Chapter Fifteen
I was born in 1960, which made me seven during the Summer of Love, and thirteen at the end of our effective involvement in Vietnam, and fifteen at the end of our official involvement there. Which meant I missed most of the American military's collision with narcotics. The heavy-duty Purple Haze years passed me by. I had caught the later, stable phase. Like many soldiers I had smoked a little weed from time to time, maybe just enough to develop a preference among different strains and sources, but nowhere near enough to put me high on the list of U. S. users in terms of lifetime volume consumed. I was a part-timer. I was one of those guys who bought, not sold.
But as an MP, I had seen plenty sold. I had seen drug deals. I had seen them succeed, and I had seen them fail. I knew the drill. And one thing I knew for sure was that if a bad deal ends up with a dead guy on the floor, there's nothing in the dead guy's pocket. No cash, no product. No way. Why would there be? If the dead guy was the buyer, the seller runs away with his dope intact and the buyer's cash. If the dead guy was the seller, then the buyer gets the whole stash for free. The deal money walks right back home with him. Either way someone takes a nice big profit in exchange for a couple of bullets and a little rummaging around.
"It's bullshit, Sanchez," I said. "It's faked. "
"Of course it is. I know that. "
"Did you make that point?"
"Did I need to? They're civilians, but they ain't stupid. "
"So why are they gloating?"
"Because it gives them a free pass. If they can't close the case, they can just write it off. Brubaker ends up looking bad, not them. "
"They found any witnesses yet?"
"Not a one. "
"Shots were fired," I said. "Someone must have heard something. "
"Not according to the cops. "
"Willard is going to freak," I said.
"That's the least of our problems. "
"Are you alibied?"
"Me? Do I need to be?"
"Willard's going to be looking for leverage. He's going to use anything he can invent to get you to toe the line. "
Sanchez didn't answer right away. Some kind of electronic circuitry in the phone line brought the background hiss up loud to cover the silence. Then he spoke over it.
"I think I'm fireproof here," he said. "It's the Columbia PD making the accusations, not me. "
"Just take care," I said.
"Bet on it," he said.
I clicked the phone off. Summer was thinking. Her face was tense and her lower lids were moving.
"What?" I said.
"You sure it was faked?" she said.
"Had to be," I said.
"OK," she said. "Good. " She was still standing next to the map. She put her hand back on it. Little finger on the Fort Bird pin, index finger on the Columbia pin. "We agree that it was faked. We're sure of it. So there's a pattern now. The drugs and the money in Brubaker's pocket are the exact same thing as the branch up Carbone's ass and the yogurt on his back. Elaborate misdirection. Concealment of the true motive. It's a definite MO. It's not just a guess anymore. The same guy did both. He killed Carbone here and then jumped in his car and drove down to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. It's a clear sequence. Everything fits. Times, distances, the way the guy thinks. "
I looked at her standing there. Her small brown hand was stretched like a starfish. She had clear polish on her nails. Her eyes were bright.
"Why would he ditch the crowbar?" I said. "After Carbone but before Brubaker?"
"Because he preferred a handgun," she said. "Like anyone normal would. But he knew he couldn't use one here. Too noisy. A mile from the main post, late in the evening, we'd have all come running. But in a bad part of a big city, nobody was going to think twice. Which is how it turned out, apparently. "
"Could he have been sure of that?"
"No," she said. "Not entirely sure. He set up the rendezvous, so he knew where he was going. But he couldn't be exactly certain about what he would find when he got there. So I guess he would have liked to keep a backup weapon. But the crowbar was all covered with Carbone's blood and hair by then. There was no opportunity to clean it. He was in a hurry. The ground was frozen. No patch of soft grass to wipe it on. So he couldn't see having it in the car with him. Maybe he was worried about a traffic stop on the way south. So he ditched it. "
I nodded. Ultimately, the crowbar was disposable. A handgun was a more reliable weapon against a fit and wary opponent. Especially in the tight confines of a city alley, as opposed to the kind of dark and wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I yawned. Closed my eyes. From the wide-open spaces where he had taken Carbone down. I opened my eyes again.
"He killed Carbone here," I repeated. "And then he jumped in his car and drove to Columbia and killed Brubaker there. "
"Yes," Summer said.
"But you figured he was already in a car," I said.
"Yes," she said again. "I did. "
"You figured he drove out on the track with Carbone, hit him in the head, arranged the scene, and then drove back here to the post. Your reasoning was pretty good. And where we found the crowbar kind of confirmed it. "
"Thank you," she said.
"And then we figured he parked his car and went about his business. "
"Correct," she said.
"But he can't have parked his car and gone about his business. Because now we're saying he drove straight to Columbia, South Carolina, instead. To meet with Brubaker. Three-hour drive. He was in a hurry. Not much time to waste. "
"Correct," she said again.
"So he didn't park his car," I said. "He didn't even touch the brake. He drove straight out the main gate instead. There's no other way off the post. He drove straight out the main gate, Summer, immediately after he killed Carbone, somewhere around nine or ten o'clock. "
"Check the gate log," she said. "There's a copy right there on the desk. "
We checked the gate log together. Operation Just Cause in Panama had moved all domestic installations up one level on the DefCon scale and therefore all closed posts were recording entrances and exits in detail in bound ledgers that had preprinted page numbers in the top right-hand corner. We had a good clear Xerox of the page for January fourth. I was confident it was genuine. I was confident it was complete. And I was confident it was accurate. The Military Police have numerous failings, but snafus with basic paperwork aren't any of them.
Summer took the page from me and taped it to the wall next to the map. We stood side by side and looked at it. It was ruled into six columns. There were spaces for date, time in, time out, plate number, occupants, and reason.
"Traffic was light," Summer said.
I said nothing. I was in no position to know whether nineteen entries represented light traffic or not. I wasn't used to Bird and it had been a long time since I had pulled gate duty anywhere else. But certainly it seemed quiet compared to the multiple pages I had seen for New Year's Eve.
"Mostly people reporting back for duty," Summer said.
I nodded. Fourteen lines had entries in the Time In column but no corresponding entries in the Time Out column. That meant fourteen people had come in and stayed in. Back to work, after time away from the post for the holidays. Or after time away from the post for other reasons. I was right there among them: 1-4-90. 2302, Reacher, J. , Mjr, RTB. January fourth, 1990, two minutes past eleven in the evening, Major J. Reacher, returning to base. From Paris, via Garber's old office in Rock Creek. My vehicle plate number was listed as: Pedestrian. My sergeant was there, coming in from her off-post address to work the night shift. She had arrived at nine-thirty, driving something with North Carolina plates.
Fourteen in, to stay in.
Only five exits.
Three of them were routine food deliveries. Big trucks, probably. An army post gets through a lot of food. Lots of hungry mouths to feed. Three trucks in a day se
emed about right to me. Each of them was timed inward at some point during the early afternoon and then timed outward again a plausible hour or so later. The last time out was just before three o'clock.
Then there was a seven-hour gap.
The last-but-one recorded exit was Vassell and Coomer themselves, on their way out after their O Club dinner. They had passed through the gate at 2201. They had previously been timed in at 1845. At that point their Department of Defense plate number had been written down and their names and ranks had been entered. Their reason had been stated as: Courtesy visit.
Five exits. Four down.
One to go.
The only other person to have left Fort Bird on the fourth of January was logged as: 1-4-90, 2211, Trifonov, S. , Sgt. There was a North Carolina passenger vehicle plate number written in the relevant space. There was no time in recorded. There was nothing in the reason column. Therefore a sergeant called Trifonov had been on-post all day or all week and then he had left at eleven minutes past ten in the evening. No reason had been recorded because there was no directive to inquire as to why a soldier was leaving. The assumption was that he was going out for a drink or a meal or for some other form of entertainment. Reason was a question the gate guards asked of people trying to get in, not trying to get out.
We checked again, just to be absolutely sure. We came up with the same result. Apart from General Vassell and Colonel Coomer in their self-driven Mercury Grand Marquis, and then a sergeant called Trifonov in some other kind of car, nobody had passed through the gate in an outward direction in a vehicle or on foot at any time on the fourth of January, apart from three food trucks in the early part of the afternoon.
"OK," Summer said. "Sergeant Trifonov. Whoever he is. He's the one. "
"Has to be," I said.
I called the main gate. Got the same guy I had spoken to before, when I was checking on Vassell and Coomer earlier. I recognized his voice. I asked him to search forward through his log, starting from the page number immediately following the one we were looking at. Asked him to check exactly when a sergeant named Trifonov had returned to Bird. Told him it could be anytime after about four-thirty in the morning on January fifth. There was a moment's delay. I could hear the guy turning the stiff parchment pages in the ledger. He was doing it slowly, paying close attention.
"Sir, five o'clock in the morning precisely," the guy said. "January fifth, 0500, Sergeant Trifonov, returning to base. " I heard another page turn. "He left at 2211 the previous evening. "
"Remember anything about him?"
"He left about ten minutes after those Armored staffers you were asking me about before. He was in a hurry, as I recall. Didn't wait for the barrier to go all the way up. He squeezed right underneath it. "
"What kind of car?"
"Corvette, I think. Not a new one. But it looked pretty good. "
"Were you still on duty when he got back?"
"Yes, sir, I was. "
"Remember anything about that?"
"Nothing that stands out. I spoke to him, obviously. He has a foreign accent. "
"What was he wearing?"
"Civilian stuff. A leather jacket, I think. I assumed he had been off duty. "
"Is he on the post now?"
I heard pages turning again. I imagined a finger, tracing slowly down all the lines written after 0500 on the morning of the fifth.
"We haven't logged him out again, sir," the guy said. "Not as of right now. So he must be on-post somewhere. "
"OK," I said. "Thanks, soldier. "
I hung up. Summer looked at me.
"He got back at 0500," I said. "Three and a half hours after Brubaker's watch stopped. "
"Three-hour drive," she said.
"And he's here now. "
"Who is he?"
I called post headquarters. Asked the question. They told me who he was. I put the phone down and looked straight at Summer.
"He's Delta," I said. "He was a defector from Bulgaria. They brought him in as an instructor. He knows stuff our guys don't. "
I got up from my desk and stepped over to the map on the wall. Put my own fingers on the pushpins. Little finger on Fort Bird, index finger on Columbia. It was like I was validating a theory by touch alone. A hundred and fifty miles. Three hours and twelve minutes to get there, three hours and thirty-seven minutes to get back. I did the math in my head. An average speed of forty-seven miles an hour going, and forty-one coming back. At night, on empty roads, in a Chevrolet Corvette. He could have done it with the parking brake on.
"Should we have him picked up?" Summer said.
"No," I said. "I'll do it myself. I'll go over there. "
"Is that smart?"
"Probably not. But I don't want those guys to think they got to me. "
"I'll come with you," she said.
"OK," I said.
It was five o'clock in the afternoon, exactly thirty-six hours to the minute since Trifonov arrived back on-post. The weather was dull and cold. We took sidearms and handcuffs and evidence bags. We walked to the MP motor pool and found a Humvee that had a cage partition bolted behind the front seats and no inside handles on the back doors. Summer drove. She parked at Delta's prison gate. The sentry let us through on foot. We walked around the outside of the main block until I found the entrance to their NCO Club. I stopped, and Summer stopped beside me.
"You going in there?" she said.
"Just for a minute. "
"Alone?"
I nodded. "Then we're going to their armory. "
"Not smart," she said. "I should come in with you. "
"Why?"
She hesitated. "As a witness, I guess. "
"To what?"
"To whatever they do to you. "
I smiled, briefly.
"Terrific," I said.
I pushed in through the door. The place was pretty crowded. The light was dim and the air was full of smoke. There was a lot of noise. Then people saw me and went quiet. I moved onward. People stood where they were. Stock-still. Then they turned to face me. I pushed past them, one by one. Through the crowd. Nobody moved out of my way. They bumped me with their shoulders, left and right. I bumped back, in the silence. I stand six feet five inches tall and I weigh two hundred thirty pounds. I can hold my own in a shoving competition.
I made it through the lobby and moved into the bar. Same thing happened. The noise died fast. People turned toward me. Stared at me. I pushed and shoved and bumped my way through the room. There was nothing to hear except tense breathing and the scrape of feet on the floor and the soft thump of shoulder on shoulder. I kept my eyes on the far wall. The young guy with the beard and the tan stepped out into my path. He had a glass of beer in his hand. I kept going straight and he leaned to his right and we collided and his glass slopped half its contents on the linoleum tile.
"You spilled my drink," he said.
I stopped. Looked down at the floor. Then I looked into his eyes.
"Lick it up," I said.
We stood face-to-face for a second. Then I moved on past him. I felt an itch in my back. I knew he was staring at me. But I wasn't about to turn around. No way. Not unless I heard a bottle shatter against a table behind me.
I didn't hear a bottle. I made it all the way to the far wall. Touched it like a swimmer at the end of a lap. Turned around and started back. The return journey was no different. The room was silent. I picked up the pace a little. Drove faster through the crowd. Bumped harder. Momentum has its advantages. By the time I was ten paces from the lobby people were starting to move out of my way. They were backing off a little.
I figured we had communicated effectively. So in the lobby I started to deviate slightly from a purely straight path. Other people returned the compliment. I made it back to the entrance like any other civilized person in a crowded situation. I stopped at the door. Turned around. Scanned the faces in the room, slowly, one group at
a time, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. Then I turned my back on them all and stepped out into the cold fresh air.
Summer wasn't there.
I looked around and a second later saw her slip out of a service entrance ten feet away. It had gotten her in behind the bar. I figured she had been watching my back.
She looked at me.
"Now you know," she said.
"Know what?"
"How the first black soldier felt. And the first woman. "
She showed me the way to the old airplane hangar where their armory was. We walked across twenty feet of swept concrete and went in through a personnel door set in the side. She hadn't been kidding about equipping an African dictatorship. There were arc lights blazing high in the roof of the hangar and they showed a small fleet of specialist vehicles and vast stacks of every kind of man-portable weapon you could imagine. I guessed David Brubaker had done a very effective lobbying job, up at the Pentagon.
"Over here," Summer said.
She led me to a wire pen. It was about fifteen feet square. It had three walls and a roof made out of some kind of hurricane fencing. Like a dog run. There was a wire door standing open with an open padlock hung on the chain-link by its tongue. Behind the door was a stand-up writing table. Behind the writing table was a man in BDUs. He didn't salute. Didn't come to attention. But he didn't turn away either. He just stood there and looked at me neutrally, which was as close to proper etiquette as Delta ever got.
"Help you?" he said, like he was a clerk in a store and I was a customer. Behind him on racks were well-used sidearms of every description. I saw five different submachine-gun models. There were some M16s, A1s, and A2s. There were handguns. Some were new and fresh, some were old and worn. They were stored neatly and precisely, but without ceremony. They were tools of a trade, nothing less, nothing more.
In front of the guy on the desk was a logbook.
"You check them in and check them out?" I asked.
"Like valet parking," the guy said. "Post regulations won't allow personal weapons in the accommodations areas. " He was looking at Summer. I guessed he had been through the same question-and-answer with her, when she was looking for Carbone's new P7.
"What does Sergeant Trifonov use for a handgun?" I asked.
"Trifonov? He favors the Steyr GB. "
"Show me. "
He turned away to the pistol rack and came back with a black Steyr GB. He was holding it by the barrel. It looked oiled and well maintained. I had an evidence bag out and ready and he dropped it straight in. I zipped the bag shut and looked at the gun through the plastic.
"Nine-millimeter," Summer said.
I nodded. It was a fine gun, but an unlucky one. Steyr-Daimler-Puch built it with the prospect of big orders from the Austrian Army dancing in its eyes, but a rival outfit named Glock came along and stole the prize. Which left the GB an unhappy orphan, like Cinderella. And like Cinderella it had many excellent qualities. It packed eighteen rounds, which was a lot, but it weighed less than two and a half pounds unloaded, which wasn't. You could take it apart and put it back together in twelve seconds, which was fast. Best of all, it had a very smart gas management system. All automatic weapons work by using the explosion of gas in the chamber to cycle the action, to get the spent case out and the next cartridge in. But in the real world some cartridges are old or weak or badly assembled. They don't all explode with the same force. Put an out-of-spec weak load in some guns, and the action just wheezes and won't cycle at all. Put a too-heavy load in, and the gun can blow up in your hand. But the Steyr was designed to deal with anything that came its way. If I were a Special Forces soldier taking dubious-quality ammunition from whatever ragtag bunch of partisans I was hanging with, I'd use a Steyr. I would want to be sure that whatever I was depending on would fire, ten times out of ten.
Through the plastic I pressed the magazine catch behind the trigger and shook the bag until the magazine fell out of the butt. It was an eighteen-round magazine, and there were sixteen cartridges in it. I gripped the slide and ejected one round from the chamber. So he had gone out with nineteen shells. Eighteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. He had come back with seventeen shells. Sixteen in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Therefore he had fired two.
"Got a phone?" I said.
The clerk nodded at a booth in the corner of the hangar, twenty feet from his station. I walked over there and called my sergeant's desk. The Louisiana guy answered. The corporal. The night-shift woman was probably still at home in her trailer, putting her baby to bed, showering, getting ready for the trek to work.
"Get me Sanchez at Jackson," I said.
I held the phone by my ear and waited. One minute. Two.
"What?" Sanchez said.
"Did they find the shell cases?" I said.
"No," he said. "The guy must have cleaned up at the scene. "
"Pity. We could have matched them for a slam dunk. "
"You found the guy?"
"I'm holding his gun right now. Steyr GB, fully loaded, less two fired. "
"Who is he?"
"I'll tell you later. Let the civilians sweat for a spell. "
"One of ours?"
"Sad, but true. "
Sanchez said nothing.
"Did they find the bullets?" I said.
"No," he said.
"Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go? They'll be buried in the brick somewhere. "
"Then they won't do us any good. They'll be flattened beyond recognition. "
"They were jacketed," I said. "They won't have broken up. We could weigh them, at least. "
"They haven't found them. "
"Are they looking?"
"I don't know. "
"They dug up any witnesses yet?"
"No. "
"Did they find Brubaker's car?"
"No. "
"It's got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and arrived at midnight or one o'clock. In a distinctive car. Aren't they looking for it?"
"There's something they're not sharing. I can feel it. "
"Did Willard get there yet?"
"I expect him any minute. "
"Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up," I said. "And tell him you heard the other thing wasn't a training accident after all. That should make his day. "
Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer had stepped inside and she was shoulder to shoulder with the armory clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing through his logbook together.
"Look at this," she said.
She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries. Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimeter pistol at seven-thirty on the evening of January fourth. He had signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.
"Why did he take it?" I said.
"We don't ask for a reason," the clerk said. "We just do the paperwork. "
We came out of the hangar and walked toward the accommodations block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers' rides. Not many imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but mostly there were pickup trucks and big Detroit coupes, some of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tires. There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.
We detoured to take a look at it.
It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean, inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly, within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The tires were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in through the win
dows. The interior looked like it had been soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a two-seat car, but there was a parcel shelf. It was small, but probably big enough for a crowbar hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.
"No grit from the track," she said. "No blood on the seats. "
"No yogurt pot on the floor," I said.
"He cleaned up after himself. "
We walked away. We went out through their main gate and locked Trifonov's gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we turned around and headed back inside.
I didn't want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down. So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn't anywhere in the mess.
So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past Carbone's empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov bunked three doors farther down. We got there. His door was standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on the narrow cot, reading a book.
I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had no Special Forces. Truly elite units were not common inside the Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia had a pretty good airborne brigade, and Poland had airborne and amphibious divisions. The Soviet Union itself had a few Vysotniki tough guys. Apart from that, sheer weight of numbers was the name of the game, in the eastern part of Europe. Throw enough bodies into the fray, and eventually you win, as long as you regard two-thirds of them as expendable. And they did.
So who was this guy?
NATO Special Forces put a lot of emphasis on endurance in selection and training. They have guys running fifty miles carrying everything including the kitchen sink. They keep them awake and hiking over appalling terrain for a week at a time. Therefore NATO elite troops tended to be small whippy guys, built like marathon runners. But this Bulgarian was huge. He was at least as big as me. Maybe even bigger. Maybe six-six, maybe two-fifty. He had a shaved head. He had a big square face that would be somewhere between brutally plain and reasonably good-looking depending on the light. At that point the fluorescent tube on the ceiling of his cell wasn't doing him any favors. He looked tired. He had piercing eyes set deep and close together in hooded sockets. He was a few years older than me, somewhere in his early thirties. He had huge hands. He was wearing brand-new woodland BDUs, no name, no rank, no unit.
"On your feet, soldier," I said.
He put his book down on the bed next to him, carefully, facedown and open, like he was saving his place.
We put handcuffs on him and got him into the Humvee without any trouble. He was big, but he was quiet. He seemed resigned to his fate. Like he knew it had been only a matter of time before all the various logbooks in his life betrayed him.
We drove him back and got him to my office without incident. We sat him down and unlocked the handcuffs and redid them so that his right wrist was cuffed to the chair leg. Then we took a second pair of cuffs and did the same thing with his left. He had big wrists. They were as thick as most men's ankles.
Summer stood next to the map, staring at the pushpins, like she was leading his gaze toward them and saying: We know.
I sat at my desk.
"What's your name?" I said. "For the record. "
"Trifonov," he said. His accent was heavy and abrupt, all in his throat.
"First name?"
"Slavi. "
"Slavi Trifonov," I said. "Rank?"
"I was a colonel at home. Now I'm a sergeant. "
"Where's home?"
"Sofia," he said. "In Bulgaria. "
"You're very young to have been a colonel. "
"I was very good at what I did. "
"And what did you do?"
He didn't answer.
"You have a nice car," I said.
"Thank you," he said. "A car like that was always a dream to me. "
"Where did you take it on the night of the fourth?"
He didn't answer.
"There are no Special Forces in Bulgaria," I said.
"No," he said. "There are not. "
"So what did you do there?"
"I was in the regular army. "
"Doing what?"
"Three-way liaison between the Bulgarian Army, the Bulgarian Secret Police, and our friends in the Soviet Vysotniki. "
"Qualifications?"
"I had five years' training with the GRU. "
"Which is what?"
He smiled. "I think you know what it is. "
I nodded. The Soviet GRU was a kind of a cross between a military police corps and Delta Force. They were plenty tough, and they were just as ready to turn their fury inward as outward.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"In America?" he said. "I'm waiting. "
"For what?"
"For the end of the communist occupation of my country. It will happen soon, I think. Then I'm going back. I'm proud of my country. It's a beautiful place full of beautiful people. I'm a nationalist. "
"What are you teaching Delta?"
"Things that are out-of-date now. How to fight against the things I was trained to do. But that battle is already over, I think. You won. "
"You need to tell us where you were on the night of the fourth. "
He said nothing.
"Why did you defect?"
"Because I was a patriot," he said.
"Recent conversion?"
"I was always a patriot. But I came close to being discovered. "
"How did you get out?"
"Through Turkey. I went to the American base there. "
"Tell me about the night of the fourth. "
He said nothing.
"We've got your gun," I said. "You signed it out. You left the post at eleven minutes past ten and got back at five in the morning. "
He said nothing.
"You fired two rounds. "
He said nothing.
"Why did you wash your car?"
"Because it's a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week. Always. A car like that was a dream to me. "
"You ever been to Kansas?"
"No. "
"Well, that's where you're headed. You're not going home to Sofia. You're going to Fort Leavenworth instead. "
"Why?"
"You know why," I said.
Trifonov didn't move. He sat absolutely still. He was hunched way forward, with his wrists fastened to the chair down near his knees. I sat still too. I wasn't sure what to do. Our own Delta guys were trained to resist interrogation. I knew that. They were trained to counter drugs and beatings and sensory deprivation and anything else anyone could think of. Their instructors were encouraged to employ hands-on training methods. So I couldn't even imagine what Trifonov had been through, in five years with the GRU. There was nothing much I could do to him. I wasn't above smacking people around. But I figured this guy wouldn't say a word even if I disassembled him limb by limb.
So I moved on to traditional policing techniques. Lies, and bribery.
"Some people figure Carbone was an embarrassment," I said. "You know, to the army. So we wouldn't necessarily want to pursue it too far. You spill the beans now, we could send you back to Turkey. You could wait there until it was time to go home and be a patriot. "
"It was you who killed Carbone," he said. "People are talking about it. "
"People are wrong," I said. "I wasn't here. And I didn't kill Brubaker. Because I wasn't there either. "
"Neither was I," he said. "Either. "
He was very still. Then something dawned on him. His eyes started moving. He looked left, and then right. He looked up at Summer's map.
Looked at the pins. Looked at her. Looked at me. His lips moved. I saw him say Carbone to himself. Then Brubaker. He made no sound, but I could lip-read his awkward accent.
"Wait," he said.
"For what?"
"No," he said.
"No what?"
"No, sir," he said.
"Tell me, Trifonov," I said.
"You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?"
"You think you didn't?"
He went quiet again. Looked down.
"Tell me, Trifonov," I said.
He looked up.
"It wasn't me," he said.
I just sat there. Watched his face. I had been handling investigations of various kinds for six long years, and Trifonov was at least the thousandth guy to look me in the eye and say It wasn't me. Problem was, a percentage of those thousand guys had been telling the truth. And I was starting to think maybe Trifonov was too. There was something about him. I was starting to get a very bad feeling.
"You're going to have to prove it," I said.
"I can't. "
"You're going to have to. Or they'll throw away the key. They might let Carbone slide, but they sure as hell aren't going to let Brubaker slide. "
He said nothing.
"Start over," I said. "The night of January fourth, where were you?"
He just shook his head.
"You were somewhere," I said. "That's for damn sure. Because you weren't here. You logged in and out. You and your gun. "
He said nothing. Just looked at me. I stared back at him and didn't speak. He went into the kind of desperate conflicted silence I had seen many times before. He was moving in the chair. Imperceptibly. Tiny violent movements, from side to side. Like he was fighting two alternating opponents, one on his left, one on his right. Like he knew he had to tell me where he had been, but like he knew he couldn't. He was jumping around like the absolute flesh-and-blood definition of a rock and a hard place.
"The night of January fourth," I said. "Did you commit a crime?"
His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.
"OK," I said. "Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head?"
He said nothing.
"Did you go up to Washington D. C. and rape the president's ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?"
"No," he said.
"I'll give you a clue," I said. "Where you're sitting, that would be about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head. "
He said nothing.
"Tell me. "
"It was a private thing," he said.
"What kind of a private thing?"
He didn't answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had been, chances were it wasn't Columbia, South Carolina. She looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs.
"What's going to happen to me?" he asked.
"That depends on what you did," I said.
"I got a letter," he said.
"Getting mail isn't a crime. "
"From a friend of a friend. "
"Tell me about the letter. "
"There's a man in Sofia," he said.
He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed it, he made it sound like he thought there was something uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn't, really. It was a story that could have been told by any of us.
There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States. She had gotten married to an American. She had become a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters. There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation. The sister's life was hell. The communist censors had passed the letters, because anything that made America look bad was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town who knew his way around the city's dissident network. The friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident network before he skipped to Turkey. The friend had packaged up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who bought machine parts in Austria. The machine-parts guy had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January second, early in the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.
He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out where it was.
His next available free time was the evening of January fourth. He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centered around the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends within driving distance.
"Still got the letter?" I asked.
He nodded. "But you won't be able to read it, because it's written in Bulgarian. "
"What were you wearing that night?"
"Plain clothes. I'm not stupid. "
"What kind of plain clothes?"
"Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. American. They're all the plain clothes I've got. "
"What did you do to the guy?"
He shook his head. Wouldn't answer.
"OK," I said. "Let's all go to Cape Fear. "
We kept Trifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast, south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although I couldn't remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never known anyone who owned one.
And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, though. Couldn't remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.
It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that billed the town as a historic and picturesque old port city but we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and made another left toward a place called Southport.
"Cape Fear is off of Southport," Summer said. "It's an island in the ocean. I think there's a bridge. "
But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn't even get to Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle. Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double-wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.
"Here," Trifonov said. "Make a right. "
There was a wide center track with narrower tra
cks branching left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar-paper roof was curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a television behind its windows.
"Her name is Elena," Trifonov said.
We left him locked in the Humvee. Knocked on Elena's door. The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman. She was a mess. She had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken ribs. She was wearing a thin housedress and men's shoes. But she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly. There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty and suffering and foreign status.
"Yes?" she said. "Can I help you?" Her accent was like Trifonov's, but much higher-pitched. It was quite appealing.
"We need to talk to you," Summer said, gently.
"What about?"
"About what Slavi Trifonov did for you," I said.
"He didn't do anything," she said.
"But you know the name. "
She paused.
"Please come in," she said.
I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside. Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt and confusion. But the trailer was neat and clean. There was nothing out of place. It was cold, but it was OK. And there was nobody else in it.
"Your husband not here?" I said.
She shook her head.
"Where is he?"
She didn't answer.
"My guess is he's in the hospital," Summer said. "Am I right?"
Elena just looked at her.
"Mr. Trifonov helped you," I said. "Now you need to help him. "
She said nothing.
"If he wasn't here doing something good, he was somewhere else doing something bad. That's the situation. So I need to know which it was. "
She said nothing.
"This is very, very important," I said.
"What if both things were bad?" she asked.
"The two things don't compare," I said. "Believe me. Not even close. So just tell me exactly what happened, OK?"
She didn't answer right away. I moved a little deeper into the trailer. The television was tuned to PBS. The volume was low. I could smell cleaning products. Her husband had gone, and she had started a new phase in her life with a mop and a pail, and education on the tube.
"I don't know exactly what happened," she said. "Mr. Trifonov just came here and took my husband away. "
"When?"
"The night before last, at midnight. He said he had gotten a letter from my brother in Sofia. "
I nodded. At midnight. He left Bird at 2211, he was here an hour and forty-nine minutes later. One hundred miles, an average of dead-on fifty-five miles an hour, in a Corvette. I glanced at Summer. She nodded. Easy.
"How long was he here?"
"Just a few minutes. He was quite formal. He introduced himself, and he told me what he was doing, and why. "
"And that was it?"
She nodded.
"What was he wearing?"
"A leather jacket. Jeans. "
"What kind of car was he in?"
"I don't know what it's called. Red, and low. A sports car. It made a loud noise with its exhaust pipes. "
"OK," I said. I nodded to Summer and we moved toward the door.
"Will my husband come back?" Elena said.
I pictured Trifonov as I had first seen him. Six-six, two-fifty, shaved head. The thick wrists, the big hands, the blazing eyes, and the five years with GRU.
"I seriously doubt it," I said.
We climbed back into the Humvee. Summer started the engine. I turned around and spoke to Trifonov through the wire cage.
"Where did you leave the guy?" I asked him.
"On the road to Wilmington," he said.
"When?"
"Three o'clock in the morning. I stopped at a pay phone and called 911. I didn't give my name. "
"You spent three hours on him?"
He nodded, slowly. "I wanted to be sure he understood the message. "
Summer threaded her way out of the trailer park and turned west and then north toward Wilmington. We passed the tourist sign on the outskirts and went looking for the hospital. We found it a quarter-mile in. It looked like a reasonable place. It was mostly two-story and had an ambulance entrance with a broad canopy. Summer parked in a slot reserved for a doctor with an Indian name and we got out. I unlocked the rear door and let Trifonov out to join us. I took the cuffs off him. Put them in my pocket.
"What was the guy's name?" I asked him.
"Pickles," he said.
The three of us walked in together and I showed my special unit badge to the orderly behind the triage desk. Truth is, it confers no rights or privileges on me out in the civilian world, but the guy reacted like it gave me unlimited powers, which is what most civilians do when they see it.
"Early morning of January fifth," I said. "Sometime after three o'clock, there was an admission here. "
The guy riffed through a stack of aluminum clipboards in a stand to his right. Pulled two of them partway out.
"Male or female?" he said.
"Male. "
He dropped one of the clipboards back in its slot. Pulled the other all the way out.
"John Doe," he said. "Indigent male, no ID, no insurance, claims his name is Pickles. Cops found him on the road. "
"That's our guy," I said.
"Your guy?" he said, looking at my uniform.
"We might be able to take care of his bill," I said.
He paid attention to that. Glanced at his stack of clipboards, like he was thinking, One down, two hundred to go.
"He's in post-op," he said. He pointed toward the elevator. "Second floor. "
He stayed behind his counter. We rode up, the three of us together. Got out and followed the signs to the post-op ward. A nurse at a station outside the door stopped us. I showed her my badge.
"Pickles," I said.
She pointed us to a private room with a closed door, across the hallway.
"Five minutes only," she said. "He's very sick. "
Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room's door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn't see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital's radiography budget all by himself.
I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.
"You two wait outside," I said.
Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.
"How are you, asshole?" I said.
The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.
"That was the man," he said. "Right there. He did this to me. "
"Did what to you?"
"He shot me in the legs. "
I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been kneecapped. Two knees, two bul
lets. Two rounds fired.
"Front or side?" I said.
"Side," he said.
"Front is worse," I said. "You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky. "
"I didn't do anything. "
"Didn't you? I just met your wife. "
"Foreign bitch. "
"Don't say that. "
"It's her own fault. She won't do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible. "
"Shut up," I said.
"Aren't you going to do something?"
"Yes," I said. "I am. Watch. "
I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.
"He is very sick," I said.
We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.
"I apologize," I said.
"Am I in trouble?" he said.
"Not with me," I said. "You're my kind of guy. But you're very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different. "
He smiled, briefly. He was calm.
"I trained five years with GRU," he said. "I know how to kill people. And I know how not to. "