Safe and Sound (19 page)

“And DeGroot got something out of him.”

Riggio looked haunted. “It took all night. We were outside the house. We could hear the guy screaming from inside. After the first hour, the locals bugged out. Even they couldn’t take it anymore. And we’re talking about some real mountain hard cases here.”

Marie spoke up for the first time. “Did you even try to stop it?” she said softly.

“Yeah,” Powell said. “Dave did. But it was too late.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

The house was one of the type owned by relatively well-to-do Afghans in that part of the valley: a low, mud-brick compound with a main house consisting of several large rooms and several smaller outbuildings in a walled courtyard. An olive grove stretched up the gentle slope of a hill behind the main house. In front, the slope continued, down to the slow-moving river below.

The house had long been abandoned as its original occupants fled the region’s endless conflicts. The roofs of some of the outbuildings had fallen in, and the untended olive trees drooped raggedly. But the main house was still in fairly good repair. DeGroot and the men he had working with him had turned some of the rooms into makeshift cells, stripping them of all furniture and placing heavy padlocked wooden doors in the doorways. Another room was where DeGroot and his cronies bunked. The remaining room, at the back of the house, had been set aside as the interrogation room. Only DeGroot and his “subjects” ever entered the room; even the other mercs avoided it as if it were a place of ill omen. Which, for the subjects who entered, it invariably was.

The three of them were camped out in the courtyard, huddled around a small fire they had built to ward off the evening chill. They were dressed in local garb. DeGroot had been the only one there when they delivered the prisoner. The other mercs were off on errands of their own. Lundgren was poking the fire morosely with a stick. The screaming from inside the house had subsided for the moment.

“You think he’s done?” Riggio said.

“I hope so,” Lundgren replied. After a short pause, he said, almost reluctantly, “This shit isn’t right, man.”

“Don’t pussy out on us now, Lundgren,” Powell said belligerently. “This asshole’s getting every fucking thing he deserves.”

Lundgren and Riggio glanced at each other. They all believed in the mission. None of them had forgotten the sight of the towers falling or the Pentagon in flames. But Powell seemed to be the one most willing to push the envelope. He seemed to have taken it personally. Rumor was that he had known someone in either the Towers or the E-Ring of the Pentagon. No one asked, though. Personal questions were bad form.

It started again. The first sound was a high-pitched babbling with an edge of desperation, a frantic plea for mercy. Then it rose into an inhuman howling, a sound of agony, horror, and despair mixed into one awful shriek. It sounded like the gates of hell being pried open with a rusty crowbar.

Lundgren threw down the stick and picked up his assault rifle. “Fuck this,” he said. He started for the house.

“You secure that shit, Sergeant,” Powell began, but his voice lacked conviction.

Riggio picked up his weapon as well. “Come on, bro,” he said. “Dave’s right. This is fucked up.”

“You know what this guy does,” Powell said.

“Yeah,” Riggio replied grimly. “But knowing about it and having to listen to it all night are different things, man. We’ve got to do something.”

Powell hesitated. Then he picked up his own rifle and followed them in.

The screaming had been bad enough from outside. Inside, in the narrow hallways, it rebounded and reverberated off the walls until they wanted to throw themselves on the ground and cover their ears. As they reached the door to the interrogation room, the noise weakened again. Only an indistinct murmuring penetrated the door. Lundgren pounded on the door. There was no response, just the blurred sound of voices pitched low.

“Open up, DeGroot,” Lundgren said.

After a moment, the door swung wide. DeGroot stood there, stripped to the waist. His chest glistened with a thin film of sweat mixed here and there with stripes of blood.

“What is it, hey?” he said irritably. “I’m busy.”

“No, sir,” Lundgren said firmly, “you’re done.”

DeGroot looked at him for a moment, then burst into a laugh. “Right,” he said. He started to close the door. Lundgren pushed Forward. DeGroot, startled by the sudden aggressive move, stumbled backward before catching himself. They noticed something glistening in his right hand. A surgical scalpel. All three weapons came to bear on him at once. “Drop it, asshole,” Powell snarled.

The scalpel clattered to the floor. “Jislaaik,” DeGroot said with an expression of wonder. “What the fuck is wrong with you three? You forgot your orders?”

“Our orders don’t include letting you do…whatever it is you’re doing in here,” Lundgren said.

DeGroot’s laugh was nasty. “That’ll come as a surprise to my employer,” he said. “Now if you don’t mind…”

There was a sound behind DeGroot, a low bubbling groan. “Step aside, sir,” Lundgren said. DeGroot started to say something, then shrugged and stepped aside.

There was a man seated in a chair at the back of the room. There was a table in front of the chair. Various objects glittered on the table. The man’s wrists and ankles were bound to the arms and legs of the chair with heavy wire that cut cruelly into the flesh. Then he raised his head to look at them.

“Oh my motherfucking God,” Riggio said.

The skin on half of the man’s face had been flayed off. They could see the white of teeth shining through the ruined flesh of his cheek. More white bone glistened here and there where DeGroot had cut through the soft tissue, digging to find and torment the sensitive facial nerves before slicing through to the skull beneath. It seemed impossible that anyone with that much damage done to him should be alive. The figure in the chair tried to speak, but the words came out as faint whimpers. Powell bent over and retched. Lundgren swung his rifle back to bear on DeGroot.

“You’re under arrest,” he said flatly.

“You’re making a mistake,” DeGroot said.

“I don’t think so. Mikey, get your medical kit. See what you can do for this guy.”

“Roger that,” Riggio said. He ducked back out the door.

“My employer’s not going to be happy,” DeGroot said. “And neither will your commanders.”

“I’ll take that chance, sir,” Lundgren said.

DeGroot shook his head. “You don’t understand, do you, boet? You can’t arrest me. There aren’t any laws. Not up here.” He gestured at the table. “Don’t you want to know what that fellow was carrying?”

Riggio came back in, clutching an olive-drab satchel. He strode over to the man in the chair and began undoing the wires around his wrists.

“Why don’t we discuss it outside,” Lundgren said.

DeGroot shrugged. “What ever. I was about done with him anyway.” Lundgren stood aside to let him pass. He plucked his shirt off the nail where it was hanging by the door. They followed him into the courtyard.

DeGroot stood by the fire, warming his hands as nonchalantly as if they were on a campout.

“That one was a good find, brus,” he said. “You might even get a medal for it. If”—he looked at them—“you decide to tell anyone. If you don’t…well, let’s say there might be a better reward than another pretty ribbon and a bit of tin.”

Riggio came out of the house. He looked at them and shook his head. “He was too far gone,” he said.

“Ag well,” DeGroot shrugged. “He wouldn’t have wanted to live like that anyway.”

“You might consider shutting the fuck up,” Powell snarled.

“In a minute,” Riggio said. He held up a slender silver object. “First, I want to know what this is.”

“Right,” DeGroot said. “Let’s talk business, hey?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There was a brief silence in the car. “Did you ever find out who the guy was?” Keller asked.

Riggio shook his head. “Not really. But no one up there, carrying what that guy was carrying, was any kind of innocent civilian.”

“What was it?” Marie asked.

Another pause. “One thing all the bad guys up there have in common…the Al-Q’s, the Talibs, the drug lords.. is money. Lots of it. They need a way to move it from place to place. And it’s not real bright to be carrying big satchels of cash over the hills and through airports. These days, most money doesn’t move that way anyway. It’s all just numbers on a computer screen. Why carry a bunch of green around when you can punch a few buttons and move it around the world?”

“What does that have to do with—”

“The guy was carrying a flash drive,” Powell said. “You plug it into a computer. Into the USB port. They hold a lot of data.”

“Including bank information.”

“Right,” Powell said. “Except that these gizmos took it one step further. You needed two of them. If you had them both, they acted like the keys to a safe-deposit box. Stick one into the computer, it loads a miniature Internet browser and takes you to a net address you won’t find on Google. The second one unlocks the account and lets you send the money anywhere you want. All done electronically.”

“How much money?” Keller said.

“DeGroot said it was between sixty and seventy million. The guy didn’t know exactly. But it’s a shitload. That’s why it took two. Checks and balances. Whoever the money belonged to, it was probably more than one person. Or one group. No one can get to it with just one key.”

“And DeGroot said he’d cut you in if you let him go.”

Riggio shook his head glumly. “Yeah. Like I said, we may not have known exactly who the dead guy was or who he was working for, but we knew he was an asshole working for assholes. Stealing their money didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Plus, Dave had something else working on him.”

“His daughter,” Marie said.

“Yeah. He’d been getting some e-mails from home. People telling him what was going on with his kid. What the Fedder woman was like. It was making him nuts.”

“You said you needed two keys.”

Powell spoke up. “The second key was held by a guy in Kabul. DeGroot got his guy to give up the address and the name. We went down to Kabul and got it.”

“And killed the second guy,” Keller said.

“Like I said,” Riggio replied, “an asshole. Or working for assholes. He won’t be missed.”

“So what went wrong?” Keller asked.

Riggio sighed. “We were supposed to meet up after Kabul. Put the keys together. Download the cash into numbered Swiss or Caymans accounts. But before any of that could happen, Dave called home to check on the kid. Carly Fedder
answered the phone, drunk off her ass. That was the last straw. He went to the CO and got compassionate leave. He was gone the next day.”

“He took the key with him?” Keller said.

“Yeah,” Riggio said. He caught Keller’s look and quickly added, “But we knew he wasn’t selling us out. By then, we were starting to have second thoughts. We were thinking maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Still, it was a shitload of money. DeGroot was still up in the hills, due to come down in two weeks. So we had a little time to think about it. We agreed we’d meet up when we got back to the States.”

“Where?”

“A place we knew. Up here in the mountains. We trained a lot up here. There’s a safe house we used sometimes.”

“Did he make the meeting?”

“Yeah. And he had the kid. But he was AWOL. And by that time, so were we. Someone ratted us out. We’re not sure who. Maybe one of the locals. We had Agency types crawling all over us, asking about DeGroot. And Dave. So we decided to disappear for a while and decide what to do.”

“Not easy to disappear from the Agency.”

“We always leave ourselves a backdoor, Keller. Especially with the spooks.”

“Nice to know who you’ve got on your side.”

“Comes with the territory. Sometimes we’re in places we’re not supposed to be. Someone gets burned, the Christians In Action want to be able to stand there in front of a congressional committee going ‘Who, me?’ You count on anybody but yourself and your people, you’re a fucking idiot.”

“So you made the meeting,” Keller said. “What did you decide?”

“We decided, ‘Fuck this,’ ” Riggio said. “The shit had just gotten way out of hand. We didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives running from the Army and the Agency both.”

“And ourselves,” Powell said quietly.

“Yeah,” Riggio said. “We’d forgotten who we were. Dave reminded us of that. So we decided to come back in. Dave was going to go back down, make contact with our command, and we were going to try to cut a deal.”

“A deal?” Keller said disbelievingly.

Riggio shrugged. “What we do, there’s a little more room for freelancing than most. I’m not saying they’d let us off the hook Completely. But maybe we wouldn’t end up in Leavenworth if we played our cards right.” He sighed. “Except we didn’t know DeGroot had made it to the States. He must have picked Dave up as soon as he surfaced.”

“Did he have the key with him?”

“No,” Powell said. “He wouldn’t have died for that. And DeGroot wouldn’t still be coming after us. He must have hidden it somewhere.”