Collateral Damage (42 page)

“Why?” Jock asked.

“Why what?”

“Why did you do it? Betray your country, your agency.”

“I didn't betray my country. I just wanted a nice nest egg for retirement and when I came across the smuggling ring during another operation, I figured I could get the money and take out the bastards who killed my buddy. A little retribution.”

“What about those women and children killed at Ban Touk?” asked Logan.

“What about them?”

“You don't think they deserved some justice, like maybe the execution of the guy who ordered them killed? Opal or Morrissey or whatever his name was?”

“Fuck 'em. A bunch of slopes. Wrong place, wrong time. We were in a war.”

“Just collateral damage,” Logan said.

Nitzler looked at Logan, a hard, defiant look. “Damn straight, bucko.”

On the last day of August, J.D., Jock, Logan, Doc Desmond, and I sat at a table on the covered patio at the Mar Vista pub. The sun had sunk into the Gulf an hour before and a slight breeze blew off the bay chasing the worst of the heat away. The big ceiling fans circulated the air so that the evening was more pleasant than I had expected.

Jock had arrived on a commercial flight from Houston about an hour before. Doc came from the airport where he'd parked his private jet. The meeting had been arranged the day after we left Virginia. We wanted to give it a couple of weeks for the agencies involved to sort out their options. Somebody would let Jock know the outcome and he would tell us.

After our talk with Nitzler, the three of us had bedded down in rooms on the second floor of the safe house. We were exhausted from our long day and sleep came easily. The next morning we had called Doc's pilot Fred Cassidy at the hotel where he'd spent the night, and he flew us to Atlanta. We met with the remnants of Team Charlie and told them that the danger was over, that they could bring their families home, get back to their lives. They wanted to know more, but all we could tell them was that they'd be told everything in due time, no more than a couple of weeks.

Cassidy had flown us back to Sarasota, and the next day Jock left for Houston. Our adventure was over. J.D. was ribbed by her fellow cops about turning into a fed, but she just laughed them off. The story Bill Lester put out, one that was backed up by Dan Delgado, the special agent in charge of the Tampa office of DEA, was that J.D. had been seconded to the DEA for help in an undercover operation. It had been so hush-hush that the only story anybody could come up with to explain her absence from the key was that she'd disappeared. Lester apologized to his men for the deception
and life returned to the desultory tempo of the island summer.

Jock had been completely briefed by his director and given permission to tell us all that he knew. He didn't actually have a lot to add. We had learned the gist of the Nitzler operation, as we were now calling it, from Nigella and Nitzler. But the story was not complete, and Jock had come to flesh it out. He reiterated what we already knew, giving Doc more information than we'd given him in Atlanta when we met with Team Charlie.

“Who were the Vietnamese involved in this thing?” asked Doc.

“They were part of a drug cartel operating on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There are a lot of Vietnamese fishermen in that area. Most are scrupulously honest and hard working, but a few of them decided to make a killing importing drugs in their fishing boats.”

“Kind of like those guys down in Everglades City a few years back,” said J.D.

“Same thing,” said Jock. “The Vietnamese fishermen would offload drugs from a mother ship way out in the Gulf and bring the drugs in. Sometimes the money is too easy to resist.”

“How did Nitzler get involved with them?” Doc asked.

“He was running an operation against one of the Mexican drug cartels and he stumbled onto the Vietnamese connection in Mississippi. He had the ones involved picked up and told them they would be put in prison if they didn't cooperate with him. They began to funnel some of their money into the Otto Foundation. It was essentially protection money paid to Nitzler to keep him from putting them out of business. When Nitzler needed some people to handle the killings, the leaders supplied a few of their enforcers.”

“Are they still running drugs over there?” asked J.D.

“No,” said Jock. “All the evidence was turned over to DEA and they made the busts.”

“What about the enforcers working for Nitzler?” asked J.D.

“There were only three involved in the killings,” said Jock. “One, the woman who was there at the first attempt on Matt's life, was the sniper. She took out Doc's son, the Fleming boy, and young Lemuel up in North Dakota. The other one, the slasher, killed the Dixson girl at the University of Virginia and tried to take out Matt on the beach. The third guy was the
one we knew as John Nguyen. He broke the
Dulcimer
's captain's neck.”

“Where are they now,” asked Doc.

“Unfortunately, they died in a car wreck,” said Jock. “They were found in a sedan that ran off the road and submerged in a lake in North Carolina. They were passengers in a car driven by a CIA officer named Barry Nitzler. The driver had a blood-alcohol content of about three times the legal limit. All four had been dead for a couple of days when the car was found.”

“What did they do about Llewellyn?” I asked.

“He's fine. The CIA took him back. He was following orders of his boss and had no reason to suspect anything illegal. Neither did any of his team members. He's probably in for some ribbing, but otherwise his career is safe.”

“What about the rest of them?” Logan asked.

“Nigella pled guilty to the money laundering and all charges relating to the murders were dropped. The prosecutor would have had a hard time proving that Nigella had anything to do with them. She's going to be in prison for the next fifteen years. Her aunt, Maude Lane, got the same sentence. She'll probably die behind bars. The other Vietnamese who were involved are going to prison on a whole raft of charges. They'll probably never get out.”

Doc shook his head. “All these years and that damn war isn't over yet.”

“It may never be over,” I said. “At least during the lifetimes of those who fought there.”

“Just think,” said Doc, “one man with an agenda, a ruthless bastard named Nitzler caused all this. The deaths at Ban Touk, our kids, and now Nitzler himself, the man who started it all. In a way, he set up his own death that day in Vietnam when he decided to have us kill those women and children. Logan thought the people after us might have been the avenging angels of Ban Touk. Turns out it was just the same pissant who ordered the deaths of those poor people.”

“Maybe in the end,” said Logan, “we were Ban Touk's avenging angels.”

“I guess we were,” said Doc. “I guess we were.”

Logan, Jock, and Desmond said their goodbyes. Logan was going to drive the other two to the airport. J.D. and I sat alone in the quiet of the late evening, savoring the gentle breeze wafting in from the bay. She was sipping a glass of wine as I worked on my last beer of the evening. We were quiet for a few minutes, lost in our own thoughts.

I felt her hand rest lightly on top of mine and looked up into those startling green eyes. She was smiling, a bit sadly perhaps. “Matt,” she said, “I'll never forget that you came to find me in the Bahamas.”

“I—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Don't say anything.”

I nodded, sat quietly, my hand still under hers on the table.

“You are very special to me,” she said. “More so than I would like. I've made it for years, since my divorce, without any special entanglement. There have been men in my life, but nothing serious. It's been kind of a rule with me. It keeps me from doing something stupid like I did when I married that jerk who tried to beat on me. You could be the exception to that rule. It scares me.”

She sat quietly then, her eyes fixed on my face. “J.D.,” I said, “I've only been in love once in my life. To the woman I married. I messed that one up about as much as your husband did your marriage. She left me and then she died. You've stirred feelings in me that I thought were gone for good. But I'm not sure that I'm man enough to live up to your expectations, to be the man you deserve.”

“You remember in the Bahamas I said I couldn't just accept friskiness as a reason for sex?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I was wrong.”

My heart did that little jig that J.D. seems to be able to trigger. I smiled. “Where does that leave us then?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you want to go home with me?”

“Yes. But I won't. Not tonight anyway.”

I was actually a little relieved. I felt that we had achieved some sort of delicate balance in our relationship, an equilibrium that was more than friendship, but not quite that of lovers. Maybe it was best to keep it that way for a while.

I raised my mug of beer and in my best Bogart imitation said, “Here's looking at you kid.”

She laughed, that wonderful laugh that made my heart want to jump out of my chest and run around the patio in pure joy. “Man,” she said, “you've got to work on that some.”

I smiled. Yes, we had a number of things to work on and we had the long months in the sun stretching before us to figure it all out. There was a hint of romance floating on the air coming off the bay, and there was no better place than our small island to let it develop at its own pace. J.D. and I would be fine, and perhaps soon, we would be better than fine.