“Blackman and Robertson,” Nakayla whispered. “Is Asheville ready for us?”
“Blackman and Robertson. Has a nice ring to it.”
“So does Laurel and Hardy.”
I reached across her waist, took her other hand, and turned her to me. “Having second thoughts?”
Her dark brown eyes searched my face. “Are you?”
“No. I know we’re crazy.”
She kissed me on the lips, confirming our shared diagnosis. “Then maybe we’d better get back to the asylum.”
I gestured toward the cooler. “But we have the champagne.”
“Bring it. If I drink another glass here, Amanda Whitfield’s next round on patrol will really give her something to enter into her logbook.”
The asylum was what we called my apartment building. It had opened in 1891 as a grand hotel, the Kenilworth Inn, during the time when George W. Vanderbilt was creating his mammoth Biltmore Estate and the adjoining Biltmore Village. Destroyed by fire in the early 1900s, the resort had been rebuilt and later converted into an army hospital for veterans of the First World War. Various incarnations included a sanitarium and a mental institution. Hence, the asylum.
Several years ago, a conscientious developer had saved the Kenilworth from demolition. The grounds and architecture still carried the impressive grandeur of Asheville’s gilded age, and pulling up to the stone porte-cochère at the end of the expansive lawn made me feel like I was arriving at my mansion rather than my relatively inexpensive one-bedroom apartment.
The pleasant evening had lured residents out on the front lawn. Some walked dogs, and a younger group of middle-schoolers tossed a Frisbee. Everyone enjoyed the cool temperature and invigorating mountain air. Overhead, the clouds had cleared and stars began popping out as the sky turned from purple to black. I was tempted to suggest we sit in the Adirondack chairs clustered on the grass and swap the bottle of champagne back and forth like two alley winos who’d won the lottery.
But, as we walked from our cars, the tinge of pain in my stump told me I needed to remove my prosthesis. The day had been long, and the night promised to be much more intriguing than the ordeal of shopping for office furniture. I wanted to be comfortable, and Nakayla was one of the few people with whom I could be my whole self regardless of whether I had one leg or two.
Nakayla Robertson and I had been brought together by the murder of her sister, Tikima. In the course of solving that crime, we’d barely escaped with our lives. Now I couldn’t imagine life without her—either as my new business partner or my bedmate. She wanted to proceed more cautiously, keeping her own house in West Asheville and limiting our lovemaking to the occasional overnight.
I tried not to think that her hesitancy to begin a more intimate living arrangement was because she had doubts about an interracial relationship or because she feared involvement with a wounded vet still coming to grips with his mutilated body. Nakayla sensed my insecurity, and more than once she’d assured me she simply needed some time to adjust to the recent upheavals in her world: the loss of her sister, the discovery of a family fortune, and the limitless possibilities of her future. She wanted to choose from those possibilities unclouded by grief or romantic passion.
For me, pleasure trumped pain no matter how emotionally vulnerable I might be. Clouding my grief with romantic passion seemed the perfect antidote to all I’d been through the previous six months.
Nakayla took the champagne as I unlocked the door to my apartment. We stood in a long, narrow hallway where the aura of institutional sterility clung to the walls and doors. Sometimes I awoke during the night and heard the creaks of the old structure sound in rhythmic waves as if white-clad nurses still scurried from room to room, ministering to those whose minds were as connected to reality as the ghostly footsteps of their long-departed angels of mercy.
Nakayla kissed me gently behind the ear and whispered, “I’ll get the glasses while you slip out of something uncomfortable.”
I went to the bedroom where I could remove my artificial leg along with the sleeve and sock that served to attach the device and create a snug fit. Plus champagne in bed seemed the perfect way to pick up where Nakayla and I had left off at the office.
I folded my pants over the chair at my small desk and noticed the red light flashing on the answering machine. The caller ID displayed an unfamiliar number with a 973 area code. I had no idea who was calling me or from where. I punched the play button and sat on the bed.
As I reached to release my prosthesis, the voice stopped me cold. The last time I’d heard it had been the last morning my left leg had been my own.
“Hey, bro. The Blackwater swill wants to drown me. They know where you are and they’ll take more than your leg next time. Don’t call. I’m going to earth.” A beep signaled the end of the message.
Although I sat on a mountainside in Asheville, North Carolina, the horror of Iraq suddenly reached through the phone and grabbed me. The beep hadn’t ended a message. It began a nightmare.
Chapter Three
“Are you all right?” Nakayla stood in the bedroom doorway, a glass of champagne in each hand.
“I’m okay.” I hit the release on my leg and set the prosthesis on the floor.
“Well, you look pale as skim milk.” She cocked her head and eyed me with concern. “Who was that on the phone?”
I wanted to say nobody, but she knew better. “Just a guy I served with.”
She sat beside me, and I took one of the glasses.
She glanced at her watch. “You need to call him back?”
“No.” I sipped the champagne and tried to regain my composure.
“Bad news?”
Nakayla probably thought I’d received word that one of our buddies had been killed. My first reaction was to lie, tell her the call was nothing more than a friend checking in. However, I was the one wanting a closer relationship, and shutting Nakayla out would be a step backwards. She read me too well. She wouldn’t press me, but I’d be building a wall rather than a pathway between us.
I set my glass on the nightstand and took off my shirt. “Play it and then we’ll talk.”
I removed my sock and sleeve while Nakayla listened to the message. Wearing only my underwear, I leaned against the headboard and massaged the tender end of my damaged leg. The surgeons had managed to save several inches below the knee, which meant greater mobility with a more natural gait. But my body weight was still being borne by flesh never intended for such a load.
“Is he talking in code?” Nakayla asked.
“No, but it only makes sense if you know the context.”
Nakayla began to undress. “Who is he?”
She had the body of a dancer, lean, lithe, and muscular with hardly a blemish on her light cocoa skin. My throat went dry and speaking became difficult. Had Nakayla been after government secrets, I would have given her the roster of the CIA.
“Calvin Stuart,” I said. “He’s a warrant officer in my unit.”
“He’s still in, then?”
“Yes, but he must be back from his tour. The phone number has a U.S. area code. I don’t know where.”
“He sounds black,” she said.
“Yes. From up North. New Jersey I think.”
Her last stitch of clothing dropped to the floor and she slid in the bed beside me. As she ran her fingers up and down my arm, she asked, “What’s Blackwater swill?”
“Gee, you say the most romantic things.”
“Talk is cheap, big spender.”
“And you’re a woman of action.”
“We’ll see. Maybe not.”
“That’s extortion.” I wrapped my arm around her and she nestled into my side.
“So call the cops,” she whispered.
“I’m a private investigator, lady. I even have a license.”
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
I stared her in the eye. “I’ve seen all I need to. You’ve convinced me.”
�
��Good.” She laid her head against my shoulder, her soft hair brushing my cheek. “I’m listening.”
“Blackwater swill. That’s the name we coined for the suspects in a case I was working.”
“Blackwater? The same company whose men were killed in Iraq?”
“Yes. But I’m not sure that Blackwater was involved in my case. They provided private security, both on corporate and government contracts. Some were heavily armed bodyguards with better weapons and vehicles than our troops. We’d gotten a tip that some of their former employees were conducting their own interrogations. They’d pick up suspected insurgents, but instead of immediately turning them over to the military, they’d have a go at them first.”
“Why?”
“To get information.”
“And you said you didn’t think Blackwater was involved.”
“The more I investigated, the more I believed we were dealing with rogue operatives. Ex-Blackwater employees who now worked their own deals. That’s why we called them Blackwater swill—garbage flushed out of the company. Informants told us they were Blackwater, maybe out of resentment, maybe because to an Iraqi the private security forces were all the same. Our leads came from civilians who’d been interrogated and released. Civilians who claimed to have been tortured.”
Nakayla raised her head. “Was our government paying contractors to do that?”
“No. That’s why we got the case. After Abu Ghraib, we didn’t want another incident of abuse fanning the flames of insurrection.” I paused and remembered the concern on the face of the military prosecutor at our initial briefing. He’d wanted the problem quietly but thoroughly exterminated.
“But this was happening outside government forces?”
“Didn’t matter. Everything reflected back on us. And there was some testimony that military personnel collaborated in the illegal interrogations.”
“What were they trying to learn?”
“Anything they could about treasure. The location of any cache that contained valuables worth smuggling out of the country.”
“And they’d found some?”
I shifted my weight, moving up in the bed so that Nakayla’s head rested against my bare chest. “Oh, yes. Remember in the early days immediately after Saddam had been deposed how the widespread looting went unchecked across the country? Banks, museums, palaces, hospitals, and any other buildings that held anything of value were ransacked. The consequences of Mr. Rumsfeld’s horrific blunder in not sending in enough troops to restore order amid the chaos of his so-called victory. Mission Accomplished—the biggest lie ever foisted upon the American public.” I looked down at where my left leg ended in a calloused stump and the bitterness of that loss swept over me.
Nakayla must have felt me tense. She rubbed her palm across the flat of my stomach and sighed. “How much is still out there?”
“God only knows. Plenty. Gold, drugs, artwork, jewels, you name it. Enough to drive the treasure seekers to use whatever means necessary if they thought they could get a lead on a hiding place.”
“And when your friend Calvin said Blackwater swill wants to drown him, he meant they’re trying to kill him?”
“Yes, but Calvin has a flair for the dramatic.”
Nakayla sat up. “But why would they be coming after you? Revenge?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I was injured before we gathered enough evidence to make major arrests. Calvin must have continued on the case, and he’s just being super-cautious by warning me. For him, it’s only been six months since we worked together. For me, it seems a lifetime ago.”
“Why wouldn’t he want you to call him?”
“I suspect he called from a cell phone. He’s probably cut it off so his location can’t be traced. Going to earth means he’s in hiding.”
Nakayla frowned. “Blackwater’s headquartered in North Carolina, isn’t it?”
I’d forgotten that, and the knot in my stomach drew tighter. “Yes. But don’t worry. I have absolutely nothing they want.”
Nakayla snuggled into me. “But you have something I want.”
Later, in the darkness, as Nakayla’s rhythmic breathing signaled she was sleeping, I kept replaying one sentence from Calvin’s message over and over in my mind: “They know where you are and they’ll take more than your leg next time.”
Nakayla left for home at seven-thirty the next morning so she could shower and change clothes. We planned to meet at the new office at ten to arrange furniture before the phone company installed our lines and Internet service. We’d missed the deadline to list our agency in the Yellow Pages, but Nathan Armitage had hooked us up with his company’s web designer. We’d have our own domain with links to and from Nathan’s company. We’d also purchased two laptops with satellite wireless support and a heavily encrypted, password-secured FTP site for storing the photos, documents, and videos we might generate during the course of an investigation. We had everything we needed except a client.
Before leaving the apartment, I used a reverse search on the Internet to check the ID number left by Calvin’s call. No name was listed, but the area code encompassed a number of cities in New Jersey. If Calvin was on leave, he must have gone to familiar territory where he had contacts he could trust. I had no idea what steps he was taking to eliminate the threat.
As a chief warrant officer, I’d taken the lead in pursuing the evidence in what we’d tagged as the Ali Baba case. The name came from the ancient Arabian folktale “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” because the threads of the investigation entwined into a pattern that indicated the existence of an organization systematically locating, consolidating, and smuggling loot. We suspected a linked network of caches and were following informants back to their central command. I was hoping to find the “Open Sesame” magic word that would unlock the master “cave” holding the identity of the cadre of thieves. Calvin’s call suggested we’d been closer than I realized.
I did a walk around my Honda CR-V before getting in. It had been my first purchase after receiving the money from my parents’ wrongful death claim, and it still had that new car smell. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. No grease marks near the hood latch or scratches on the door lock. Car bombs were a fact of life in Baghdad, and you learned to eye every vehicle with suspicion.
Asheville was an unlikely spot for such a crude killing device, and I feared my imagination was running wild. If someone were out to assassinate me, a quick shot to the head would be more efficient. Locating me would not be difficult. Calvin’s warning that “they know where you are” wasn’t particularly ominous. It wasn’t like they’d undertaken some sophisticated tracking operation to hunt me down. When Nakayla and I had solved the murders of her sister and an Asheville cop, we’d been plastered all over the media, from the New York Times to Fox News. Between that publicity and my earlier testimony before a Congressional committee about the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Hospital, testimony that had gotten me shipped to the V.A. hospital in Asheville, I’d had plenty of opportunity to reveal information that would have incriminated any number of thieves. Still, on my drive up Biltmore Avenue to my office, I spent as much time looking in my rearview mirror as the road ahead.
I stepped on the elevator for the short lift to the third floor. Two middle-aged men got in on either side of me. Each held a briefcase and a cup of coffee. Their dark suits, crisp white shirts, and conservative ties pegged them as lawyers in one of the firms in the building. We nodded an unspoken “good morning,” and I relaxed. Assassins wouldn’t have both hands full unless they planned to club me with a briefcase and scald me to death. As I left the elevator, one of the men said, “Have a good day, Mr. Blackman.” My fame hadn’t been so fleeting that my face wasn’t recognized.
I would have a good day. I was a professional, and this first morning on the job gave me a renewed sense of purpose. I wasn’t as formally dressed as the attorneys, but my blue blazer, open-necked pink dress shirt, and tan slacks were fashionable enough
for me to meet with any potential client with confidence. I had a Blackberry clipped to my belt, a P.I. license in my wallet, and years of investigative experience in my head.
What I didn’t have was a weapon. My credentials from North Carolina included the right to carry a concealed weapon. Nakayla owned a small .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol, but my sidearm had been the property of the U.S. government. Later in the day, I planned to purchase a suitable handgun and side holster.
A square white box sat on the floor outside our office door. It was no more than six inches by six inches. I approached it warily. Neither Nakayla nor I expected any deliveries. I bent down beside it and saw the logo for the City Bakery Café on the lid. Beneath it and written in blue ink were the words: “Sorry to have bothered you. Welcome! Amanda Whitfield.” Our security guard had gone to the trouble to come back, and even though she had a passkey, she’d chosen not to enter our office. Or maybe the person who brought it didn’t have a key. That possibility sent a mental alarm ringing.
My bad leg didn’t bend so well so I dropped to both knees and leaned over the box. Then I put my nose close to the seam of the lid and sniffed like a dog. If the contents were an explosive device, someone had gone to the trouble to use materials that smelled like freshly baked muffins.
“Are you okay?” A woman’s voice came from behind me.
I felt my face flush. She couldn’t see my embarrassment. Her view would have been of my butt sticking up in the air. “Ummm” was all I could manage. I tried to rise but my artificial leg didn’t want to flex enough to get both feet under me.
“Sir?” she asked more urgently.
“Contact. I dropped a contact.” It was the second thought that popped in my mind after I discarded morning prayers. “Oh, here it is.” I reached out and grabbed an imaginary lens by the door. I pretended to moisten it in my mouth and then insert it in my eye.
The Fitzgerald Ruse Page 2
