I still had the Russian cab driver’s phone number, so I called it from a public phone in the hotel foyer. Fifteen minutes later, I opened the car door and climbed into a miasma of cigarette smoke. “You were right about The Bump,” I said, fastening the seat belt. “It sucked.”
“You Americans never listen. Where are we going?” he asked as we pulled into the traffic.
“The airport,” I said.
“Here,” he said, passing me a pink plastic drink bottle. “You look like you need this. Real Russian vodka. Better than the shit we export to the West. You can still taste the soil on the potatoes.” We swerved around a horse and cart and the former Red Army translator said something loud and no doubt unpleasant out his window at the ensemble.
“No, thanks,” I said, declining the offer of a drink. Aside from the fact that it was barely 0800 hours, I hadn’t eaten anything, and the nozzle on the bottle was chewed and unappealing. Ordinarily, though, none of this would’ve bothered me. I’d have taken a mouthful or two, and big ones, the reason being I had a plane flight ahead. But this time, I’d made the decision to face it without a crutch. I’d been flying a lot lately, and I’d noticed that not one of those aircraft had fallen out of the sky. The episode in the C-47 in Afghanistan, the flashing knives on the mountaintop, and the scorpions in my dreams were not so much receding as being replaced by more recent events. The reality of the suffering of the Chechen villager, his fingers ground into pulp and fed to him, was proving a powerful purge.
“Next time you come to Riga, you call. I show you real nightlife—even in the daytime,” promised my driver.
“Deal,” I said, although I knew I’d never be coming back to this place. I looked out the window and watched the city flash past in the rain. The weather was still cold and gray. It suited my mood. I wondered why Radakov had given me so much information. I was sure his original plan had been to kill me, but, for whatever reason, he’d decided not to go through with it. Instead, I’d been given facts enough to put some heavy people in front of a jury and seriously embarrass NATO. Was that why—because he had something against NATO? Or was it simply that Radakov admired and liked General Scott and was angry about what had happened to him? I knew his decision to let me go was connected to something else—this mysterious organization that kept cropping up: The Establishment.
Was it real, or the figment of a collective imagination, like the bogeyman or UFOs? At least I now knew who to question about it: my favorite widow. I’d asked Harmony Scott before about The Establishment, and gotten nowhere. Now, however, thanks to Radakov, I had new insight and my questions would have more bite.
The Russian slammed the brakes on at the drop-off zone at Riga International. “You sure?” he said, holding up the drink bottle and giving it a waggle. “You look like you need it.”
“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “Next time. What do I owe you?” We settled on an amount in euros, as I didn’t have any local cash. I retrieved a few notes, including a generous tip, from the crinkled ball in my pocket. I was getting low on funds, but it didn’t matter—I had enough to complete the job. I said good-bye and watched the Russian narrowly avoid an accident as he accelerated into the traffic flow, careless of anyone’s safety, including his own.
I didn’t have to wait long for a flight. The takeoff was tense, but when we didn’t stall and plunge into the ground, I managed to loosen up a little—enough to skim through the general’s notes again and go over what I did know. When I got back to Ramstein, I’d be dropping a bombshell on the place and I wanted to make sure it hit the bull’s-eye.
I slept dreamlessly for an hour of the three-and-a-half-hour flight and woke up when the screws under my seat whined, signaling that the flaps were being deployed. I tried not to think about crash statistics that say the takeoff and landing phases of flight are the most dangerous, that altitude is a plane’s best friend and that we were fast losing ours. But we landed without incident and, twenty minutes later, I was walking through customs and into the terminal at Frankfurt International.
I passed a newsstand and stopped. From a poster for
Der Standard,
Germany’s equivalent of
The Washington Post,
a familiar face smiled out at me. It was Heinrich Himmler—my good buddy Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen. I picked up a paper and his face was all over it, and I recognized some of the photos from the wall of the Melting Pot. Damn, I thought, I was too late. The media had somehow run down the story. I couldn’t read German, so I picked up a copy of the
Herald Tribune
to see if they also carried the scandal.
I found it on page three. The headline read: “NATO General Dies in Car Accident.”
What?
The photo from the
Der Standard
poster ran alongside the article in the
Trib.
It was von Koeppen’s official head-and-shoulders shot; the general wore a comfortable, easy smile. It reminded me of the photo of General Scott. Both smiling, both very dead, neither smiling now. I read the brief accompanying paragraphs.
German Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen, acting commander of Ramstein Air Base, the vast NATO facility in southwest Germany, was killed two days ago when the car he was in slammed into a wall.
Witnesses to the crash said the vehicle failed to make a sharp turn and hit a roadside retaining wall head-on.
Police crash investigators have attributed the accident to brake failure.
The commander of Ramstein Air Base, USAF General Abraham Scott, died in a glider accident one month ago.
Also killed in the accident was the driver of the vehicle, USAF Special Agent Anna Masters.
THIRTY-NINE
I
don’t know how long I stood there at the newsstand reading that article, but it was long enough for the guy who owned the store to tap me on the shoulder and give me the “buy it or move along” eyeball. I bought it.
Also killed in the accident was the driver of the vehicle, USAF Special Agent Anna Masters.
Anna, dead? A car accident? Brake failure? Where this case was concerned, there were no such things as accidents. They were planned and executed. General Scott’s first wife, Helen Wakely, died in a car accident caused by brake failure. I felt a pain in my heart and a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow.
I hired a cab and headed for Ramstein. I had just over three hundred bucks remaining of the original sixteen-hundred-dollar float. I thought about what I was going to do next as the autobahn flashed past. Anna, dead? No, it wasn’t possible. I saw her face, the freckles sprinkled across her nose, those blue-green eyes and her luscious hair. In the picture in my mind, she was smiling that smile of hers that lit up the room. Somehow, the motivation for pursuing this investigation had evaporated and all that was left of it were overwhelming feelings of exhaustion, loss, and helplessness. The tears streamed down my face. I hadn’t done that for a very long time—cry. Contrary to what I’d heard, it didn’t make me feel better. Anna had finally received the attention she believed she deserved. Someone had taken her seriously enough to kill her. What a fucking waste. The cab driver passed back a box of tissues.
In my life, I have seen a lot of death, but I’d never lost anyone I’d been in love with. Yeah, I was in love with Anna, and it was only at this moment that I realized it.
I asked the driver if he knew any good hotels in Kaiserslautern. I didn’t want to go back to the Pensione Freedom in case it was being watched. In broken English, the driver told me he had a brother-in-law whose father had a share in a tourist hotel in K-town. I had him drive me there, paid the fare in cash, and then went to a hotel a block down the road from the one he’d recommended. No, I wasn’t being paranoid; I was being careful—careful is paranoia with cause. On the way, I bought two bottles of my old buddy, Glenkeith, for company. I had a hundred and twenty dollars left—a hotel room for three nights, or two nights with food. I didn’t intend to do much eating.
I got to the room, pulled the curtains, stood in the shower an eternity, and then sat on the bed, naked, with the two bottles of booze clinking together beside me on the mattress. The Establishment had killed Masters. Why? Was it a warning to me? Was this the price of the knowledge Radakov had given me? If so, why kill von Koeppen too? I hadn’t a shred of evidence. There was so much in this case I couldn’t fathom and yet, at the same time, I knew the answers were staring me in the face. Maybe, if I’d been a little more attuned to them, Masters would still be alive. And while I was beating myself up about this, it occurred to me that she’d also probably still be alive if I could’ve convinced her to accept close protection.
I cracked open the seal on the first bottle and didn’t bother with a glass. I drank a third of it in one hit. It didn’t taste as good as I remembered, most probably Glen’s way of punishing me for ignoring him. Well, never mind, I intended to reacquaint myself over the next day or so. The heat hit my empty stomach like the angry bulls that chase those idiots down the streets of Pamplona, goring them, and went to my brain with the same nasty intent. Just what I needed.
I don’t remember too much from there on. When I woke, I had no idea whether it was day or night. Nor did I care. I took another shower, drank another third to take away the headache, and lay back on the bed and gazed unseeing at a spider that had made its web in a corner of the ceiling. I felt nothing, which is a good thing to feel sometimes, even though I was aware that I had no career left, nowhere to go, and no one to go there with. I was so drunk I didn’t care. I drank the remainder of the second bottle and said good-bye to another day. Or was it night?
I was snarled in the sheets with the two empty bottles. There was a sourness in my gut and vomit on the pillow. I had enough sense to know there was nothing left to drink and almost nothing left to buy it with, unless I used a credit card. That was always an option—a solution in itself: “Hey, you fuckers, here I am. Come get me.”
I raised my head and took in the room. It was a small box with a window that opened onto a brick wall and a nest of pipes evacuating sewage from the upper floors. Beside the bed was my overnight bag, open, the contents spilled onto the linoleum. I focused on the cell phone. There’d be messages on it. I couldn’t hide from them forever. I sat up and felt the hammers in my head go to work on the back of my skull. I reached for the cell with my foot and toed it toward the bed. I picked it up and hit the power-up button. The screen illuminated briefly, then turned black. The battery was dead. I caught sight of the charger and recovered it, again with my foot. Anna had been right about it coming in handy. I plugged one end into the wall socket beside the bed and the other into the phone and tried turning it on again. Second time lucky. The thing started ringing almost immediately. I pressed the receive button and the automated voice informed me that I had seven messages. I hit the button to begin receiving them.
The first two were from General Gruyere. She sounded as if she had something red hot probing an unfortunate place.
Next, surprisingly, was a message from Arlen Wayne, my last remaining bud, back at Andrews. He wanted to know what was up. “Heard a bunch of bullcrap that you gone AWOL, boy,” he said. He went on to reaffirm that he didn’t believe it but recommended that I get my ass back to where it goddamn belonged. Yeah, I thought, in a sling. Thanks, Arlen. I knew he meant well and it was nice to know someone cared.
Brenda followed with a couple of urgent requests to call her back. She had news and didn’t want to leave it in a message, she said. Nothing new there. She’d already told me that in the last score of rants deposited.
The next message got me sitting up, which gave the hammers in my skull something to get seriously angry about. “Vin,” Anna said. “Something has turned up here. We’ve got a lead on Scott’s expenditure. We found a receipt in his files. It concerns that missing week. It seems he booked himself a flight to the U.S.—Washington, D.C. This is the weird part: He could have taken a C-5 any day of the week, but he chose to pay cash, maybe for the same reasons you did—to keep the fact that he was moving around hidden.” There was a smile in her voice. “I guess this solves one of our little mysteries. Call back in when you can. I…I miss you—who’d have thought? Bye.”
I’d bitten my bottom lip hard and tasted copper flooding into my mouth. I missed her, too. And now I’d be missing her for good. Hearing her voice…it was like the photo thing, seeing someone you knew was no longer among the living, smiling out at you as if they were sharing some private joke with a punch line you didn’t understand. Hearing her speak was a voice from beyond.
The messages kept coming and didn’t allow me time to stop and think, or get any more maudlin than I already was. Next I heard Bishop’s BBC voice, as formal as ever: “Special Agent Cooper, I believe Special Agent Masters has informed you of the movements of General Scott in the period after the death of his son, Peyton. We have the forensics report back on the bullet fragments recovered from the water barrels in Baghdad, and the helmet. We can confirm that the blood on the helmet and the hair and blood on the bullet fragments are from the same person. The blood type matches Peyton’s, but his was O positive, the most common blood type.
“From this evidence, sir, we can say with authority that the bullet went through the helmet and that the person wearing it received, in all likelihood, a fatal head shot. We just can’t be a hundred percent sure that the person in question was, in fact, Peyton, because we have nothing to compare the DNA sample with.”
“Hmm,” I said to Bishop’s voice. “Fair enough.” Given Dante Ambrose’s assertion that the helmet was Peyton’s, and that he’d seen the event in question, I was satisfied on that score—that Peyton had been shot in the head by the bullet whose fragments we had in our possession. Before DNA, this would have been enough to convince even the most cynical board. Bishop was just being careful and thorough, looking for loopholes, looking at the way an inquiry would consider the evidence.