by Lee Child
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 windows. 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 a
rea 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 tracks 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.