Masters interrupted my thoughts. “You’ll need cash. And you’d better take this.”
“What is it?”
“A charger for the cell. You’ll need it.”
I opened my bag and she dropped it in. Then I cupped my hands and she filled them with assorted small-denomination notes and coins.
“That cleans me out, I’m afraid. A little over a hundred euros, plus change. Don’t spend it all at once,” she said playfully. I hailed a cab. As it pulled up beside us, I squeezed her arm and promised I’d be back in a couple of days. I climbed in and closed the door. I wanted to kiss her, bury my nose in the soft chocolate folds of her hair, but I was way too tough for that. Actually, more truthfully, I was afraid of rejection, afraid that we’d had our moment and that it had passed, never to return. I looked back as the cab pulled away and saw her wave at me, the image filtering through a film of dirt across the rear window. I knew damn well I should have kissed her, taken the risk.
“Stuttgart Airport, thanks,” I told the driver.
“Stuttgart Airport?”
“Yeah, Stuttgart Airport, Stuttgart. It’s a little town about ten klicks south of Heidelberg.” I knew that because Anna had told me where to go, and how far.
“I know vere it is,” he said. “A long vay. At least sewenty kilometers.”
“Can we stop at an ATM somewhere? I’ll need to get some money.”
“You don’ need cash. I take credit.”
“I hate credit,” I said.
The driver shrugged. I opened the window to get some air.
He drove a block and a half and stopped in front of a building made from huge black granite blocks, no doubt intended as a metaphor for the bank’s permanence. The street in front of the bank was empty except for a tall, skinny kid with a grimy face and elaborate tattoos up his forearms, who I doubted was one of its customers. He wore a fluorescent T-shirt and pushed a broom with a small roll of grit and paper in front of it. He didn’t look up as I crossed his path. I accessed the hole in the wall and cleaned out my savings account, which amounted to the sum total of twelve hundred euros. I had thirteen hundred euros altogether—a little over sixteen hundred U.S. dollars. It wasn’t a lot, but it would have to do.
The NCMP guys I thumped in the stairwell would be making a report right about now. A soldier gone AWOL wasn’t exactly a fugitive, but this case was weirding me out some. How energetically would I be pursued? I didn’t want anyone except Masters knowing where I was going, and credit cards would leave a trail. Masters was sure no one had seen her come up to my room—the frau had apparently not been in attendance in the lobby—and I was sure no one had seen her leave with me. She was in the clear, although, being my partner, some mud would undoubtedly stick. Her Mercedes was outside, but she could always claim I’d borrowed it.
I climbed back into the cab. A short while later we were on the autobahn heading east. Signs flashed by announcing the distances to Ramstein AB, Worms, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Stuttgart. I reached into my bag and dug around for the cell phone. I found it and turned it off. I didn’t want another call from Gruyere. And there was also the risk that Brenda would start phoning again—and that I could definitely do without.
The adrenaline was leaching out of my muscles, leaving them and me even more exhausted than we’d all been before. But I didn’t want to go to sleep, not yet. I wanted to store up the fatigue till I got on the plane. I wondered what I’d managed to pack before the hasty exit. Placing the phone on the seat beside me, I turned on the ceiling light and dug around in the bag. I found a toothbrush, two pairs of underpants—both of them dirty—a clean ACU and one pair of dirty socks. I’d have to buy some clothes. There was also the folder of printed material. I sorted through the contents. There was the printout detailing U.S. exports to Imperial Japan prior to WWII; a similar set of figures yet to be identified; a fat file on the new range of weapons our government was currently developing; a breakdown on U.S. military spending and the overview of defense-industry payments to senators and congressmen; a report on the sex-slave trade; a one-hundred-page brief on the history of the recent wars Moscow had waged with secessionist Chechnya; the OSI report on the theft of three hundred CAC cards; and a black-and-white laser print of the body bags lined up behind a C-130. At the bottom of the pile was a photo of the OSI Whiteboard at Ramstein on which we’d written thirty-two names, most of them united by an untimely death. I stared at the list headed by the title The Establishment. The question running through my head pretty much said it all: What the fuck was going on here?
It suddenly occurred to me that Abraham Scott, being a four-star, pretty much had the highest security clearance possible, yet most of his information had been downloaded from the Internet. From that, I drew three conclusions. One: Scott didn’t believe he was getting the whole truth in the official assessments he received. Two: he didn’t want anyone to know he had an interest in the topics he was researching. Three: a combination of points one and two.
I picked up the print of Scott’s photo of the body bags and examined it again under the ceiling light as we sped down the autobahn. “This must have really pissed you off,” I said quietly. By you, I was referring not to Abraham Scott but to his father-in-law, the VP, Jefferson Cutter, who’d written to the general about the photo’s appearance in
The Washington Post.
Cutter knew enough about me to recommend me to Gruyere as the lead investigator into the death of his daughter’s husband. So…how
much
did Cutter really know about me? He must have known that I’d been shooting myself in the foot so much over the past year that I was practically walking on stumps. Was it possible that I’d been chosen because he thought I’d fail? I looked up and blinked a couple of times. Was that possible? Did Jeff the Cutter pick me because he wanted what the record suggested I was: a broken-down fuckup who would pretty much guarantee the murder of his son-in-law would end up in the freezer with all the other cold cases? For some reason, that line of logic seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense than the other possibility—that the Vice President thought I was a fine, outstanding special agent whose impeccable record showed him to be a loyal, dedicated, and tenacious investigator who wouldn’t give up till the truth was uncovered. Actually, I knew guys like that. With the occasional exception, they were poor investigators. My theory here was that they were unable to see the flaws in themselves and so were unable to recognize them in others. They investigated cases by the book and took too much of what they found at face value. But then again, having flaws, I
would
think that.
It made sense, on the surface at least, that a wife would want to see her husband’s killers brought to justice. Yet that picture didn’t fit my image of Harmony Scott. Was she her father’s daughter? Were father and daughter two peas in a pod? It’s not often a major gets to feel sorry for a four-star general but, surrounded by laser printouts and dirty underwear, that’s exactly how I felt as I tore down the autobahn at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour.
I am one of the world’s rare human beings who can read without getting carsick, which was just as well because I had a lot of it to do. Seventy kilometers later I knew pretty much everything there was to know about those super-smart weapons systems Scott had been checking out, the ones making a big hole in that $2.3 trillion expenditure on the military. I knew about the new Boeing AH-64D Apache Longbow helo and how it can detect and classify one hundred and twenty-eight more targets and hit four hundred percent more of them than the AH-64A. I also knew about the new Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66, the first helo to employ stealth technology; about the F-22 Raptor, the new aircraft that makes obsolete every other fighter jet deployed by every other air force in the world; I knew about the new day/night version of the Harrier Jump Jet, the II Plus (AV-8B). I was brought up to speed on the new Joint Strike Fighter, as well as on the new A-10 Thunderbolt II, the new Tomahawk missile, and the new ABL YAL-1A Attack Laser mounted on the nose of a modified Boeing 747-400. I read up on the new Predator unmanned aerial vehicle that can stay aloft over a battlefield for sixteen hours before having to land and refuel, and I caught up on the new C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane, the troubled Tiltrotor V-22 Osprey, the new Sea Shadow Stealth destroyer, the new Javelin shoulder-launched missile, the new M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank, the new M6 Bradley Linebacker fighting vehicle, and the new nonlethal Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial System that fires a beam of electromagnetic energy at people, causing them extreme pain. I also boned up on the new Line-of-Sight Anti-Tank missile, a radical kinetic energy missile with no warhead, that does the job simply because it slams into its target at five thousand feet per second. New. New. New. New. All of it cutting-edge, high-tech stuff. And, of course, all of it hugely expensive.
The thrust of the material Scott had downloaded was that the funding of these programs was the result of pressure on Congress applied by the giant defense conglomerates—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and others—combined with the willingness of individual senators and congressmen to keep the weapons’ production lines in their own states humming along with new products coming down the pipe. So, military technology is big business—tell me something I don’t know, I said to myself. Still, the facts and figures made fascinating reading. I dug around for the paragraph that had stuck in my mind:
The U.S. accounts for more than 34% of the world’s military spending. The next biggest spender is NATO, one of the biggest customers of U.S. military technology and getting bigger as it absorbs new members, all of whom must then make their military contribution to the whole.
And from whom did they buy the military hardware with which to make this contribution? Uncle Sam, of course.
Interesting as the report was, I still had no idea why General Scott found it so. I watched the passing lights whip past, the illumination from the glowing white and orange balls diffused by water vapor condensed on the taxi’s window. I wondered what Masters was doing. If she had any sense, she’d be tucked up in bed. If I had any sense, I’d be tucked up beside her. Or on top of her. The cab’s headlights lit up the overhead sign and the suggestion that the left lane should be taken for Stuttgart Airport. The driver flicked the turn signal.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in a largely vacant airport. I went to the Lufthansa counter, it being the only one still staffed at this hour. I asked about the next flight for Riga and was told it departed at 0700 the following day. I must have looked beat because the next bit of helpful information volunteered was that I could get a room at the nearby F1 Hotel. Rolex time said 2300 hours. Sleep was the best suggestion I’d heard in a while. I said thanks and went off to find another cab to take me to the hotel. A short while later, I rented a small box on the ground floor. I brushed my teeth and then stripped. The bump on my head had gone down but the dressing on the wound in my arm was crusty and black with coagulated blood. I removed it and found that I’d pulled a couple of stitches out, but the others had held and the bleeding had stopped. It looked ugly, but I’d live. I climbed between the sheets and closed my eyes.
There was a lot on my mind and so I dreamed. I dreamed of crashing in a glider, of spinning to the earth and of ending as a splash of flesh and blood and hair. I dreamed of kissing Harmony Scott and of tasting the poison in her soul. I dreamed I saw Varvara sitting on a bench in a Roman slave galley, dragging an oar while she blew the sweaty Roman colonel standing in front of her. I dreamed of Anna Masters’s breasts and the firmness of her erect nipples. I dreamed of von Koeppen dressed as a Nazi SS general standing up in a new open-topped Mercedes convertible and smiling while a boxcar full of human beings smelling of excrement and fear pulled out of the siding. I dreamed that four assassins came into my room, under the door and through the keyhole, and offered to sell me their timepieces. But I knew that to be a dream while I dreamed it because the door didn’t have a keyhole; it had a swipe card and you couldn’t get in without one. And then I woke to a burst of static through the clock radio just as I dreamed I was about to grasp something important in this case. The memory of the images of my sleep hung around like the last shreds of a fog.
I’d set the clock two hours earlier than necessary, 0430, and it was still dark. I wanted to be exhausted for the flight so that maybe I’d sleep. Already the thought of getting airborne made me want to go to the toilet. So I did, and I took some more of Scott’s files to read.
I checked out at 0545, wearing yesterday’s underwear. I paid cash, which raised the interest of the gothic teenager on night shift behind bulletproof glass only slightly less than zero. She took my notes from the slot under the glass without once making eye contact.
Stuttgart Airport was considerably busier at 0615 than it had been when I was last here. The place was full of businessmen hurrying to get somewhere or other. I bought a return flight to Riga with the homeward leg open-ended. I paid cash and received a wary look from the man behind the counter, although I had no idea why. Wearing an ACU and with all the required paperwork in order, I was hardly a risk. But let’s face it, no one pays cash these days unless they have something to hide.
It was too early to ring Masters, although I was tempted, if only to hear her voice. My dream, along with the memory of her skin under my fingertips and the way she smiled, was still strong. The gate lounge wasn’t too crowded on the Riga flight. The plane began to board as I arrived. The beads of sweat were starting to muster on my forehead, my top lip, and in the small of my back. The attendant smiled at me and motioned to come through. I made the universal sign of “I must use my mobile phone” and took a seat away from the passengers lining up for the flight. I pulled it out of my bag and looked at it. Maybe it wasn’t too early to call Masters, after all. Did I really want to turn the thing on? What shit would come down the line? I took Masters’s card out of my wallet, punched the power-on button, and waited for a connection. As soon as I had a signal, I keyed her number.