“You spilled my drink,” he said.
I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his eyes.
“Lick it up,” I said.
We stood face-to-face for a second. Then I moved on past him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But I wasn’t about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a bottle shatter against a table behind me.
I didn’t hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned around and started back. The return journey was no different. The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a little.
I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room, slowly, one group at a time, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and stepped out into the cold fresh air.
Summer wasn’t there.
I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the bar. I figured she had been watching my back.
She looked at me.
“Now you know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman.”
She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their armory was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn’t been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job, up at the Pentagon.
“Over here,” Summer said.
She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue. Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn’t salute. Didn’t come to attention. But he didn’t turn away either. He just stood there and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper etiquette as Delta ever got.
“Help you?” he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of every description. I saw five different submachine-gun models. There were some M16s, A1s, and A2s. There were handguns. Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.
In front of the guy on the desk was a logbook.
“You check them in and check them out?” I asked.
“Like valet parking,” the guy said. “Post regulations won’t allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas.” He was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone’s new P7.
“What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?” I asked.
“Trifonov? He favors the Steyr GB.”
“Show me.”
He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.
“Nine-millimeter,” Summer said.
I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn’t. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don’t all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won’t cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I’d use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.
Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.
“Got a phone?” I said.
The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant’s desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.
“Get me Sanchez at Jackson,” I said.
I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
“What?” Sanchez said.
“Did they find the shell cases?” I said.
“No,” he said. “The guy must have cleaned up at the scene.”
“Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk.”
“You found the guy?”
“I’m holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less two fired.”
“Who is he?”
“I’ll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell.”
“One of ours?”
“Sad, but true.”
Sanchez said nothing.
“Did they find the bullets?” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go? They’ll be buried in the brick somewhere.”
“Then they won’t do us any good. They’ll be flattened beyond recognition.”
“They were jacketed,” I said. “They won’t have broken up. We could weigh them, at least.”
“They haven’t found them.”
“Are they looking?”
“I don’t know.”
“They dug up any witnesses yet?”
“No.”
“Did they find Brubaker’s car?”
“No.”
“It’s got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o’clock. In a distinctive car. Aren’t they looking for it?”
“There’s something they’re not sharing. I can feel it.”
“Did Willard get there yet?”
“I expect him any minute.”
“Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,” I said. “And tell him you heard the other thing wasn’t a training accident after all. That should make his day.”
Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder to shoulder with the armory clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his logbook together.
“Look at this,” she said.
She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimeter pistol at se
ven-thirty on the evening of January fourth. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.
“Why did he take it?” I said.
“We don’t ask for a reason,” the clerk said. “We just do the paperwork.”
We came out of the hangar and walked toward the accommodations block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers’ rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pickup trucks and big Detroit coupes, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tires. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.
We detoured to take a look at it.
It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean, inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly, within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The tires were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in through the windows. The interior looked like it had been soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a two-seat car, but there was a parcel shelf. It was small, but probably big enough for a crowbar hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.
“No grit from the track,” she said. “No blood on the seats.”
“No yogurt pot on the floor,” I said.
“He cleaned up after himself.”
We walked away. We went out through their main gate and locked Trifonov’s gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we turned around and headed back inside.
I didn’t want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down. So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn’t anywhere in the mess.
So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past Carbone’s empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov bunked three doors farther down. We got there. His door was standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on the narrow cot, reading a book.
I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions. The Soviet Union itself had a few Vysotniki tough guys. Apart from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game, in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of them as expendable. And they did.
So who was this guy?
NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn’t doing him any favors. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand-new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.
“On your feet, soldier,” I said.
He put his book down on the bed next to him, carefully, facedown and open, like he was saving his place.
We put handcuffs on him and got him into the Humvee without any trouble. He was big, but he was quiet. He seemed resigned to his fate. Like he knew it had been only a matter of time before all the various logbooks in his life betrayed him.
We drove him back and got him to my office without incident. We sat him down and unlocked the handcuffs and redid them so that his right wrist was cuffed to the chair leg. Then we took a second pair of cuffs and did the same thing with his left. He had big wrists. They were as thick as most men’s ankles.
Summer stood next to the map, staring at the pushpins, like she was leading his gaze toward them and saying: We know.
I sat at my desk.
“What’s your name?” I said. “For the record.”
“Trifonov,” he said. His accent was heavy and abrupt, all in his throat.
“First name?”
“Slavi.”
“Slavi Trifonov,” I said. “Rank?”
“I was a colonel at home. Now I’m a sergeant.”
“Where’s home?”
“Sofia,” he said. “In Bulgaria.”
“You’re very young to have been a colonel.”
“I was very good at what I did.”
“And what did you do?”
He didn’t answer.
“You have a nice car,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “A car like that was always a dream to me.”
“Where did you take it on the night of the fourth?”
He didn’t answer.
“There are no Special Forces in Bulgaria,” I said.
“No,” he said. “There are not.”
“So what did you do there?”
“I was in the regular army.”
“Doing what?”
“Three-way liaison between the Bulgarian Army, the Bulgarian Secret Police, and our friends in the Soviet Vysotniki.”
“Qualifications?”
“I had five years’ training with the GRU.”
“Which is what?”
He smiled. “I think you know what it is.”
I nodded. The Soviet GRU was a kind of a cross between a military police corps and Delta Force. They were plenty tough, and they were just as ready to turn their fury inward as outward.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“In America?” he said. “I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“For the end of the communist occupation of my country. It will happen soon, I think. Then I’m going back. I’m proud of my country. It’s a beautiful place full of beautiful people. I’m a nationalist.”
“What are you teaching Delta?”
“Things that are out-of-date now. How to fight against the things I was trained to do. But that battle is already over, I think. You won.”
“You need to tell us where you were on the night of the fourth.”
He said nothing.
“Why did you defect?”
“Because I was a patriot,” he said.
“Recent conversion?”
“I was always a patriot. But I came close to being discovered.”
“How did you get out?”
“Through Turkey. I went to the American base there.”
“Tell me about the night of the fourth.”
He said nothing.
“We’ve got your gun,” I said. “You signed it out. You left the post at eleven minutes past ten and got back at five in the morning.”
He said nothing.
“You fired two rounds.”
He said nothing.
“Why did you wash your car?”
“Because it’s a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week. Always. A car like that was a dream to me.”
“You ever been to Kansas?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s where you’re headed. You’re not going home to Sofia. You’re going to Fort Leavenworth instead.”
“Why?”
“You kn
ow why,” I said.
Trifonov didn’t move. He sat absolutely still. He was hunched way forward, with his wrists fastened to the chair down near his knees. I sat still too. I wasn’t sure what to do. Our own Delta guys were trained to resist interrogation. I knew that. They were trained to counter drugs and beatings and sensory deprivation and anything else anyone could think of. Their instructors were encouraged to employ hands-on training methods. So I couldn’t even imagine what Trifonov had been through, in five years with the GRU. There was nothing much I could do to him. I wasn’t above smacking people around. But I figured this guy wouldn’t say a word even if I disassembled him limb by limb.
So I moved on to traditional policing techniques. Lies, and bribery.
“Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment,” I said. “You know, to the army. So we wouldn’t necessarily want to pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go home and be a patriot.”
“It was you who killed Carbone,” he said. “People are talking about it.”
“People are wrong,” I said. “I wasn’t here. And I didn’t kill Brubaker. Because I wasn’t there either.”
“Neither was I,” he said. “Either.”
He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at Summer’s map. Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward accent.
“Wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“No,” he said.
“No what?”
“No, sir,” he said.
“Tell me, Trifonov,” I said.
“You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?”
“You think you didn’t?”
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