Private L.A. (28 page)

Front and center: Carmine Noccia. He’d outright accused me of tipping the DEA to the hijacked shipment of painkillers. I’d outbluffed him when he and Tommy had tried to extort me out of Private. No doubt about it, Carmine had cause.

Two: Tommy? I wanted desperately to say impossible, but he was ruthless, and mean, and more than a little fucked up in too many ways to count. He might try to leverage me in ways I hadn’t considered. He’d pretend that he’d implicate me in murder. But would he? He’d certainly screw me over if he could, and had succeeded at that more than once. But in the end I was his brother, right? There was a line somewhere that he wouldn’t cross, right? He wouldn’t personally hire a Russian assassin, would he? Or was I just a hopeless romantic when it came to what my brother might have been?

Three: No Prisoners? Possibly. But why would they key on me? I hadn’t exactly been front and center on that case. LAPD and L.A. Sheriff’s had helped me in that respect, putting their own people in front of the cameras.

Four: members of the Harlow-Quinn team? Had one of them threatened to blow the story on the orphans’ fund? Or had the actors been ignorant of the way the money was being funneled to the
Saigon Falls
project, then discovered it, and had they been preparing to go to the authorities?

Five: whoever took the Harlows, excluding the Harlow-Quinn team.

I supposed that was possible. Maybe we were close and someone had decided to take me out?

Then again, for the most part, Justine had taken the lead in that investigation. Had she been the assassin’s real target, with me a lucky opportunity?

It was suddenly all too much to think about. My head ached and I closed my eyes. I honestly don’t remember falling asleep.

MY CELL PHONE
rang and I jerked alert on my couch, head groggy. What time was it? Three thirty a.m.? I’d been sleeping five hours?

Yawning, I picked up the cell, saw a number I didn’t recognize, answered, “This better be good.”

“Didn’t want to come tell me in person that someone tried to kill you, huh?”

I hung my head, feeling guilty for having forgotten to visit Del Rio, or at least call him. “It was a crazy day, Rick,” I began.

“I’m sure it was,” he said. “Make up for it. Get over here ASAP.”

“It’s three thirty in the morning.”

“There’s someone here wants to see you, misses you deeply.”

I flashed on Angela, the Filipina nurse. “It’s three thirty in the morning.”

“Which is why you better get your ass over here, Jack,” Del Rio said firmly. “Ghosts like the one standing in front of me need to be gone and well hidden in spooky spook land long before sunrise.”

I HADN’T SEEN
him in more than a decade, but he had not aged a bit and still looked like an overgrown choirboy, with pale pinkish skin, a pleasant pie-shaped face, and a riot of curly orange hair. But the eyes gave the lie to everything else, hard and dark as sapphires even if his lips were smiling.

“Guy Carpenter,” I said when I saw him in the chair usually reserved for me in Del Rio’s hospital room.

Carpenter was dressed in boat shoes, khakis, a white polo shirt, and a blue Windbreaker sporting the logo of a country club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With the Titleist ball cap on his head, he looked ready for thirty-six holes. I knew better. He’d never been in a country club in his life, unless it was one constructed especially for bad-asses, which he most definitely was.

“Jack Morgan,” Carpenter said, getting to his feet, shooting me a winning smile, and shaking my hand while those hard sapphire eyes danced over me, making me feel oddly expendable. “Been following your career since the ’Stan.”

“Can’t say the same about you.”

“Yeah, well, I was always better suited to the shadows than you were. How long
did
you last at the company?”

“Two years,” I said. “Difference of philosophy.”

“I figured that,” he replied, then laughed and shook his head. “Isn’t it strange the way life unfolds? The unexpected turns and twists?”

Del Rio spoke up from the bed. “You come here to tell us something, Guy, or get all touchy-feely about life unfolding in its grand arc?”

“He hasn’t changed,” Carpenter said to me, throwing a thumb Del Rio’s way. “Even with a broken back he hasn’t changed.”

“Not a bit,” I replied.

Carpenter’s smiling face fell then, and I saw the darkness I’d glimpsed several times in Afghanistan when Del Rio and I were charged with moving him about the country on missions we never fully understood.

He went to the door and shut it, then jammed a chair under the doorknob. “That nurse is a real pain,” he said. “I figured she might try to interrupt our business just to get her jollies.”

“You were always a quick study,” I said.

“Dartmouth will do that for you,” Carpenter replied before looking at Del Rio. “Those fingerprints you sent me?”

“Yes?”

“They don’t exist.”

“And that’s why you flew three thousand miles to see me?” Del Rio asked.

“I heard your back was broken.”

“Bullshit,” Del Rio said.

“Whatever,” Carpenter replied, his face hardening. “Those fingerprints belong to no one, and because the three of us go way back, I thought you’d want to hear me say that in person. Take it as a warning if you want, but don’t try to find someone who doesn’t exist.”

“Wait,” I said. “Warning from who?”

“People with far more reach than I’ve got,” Carpenter said. “Spooky, spooky spook people.”

“Did Rick tell you where the fingerprints came from?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, no,” he replied. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, but it does,” I said.

I told him everything, described seeing the four dead bodies on Malibu Beach, the killings in the CVS, and the explosion on the Huntington Beach Pier. Then I described how a drag-queen shooter playing Marilyn Monroe on skates killed six at Mel’s Drive-In before a granny who would have been the seventh shot him dead.

“This is our first serious clue as to who is behind No Prisoners,” I said. “We need your help or eight will die tomorrow.”

Through all of it, Carpenter had listened impassively, as if he were hearing the plot of a new action movie and not the gruesome details of an actual mass-murder spree.

When I was done, he blinked several times, rubbed his fair cheeks, and pursed his lips. “I read about some of this,” he said. “No Prisoners?”

“That’s the handle,” Del Rio said. “You recognize it?”

Carpenter shook his head.

“But you know those fingerprints,” I said. “Otherwise, I don’t see you coming here at all, as compassionate a man as you are. And I don’t think that warning was coming from any triple-spooky people. I think it’s coming from you.”

Carpenter thought that was funny but said, “No one ever said you were a dummy, Jack. But from me or whoever, take it as fair warning.”

Del Rio said, “There are twenty-one people dead. Innocent people. Eight more may die. Women. Children. Doesn’t that kind of thing get through to you? Or are you so jaded by your life in the shadows that nothing gets through anymore?”

To my surprise, Carpenter’s face cracked and the hard bravado fled, and he honestly seemed to age right in front of me, his eyes hollowing and his cheeks sagging. He said in a weary voice, “These kinds of things get to me more than you could ever imagine, Rick. The things I’ve seen? The stuff I know? I haven’t slept right in years.”

“High time to get some of it off your chest,” I replied. “Either that or the twenty-one people dead here in L.A. are going to become a permanent part of your nightmares and obsessions.”

Carpenter’s shoulders hunched and he gazed at me as if I were Jacob Marley’s ghost, showing him the length and weight of an invisible chain that threatened to hang from him for all eternity.

“I don’t want that,” he said quietly.

“Then tell us what you know,” Del Rio said. “Help us stop these killings.”

CARPENTER LOOKED AT
the floor for a long time, as if seeing something on the antiseptic film that coated the hospital tiles.

“Okay,” he said at last. “But none of this can become public. And none of this can ever be traced to me. If you attribute the information to me, well …”

“We get it,” I replied. “Far as I’m concerned, you were some mirage I once hallucinated in Afghanistan.”

Del Rio nodded. “You’ve got our word.”

Carpenter sighed, slouched in the recliner, and for the next hour and a half, and on past sunrise, told us a story that we never would have believed if Del Rio and I hadn’t been in Afghanistan ourselves during the crazy times after the invasion, after Bin Laden’s escape from the Tora Bora cave system, during the beginnings of the neo-Taliban counterinsurgency, long before the surge.

Carpenter said the fingerprints belonged to Clive Johnson, Master Sergeant Clive Johnson, who’d served in the Rangers and then with several Joint Special Operations Command teams, which drew elite warriors from all four branches of the military.

“It was early 2003, and the forces we’d committed to Afghanistan were being drawn down, sent to stage up in Kuwait before the invasion of Iraq,” Carpenter said. “There was a lot of dissension in the ranks, especially among spec ops who’d been in country since November 2001, right from the beginning.”

I remembered. “They felt they were being undercut, forgotten.”

Carpenter nodded. “They were being given all sorts of conflicting signals regarding the rules of engagement, when you could shoot, who you could shoot, that kind of thing.”

Del Rio nodded. “All sorts of good men died because of that. Hell, that was still going on two years later when SEAL Team Ten turned into the lone survivor because they wouldn’t kill the kid who betrayed them to the Taliban.”

Carpenter nodded. “That was just the worst of it.”

But back in 2003, frustration among the special forces hit another, earlier high point. These elite soldiers were asking themselves whether they were in Afghanistan to fight and beat the Taliban, or merely to offer Al Qaeda easy access to walking, talking American targets. Indeed, those questions echoed high into the US chain of command in Kabul.

“An army general who shall remain nameless decided that enough was enough,” Carpenter said. “He decided on his own to detach a new secret JSOC team out of Kandahar. Their job was simple: to disrupt the trade in raw opium and black tar heroin that was funding the Taliban insurgency in the mountains along the Pakistani border. By any means necessary.”

“Johnson was a member of that JSOC team?” Del Rio asked.

“Handpicked by the marine recon commander the general chose to lead the secret team.”

Carpenter got a tablet computer from a backpack I hadn’t noticed and called up a grainy snapshot of a man in his early forties. The left side of his face was covered in scars, and he gave off the distinct impression that he could eat broken glass and like it.

“Meet Lee Cobb, one bad dude,” Carpenter said, looking old again. “He got the scars in the first Gulf War. Land mine. Shook it off, healed up, went right back at it. Remember when you took me on that night drop-off, spring of oh-four?”

“Snowstorm?” I asked. “Zabul province?”

“That’s the one,” Carpenter said. “West of Qalat.”

I remembered it. Brutal terrain. Hard-core Taliban country.

Thinking back on how stranger than normal Carpenter had seemed that night, I said, “You were going to meet up with Cobb and his team?”

“More like try to stop them before they committed any more atrocities,” Carpenter said in a hollow voice.

FROM EARLY MARCH
2003 through April 2006, while the world’s attention was largely focused on the invasion of Iraq, the chaotic aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the rise of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Cobb’s team ran ad hoc missions in some of the most dangerous country in Afghanistan.

“At first, Cobb and his men stuck to the general’s playbook,” Carpenter said. “They worked to break up networks developing between poppy growers and Taliban fighters demanding tribute from the heroin manufacturers. In return for security, the growers paid the Taliban, who used the cash to fund their war.”

“At first?” Del Rio said.

“At first,” Carpenter replied. “Spring of 2004, things slipped off the rails while Cobb and his men were on a mission north-west of Tarin Kot. The general had a heart attack and died, having destroyed virtually all records regarding the secret JSOC team. They were, shall we say, left to their own devices.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“They became a ghost team,” Carpenter said. “They didn’t exist. So they were never extracted. Left out there, in country.”

“Until you went in after them?” Del Rio asked.

“I was the third to try to bring them in,” Carpenter said.

He said that in the summer of 2004, US Defense intelligence began getting reports of a rogue unit operating in the rugged massif north of Kandahar. Cobb and his men were said to be turning the tables on the Taliban, demanding their own tribute from the poppy growers and executing anyone or anything suspected of supporting Al Qaeda and the insurgency.

“Men, women, children, dogs, horses,” Carpenter said quietly. “You name it, they killed it if their demands weren’t met.”

“So Cobb kind of went Colonel Kurtz?” I asked.

“You could say he found his own way to the heart of darkness,” Carpenter agreed. “You could also say that he led a thirteen-month reign of terror that quite frankly worked.”

“How so?” Del Rio asked.

“The Taliban lost ground or died out everywhere Cobb’s team went,” Carpenter replied. “Poppy growers paid up or died too. And there was ample evidence that Cobb and his men amassed a small fortune in gold and black tar heroin that they managed to stash across the border in Pakistan.”

By late fall of 2004, the evidence of a secret JSOC team was overwhelming. Two senior CIA Special Activities Division, or SAD, operators were sent in to convince Cobb to come out of the hills and report his activities.