The Death Trust (30 page)

I pulled the visor down and took a look at the face in the mirror. I barely recognized the person staring back at me. There was a deep purple-and-black shiner around my left eye, fading to sickly yellow around the other eye and cheek. The whites of both eyes, the left in particular, were flecked with blood. I peeled the dressing off the left side of my face. The skin was bruised, swollen, and split—mashed—but the injury was already beginning to scab over nicely. My face was also covered in small cuts and a suture or two. Anyone could see I’d been playing hard. I decided to leave the bandage off and let the wound breathe.

I flipped up the visor. It was a gorgeous day. The fluffy clouds were back, pasted onto that baby blue sky. Ramstein looked as if it’d been washed and scrubbed clean. This being Germany, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it had been. The sun was out and behaving nice, saving its worst for Iraq, no doubt. I was real pleased to be back here, in this place, even if it wasn’t home, and that made me feel guilty.
I
could leave Iraq, but over a hundred thousand Americans there didn’t have that kind of freedom, unless they were zippered into a bag.

A phalanx of U.S. Marines—a couple of platoons—jogged by in the opposite direction, their white T-shirts gray with sweat, a large black man chanting out a rap-style cadence. According to the man, they were basically off to “teach those Eye-rakis a motherfuckin’ lesson, ’cause it be the You-Ess Marines gonna do the messin’.” We drove past slowly. I couldn’t help feeling that young warriors have been going off to war like that since the Battle of Troy, convinced of their own bravery, invincibility, sense of purpose, and righteousness. I also couldn’t help feeling that Iraq would beat that piss and wind out of them pretty hard. They might have been some of the best-trained fighting men the world had ever seen, as their sergeant proclaimed, but Iraq was probably not what they were expecting. I wondered which of these men the Reaper had marked as his cut. Even the men who did manage to walk out would be changed in some deep and permanent way. Kosovo and Afghanistan had taught me that war rarely brings out a man’s best. Mostly, it brings out the worst, and, no matter how good you are, you find out that you have the bad in you. If you’re lucky, you discover that the balance between the two is about equal. But, whatever the ratio, the memories and the self-knowledge stay with you, poisoning your sleep with memories you wish you’d never had. I suddenly realized that Masters had been talking. “Sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”

“I said, I’m a bit insulted that no one has tried to whack me.”

“What…?”

“As I said, I’m working this case, too. Why
you
while I’m apparently ignored?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Well…yes and no.”

“Have you had a good look at me lately, Anna? Happy to swap if you like.”

“Look, I am half serious about this, Cooper. All I ever wanted to be was an investigator in the military. That’s an offbeat ambition, I know, but that was always my dream. So now I’m here. What do I have to do to be taken seriously?”

“You sure as hell don’t have to be shot or mugged,” I said. I turned to face her against my body’s better judgment, every muscle, sinew, and joint screaming at me to give them a break. “Okay, all bullshit aside, you
are
doing a great job. You ask good questions. You cut through the crap and you get to the heart of the problem damn quick. You did your job in Iraq when we were under fire. And you’ve made some fearless decisions when plenty of others would have turned chickenshit. You marched into Harmony Scott’s house and secured those records. I wouldn’t have done that. You’ve got balls, lady. You got this case off the ground.”

We drove in silence for a minute or two. And then Masters said, “Thanks, Cooper.”

“Now can we go find that Jacuzzi?” I said. I realized how far Masters and I had come when her smile didn’t fade.

“So, have you spoken with General Gruyere while I’ve been sleeping in?” That was a call I was dreading having to make, but the boss was due an update.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Masters said. “Is she as tough as she sounds?”

“How did she sound?”

“Like, like—”

“Like she smokes cigars in bed?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“She’s a tough old buzzard, but I like her. More important, I respect her.”

“Well, she said, basically, that you were a fuckup and that the minute you got back home she was going to pack you off to Eielson AFB, Alaska, to change traffic-light bulbs.”

“We have a special relationship. Did she say
when
she wanted me home? Are there orders on the way?”

“No, I updated her on the case. But she wants you to call when you’ve recovered sufficiently.”

I nodded. That gave me plenty of room for interpretation. I could probably stretch it out to twenty-four, maybe even thirty-six hours.

“Your cell’s in the console, by the way, if you want to check your messages.” Masters tapped the box between our seats.

I hesitated. Who’d be calling? I ran my tongue in and out of the expanse left by my dearly departed molar. I’d handed out a few business cards. Could be a whole range of people, two in particular. What the hell. I took it out and fired it up. A few seconds after the thing made a connection, it began to chime. Once, twice, three times—four, five, six…I had half a dozen text messages and twice as many recorded messages. Several minutes later, I had ascertained that Brenda, my former wife, wanted to talk. Urgently. She didn’t want to say about what in a recorded message. No one else had called. I was secretly hoping one of the messages would be Varvara dropping me a line for old times’ sake, even though I’d told her to disappear but good. Number two on that list of fantasy calls was Fischer, von Koeppen’s PA. But no, every single one was Brenda. Twelve times. There was nothing I wanted to say to her that I hadn’t already said, and I couldn’t think of anything she could say to me that I’d want to hear. We were done. Finished. Over.
Kaput,
as I think they say in this country. At the very least, she could wait. I turned the phone off and dropped it back into the console as we pulled into the OSI block’s car spaces.

“Everything okay?” inquired Masters as we came to a stop.

“Yeah. The messages are from my ex.”

“All of them?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want some privacy to call her back?”

“No.”

“No, you don’t want privacy, or no, you’re not going to call her back?”

Was it my imagination here or was Masters giving me a hard time? “No to both.”

“A bit childish, don’t you think?”

“Actually, I think it’s adolescent, which is a rung above childish.”

Masters fixed me with a look, the one that says
I’m placing you on the scales, buddy, and I’m thinking that you’re not measuring up right at this moment.

“Special Agent, it’s all too close and the memories are fresh. And please, don’t tell me I have to let go of my anger, or any such New Age mumbo jumbo. I want to stay good and angry for a while longer.”

“Okay, I won’t,” Masters said cheerfully.

I got out of the vehicle, ending the conversation, moving with the athleticism of a tin man left out in the rain. The NCMPs standing guard on the front door saluted as we approached. Others, I noted, were patrolling the building’s exterior. I thought maybe the security was a bit over the top given that we were in the middle of Ramstein Air Base, but that was Masters’s call. I saluted back, trying not to wince with the discomfort the action induced.

We walked into the room Masters had set aside for the investigation. It was more ordered than I remembered. The names I’d written up on the Whiteboard were untouched, but Masters had added substantially to the list, as well as setting out in bullet points the facts as we knew them. It felt like years since I’d been here, but it’d been days. Several people I didn’t recognize were hunkered over keyboards or speaking down phone lines. I recognized only one of them, Flight Lieutenant Peter Bishop, and his cheeks still reminded me of hamburger buns. He glanced up, snapped to attention in his seat—if that’s possible—hastily ended his phone call, and came over.

“Special Agent Cooper, welcome back,” he said, his eyes shifting to the various cuts, bruises, and abrasions on my face. “You’re looking a bit fragile. Can I get you a seat?”

I wavered momentarily between the resentments of being treated like an old man, and feeling like an old man. In fact, I did want to sit, on account of I was a bit light-headed, and I consoled myself with the knowledge that having your brain pretty much batted out of your skull would do that to just about anyone. “Thanks,” I said.

“Sit here,” he said, pulling a chair across, “and I’ll take you through what I’ve found.”

I sat, making a supreme effort not to grunt like an old man as the weight came off my bones.

“I’ve debriefed the team on what we uncovered in Iraq.” Masters motioned at the Whiteboard. Headlining the list was
The Establishment.

“Okay, as the computer program’s name suggests,” Bishop began, “Dungeon is a prison, but, in this instance, it’s a prison for information—the stuff you want to lock up and then throw away the key. Imagine concentric circles, a circle within a circle, each circle made up of fire walls.”

I nodded.

“As you get further in toward the center, the fire walls get thicker, more impregnable. It’s hard enough breaking into the first wall, let alone the subsequent walls of encryption. And, of course, to get into the center you need to break through all of the walls. These defenses take up a lot of hard-disk space. Dungeon is roughly five megs in size but the cells in this virtual prison are small—”

Masters interrupted, perhaps for my benefit. “Which means…?”

“Not a lot of room inside for information, ma’am. Also, the advantage of Dungeon, aside from each of its cells being almost impossible to break into, is that it can’t be wiped out or erased. The hard disk actually has to be physically removed from the hardware and destroyed. The information is kept safe, locked away from prying eyes and secured against all but the most determined attempts to see it or destroy it.”

“No offense, Flight Lieutenant. If Dungeon’s so impregnable, how come you managed to break in?” I said.

“None taken. I went to school with one of the chaps who wrote part of the program. He was most helpful.”

I nodded. “Oh.”

“The old-boy network, you know,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” Actually I didn’t know. Most of the kids I went to school with were making license plates at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in New Jersey, or assembling auto parts at the one factory outside the small town I grew up in. Unless I needed to start an expensive, imported sports car in a hurry without a key, or fence a bunch of used household items out of someone’s garage, my old-boy network wasn’t a hell of a lot of use.

“Unfortunately,” Bishop continued, “he could only help me get inside the first circle. He had a key, I guess you’d call it. But it doesn’t fit the inner cells. He believes other programmers might have created their own keys for their cells. Of course, I’ve asked him to contact these former coworkers and enlist their assistance. He thinks they may consent to help.”

“Good,” I said. “So what’ve you got?”

“Well, it’s interesting, but I can’t tell you what it means. From the looks of things, General Scott was conducting a research program, part of which involved U.S. trading partners over the past eighty years, with particular interest in the balance of trade with Imperial Japan.”

“What?” The word snuck out before I could pull it back. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what the flight lieutenant had just told me wasn’t on the list.

But it did jog my memory. “Masters, have you got your camera? The one you used to take photos of the general’s study?” I was thinking about that section of shelves crammed with reference books on Japan, its brutal war in China, Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific, and other related topics.

“Yeah, I haven’t downloaded the shots yet.” She went to her desk and retrieved a little Sony digital. Moments later, the images of Scott’s library were up on the screen.

I remembered thinking it made some sense that a general might be interested in WWII and the events that led up to it. But how was it connected—if at all—to his death?

Bishop clicked on an item. The photos disappeared. In their place was a document displaying columns of figures. “Hey, I recognize this. In my bag—the one I took with me to Iraq. Is it here?”

Masters nodded. She leaned back behind her and pulled it out from under a desk. I noted that the leather was still slightly damp. This bag had saved my head from being split like a coconut. I opened it. Inside was a folder containing the photocopy of the Veitch autopsy and the laser-printed sheets of figures. The way the columns were laid out seemed to match those on the screen. I said, “Could you search for five hundred and seventy-four thousand, three hundred and seventy-six?”

Bishop tapped the number into the “Find and Replace” box and hit enter. The six-digit number came up instantly, highlighted in a red box on page seventeen out of fifty-six. “Well, I guess we know where this printout came from,” I said. “But do we know what it’s about?”

“I believe so, sir,” said Bishop.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Scott’s Web log indicates that he spent a fair bit of time digging around in the archives of the U.S. Office of Trade and Economic Analysis, among other places. I think what you’re looking at is the numbers of that trade activity.”

“With Japan?” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Bishop replied.

“Before the Second World War?”

He nodded.

“Any idea why?”

“The general compiled a brief historical summary, the events of the day, the background to those figures. That might tell us something.”

“Let’s have a look at it.”

The flight lieutenant tapped a few keystrokes. Another window appeared.

“Can you print out a couple copies of that?” I asked.

“Done, sir,” said Bishop, manipulating the mouse and clicking.