The Red Horseman (45 page)

He found them one evening in late May as he
rooted in the drawer for a fresh pen. He fingered the
bottle, then pried off the cap and dumped the white
tablets on the desk in front of him. As he
looked at the pills, the whole experience came
flooding back.

Toxic waste. That’s what these pills were.
If he dumped them down the toilet the
man-made chemical compounds would go through the sewage
treatment plant into the Potomac. Too dangerous
to just toss them into the garbage for burial in a
landfill. Can’t throw them into the ocean.

If he burned them … but Lord knows what that
might do to the active ingredients. And the resultant
fumes might be poisonous.

These things were like plutonium pellets, their
components deadly in the most minute quantities,
difficult to dispose of safely.

That evening on the way home he bought a new
battery for the car and asked if he could bring in the old
battery in the morning for recycling.

Sure.

After he had the new battery installed, he opened
one of the plastic cell caps on the old one and
dropped the tablets into the acid. Then he quickly
screwed the cap back on.

When he looked up he found Callie was standing
there in the garage with her arms folded across her chest,
watching him. “What was that stuff you put in there?”

“Ahh . . .”

She stood looking at him with raised eyebrows.

What the hell! “Binary poison. This was what
all the hassle was about last summer.” He
told her about Herb Tenney.

“Do you think putting that stuff in there is safe?”

“Should be. They’ll drain this battery into a huge
vat of acid and that will dilute the poison. Whatever
they do to the acid should destroy the compound, I think.”

“It’s a risk then.”

“Life’s a risky business,” he told her as
he wiped his hands on a rag.

“Jake, what really happened in Iraq?”

“That was ten months ago, Calfie. Does it
matter?”

She shrugged. “I suppose not, but on some
level it does.

Last fall when we went out for ice cream with
Jack Yocke after that lecture, he and I
talked. I read his story in the Post.”

“And?”

“Well, I never understood exactly what
happened. Why did Saddam get killed? The
Russian generals?”

“Yocke talked to you about that?” The words came out
sharply, and Jake regretted it.

Callie didn’t seem to notice. “No,” she
said slowly, recalling that conversation. “He said his
story covered it.

That was the problem. The story just explained what
happened, not why.

I kept the clipping. I was looking at it again
last week. You usually never talk about things like that-which
I can understand, although at times it seems hard,
unfair even. There’s a whole side of you I
don’t know about.”

“Why did you wait until now to bring this up?”

“I wasn’t going to,” Callie said. “Then you
brought that poison home.

So I’m asking. If you don’t want to tell
me, I understand.”

Jake Grafton stared at his wife. After a
moment he said, “Yocke’s story is true. He
reported what he saw.”

“But not everything he saw.”

“No, not everything.” Jake ran his fingers through his
hair. “We were in the hangar at Samarra. Toad
put the gun he was holding on the table in front of
Yakolev and bent over to cut the plastic tie that
held his hands. Yakolev grabbed the gun and killed
Mikhailov and Hussein.”

“Toad wouldn’t make a mistake like that. You
set it up?”

My wife knows me very well, Jake
reflected. Too well.

“Yes,” he said softly.

“And the marine captain killed Yakolev?”

“Yes.

“Shot him in the back?”

Yes.

Callie thought about it. “Why?”

“I thought the world would be a lot better place if
Saddam Hussein wasn’t in it. My
responsibility. But if I shot him he would be a
martyour. So I had a talk with Yakolev.

We both knew that if he went back to Russia
he would be shot. He said he was a soldier, he
didn’t fear a buflet. I told him I knew
that and wanted his help.”

“And what was his reply?”

“He just looked me in the eye and said he would think
about it. So I set it up. When Yakolev saw the
pistol placed on the table within his reach, he knew
what it was I wanted. And he knew how it would end.
He made his choice. Mikhailov didn’t know
what was going on but perhaps he would have wanted it to end the
way it did. Maybe.

He was old and tired and wanted to die … that was
my impression, anyway.”

She stepped toward him and touched his cheek. “Why
didn’t you tell me about this sooner? You shouldn’t have
carried this by yourself.”

“Yakolev and Mikhadov were soldiers. They
screwed up big-time. I think they realized that
toward the end.”

“And Hussein?”

“Saddam Hussein was a thug who clawed his way
to the top of the neighborhood dung heap, like Also
Capone, Joe Stalin, Adolph Hitler,
Attila the Hun and a hundred others.

I have no regrets.”

“General Land? The president? What did they
think afterward?”

“They liked Jack Yocke’s version. After they
put down the newspaper they probably said, Next
problem.”

He flipped off the garage light as he followed
her out the door into the late spring evening.

“How many times,” she asked, “can you take on the
Herb Tenneys and Saddam Husseins of the world and
come out alive?”

He looked at her with raised eyebrows.
“Gimme a break, Callie. I lead a very
sedentary life. I’m a bureaucrat, for
heaven’s sake. You know me!”

“I know you better, Jacob.”

He examined her face, pushed a stray lock
back from forehead. “I’ll fight the good fight as
long as I have any fight left in me.”

She smiled, then brushed her lips across his cheek
as she took his hand.

“Come eat your dinner,” she said as she led him
toward the house. “You can’t fight on an empty
stomach.