The Death Trust (6 page)

Roach continued, “I didn’t know him—the general—but, for what it’s worth, those who did, say he was a pretty cool CO. A workaholic, apparently. First in, last out.” That phrase struck a chord with me.
First in, last out
—the motto of the combat air controllers, the lunatic squadron of which I was once a member.

“How long would it have taken the clamp to fail?” I asked, wiping my face on a hand towel.

“Yeah, well, I guess that’s the problem—from your point of view, anyway,” Roach observed. “Pinpointing when the clamp was tampered with would be a guess. Could’ve been a couple of days ago; could’ve been months.”

Given the number of people at Ramstein and the fact that anyone could have had access to the glider, that gave me roughly forty thousand suspects. In other words, I had a trail to the murderer that was as dead as the victim. “Doesn’t anyone kill with a nine-millimeter anymore, preferably with their prints all over it?”

“Pardon?”

“Never mind. Just thinking aloud.” I didn’t bother asking him if he knew why Scott had been killed, or by whom. Coming up with answers to those questions was why OSI paid me so much money. Yeah, right. I cleared my throat and asked the tough question. “What about the people who maintained the plane? You got a signed maintenance schedule anywhere?”

Roach smiled and snorted at the same time. “Take your pick from over two thousand engineering personnel—Americans, Dutch, English, German, French. The general didn’t have a crew chief on his plane. If he needed something done, he’d just ask someone to do it. The reality is that just about everyone and anyone on this base had access. And, as for a maintenance schedule, this was a glider, not a military aircraft—or even a powered private plane. It’s really no more than a snag sheet and there are no signatures.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, well…” said the Australian, fiddling with the clamp.

Okay, so my list of suspects had shrunk from forty thousand to two thousand, but it might as well have been a million. I had one dead general, one sabotaged plane, no maintenance schedule, and no leads. I comforted myself with the knowledge that killing a general is a big deal. Someone on this base had to know
something.
I just had to find that person. “So, the glider pilot who witnessed the crash—” I glanced at my notebook. His name was Captain Reinoud Aleveldt, Royal Netherlands Air Force. “You got anything more from him?”

“No,” said Roach.

“How about a number for him here on the base?”

Roach nodded and walked over to the phone on the wall. On a bench beside it was a base directory, a book the size and thickness of the average novel. Another reminder of the size of Ramstein. “How long have you been here, Squadron Leader?”

“Coming up for six weeks now. Why do you ask?”

“Because if there was someone wandering around here, someone who wasn’t NATO, you haven’t been here long enough to know whether they were out of place.”

“Yeah, but bases like this…” he shook his head, “…with people coming and going all the time, wearing different uniforms, speaking different languages, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of keeping tabs on people. You just assume if they’ve got through the front gate, or come in on an aircraft, they’re okay. If you didn’t operate on that assumption, you’d never get your job done.”

I wondered who “Buckley” was and assumed he was probably one very unlucky guy. I also thought about the security check I’d experienced at the front gate. It was pretty thorough, though hardly a retina scan. I had to show my CAC card, the identity card issued to every serving member of U.S. forces, and my name was probably also on some kind of database. As far as the CAC card went, an intruder would need to steal one and have a vague similarity to the photo on it. The reality was that, for a determined adversary, it wouldn’t have been impossible to slip through the net, certainly not for one with a premeditated plan to kill the base’s commander.

“Anything else, Special Agent?” asked the Australian, butting in on my speculation.

“Yeah, can you recommend a good dentist?”

“Wouldn’t get anything done here, mate. These blokes are butchers. You need an Aussie dentist—best in the world.”

Australia was a long way to go to get a tooth filled. I was hoping I’d find one a bit closer, but I wasn’t having much luck on that front. “Thanks for your time,” I said.

“The full revised report is in the process of being written up. Should have it done by this evening.”

“Send a copy to me care of OSI here. We’re in the phone book.” At least, I assumed OSI was in it.

“No worries, mate,” he said as I turned and walked out. So, Scott had been murdered. This had suddenly become a very serious deal, no matter who his old lady’s daddy was. Generals generally do not get murdered for the reasons the rest of us do. In fact, when you’re a general and you get killed violently by persons unknown, the motive that leads to that kind of demise could possibly have implications for national security. That’s what I was thinking as I walked toward the hangar’s exit, a rectangle of bright light in the dark corrugated wall.

Outside, I noted it was still cold, although the sun was doing its best to rectify that situation. The clouds and rainbows had gone, chased away by a breeze that went straight through my ACU as if I wasn’t wearing one. Three C-130s taxied past, making a hell of a racket. Beyond was the distant roar of a fast jet accelerating down one of the runways in full afterburner. I flipped open my pad and checked the copious notes I’d made interviewing Squadron Leader Roach. They amounted to one solitary line on the page, the name and phone number of the Dutch air force captain, Aleveldt. I wondered if he’d be able to make things any clearer for me, but I could definitely pass on a repeat of the account of Scott plunging to his death from twelve thousand feet.

The screech of tires caught my attention and lifted my eyes from the notebook. It was a purple Mercedes. Little puffs of dust and burnt rubber boiled around the tires as they shuddered, locked up solid. The door flew open. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Masters demanded to know as she stomped toward me, hands jammed deep in her jacket pockets.

“Investigating an assassination,” I said, which had the gratifying effect of stopping her dead in her tracks.

FOUR

S
pecial Agent Masters drove. She ground her jaw, the small pencil-like muscles flexing. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t just disappear off on your own. I don’t know whether you realize this, Special Agent, but we are not fucking playacting around here. People like General von Koeppen have things to do. You see them when
they’re
ready, not when it fits into
your
schedule.”

I listened to this lecture and wondered whether I should bite. She was reminding me of my ex—not the words so much as the moral certainty that she was right and that I was a moron. “Stop the car.”

“What?”

“I said stop the goddamn car.” I reached across her and pulled on the hand brake. The Mercedes skidded sideways to a stop.

“Let’s get a couple of ground rules straight,” I said as the car rocked on its suspension. “I don’t know what organization you belong to, but I’m basically a cop. I don’t give a damn about rank or privilege when I’m on a case. Also, I don’t answer to you or the CO here. I promise you, my boss back home is a lot scarier than both of you combined.”

Masters folded her arms and shot a glance of pure poison at me.

“Before I saw von Koeppen,” I continued, “I wanted to know what kind of investigation I was running—”

“You’re
running?”

“That’s what the SAC usually does.”

“Who said you were the special agent in charge here?”

Gruyere hadn’t brought Masters up to speed. What did the big cheese expect us to do? Duke it out over who was boss?

“You were sent to
assist
me,” she said.

“Whatever,” I said. If you need to tell people you’re running the show, then you probably aren’t. If Masters wanted the poison chalice of SAC, she could have it. I changed the subject. “Squadron Leader Roach’s findings are critical. Now we can go and see your CO and tell him what’s up.”

“What makes you think Ramstein OSI can’t handle this on our own?” she said, holding me with those eyes.

Oh, right. Insecurity. I said, “What
I
think is neither here nor there, Special Agent. It’s what Washington thinks.” As I said this, I wondered whether I should come clean and tell Masters exactly what Washington thought of
me,
but I didn’t want to spoil my little speech with reality and reinforce her already negative view.

“Are you that good an investigator, Cooper, that you can just waltz in here and show us yokels how to do it right?”

Perhaps Masters felt she had me on the run. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Special Agent. I don’t want to be here any more than you don’t want me to be here,” I informed her. “I was doing perfectly well back in Maryland, ending my marriage and screwing things up in my own life. Now I have to put all that on pause to hold your hand here—figuratively, of course.” My patience had pretty much run out. And my toothache was back. I was hungry. I also had absolutely no idea how a NATO command, let alone one as seriously big as Ramstein, worked. Masters was right. I was way out of my depth. And, on top of that, I stank. I really should have taken that shower when I could have.

The look on Masters’s face was the same one I had seen on Gruyere’s—the puzzle-with-the-missing-pieces one. “Are you usually so…?”

“Lovable?”

“Sarcastic, negative, contrary.”

“It’s the toothache talking. I’ll be much better when I have something to distract me from the pain. Like, if you could just shoot me in the leg or something.”

“Can we go now?” she said. “It’s nine ten. We’re late.”

I shrugged. She eased the Merc out from the curb.

The administration building was a long way from Roach’s hangar, so the drive was a good opportunity to take in the base.

Something from Masters’s direction landed in my lap. It was a bag of what looked like dried apple stems.

“What’re these?” I asked.

“Cloves,” said Masters. “I bought them back in K-town.”

“For me?”

I picked up the bag and took a closer look at the contents.

“My grandma’s recipe for toothache. Hold one against the tooth with your tongue and the clove will numb the nerve. They’re good for the breath, too. You should take half a dozen.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I think.” I suddenly felt bad about being so pushy.

Masters’s cell saved me from apologizing. It began playing an old KC and the Sunshine Band number, which transported me to my high-school prom, the backseat of my parents’ car, and a pro-wrestling bout with the catch on my date’s bra.

“Yes, sir,” she said, then “yes, sir,” followed by another, “yes, sir.” Masters managed to pull the fang out of the record groove and said, “We’re at the building now, sir.”

“Let me guess: Colonel Klink?” I asked.

“General von Koeppen,” she corrected as the front wheels of her Merc hit the driveway a little too fast and the oil pan clanged on the road.

“Yeah, that’s what I said—Colonel Klink. Can you ring him back and tell him I know
nuh-sink, nuh-sink…”

Masters and I stood at attention. Wolfgang von Koeppen looked nothing like the buffoon in
Hogan’s Heroes,
which was disappointing. Instead, he was tall, lean, and tanned, with blond hair and blue eyes. He wouldn’t have been out of place in a Ralph Lauren ad, standing behind the spoked wheel of an old sloop, sweater tied around his shoulders, a pretty young thing behind him laughing in the breeze. Or perhaps sitting in the backseat of a black Mercedes wearing the uniform of the Gestapo Reichsführer, directing a somber queue of women and children toward a railway car.

“That will be all, Anna,” he said to Masters in an accent that was vaguely English. Something in the way she turned and walked out told me that Masters didn’t appreciate being dismissed. We were, after all, conducting this investigation together. I was at a loss as to why she didn’t stand her ground. She would have been within her rights to do so. “At ease, Major,” he said, giving me the once-over.

“Special Agent,” I said, getting up the German’s nose from the starting gate.

“Yes, of course. Special Agent.”

Ordinarily, I’d have been in civilian clothes while on the job: a suit, or maybe pants and a blazer for that relaxed, hard-ass look. It’s easier to interview an officer, especially one higher up the ladder than you, when he or she has no idea what your rank is. Back at Brandywine, when Arlen had grouped “your passport” and “Ramstein” in the same sentence, I’d decided to put on an ACU. If I was headed to an air base in Germany, wearing a standard Army Combat Uniform would make moving around the place a lot easier. In a suit, I’d be stopped every other minute and asked to show ID. But I was now experiencing the downside of that decision. General von Koeppen looked me up and down and I could tell he didn’t like what he was seeing: an officer of inferior rank, and a rumpled one at that. Maybe Masters was right about the whole neatness thing. At least the feeling between Himmler and me was mutual from the get-go.