The Death Trust (44 page)

“No.”

“Your boyfriend dreamed up bogus missions in Riga, Latvia, and sent NATO C-one-thirties there. On the return flights, these aircraft brought back women. Many of them were subsequently sold into the European sex trade as slaves.”

Harmony was shaking her head, as if she was trying to keep my voice from reaching her ears.

I continued. “They were given ACUs and CAC cards on arrival at Ramstein and hustled off the base. Somehow, your husband found out about that. He threatened to have it stopped and was told to lay off, or else. He wouldn’t. And then Peyton was KIA in Iraq. Only it was murder and your husband knew it was murder. He knew it because you told him.”

“No.”

“You were the messenger.”

“Enough!”

“How did you break the news to your husband that his son had been murdered, Mrs. Scott?”

It suddenly dawned on me that she might have had some tangible proof.

“You showed him the original autopsy report, didn’t you?” I said. The shame written on Harmony’s face told me I was right. An autopsy in accordance with U.S. Army practices in Iraq had indeed been performed on Peyton Scott’s remains. It had then been subsequently erased on the DoD’s system, despite Captain Blood’s assurance that such an action was impossible. But a hard copy of the report was in existence, and this woman had it.

“Your husband had to be certain. There was no other way. He had to look into Peyton’s body bag.”

She shook her head.

“Was it worth it, Mrs. Scott? Was the love you shared with von Koeppen worth losing your humanity for?”

“Peyton was dead. Nothing I could do would bring him back.”

I could feel my own heart rate rising with anger, indignation, and a little fear. I was in the presence of someone who’d traded her soul with the devil for a relationship that was doomed.

“General Scott went to Iraq, to the hospital there,” I said, “to talk to the men your stepson fought alongside, and to question the medical officer whose name appeared on the autopsy report that stated Peyton had been killed by a mine. And then he went to Washington, to see your father.”

Harmony Scott pinned her trembling hands between her knees to get control of them. “I’m not saying anything more,” she insisted.

“Fine. Happy to continue uninterrupted,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” Harmony replied, her eyes sliding in and out of focus, her fury ebbing and flowing.

“Are you going to show it to me?” I asked.

She replied, “Show you what?”

“The autopsy report, the original one performed by someone who wasn’t already dead. The one documenting that Peyton Scott, sergeant, USMC, had been decapitated.”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because you’re leaving now.”

“I am?”

Her eyes slid from me to the door behind me. I heard the slightest noise, or maybe it was the faint change in air pressure across the hairs on the back of my neck.
She’d been on the phone. Who had she called?
I turned and saw a man I recognized kneeling on the floor. He was wearing army ACUs, the European pattern. Against the brown walls, his camouflage made him stick out like a pork chop in a vegan’s soup bowl. The silenced M4 carbine he had aimed at my head made me decide to keep my mouth shut about the pork-chop thing. Four other men also armed with silenced M4s swarmed past him into the room. They checked it out quietly and efficiently and then came straight for me, and it was not to shake my hand. One of them gestured with a flick of his rifle that I should put my hands up. I obeyed and he cuff-locked them together, tight. The soldier who did this had a face that reminded me of a road still under construction. That’s what happens when you get hit with the ancient karate brick-in-the-kisser move, one of my personal favorites. I remembered the moment in Baghdad and savored it. Whenever I met these guys, they put me in the hospital. I knew that was a professional disappointment to them, on account of their intention having always been to put me in the morgue. I felt the rifle butt, then watched an explosion of white and orange fireballs inside my skull. Good night.

FORTY-THREE

N
o erotic dreams accompanied my return to consciousness this time, though I had a pain in the back of my head equal to the worst hangover of my life.

I kept my eyes closed, none too eager to see what was on the other side of my eyelids until it was absolutely necessary. Whatever was going on, I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. The quality of the air, the occasional thump, the engine drone. I was in an airplane. The Pavlovian association of getting a rifle butt to the back of the head wasn’t going to help my flying phobia any, and just when I was getting used to flying again.

There was a shift in engine noise and various gear whines somewhere under my feet. The plane lurched. I opened my eyes and mouth. Two men in suits were seated opposite, both staring at me. The one who cuffed me before the lights went out smiled. He held up his wrist and gave it a waggle. I recognized my watch. Or more accurately his watch, now definitely his again.

“Nice fake,” I said, groggily. His smile faded.
Fuck you, buddy. And thanks for giving me a look at the time.
The man’s face was badly bruised where I’d smacked him with the brick, and a large bandage covered his nose.

The little hand was past the eleven and the big hand was coming up to forty minutes past the hour. My mind was working slow, like a ten-year-old’s, so only slightly slower than usual, the unkind would have said. The sky was black beyond the porthole. That made it 2340 hours. Genius. First mystery of the day or, rather, night, solved.

It hurt my brain to use it. I took in my situation in the hope of getting it kick-started.

It was difficult to move. I glanced down and found out why. My hands were still cuff-locked together and I was strapped down tight into a comfortable, expensive leather chair, or it would have been a comfortable chair if I’d been sitting in it attended to by a pretty flight attendant with a beverage cart. The plane was small and expensive, an executive jet. I wondered whose.

Apes dressed in Armani sat around me: two opposite, two in swivel chairs in what normally would’ve been the aisle, and one beside me. Another leaned against a bulkhead, looking at me with about as much expression on his face as a store dummy’s. So these were the asswipes who had jumped Masters and me in Baghdad, and then performed a little dentistry on me a day later outside the Pensione Freedom. I knew I’d meet up with them again. Someone break out a deck of cards; I felt like we were old friends.

I wondered which of them knew their way around a Barrett 50 cal. I wanted to tell them that they were dud shots, but they would have known the bravado was hollow, given that it was me and not them who was the prisoner here, wearing a bump on the back of his head the size of a dodo’s egg. I was plainly at their mercy, theirs and the person funding their fashion sense.

Where the fuck was I? Where was I being taken? How long had I been out? I decided to try to break the ice. “Have any of you guys got a mint?” I asked. “It’s either my breath or someone here needs a shower real bad. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s me,” I said, keeping it light. I got more response from the overhead locker. “So, where we headed?” One of the men reamed the inside of a nostril with his index finger and then flicked the harvest at me. He missed.

Aside from that, I got no other reaction. Ten minutes later I was getting so bored I almost cracked and gave up everything I knew. But then the plane jumped as it hit a thick layer of cloud and I remembered that I was flying rather than competing in some world championship silence competition.

I looked out the porthole, expecting to see the earth rushing up at some crazy, life-threatening angle, but all I got was more cloud, the wingtip strobe blinking metronomically as it sliced through the silver tufts. And then, just as I was about to look away, I saw the briefest flash of a city beneath. A big city. Again I wondered how long I’d been in the air. I also wondered why I was so threatening to these guys that they had to sit almost on top of me. I mean, it wasn’t likely that I was going anywhere or capable of doing anything very much, trussed as I was. I could maybe breathe at them aggressively, but that was about it in the retaliation stakes. It took me a while to realize the reason: I made them nervous, simple as that. I was a threat to these people and to whoever was pulling their strings. I was unpredictable. They’d tried to remove my piece from the board several times and failed. It was they who were scared of me. “Boo,” I said to test the theory. No reply. One of the men was asleep. Another yawned. On the other hand, maybe I was just blowing smoke up my own ass.

I closed my eyes and tried to get my thoughts in order. My last memory, and a hazy one at that, was of Harmony Scott’s liquor. I should have realized that she would call someone when she saw me in the garage snooping around. Even now, I still wasn’t completely sure where exactly Harmony fit into things. She’d given me the picture of a woman who’d lost the man she loved, felt him drift away, hating the way their marriage had turned out. I also saw her as playing a starring role in the manipulation of her husband—either willingly or unwillingly—over many years. And, of course, when it came to Peyton, she had ultimately shown herself to be self-absorbed and utterly heartless.

That brought me back to Abraham Scott. There’d been a lot of time between Peyton’s death, the taking of the body bag photograph, and his own “accidental” death in the glider. All up, a year. Why so long? Had the general discovered that the people-smuggling racket operating between Riga and Ramstein was not just about money used to finance Radakov’s separatists? I figured he’d discovered a bigger game, and he’d needed time to put it all together. So he kept a low profile, kept his nose clean. I was sure he’d uncovered the same cancer I had—the research into our trade with Japan and Russia were at least circumstantial proof of that.

The descent became rocky. The clouds played a vigorous game of shuttlecock with the plane, batting it up and down and sideways. Windshear. Rain droplets smeared the porthole. It was a shitty night in wherever. I heard the flaps fully extend as the motion played havoc with my Eustachian tubes. I was vomiting before I knew it, too fast for my friend fond of flicking boogers about the place to avoid the projectile bile heading toward his lap. Oops. Better out than in, pal.

An instant later, my face was stinging from a backhanded strike. I was tempted to explain that I didn’t mean it but I knew I wouldn’t be believed: Lies need conviction to stick.

I turned away. We were coming in low over the city. Air traffic control took us on a sightseeing tour. I could see a bunch of lights through the cloud, but the effect was like a sock on a bank robber’s face and I still couldn’t recognize the place through it. Suddenly a patch of clear night sky opened up below the wingtip. I looked down and saw clearly where I was. Familiar monuments lit up stark and white instantly nailed this city of empire. Christ, Washington, D.C.

Mystery number two cracked.

My heart began to pound. I felt it muscle up against my ribs, wrestling for space. D.C. That meant I had a very good chance of cleaning up this mess. Though, of course, shortly thereafter I would be dead.

FORTY-FOUR

T
he aircraft touched down without incident, which surprised me as it always does, and taxied up to and then inside a hangar. No immigration, no homeland security checks. That meant whoever was in control could pull powerful strings, but I already knew that.

The Rolex guy lifted the latch on my seat belt and motioned at me to stand. I did as I was told without causing trouble. I’d antagonized them enough and baiting them would only get me beaten up some more. Who said I can’t learn?

The pilots shut down the engines and an ape cracked the hatch. I was shuffled down the stairs, across the hangar floor, and into the back of a black Suburban, accompanied by my simian buddies. The air was warm and humid. With all the rain, I expected it to be cold, like Germany. I was sandwiched in the backseat of the vehicle between a couple of thousand dollars of Italian suit. The windows fogged up almost instantly, but I could still see through the windshield. There wasn’t much traffic on the streets. We came to a fork in the freeway: right to Andrews AFB, left to the city. We turned left.

The pickings were still slim in the conversation department. We drove in silence toward the halo projected by the city’s lights onto the low cloud above it. The place was pretty much deserted at this after-midnight hour and seemed lit up for a party where the invitations hadn’t been sent. I passed some time again trying to work out who these people were who had, at various times over the past few weeks, done their best to kill Anna and me. In their suits and earpieces, they looked like Secret Service types, but the suits made them look uncomfortable, like kids dressed by their grandmothers for church. I pegged them as mercenaries or, in the lexicon of current PC military job speak, “security.”

The Suburban took it slow, just another government car. No need to hurry. The Potomac was a river of black glass throwing up rippling colors of reflected light. We paralleled it for a couple of miles before crossing the bridge to the city’s heart. Here the monuments were easy to pick out: the Jefferson Monument and then, as we crossed the river, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument beyond it.

This case had given my feelings about national pride, embodied by these grand architectural displays, a bad shake. I was sorry to say I now viewed these symbols as props in a show. They represented an ideal, but not a lot more.

The driver followed the signs to Pennsylvania Avenue and then to Massachusetts Avenue. A couple of ancient Chevys full of rust and young partygoers rolled past, the rap music so loud it made the droplets on the Suburban’s windows fizz. Two black guys, naked to the waist, hung out the windows and shouted at us. One of the apes gave them the bird. The White House appeared for an instant as we turned in an intersection. It stood white and clean, bathed by innumerable spotlights. How anyone inside got any sleep was beyond me.