“Capturing the VAL was a really big coup. A sensation. It was a completely unknown weapon. Its acquisition would have been rewarded with a really big medal.”
“But which one?”
“My mother concluded it would be the Distinguished Service Medal. That one is big, but different. The applicable standard is exceptionally meritorious service to the United States Government in a duty of great responsibility. It is completely independent of formal declared combat activities. It is normally awarded to politically pliable Brigadier Generals and above. My mother was under orders to execute all holders of the DSM immediately. Below the rank of Brigadier General it is awarded only very rarely. But it’s the only significant medal a Delta captain could have won that night in the Korengal Valley.”
I nodded. I agreed. I figured Svetlana Hoth was a pretty good analyst. Clearly she had been well trained, and well informed. The KGB had done a decent job. I said, “So you went looking for a guy called John who had been a Delta captain and won a DSM, both in March of 1983.”
Lila nodded. “And to be certain, the DSM had to come without a citation.”
“And you made Susan Mark help.”
“I didn’t make her. She was happy to help.”
“Why?”
“Because she was upset by my mother’s story.”
Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded.
Lila said, “And she was a little upset by my story, too. I’m a fatherless child, the same as her.”
I asked, “How did John Sansom’s name come up even before Susan reported back? I don’t believe that it was from a bunch of New York private eyes sitting around reading the newspaper and making jokes.”
“It’s a very rare combination,” Lila said. “John, Delta, DSM, but never a one-star general. We noticed it in the Herald Tribune, when his Senate ambitions were announced. We were in London. You can buy that paper all over the world. It’s a version of the New York Times. John Sansom might well be the only man in your army’s history who matches those criteria four for four. But we wanted to be absolutely sure. We needed final confirmation.”
“Before what? What do you want to do to the guy?”
Lila Hoth looked surprised.
“Do?” she said. “We don’t want to do anything. We just want to talk to him, that’s all. We want to ask him, why? Why would he do that, to two other human beings?”
Chapter 38
Lila Hoth finished her tea, and put her cup down on her saucer. Bone china clinked politely on bone china. She asked, “Will you go get Susan’s information for me?”
I didn’t answer.
She said, “My mother has waited a long time.”
I asked, “Why has she?”
“Time, chance, means, opportunity. Money, mostly, I suppose. Her horizons have been very narrow, until recently.”
I asked, “Why was your husband killed?”
“My husband?”
“Back in Moscow.”
Lila paused, and said, “It was the times.”
“Same for your mother’s husband.”
“No. I told you, if Sansom had shot him in the head, like what happened to my husband, or stabbed him in the brain, or broken his neck, or whatever else Delta soldiers were taught to do, it would have been different. But he didn’t. He was cruel instead. Inhuman. My father couldn’t even roll to his rifle, because they had stolen his rifle.”
I said nothing.
She said, “You want a man like that in your Senate?”
“As opposed to what?”
“Will you give me Susan’s confirmation?”
“No point,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because you wouldn’t get anywhere near John Sansom. If any of what you say actually happened, then it’s a secret, and it’s going to stay a secret for a very long time. And secrets are protected, especially now. There are already two federal agencies at work on this. You just had three guys asking questions. At best, you’ll be deported. Your feet won’t touch the ground, all the way back to the airport. They’ll put you on the plane in handcuffs. In coach. The Brits will pull you off the plane at the other end and you’ll spend the rest of your life under surveillance.”
Svetlana Hoth stared into space.
I said, “And at worst, you’ll just disappear. Right here. One minute you’ll be on the street, and then you won’t be. You’ll be rotting in Guantanamo, or you’ll be on your way to Syria or Egypt so they can kill you there.”
Lila Hoth didn’t speak.
“My advice?” I said. “Forget all about it. Your father and your uncle were killed in a war. They weren’t the first, and they won’t be the last. Shit happens.”
“We just want to ask him why.”
“You already know why. There had been no declaration of hostilities, therefore he couldn’t kill your guys. It’s about the rules of engagement. There’s a heavy-duty briefing before every mission.”
“So he let someone else do it for him.”
“It was the times. Like you said, it might have started World War Three. It was in everyone’s interest to avoid that.”
“Have you looked at the file? Did Susan really have the confirmation? Just tell me, yes or no. I won’t do anything without actually seeing it. I can’t.”
“You won’t do anything, period.”
“It wasn’t right.”
“Invading Afghanistan in the first place wasn’t right. You should have stayed home.”
“Then so should you, from all the places you went.”
“No argument from me.”
“What about freedom of information?”
“What about it?”
“America is a country of laws.”
“True. But do you know what the laws actually say now? You should read the Herald Tribune more carefully.”
“Are you going to help us?”
“I’ll ask the concierge to call you a cab to the airport.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s the best help anyone could give you.”
“Is there anything I can do to change your mind?”
I didn’t answer.
“Anything at all?”
“No,” I said.
We all went quiet after that. The tea expert brought the check. It was in a padded leather wallet. Lila Hoth signed it. She said, “Sansom should be called to account.”
“If it was him,” I said. “If it was anybody.” I took Leonid’s phone out of my pocket and dumped it on the table. I pushed my chair back and got ready to leave.
Lila said, “Please keep the phone.”
I said, “Why?”
“Because my mother and I are staying. Just a few more days. And I would really like to be able to call you, if I wanted to.” She wasn’t coy in the way she said it. Not coquettish. No lowered eyelids, no batted lashes. No hand on my arm, no attempt to seduce, no attempt to change my mind. It was just a plain statement, neutrally delivered.
Then she said, “Even if you’re not a friend,” and I heard the tiniest bat-squeak of a threat in her voice. Just a faint far-off chime of menace, a hint of danger, barely audible behind the words, accompanied by an imperceptible chill in her amazing blue eyes. Like a warm summer sea changing to sunlit winter ice. Same color, different temperature.
Or maybe she was just sad, or anxious, or determined.
I looked at her with a level gaze and put the phone back in my pocket and stood up and walked away. There were plenty of cabs on 57th Street, but none of them was empty. So I walked. The Sheraton was three blocks west and five blocks south. Twenty minutes, max. I figured I could get there before Sansom finished his lunch.
Chapter 39
I didn’t get to the Sheraton before Sansom finished his lunch, partly because the sidewalks were clogged with people moving slow in the heat, and partly because it had been a short lunch. Which I guessed made sense. Sansom’s Wall Street audience wanted to spend maximum time making money and minimum time giving it away. I di
dn’t make it onto the same Amtrak as him, either. I missed a D.C. train by five minutes, which meant I trailed him back to the capital a whole hour and a half in arrears.
The same guard was on duty at the Cannon Building’s door. He didn’t recognize me. But he let me in anyway, mainly because of the Constitution. Because of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to petition the Government. My pocket junk inched through an X-ray machine and I stepped through a metal detector and was patted down even though I knew the light had flashed green. There was a gaggle of House pages inside the lobby and one of them called ahead and then walked me to Sansom’s quarters. The corridors were wide and generous and confusing. The individual offices seemed small but handsome. Maybe they had once been large and handsome, but now they were broken up into reception anterooms and multiple inner spaces, partly for senior staff to use, I guessed, and partly to make eventual labyrinthine access to the big guy seem more of a gift than it really was.
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 alternate route, possibly via a colleague’s billet. He said the place was a warren and that there were always conversations to be had and favors 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 paneled 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 bet
ween 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 journalistic 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?”
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