Hard Rain (24 page)

‘So that if one set got stolen, there was always a copy in the floor safe.’

‘Exactly. And the killers fell for it. They murdered him, blew the door off his wall safe, and were happy enough with what they found to stop looking and swim back to the
Onur,
from whence they came.’

‘Fits the facts,’ Masters agreed. She took a walk around the room, digesting the theory. ‘It certainly explains why Portman would mail that combination back to himself.’

‘Only, Portman didn’t take Fedai’s actions into account. He arrived early for work, perhaps earlier than usual, found his boss all over the top floor and saw the wall safe blown. And because maybe Portman trusted him, he knew about the hidden floor safe and had a combination to it. Maybe Portman confided in him. So he opened it, took whatever he found inside, and split.’

‘And then a few days after the murder, we’re looking over Fedai’s home and we get jumped by a bunch of thugs who are after him,’ said Masters. ‘
They
have to be our hit squad, our team of assassins.’ She was leaning forward, looking at her feet – excited, but avoiding eye contact.

‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘Out with it.’

She wrung her hands together. ‘We’ve got problems.’

‘Ones I’m not aware of?’

‘Kumayt. I already know a lot about it.’

T
here was a stillness in the office like it was holding its breath. ‘You want to fill me in?’ I said, finally, if only to get the room’s diaphragm working again. At least the reason for Masters’ sullen demeanour was now out in the open. A knock on the doorframe distracted me.

‘Ah, the sleuths are in . . .’ It was Ambassador Burnbaum, back from Ankara. He was beaming, dressed in an immaculate tailored Italian suit, white cotton shirt, red silk tie, a Stars and Stripes pin in one lapel.

An entourage of male aftershave and body scents rushed forward from him, hooked their fingers into my nose and clamped onto my epiglottis. The guy had gone for a swim in Calvin Klein. I figured he was on his way out to some function, ambassadors being, generally speaking, happy to roll up to the opening of a clamshell.

‘The New York City Ballet Company is in town. I’m off to the preview,’ he announced. ‘Just let me know if you want tickets, okay?’

‘Thank you, Mr Ambassador. I might take you up on that,’ I said, though I doubted it – men in tights only doing it for me when one of them is Mel Brooks. ‘In the meantime, do you have a moment, sir? We’d like to bring you up to speed on the investigation, and maybe ask you a few more questions.’

Burnbaum checked his Breitling for permission. ‘Well, yes, I suppose, as long as you keep it brief.’

‘Do our best, sir,’ I said as he took a seat on the couch and crossed his legs.

Masters got up, walked to my desk and leaned against it.

‘To start with, Mr Ambassador,’ I began, ‘we don’t think Colonel Portman was the victim of a serial killer. We believe he was assassinated by a hit squad, possibly one with military or special forces training.’

Burnbaum’s mouth dropped open. He eventually got control of it. ‘But what about the other killings . . . ?’

‘We believe they were a false trail, designed to lead us away from the real reason that Colonel Portman was murdered.’

‘Do you have any evidence to support this theory?’ Burnbaum asked, his face a conglomerate of disbelief, tragedy and concern.

‘No, nothing hard,’ I said, but maybe that would change tomorrow at Ephesus. I took the crinkled email from ‘B’ off my desk and passed it to him.

‘What’s this?’

‘We believe Colonel Portman was involved in some way in an infrastructure project at a place called Kumayt, down in southern Iraq. Would you know anything about that?’

Burnbaum shook his head slowly, frowning, thinking hard on the question. ‘No, no. I don’t . . . Where did you say? Iraq’s not exactly my turf.’

‘You don’t know who this B could be, sir?’

‘Well, it’s certainly not from me, if that’s what you’re thinking. Frankly, I have no idea. Where did you get it?’ He handed back the ragged sheet of paper.

I filled him in on its discovery.

‘That was a stroke of luck,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Ambassador, I’ve spent a fair bit of time going through Portman’s correspondence and I can’t find the rest of it. Or, in fact, any email that refers to events or projects he might have been involved in.’

‘So what are you suggesting, Special Agent? That Portman’s email folders have been tampered with?’

‘Is that possible?’ I asked, putting it back on him.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’ The Ambassador stood. ‘I don’t have to tell you both that your allegations are grave.’

He was right – he didn’t have to tell us that.

‘Do you yet have any suspects for these murders?’ he asked.

‘We’re looking at a few people.’

‘Are they part of my mission?’

‘No,’ I said, telling him what he wanted to hear.

‘That’s something at least.’ He shook his head, dismayed.

‘That’s all we’ve got for the moment, sir,’ I said. ‘We’ve been hoping to catch you and bring you up to speed.’

‘I appreciate the heads-up, Special Agents. You’re both doing great work here. Now, if you don’t mind?’

‘Just one thing, Mr Ambassador – would you know if Harvey Stringer’s in the building?’ I asked.

‘I think Harvey’s still in the States.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Well, keep up the good work,’ he said, giving us a few more words of motivation. They weren’t necessary, nailing up the bad guys being the fun part of the job. He gave us both a nod and departed.

And after he was gone, I was back where I started: circling Masters for an opening. ‘You want to play twenty questions?’ I asked.

Masters returned to the couch and sat heavily.

I tried some small talk to loosen her up a little. ‘What did you make of Burnbaum?’

She shrugged. ‘I think he’s about ready for retirement.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said, sitting beside her. ‘So, here we are . . . a little spot called Kumayt.’

‘Maybe you’ll understand how difficult this is for me once I’ve told you.’

‘Just tell me what you know before I go get a crowbar and jimmy it out of you,’ I replied. Nothing but silence for another few seconds. I
sighed and looked around the room. ‘Something tells me this is going to be a long night.’

Masters turned to glare at me. Her anger magnified the palette of her eyes and they flashed like opals. ‘Richard asked me to help compile his case for the DoD,’ she began, ‘which meant I got to see a lot of sensitive material – facts, figures, depositions. The arguments and counterarguments about aerosolised DU oxide and its effects on the human body aren’t neatly balanced. For every scientist or expert who’s anti DU, there are half-a-dozen who are pro.’

I nodded. That wasn’t so surprising.

‘But if you dig around, what you find is pretty ominous. When Richard came over this afternoon, he spent most of the time in the bath . . .’

I chose that moment to tactically retie a shoelace.

‘And I know I shouldn’t have, but while he was out of the room, I went through his notes.’

‘Is that why you’re upset? You feeling guilty?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m feeling. I’m upset because I’m betraying a trust.’

I wasn’t going to argue with her.

‘I wrote down some stuff,’ said Masters, opening her notebook and reading. ‘Twenty-eight per cent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems loosely called “Gulf War Syndrome”. That’s more than five times the rate of Nam vets.’

‘
What
?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She referred back to her notebook. ‘How about this: over seven thousand soldiers were reported as having been wounded in Gulf War I. But over
half-a-million
vets have received disability compensation. That makes the number of vets disabled since that war finished
seventy times
the number wounded in the conflict itself.’

‘Shit . . . all because of DU?’

‘That’s what this class action’s all about – the people sitting on the other side of the courtroom from Richard believe it’s a big part of the reason why they’re sick, and that it’s being covered up. And then there’s Capstone. The full title was
The Capstone Depleted Uranium Aerosols Study &
Human Health Risk Assessment
. The report cost six million dollars and was prepared for Washington by a company called Battelle. Battelle is a major nuclear contractor to the US government, by the way.’

‘Call me cynical, but a company like that is hardly going to bite the hand that feeds it.’

‘It’s unlikely,’ Masters agreed. ‘From what I can make out, one of the main arguments against the claims that DU is harmful is that there are no results from tests done into the long-term effects of exposure. Could be that the people with the money to spend on that kind of research . . . well, they don’t want it done.’

‘You sound like you’ve changed teams.’

‘Plenty of questions have been asked about the validity of the report’s findings and yet so far there haven’t been a lot of answers. It makes you think.’

It did. It made me think about the way Tyler had slowly wasted away and the fight he’d put up – and the anger I felt about this was rising into my temples.

‘So anyway,’ she continued, ‘back in 1979, this same company that now proclaims depleted uranium is harmless found that more than thirty per cent of those aerosolised DU particles remained airborne until inhaled or rained out. And Battelle can’t claim ignorance about how easily and effectively aerosolised DU can penetrate the human body, because it has a subsidiary that develops aerosol devices to deliver medications
through the lungs
. When they get into your body, these small particles emit alpha radiation that penetrates the cells around them, wreaking damage all the way down to the DNA level.’

‘Must have been a long bath,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘You’ve become an overnight expert.’

‘I’m an investigator, remember? I had questions – these are some of the answers.’

‘So what happens to those rained-out particles?’

‘My understanding is that they end up in the ground water or the food chain, or both. From there, it’s only a short trip to your kidneys,
which get necrotised – die, basically. And you know, at the end of the report, there’s a disclaimer. I wrote it down because it made me laugh. Well, maybe not laugh, exactly . . .’ Masters flipped backwards and forwards through a few pages until she found it, and started reading.
‘Neither the US government nor Battelle is responsible for the accuracy, adequacy or applicability of the contents, or any consequences of any use, misuse, inability to use or reliance upon the information
.’

‘Sounds like a sidestep written by someone like your fiancé.’

‘Whether you like it or not, Richard’s just doing his job.’

I sucked something out from between a couple of teeth. Of course he was. ‘Dick’s not going to be real happy when he finds out you’ve been doing yours amongst his case notes.’

‘He already found out, because I told him,’ she replied.

‘How’d he take it?’

‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’

‘Suit yourself. You still haven’t told me what any of this has to do with Kumayt.’

‘I found a register amongst Richard’s notes,’ Masters continued. ‘During both Gulf wars there were sites established to dispose of wreckage contaminated by DU – trucks, armour, et cetera. There’s a rumour that Kumayt is one of the places where a dump is located, where they buried wrecks from the Highway of Death. They trucked them up there, dug a big hole, and pushed the lot into it. According to what I’ve heard, that wreckage was over a hundred times more radioactive than the background radiation.’

The Highway of Death. It was before my time in the military but I remembered the pictures. The road out of Kuwait heading to Basra where, on a Sunday night early in ’91, mile after mile of the retreating Iraqi army was charred beyond recognition, shot up by DU fired from Coalition aircraft back when DU was just a whispered half-secret. I sat back and exhaled. Kumayt, the Highway of Death, the unresolved issues circling the use and effects of depleted uranium . . . ‘So what exactly have we got here now? A series of savage murders linked to a radioactive trash heap?’

M
asters shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe we should do what Adem Fedai suggests and put the place under the microscope.’

‘Well, don’t let me get in your way,’ I said. I returned to my desk, ignored Mehmet on the wall behind me feeding the earth blood and bone, and fired up the Dell. My inbox was clogged with the usual office detritus plus two emails from Rodney Cain, one from the FBI with information already relayed about the explosives, another from someone in State I’d never met, and – at last – a note from Andrews Flight Records.

Before I opened any of them I sent an email to Cain, debriefing him on the discovery of the email from ‘B’, and asking him to run a search on tenders for reconstruction projects in the area of Kumayt, southern Iraq, over the last five years. I asked him to be especially interested in tenders for hospitals and/or water projects.

Cain’s email to me was one forwarded from the Turkish police with the subject line, ‘Onur’. I skimmed it. Homicide – Karli and Iyaz’s people – had found the vessel’s master in his car. It was burnt out and the back of his charred head was found in the rear passenger foot-wells. Two nine-millimetre holes above the guy’s left eye completed
the story. Most of the drowned men aboard the
Onur
had bleeding and cracked fingernails. There was also quite a bit of smashed furniture that had made no impression whatsoever on the steel coffin sinking into the Sea of Marmara, aside, that is, from a little chipped rust on the one door out. Forensics had come up with no leads. Nothing I hadn’t expected: a bunch of ends, neatly pinched off with nothing left loose.

The captain’s second email was another forwarded from the Turkish police. They’d failed to find any trace of the assholes in the park, apparently. No surprises there either.

Next, I clicked on the email from a Tracey Pratt, who, according to her email address, worked for State. I doubted that, if only because it was Pratt who’d forwarded both Masters and me a copy of the CIA background checks on Adem Fedai, the file promised by Harvey Stringer. ‘You got all these emails?’ I called across the room, ‘two from Cain, one from CIA masquerading as State, one from Andrews Flight Records?

‘Nothing from Andrews. Opening the others now,’ said Masters.

I clicked on the Flight Records email and read it. This one gave me a surprise. ‘Hey . . .’

Masters looked up.

‘I’m sending you this. Y’know how everyone – including me – keeps talking about how Portman was this incredible F-15 appi-8 warrior?’

‘So?’

‘So the guy was officially grounded a month before he died.’

‘Why?’

‘Wasn’t putting in the required hours.’

‘What was his last mission?’

I opened the PDF, a copy of a page of Portman’s flight log, and translated the block of data. ‘With the Reapers. A training sortie out of Incirlik.’

‘Miffed’ was the word that best described Emir when Masters told him we were leaving him and his second-hand smoke behind. The drive
down to Ephesus, which turned out to be the site of a bunch of Roman ruins, would have taken around eight hours, give or take. I figured we were doing the guy a favour. He wouldn’t have survived the trip, and I’d have been up for manslaughter. Rather than sharing Emir’s company, we could catch a one-hour flight to Izmir, a city near Ephesus, jump in a rental and drive the short distance remaining. The term for this alternative was ‘no brainer’.

So it was that Masters and I arrived at Ephesus around two hours before the appointed time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll rewind.

As expected, we pulled an all-nighter, mostly reviewing our case notes, going back over interviews, reviewing the forensic notes, chasing Karli and Iyaz for anything new (there wasn’t anything new), calling folks in the States, and spinning our wheels over getting any additional hard information about those pits holding radioactive wreckage in Iraq, in particular, the one at Kumayt. The US Department of Energy had quietly consulted on the containment operations in Iraq, the handling and disposal of radioactive waste being its specialty, but calling from the other side of the world as we were, it was easy to be given the runaround.

The CIA background check on Adem Fedai was interesting. He was a Kurd, had a peasant background. His family still tended goats in the mountains between Turkey and Iraq. Masters’ research took in a review of the Yezidi, the supposed Satanist worshippers of which Fedai was allegedly a member. Apparently, the devil-worship thing was a label the sect had been enduring for at least a couple of thousand years. Their religion was older than Islam, older than Christianity, and probably challenged Judaism in the most-ancient stakes. Yezidis believed that God had forgiven the Fallen Angel – ‘the Peacock Angel’, as they called Him – after He refused to say some nice words about Adam, which was where the religion’s reputation took a fall. Other odd facts: Yezidis were forbidden to wear the colour blue, they didn’t worship heaven or hell, and lettuce was off their menu. Lettuce? If they just added brussels sprouts to the forbidden list, maybe there was an opportunity to turn around the sect’s slide into obscurity.

Fedai himself had never worked as a manservant before being hired by Portman, but he was educated and had no strange affiliations other than the one he was born into. Basically, the FBI and then the CIA had both done the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug, said ‘What the hell, he’s clear’ and banged his forms with all the right stamps.

Moving on to Kumayt, research revealed it was a small Shiite town around 170 miles south-east of Baghdad and forty miles from the Iranian border. Twenty minutes on Google Earth put it roughly midway between Baghdad and Al Basra, around 160 miles from both. Tallil Air Base was eighty miles south-west of Kumayt, just twenty convenient minutes away by chopper. Someone in Portman’s position would have been able to scoot down there fairly easily if he’d wanted to.

Kumayt itself was built on dwindling marshland where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. According to the intel we had access to, in comparison with most places in the hornet’s nest of Iraq, the town was a sleepy hollow. But something was going on there, and it was connected to Portman’s dramatic exit. Adem Fedai, we were also reasonably sure, would lead us to it.

Most of the two hours we had up our sleeve in the Ephesus parking lot I spent asleep, with my head on my chest, drooling onto the seatbelt.

My body clock woke me twenty minutes before the alarm Masters had set on her cell phone was due to go off. I watched a tour bus disgorge its load in the light rain. The tourists hooked up with a guide and slowly trickled down the hill.

I had with me the photograph of Fedai, which I removed from my jacket pocket and propped on the instrument panel. Another tour bus arrived and dropped off its passengers. I looked at the photo. The guy had a pleasant though unremarkable face: brown eyes, olive complexion, dark hair, moustache. He was short, just under five foot seven, and had a slight build. Add it all together and it was easy to see how he could just disappear in a country like Turkey. He looked like every second guy you passed in the street. Fedai must have got the shock of his
life when he came to work that morning and found the mess his boss had made all over the carpet. But somehow he’d kept his head, and he was still alive while others connected with this case were fattening up worms. He was smart. I wondered how smart.

I glanced at Masters. Every inhaled breath was catching quietly in her soft palate as she slept. I wondered how things were between her and her fiancé. There were plenty of reasons for them to be going off the rails. Maybe that’s why the guy looked like he’d swallowed a turd when I’d seen him in the elevator back at the Charisma. Masters took a deeper breath, shifted position, and her hair slid in layers across her face. She was a hell of a lot easier to get on with when she was snoring. I decided to give her a few more minutes. But then I changed my mind.

‘Anna.’ I shook her arm.

‘Wha . . . ?’ Masters was disoriented with sleep. Her eyes opened, blinked a couple of times and brought me into focus. ‘God, it’s a nightmare,’ she said before turning away.

‘Rise and shine. Fedai. He’s here early.’ Like us.

The guy had suddenly appeared, standing under a black umbrella a dozen metres from the ticket box.

‘Jesus, I fell asleep,’ Masters informed me.

‘Yeah, that’s unforgivable. Let’s go.’ I cracked open the door and got out. I didn’t bother with an umbrella because that’s the kind of macho guy I am. Also, it was barely spitting.

‘You see him arrive?’ Masters asked.

‘No. The guy’s frightened. He could have been here all day, scoping the place out.’

When Fedai saw us approach, he turned and joined a tour group heading off across the open ground to the first set of ruins.

‘Did you read the guidebook?’ Masters enquired as we set off after him.

‘Nope.’

‘This place was once the capital of the whole of Asia Minor.’

‘Have you brought your flag on a stick? I might get lost,’ I said.

‘Thought you might be interested in a little culture. Ephesus was sacred to Artemis.’

‘The brand of handbag?’

‘That’s Aramis, and
they
make perfumes. Artemis was the goddess of hunting, of the chase.’

‘I feel an omen coming on,’ I said, tuning out.

Adem Fedai appeared nervous, his head swivelling continuously. It was obvious from his disappearance, the location of this meeting place, and the way he moved, that Fedai believed he was in danger. I was pretty sure I agreed with his assessment. The guy detached himself from the tour group as it loitered around a bunch of crooked columns and continued moving down the hill. We followed.

‘He’s heading to the library,’ said Masters.

I assumed Masters was talking about a columned façade at the foot of the hill, which reminded me of any number of modern government and municipal buildings, though somewhat more ideally in proportion, but in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. I’d seen this ruin before, on a postcard or stamp, or maybe in a history book.

Fedai glanced over his shoulder as he climbed the steps up to the façade’s main entrance – a glance to check we were still in his shadow. Somehow we’d managed to engineer a gap in the tour groups and the forecourt was empty. Fedai stepped beneath the main arch and disappeared inside. We had one last look around before following. The coast, from what we could see, was clear. We took the stairs and went in. The room was small and open to the sky.

‘You will turn around and face the wall,’ said the voice I’d heard coming out of Ocirik’s cell. The man speaking it was the same man in the photo, but he was now somehow tougher, more determined than he’d been in the message, and the moustache was lost in a couple of weeks of beard.

‘Why would we do that?’ Masters asked, beating me to it.

‘Because I am nervous,’ he replied, pulling a hand out of his coat. His fingers were wrapped around the familiar black plastic stock of a Glock 19, revealing the source of his bravado. The arm was bent at the elbow,
so that the weapon was resting on his hip. He didn’t look too nervous to me.

We did as we were told, and turned to face the wall. Graffiti had been scratched over the stone. Apparently, Guido was here in 1879, along with a bunch of other people who felt compelled to recall the event for posterity.

‘You are armed?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

He frisked me anyway with his free hand, and gave Masters the same half-hearted treatment. He might have been familiar with guns, but not with hostage taking. ‘Show me ID,’ he demanded, glancing at the entrance to check on our continued privacy.

We pulled our shields and held them out.

‘You’re comfortable around firearms,’ said Masters as he examined our credentials.

Fedai shrugged. ‘I am Kurdish. My people live in the mountains. Saddam try to kill us. The Turks try to kill us. I cannot remember a time when I have not been able to reach out and take a weapon.’

‘So much for the Company’s background checks,’ Masters observed under her breath.

‘Hand over the gun, Fedai,’ I said. ‘We’re taking you into custody.’ If I sounded confident, it was only because I believed that the last thing Fedai wanted to do was shoot us.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I do not think so.’

‘It’s for your own safety.’

‘And what will you do? Sleep on the mat outside my cell?’ He shook his head, pulling back his coat and burying the muzzle in his belt. ‘I trust
you
, Mr Special Agent, but I do not trust the Turks. When I am finished here, I will trust the mountains. And also, I know you cannot arrest me. You are American. You have no powers here.’

He had me there. ‘What did you see when you arrived for work that morning?’ I asked, letting the whole arrest thing slide. Fedai had managed to keep himself alive till now. Maybe he knew how to keep doing so. And, as he and his Glock pointed out, what choice did I have?

‘I did not see the killing. I saw blood, and pieces of body. I have seen much death, but none delivered with such . . .’ He searched for a word in the limited English-language thesaurus between his ears. ‘. . . such pleasure. Over the smell of death, there was another smell – sweet. I have been in hospitals. It was like that.’

‘Chloroform,’ Masters offered.

‘I like Mr Portman. He was good man. We talk. We talk of many things.’

‘In that phone message delivered by Ocirik, you said you had something for us,’ said Masters, suddenly impatient.

Movement out the corner of my eye caught my attention. A posse of tourists was meandering towards us, picking its way across the flagstones.

‘The safe in the floor was secret,’ continued Fedai. ‘No one know of this except Mr Portman and me. The safe in the wall – it was destroyed. I went to safe in the floor, open it. I took what was inside, and then I run.’ Fedai reached down inside his coat, produced a large envelope and handed it to me. ‘I think Mr Portman, he want you to have this.’

The package was heavy, had a bulge in it. I tipped the loose contents into my hand, leaving a wad of papers behind in the envelope: a USB memory stick and a small white plastic bottle containing a liquid the colour of orange Gatorade.