The Death Trust (25 page)

Lying in these shadows was the corpse of someone’s father or son, wife or daughter. The stench and the loneliness brought back the memory of the airless cold and the image of slashing steel in Afghanistan.

I noticed that the dogs were hanging around in groups of three. These animals had long since ceased to be man’s best friends. Instead, they’d taken up employment in the Baghdad city sanitation department for the uncomplicated promise of all they could eat, free.

Despite the heat, a shudder went through me. I forced my attention back to the conversation Ambrose and Masters were engaged in. The former marine said, “We came to this part of town to search for weapons. Nothing out of the ordinary.” As he spoke, we burst out of the shadows and into bright sunshine with the Tigris beside the driver’s window. “We’d pretty much finished the patrol and weren’t expecting trouble,” he added over his shoulder. I leaned forward between the seats. “We were retracing our steps through the streets I’ve just taken you through, but found our way blocked by vehicle wrecks. I thought we’d just made a wrong turn but I was wrong.”

The river’s floodplain was below us on the left, on the other side of a low retaining wall. On our right were the brick and concrete walls of the local residents, built high to keep prying eyes away from the women.

Ambrose slowed the Toyota to a crawl. “We found ourselves here.” He pulled to the side and stopped. He picked up the microphone from the radio set mounted under the dash and called in our position. I glanced behind us. A couple of the men had jumped out of the pickup. They were moving to form a perimeter defense, checking the angles, their personal weapons pointing toward the sky. Ambrose grabbed Marlene and a backpack from the passenger floor and got out. Masters followed. One of the Fijians swung his legs to one side so that I could pass.

The heat bouncing off the concrete surfaces was intense, and the air was laced with the scent of a mound of raw sewage piled beside the road, upwind.

“We came down here in a convoy of four Humvees. Our minds weren’t on the job. We were hot, tired, and looking forward to getting back to the compound and then something hit us, and hard.”

“A land mine?” I asked.

“No, man, it weren’t no land mine,” Ambrose snorted. “You saying a land mine means you’ve seen Peyton Scott’s autopsy report.”

“Yeah, have
you
?” I asked.

He nodded. “Peyton’s old man showed me. The general. After Peyton’s body was shipped home, he came to see me, flew down from Germany…”

Bingo,
I thought. The general’s missing days—more of them accounted for.

“…the autopsy report said Peyton had been killed by a land mine explosion—shrapnel wounds to the body, right?” Ambrose snorted again. “You ever been spritzed by a man’s brains, Special Agent?”

“No,” I said.

“I was standing beside him. We were talking. And then suddenly Scotty’s head was gone and my skin was cool. It was Peyton—atomized. All over my arms, my face. Y’know, his hands reached out to me. Can you believe that? Like he could see, but there was nothing to see with ’cause his brains were all over me. An image like that—it burns itself onto your mind.” He shook his head as he looked at the ground, no doubt seeing the image he couldn’t erase.

I nodded. I had my own memories keeping me company.

Ambrose dug into his backpack and produced a clear plastic bag. He held it up and said, “Anyway, it wasn’t no land mine. This is what killed him.”

I took the bag from his fingers and examined it. Inside were bullet fragments, something big and unusual.

Masters asked, “Where’d you get this?”

“We came back here the day after to check the place out—make some sense of what’d happened. There was a hole punched in the wall—you can see where it’s patched.” Ambrose ran his hand over a rough, unpainted section. “The round that killed Scotty did that. And then it smashed through a forty-four-gallon drum filled with stored drinking water on the other side. We found the remains of it—what you’re holding in the bag—in the bottom of the drum.”

“Jesus,” Masters murmured.

Masters was right to be impressed. It would have taken a hell of a lot of force to punch through into a steel drum after bashing through concrete.

“I think the round that took down our Humvee was different, maybe an armor-piercing incendiary round. It went through the radiator, shattered the crankcase. We didn’t look for that round—there wouldn’t have been anything left of it.”

“What would fire something like this?” Masters examined the bag.

“An AMR, an anti-material rifle,” I said. “Possibly a Barrett gun.” I’d seen Barrett guns in action in Afghanistan. From across the valley, I’d watched a team of Australian snipers clear a hilltop of giant scorpions from a mile away. It was a formidable weapon.

Ambrose agreed. “For what it’s worth, that’s what I reckon too.”

The fragment Ambrose had removed from the drum sure looked like the remains of an AP round—the tungsten penetrator. Also bagged were a few fragments of the copper jacket that would have peeled away when the round hit the wall. Whoever killed Peyton Scott wanted no mistake, but also wanted the body left relatively intact. It felt like we were getting lucky—having the forty-four-gallon drum in place to catch the projectile that killed him—but I didn’t want to say as much for the very reason that the bullet had gone through Ambrose’s buddy to get there. But, all the same, we
were
fortunate. We now had evidence literally in the bag, and Peyton’s DNA—specifically, his gray matter—could still be on the copper casing fragments. Of course, I didn’t mention that, either. With Ambrose’s eyewitness account to go with the fragments, we could call into question the authenticity of the Veitch autopsy report.

“You wouldn’t still have Peyton’s Kevlar, by any chance?” I asked. His helmet might still contain hairs, skin, and possibly blood fragments, all of which would contain his DNA. We’d need that reference to prove any DNA still present on the copper casing fragments was Peyton Scott’s.

Ambrose smiled. “Indeed, I do.” He opened the backpack. Inside was another clear plastic bag. This one contained a helmet.

I was officially excited. This was another genuine break. I accepted the backpack. “Can you tell me what happened next, after Peyton went down?”

“We started shooting up shit. We were as jumpy as hell. But there weren’t nothin’ to shoot at. Look around. It’s just the same now as it was that day. We called it in and a Black Hawk flew overwatch for a while, but, well, nothing…”

I looked around. The walls of the houses backing onto the street curved away with the floodplain. The sniper’s hide could only have been on the other side of the river, a good mile and a half away in the heat haze, but well within the range of a Barrett gun. “Any other shots fired?”

“None came back at us. One shot took out our vehicle. The next whacked Peyton. And no one even heard those shots.”

Most likely the shooter had buried himself in an abandoned building with a clear line of sight to this bend. The rifle was probably also equipped with a baffle—no muzzle flash and no sound to give away the shooter’s position.

“Was Peyton’s body medevaced out?” asked Masters, beating me to it.

“Yeah. We also had one walking wounded—leg wounds. Shrapnel from the hit on the Humvee.”

“You said you were retracing your steps through the streets, but you found the way blocked. You want to tell us more about that?” Masters asked.

Ambrose took a small map from his back pocket and spread it on the Toyota’s hood. “This was our route in and out.” He traced it with his finger. “By the time we pulled out, barricades had been set up here and here. When we came to a barricade, we tried to find another way around it—we didn’t want to break through them in case they were stacked with IEDs.”

“So you believe you were herded through this point here?” Masters said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That means you’re saying you think the whole thing was planned and executed—”

Ambrose didn’t like Masters’s disbelieving tone. He cut her off. “Yeah, that’s what I believe. Of all the men who were with Peyton on that day, I’m the last man standing. And now Scotty’s father—the general. He’s dead, ain’t he? That’s the real reason you people are here, ain’t it?”

I didn’t look at Masters, although I felt her eyes flick to me. “Yeah, that’s why we’re here,” I said.

The road was quiet. There weren’t even any dogs or cats slinking about. Ambrose’s men had formed a perimeter. They were watchful and patient, good soldiers whether wearing their country’s uniform or not. There was the faint hum of traffic floating across the river from the far bank, as well as the ever-present noise of helicopters, but nothing else. No bomb blasts, no
tat-tat-tat
of distant gun battles. Under the sun’s naked flame it was unbelievably hot and still. So why were chills crawling around under my skin? “You said General Scott came to visit you. What about?”

Ambrose walked toward the retaining wall and looked out across the Tigris. “It was a week after Peyton’s death. He wanted to know what had happened to his son. Like I said, he showed me Scotty’s autopsy. Cause of death was trauma from a land mine. I knew that was a lie, and because the general had seen his son’s body, he knew it was a lie, too. I think he just wanted Scotty’s murder confirmed by an eyewitness.”

“Do you think someone told him his son had been murdered?” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure—he didn’t say—but why else would he not have believed the autopsy report?”

I nodded.
Yeah, why else?

“How long did he stay in Baghdad?” Masters asked.

“Just one day, I think. And he was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel.”

“Didn’t you think that was odd?” Masters said.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, ma’am, because a four-star tends to attract attention. Lieutenant colonels? Not so much. He wanted to be here incognito.”

“Did Peyton have any enemies?” I asked. There was that question again, the one that always gets an airing in murder investigations. I was expecting Ambrose to give the usual answer, but he surprised me.

“Yeah, I think he did have enemies—maybe the same ones his father had. Scotty began to talk about how he was in danger, how people might try to get to his father through him. We all laughed about that—we were in Iraq, for Christ’s sake, and every motherfucking one of us was in danger. So we thought he was just full of shit—mucking around, y’know? But now, with Scotty dead and all my men dead and his dad dead—and probably a lot more folks dead that I don’t know about, right?—well, I don’t think he was so full of shit, after all. Now I’m a believer.”

“A believer in what?” I asked.

“You ever heard of a group…a group that calls itself ‘The Establishment’?”

TWENTY-SIX

T
he establishment. No, amend that. Not the airy one we all refer to, a euphemism for the status quo. He was talking about The Establishment, a different animal entirely—one with a capital T and a capital E and, apparently, an appetite for blood. I stood there not knowing what to say for a couple of seconds while Varvara’s words ran through my brain.
The Establishment killed him—the same people also killed his son, Peyton.
She knew. Had Varvara mentioned the name of this shadowy organization just to see if I’d react? To see if I was in the loop? What had Abraham Scott told her? Was it possible there really was a group called The Establishment out there punching people’s tickets? And, if so, why? At the time, Varvara had been correct in assuming that, had she just laid it all out for me, I wouldn’t have believed her. But now…? “Did Peyton tell you what or who The Establishment was?” I asked Ambrose.

Something rang. It was Ambrose’s Iridium phone. He held up a hand to put me on hold for a moment and pulled the unit off the clip on his belt. He answered it, saying a few quiet words I didn’t catch. The call finished, he hooked it back on his belt, placed a finger in his ear, and then repositioned the thin tube that contained the tiny microphone in front of his mouth. He muttered something into it; again, nothing I caught. Then he told us, “Sorry. Just got the word. Been told by The Man to clear this sector.” Ambrose hopped up on the Toyota’s doorsill and slid behind the wheel. The men assumed their positions in the two vehicles behind. “Getting back to Peyton, Special Agent, I can’t tell you too much more. Scotty wasn’t long on detail. Maybe he didn’t know what he was dealing with. It had something to do with his father—that’s all he said. I wish I knew more. Then maybe I could use the information to get a little leverage, get whoever or whatever to lay off; you know what I’m saying?”

I knew. Ambrose was scared and he had every right to be. I wasn’t feeling too comfortable myself, and neither was Masters if the frown on her face was anything to go by. I stood there on the road, my mind a black hole of confusion. I had questions but I didn’t know which to ask first. One pushed its way to the front. “You said the general came here for a day.”

“That’s right, but I don’t know exactly how long he hung around. He only spent the morning with me. He said he was leaving but I didn’t see him get on the plane or nothing.”

“Okay,” I said, taking this in. Sergeant Audrey Fischer, the PA in von Koeppen’s office, said Scott had taken three weeks off. We now knew that he’d spent one, possibly two days in Iraq with Ambrose sorting the facts from the lies surrounding the death of his son. Varvara had said he’d gone to Riga for a week. At the end of that time, he’d returned to Germany, taking her back with him. That left us with a number of days still unaccounted for.

“Earth to Cooper…?” Ambrose said.

I was holding up the show.

“Huh? Oh…sorry,” I said. Everyone was loaded up and ready to roll. I climbed in—this time in the front seat beside Masters—and pulled the door shut. Ambrose stood on the gas, turned hard right, and we plunged into the darkened streets. The narrow houses flashed by but I didn’t see them. I was trying to organize what we now knew, and what the implications of that knowledge might be. My instincts told me Peyton Scott had been murdered as some kind of warning to his father—just as Peyton had told the men in his squad. But, for whatever reason, the general didn’t heed that warning and so
they
killed him. From what Ambrose was saying, the mysterious
they
were The Establishment. If so, what was the motive?
They
also had to be a connected and powerful organization with serious reach and resources to erase a four-star general from the roster.