‘Hello, John,’ Admiral Greer said, still reeling from the news he’d received a half hour before from Dutch Maxwell. Greer pointed him to a seat, and the door was closed. Ritter was smoking, to Kelly’s annoyance.
‘Glad to be back home, Mr Clark?’ the field officer asked. There was a copy of the Washington Post on his desk, and Kelly was surprised to see that the Somerset County story had made the first page there, too.
‘Yes, sir, I guess you can say that.’ Both of the older men caught the ambivalence. ‘Why did you want me to come in?’
‘I told you on the airplane. It may turn out that your action bringing that Russian out might save our people yet. We need people who can think on their ieet. You can. I’m offering you a job in my part of the house.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Whatever we fell you to do,’ Ritter answered. He already had something in mind.
‘I don’t even have a college degree.’
Ritter pulled a thick folder from his desk. ‘I had this brought in from St Louis.’ Kelly recognized the forms. It was his complete Navy personnel-records package. ‘You really should have taken the college scholarship. Your intelligence scores are even higher than I thought, and it shows you have language skills that are better than mine. James and I can waive the degree requirements.’
‘A Navy Cross goes a long way, John,’ Greer explained. ‘What you did, helping to plan BOXWOOD GREEN and then later in the field, that sort of thing goes a long way, too.’
Kelly’s instinct battled against his reason. The problem was, he wasn’t sure which part of him was in favor of what. Then he decided that he had to tell the truth to somebody.
‘There’s a problem, gentlemen.’
‘What’s that?’ Ritter asked.
Kelly reached across the desk and tapped the article on the front page of the paper. ‘You might want to read that.’
‘I did. So? Somebody did the world a favor,’ the officer said lightly. Then he caught the took in Kelly’s eyes, and his voice became instantly wary. ‘Keep talking, Mr Clark.’
“That’s me, sir.’
‘What are you talking about, John?’ Greer asked.
“The file’s out, sir,’ the records clerk said over the phone.
‘What do you mean?’ Ryan objected. ‘I have some copies from it right here.’
‘Could you hold for a minute? I’ll put my supervisor on.’ The phone went on hold, something that the detective cordially hated.
Ryan looked out his window with a grimace. He’d called the military’s central records-storage facility, located in St Louis. Every piece of paper relating to every man or woman who had ever served in uniform was there, in a secure and carefully guarded complex, the nature of which was a curiosity, but a useful one, to the detective, who’d more than once gotten data from the facility.
‘This is Irma Rohrerbach,’ a voice said after some electronic chirping. The detective had the instant mental image of an overweight Caucasian female sitting at a desk cluttered with work that could have been done a week earlier.
‘I’m Lieutenant Emmet Ryan, Baltimore City Police. I need information from a personnel file you have -‘
‘Sir, it’s not here. My clerk just showed me the notes.’
‘What do you mean? You’re not allowed to check files out that way. I know.’
‘Sir, that is not true. There are certain cases. This is one of them. The file was taken out and will be returned, but I do not know when.’
‘Who has it?’
‘I’m not allowed to say, sir.’ The tone of the bureaucrat’s voice showed her intensity of interest, too. The file was gone, and until it came back it was no longer part of the known universe as far as she was concerned.
‘I can get a court order, you know.’ That usually worked on people, few of whom enjoyed the attention of a note from somebody’s bench.
‘Yes, you can. Is there any other way I can help you, sir?’ She was also used to being blustered at. The call was from Baltimore, after all, and a letter from some judge eight hundred miles away seemed a distant and trivial thing. ‘Do you have our mailing address, sir?’
Actually, he couldn’t. He still didn’t quite have enough to take to a judge. Matters like this were handled more as a matter of courtesy than as actual orders.
‘Thank you, I’ll get back’
‘Have a good day.’ The well-wish was in fact the bland dismissal of one more forgettable irrelevance in the day of a file clerk.
Out of the country. Why? For whom? What the hell’s so different about this case? Ryan knew that it had many differences. He wondered if he’d ever have them all figured out.
‘That’s what they did to her,’ Kelly told them. It was the first time he’d actually said it all out loud, and in recounting the details of the pathology report it was as though he were listening to the voice of another person. ‘Because of her background the cops never really assigned much of a priority to the case. I got two more girls out. One they killed. The other one, well …’ He waved at the newspaper.
‘Why did you just turn her loose?’
‘Was I supposed to murder her, Mr Ritter? That’s what they were planning to do,’ Kelly said, still looking down. ‘She was more or less sober when I let her go. I didn’t have the time to do anything else. I miscalculated.’
‘How many?’
‘Twelve, sir,’ he answered, knowing that Ritter wanted the total number of kills.
‘Good Lord,’ Ritter observed. He actually wanted to smile. There was talk, actually, of getting CIA involved in antidrug operations. He opposed that policy – it wasn’t important enough to divert the time of people who should be protecting their country against genuine national-security threats. But he couldn’t smile. This was far too serious for that. ‘The article says twenty kilograms of the stuff. Is that true?’
‘Probably.’ Kelly shrugged. ‘I didn’t weigh it. There’s one other thing. I think I know how the drugs come in. The bags smell like – embalming fluid. It’s Asian heroin.’
‘Yes?’ Ritter asked.
‘Don’t you see? Asian stuff. Embalming fluid. Comes in somewhere on the East Coast. Isn’t it obvious? They’re using the bodies of out KIAs to bring the fucking stuff in.
All this, and analytical ability too?
Ritter’s phone rang. It was the intercom line.
‘I said no calls,’ the field spook growled.
‘It’s “Bill,” sir. He says it’s important.’
The timing was just perfect, the Captain thought. The prisoners were brought out in the darkness. There was no electricity, again, and the only illumination came from battery-powered flashlights and a few torches that his senior sergeant had cobbled together. Every prisoner had his feet hobbled; in each case the hands and elbows were bound behind their backs. They all walked slightly bent forward. It wasn’t just to control them. Humiliation was important, too, and every man had in close attendance a conscript to chivvy him along, right to the center of the compound. His men were entitled to this, the Captain thought. They’d trained hard, were about to begin their long march south to complete the business of liberating and reuniting their country. The Americans were disoriented, clearly frightened at this break in their daily routine. Things had gone easy for them in the past week. Perhaps his earlier assembly of the group had been a mistake. It might have fostered some semblance of solidarity among them, but the object lesson to his troops was more than worth that. His men would soon be killing Americans in larger groups than this, the Captain was sure, but they had to start somewhere. He shouted a command.
As one man, the twenty selected soldiers took their rifles and butt-stroked their individual charges in the abdomen. One American managed to remain standing after the first blow, but not after the second.
Zacharias was surprised. It was the first direct attack on his person since Kolya had stopped that one, months before. The impact drove the air from him. His back already hurt from the lingering effect of his ejection and the deliberately awkward way they’d made him walk, and the impact of the steel buttplate of the AK-47 had taken control of his weakened and abused body away from him at once. He fell to his side, his body touching that of another prisoner, trying to draw his legs in and cover up. Then the kicks started. He couldn’t even protect his face with his arms bound painfully behind him, and his eyes saw the face of the enemy. Just a boy, maybe seventeen, almost girlish in appearance, and the look on his face was that of a doll, the same empty eyes, the same absence of expression. No fury, not even baring his teeth, just kicking him as a child might kick at a ball, because it was something to do. He couldn’t hate the boy, but he could despise him for his cruelty, and even after the first kick broke his nose he kept watching. Robin Zacharias had seen the depths of despair, had faced the, fact that he’d broken on the inside and given up things that he knew. But he’d also had the time to understand it. He wasn’t a coward any more than he was a hero, Robin told himself through the pain, just a man. He’d bear the pain as the physical penalty for his earlier mistake, and he would continue to ask his God for strength. Colonel Zacharias kept his now-blackened eyes on the face of the child tormenting him. I will survive this. I’ve survived worse, and even if I die I’m still a better man than you will ever be, his face told the diminutive soldier. I’ve survived loneliness, and that’s worse than this, kid. He didn’t pray for deliverance now. It had come from within, after all, and if death came, then he could face it as he had faced his weakness and his failings.