‘No,’ he said.
‘Why not? It was an alley, right? How far could they go?
They’ll be buried in the brick somewhere.’
‘Then they won’t do us any good. They’ll be flattened beyond
recognition.’
‘They were jacketed,’ I said. ‘They won’t have broken up. We
could weigh them, at least.’
‘They haven’t found them.’
‘Are they looking?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘They dug up any witnesses yet?’
‘No.’
‘Did they find Brubaker’s car?’
‘No.’
‘It’s got to be right there, Sanchez. He drove down and
arrived at midnight or one o’clock. In a distinctive car. Aren’t
they looking for it?’
‘There’s something they’re not sharing. I can feel it.’
‘Did Willard get there yet?’
‘I expect him any minute.’
‘Tell him Brubaker is all wrapped up,’ I said. ‘And tell him
you heard the other thing wasn’t a training accident after all.
That should make his day.’
Then I hung up. Walked back to the wire cage. Summer
had stepped inside and she was shoulder-to-shoulder with the
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armoury clerk behind the stand-up desk. They were leafing
through his log book together.
‘Look at this,’ she said.
She used both forefingers to show me two separate entries.
Trifonov had signed out his personal Steyr GB nine-millimetre
pistol at seven thirty in the evening of January 4th. He had
signed it back in at a quarter past five on the morning of the
fifth. His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I
guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was
new to writing with Roman letters.
‘Why did he take it?’I said.
‘We don’t ask for a reason,’ the clerk said. ‘We just do the
paperwork.’
We came out of the hangar and walked towards the accommodation
block. Passed the end of an open parking lot. There
were forty or fifty cars in it. Typical soldiers’ rides. Not many
imports. There were some battered plain-vanilla sedans, but
mostly there were pick-up trucks and big Detroit coupds, some
of them painted with flames and stripes, some of them with
hiked back ends and chrome wheels and fat raised-letter tyres.
There was only one Corvette. It was red, parked all by itself on
the end of a row, three spaces from anything else.
We detoured to take a look at it.
It was about ten years old. It looked immaculately clean,
inside and out. It had been washed and waxed, thoroughly,
within the last day or two. The wheel arches were clean. The
tyres were black and shiny. There was a coiled hose on the
hangar wall, thirty feet away. We bent down and peered in
through the windows. The interior looked like it had been
soaked with detailing fluid and wiped and vacuumed. It was a
two-place car, but there was a parcel shelf behind the seats. It
was a small space. Small, but probably big enough for a crowbar
hidden under a coat. Summer knelt down and ran her
fingers under the sills. Came up with clean hands.
‘No grit from the track,’ she said. ‘No blood on the seats.’
‘No yogurt pot on the floor,’ I said.
‘He cleaned up after himself.’
We walked away. We went out through their main gate and
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locked Trifonov’s gun in the front of our Humvee. Then we
turned around and headed back inside.
I didn’t want to involve the adjutant. I just wanted to get
Trifonov out of there before anyone knew what was going down.
So we went in through the mess kitchen door and I found
a steward and told him to find Trifonov and bring him out
through the kitchen on some kind of a pretext. Then we
stepped back into the cold and waited. The steward came out
alone five minutes later and told us Trifonov wasn’t anywhere in
the mess.
So we headed for the cells. Found a soldier coming out of
the showers and he told us where to look. We walked past
Carbone’s empty room. It was quiet and undisturbed. Trifonov
bunked three doors further down. We got there. His door was
standing open. The guy was right there in his room, sitting on
the narrow cot, reading a book.
I had no idea what to expect. As far as I knew Bulgaria had