The Devil's Bed

by William Kent Krueger

  “You used to get up every day at five-thirty to work out for an hour. You’re in good shape, so I’d bet that’s still your routine. You’ve shaved. I can smell that damn Old Spice you use. And your hair’s still wet from the shower. What time is it?”

  “Seven-ten.” Kingman smiled. “You’re some piece of work, David.”

  “You had your moments, too, Walter. Still do, apparently. I’m impressed that I’m here. Wherever here is. They’re not looking for me?”

  “We’ve taken care of that. What do you remember?”

  “The hand-to-hand with that Secret Service agent.”

  “Thorsen.”

  “The next thing I know, I’m here.”

  “You took a pretty nasty tumble. Fell at least fifty feet. You were lucky you didn’t die.”

  Moses looked up from his eating. “How long’s my luck going to hold?”

  Kingman didn’t answer.

  “Was it luck you found me?”

  “A little luck, a little careful planning.”

  Kingman left the darkness near the door and stepped into the dim light of the lamp. He wore a white linen sport coat over a black T-shirt. Gray had replaced most of the brown in his hair. He looked a lot older than when Moses had seen him last.

  “When you skipped out of that mental hospital,” Kingman said, “I asked to lead the team the Company sent to track you down. Picked my own people. We couldn’t find a trace. Then this Thorsen shows up, asking a lot of questions. When I realized the Secret Service was interested, and that the First Lady was in town, I put two and two together. I didn’t know what your interest in the First Lady was or even if Thorsen was on the right track, but it was all we had to go on. I put a man out front of Wildwood. I got myself a launch and watched from the river. That was the planning part. The luck was that I was there when the shooting started. When you fell off that cliff, I figured you for dead. Next thing I know, you’re crawling into the river, trying to swim away. You’re one tough bastard. You always were.”

  “Wasn’t that why you recruited me?”

  Kingman smiled. “I was surprised when I heard you were killed at Agua Negra.”

  “The report of my death was greatly exaggerated.”

  “Coates filed the report,” Kingman said.

  “Coates.” Moses nodded.

  “Maybe he was simply mistaken.”

  With the back of his hand, Moses wiped a few toast crumbs from the corner of his mouth. “Didn’t you ever wonder why Coates would assign someone in my line to a place like Agua Negra? Some god-forsaken jungle camp manned by a bunch of bush-league drug agents.”

  Kingman shrugged. “Your expertise?”

  “My expertise was political sanction. Quiet, solitary work. Those guys were noisy, ill-trained, and brutal. It didn’t surprise me at all when we were attacked. Everybody died, cut in half with machine gun fire, or hacked up with machetes. Everybody except me. Me, they took alive. They locked me up in a hellhole and took their time trying to kill me with a daily dose of humiliation and torture. They almost succeeded.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “Because Coates made a mistake. The son of a bitch couldn’t help gloating.” He put his fork down and shoved his tray aside. “The captain of the guards was a guy we all referred to as La Cucaracha. A piece of shit on two legs. I had one of my weekly sessions with him on an apparatus the prisoners called la Cama del Diablo.”

  “The Devil’s Bed.”

  “I wasn’t particularly lucid. I never was after a session. La Cucaracha grabbed my hair and lifted my head up so I could see. And there was Coates, standing beside that filthy guard like they were compadres. They were both grinning. And do you know what Coates said to me? He said, ‘When you die, David, you’ll think hell is a vacation.’”

  In that hellhole of a prison, when he understood that Coates had betrayed him, he’d entered a period of despair. He obsessed on the past and realized that his life had been nothing but one betrayal after another. First his mother and his grandfather. Then there were the lies told by two other people he’d once loved and trusted. Tom Jorgenson and his daughter Kate. And finally there was Coates.

  Hate had festered inside him, swelled huge and hard, barely contained by his intelligence. Patience, he told himself. Wait. Plan. Execute.

  Execute, he did.

  He’d observed that there were only two ways of leaving the prison compound. Most men left dead. They were executed on their knees in the yard or killed by disease or a beating or died on the Devil’s Bed. The others left because they were no longer dangerous. They were the broken men, the empty ones, the ones with hollow eyes. The other prisoners called them los espectros. Ghosts. They wandered the yard freely, drifting inside the razor wire, until one day the gate opened for them. They left for brief periods on work detail, chained together on the back of a flatbed, accompanied by several guards. Usually they cut back the brush that threatened to engulf the perimeter fence, or they repaired the jungle road.

  One day the gate opened for Moses.

  Over a period of six months, he’d allowed himself to dissolve, to become one of los espectros. In the end, he whimpered when he was taken to the Devil’s Bed. He’d wet his pants before he got there. He no longer cursed La Cucaracha after the violations. He never looked another man in the eye. He lost weight because the other prisoners stole his food. Then they, too, began to abuse and to beat him.

  Eventually, he was gathered up with several los espectros, chained on the flatbed, and driven out the gate. A jeep containing four guards armed with old Soviet SKS semiautomatic rifles accompanied them. They drove five miles until they came to a stream where the road had been washed away. Big mounds of rock and gravel for repair had been dumped beside the road. Each man was given a shovel.

  As soon as the shovel was in his hand, Moses sank the sharp metal edge into the face of the guard nearest him, and he grabbed the man’s SKS. He dropped another guard with a heart shot before anyone had a chance to react. The third guard got off a hurried round that sizzled past Moses’s head, then Moses clustered three shots dead center in his chest. The last guard made for the jungle. Moses dropped him before he was forty yards out.

  The driver of the truck had plopped himself down on the running board. He held a pack of cigarettes in one hand, and he sat paralyzed in the middle of pulling out a smoke. He eyed Moses from under the brim of a ratty cap with YANKEESsewn in silver across the crown.

  Moses put the barrel of the rifle against the driver’s forehead.

  He considered letting the driver go. The man was a local who worked for the prison. He wasn’t one of the policia. He looked like the kind of man who might have a wife and children. But to spare him would have required compassion, an emotion that had become even more rare to Moses than fear.

  The bullet made only a small entry wound between the man’s eyes, but it splattered the back of his head across the side of the truck. Moses dug the keys out of the dead man’s khakis, shoved the body aside, and climbed into the cab. The other prisoners had watched the whole scene placidly, and none made a move to join him.

  Within a day, he’d reached the embassy in Bogotá and the Company had been notified.

  Returning to the United States, Moses had three missions. To kill Coates. To kill Tom Jorgenson. And to kill Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon. Attempting any one of those assassinations was probably suicide, but David Moses was a man with nothing left to lose. His life had already been taken from him. What remained was little more than vengeance breathing.

  The Company had given him a hero’s welcome. Even Coates shook his hand warmly. Two days later, Coates was found dead in his home. He was naked and bound to his kitchen table. A car battery had been set on the kitchen counter. Two wires ran from the battery terminals and were connected to the man’s genitals, which, when he was found, were charred to a black the color of cockroaches.

  • • •

  Kingman said, “A lot of us knew what kind of man Coates was.
We all figured it was only a matter of time before you moved ahead of him and were the one giving the orders. Coates must have figured it, too. I was with him when he got the news that you were alive and on your way home. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a man quite as frightened. But when you returned to the Company, you didn’t say a word.”

  “I came back to kill him. You think I should have announced that?”

  “You might have saved yourself a lot of trouble if you’d just gone through channels.”

  “Channels.” He nearly spit.

  “After you killed Coates, why did you come back to Minnesota?”

  “Business,” Moses said.

  “You killed a homeless man here, David. What kind of business was that?”

  “An accident. I thought he was Company. One of you, undercover. I was, I admit, a little delusional by then. He’d been eyeing me. Later, I realized he probably just wanted to steal my watch.” Moses shifted, and Kingman’s right hand shot under his coat, to the shoulder holster there. “Let me ask you a question, Walter. Why didn’t the Company sanction me while I was in the Minnesota Security Hospital? It would have been easy.”

  “My doing. I wanted you alive.”

  “Why?”

  Kingman knocked on the door. The other came in, gun drawn. Kingman approached Moses. “Your hands,” he said. He cuffed Moses to the bed and took the tray. As he turned to the door, he said, “You’re not the only one who’s ever been betrayed by the people he trusted.”

  The next day Kingman opened the door and came in. He carried a rifle in one hand, a small cardboard box in the other. On his hands, he wore black leather gloves. Another man hung back at the door. Kingman set the rifle and the cardboard box on the metal table. He unlocked the cuffs that shackled Moses’s hands to the frame of the cot. He turned to the table, picked up the rifle in his gloved hands, and held it toward Moses.

  “Take it, David,” he said.

  The man at the door had what looked like a P-series Ruger, probably a nine millimeter, trained on Moses’s heart. Moses took the rifle. It was an M40A1, a sniper rifle, forty-four inches in length with a twenty-four-inch barrel. Weight 14.5 pounds. Muzzle velocity 2,550 feet per second. Maximum effective range 1,000 yards.

  “Not the latest technology, but it was always your favorite,” Kingman said. “Grip it hard.”

  Moses tightened his fingers around the stock.

  “Now pull the trigger.”

  Moses did. Kingman reached out and took the rifle. He laid it back on the table, opened the cardboard box, pulled out a rifle scope, and handed it to Moses. It was a Trijicon ACOG military scope, excellent for night shots over a long distance.

  “Good,” Kingman said after Moses had put his prints on it.

  He took the scope from Moses and set it back in the box. Next he extracted five cartridges and held them out for Moses to take. They were .308 Winchester loads, a good precision caliber. Moses handled each round and gave them back to Kingman. Kingman cuffed him to the cot frame again, then nodded to the man at the door. The man, who also wore gloves, holstered his Ruger, picked up the rifle and the cardboard box, and left the room.

  As Kingman slowly shed his gloves, Moses was thinking. He’d believed it was the Company who’d tracked him down and taken him after Wildwood. He figured their stake in him was the embarrassment factor. If it became known that a former operative of the United States government had attempted to assassinate the First Lady and her father, the Company would suffer tremendous public embarrassment, one more in a long line. Taking him quietly and disposing of him in secret was a much preferable scenario.

  But he hadn’t been disposed of. Not yet. The reprieve was Kingman’s doing. Moses was beginning to wonder how much the Company really knew about what Kingman was up to. “This isn’t Company business,” Moses said. “Who are you working for?”

  Kingman sat down beside the cot. He smiled. “Remember Budapest?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “I’ll bet you do. A long and troubled recollection. But Budapest is a good memory. For me, anyway. A time when I still trusted the Company.”

  Moses just stared at him.

  “We believe in our country,” Kingman began. “We believe in the ideals it was founded on. But the ideal and the reality are worlds apart. You know it, too. Look at you. Consider all you risked and all you gave up, and in the end, those you trusted betrayed you. We’ve all been betrayed, all of us who are now brothers and sisters.”

  “You? Betrayed?”

  “I had a daughter.”

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy.” Kingman nodded. “For her high school graduation I gave her a trip to Europe. Her and her best friend, three weeks on the Continent. She was so excited. I saw her off at Dulles. It was the last time I saw her alive. She was in a café in Marseilles ten days later. A car bomb went off in the street outside. The flying glass tore her apart.”

  Kingman looked toward the dim lamplight. There was a gloss to his eyes.

  “The bomb was planted by a man who called himself Abu al-Afghani, working on behalf of the Group Islamic Army. It was meant to kill an Algerian diplomat who was also dining in the café. The Company knew beforehand about the bombing, but they did nothing to stop it. You see, sometimes al-Afghani worked for the Company.” He shook his head. “They could have told me, David. They could have warned me to keep Lucy away from Marseilles.”

  “You used the past tense with al-Afghani.”

  “We got him.”

  “There’s that ‘we’ again. Are you a mole now or what?”

  “Not in the way you think of it. However, my loyalty has shifted.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “It’s simple enough. You tried to kill the First Lady, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kingman looked him hard in the eye. “You still want to?”

  chapter

  forty-two

  In the quiet of the church, Bo heard the blower kick on, and a cool draft touched the back of his neck. It was not as cold as the muzzle of the gun Moses held there.

  “You declined their offer?” Bo asked.

  “If offer it was. They didn’t need me. They had my prints all over the weaponry. If in fact they wanted me to pull the trigger and put the round into her, it would have been the last thing I ever did. So I took my leave.”

  “Just like that?”

  “When I was stronger, they exchanged my handcuffs for a strait-jacket. A mistake. It was a Posey,” he said. “Posey makes four kinds. The one they chose is the simplest to escape. The weakness is the buckles. You work them against any sharp, hard edge, the frame of a cot for example, and you can knock them loose pretty quickly. Took me three minutes. Houdini could do it in less time and while he was hanging upside down. Now there was a genius.”

  Moses resettled himself in the pew behind Bo. The kiss of the gun barrel ended, but Bo knew the weapon was still trained on him.

  “You continue to have resources,” Bo noted.

  “An elementary piece of any stratagem. Always have a backup cache somewhere,” Moses said. “What I’ve been wondering since I read about your crime spree in the papers is what’s the connection. I’d guess the people who framed you are the same ones who nabbed me.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I hate a puzzle with missing pieces. Who are these people, Thorsen? Why do they want the First Lady dead?”

  “Why do you want the First Lady dead?”

  “I have a pretty good reason. And I think you know it.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “About you knowing?”

  “About the good reason. About what really happened that night on the bluff at Wildwood twenty years ago. What you think went down didn’t. It wasn’t Tom Jorgenson with Kate. It was his brother, Roland. All this time you’ve hated the wrong man.”

  “Of course you’re lying. Your job is to save her.”

  “Think about it for a m
inute. Two brothers very similar in build and appearance. One, a man committed to peace. The other, an artist with an unconventional lifestyle. One, a father. The other, an uncle who’d been generally distant. Think about the strength of the man you fought. A politician or a worker in iron? Ask yourself who was more likely to have been with Kate that night.”

  The blower shut off and the church lapsed again into a deep silence. Moses didn’t speak. The figures in the stained glass windows were dark images now, barely discernible as human.

  Bo said, “It was incest no matter how you cut it, but Tom Jorgenson wasn’t guilty. The guilty one is dead.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me this herself?”

  “You never gave her a chance. I was there. Every time she tried to explain, you cut her off. You didn’t want to hear. But you know what? I also think you didn’t really want her dead.”

  “Didn’t want her dead? I should have killed her years ago, and her father.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I thought I’d found a family in the Company. I thought I’d found a place I belonged. Until I spent time on the Devil’s Bed. That pretty well cleared my thinking. I knew what I had to do.”

  “What was that? Kill everyone who ever lied to you? If you’re like most of us, it would be a long list.”

  “I didn’t care about everyone.”

  “Only those you’d hoped would be family? I talked with Father Cannon. I know about Wildwood.”

  Moses didn’t argue, but neither did he agree.

  “But when you had the chance to kill Kate,” Bo said, “you offered her her life. After all your careful planning, why did you even hesitate? You know what I think? I think in that moment when you had her on her knees, you understood that she wasn’t the real monster, that all those years ago she was just a scared kid involved in something way over her head. It was her father who needed killing. Except that it wasn’t. The man you really wanted dead killed himself a long time ago.”

  “How is it you know her personal history?” Moses asked.