The Death Trust (48 page)

The reality wasn’t great.

The beeping sound was familiar and so was the smell. I sensed a presence hovering over me. I opened my eyes and waited for the recognition. It was male, pushing fifty, with pattern baldness. A stranger.

“Take it easy, soldier,” he said. “You’re in the hospital. Let’s have a listen to your lungs.”

“Which hospital?” I managed to say.

“Andrews AFB. Base hospital,” he said, maneuvering the stethoscope inside my hospital gown.

“Breathe,” he said.

I breathed.

“Again.”

I breathed again. We went on like that for several breaths until I got seriously light-headed.

“Pretty good,” he said. “Considering.”

Considering what?

“How do you feel, Special Agent?” he asked.

“Light-headed and thirsty,” I said. “Aside from that, I haven’t a clue.”

“Good. Means the morphine’s working.”

“What’s the damage, Doc?” I asked. By now I knew I’d been shot. I just wasn’t exactly sure where because, like he said, the morphine was working.

“We believe a gun you were holding in your hand deflected the first bullet. That explains the broken fingers. You were lucky. The second bullet entered your arm here,” he said, pointing to the muscle under his upper arm, “entered your bloodstream, and traveled to your heart. We had to remove it.”

“My heart or the bullet?”

“What? Oh, right. Funny.” He wasn’t smiling.

A joke popped into my mind. I had the feeling the doctor wouldn’t be amused, but I launched into it anyway, slurring because of the morphine. I said, “A patient says to his doctor, ‘Doc, if I give up drinking, smoking, loose women, and fast cars, will I live to be a hundred?’”

The doctor, looking down on me, said, “No, but it’ll seem like it.”

“Oh, you’ve heard it,” I said.

“I’m a doctor. I’ve heard every doctor-patient joke in the book.” He tapped an IV line. “You’ve lost quite a lot of blood. We removed several large slivers of glass from your legs. They severed a few veins, but no arteries. Good luck there, too.”

All this good luck. Too much more of it would kill me.

He poured me a cup of water from a jug beside the bed and held it to my lips while I drank. I’d never tasted anything as good and as sweet as that water.

“I’ve reduced the morphine dose a little, but if the pain gets uncomfortable, just squeeze this ball and you’ll get a small release of morphine.” He placed the ball in my hand.

“What day is it?” I muttered. I closed my eyes and let my head sink into the pillow.

“You’ve been here fifteen hours. It’s Monday afternoon, just after five
P.M
.”

“Thanks,” I said, eyes still closed. Along with the blood, I’d lost a lot of time.

“Do you feel up to visitors, Special Agent?” he asked.

“Who is it?” I replied.

“Only me,” came a familiar voice from behind the curtain separating my bed from the others in the room.

It was Gruyere.

The doctor had a brief whispered chat with the general, none of which I could hear. I guessed he was probably telling her not to stress me out. If that’s what he was saying, he was too late. I glanced at the monitor wired up to my heart. It was registering a hundred and fifteen beats per minute and climbing. For the first time I noticed I was connected up to a spaghetti of tubes and wires. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was sick. When I looked back at Gruyere, the doctor had gone. The general was holding up a copy of a newspaper so that I could read the front page. At first I had no idea why. Then the headline in large black letters beneath the masthead swam into focus. It read, “CONSPIRACY.” A smaller headline said, “Military’s ‘Quality Guarantee’ Delivers War Every 15 Years.”

“Was this fucking necessary, Special Agent Cooper?” said Gruyere, giving me her angry grandmother routine.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, not feeling up for games.

Bishop. I’d given him instructions to pass the details of the First Convention to
The Washington Post.
If the press pulled that thread, the whole mess would unravel. I’d called Bishop just before I went to interview Harmony. He was to contact the paper if I failed to call him within eight hours. It was supposed to be my insurance policy. And it might have worked had Cutter believed in “that old ploy.” Cutter and I both had a lesson to learn: he for being too clever, me for being too unimaginative.

Gruyere seemed to accept my answer, and I was surprised by that. She folded the paper and let it fall on the end of my bed. “Been putting your body on the line again, I see.”

“I thought you were at Ramstein, ma’am,” I said.

“I was, but now I’m here.”

“Because I’m here?”

“Among other reasons,” she said. She stood beside the bed, arms folded, scowling. “You gave us a few scares, Cooper. You’re a most unorthodox investigator.”

“Is that good or bad?”

The big cheese shrugged and said ambiguously, “It is what it is.”

“When do you want my report, ma’am?”

“Plenty of time for that. Besides, Anna Masters gave me a full update before the crash. And I’ve already read Flight Lieutenant Bishop’s report. Forensics have cleared you of manslaughter, by the way.”

“Manslaughter?” As far as I was aware, I hadn’t killed anyone. Not recently, anyway.

“Jefferson Cutter.”

“Ma’am?”

“You shot the Vice President in the temple, Cooper. A ricochet.”

“I what?”

She nodded. “Officially, it is being called an accident—cleaning his gun when it went off, apparently. Happens all the time.”

Yeah, but not to vice presidents.

“Secret Service have been debriefed. Harmony Scott has been arrested and charged with conspiracy relating to the murder of her husband. We searched her house and found this.” Gruyere pulled an evidence bag from her briefcase and put it on my stomach. Inside was an official form. I had a good idea what it was even before I saw “U.S. Army Autopsy Report” in large black letters at the top of the page. It was the very first autopsy performed on Peyton Scott’s remains, the one subsequently wiped from the DoD’s computer in Washington. I caught the words “massive trauma” and “decapitation” in the “cause of death” section.

“There is some consideration being given to charging her with various acts of treason. I say consideration because we believe any good lawyer would get her off those charges, and we know she’ll be hiring the best.”

“What about the suicide note?” I asked.

“Forensics came back clean. We suspect von Koeppen had it forged and hid it in the book. Harmony went along for the ride. Who else would you like an update on?”

“Radakov,” I said.

“You’ll find a small piece on him on page five.” Gruyere nodded at the newspaper. “There wasn’t much left of him to bury. Seems someone told his Chechen friends that he was former KGB.”

I wondered who that someone was. I didn’t believe it was Cutter—at the end, he was more concerned about me than about Radakov.

Gruyere continued. “Now, as for the case, I think you know already that the DoD and the FBI have taken over. This is out of our hands now. Smuggling humans is a serious crime. You’ve done a fucking great job here, Cooper.”

I might have been doped to the gills but I wasn’t in la-la land. This whole speech was carefully worded for my benefit. I doubted there’d be much of an investigation. And, with Radakov dead, there was no one left who knew the whole story. Except maybe me, but, as my file suggested, I was easily discredited. “My cell was bugged with a homing device, ma’am. You knew where I was most of the time.”

“Yes, I did. It was important for us to know where this case was taking you.”

“Was Anna in on it?” I asked.
Anna Masters gave me a full update before the crash.

“Anna knew more than you about certain things.”

“Such as?”

“She knew von Koeppen was up to something illegal—as it turns out we just had no idea what. Masters was working the case. Von Koeppen probably thought he was pretty clever, dating someone from OSI. I can tell you it wasn’t something she enjoyed.”

I took my mind back to the moment in Anna’s Mercedes when I’d asked her about von Koeppen. I wished she’d confided in me then. The German might not have passed under my radar for as long as he did if she had. Things might have turned out differently if I’d known what he was capable of from the beginning. Maybe she’d still be alive. “Why didn’t you brief me on von Koeppen?” I asked.

“The situation was delicate. We didn’t want him to know he was under suspicion until we had something solid. It would have been too easy for him to just lie low.”

“And then General Scott died,” I said.

General Gruyere nodded. “Yes. The Vice President’s interest in the case was immediate. I shouldn’t have been surprised—Scott was his son-in-law. But, I have to admit, his insistence on
you
taking the case did intrigue me. As you know, you weren’t my first choice. Or my second or fifth, for that matter. On the strength of your current performance review, you weren’t up to something like this. Cutter gambled on you fucking up, and lost.” Gruyere had her back to me as she gazed out the window, her arthritic hands clasped behind her.

“Why did you take me off the case when it looked like I was getting somewhere?”

“You and I both know you work best under pressure. I simply applied some.”

Okay, there was some truth in that.

“It’s safe to say a little redemption is due to come your way as the result of all this, Vin.”

Oh, oh, first names. Run for cover.

“That bullet you picked up in Iraq. There’s another Purple Heart in it for you. You’re assembling quite a collection.”

I felt like giving the morphine ball a squeeze.

“The business about the First Convention finding its way into the public domain isn’t so great, but that storm will pass. The convention works for the military—it has to be that way. We can’t afford the latest and greatest unless private enterprise is prepared to take the investment risk. And no one wants our men and women at arms to have to use second-rate equipment—stuff that doesn’t work when and where it’s supposed to. Call it a warranty.”

That was another way to look at it. I changed the subject. I wanted to talk about her membership in a certain club. “You’re part of The Establishment.”

Gruyere turned. “What, as in the status quo?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” I noticed my BPM had come way down. I was calm.

The general regarded me over those half-moon spectacles of hers for several moments before speaking. Then she said, “By The Establishment, I take it you mean a secret society that conspires to manipulate world events for the benefit of America’s coffers.”

Close enough. I nodded.

“No such entity exists, Vin. You and I need to be straight on that point.”

“And, if I’m not?” I heard myself saying.

“You sound like someone fending off a threat.”

“Am I?” I asked.

“No, Vin. I’m not going to threaten you. Hypothetically speaking, if there was such a group, my guess is that it’d have to be governed by a pretty strict set of rules. One of those rules would surely have to be that its members didn’t embark on individual, unsanctioned projects. If that were to happen, I believe such a group would act to protect the very institutions it was brought into existence to serve.”

The effects of the morphine were wearing off. My mind was sharper. So was the pain. My arm felt like it had been chewed on, and my other arm, the one that’d received the bullet hole in Baghdad, didn’t feel much better. Jesus—I saw it. I suddenly realized what Gruyere’s—The Establishment’s—end game had been all along. “Which is why I was manipulated into killing the Vice President for you.”

Gruyere gave me a thin, sympathetic smile. “Whatever anyone wanted is now, thankfully, immaterial. The fact is that the fates took a hand and tidied some loose ends—hypothetically speaking, of course.”

Radakov. I was right: Cutter wasn’t the one who fingered him.

I looked at Gruyere and she at me. Neither of us spoke for several minutes. I had not one shred of evidence that The Establishment existed, let alone that she or anyone else was a member. Cutter and von Koeppen were dead. No one else would come forward, certainly not Alu Radakov. Not anymore. And Harmony Scott knew what she knew, but like me, I doubted she had evidence to back up any claims. There was Scott’s Dungeon, of course, but there was nothing on it about The Establishment, and, if there had been any evidence in Scott’s files, I doubted it would still be there.

“It’s over, Vin. You did your job and now it’s time to stand down,” she said.

I found my mind wandering back to Cutter’s study. What had really happened there? I remembered the two Secret Service types coming through the door, their pistols raised and in the shooting position. Those guys do not miss, especially not at the range they were shooting from. If they thought I’d shot Cutter, or was about to, they’d have whacked me but good, no question. Except I was still alive and the Toe Cutter was down in hell standing on his hands in a room full of excrement. That meant the pair who came through the door were not Secret Service. It also meant I doubted the Vice President had been killed by an accidental ricochet.

“I know what you’re thinking, Vin, and you need to move on. Also, you should know that I have retired. It has already been announced. Effective from today, actually. I have grandchildren I want to spend more time with.”

I nodded. “Sorry to hear that, ma’am,” I said perfunctorily. In fact, the only people I felt sorry for were those grandkids.

“Something you may not be aware of, Vin,” she said. “Abraham Scott and I were friends. When we were younger, we were more than friends. We stayed in touch over the years. He came to see me after Peyton was killed, after he’d been to Baghdad. He told me he believed his son had been murdered and that the autopsy report had been altered. For reasons of his own, he chose not to tell me what the motive for that murder was. I believe that, at the time, he didn’t know, or wasn’t sure. I checked into the autopsy issue quietly, but couldn’t see how the records had been tampered with. Now, thanks to your investigation, we know what Cutter was up to.”