Divine Justice (13 page)
Stone put on his jacket. He needed air. He needed to think. Could he even leave Divine now? He should call Reuben, but he would have to wait until tomorrow. Now he just wanted to walk in the darkness and peace of Divine. And think.
He reached the main street, turned right and walked at a brisk pace. He soon left the little downtown area behind. The trees grew thicker and the lights of the small houses that dotted the perimeter of Divine finally disappeared.
Five minutes later Stone had decided to turn back when the scream reached him. It was from up ahead. It was a man. And he sounded beyond terrified.
Stone started to run.
A
FTER LEAVING
Leroy’s place in Maryland Knox did not drive home. One question had been bothering him so badly that he had to have an answer. He headed not for Langley, but for a nondescript building in the heart of Washington. He’d called ahead and was admitted without issue, what with his military background and government credentials.
He entered a vast room filled with long, scarred tables where gray-haired men, probably grizzled vets of past wars, along with some bow-tied historians, sat reading through piles of yellowed documents. It was windowless and seemed nearly airless as well. As Knox looked around, the one emotion he sensed was misery. This place contained the recorded and too brief lives and violent deaths of far more people than one would ever want to think about.
The main collection center for U.S. Army records was in St. Louis. Unless you were next of kin, to get access to an enlisted person’s complete service record there required either that person’s permission or a court order. However, Knox had learned something unknown to most people: The St. Louis facility didn’t have
all
the records. There were some in D.C.—and, indeed, copies of some of the ones housed in St. Louis. And they weren’t simply records of enlisted personnel. Here were housed documents chronicling America’s wars. That was why many historians came here to do research, many with FOIA requests in hand, since the military only reluctantly revealed anything about itself.
Many of the records he wanted to look at had not been computerized yet, but some had. Still, after Knox showed his creds, the attendant was able to pull the boxes he wanted very quickly and showed him how to access the computerized files. His butt parked in front of a PC, Knox started with the digital ones first, flicking from screen to screen. He had a hunch and he wanted to see if it was true. What had been bugging him was why Macklin Hayes would want to get to John Carr so badly. If Carr had killed Simpson and Gray, he was now on the run. He was not going to hold a press conference and start blabbing about secrets from the past. Knox could understand Hayes wanting him to nail Carr before the police did. If the cops caught up to Carr he might start talking in exchange for a deal. But Hayes had also said that the cops had been put on a short leash on this investigation, giving Knox, in essence, a clear field in which to operate. And even if the police somehow got to Carr first, the CIA could, like Hayes had said, just swoop in and take him away under cover of national security interests. Carr would never even reach a press conference or make a phone call to his lawyer.
So why the all-out necessity to get this guy? Aside from the moral issue of letting a killer escape justice, in some ways letting him go away and die peacefully made the most sense strategically. The bottom line was, Hayes was acting somewhat irrationally and he was not an irrational man. There had to be another reason.
Knox stared at the screen, reading the military records of the men and women who had served in Vietnam. He exhausted the digital trail and had to resort to the boxes after consulting with another attendant who helped him narrow his area of search. He went through thirty of the boxes without success. He was about to call it a day when his hand gripped a sheaf of papers, the top page getting his immediate attention.
As Knox leaned forward, the rest of the room seemed to slowly disappear around him. He was reading the official history of a soldier named John Carr, an enlisted man who’d quickly risen to the rank of sergeant. The account Knox was enthralled with was Carr’s heroic actions during one five-hour period nearly forty years ago.
Outnumbered dozens to one, Carr had almost single-handedly turned back an attack by the enemy, saving his company and carrying several of his wounded comrades to safety on his back. He’d killed at least ten enemy soldiers, several in hand-to-hand fighting. Then he’d manned a machine-gun nest to hold back the North Vietnamese while mortar and rifle rounds hit all around him. He’d left that post to radio in air support to allow his men to retreat safely. Only then had he walked off the battlefield drenched in his own blood and permanently scarred by bullet and machete wounds. Knox had experienced combat in those jungles and knew the confusion and horror that such confrontations almost always held. He’d been wounded. He’d been scarred. He’d been routed in action thinking this was surely his last day on earth. And he’d been part of successful attacks in the last days of America’s participation in that war in Southeast Asia, although by that time little victories in the field meant nothing. If they ever did.
Yet Knox had never read or heard of any soldier doing what Carr had done that day. It was beyond miraculous. It was beyond human, in fact. His respect, along with his fear of the man, notched upward even more.
With such heroism there must’ve been reward. The military was often slow in many ways, but it was quick at awarding bravery and selflessness in the field if for no other reason than to inspire other soldiers. And such accounts also made for great PR. The extraordinary heroism and extreme gallantry Carr had demonstrated that day not only
easily
qualified him for the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award the army could bestow, but, in Knox’s judgment, it should have earned him the country’s highest award for military heroism, the Medal of Honor. John Carr a Medal of Honor winner? Hayes had not mentioned any of that in his briefing. Nor had that piece of background made its way into press accounts when the man’s grave had been dug up at Arlington.
Knox flipped through page after page and explored several more boxes before he was able to piece the story together.
Carr’s Purple Hearts could not be denied him because the wounds alone were proof enough. All told, he received four of them, counting injuries received in other battles. Then there had been talk of awarding him a Bronze Star, but the date of this document was long after the fact of Carr’s miraculous actions in the field. And the Bronze Star—while certainly prestigious—didn’t come close to recognizing what the man had done, Knox felt. The Bronze was a bit of a hybrid in Knox’s mind. It could be given out for bravery in battle with a Valor device attached, but also for acts of merit or meritorious service. The Silver Star, Distinguished Service Cross, and Medal of Honor, the acknowledged triumvirate of recognition for the fighting soldier, were for bravery and heroism
in combat
, pure and simple.
He finally found a sheaf of documents showing that Carr’s immediate superior
had
recommended Stone for the Medal of Honor. The man had filled out all the requisite documents and assembled all the required proofs and eyewitness accounts. He’d then sent it up the chain of command. The date on the documents showed it to be shortly after Carr’s actions in the field, long before the documents talking about awarding him the Bronze Star. What the hell was going on?
And nothing had happened. It apparently had stalled out at that point. Knox could find no other documents that touched on it. But why? It was a perfect story. The man was a hero. Instead Carr had disappeared from the ranks shortly thereafter. Knox thought he knew why. That’s when he’d been enlisted by the CIA for its Triple Six Division. The spooks, Knox was aware, often trolled for their assassins in the ranks of the military’s best.
He put the documents back in the box. And that’s when he noticed it. Two pieces of paper stapled together that had slid down in between the interior flap of the box and the exterior cardboard wall. Knox almost didn’t read it, so disgusted was he at the military’s injustice to a man who should have been one of the most legendary recipients of its highest award.
But Knox did reach for the papers.
It was an order, a simple one. It shut off any further consideration of John Carr receiving the Medal of Honor or any other commendation. As Knox read through the document it was filled with official mumbo jumbo about unreliable evidence and inconsistent eyewitness accounts and conflicting background documentation. It made no sense at all until Knox’s gaze reached the signature line where the name of the officer appeared.
Major Macklin D. Hayes.
K
NOX SLOWLY DROVE
his Range Rover into the garage of his town house. Before he hit the button on his remote to close the door, he scanned the street in his rearview mirror. They were out there, he was pretty sure, watching him. Hayes typically covered all the bases.
The former general trusts me about as much as I trust him.
There might come a time when Knox would have to give those boys the slip, and when and if the time came, he hoped he was up for the challenge.
It might seem bizarre to ordinary citizens that a government agent like Knox would be nearly as fearful of his employer as he was his quarry. Yet Knox was only called in when things had gone to hell and people were already pointing fingers at each other and essentially building their “blame” strategies. He sometimes compared his job to that of an internal affairs officer in a police department. No matter what you did, someone was going to be pissed at you. And being pissed off and taking somebody’s life as payback did not require a great leap of thought. Sometimes, it simply needed a walk across the street, a decisive trigger pull and a good cover strategy.
And from what Knox had learned about John Carr’s military past, Hayes was definitely playing his own agenda on this one. He had clearly lied to Knox already. He’d commented on what an honor it would have been to command a killing machine like Carr. Well, the man
had
commanded him. In his murderous prime. And denied him the honor that was surely his. What had Carr done to tick the man off? Hayes was known to hold grudges for decades, and it seemed like that reputation was proving true here.
Knox had spent several more hours in the records room trying to find an answer to that question, but had come away with nothing more than speculation.
The dark thoughts going through his mind right now were nearly as numbing as what he’d experienced in his last nights in a Vietnam jungle before his country had called it a war and gone home. Knox’s battalion had been one of the last to be sent to Southeast Asia. He’d been there all of eleven months and it had felt like eleven years. When he’d gotten back with a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh and a truck load of recurring nightmares as reminders of his time there, he’d decided that war was not a particularly smart way to decide global issues, especially when politicians rather than the grunts on the ground were calling the shots. That’s when he’d worked his way to the Defense Intelligence Agency and from there to the civilian side and CIA.
Now his official home was a specialized piece of that agency that John Q. Public had never heard of and never would. He had two sets of creds: one for the public that showed him to be with Homeland Security and was suitably intimidating; and another set that he showed only to certain fellow federal agents. That evidenced his association with OSM, the Office of Special Matters. It was made up of personnel from five of the major intelligence agencies, though it was controlled by a handful of folks at Langley. “Office of Special Matters” sounded a little hokey, Knox thought, but what they did was far from it. Knox had been up to his ass in “special matters” for years, often handling six crises of international meltdown range at once.
In fact he’d been involved in every major op OSM had been handed over the last decade, including some paramilitary action that had gotten him back into the field with a gun and lives to take care of, and others simply to take. He’d narrowly avoided the “WMDs that never were” fiasco and then had spent six years in the Middle East doing things he would never write down and had done his best to forget about since.
He’d been thousands of miles away when his wife had died from a brain hemorrhage. He got back just in time for the funeral to say a hurried, mumbled good-bye to his life partner, the only woman he’d ever loved. To this day he felt like he had cheated her.
Twenty-four hours after burying her, he was back in Iraq trying to figure out where the next suicide blast was coming from and paying yesterday’s enemies with good American cash so they’d kill extremists instead of U.S. troops. When the money eventually ran out Knox knew he didn’t want to be within five time zones of the place. Then he’d gone back to his safe room in the Green Zone and wept for the love of his life in the privacy of his own nightmares.
It had been more than a challenge and in the last year Knox had seriously contemplated retirement after talking his way out of the Middle East where no Muslim trusted anyone with light skin who held a firm belief in the supreme holiness of the Lord Jesus Christ. He’d pulled enough time. He could go out on his terms. He was actually on a short sabbatical when Hayes had called. And now look at him. And the same old question had raised its ugly head once more:
Will the sun come up for me tomorrow?
He walked into his kitchen, tossed his keys on the counter, opened the fridge and popped a beer. He sat down in his small study and considered what he did and didn’t know, the latter unfortunately being far more voluminous than the former. He slipped the pages from his pocket. He’d taken the two-page order with Macklin Hayes’ signature on it. It was probably a felony stealing government property but Knox really didn’t care at this point. He looked at the precise signature of the man.
