Kemper’s smile faded. “You shouldn’t have brought that here. There are avenues for that.”
“I don’t want my name on anything. I figured you could get it to him directly. There’s thirty thousand there. My donation to his campaign. Gordon tells me if he’s reelected, it’ll be good for all of us.”
“He’s a man that understands his obligations, that’s true. Which is more than you can say for many in his business. I’ll see it gets to him.”
“Make sure he knows it’s from me. Tell him.”
“I will. I’m sure he’ll appreciate your generosity.”
“I could use a good friend too.”
“Can’t we all,” Kemper said. He opened a drawer, set the envelope inside, closed it.
Lukas looked up at the painting again. “That’s new, too.”
“It’s called ‘Storm on the Sea at Night,’” Kemper said. “It’s by Aivazovsky, 1849. I got it on my last trip to Russia, in St. Petersburg. I’d had my eye on it for years.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“I’d hate to admit.”
“More than a million?”
“Quite a bit more. But we’ve established some lucrative partnerships with Russia in the energy field over the last year, and I wanted a memento of sorts to take back with me. It was my gift to myself.”
A knock at the door. It opened and Farrow came halfway in, touched his watch. Kemper nodded. Farrow looked at Lukas and went back out, left the door ajar.
Kemper turned back to the desk, tapped the paper with his glasses. “Some notes I’m making for a meeting tomorrow with the commissioner of the NYPD, and the head of their Strategic Response Group. They’re interested in some nonlethal technologies we’re developing. Could be quite a coup. They have almost thirty-five thousand officers. What we’d earn would be minimal compared to some of our other contracts, but the public relations value will be priceless.”
“I’m sure it will go fine. It always does.”
Kemper sat back, crossed his arms. “If there’s anything I’ve learned in my sixty-eight years on earth, it’s that wherever there’s transition, there’s conflict. It’s inevitable, but it passes. There are big things ahead for us, Lukas, all of us. You’re helping make that transition. Some of the faces around me may change, but never doubt that you’re among family. You’re like a son to me, and they all know it.”
“I’ll always be grateful for what you did. Finding me, bringing me over there.”
“Now that things are calmer, you may want to go back home someday, visit. Croatia’s a beautiful country. You might find you still have some relatives over there.”
“No,” Lukas said. “Everyone I knew there is dead.”
Kemper folded his glasses, slipped them in a front shirt pocket.
“There are things I probably should say more often than I have. You’ve been invaluable to me. And I know I’ve put you into some unenviable positions. You’ve had to deal with the worst of the worst, all for my benefit, and the benefit of Unix. I haven’t forgotten that.”
Lukas waited, wondering where this was going.
“This NYPD deal”—Kemper touched the paper—“is the tip of the iceberg. We’re also bidding on staffing for a network of private correctional facilities in the Southwest. If we get that contract—and there’s no reason we shouldn’t—that will be a steady source of income for years to come, decades probably.” He grinned. “No one ever went broke running a prison in the United States.”
“Big plans,” Lukas said.
“There are other things too. Some I can talk about. Some I can’t, for the moment, at least. What we’ve accomplished this far is nothing compared to what’s in our future. The real work is still ahead of us, in a dozen different countries, not just here. And you’ll share in those rewards.”
“Thank you.”
“Meanwhile, there are certain aspects of the business we’re leaving behind. Things with too much risk, not enough return.”
“I know.” He thought about Budapest, the look in Penskoff’s eyes when he realized what was happening. “I can do whatever you need me to do.”
Kemper patted his hand, then took out his glasses again. “Back to work.”
Lukas stood. “Thank you for seeing me.”
Kemper nodded, but he was looking down at the paper again. Lukas felt awkward, foolish, realized the conversation was over. Kemper didn’t look up when he went out, closed the door softly behind him.
Farrow was waiting in the hallway. “You satisfied? Get what you need?” Keeping his voice low.
“What I came for,” Lukas said. “Yes.”
“Feel better?”
“A little. Thanks for your interest.”
In the foyer, the two guards waited, watching him. One of them pushed the button to call the elevator.
Farrow put a hand on Lukas’s elbow. “I think we need to get some things straight.”
Lukas looked down at his hand. Farrow took it away.
“I’m sure he told you about the way things are going,” Farrow said. “What’s coming together for us.”
“Yeah, he did.”
“You can’t go around stirring up shit because you think you’re not getting enough attention. There’s too much going on now. Everybody will be taken care of. We all just need to be patient.”
“I am. Tell me, those Chinese AKMs, where did they end up? Yemen? Liberia?”
“Does it matter? We’re done with that side of the business anyway. Soon everything we’re involved in will be one hundred percent aboveboard. We’ll never have to break—or even bend—another law again.”
“That’s comforting to hear. Too late for our Russian friends, though.”
“We do what we have to do to move forward. They were a liability.”
“Like Devlin.”
“Let’s just say he’s capable of fucking things up for all of us without even knowing it. Why you need to find him, wherever he is, take care of it. When that’s done, you can get some rest, go on vacation. Spend your money.”
“Thanks for the suggestion. And thank the old man for seeing me. I suppose I should be grateful for the audience.”
“He loves you, Lukas. I’m not sure why, but he does. But do us both a favor—don’t push it.”
Lukas looked at him, wondering if there was a threat there. Winters had come out of the living room, was watching them.
“Don’t worry,” Lukas said. “When I start to push, you’ll know it.”
On the drive back, he called Tariq’s cellphone.
“We need to get our things together,” he said. “Be ready to move.”
“What for?”
“Road trip,” Lukas said.
Twenty
Tell me more about San Marcos,” Tracy Quinn said.
Devlin looked down at the recorder, the glowing green light, wondered if he was ready.
They were at the table in his motel room. Noon, and the curtains were pulled back, the room flooded with sunlight. In the diner the night before, he’d given her the short version of what he and the others had done for Acheron.
“It wasn’t just there,” he said. “There were other places too.”
“I want to fill in some gaps from what you told me. San Marcos was the last work you did for them?”
She had a notebook open on the table. Devlin could see a page of disorganized writing, sentences scrawled at different angles, words underlined and circled, multiple exclamation points.
“The last fieldwork,” he said. “I was on disability for a while, then came back to some administrative duties, paperwork, mostly. I was out of the game, though, and everyone treated me that way. I wasn’t privy to any of what was going on, where anybody was being sent.”
“I looked up the name you gave me, Roland Kemper, and this company, Unix Technologies. For someone with his history, there hasn’t been much written about him. Until recently, he seems to have flown under the radar.”
“In that industry, you p
ay for discretion. You don’t want someone with a public face, who shows up in the papers, running the show.”
“He’s been quite the philanthropist at times. Hospitals, resource centers for veterans. He made a major donation to Walter Reed Medical, a couple hundred thousand. Back in the ’90s, he helped fund a U.N. group that sponsored war orphans from the Balkans, brought them to the States, found families for them, set up trusts and scholarships.”
“I’m not surprised. He was always generous. As much as he was earning, that probably wasn’t hard. Say what you want about his dealings, he always took care of his people financially. Acheron was a good gig, until it wasn’t.”
“Can you give me some other names, people that worked with you?” she said.
“That wouldn’t be my place, would it? And it’s old news anyhow. A lot of them are dead.”
“It’ll be useful to have someone else corroborate what you’re telling me.”
“I can’t help you with that. You can believe me or not. It’s your choice.”
“It’s not a question of what I believe,” she said. “It’s a question of what I can prove. If I came up with some other names on my own, would you confirm or deny they worked for Acheron?”
“I might. If they were the right names.”
“If you did, that would be just a starting point. I’d take it from there. No one I talked to would know how I got their names.”
“You say.”
“I’ve never burned a source in my life,” she said. “You’ll have to trust me.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s all I got.”
He liked that. “Fair enough.”
“When you were training foreign troops, did Acheron supply weapons to them as well?”
“Some of the groups we worked with could hardly be called troops,” he said. “If you have enough money, you can always buy weapons from somebody. In most cases, the locals had no issues getting ordnance. It was learning how to use it that was the problem.”
“You were mercenaries.”
“Technically, a mercenary is someone who fights for a foreign government for pay. That wasn’t us. We worked for an American company that contracted with other governments. We got a salary, bonuses, et cetera, but they came from Acheron, no one else.”
“How much were you making?”
“Depended on the job. Where it was, what had to be done. We weren’t supposed to do any actual fighting, just train whoever we were hired to train, and provide support. Basic military tactics, map reading, discipline, weapons training. Some hand-to-hand fighting. Basically, we taught whatever they needed. We had guys who’d never seen the inside of a schoolhouse in their life, couldn’t read or write, and now we were showing them how to set up perimeters and ambushes, or break down a belt-fed SAW.”
“What’s a SAW?”
“Squad automatic weapon. Usually an M249, but basically any kind of light machine gun a squad can carry. A lot of bang for the buck, but a bear to operate.”
“You were teaching men to kill.”
“Mostly we were teaching them how to stay alive. There’s always some rationalization goes on in war. But most times I felt we were on the right side, giving underdogs a chance against larger, better-equipped, and better-trained opponents.”
“Most times?”
He saw she was waiting for his reaction, for him to take the bait. When he didn’t respond, she said, “Where else were you?”
“All over. Around ’91, we helped train Croatian Army troops who were fighting the Serbs in what used to be Yugoslavia. Their army at the time was new, basically just a police force. The Serbs were chewing them up at first. They needed help. That’s where we came in.”
“And that’s what you did in San Marcos?”
He looked out the window, deciding how much he wanted to say, how to say it.
“You know much about the country?” he said. “What happened there?”
“Now I do. Most of what I read was pretty depressing.”
“Herrera, the president back then, fancied himself a new Fidel. He was giving the finger to Washington, talking about throwing out U.S. oil companies, seizing their production facilities. At the same time, his people were starving, and anybody who spoke out against him ended up in prison or dead in the street.”
“Then came the coup.”
“Ramírez saw the time was ripe. He had part of the army behind him, but they were ill equipped and ill trained. His people reached out to Acheron, contracted for advisers. They sent Roarke, Bell, and me. We didn’t know much about what was going on there politically at the time, and didn’t much care. I didn’t even speak Spanish.”
“Just the three of you?”
“We were cadre, that’s all. Instructors. The idea was we’d train a certain number of troops, who’d then pass those skills on to others. They moved us around to different units. We shared what we knew. It wasn’t just fighting, though, there were other aspects as well. Gathering intel, interrogation.”
“Torture?”
“I never saw any of that.”
“You’re not saying it didn’t happen.”
“After the fighting started, Ramírez’s men took over an old shopping mall, used that as a detention and interrogation center. The three of us never set foot in there. I don’t know what went on behind those walls.”
“But you could imagine.”
“I could,” he said.
“Did you go along on operations?”
“Not usually, for obvious reasons. If we were killed or captured and word got out, it would look like America was involving itself in a foreign conflict, private firm or not. It would have been a mess. Would have put Acheron out of business.”
“You said ‘usually.’ So there were times you did?”
He looked out the window again, then back at her. “Yeah, there were times.”
“How long were you there?”
“Only three months. After the coup, Ramírez didn’t need us anymore, and didn’t want us around. Can’t blame him.”
“You didn’t answer my earlier question. Was Acheron selling Ramírez arms?”
“Not that I saw firsthand, but I wouldn’t be surprised. When we got there, a lot of the equipment his people had was Cold War era, or AK knockoffs. But after a while, the quality of what they were getting seemed to improve—Claymore mines, M-16s, better coms.”
“Coms?”
“Communication setups, radios. Did I ever see money change hands, or weapons being offloaded? No. But it made no difference to me. I was happy to have them.”
“This was all illegal, wasn’t it?”
“Washington wanted Herrera gone, so no one was going to come down hard on us. They felt they were better off with Ramírez in place.”
“You said you got hurt there. What happened?”
“I hit a mine on a road. They weren’t so good at keeping track of where they were planting them back then.”
“I read a lot of civilians were killed during the fighting,” she said. “Murdered by both factions, especially out in the countryside. Did you see any of that?”
He gestured to the recorder. “Turn it off.”
“Why?”
“Please.” It had snuck up on him, and now he was seeing it again, muzzle flashes and the gray haze of gun smoke. Remembering the heavy silence that had seemed to quiet the jungle itself.
She hesitated, then said, “All right,” and touched a button. The green light went out.
Here you are, he thought. Another threshold moment. How far will you go?
“We ended up putting together a commando unit,” he said. “About twenty men we’d handpicked, led by a Sergeant Garza. They called themselves El Tigre Battalion—the Tigers. We had them conducting operations, sniping, night patrols, demolitions. Anything to chip away at Herrera’s hold on the country.
“Herrera was from a village called Santa Rosa on the Rio Negro—the Black River. It’s wher
e he was born. Garza claimed he’d gotten intel from a prisoner that a company of Herrera’s men were holed up there, using it as an operations base.
“Bell, Roarke, and I planned the mission. It was a predawn attack from upriver, using Zodiac boats the U.S. had supplied. There was only one main road in and out of the village, so the three of us set up a command post and roadblock. That way we could drive back any troops who tried to escape, and hold off any reinforcements they might call in from another area. We’d also be able to monitor the progress of the attack, stay in radio contact. It was a textbook operation. At least it started out that way.”
“What happened?”
“The intel was wrong.”
“How?”
He blinked, squinted in the light coming through the window, brighter now.
“You need to take a break?” she said.
“Yes.”
“We’re still off the record, you know. You have my word.”
“Some other time,” he said. “Not today.”
She watched him for a moment, then turned a page in her notebook. He saw more scrawled writing.
“Quid pro quo,” she said. “My part of the bargain. I looked up this firm Bell worked for, Core-Tech, ran some corporate database searches. It’s a Delaware company, no surprise.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Delaware’s a friendly state when it comes to setting up shell companies and tax shelters. It’s easy to incorporate there, and there isn’t much oversight. That’s why it’s a favorite for money launderers.”
“Did you get an address?”
“Yes, but it won’t do me any good. Probably a drop box there, nothing else. There are about seven hundred other businesses using that same corporate address. I’m trying to get some more financial documents. They’re in the security business, all right, and it looks like they have a lot of contracts, here and overseas, including some dodgy countries that aren’t exactly sticklers when it comes to banking regulations.”
“Which means what?”
“I don’t know enough to say yet. You’d need a forensic accountant on the case who knows what to look for. But if you’re asking me off the top of my head, I’d say someone was doing a little money washing.”
Some Die Nameless Page 14