The room was deliciously cool and two air conditioners punched into the brickwork thrummed away. Plastic streamers waggling like colorful worms on speed writhed and flicked in the stream of refrigerated air gushing from the vents.
There were also numerous posters of pouting naked women suggestively holding various items from shock absorbers to shoulder-launched Stinger missiles. I wasn’t sure what the suggestion was—did they want to have sex with the cameraman or the items in their hands? Whatever, this was an office environment the PC weenies back home had not yet invaded, although these men were obviously ready for them if they tried, because two M4 carbines leaned against the wall within easy reach. The weapons were well used—the bluing worn away in places—but immaculately clean with a light sheen of oil on the barrels. It was the sort of office General von Koeppen’s twin would have had if he had a twin and that twin was his polar opposite.
This was MaxRisk’s operational HQ. I guessed the company probably had business offices somewhere else in town with Muzak, talking elevators, and secretaries, where contracts were negotiated and clients won over, because there was a shitload of money to be made in this game in Iraq and MaxRisk was a company doing just that.
“Can I help you, sir, ma’am?”
The black man with his death’s-head T-shirt and gold rings was leaning on the filing cabinet between us. He was powerfully built. The clear, brilliant whites of his eyes and teeth spoke of health, as did the muscle bulk of his shoulders and arms. His voice was deep and smooth as peanut butter.
I got right to the point. “We’re looking for a Mr. Dante Ambrose.”
“Who’s asking?”
I gave him a look at my star and said, “Special Agent Vincent Cooper, OSI.”
“And your friend?” he said, motioning at Masters.
“His trusty sidekick. Special Agent Anna Masters, OSI,” she said, holding her ID where he could see it.
The man folded his massive arms on his chest and regarded Masters and me for a few seconds. Then he fired the remote unit at the sound system, silencing Eminem mid-abuse. In the sound vacuum, he said, “It’s about time you goddamn people showed up.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I
asked the man if I could see some identification.
He produced a wallet from his back pocket, and showed me the plastic window occupied by a CAC card. The name said Dante P. Ambrose, and the man standing opposite wore the face in the photo.
“Is there someplace we can talk to you, Mr. Ambrose?” asked Masters.
“Yeah,” he said, with a hint of the deep South in his voice. “Teddy—you mind holding the fort awhile?”
“You got it,” said Teddy with a bored wave.
The room Ambrose showed us into was a storeroom. Locked, khaki-painted steel gun cases were bolted and heavily chained to the wall. There was a desk, two chairs, a few columns of cardboard boxes, and a small fridge. It was hot and stuffy in the room. Ambrose turned on the air-con and I noticed he’d brought his rifle. My eyes followed it.
“Don’t let Marlene bug you, Special Agent; I sleep with her. Spend more than a week in this country and you’ll be doing likewise. Get you a drink? The heat will kill you. We got Dr Pepper or Diet Sprite. Take your pick.”
Masters and I went for a Sprite and a Dr Pepper respectively. I also asked for Tylenols, if there were any to spare. Ambrose called out to Teddy, who thankfully played requests, and I washed three down with the doctor. To break the ice, I said, “So, MaxRisk. What do you people do here?”
Ambrose gave us the sales pitch. “Mostly, we do CP—close protection—get paid to chew on a bullet for the people we watch over so that they can go about their business. We specialize in anti-hostage work. No one under MaxRisk’s CP has ever been taken by insurgents. That’s a record we’re pretty proud of. We’ve also had no deaths, no accidents recorded among staff or customers. At the moment, we’re contracted to the U.S. Army as well as an Australian company—water-treatment specialists.”
“You were pretty hard to find,” I said.
“Yeah, well, that’s a good thing.” He allowed himself a smile. “Might keep me alive a bit longer. Before we go any further…Reassure me you ain’t CIA.”
I was offended. CIA people had a certain look about them, like their mothers dressed them before they came to work. “No, we’re not CIA, nor are we after you for unpaid parking fines, Mr. Ambrose.”
Masters said, “You know why we’re here.”
“I
know why you’re here, but I guarantee
you
have no idea why you’re here.”
“What do you mean by that?” Masters again.
“When are you going to start asking me about Peyton Scott?”
“Start at the beginning, Mr. Ambrose,” I said. “How well did you know him?”
Ambrose swallowed a mouthful of soda and said, “Scotty was my sergeant. I was his senior NCO. I met him before we left the States. We did a little house-to-house and room-to-room stuff—trained together with a bunch of Israelis before we landed here. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah. You get along?”
“Yeah, we got along. He was the son of a general and could have been an officer, but he wanted to soldier from the front line—get his white-boy hands dirty. He was good at it—a good soldier. The men liked him, respected him. I liked him. He knew what he was doing and none of our guys got a scratch while he was alive.”
“And after he was gone?” I knew the answer before I asked the question.
“Our unit got shredded. Within three months we’d lost seven guys to insurgents, booby traps, IEDs, and drive-bys. We went from the luckiest squad in Iraq to the unluckiest outfit in the whole fucking corps. Some guys left—got out—others went to new units, but the killing didn’t stop.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying that my men—all of us—were targeted. And it all started with Peyton. Even after the men left—went home—they kept on dying.”
Bishop had already confirmed as much about Peyton’s old squad when it was in-country, but what Ambrose was talking about smacked of something more sinister. “How do you know that?” I asked.
“Because everyone I’ve contacted has turned up dead. Three guys were snuffed out in fires; four in car crashes; there’ve been accidental electrocutions, drownings, boating accidents; one guy’s car fell on him—he was working under it in his garage. Some pretty weird shit has been going on, that’s for damn sure.”
The word “fire” rang alarm bells.
Masters asked, “And you think they’ve been murdered?”
“Not according to any police report I’ve seen. Every single damn one has been an accident.”
“How many accidents are we talking about?” I asked.
“Twenty-four,” said Ambrose.
I swallowed. Hard. I thought back to the other people who’d inadvertently come into the Scotts’ circle and ended up whacked—Alan Cobain, François Philippe…I hoped my insurance was up-to-date. I thought of the Whiteboard back at Ramstein with those names on it, and about adding twenty-four new ones. This picture mingled with another one—the gurneys lined up patiently for Captain Blood’s attention, loaded with human beings the shape of football bladders, and, despite the heat, a shiver began in my boots and rolled up my body. “You left the marines. What brought you back here?”
“Two thousand George Washingtons a day, plus benefits.”
“Besides the money.”
“I looked up a couple of the guys who lived in Mississippi. I arrived the day one of them was pulled out from under his daddy’s tractor. I stayed for the funeral and then went to check on the other. The man’s house was just a burned-out husk. You want the truth? I got scared. Here I can carry a gun out in the open. I hang out with badass warrior types. At MaxRisk, we got ex-Delta, ex-SAS; we’ve got the cream of the cream, as well as some real nasty motherfuckers from the island of Fiji. Basically, while I’m protecting people, my guys are also protecting me. But I know my day will come. Maybe today. So even with all the lunatics and crazies running around in this country, I still feel a damn sight safer here than I do back in my own.”
I took a long drink of soda and tried to get my thoughts in order. I had not expected to hear what Ambrose was telling me. I suddenly realized he was right: I had absolutely no idea why I was here—or, at least, what I expected to find here. The death of General Abraham Scott suddenly seemed almost trivial against the background of what was obviously murder on a mass scale. And yet, I had a feeling that finding out what happened to the old man, and why, were the keys to the slaughter.
Masters said, “Do you want to tell us what happened to Peyton Scott, Mr. Ambrose?”
“Call me Dante, Special Agent. And no, not really—not if I can avoid it. Can I avoid it?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“I knew it,” he said, and those massive shoulders of his slumped. “We need to go for a drive—back to the spot.”
I thought it would be a good idea, but I checked it with Masters before agreeing. Accord was clearly part of our détente. She nodded. Permission granted.
TWENTY-FIVE
T
he temperature soared the farther we got from the influence of those air-con units. Heat radiated up the stairwell from the open door below. It was just after 1400 hours—the hottest part of the day. The heat had a sadistic quality about it. I wondered whether it was antihuman or just anti-American. I recalled how unaffected the locals seemed to be by it and decided it was probably the latter.
Teddy, up in the main office, must have relayed the news that we were headed out because the courtyard was a markedly different place from the one we’d seen on our arrival. For one thing, the soccer game had been abandoned. For another, one of the pickup trucks had pulled away from the wall and four men were readying it for service, loading it up with ammunition for the door-mounted machine gun, the roof-mounted MK19 40mm grenade machine gun, and the Browning M2 machine gun sitting on top of a post rising out of the rear tray.
Parked in front was a modified Toyota 4X4 with its doors removed. M249 machine guns—one on each side—were mounted where the rear passenger doors used to be. They looked like postapocalyptic RVs, because I guess that’s exactly what they were.
“Teddy is going to try to get us logged in to the army’s patrol schedule—line us up with infantry and gunship support if things get rough,” said Ambrose. He frowned and put a finger to an ear. “Okay, we’re cleared in.” There was no need to relay this to the men, as they’d already received the same information over their tactical radios.
Ambrose drove and Masters took the front passenger seat. I sat in the back between two mountainous Fijians, our waist gunners. The islanders ignored me, turning their snarls to the outside world once they’d checked out the white boy sitting between them. I returned their hospitality. Ambrose fired up the Toyota and set the air-con to stun. We rolled out, past the guys with HKs looking left and right, either checking for threats, or, in the case of the man I’d first met, looking for that lost chromosome.
“What do you think of Baghdad so far?” Ambrose asked Masters.
“Three words: dangerous, dusty, hot,” I heard her say.
Those gorilla shoulders shrugged. “Yeah, that’s all true, but this place grows on you. They’s not all Loony Tunes, you know—the Iraqis. The crazies here are like them vocal minority people we get back home. They’s the only ones you hear about ’cause they got the loudest voice.”
Yeah, only here the vocal minority does all its talking with rocket-propelled grenades and Semtex,
I thought.
Ambrose continued. “Iraqis are not so different from us. They love their country. Seeing invaders strutting around the place gets them pissed. How do you reckon we’d like it if one day the Canadians invaded us?”
“Don’t get me started,” I said from the back stalls.
“Don’t get him started,” Masters echoed.
Masters and Ambrose talked. I tuned out and tried to focus on the implications of what Ambrose had told us so far. The killings seemed to be mounting up faster than I could sprout fingers and toes to count them on. I wondered whether, buried somewhere in General Scott’s files, there was a copy of that original autopsy, the one done when Peyton Scott’s remains were delivered to the 28th Combat Support Hospital on the day he died.
I glanced out the window. We were on a main road with plenty of other traffic, heading in a northerly direction. The housing on either side of the road was not Baghdad’s finest. “When we first came in,” I heard Ambrose say, “the Iraqi resistance would warn the local people about IEDs by the roadside or packed into the Armco fencing. They’d write a warning in the local lingo on the road nearby. So the Iraqis would give these IEDs a wide berth, but we’d just blunder straight on into them. We’ve wised up now—and the result? More Iraqis get killed because warnings are no longer given. Fun and games.”
Well, games at least.
Masters and Ambrose continued their friendly chat. I wondered when they’d move on to discuss their favorite restaurants. Ambrose turned hard left and dove into a narrow lane between close-packed homes. Sensibly, the Iraqis were in the shadows, out of the direct heat of the sun. There were still plenty of kids around, playing soccer or chasing each other. It reminded me a little of home. Kids are kids all over the world. Ambrose slowed and used plenty of horn to clear the road. The Toyota was mostly ignored but a few fists were raised in our direction, accompanied by a shout or two. Clearly there weren’t many Iraqis who owned nice new Toyotas, with or without doors.
The streets got narrower and darker and we slowed some more. Fewer people were out on these streets. I caught the unmistakable stench of long-dead human, and then I saw the movement down a narrow alley darkened by deep shadows. Rats the size of rabbits squabbled with dogs over the remains. After Afghanistan, I was intimately familiar with this most acrid of smells. There the cold often hid death’s presence. Here, it was different. The heat stripped away any restraint. But cold weather or hot, the olfactory palate of a long-dead human being was as complex in its way as a fine French perfume, although, unlike the latter, definitely not to be worn behind the ears. I wished I’d taken the sergeant up on his offer and accepted some of that mint chewing tobacco.