Valley of Bones (42 page)

Silence, except for the thump and muttering above.

“Yeah, you’re heavily protected, Dave, in high places. Unfortunately, right now, I’m your only low-place protection. From that.”

Paz raised his eyes to the overhead.

“…the righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.”

“He means it too. He’s a fundamentalist. He will
literally
wash his feet in your blood. So start talking. I’m tired, I’ve been driving all day and I want a drink and bed.”

Packer said nothing.

“Okay, your choice. You know, you messed with the wrong guy there. He was kicked off the force for trying to murder the chief of police. He’s a religious maniac and you’re the devil. In fact, after he finishes with you, he’ll probably just toss a match into that gas puddle and walk away clean.” Paz picked up Barlow’s knife and worked it under the hasps of the attaché case locks. The lid popped up, revealing
that the case was full of wrapped hundreds. He whistled. “Well we don’t want
this
to get burned up, do we? What else have we got?” Paz riffled through the file folders in the portfolio built into the case’s lid.

“Passports? Here’s our old pal Floyd Mitchell, and gosh he does look just like you! Amazing. And here’s a much-used one for Wayne Semple. A traveling man is Wayne. Spent a lot of time in the Middle East, Sudan too. And here’s an ID card from the Strategic Resources Protection Unit, also in the name of Wayne Semple. I guess that’s your real name, although I think I’ll keep calling you Dave. You seem like a Dave to me. But it’s a good thing I’ve got these, because I doubt they’d be able to identify the corpse after the fire.”

“You can have the money,” said Packer. “Just call…just call a number.”

“This is incredible. You
still
don’t get it. Dave, I
have
the money and you’re all tied up with about twenty minutes to live after I walk out of here with it. I’ll mail the passports back to SRPU. We don’t want your family to suffer.”

Paz picked up the case and walked toward the door. He was just stepping through when Packer shouted for him to stop. Paz walked back. He went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer, opened it, and took a long drink. He saw Packer watch him and lick his lips. “You must be pretty dry, Dave. Fear’ll do that. Want one?”

A pause. Then Packer nodded. Paz got another, cracked the cap and held it up to Packer’s mouth. Paz sat down on a chair with his face about a yard from Packer’s.

“So. Wayne Semple is your real name, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re an employee of the federal government? In this SRPU outfit?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you do there?”

“I’m a contract manager.”

Paz laughed heartily. “In a manner of speaking. What do you do officially?”

“I told you. I’m a GS-13 contract manager. I’m not some kind of criminal mastermind. I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I just wanted some information, I wanted to know how much al-Muwalid knew. I didn’t know those morons would throw him out the window.”

“Uh-uh, Dave. We
need
a criminal mastermind here, and remember I got the whole story of how the murder went down from Ignacio. Someone traced Emmylou Dideroff to Miami. Someone got that little houseboat all available to rent to a poor lady on the run and someone got you this one where you could keep an eye on her. You got her the job with Wilson, we know that, and we know that Wilson set up the original murder and the frame and the attempted theft of Emmylou’s confessions. Someone found Emmylou at the Barlows and kidnapped her. If that wasn’t you, who was it?”

“The contractor. He arranged everything. I’m just managing the contract, paying out money, keeping records….”

“What contractor?”

“GSE, it’s called. Global Supply Enterprises. The local honcho is named John Hardy. He’s the one who set it all up.”

“What’s his real name?”

“That’s the only one I know. Why would he use a fake name?”

Paz stared at the man. He really didn’t know. “John Hardy was the name of a famous outlaw. A desperate little man. So you didn’t check this guy out in any way?”

“Check him out? You mean with the Better Business Bureau? Don’t be stupid! The guy showed up in Khartoum and he could do the job. We hired him.”

“How much of my hard-earned tax dollars did you give him?”

“About a million two so far. A lot of it was pass-through to the Sudanese.”

“To a guy with a phony name? A million two?”

“That’s chump change. God, you have no idea how much money is washing around in this antiterrorism business. I have a thirty-two-
million-
dollar budget I have to spend all by myself, me, a GS fucking 13. That’s what they do when they don’t know what to do, they
throw money around. And you have to spend it before the end of the fiscal year or you get dinged.”

“That’s bad, getting dinged,” said Paz. “And where’s Mr. Hardy now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Uh-huh. Well, so long, Dave.” Paz rose from his chair and picked up the case.

“I don’t!”
Packer cried. “Please, the whole point of using GSE is that it’s all deniable. We pay in cash. I don’t
want
to know what they do. Hardy handles everything. For Christ’s sake, man, look at me? You think I’m a killer? I peed my pants when that gun went off. I’m a fucking bureaucrat. I live in Rockville and carpool to work….”

“But you went to see Hoffmann.”

“Hardy didn’t want to go. He said Hoffmann knew him from another deal. He said Hoffmann wouldn’t play if he knew he was involved.”

“Okay, Dave. Let’s start from the beginning. When was the first time you heard of Emmylou Dideroff.”

“In the Sudan, but we didn’t know that was her name. It’s complicated…you don’t know the background.”

“You’ll explain it, then. We have all night.”

Packer asked for another drink of beer, and then, after a deep breath, began.

“The mission of SRPU is to keep the oil flowing. Oil is a big terrorist target, or it could be, so we have people in the oil-producing nations to make sure nothing happens. Sudan is a small oil producer but it’s also a terrorist center, or was at one time, so we had people there. Mainly it was to make sure that the government had enough resources to keep the rebels out of the oil fields and away from the pipelines. No biggie, really. It was a shitty little post, just me and the guy I worked for, Vernon McKay, and a bunch of locals. But I needed foreign duty to get my ticket punched, a six-month posting. Okay, I’m there a couple of weeks, we started to hear rumors that an Almax survey team had made a major find
in the southeastern part of the country, east of the Pibor River…”

“Who’s Almax?”

“A survey outfit, working for a Chinese-French consortium. Anyway, we were monitoring their transmissions and we picked up the team leader, Terry Richardson, saying they’d found what looked like a major reservoir. It looked big, really big, maybe another Libya. A diagenetic trap.”

“A what?”

“It’s a rare formation and hard to find, which is why it’d been overlooked. Basically it’s a fossil coral reef capping an oil reservoir. The Sirte basin in Libya is a trap like that, and it’s around thirty billion barrels. Anyway, Richardson said that he’d send the data the next day. That was the last anyone heard from him or from anyone in the Almax team. They disappeared off the map. The government sent people into the area, troops, at first only a few and they disappeared, and then they sent planes, and stronger parties, and they disappeared too. The government was going nuts because there wasn’t supposed to be anyone on the other side of the Pibor except bunches of starving refugees and a few SPLA militia. And then we started to hear about Atiamabi.”

“Who’s he?”

“She. A white woman. That’s what the natives called her. She showed up in this little shit-hole east of the Pibor called Wibok, and all of a sudden these raggedy-ass locals are knocking off the Sudanese like clay pigeons. The whole area is closed off. We got onto our SPLA contacts and they say she’s not one of theirs. They’re pissed at her too, and when they sent people in there, they never came back either. Or they did, but with all kinds of insane stories. She was a nun, they said, she could do miracles, call lightning from the sky, all kinds of shit. So McKay told me to check it out, because he didn’t believe that a nun was playing fucking Erwin Rommel down there. It had to be some kind of pro and he had to be interested in the oil. I mean there’s nothing else there. We figured the nun was some kind of figurehead. So I hired people to go across the river, locals, and nothing, zilch. And then Hardy showed up. He knew who she was, an American named
Emmylou Dideroff. A maniac like bin Laden, he said, but Catholic and she really was a nun. Hated Muslims, wanted to stake out a little oil kingdom of her own, use the resources to set up some kind of Christian theocracy. That’s all we needed, right? Every fucking raghead in the world is going to say, See, we told you so, the crusaders are back and they’re after our oil. It’d be worse than Israel. A catastrophe! But politically we couldn’t do anything out in the open. I mean can you imagine the fucking right-winger fundies in this government if they learned we were helping the Sudanese Muslims knock out someone like that? Not to mention the pope getting on the horn with the president. So it had to be completely covert. Could I have another drink?”

Paz provided it. The man drank, belched, resumed his story.

“This is where al-Muwalid comes in. He was our liaison with the GOS—”

“The…?”

“The GOS, the government of Sudan. He was doing what we were doing, keeping the oil flowing. He had a military unit, planes, a couple of tanks and armored personnel carriers…”

“To keep oil flowing? Tanks?”

“Yeah, he was chasing people out of Bahr al-Ghazal, where the fields are. Mainly he used Arab militias, but he had the heavy stuff too, if the SPLA gave him any trouble.”

“I thought they called that ethnic cleansing,” said Paz.

“It’s part of the price at the pump. Those people were in the way and he moved them. Anyway, we funded Hardy and he was able to upgrade their equipment, I mean al-Muwalid’s outfit, and he crossed the river and won this smashing victory, according to him. Well, fuck, we gave him pretty near an armored battalion, that’s no surprise. And he captured the bitch. Which was good, but he didn’t capture anyone else. No prisoners, no oil survey team, and no fucking data. I mean let’s face it, the characters you’re dealing with, in those places, you know…” Packer’s face flushed around the cheeks.

“Niggers, you mean,” said Paz helpfully. “Dumb-ass jungle bunnies. Go on, please.”

Packer cleared his throat heavily and did so. “Okay, so it was critical to find out whether they really had a big strike or not. McKay got Washington involved here. It was a big policy deal. I mean all the way up to the top.”

“Why?”

“Well,
if
it was all that big, like another Libya, say, then they had to decide what to do about Sudan. A country that’s got reserves of point six billion is a whole nother thing from a country that’s got sixty or more. Plus the country’s run by a bunch of Islamist crazies make the Saudis look like Methodists. So do we try for a coup, get the crazies out of there? Or throw support to the SPLA, let them take over the region, push them to declare independence? Maybe it’d be a good thing to have a nominally Christian nation with a shitload of petroleum down there. It’d piss off the Muslims, though, which is all we need right now. The point was, the big fish couldn’t come to a policy decision until we
knew
what the Almax team had discovered. We put the screws to al-Muwalid. He had the woman then. Could we see her? No. Did you find the data? No comment. You won this big victory, you got control of the region, let’s get another survey going. The situation is too delicate at present, he says. And bullshit like that. No one’ll give you a straight answer in the whole fucking country. Then we heard three things practically at the same time. One, the Almax team was dead, burned in their truck without a scrap of data, two, al-Muwalid had actually gotten his ass creamed by the n…by the locals across the Pibor, so there wasn’t a hope of getting another team in there, and three, this Dideroff character had escaped.”

“Who told you that?”

“Hardy. Some guys came in and snatched her out of the jail where al-Muwalid was holding her. A professional lift, not her people. We figured the Israelis, but our sources there said it wasn’t them. Washington is going nuts by this time. Meanwhile, she’s smoke for over a year. We looked for her hard, I can tell you that. The only Emmylou Dideroff on record skipped on a minor dope
charge ten years ago and vanished. No record of employment, no criminal record, no credit, no passport….”

“Just like you,” said Paz. “And then…?”

“Hardy found her, I don’t know how. She was in some convent in Malta, but by the time we got our ducks in a row, she’d skipped. By this time she was important enough to have a federal presence on site, and they picked me. Hardy said she’d go to Miami, maybe he had people tracking her, I don’t know, but she showed on the manifest of a London–Miami flight, no attempt at an alias, on a passport under her own name, for crying out loud, and I met her at the airport. I got into a conversation with her, fed her some names of people she trusted, and the next part you know, the houseboat, the job with Wilson. We watched her like fucking hawks and she didn’t do shit. No long-distance calling, no contacts, no friends. She went to work and church and volunteered at a shelter, period. Then al-Muwalid showed up in town. Obviously, we were alerted. Hardy came up with the idea.”

“What idea?”

“Get the two of them together, bug the place, see what they talked about.”

“Dave, that’s lame, even for you. The plan was to kill the Arab and frame Emmylou for it, period. You knew she was a religious nut and would go for mental evaluation, and you figured you could extract from the shrink’s notes what you couldn’t get in your torture session. That’s why you’ve been trying to lift those confession notebooks.”