Hard Rain (5 page)

T
he Air Attaché’s office had a similar view to the one we’d just left down the hall. It was roomy. There was a modern desk – nothing fancy – a water cooler, a two-seater couch and a six-drawer filing cabinet. On the desk was a thin LCD computer screen and keyboard, a laser printer, an older-style, well-worn fighter pilot’s helmet, Rolodex, a pad of Post-its and a couple of pens. I gave the Rolodex a roll. Next I tapped the keys on the keyboard, in case his computer was just sleeping. The screen stayed black.

The walls without the view were bare, except for one with a pin board. On the board were a couple of photos of the murder victim. One showed him with his oxygen mask hanging free, taxiing in or out – I couldn’t tell – and a further photo of him shaking hands with another officer who, like Portman, was wearing a flight suit. Behind the two men was a crisp line-up of F-15 Eagles, the air-to-air variant. It was a happy occasion and both men were smiling.

I checked the desk drawers, looking for his diary. I didn’t find it. All were empty except for one, which held various items of stationery – pencils, erasers, paperclips and so forth.

‘Did Captain Cain say Portman spent more time here than at the Ankara embassy?’ Masters asked, standing beside open filing cabinet drawers.

I could see they were mostly empty, except for two. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He did.’ I had a quick skim of the folders. ‘You wouldn’t think so.’ It felt more like a temporary office, an office Portman was either in the process of moving in to or moving out of. Perhaps, as Cain had said, the Air Attaché was an electronic office kind of guy. ‘C’mon,’ I said. ‘Nothing to see here.’

A stiff wind had sprung up since Masters and I had arrived at the consulate-general. We walked down to the water and took a cab from there. After twenty minutes of contemplation, we were back in the vicinity of our hotel.

As I got out of the cab I watched a huddle of old women wearing black walking up the steeply angled street towards us, leaning into the blast, pulling the corners of their scarves down over their faces for protection. Coming up behind them were a couple of young women wearing micro-minis who’d thrown dice with the weather and lost. The sky was a pale blue with fluffy, powder-puff clouds, the city’s skyline clean and stark against it. Sheets of newsprint and torn paper bags danced and swirled with the last leaves in airborne eddies. I shivered in my T-shirt and jacket. It had to be less than 50 degrees. I needed another couple of layers next to my skin. The middle fingers of my left hand encased in the fibreglass cast, my own personal weather forecasters, ached dully with the chill. I gave them a wiggle, just to make sure they still worked, then held them up to my lips and blew some warmth onto them. Life had not been kind to those fingers. They’d been broken twice within the last twelve months, the first time by a small-calibre bullet fired from a handgun at close range, the second when I fell on them during a mission in Pakistan – and from a height of around 20,000 feet. But that’s another story.

‘You want a coffee?’ I asked Masters. ‘I’m buying.’

‘Come into some money?’

‘Yeah, I won a bet.’ I dug my hands into my pockets.

‘I saw a place down there,’ she said, indicating the general direction with a nod of her head – a narrow road opposite our hotel that dived down the hill. The road was lined on both sides by jumbled pink, cream and tan buildings like shoebox stacks about to fall into each other.

‘Well, luck before experience,’ I replied, gesturing at her to lead on.

Masters stepped off the sidewalk and headed for a place with a couple of empty, windblown tables out the front, their white tablecloths snapping in the wind. I hesitated before crossing and waited for an old guy the colour of smoked fish who was trudging up the steep road towards me. He was bent over double with a heavy load strapped to a wooden brace across the small of his back. A BMW, a big new one, came up behind him and blew its horn. The old guy ignored it – didn’t alter his line or step one iota. If I were the sensitive type and open to metaphors, I might have caught that this city was engaged in a war between the new and the old, one that had probably been going on for a very long time. But I’m not the sensitive type, so I missed it and belched instead with mild hunger.

‘Hey, Mr Experience, you coming?’ called Masters from the other side of the road, impatient.

The café was warm and filled with the aromas of scorched sugar and coffee. The décor was early ’90s, the colour scheme a mixture of orange, dark wood and chrome. Only a few of the tables were occupied. We took one beside a couple of Nordic backpacker types: blond hair, long-sleeve T-shirts, shorts and hiking boots. They could have been brother and sister, though the girl was twice the size of her companion. She wore her hair in plaits. I could picture her in a helmet with horns.

A waiter came over, took our order and left. I caught the Nordic guy staring at Masters, regarding her as she removed her New York Fire Department cap and shook out her hair. The guy was embarrassed when he realised I’d busted him in the middle of performing a little eyeball striptease. He swallowed, turned away, and self-consciously pointed at something in the guidebook before Brunhilde also caught him and maybe slugged him. She looked like she could pack a punch.

Masters missed all this, as she always does, completely ignorant of the effect she has on a room. The immediate important business taken care of, namely breakfast, I said, ‘I have a few questions about this morning.’

‘Me too.’

‘You wanna start?’

‘Ego before talent,’ she said.

‘Okay,’ I began. ‘Karli, the cop hung like a sock drawer, said something about following the drain all the way to the Bosphorus.’

‘So what’s the question?’

‘What’s the Bosphorus?’

Masters scoffed. ‘You’ve never heard of the Bosphorus?’

‘And what if I haven’t?’

Masters shook her head. ‘It’s only possibly one of the most famous stretches of water in the world.’

‘Because . . . ?’

‘It’s less than a mile wide, divides the continents of Europe and Asia, splits Istanbul in half, connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and people have been fighting for control of it for more than two thousand years.’

‘I thought it might be related to phosphorus – its evil sister, maybe.’

‘I’ll get you a guidebook,’ she said.

‘I don’t need one,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got you. I’ll get
you
a stick with a little flag on it.’ I was going to say something about her fiancé, the JAG lawyer, but I let it go. We still hadn’t had The Talk. The Talk would be when Masters filled me in on this guy that, I’d just been told completely out of the blue, she was going to marry; the one she’d apparently met in this city; the one she was seeing five minutes after we had stopped seeing each other. Or maybe I was being generous: it seemed to me there could have been a period of overlap. I felt Masters owed me that much, and I wanted to collect. ‘So what did you make of the show put on for our benefit?’ I asked instead.

‘At the consulate-general?’

‘Been to any other shows lately?’

She shrugged. ‘The Ambassador’s charming, the local cops are barely adequate, Captain Cain seems on the ball, those CID guys gave me the creeps, and the Attaché’s missing a few components.’

‘Where was CIA?’ I asked.

‘CIA? Why did they need to be there?’

‘Lots of reasons?’

‘Name one.’

‘Portman was an appi-8.’

‘A what?’

‘An A-P-I Eight,’ I said, spelling it out.

‘I didn’t see that in his file.’

‘It wasn’t in his file. I went online before we left Andrews. I was hunting around for background.’ The acronym API was short for Aircrew Position Indicator, a term used by the bean counters to describe flying status within the fighting machine collectively known as the United States Air Force. An API-1 was a pilot assigned to a squadron. An API-8, or ‘appi-8’, was an officer above wing level staff who was permitted to maintain a basic level of currency, which allowed him or her to fly a particular type of aircraft.

‘So what was he current on?’ Masters asked.

‘Eagles.’

‘He flew F-15s?’

‘He had a loose attachment to the Grim Reapers, the 493rd. They let him out in the sports car every now and then.’

Masters gave the kind of nod that indicated she was impressed, just as I’d been. The McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle was a hell of a weapon. In the right hands, it was capable of killing the enemy in any number of ways. In the wrong hands, it would more than likely just turn around and kill the pilot. It was a very fast and very lethal front-line fighter that required a lot of skill to fly. Portman was pushing fifty and there weren’t many his age allowed in an Eagle’s driver’s seat. Yeah, Colonel Portman was special.

‘You’re thinking that CIA would have had a guy like Portman working on something?’ Masters enquired.

‘I’d put money on it.’

The waiter arrived with breakfast and we ate in silence. It wasn’t a comfortable silence.

‘So,’ I said, deciding to warm things up a little, ‘heard the one about the attorney driving down the highway in his brand new Mercedes?’
Masters gave me a blank look. ‘He loves it so much he’s even making up songs about it. “I love my new Mercedes. Mercedes, Mercedes, Mercedes . . .”’

‘Do I really want to hear this?’ Masters asked.

Yes, she did. ‘The guy gets so caught up in how much he loves this new automobile of his that he forgets to take the corner. He goes over the embankment, hits a tree and smashes into a boulder. Luckily, the attorney’s thrown clear just as the car bursts into flames. Meanwhile, the guy who was driving in the vehicle behind screeches to a stop, gets out and runs down the embankment. He makes it to the lawyer and finds him on his knees, sobbing, “My new Mercedes! My beautiful new Mercedes!”

‘Horrified at the sight of the crash victim, the guy says, “My god! You’ve lost an arm!” The lawyer looks down and notices for the first time that he has indeed lost his whole arm. He then starts screaming, “My new Rolex. My new Rolex!”’

Masters didn’t say anything for a moment, just glared at me with those turquoise eyes of hers. And then she said, ‘If you’re going to tell bad lawyer jokes, at least do ones I haven’t heard.’

I shrugged. ‘Then I guess you also know the one about the scientist who goes to the brain store to get some brain to complete a study?’

Masters gave me another burst of silence, which I took as a no.

‘Well, this scientist in the brain store sees that there aren’t any prices on the various types of brains on offer, so he asks the guy behind the counter, “How much does it cost for dentist brain?”

‘“Three dollars an ounce,” says the guy.

‘“How much does it cost for doctor brain?”

‘“Four dollars an ounce.”

‘“How much for lawyer brain?”

‘“Five hundred dollars an ounce.”

‘The customer’s amazed. “Wow,” he says. “So why’s lawyer brain so much more expensive?”

‘The salesman replies, “Do you know how many lawyers we have to kill just to get one ounce of brain?”’

Masters was sitting back in her seat, her hands clasped on the table in front of her, not the barest hint of a smile on the horizon.

‘I know, you’ve probably heard that one too,’ I admitted, ‘but the whole cop-marrying-attorney thing . . . You know what they say, one good cliché deserves another.’

‘Maybe us taking this case together wasn’t such a great idea,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t aware we’d been given the choice.’

Her face flushed with anger. ‘This isn’t easy for me either, you know, Vin. And why the big problem with attorneys? You read law at NYU, didn’t you, before you enlisted?’

‘Yeah, but I saw the error of my ways.’

‘Which was?’

‘The law might have everything to do with guilt and innocence, but the system doesn’t. It’s about who has the biggest wallet, or which party has the most power. The people who win nearly always have more of both than the people who lose. Guilt and innocence are just the bystanders.’

‘As a cop, you’re still part of the system.’

‘I like being a bottom feeder. Everyone’s equal down in the sludge. Down here, the evidence is the only thing that matters – at least to me. And I know it’s the same for you. So, are you going to tell me about this JAG lawyer fiancé of yours or do I have to tell you the one about the attorney and the devil?’

‘I wasn’t going to, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s none of your damn business.’

‘So, anyway, there’s this lawyer and the devil and –’

‘Vin!’ Masters said it loud, to stop me. Both Brunhilde and her companion turned their heads towards us, which had the effect of making Masters turn down the volume. ‘You know it wasn’t great between us – it hadn’t been for a long time. You were in Washington, I was in Germany, and neither of us seemed willing to do anything about it. We agreed – you agreed – to call it quits.’

I wasn’t going to disagree. I couldn’t. What Masters said was true. It did seem to me, however, that her reasons for wanting an end to our relationship might have had less to do with our forced separation and more to do with the fact that her former Istanbul romance was in town, sniffing about. ‘Where’s your fiancé based?’ I asked. The guy was JAG, which meant he could be stationed anywhere.

Masters shifted uncomfortably in her seat, her eyes moving from the table to the light fittings and then out the window.

‘You going to plead the Fifth, Anna?’ I asked.

Masters sucked in her top lip and her eyes shifted back to the view outside. ‘He moves around a lot.’

‘Where’s he stationed?’

‘What difference does it make where he’s based?’ she snapped, picking up a salt shaker and fidgeting with its top.

‘Maybe it doesn’t make any difference at all. It’s just that you keep saying that distance is what killed us. I’m assuming this JAG guy is waiting for you back in Germany, at Ramstein.’ I could almost understand that. Getting together for a week here and there was frustrating and difficult and –

’He’s in DC, okay?’ Masters blurted. It came spurting out like I’d just lanced a boil.