by Lee Child
Sansom’s place looked the same as all the others. A door off the corridor, lots of flags, lots of eagles, some oil paintings of old guys in wigs, a reception desk with a young woman behind it. Maybe a staffer, maybe an intern. Springfield was leaning on the corner of her desk. He saw me and nodded without a smile and pushed off the desk and came to the door to meet me and jerked his thumb farther along the corridor.
‘Cafeteria,’ he said.
We got there down a flight of stairs. It was a wide low room full of tables and chairs. Sansom was nowhere in it. Springfield grunted like he wasn’t surprised and concluded that Sansom had returned to his office while we were out looking for him, by an alternative route, possibly via a colleague’s billet. He said the place was a warren and that there were always conversations to be had and favours to be sought and deals to be struck and votes to be traded. We walked back the same way we had come and Springfield stuck his head around an inner door and then backed away and motioned me inside.
Sansom’s inner office was a rectangular space larger than a closet and smaller than a thirty-dollar motel room. It had a window and panelled walls covered with framed photographs and framed newspaper headlines and souvenirs on shelves. Sansom himself was in a red leather chair behind a desk, with a fountain pen in his hand and a whole lot of papers spread out in front of him. He had his jacket off. He had the weary, airless look of a man who had been sitting still for a long time. He hadn’t been out. The cafeteria detour had been a charade, presumably designed to allow someone to make an exit without me seeing him. Who, I didn’t know. Why, I didn’t know. But I sat down in the visitor chair and found it still warm from someone else’s body. Behind Sansom’s head was a large framed print of the same picture I had seen in his book. Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, in Baghdad. Sometimes our friends become our enemies, and sometimes our enemies become our friends. Next to it was a cluster of smaller pictures, some of Sansom standing with groups of people, some of him alone and shaking hands and smiling with other individuals. Some of the group shots were formal, and some were of wide smiles and confetti-strewn stages after election victories. I saw Elspeth in most of them. Her hair had changed a lot over the years. I saw Springfield in some of the others, his small wary shape easily recognizable even though the images were tiny. The two-shots were what news photographers call grip-and-grins. Some of the individuals in them I recognized, and some I didn’t. Some had autographed the pictures with extravagant dedications, and some hadn’t.
Sansom said, ‘So?’
I said, ‘I know about the DSM in March of 1983.’
‘How?’
‘Because of the VAL Silent Sniper. The battleaxe I told you about is the widow of the guy you took it from. Which is why you reacted to the name. Maybe you never heard of Lila Hoth or Svetlana Hoth, but you met with some other guy called Hoth back in the day. That’s for damn sure. It was obvious. You probably took his dog tags and had them translated. You’ve probably still got them, as souvenirs.’
There was no surprise. No denial. Sansom just said, ‘No, actually those tags were locked up with the after-action reports, and everything else.’
I said nothing.
Sansom said, ‘His name was Grigori Hoth. He was about my age at the time. He seemed competent. His spotter, not so much. He should have heard us coming.’
I didn’t reply. There was a long silence. Then the situation seemed to hit home and Sansom’s shoulders fell and he sighed and he said, ‘What a way to get found out, right? Medals are supposed to be rewards, not penalties. They’re not supposed to screw you up. They’re not supposed to follow you around the rest of your life like a damn ball and chain.’
I said nothing.
He asked, ‘What are you going to do?’
I said, ‘Nothing.’
‘Really?’
‘I don’t care what happened in 1983. And they lied to me. First about Berlin, and they’re still lying to me now. They claim to be mother and daughter. But I don’t believe them. The alleged daughter is the cutest thing you ever saw. The alleged mother fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch. I first met them with a cop from the NYPD. She said thirty years from now the daughter will look just like the mother. But she was wrong. The younger one will never look like the older one. Not in a million years.’
‘So who are they?’
‘I’m prepared to accept that the older one is for real. She was a Red Army political commissar who lost her husband and her brother in Afghanistan.’
‘Her brother?’
‘The spotter.’
‘But the younger woman is posing?’
I nodded. ‘As a billionaire expatriate widow from London. She says her husband was an entrepreneur who didn’t make the cut.’
‘And she’s not convincing?’
‘She dresses the part. She acts it well. Maybe she lost a husband somewhere along the line.’
‘But? What is she really?’
‘I think she’s a journalist.’
‘Why?’
‘She knows things. She’s got the right kind of inquiring mind. She’s analytical. She monitors the Herald Tribune. She’s a hell of a storyteller. But she talks too much. She’s in love with words and she embroiders details. She can’t help herself.’
‘For example?’
‘She went for some extra pathos. She made out that the political commissars were in the trenches along with the grunts. She claims she was conceived on a rock floor under a Red Army greatcoat. Which is bullshit. Commissars were big-time rear echelon pussies. They stayed well away from the action. They clustered together back at HQ, writing pamphlets. Occasionally they would visit up the line, but never if there was any danger involved.’
‘And you know this how?’
‘You know how I know it. We expected to fight a land war with them in Europe. We expected to win. We expected to take millions of them prisoner. MPs were trained to handle them all. The 110th was going to direct operations. Delusional, maybe, but the Pentagon took it very seriously. We were taught more about the Red Army than we were about the U.S. Army. Certainly we were told exactly where to find the commissars. We were under orders to execute them all immediately.’
‘What kind of journalist?’
‘Television, probably. The local crew she hired was tied to the television business. And have you ever seen Eastern European television? All the anchors are women, and they all look sensational.’
‘What country?’
‘Ukraine.’
‘What angle?’
‘Investigative, historical, with a little human interest mixed in. The younger one probably heard the older one’s story and decided to run with it.’
‘Like the History Channel in Russian?’
‘In Ukrainian,’ I said.
‘Why? What’s the message? They want to embarrass us now? After more than twenty-five years?’
‘No, I think they want to embarrass the Russians. There’s a lot of tension right now between Russia and the Ukraine. I think they’re taking America’s evil for granted, and saying that big bad Moscow shouldn’t have put poor helpless Ukrainians in harm’s way.’
‘So why haven’t we seen the story already?’
‘Because they’re way behind the times,’ I said. ‘They’re looking for confirmation. They still seem to have some kind of moralistic scruples over there.’
‘Are they going to get confirmation?’
‘Not from you, presumably. And no one else knows anything for sure. Susan Mark didn’t live long enough to say yea or nay. So the lid is back on. I advised them to forget all about it and head home.’
‘Why are they posing as mother and daughter?’
‘Because it’s a great con,’ I said. ‘It’s appealing. It’s like reality TV. Or those magazines they sell in the supermarket. Clearly they studied our culture.’
‘Why wait so long?’
‘It takes time to build a mature television industry. They probably wasted years on
important stuff.’
Sansom nodded vaguely, and said, ‘It’s not true that no one knows anything for sure. You seem to know plenty.’
‘But I’m not going to say anything.’
‘Can I trust you on that?’
‘I served thirteen years. I know all kinds of things. I don’t talk about them.’
‘I’m not happy about how easy it was for them to approach Susan Mark. And I’m not happy we didn’t know about her from the get-go. We never even heard of her before the morning after. This whole thing was like an ambush. We were always behind the curve.’
I was looking at the photographs on the wall behind him. Looking at the tiny figures. Their shapes, their postures, their silhouettes. I said, ‘Really?’
‘We should have been told.’
I said, ‘Have a word with the Pentagon. And with those guys from the Watergate.’
Sansom said, ‘I will.’ Then he went quiet, as if he was rethinking and reassessing, more calmly and at a slower pace than his usual fast field-officer style. The lid is back on. He seemed to examine that proposition for a spell, from all kinds of different angles. Then he shrugged, and got a slightly sheepish look on his face, and he asked, ‘So what do you think of me now?’
‘Is that import ant?’
‘I’m a politician. It’s a reflex inquiry.’
‘I think you should have shot them in the head.’
He paused and said, ‘We had no silenced weapons.’
‘You did. You had just taken one from them.’
‘Rules of engagement.’
‘You should have ignored them. The Red Army didn’t travel with forensics labs. They would have had no idea who shot who.’
‘So what do you think of me?’
‘I think you shouldn’t have handed them over. That was uncalled for. That was going to be the point of the story, as a matter of fact, on Ukrainian TV. The idea was to get the old woman next to you and let her ask you why.’
Sansom shrugged again. ‘I wish she could. Because the truth we didn’t hand them over. We turned them loose instead. It was a calculated risk. A kind of double bluff. They’d lost their rifle. Everyone would have assumed that the mujahideen had taken it. Which was a sorry outcome and a major disgrace. It was clear to me that they were very scared of their officers and their political commissars. So they would have been falling over themselves to tell the truth, that it was Americans, not Afghans. It would have been a kind of exculpation. But their officers and their commissars knew how scared they were of them, so the truth would have sounded like a bullshit story. Like a pathetic excuse. It would have been discounted immediately, as a fantasy. I felt it was safe enough to let them go. The truth would have been out there in plain sight, hut unrecognized.’
I said, ‘So what happened?’
Sansom said, ‘I guess they were more scared than I thought. Too scared to go back at all. I guess they just wandered, until the tribespeople found them. Grigori Hoth was married to a political commissar. He was scared of her. That’s what happened. And that’s what killed him.’
I said nothing.
He said, ‘Not that I expect anyone to believe me.’
I didn’t reply.
He said, ‘You’re right about tension between Russia and the Ukraine. But there’s tension between Russia and ourselves, too. Right now there’s plenty of it. If the Korengal part of the story gets out, things could blow up big. It’s like the Cold War all over again. Except different. At least the Soviets were sane, in their way. This bunch, not so much.’
* * *
After that we sat in silence for what felt like a long time, and then Sansom’s desk phone rang. It was his receptionist on the line. I could hear her voice through the earpiece, and through the door. She rattled off a list of things that needed urgent attention. Sansom hung up and said, ‘I have to go. I’ll call a page to see you out.’ He stood up and came around the desk and walked out of the room. Just like an innocent man with nothing to hide. He left me all alone, sitting in my chair, with the door open. Springfield had gone, too. I could see no one in the outer office except the woman at the desk. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. No page showed up.
We were always behind the curve, Sansom had said. I waited a long minute and then started squirming around like I was restless. Then after a plausible interval I got out of my chair. I stumped around with my hands clasped behind my back, like an innocent man with nothing to hide, just waiting around on turf that was not his own. I headed over to the wall behind the desk, like it was a completely random destination. I studied the pictures. I counted faces I knew. My initial total came to twenty-four. Four presidents, nine other politicians, five athletes, two actors, Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein, Elspeth, and Springfield.
Plus someone else.
I knew a twenty-fifth face.
In all of the celebratory election-night victory pictures, right next to Sansom himself, was a guy smiling just as widely, as if he was basking in the glow of a job well done, as if he was not very modestly claiming his full share of the credit. A strategist. A tactician. A Svengali. A behind-the-scenes political fixer.
Sansom’s chief of staff, presumably.
He was about my age. In all of the pictures he was dusted with confetti or tangled with streamers or knee deep in balloons and he was grinning like an idiot, but his eyes were cold. They had a canny, calculating shrewdness in them.
They reminded me of a ballplayer’s eyes.
I knew why the cafeteria charade had been staged.
I knew who had been sitting in Sansom’s visitor chair before I had.
We were always behind the curve.
Liar.
I knew Sansom’s chief of staff.
I had seen him before.
I had seen him wearing chinos and a golf shirt, riding the 6 train late at night in New York City.
FORTY
I checked all the celebration pictures, very carefully. The guy from the subway was in all of them. Different angles, different years, different victories, but it was definitely the same guy, literally at Sansom’s right hand. Then a page bustled into the office and two minutes later I was back on the Independence Avenue sidewalk. Fourteen minutes after that I was inside the railroad station, waiting for the next train back to New York. Fifty-eight minutes after that I was on it, sitting comfortably, leaving town, watching the dismal rail yards through the window. Far to my left a gang of men wearing hard hats and orange high-visibility vests was working on a section of track. Their vests glowed through the smog. The fabric must have had tiny beads of reflective glass mixed into the plastic weave. Safety, through chemistry. The vests were more than highly visible. They were attention-getting. They drew the eye. I watched the guys work until they were just tiny orange dots in the distance, and then until they were completely lost to sight, which was more than a mile later. And at that point I had everything I was ever going to get. I knew everything I was ever going to know. But I didn’t know that I knew. Not then.
* * *
The train rolled into Penn and I got a late dinner in a place directly across the street from where I had gotten breakfast. Then I walked up to the 14th Precinct on West 35th. The night watch had started. Theresa Lee and her partner Docherty were already in place. The squad room was quiet, like all the air had been sucked out of it. Like there had been bad news. But no one was rushing around. Therefore the bad news had happened somewhere else.
The receptionist at the bullpen gate had seen me before. She turned on her swivel chair and glanced at Lee, who made a face like it wouldn’t kill her one way or the other whether she ever spoke to me again, or not. So the receptionist turned back and made a face of her own, like the choice to stay or to go was entirely mine. I squeaked the hinge and threaded my way between desks to the back of the room. Docherty was on the phone, mostly listening. Lee was just sitting there, doing nothing. She looked tip as I approached and she said, ‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘For what?
’
‘Susan Mark,’ she said.
‘Any news?’
‘None at all.’
‘Nothing more on the boy?’
‘You sure are worried about that boy.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘Not even a little bit.’
‘Is the file still closed?’
“Fighter than a fish’s asshole.’
‘OK,’ I said.
She paused a beat and sighed and said, ‘What have you got?’
‘I know who the fifth passenger was.’
‘There were only four passengers.’
‘And the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese.’
‘Did this alleged fifth passenger commit a crime somewhere between 30th Street and 45th?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then the file stays closed.’
Docherty put his phone down and glanced at his partner with an eloquent look on his face. I knew what the look meant. I had been a cop of sorts for thirteen years and had seen that kind of look many times before. It meant that someone else had caught a big case, and that Docherty was basically glad that he wasn’t involved, but a little wistful too, because even if being at the heart of the action was a pain in the neck bureaucratically, it was maybe a whole lot better than watching from the sidelines.
I asked, ‘What happened?’
Lee said, ‘Multiple homicide over in the 17th. A nasty one. Four guys under the FDR Drive, beaten and killed.’
‘With hammers,’ Docherty said.
I said, ‘Hammers?’
‘Carpentry tools. From the Home Depot on 23rd Street. Just purchased. They were found at the scene. The price tags are still on them, under the blood.’
I asked, ‘Who were the four guys?’
‘No one knows,’ Docherty said. ‘That seems to have been the point of the hammers. Their faces are pulped, their teeth are smashed out, and their fingertips are ruined.’