“I’ll let you know in an hour,” I replied.
Masters put her drink down on the bedside table, took mine out of my hand, then set it down beside hers. “Fuck the talking,” she said in a whisper.
She took a step toward me. I smelled her perfume and felt her breath against my cheek. Yeah, I liked this woman, possibly all the more because we’d been through so much in such a short time. We’d compressed a year’s worth of living into a handful of days, faced down death together, and I, at least, had rediscovered what it meant to live. In some ways, I realized, I’d been in a state of waking sleep for a year. Her eyelids closed like butterfly wings as her lips brushed mine. She pulled herself close, running her hands gently up my back. Her lips touched mine again, this time welcoming my tongue, and I tasted cool Jack Daniel’s and the chill of the ice on it. My breathing shortened as we tried to climb into each other through our mouths. The kiss got more desperate, and I became like a drowning man gasping for breath. I wondered if she could feel me harden against her stomach. I think the answer was yes, because Masters lifted her shirt from out of her pants, and began undoing the buttons. I got the hint and took over.
The cell in my pocket began ringing.
Masters released the bra clasp and my hands cupped her breasts. They were warm, larger than I’d thought. My fingers bounced across the firmness of her nipples, the flesh crimped and bunched around them with excitement.
The cell kept ringing.
“Jesus,” I hissed.
“Don’t answer it,” Masters whispered.
I had no problem with that.
The ringing stopped.
And then it started up again. Whoever was on the other end was one persistent motherfucker.
“Shit,” said Masters. “It’s not going to stop, is it?”
We both knew the answer to that. “Have I told you how much I hate these damn things?” I said. I took the cell out and hit the green button.
“What?” I snapped.
“Cooper! Is that you? Damn it to hell. What in the name of dry fucking are you doing?”
“General Gruyere!” I said. For an instant I believed the big cheese might have had a camera secreted in the room.
“I just got a call from General von Koeppen and I can tell you it wasn’t a social call. He said you accused him and Harmony Scott of murdering her husband. You’d better be damned sure of yourself, Special Agent.”
I wasn’t.
“Well? I’m waiting.”
“Ma’am. Mrs. Scott and General von Koeppen are involved in an intimate relationship with each other. I also believe it’s possible that they are involved in, at the very least, the murder of General Scott.”
“How? You got anything in the way of evidence to back your assertion?”
After a pause, I said, “No, ma’am.” It was hard to say, but there was no other answer.
“Cooper, you know damn well your intu-fucking-ition won’t cut it in a court-martial. And furthermore…Furthermore, I don’t know where to fucking furthermore…”
I pictured General Gruyere leaning over her desk, clutching the handset away from her face and yelling straight at it, the veins in her forehead pumping like fire hoses. She was not happy. I couldn’t give her an executive summary of the case as we knew it—there were too many extraneous appendages. “I’m going to need another week,” I said.
“You
are
crazy, Cooper. Asking me for another week proves it. You are
so
out of time; it’s yesterday for you—do you understand me?”
I’d kind of picked that up already. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You are done and fucking gone on this case. The DoD investigators are on their way with the FBI. You are hereby officially replaced.”
The DoD investigative service was rumored to be made up of no more than two hundred agents. They worked exclusively and directly for the Secretary of Defense and handled, so rumor had it, only the biggest, most secret cases. I’d never met any of these DoD guys. They had reached almost mythical status.
There was not much I could say, so I said nothing. I knew Gruyere was aware of what had happened to me both in Iraq and in the attack in Kaiserslautern. I also knew she wouldn’t give a lab rat’s pink puckering anus.
“You were a good investigator, Cooper, and the past tense is no accident. But for reasons beyond me—and against my better judgment—the Vice President himself personally picked
you
to look into the death of his son-in-law.”
I believe my mouth opened at that news, and the change in pressure over the mouthpiece gave rise to an electrical roar in the speaker against my ear. What had she said back at Andrews that first morning?
Someone up there likes you…
Yeah, that’s right. That had vaguely puzzled me at the time. So that someone was Jeff the Cutter, Vice President of the United States of America!
“I have been asked by von Koeppen to have you escorted out of Germany. If I were you, I’d get my bags packed.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. A blue light flickered dimly against the wall. I made my way to the window and pulled back the edge of the lace curtain with a couple of fingers. Half a mile up the road, an NCMP vehicle was driving too fast down the wrong side of the street, playing chicken with the oncoming traffic. The urgency couldn’t be a coincidence. Von Koeppen, Harmony, and now General Gruyere wanted me out of Germany, and fast.
“I want you standing in front of my desk, with all your notes on this case, tomorrow morning D.C. time,” said Gruyere. “Are you clear on that?”
Crystal. “Yes, General,” I said. Gruyere terminated the call. I didn’t need to tell Masters that our moment of intimacy was gone. She was fully dressed, and the dreamy look in those astonishing blue-green eyes of hers that I now decided reminded me of a tropical sea was replaced with concern and uncertainty.
Masters said, “Was that as bad as it sounded?”
“We have to leave right now,” I replied.
“That would be a yes, then,” she said.
I grabbed my bag off the floor and began stuffing things into it, starting with the folder Masters had brought over. I could go quietly, or I could decide to take leave—starting immediately and without telling anyone or filling in the required forms and waiting for Gruyere to grant it whenever she damn well felt like it—and it’d be the end of my career in the OSI. Either way, I was fucked. But maybe I’d be less fucked, I reasoned, if I could make a few more connections in this case to make sense of it. Or maybe my reasoning powers had been addled by concussion coupled with a nasty bout of coitus interruptus. I was convinced I, or rather we—Masters and I—were close to something. I thought I could feel the knowledge, the certainty, coalescing, taking shape. And that shape was ugly. I grabbed the postcard of the Eiffel Tower off the counter and flicked it into the open bag. I hesitated, took it out, and read the name on the flip side.
Masters and I didn’t have a lot of time. I stuffed the postcard in a back pocket and headed down the hall to the room next door. I thumped on the thin door panel, loud enough for the noise I made not to sound like part of the racket being played on the other side. The volume went down and someone called out, “Who is it?”
“Your neighbor.”
Something bumped against the door and then a voice said, “Oh, sorry, dude—we’ll turn it down.”
“No, it’s okay. I just wanted to thank you.”
The door opened. I recognized one of the young men I’d seen, what seemed an eternity ago, staggering drunk and laughing hysterically under the weight of his pack. “Hey, you’re the army dude, right?” he said.
“Air Force,” I said.
“Sweet. We just wanted to help, you know?”
“Yeah, thanks a lot. I’m glad you came along when you did. It was a close call. Hey, is that weed you’re smoking in there?” I said, cutting to the chase.
“Um, no, it’s um…”
“It’s okay, man. Me and my lady friend wondered if we could buy some, you know.”
The Canadian was young, tall, and thin, and was suffering from an acute case of pillow hair. Fragments of chips had gathered at either corner of his wide mouth. He was in the grip of the munchies, obviously. “Surely, dude. It’s totally wicked pot. We’ve got plenty—came down from Holland, man. It’s like so cool there, you know? You can just walk in off the street, have a cup of coffee, buy some ganja…” He patted the front pocket of his shirt slowly, his motor reflexes inhibited by the cannabis, and produced a packet of Marlboros. He flipped the top, extracted a large prerolled joint, and handed it to me.
I said, “Sweet, dude. Totally awesome.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying, let alone what I was doing. “What do we owe you?”
“You can have it, dude. Consider it like a present to a fellow traveler in the cosmos.”
“Thanks. Got a light?” I asked.
“Sure, man.”
The Canadian sparked it up with a disposable butane lighter. “Thanks,” I said again, turning away in a hurry.
“Dude, careful with the fire alarm,” I heard him say to my back as Masters closed the door behind me. The volume next door returned to the permanent-brain-damage range.
“What are you doing?” demanded Masters.
“With any luck, giving the frau downstairs a headache.” I glanced out the window. The NCMPs were stopping across from the pensione’s front steps to give a big “fuck you”—or whatever they say in German—to the traffic jam that would build up behind them. The Humvee’s doors swung open while the vehicle was still in motion and I watched a man hit the pavement at a run. The rear door followed and another man jumped out and bolted after the first. These boys were a little too keen to follow orders for my liking.
I took a massive drag on the joint and blew it at the ceiling. Nothing. I took a second drag and repeated the action. The smoke detector suddenly began to warble. The device was wired to a central alarm and the air was filled with an electronic scream, an earsplitting noise similar to the one I heard in Varvara’s apartment building.
I snatched my bag along with Masters’s hand and pulled her out the door and into the hall, the adrenaline charging through my system, overwhelming my fatigue and the injuries, and headed for the fire escape, a narrow chasm of a stairwell beside the elevator. As we passed the elevator, I saw that it had stopped mid-floor. The power to it had been automatically cut, temporarily imprisoning the occupants. With any luck, both MPs would be inside it, encased in darkness. I was thinking this as a middle-aged man came puffing around the corner of the stairwell, dressed in the uniform of an NCMP, a sergeant. No time to think. I dropped my right shoulder into his solar plexus. I hit him so hard the air hissed out of him like a slashed tire. He was not a big man and the encounter caught him by surprise. He sank to the floor, winded, his eyes wide with shock and his mouth open, gasping, hoping to find air but failing.
His partner coming around the corner had a little more time to react and was in the process of raising his pistol when I drove my elbow down into his chin. The shock wave generated by the blow rolled through his jawbone and exploded in the part of his brain that controls consciousness. His eyes rolled back in their sockets to look at stars and tweetie birds and he collapsed where he stood, his tongue lolling. I caught him by the front of the shirt as he went down so that he wouldn’t smack the back of his head on the concrete. I wanted him out cold, not dead.
I heard other doors opening into the fire escape as people began to make their way out of the building. The NCMPs would be found within half a minute. Three flights of stairs later, Masters and I opened the exit door out onto the narrow side lane where I’d been jumped the night before. “Where’s your car?” I asked.
“Blocked in.”
“What do you mean, blocked in?”
“The NCMPs. They’ve blocked me in.” Masters pointed at her Mercedes and the NCMP vehicle stopped beside it, the revolving electric blue light washing over its roof.
We started to walk quickly in the opposite direction, away from the pensione, as dazed and bewildered guests began spilling onto the street. A few hundred yards down the road, a pair of fire trucks peeled out of a side street, their sirens wailing. All the flashing and revolving lights danced over the vehicles and buildings and gave the impression that an emergency-services outdoor nightclub was in full swing. Meanwhile, the traffic situation was turning ugly as drivers stopped to gawk, no doubt expecting that the show might be improved upon at any moment by the appearance of naked flames suddenly leaping from upper-story windows or, better yet, people.
We kept walking, but not fast enough to attract attention. There must have been four MPs. The two I had seen jump from the Humvee before it stopped had taken the elevator; their pals had followed a beat later up the stairs. I didn’t feel good about putting two of our own people away, but it was necessary.
“What now?” said Masters.
“Where’s the nearest international airport?”
“Why? Where are we going?”
“Not
we.
Anna, this time you’re staying here. You’ve got to bring the German police up to speed and get those phone records. And we need surveillance on Harmony and Himmler…”
“Who?”
“Von Koeppen.”
“Okay, let’s assume for just a moment that I am staying here. Where exactly are you going, Cooper?”
“To check on the going rate for sex slaves.”
THIRTY-THREE
M
asters and I argued for a couple of minutes about whether she should come with me, and then, once she agreed to stay behind, whether or not she should stay in close company with a protection squad. She insisted she didn’t want to give the impression that she’d been intimidated. And, as the violence seemed to have been centered on me, it was a no to close protection. But she could see why we needed to split the team. Begrudgingly. There was plenty to get on with back at the ranch.
I was pleased I wasn’t operating a vehicle, rental or otherwise. Not driving around in something with my name all over it made me feel like a smaller target. Cabs would do just fine. Part of me felt I was being overly paranoid; the other half—the half that had been shot at and mugged by the Rolex gang—thought the half that wasn’t paranoid needed to have its head examined. It also occurred to me that I might possibly have the same mind-set General Scott had had after his son was murdered. Was I not on exactly the same road to the same destination, and going possibly to ask the same questions?