War Lord Read online

  ‘Other than they were manufactured by FN Herstal? Nothing, except that it suggests a possible connection to White, given that FN once employed him. As for the numbers, professionals removed them and we still don’t even know what batch the rifles came from or what the manufacturing date was. For all we know they were pilfered right off the assembly line.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘Right now, I’m not sure what I think. Some solid evidence would be handy.’

  ‘Or even a lead, by the sound of things.’ I tossed him the Redskins ball overhand, imparting a spin to it. Arlen caught it, and spun it right back. ‘So what’s the next move?’

  ‘There isn’t one,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re off the case.’

  I dropped the ball. ‘Who says?’

  ‘The DoD.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This one’s too big for OSI – it goes across service lines and happened overseas.’

  ‘When were you told to stand down?’

  ‘An hour ago.’

  ‘So who’s on it?’

  ‘CIA.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I said.

  ‘I wish I was.’

  The Company shot itself in the foot so often it had no toes left. But aside from that, picking up the threads of that case was the only work I was interested in doing. ‘So what now?’

  ‘For you? We’ve got a couple of deserters from Lackland AFB to chase down. We think they’re involved in the drug trade, possibly with a Mexican cartel. Thought you might like to take it on. Mexico . . . beaches . . .’

  I flicked him the ball and sucked a little air between my front teeth.

  Arlen shrugged at the lack of traction he seemed to be getting. ‘We haven’t had a chance to talk about the report. You’ve read it, right? You want to talk about it?’

  ‘I read it. And let’s skip it.’

  ‘Okay . . .’

  The report Arlen was referring to concerned the death of the late Special Agent Anna Masters. Masters and I had been close – partners and, well, partners. She died in a shootout. There was a lot of lead flying around at the time and some of it was mine. I’d gone a ways down the road thinking it was my bullet that killed her, but a forensic report just completed a week ago – many months after her death – confirmed otherwise. Whether it was my bullet or not, I’d always carry the guilt. She was gone. Nothing could change that.

  ‘Vin, it’s been eight months. Time to move on.’

  I didn’t respond. Arlen juggled the ball back and forth between his hands. ‘You don’t want to go to Mexico on a case? Your call, I can accept that. How about instead I make it easy and fill out a 988 for you? All you’d have to do is sign it.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Take some time, buddy,’ he continued. ‘You need it, and you deserve it.’

  The 988, or more correctly the AFF 988, was the request leave/authorization form. I couldn’t skip Dodge unless it was properly filled out and countersigned by my supervisor, which happened to be Lieutenant Colonel Arlen Wayne here. ‘All right, you win. Put me down for a week or two,’ I said.

  ‘There you go . . . So, what you gonna do?’

  Before she was killed, Anna had said she was headed to her sister’s scuba-diving business in the West Indies. She’d told me she was leaving the Air Force to get her diving instructor’s license and work on her all-over tan. The memory of that conversation came with a picture of her bronze body lying in the sunshine, naked. ‘Maybe I’ll go to the West Indies – get in some diving,’ I said.

  ‘The West Indies. That’s not so far. Maybe I could come for a few days, stitch it onto a weekend.’

  ‘Satchquatch.’

  ‘Absquatulate.’

  ‘Yeah, you need a holiday too,’ I told him. ‘Give all those paper cuts time to heal.’

  Arlen managed a smile, but only just. ‘Why don’t I come over to your place later? We can talk about it and maybe go out for a drink.’ He let the ball drop to the floor and tapped it into the corner with his toe. ‘A new bar’s opened over your way. They get a young crowd. Maybe we could go there and cut a couple out of the herd. What do you say, Hopalong?’

  ‘Yee hah,’ I said.

  ‘Call you later,’ he replied, leaving the room.

  Hmm. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of some time off. I folded the Myers-Briggs test and dropped it in the file, the round one on the floor under my desk.

  ‘Vin, before you go . . .’

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw Arlen’s head around the corner of the door.

  ‘The test. Do it.’

  That’s the trouble when you know someone well – they know you well right back. I gave a weary sigh, retrieved the forms from the trash, filled out the fields for my name and service details and then scanned the questions, all of which required a simple yes or no answer – questions like ‘You feel involved watching TV soaps’, ‘You tend to be unbiased even if this might endanger your relationships with people’, ‘You spend your leisure time actively socializing with a group of people, attending parties and shopping’, ‘You tend to sympathize with other people’, and so forth. Seriously, Wynngate had to be fucking kidding.

  Two

  St Barts was the name of the place in the West Indies. I checked it out online and liked what I saw. Blue water and white bikinis.

  I was on the edge of jumping in, the onscreen arrow poised over an orange button that pulsed ‘Book now, Book now’, when I heard a knock on the front door. I checked the time. Arlen wasn’t due over for at least another half hour, unless he’d clocked off early. I got up, opened the door, and went into shock, paralyzed from the eyeballs down.

  The person standing in front of me could not be real. Was I hallucinating? My heart thumped loudly from an unusual place, like it had taken up residence somewhere between my ears. This could not be possible, could it? I spent a bunch of pregnant seconds standing in the doorway questioning my memory – the Mexican standoff, the shootout, the funeral, the grief – because the woman framed in the doorway, with her dark chocolate hair, green eyes, the lips, I knew her. ‘Anna?’ I tried to get the word out but it got stuck somewhere in my throat like a cork pushed down into the neck of a wine bottle.

  ‘You going to ask me in or should I just stand here for another minute looking at your open mouth?’ she asked.

  I let the door swing open. The apparition came in pulling a bright red overnight case behind her, a family-size bucket of KFC in her other hand. She was an inch shorter than I remembered and her scent . . . there were only echoes of familiarity with it.

  ‘Jesus . . .’ She turned, looking around the room. ‘You honestly live here?’

  A few things weren’t marrying up as they should have, like her height and the perfume she used and that last comment. This Anna had never been to my place before. And then the clouds parted and I snapped out of it. ‘Nice of you to call ahead, Marnie,’ I managed to extract from my larynx.

  ‘Well, we didn’t part on the best of terms and I thought you’d tell me to get lost if I gave you advance warning.’

  Actually, the language I’d have used for the terms we parted on might have been a little stronger than that. ‘You look different’ I said, changing the subject.

  She took a length of hair and examined it up close, which made her briefly cross-eyed. ‘I got sick of all the blonde jokes, so I went back to my normal color. Sorry if I startled you. Everyone’s been telling me how much I look like . . . you know.’

  Yeah, I knew. Marnie Masters was fifteen months younger than her sister, Anna. I wasn’t in Marnie’s good books. She blamed me for Anna’s death, so that made two of us. When I last saw her, which was at the wake, she was crying, yelling at me to get lost while throwing plates, wine glasses and pastrami sandwiches in my direction – whatever came to hand. I’d slunk away and we hadn’t spoken since.

  ‘You look different too,’ she said. ‘Still g
ot those rugged good looks, but . . .’

  ‘Only they’re getting more rugged.’

  ‘You look – I don’t know . . .’

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose and felt the swelling beneath my fingertips. ‘I’ve had a nose job since I last saw you.’ I didn’t think it worth mentioning that it had been performed by a truck’s steering wheel in the Congo.

  ‘I’d ask for a refund.’ Marnie smiled. ‘Anyway, I’ve had time to think through what happened. I came to realize that I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Forget about it,’ I said.

  ‘No, hear me out. Anna wanted to be a cop. That was her dream, her choice. She knew it came with risks, and the risks added to the job satisfaction. I’m saying I know you didn’t kill her, Vin. It just happened, just one of those things. I don’t hold you responsible. I did, but now I don’t. I shouldn’t have said those things to you at the funeral.’

  ‘I haven’t eaten pastrami since.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was in shock. I loved my sister and she was gone and you were the only person I could blame. There was no one else closer to her than you.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I could have put all that in an email, but I thought I owed it to you to come here in person. I’m not proud of my last performance.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I was a little in shock myself. One minute I was surfing soft porn lying around on a beach on St Barts and the next I was looking at Anna reincarnated, full of forgiveness, a bucket of fried chicken in her hand. Surreal was the word that came to mind. I must have been looking at that bucket because she glanced down at it then lifted it onto the table.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not here to throw fried chicken at you.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ I said.

  ‘Anna loved you, by the way. But you know that.’

  I did know that.

  She ran her fingers through chocolate-colored hair, then flicked her head a little to reposition the bangs. ‘It’s been a hell of a trip.’ She took in my interior-decorating skills again. ‘Who does a girl have to blow to get a drink around here?’ Marnie might have looked like Anna, but she didn’t talk like her.

  ‘Well, that guy’s not around, but I’ll see what I can rustle up.’ I headed for the kitchen. ‘There’s Jacks or single malt,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I might have a couple of beers.’

  ‘Beer, please,’ she said.

  I looked in the fridge and saw a pair of Heinekens, the right number. ‘Glass?’ I called out.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I took the tops off the bottles, delivered hers with the glass and then poured it for her.

  ‘Friends?’ she said, holding up the glass.

  I clinked it with the bottle, said, ‘Friends,’ and took a swig.

  ‘So, you really got a bit of a shock when you opened the door, right?’

  I was going to say that I’d thought I was looking at a ghost, but I changed my mind. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When we were in our teens people used to think Anna and I were twins.’

  I could believe it. The similarity would once have been uncanny, but now it was spooky given that Anna was dead. I moved it along. ‘Not that I believe in these things, but it’s a coincidence that you should arrive just now.’

  ‘Really? Why’s that?’

  I spun my laptop around and touched the space bar. The screen lit up showing a woman lying face down on white sand.

  ‘Did I interrupt you in the middle of something?’ she asked with a raised eyebrow.

  I backspaced and the girl in the white bikini bottoms was now standing on the shoreline, her top around her neck, hanging in her cleavage.

  Marnie sipped her beer. ‘You were saying something about a coincidence?’

  I skipped through another half dozen pages showing the white bikini girl in various semi-nude poses.

  ‘I can come back, if you like?’ Marnie said sarcastically. ‘How long do you need? A minute or two?’

  Finally, an image opened of the white prow of an old fishing boat against the blue of the sea and the sky.

  ‘Hey, I know this website. That’s home – St Barts. You were checking this out?’ Marnie asked.

  ‘I was about to book a trip, head over, get in some diving. That was Anna’s plan. She was gonna come to St Barts and spend time with you. At the funeral, I never got around to telling you that.’

  ‘I guess I never gave you the opportunity.’

  No, she hadn’t.

  ‘It’s kinda freaky that I should suddenly just turn up on your doorstep then,’ she added.

  Like I was saying.

  Another knock on the door. ‘Excuse me,’ I told her and opened up on Arlen armed with a six-pack of Heinekens. I was about to tell him to come on in when he said, ‘Hey, Marnie,’ pushed past me and went straight over to her. I stood back and watched as they air-kissed and embraced and asked each other how the other was, and so forth. I gathered that Arlen and Marnie had become Facebook friends since hitting it off at the wake, after I’d been given my marching orders.

  Once the pleasantries were out of the way, along with a repeat of the conversation about how much Marnie now looked like a certain someone else, Arlen went over more old ground about the trip to St Barts, which, if nothing else, at least confirmed that I wasn’t making it all up, and also gave me the chance to relieve him of one of his beers.

  Eventually, when Arlen realized that I was also in the room and steadily working my way through his booze, he excused himself to Marnie and presented me with the 988. ‘This is filled out on my end and ready to go.’

  Except that Marnie was here now and a big part of the reason for going on vacation was null and void. I checked over the form.

  ‘Today you’re on Air Force time,’ my supervisor and closest pal said. ‘Sign it and tomorrow you’re on yours – do you good, buddy.’ He picked up his beer. ‘I was thinking we could take Marnie out for dinner, but I see you’ve already got it worked out.’ He nodded at the bucket of KFC on the table.

  I glanced at her. ‘You want me to reheat?’

  ‘Maybe you should sit down,’ she said. ‘Both of you.’

  The way she said it told me that it wasn’t because the chicken would need more than a minute or two in the microwave. In my job, when folks tell you to sit down it’s usually because they’re gonna tell you something that’ll make you want to jump to your feet, but I took her advice and a chair, along with Arlen’s last Heineken.

  ‘So what’s in the bucket, Marnie?’ Arlen asked her.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t hot. Now that I was looking at it more closely I saw condensation had formed on the sides. A droplet of water slid down into a small puddle that had formed around the base. Arlen sat and frowned at the bucket, waiting.

  Marnie opened her mouth to speak, closed it, opened it again, then closed it. She didn’t know where to start – that much was clear. ‘This is complicated,’ she finally managed to say.

  ‘Just show us what you’ve got,’ I suggested.

  Marnie hesitated and then peeled the lid off the bucket. A white fog of dry-ice vapor rolled up like a smoke ring beneath the lid and climbed above the table, followed by a wave of the stuff pouring out over the sides. I had to admit I was intrigued. So was Arlen, leaning forward on the table, up on his elbows. Marnie’s hand disappeared inside the bucket.

  ‘Some days ago, a woman I have recently come to know received this,’ she said, producing a plain white envelope. She handed it to me. It was cold and wisps of fog clung to the edges. I’d been expecting . . . Actually, I don’t know what I’d been expecting once I knew a drumstick was unlikely, but an envelope wasn’t it.

  ‘Open it,’ Marnie urged.

  I did as she suggested and removed a sheet of paper. A line of default Microsoft Word black twelve-point Times New Roman type was printed on it. The line was italicized suggesting urgency and several words were in caps. The note read, FAILING to come up with $15 MILLION will TRIGGER delivery of his HEAD. You hav
e 20 days. You will be contacted. No police.

  And then Marnie lifted a human hand packed into a meat tray from the KFC bucket and placed it on the table.

  Arlen’s jaw hit the floor.

  The sight of it caught me by surprise too, as well as giving me a flashback to a scene I witnessed in the Congo of a man kneeling in the mud, screaming, as soldiers hacked off both his hands with machetes.

  ‘They run out of chicken?’ I asked her.

  Marnie wasn’t amused.

  I reached for the pen in Arlen’s top pocket and poked the tray with it, positioning it so I could get a better look at the hand, condensation fogging the plastic wrap with each passing second. Through an oval window in the frost, I could see that the hand itself was greenish brown, the fingernails rimmed with dried blood. A gold ring dressed its squat pinky. ‘So who’s the woman who was sent this?’

  ‘Her name’s Alabama. She’s a friend of Anna’s. Or, rather, her boyfriend was,’ Marnie said, looking away from the tray. She got up from the table and walked toward the kitchen, the sight of the severed hand obviously giving her some problems. ‘She’s a topless dancer in Vegas.’

  This was getting more interesting with each passing second. It was also getting more confusing.

  ‘We should call this in to the local PD,’ Arlen decided.

  ‘But the letter . . . it says no cops,’ Marnie said.

  ‘This is a matter for police,’ he insisted.

  I reread the note. Someone wanted money to supposedly stop a man being killed. Presumably the contact mentioned would specify the collection details. I wondered why the capital lettering on selected words. Maybe it was used merely for emphasis. ‘Why don’t you take us through the story from the beginning?’

  ‘Do you mind covering that first?’ she asked, her eyes flicking to the tray.

  I considered whether to use something that wouldn’t leave my DNA on it. The tray and its contents would end up as evidence in a case sooner or later, but Marnie had handled it and I guessed this Alabama person had, too; and I doubted that KFC had provided the original packaging. So I picked up the tray with my fingers and gave the hand a closer inspection through the window of frost, now starting to melt, before returning it to the Colonel’s care.