconceptions about me. But this identity, Exhumationist, a joke at first, became an open wound. I started thinking that one day I would unzip a body bag and find myself inside.
Kristen rejoined her family. They were not crying either, yet. A preacher had tagged along, ignored by all, stationed on the opposite side of the grave from Jim. I glanced at the man working with a rake about one hundred yards to my right, on a small rise. He was Mack Rios, a Marine sniper I brought along as a precaution: Millions in cash is a temptation for everyone, even the bereaved. The small white tent where we would open the coffin stood between us. Exhumation is a private business. This one, even without tears, felt no different from the others.
I wished it did.
The first time we dug up a grave and unzipped the body bag and found money, I got that thrill that comes from being right. Hard work rewarded. We had to count the money even though the game was still going on and counting brought questions, which deflated the good feeling. We expected to find twenty-five million dollars in each grave: The first had one million; the second had a million and a half. Something was wrong. We did not understand what it was.
The snow stopped. The winch operator signaled to Will that he was ready. Will nodded. The winch spun. Everyone stared dutifully at the hole in the ground as if they did not know what was going to emerge. But the grave seemed to be two miles deep. The creaky chains rolled up slowly. Maybe the winch man was holding out for overtime. I snuck in behind Jim Williams and grabbed his right arm into a quick hammerlock and slipped my hand into his pocket and extracted the knife. He hissed once more.
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At last the casket floated up from the grave and hovered like an alien drone that we had foolishly unearthed and activated. It swung hypnotically and Kristen flinched. It almost hit the preacher, whose eyes were closed, but no one interrupted his reverie. Each exhumation was like a combat patrol. This was my third exhumation, so I felt like a veteran: weary but addicted. I tried to watch the family without staring. I wanted to know what they were hoping for. If I was wrong, if the body was in the grave, then hope was crushed forever. If I was right and the grave contained a body bag filled with money, then hope, which I knew I had revived when I contacted them, would rise up and slam them to the ground and stomp on them, probably as long as they lived. I wanted to watch them to see which choice they thought they preferred. But this was only the third grave and it would take thousands to make a good sample.
The explosion was small, a flash and a pop, but so was the tent. Dirt pelted us, speeding through the strips and bits of white canvas swirling around us. Beyond the tent, Mack Rios went down with the first shot. The second shot hit Will Panos, who had jumped in front of Kristen to shield her. He yelled, “Damn, damn, damn,” and tottered and brought her down when he fell. A hand pushed me in the back and I bent forward to maintain my balance. Jim Williams said something like “You, damn you . . .” The rest was drowned out by the third shot, which went through his neck.
For a moment I thought the silence was complete, but the creaking of the chains holding the coffin kept a steady beat as I ran up the hill to Mack. He was dead, shot in the face, lying on his back with his rifle just inches from his left hand.
I stood up and looked back toward the grave. At first, the area was diorama still, then the figures began to move as if a spell had been cast off. The gently swinging ticktock of the coffin accentuated the stillness of the scene. The shots had come from the big, peaceful field of headstones lined up like seats in an auditorium beyond the grave site. A shooter could have hidden behind any one of them, but no one was out there now.
The sirens were close by the time I got back to the graveside and Will Panos. His wound cut across the front of his right thigh. He was trying to stand. I pulled him down and kneeled next to him. “How is it?”
“Not bad,” he said while wincing, because the only bullets that don’t hurt are the fatal ones.
Kristen had crawled out from under him and gone over to her parents. The flashing lights from the cop cars coated the scene in glimpses of red, so it took me a moment to realize the back of her jacket was smeared with Will’s blood.
“Get the attention of the first cops. Howl if you have to,” I said. “I’m going to try to get out of here with the money.”
I left Will and went to the winch operator and pulled him up. “Lower the coffin to the ground. Right where it is. Now,” I said. He was staring at Will, still on the ground. “Just do it. Do it now. Where’s the crank?” He pointed to a tool chest next to the winch. I pushed him toward the controls and he went to work. I meant for him to drop the thing, but he lowered it as if the world’s last bottle of bourbon were inside. As soon as the casket was on the ground, I put in the crank to pop the lock, then wedged the crowbar in the middle to lift the top. The winch operator sat there as if waiting for further instructions.
The cops were getting out of their cars. An ambulance was pulling up. I was not sure how I was going to get out of there with the money, but I knew I did not want the local police claiming it. I lifted the top of the casket and reached inside and unzipped the body bag and I flinched. The skin was thin as fancy stationery and the hair was sparse and the remains of a man wore a Marine uniform. From behind me Kristen said, “Who the hell is that?” I stared at her and might have kept staring at her while I tried to comprehend the situation, but I saw cops coming toward us. I zipped up the bag and closed the lid.
2.
My father, Dan, dead now, though not departed, the former and forever Minister of Collateral Damage, had sniffed out the plot by a bunch of officers to ship millions home from Iraq in body bags in the early days of the war. Dan only knew about one shipment. Retrieving it and relocating it came as naturally to him as burying nuts is to a squirrel. He stole it, but he did not want to spend it. The money lay hidden for years until about six months ago, when the plotters dug up the grave Dan had already looted and found nothing but stale air. Dan’s last, and only, gift to me was a clue about where he had hidden it.
Colonel McColl and his gang killed Dan and followed me while I followed Dan’s clue; I found the money and used it as bait to kill them for what they had done to him. That brought me to the attention of Major Hensel. He had just formed SHADE, which is short for Shared Defense Executive; it’s a division of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Concerned with national security issues involving the military,” according to the Major, who is the only one who would know. That is how I came to have the job these past months hunting down the other money-seeded graves McColl had boasted of.
I didn’t burn Dan’s body with the intent of ridding myself of him forever, though I thought that would be a side benefit. For any decent father, a son avenging his murder would have put the matter to rest, but that sort of decency eluded Dan even in death and he has been stalking me relentlessly, with the same irresponsibility, unpredictability, and irritating selfishness that he perfected in life, dogging me with stories I had heard many times and stories I had never heard before.
Though I studied desert combat, small arms combat, mountain combat, survival techniques, counterinsurgency, tai chi, aikido, yoga, petty thievery, breaking and entering, and other arcane street lessons, Dan studies was my major, my minor, my hobby, my relentless affliction. I hated him while he lived and avoided him as soon as I could, but his death defeated my hatred. Dan fascination, long unacknowledged, often denied, found no new poison after his death and so flourished.
Dan accompanied me out of Havre to the Canadian border, going on about the scene at the grave before the shooting.
“Nice of the old man to save your life like that.”
“He was a great guy.”
“I’d have done the same.”
I laughed.
“Tough having to put your son in the ground and then having to stand there again to find out if you did it right the first time.”
That’s when I knew the purpose of this chat: Dan had been robbed of the grand stage my graveside would have provided him.
What stories would he have concocted on the spot? My last letter: He would pull a few pieces of paper from his pocket, hold them a moment, then shake his head and put them away. He could recite it by heart: a letter foreshadowing my tragic death and revealing to him the ways he had always inspired me. Funny stories would follow, oozing fatherly wisdom in the face of the stubbornness of impetuous youth. If I left an attractive widow, the show would be directed toward her. Whatever tears and laughs he evoked would be in service of that conquest.
Dan spoke up at that thought: “I would not.”
“Because you had already succeeded, or because you had already been turned down?”
“Because at some point she would start feeling guilty and ruin all the fun.”
But he would not feel guilty.
Canada looked just like Montana. A thin white coating over a flat sheet spreading to the horizon like an exposed bed you could never roll out of. The snow started again, just enough to make a dusting on the road and on the windshield. I pulled onto the shoulder about fifty yards before the border and parked myself on the hood of my car. I took off my jacket and enjoyed the bite of the cold air. I wanted to linger, to clear my mind so I could begin to understand the puzzle of the graves. Dan receded, but just a moment later a border guard emerged from the small station on the left, which looked like a drive-through coffee stand. He wore a parka with an American flag on the sleeve and a Homeland Security patch.
“You waiting for something?”
�
�Yes.”
“What’s that?”
“A revelation.”
He looked around for a moment, stared as if he could see the North Pole, brushed snow off his coat. “Well, trust me on this; I been working this station fifteen years and unless you’re waiting for Santy Claus, you’re facing the wrong direction.” He tapped on my roof and gestured with his gloved hand. “If this isn’t government business then you gotta move along.”
When he got about ten yards away I said, “Truth is, I’m waiting for Ethan Williams.”
His head slowly tilted and his eyes got squinty as if I had asked him to complete a tough math equation. A car was coming up from behind me. The guard considered hustling back to his post. Instead, he put up his hand to stop the car. It slowed down and stopped next to him and he leaned down. I could only hear his end:
“Hey, Bill. You got anything I need to know about . . . ? When you coming back . . . ? It’s fine. No problems . . .” Bill drove across the invisible border and the guard returned to me.
“Who’d you say?”
“Ethan Williams.”
“You a relation of his?”
“No.”
“Well, if you’re waiting for Ethan, you better be patient. That boy died in Iraq years ago.”
“You knew him?”
“I know about everybody here. Except you.”
It took a day and a half to get to Chicago. Only Dan interrupted my guilty silence.
“This isn’t on you. You didn’t cause this.”
“Man down, a good man. Another man wounded.”
“It might have been worse if they hadn’t been there.”
“How?”
“Did I ever tell you the story about the time I fell in love? Beautiful woman, lived up in San Francisco.”
“Before I was born?”
“I think you were staying with someone in Arizona and I didn’t want to interrupt your life. It wouldn’t have been fair to drag you away.” Fair to him, he meant. “A beauty she was, and rich, too. Her father was a financial wizard on the East Coast. She ran an art gallery. The walls lined with paintings I couldn’t look at and the floor filled with rich friends I couldn’t take my eyes off of. All of them eager to spend their money. For me, it was like being the house at a craps game; I could make a deal every time I blinked my eyes. The biggest problem was keeping track of them all. Sometimes I would hide from people trying to give me checks, which you know made them increase the size of those checks. She was perfect; I don’t think she cared what deals I made. And then, suddenly, she broke it off. Not only did the checks stop coming in, everybody wanted their money back. I was devastated. At least I convinced myself of that, at first. Played the part. Of course that helped me with all the investors who suddenly needed their money back. I was too distracted to bother about such small matters. But I must have bought into my show of distress because they seemed to believe me.”
