The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  “My turn for show-and-tell,” I said as I handed her a small waxy slip of paper.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “A receipt.” It was difficult to read. The print was fine, and fading. “Aurora Aviation, for three thousand eight hundred and forty euros. We might not be able to find out who did the work on Scott’s glider, but at least we know who he bought those new bits and pieces from.”

  Masters nodded. “Good find.”

  I exchanged it for a yellowing press clipping, also from Scott’s files. “So’s this.”

  She frowned as her eyes flicked over the headline: “Death Row.” The picture accompanying it showed a long line of what were either body bags or sleeping sea lions lying on the tarmac behind the ramp of a transport plane. A couple of soldiers were carrying another one between them down the ramp, which narrowed the odds about what they were carrying, given that sea lions weigh half a ton each. I’d read the accompanying article a dozen times and almost knew it by heart. The gist of it was that this row of dead soldiers on the Ramstein tarmac represented one month of our butcher’s bill from the war in Iraq. It was also the first time a press photographer had managed to snap such a scene, Washington fearing the effect such a picture would have on the psyche of the folks back home.

  I remembered this photo, this story. When it appeared in newspapers across the country, it rekindled the debates about whether the price in blood America was paying in the Middle East was worth it. So perhaps Washington had been right after all to keep this sort of imagery out of the public domain. But then maybe censoring the reality of the war was worse, denying America the awful truth—of the choices we had made, and the personal consequences that flowed from them. And there was something very real and very brutal about body bags, especially when there were so many of them.

  “I remember this,” said Masters, echoing my thoughts. “Caused a real flap.”

  I handed her the letter General Scott had received shortly after the photo had been published. It was a very impressive letter headed with a bald eagle clutching a bunch of arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other. The top left corner had a staple in it with a small torn section of newsprint. The article Masters was reading had originally been attached to the letter but had separated at some stage. The author had handwritten the note with a fountain pen; the script was elaborate.

  Masters read aloud.

  “Dear Abraham,

  The President and I were dismayed to see that security could be breached at such an important facility as Ramstein. Photos such as this one recently taken at your facility, images we have been at pains to keep out of the public forum, have a disheartening effect that is incalculable. I strongly recommend that this incident be investigated and that the persons involved in the security breach be officially reprimanded. Do your best to see that it doesn’t happen again.

  Sincerely,

  Jefferson Cutter

  Vice President of the United States of America.”

  “Terse,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was any investigation ever carried out?” I asked.

  “No, not to my knowledge.”

  “Don’t you think that’s odd?”

  “What? That Scott was asked to investigate how a photograph like this could be taken, and didn’t? I’m sure he had his reasons, but he didn’t think to let me in on them.”

  “No…I guess not.” I wanted to know why Scott had ignored such a strong recommendation from the VP, his father-in-law.

  “Do you think this business with the body bags is important in the scheme of things?” Masters asked.

  “You mean in our investigation into Scott’s murder?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shrugged. “We don’t know what’s important and what’s not. At least, not yet. By the way, I rang the night desk of The Washington Post to see if I could get some contact details for the journalist responsible.”

  Masters glanced at the clipping. “Alan Cobain.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have been busy.”

  “He’s dead. Killed in Iraq covering the war. About a month after this article appeared. He was abducted. They found his body ten days later. Or what was left of it, anyway—looked like he’d been attacked by sharks.”

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” said Masters.

  “Especially if you were Alan Cobain.”

  TEN

  Masters’s NCMP noncoms were continuing their task of archiving Scott’s papers.

  “Who’s this Captain François Philippe?” Masters asked, looking at the Whiteboard where I’d transferred the list of people I’d made in my notebook.

  “Medical officer. He’s the guy Scott had perform an unofficial autopsy on his son’s body here at the base hospital. What’s your French like?”

  “Très bien. Pourquoi?”

  “You’ve got the job. Would you mind giving him a call and asking him about it? He doesn’t speak much English, apparently.”

  “Sure.”

  “Here’s his number.” I opened my notebook and gave her the Post-It.

  A USAF sergeant seconded to the NCMPs hovered on the edge of our conversation. He was a large man with short orange hair that reminded me of shoe-brush bristles. Politely, he said, “Excuse me. Special Agent Masters? I’ve got the chief medical officer on the line. He’d like to have a quick word.”

  Masters took the handset, spoke briefly into it, then hung up. “General Scott’s body is being released later this morning.”

  “How far away is the hospital?” I asked.

  “A ten-minute drive, give or take.”

  “Let’s go, then,” I said. Instead of calling this François Philippe, we could pay the guy a visit. Maybe, with all this talk of autopsies, the CMO’s ears were burning. We had a full day ahead and the morgue at Landstuhl Medical Center was on my list of places to see anyway. It was a couple of miles south of Ramstein. We took a Humvee.

  The weather was much like the previous day’s, with little cotton-ball clouds, a low mist, a touch of sunshine, and a procession of rainbows. It all reminded me of the lid on a chocolate box. “See anything else interesting in Scott’s records?” Masters asked.

  “Plenty. He conversed with two previous presidents as if they were best buddies. He had a wide circle of friends in politics, most of them people he flew with who went on to Congress or the Senate after leaving the military. He was a prolific letter-writer—wrote to his son every two weeks. There are citations, awards, requests from charities and associations—he was a meticulous record-keeper. And then it all stopped.”

  “What did?”

  “The letter writing, the keeping of records—it all stops.”

  “Are you saying you think someone has beaten us to them? Already?”

  “What I mean is he suddenly had no time left to write to anyone. He just started producing figures. Numbers. Pages and pages of numbers. He became preoccupied with something—like it was driving him crazy.”

  Masters pulled over momentarily in order to let a convoy of rigs loaded with tanks pass.

  “You familiar with that Spielberg movie—Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “Do you remember how the people in it get obsessed with the flattop mountain the aliens are going to land on? It’s all they think about? They dream about it, draw it, become consumed by it?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well, that’s like our general. Scott was consumed by something. I have no idea what it was, but it was big and it was scaring him.”

  “You have a good imagination, Special Agent.”

  “Okay, okay, so the scaring thing I made up.”

  “Apart from the numbers puzzle, did you find anything else of interest?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact.” I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out several sheets of folded computer printout.

  “What’s that?”

  “Computer printout,” I sai
d.

  Masters gave me a look of flat boredom. “You know, getting anything out of you is like pulling teeth.”

  “Would you please? I’d appreciate it.”

  “The printout?” Masters asked, doing a fair job of keeping her exasperation reined in.

  “Oh, right. So…which airport has the designation RIX—Romeo Indigo X-ray?” I asked, wrestling with the printout.

  “I think that’s Riga International—Latvia,” said Masters, her interest ignited. “Why?”

  “This is a printout from Ramstein’s air traffic control flight log for a period last year—fourteen months ago, actually. There are several flights marked out in the month of December with green highlight pen. They’re all C-130s heading off to Riga—RIX. I found it in one of the boxes with a handful of flight-progress strips—the little strips of paper the air traffic controllers use to help them identify aircraft as they’re handed from one flight information sector to another.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Cooper. I’m air force too, remember?” Masters kept her eyes on the road, but I could sense it took a force of effort.

  “Sorry. I was just thinking aloud, that’s all. Y’know, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the gears whirring.” I pointed to my forehead.

  “Forget it,” she said. “So…Riga…”

  “Riga,” I repeated. “I don’t know why Scott highlighted these flights, or even if it was him who did the highlighting. It was just in with his papers…” I wasn’t sure where I was going—round in circles, probably.

  Masters turned off the road and into a broad parking lot laid out before a large, utterly charmless four-story block designed by someone who probably should have chosen another career. She pulled into a bay and turned off the ignition. “Look, I was thinking last night after I dropped you off…I want to talk to you—about me and General von Koeppen. Sort of clear the air.”

  “There’s no need,” I said. “Unless you know something about the guy that’s going to help us crack this nut, I don’t need to know.” I had the feeling Masters was embarrassed about her relationship with von Koeppen. But everyone makes mistakes. Hell, I married mine. “So,” I said. “Who are we seeing here?”

  Masters took a breath and let it out. “A Royal Canadian Air Force major by the name of Pierre Lamont,” she said.

  “A Canadian. Great, I love Canadians, especially those wacky French Canadians.” Actually, I don’t. If there’s one thing I dislike more than a Canadian, it’s a French Canadian. And even the Canadians agree, which is one of their few redeeming traits. “Have you heard the one about the two young boys playing in the front yard of their Toronto home when the neighbor’s Rottweiler hops the fence and starts attacking one of the boys?”

  “No,” said Masters. “Do I want to?”

  “We’re about to visit the morgue. Humor me.”

  Masters looked at me in a way that said it had better be good.

  “So, as I said, the neighbor’s Rottweiler hops the fence and attacks one of the boys. The other boy picks up his hockey stick and smacks the dog over the back of the neck, killing it.

  “News of all this gets around and soon a reporter from the Toronto Star shows up and talks to the young hero. ‘I can see the headlines tomorrow,’ he says. ‘ “Toronto Maple Leaf Fan Uses Hockey Stick to Deliver Crushing Blow to Attacking Dog.” ’

  “The kid replies, ‘But sir, I’m not a Maple Leaf fan.’

  “The reporter reconsiders and says, ‘Okay, how about—“Blue Jays Fan Uses Stick to Strike Out Attacking Beast?” ’

  “Again the kid says, ‘But I’m not a Blue Jays fan, either.’

  “‘Then what team do you like, for Christ’s sake?’ says the reporter.

  “‘I’m a Montreal Canadiens fan, sir!’

  “To which the reporter says, ‘Shit, well then, how about—“French Bastard Kills Neighbor’s Beloved Pet?” ’”

  “Can we go now?” Masters said, without the hint of a smile.

  “I’ve got others.”

  “No,” she said, getting out of the Humvee.

  Masters walked briskly to the hospital’s main entrance. “I’ve been here before,” she said. “It’s in the basement.”

  “Where else?” I followed Masters.

  We took the stairwell. It got cooler as we descended, as we closed in on the Grim Reaper’s rumpus room. We came out of the stairwell into a brightly lit hallway built for heavy traffic, and pushed through a set of double swing doors, the sort made from thick, translucent plastic sheeting. The air here was heavily laced with formaldehyde, top notes of human excrement, and various gastric odors. I was thinking death’s deodorant.

  We saw some movement, a shadow on a wall, and followed it through into a concrete cave lined with stainless-steel doors. Another room split off from this main cavern, where bodies loosely wrapped in plastic were stacked two deep on shelves from floor to ceiling. In another chamber, I could see a naked black man lying on a stainless-steel bed, dark fluids seeping into deep channels. The head and one side of the corpse were crushed flat and resembled a spreading ink stain. A man in a green coat was cutting into the man’s thorax with gusto, like he was carving into a tough Thanksgiving turkey.

  “Got run over by a tank,” said the voice behind us. “Although that’s not what killed him. Myocardial infarction. Can I help you?”

  “We’re looking for Major Pierre Lamont,” I said, badging him.

  “That’d be me.”

  Lamont might have had a French-sounding name but he didn’t have the accent. He was painfully thin and I wondered if his job had permanently put him off his food. His skin had a yellow tinge, the color a specimen gets when it’s been sitting in a jar of preservative. His hair, what remained of it, was black gristle, and his red-rimmed eyes sagged in their sockets. The guy had obviously seen far too much horror for anyone to bear and if his demeanor wasn’t aware of it, at least the rest of him was. He’d clearly been down in this place too long and was in serious need of a good piece of steak and a few hours on a beach.

  “Do you mind if we take a look at the body?” Masters asked.

  Given that he called us, Lamont knew whose body Masters was referring to. “Body? I wouldn’t call it that, but you can certainly take a look.” We followed him to one of the stainless-steel doors. “Unlike Mr. Flapjack in there,” he motioned toward the room where the guy who ended up as chewing gum on the bottom of a tank track was being filleted, “I can’t tell you exactly what killed General Scott—put it down to a whole range of failures that happened within the split second of him being liquefied. Think roadkill.”

  Major Lamont had a loud, deep voice that didn’t seem possible coming from a human built like a Slim Jim.

  “Did you test for drugs, Major?”

  “Yep. Found traces of paracetamol—maybe Scott had had a headache. Nothing else.”

  Masters was covering off the suicide angle. Did the general take a dose of something before he went up, knowing full well his glider would fail? Make the plunge easier?

  Lamont cracked open the fridge and pulled out the tray. Inside were two square stainless-steel tubs of what looked like ruddy omelette mixture, with a few chunky knucklebones thrown in. One of the tubs had hair in it.

  “Voilà,” Lamont said as if presenting the plat du jour.

  “Shit,” said Masters under her breath.

  Lamont pushed the tubs back into the Westinghouse. “They’ll need to line his coffin with plastic,” he said cheerfully.

  I could feel the clammy sweat, that hot and cold feeling of phobia coming over me. This is what happens when you fly. See? In my mind I could picture Scott plummeting in his plane, being dragged down by the hand of gravity. Except it wasn’t Scott pinned in the Perspex bubble of the glider; it was me. I was “projecting,” as my ex would have said—empathizing. The crash had reduced the man to a couple of bowls of pudding and all I could think about was myself, my own fears surfacing and threatening to overwhelm me. I had to get a grip,
concentrate, redirect, or lose it completely. “Major,” I said, “do you have a Captain François Philippe working here?”

  “Did. Nice fella. Shame about what happened to him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He transferred out around twelve months ago. Died in a house fire soon after.”

  “Oh,” was all I could manage.

  “Mother, father, sister—all killed. Electrical fire in the roof, apparently.”

  Was it that imagination of mine again or was there a fair bit of nonrandom death going on? “Do you know anything about an autopsy he performed on General Scott’s son, a marine combat sergeant KIA in Baghdad?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I did hear something about that. We can check the records, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Masters was looking at me, frowning, but it was more a frown of concern for my well-being than the displeasure I was used to seeing on a woman’s face. It made a nice change. I knew I looked green, like one of the many people down here gone well past their bury-by date, but the worst of it had passed. I’d be okay and I conveyed as much with a nod.

  Lamont made his way through a series of chambers filled with stainless-steel racks waiting for somebody, or, should I say, some body? “You expecting a few guests?” I asked as we entered the fourth room.

  “No. You’ve gotta remember, this place was built when the folks back home thought the Russkies were going to pour across Germany in their tanks. Turned out the only thing the Russians could pour was vodka, but how were we to know that back then? We’ve got enough space here for five thousand dead at any one time. These chambers are like the Energizer bunny—they just go on and on.”

  We passed several men and women wheeling gurneys carrying corpses covered in plastic. Many had suffered massive and obvious trauma—the wheelees, not the wheelers. “We occasionally get a little extra work from Iraq. The overload. We’ve certainly got the facilities, but a few more hands would be good.”