The Death Trust (31 page)

I glanced at the screen and checked the date this folder had been created: two months before Peyton’s death.

I examined the printout. There was no headline or title, just a bunch of bullet points.

• 2/32. Japan conquers Manchuria, sends two divisions to Shanghai

• 12/34. Japan buys shells from Fort Stevens. Exporter assures that the steel will not be used for war materials

• 12/34. Japan renounces treaty restricting the size of its navy. U.S. continues sale of oil and steel

• 34–36. Political unrest in Japan. Imperial Army factions move against those they consider “weak.” Parliament and War Office seized

• 11/36. Japan joins Germany and Italy in Anti-Comintern Pact

• 7/37. Japan invades China

• 12/37. Imperial Japanese troops occupy Nanking, the Chinese capital. 50,000 killed in city

• 12/12/37. Japanese bombers sink U.S. Gunboat
Panay
along with three American tankers on the Yangtze River, China

• U.S. exports to Japan are
increased
500%

• 3/38. Hitler seizes Austria

• 21 railcars of scrap steel sent to Japan. Despite pickets, exports continue

• 7/20/39. Bill introduced to embargo the sale of steel to Japan. President Roosevelt
opposes
the bill—it is defeated

• 9/39. Nazis invade Poland. WWII begins. Washington ports send 70,900 tons of scrap steel to Japan

• Japan has an army of 51 divisions, 133 air squadrons—one million men at arms and three million reservists

• 9/26/40. Japan invades Indochina. Roosevelt declares embargo on scrap steel, effective 10/15/40

• 9/27/40. Japan signs Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Italy

• 10/11/40. Seattle’s streetcar lines, many tons of steel, are loaded onto Japanese freighter. It sails despite union protests

• 12/40. Japanese ships load railcars of steel ingots at U.S. ports. Roosevelt’s embargo does not include
melted
scrap

• 8/4/41. Export of crude oil and gasoline sharply curtailed

• 12/7/41. Japan strikes Pearl Harbor. Pacific War starts

• Two years into the war, U.S. standard of living increases 12%

“So we were selling oil and steel to Japan almost right up until Pearl Harbor!” Masters sounded shocked.

“Looks like it,” I said. “But what’s it got to do with General Scott—alive or dead?”

We had no idea, bright or otherwise.

“Why’d he include that last point about the standard of living?” Masters wondered. “Did he think that was the intention of America’s trade policies back then? To start a war so that the country could enjoy the good life?”

No one jumped in to answer that one, either.

“Flight Lieutenant, you said this Japan stuff was part of Scott’s research. What else was he digging around in?” Maybe, I thought, we’d find the answer there.

“There are a few files. I haven’t really looked at them yet. Should I print them all out?”

“Yeah, and make a copy for Special Agent Masters.”

Bishop highlighted a number of PDF icons and dragged them into the print tray. Five minutes later, Masters and I were examining an extraordinary range of material that covered a detailed report on the $2.3 trillion the U.S. was expecting to spend on the development of military hardware over the following half-decade. Over the title page was scrawled in heavy black ink, “First Convention!” There were also documents covering the Russian crisis with Chechnya, as well as the smuggling of sex slaves from the old Soviet Union states to western Europe.

“What the hell is all this?” asked Masters.

“Beats me,” I said. “First Convention ring any bells?”

Blank stares. Apparently not.

Masters said, “Two point three trillion. Are we spending that much?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. And, even more honestly, I didn’t care. All I wanted to know was what it had to do with Abraham Scott and, in particular, his murder. “Got anything else there to show us?” I asked Bishop. “Anything on something called ‘The Establishment’?”

“No, sir. This came for you, though.”

He handed me a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. I turned it over. In small, careful handwriting was written an address:
Alu Radakov, 231 Dzimavu-iela, Riga.
The card was unsigned, but I knew immediately who’d sent it.

“Anything?” Masters asked.

“Junk mail,” I said, but I gave her a surreptitious look that said “later.” “Are you running tests on the penetrator and casing that killed Peyton?”

She nodded. “I’ve sent it to a civilian forensics laboratory in Frankfurt. I’ve also sent Scott’s helmet for DNA comparison tests.”

“Frankfurt?”

“Yeah. We don’t have the resources to conduct that sort of testing here. I could have sent it to D.C., but I thought it would be best to keep it local.”

It was my turn to nod. I knew what Masters was saying. Her circle of trust had shrunk to more or less encompass the people in this room. I understood. And I concurred. “When’ll we get the results?”

“Five working days. And that’s with a rush on it.”

“Okay. Have all the men in Peyton Scott’s squad been accounted for?”

“They have,” said Masters.

“And?”

“All dead, with the exception of Ambrose.”

My eyes were drawn to the Whiteboard. “The Establishment” had been written large on it, like it was the headline and the various deaths and other clues were the details. I had the feeling the facts of our oil and steel exports to Japan in the thirties should be added to the list, along with Scott’s other research insights, and perhaps even the words “First Convention.” I took a deep breath. “What else are we doing?” I asked.

“We’re checking with local police forces to see if any of the deaths of Scott’s men have been investigated. We’re also looking into Aurora Aviation, the company that sold Scott the instruments for his plane. Turns out it’s quite a large company that also supplies avionics to the U.S. Army and Marines, as well as several large civilian carriers. But they’re taking their time processing our inquiry—better things to do, it seems.”

“In the meantime, something interesting has turned up in Captain Aleveldt’s phone records,” said Bishop, pulling out some sheets of paper. He handed them across. There were several highlighted phone numbers. “These are calls he made to the command HQ here at Ramstein over the six-month period that preceded the crash of General Scott’s glider.”

“Aleveldt was Scott’s buddy,” I said. “So what’s the significance?”

“But they weren’t calls made to General Scott. This is General von Koeppen’s direct line—bypasses the secretarial staff.”

“Really?” I said. Interesting. What was Aleveldt calling Himmler for? “We might have to go chat with him about that. What about his bank accounts?”

“Nothing unusual that we can find—brings home what a captain in the Netherlands air force earns. Most of it goes to his mother back in Utrecht. What’s left gets spent on food, housing, gliding. Doesn’t save much, unless his mother’s putting it away for him.”

If inability to save was a crime, then I was also guilty. “Anything turned up on Varvara Kadyrov?” I avoided the inevitable look of disapproval from Masters by addressing the question to Bishop.

“No,” he replied. “The local police arson squad has an all-points out on her. The belief is that she’s left the country.”

“Does local law enforcement want to speak to me?”

“No, sir. They’ve accepted the statement you gave at the scene.”

“Hmmm,” I said, rubbing my chin but giving nothing away. I knew exactly where Varvara was because it was she who’d sent me the postcard.

“Nice watch, by the way,” said Bishop, nodding at the Rolex. “I’ve always coveted one of them.”

“Me, too. Picked it up cheap in Baghdad,” I said, admiring the watch that had replaced my old Seiko. “Well,” I said, clearing my throat, moving right along. “I guess we should go and pay our number-one fan a visit.”

“That would be Mrs. Abraham Scott?” said Masters.

“Who else?” I replied.

THIRTY-ONE

A
lu Radakov.” I dropped the name as we drove down the highway to K-town in a borrowed OSI vehicle. “Ever heard of him?” I pulled the postcard of the Eiffel Tower from my breast pocket and handed it to Masters. She turned it over a couple of times.

“Radakov. No. Should I have?”

“He’s a Latvian who deals in sex slaves.”

“Nice. Friend of yours?”

“He’s the man who owned the girly bar Varvara worked in called The Bump. She mentioned it when we first interviewed her. I think he sold Varvara to General Scott. The postcard’s from her, by the way.”

“Hang on, Varvara was
sold
? As a sex slave to Abraham Scott?”

“She didn’t say as much, but she insisted she and the general weren’t lovers.”

“With what?”

“Some things she said, and the fact that Scott was investigating the smuggling of sex slaves into Europe.”

“Because of one Internet download? Bit of a stretch, don’t you think?”

“Maybe. It’s my gut speaking.”

Masters gave the postcard a closer inspection. “Back at OSI, you didn’t want to mention this postcard was from her. Why not? Don’t you trust Bishop?”

“Yeah, I trust him, but, as far as the world is concerned, Varvara has disappeared. She kept her end of the bargain. I think we should keep ours.”

“So what’s your gut saying about this people-smuggler, Alu Radakov?”

“That we need to go see him.” I’d been trying to recall the details of the après-sex confessional Varvara and I had shared. If my memory served me correctly, Radakov had another business aside from running a lap-dance bar in Riga, Varvara’s hometown. In his downtime, he slipped into the role of Chechen rebel.

“Uh-huh.” I caught Masters’s tone. She was less than impressed. “Anything else you’d care to tell me? Any other details you’ve failed to mention?”

“No, not that I’m aware of.”

“What about the watch?”

“What about it?”

“Why aren’t you putting it into evidence? There’d be skin, hair fibers we could—”

“Look, the guys that jumped us are military or ex-military. Either way, I’d bet you this watch that there’s no record of those guys ever being born, let alone having a nice, handy DNA signature we could compare that’s lying around in some cyber filing cabinet. Fuck it. Call it a spoil of war.” I was working myself up. Those assholes had tried to kill us. But Masters was right. I should have entered the watch into evidence and run DNA tests, even if for future reference. I had a feeling, though, that the original owner and I would run into each other again some day, and I wanted the pleasure of bringing him down with it on my wrist.

We’d turned off the highway and down the exit ramp to K-town. Masters said, “Those highlighted flights to Riga in the Ramstein ATC logs.
My
gut’s telling me they’re connected to this.”

I nodded. Masters was pointing out the obvious. They undoubtedly were connected, but we still had no idea why or how. Whatever the answers, the questions were big enough to get Scott, a four-star general, concerned enough to get up and go to Riga personally. A four-star general investigating? That in itself was highly irregular. I made a mental note to ask Bishop to look into the aircrews on those flights. Some of them might still be flying out of Ramstein. The investigation was reaching the point where the same names and places were beginning to turn up, but through new and different connections. A pattern was emerging.

The beginnings of K-town slid past. It was getting close to 1930 hours. We began to pass joggers, military personnel for the most part, identified by their youth and hair buzzed down to the scalp. The Black Forest lay ahead, like a big welcome mat to the blue-gray granite hills beyond. Masters appeared to be deep in thought. She was thinking, most probably, like I was—about how to handle Harmony Scott. We were getting close to the widow’s lair. So far, neither of us had managed to extract anything from her that she didn’t want us to know. “I’ll follow your lead,” Masters said suddenly.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Your lead. You direct the questioning. I’ll look for holes.”

“Just don’t go too hard on the widow, when you see one of them big ol’ holes opening up,” I warned.

Anna Masters replied by giving my leg a friendly punch. I glanced at her to make sure that’s exactly what it was—friendly—and I was rewarded by a smile, and something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I turned into Harmony Scott’s street. It looked the same as the last time I was here—unwelcoming.

“Shit,” said Masters.

“What?”

“That BMW parked out front of her house.”

“What about it?” I said. One Beemer looked like every other Beemer in my book, and they were everywhere in Germany—almost as ubiquitous as Mercedes-Benzes.

“I know who owns it.”

I gave the eagle-and-deer knocker a workout. The front door eased open and a waft of chill air rushed out. I had the image of an old tomb with a curse on it being opened. The air held a complex array of odors, a mix of Harmony Scott: the tang of cigarettes, French perfume, blended whiskey, cosmetics, and something that was familiar in a distant kind of way, like a face you see once in a crowd and then again a month later but in a different, unrelated gathering. The smell was vanilla and pine. I’d noted it before when I’d been here, but I hadn’t nailed it at the time. Now I knew what it was. It was the smell of General von Koeppen. I remembered it from being in his office, a cross between aftershave and trough drops—those things they throw in the bottom of urinals in public toilets.

I wasn’t sure but I think I detected the very slightest surprise in the widow when she opened the door, like maybe she was seeing a ghost. “Yes, can I help you?” she said. The loose skin under her chin quivered as she spoke. She looked up at me with those gray ice-pick eyes of hers; the color of snow clouds and battleships. She was wearing beige slacks and a white cotton shirt. On her feet were sandals; her exposed toenails were painted red. This was a different Harmony Scott from the one I’d previously met. She was almost feminine. The slacks were tight and the shirt was also body-hugging, the top buttons undone, revealing the hint of a white lace pushup bra doing what it could to plump up her small breasts into the rumor of cleavage. Her hair was loose this time. It fell to her shoulders, was newly dyed blond, and tousled rather than pulled tight and wound on top of her head. I noticed that her small figure was well proportioned and, in the right light, her forty-eight years could pass for thirty-eight. But this wasn’t that light. Her face was still expressionless. There was, no doubt, enough toxin injected beneath the skin to tip the hunting arrows of half the tribes of the Amazon Basin.