“I was told to tail him. Your museum piece got a hit on AFIS and CODIS. The brigadier obviously told you about that. Brad Hoight, a private dick. He had some form. Nothing to write home about, but enough to make him interesting to us. Petty theft, bit of harmless extortion, small-time blackmail; but most of all acts of random violence. Chief thought it was a sign of an unbalanced man. Thought maybe he had become fixated on you.

  “When we ran the registration number of the revolver and it turned out it had belonged to Gregorio McDonald as part of his collection, the coincidence was a bit too much. He’d taken Gregorio’s name and his gun, and he was stalking you. The chief wanted to know why.” He gave a small shrug. “So here I am, following him.”

  I looked back at the body. “So if you didn’t kill him, who did?” I looked back at the corporal. “That is not an easy kill. It takes skill. The kind of skill you have.”

  “Don’t be modest, Harry. You have those same skills yourself.”

  “Yeah, but I just got here. You were supposed to be watching him.”

  “I was. Like I said, he was a private dick. So I had to be careful tailing him. As you well know, creeping through the woods is a noisy business unless you are slow, careful and patient. So he pulled ahead, and by the time I got here, he was dead.” He nodded at the corpse. “Just the way you see him now.”

  “Whoever he came to see killed him?”

  “That’s the way it looks to me. Any suggestions?” There was just a hint of irony in his voice.

  “I had no reason to kill him. All I wanted was information. Information I am now not going to get.” We stood a moment staring at each other, sizing each other up, till I asked him the question that was nagging at my mind.

  “So why do you care if I killed him or not?”

  He shrugged. “Personally, I don’t give a shit, mate. But the chief likes a tight ship. One thing is delivering on a contract. Quite another is going out and performing an unsolicited public service. Rules are strict on that one.”

  “So were you following him or me?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s say I was keeping an eye on both of you.”

  “He told you I might kill Hoight?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Nah, not him. Her.”

  A cold anger suffused my skin. “The colonel?”

  He was enjoying it and made no attempt to hide it. “Yeah, mate, the chief of operations. She was worried you might off the little fucker ’coz he was harassing you.”

  “The colonel told you to watch me in case I tried to murder Hoight.”

  “Yes, Harry.”

  “And what are you going to report to her, Corporal?”

  “That you arrived after he was killed, and that you were unwilling to tell me why you had come to find him.”

  I snarled, “I told you, I wanted to talk to him.”

  “What about, Harry? The skills you picked up murdering prisoners in Afghanistan?”

  I didn’t answer for a moment. Then I crossed the distance that separated us. He was an inch taller than me, with powerful shoulders. He didn’t move. He kept his eyes on mine.

  “You got some beef with me?”

  He gave his head a small shake. “I didn’t know who you were till the colonel told me.”

  “You’re SAS? I don’ remember you.”

  “Corporal Phil Turner, SAS. We never met.”

  “You want to know what I wanted to talk to him about?”

  “I can’t wait, Harry.”

  “See, the guy who’s been harassing me has skills. Real skills. He scaled my house and got into my attic without my noticing, he disabled my alarm system, he got into my room without waking me up. He could have killed me and I would never have known. There aren’t many men on this planet who can do that, Corporal. You know that. You’re the same.”

  I let the words sink in a moment, but he had understood. I gave my head a small shake.

  “Hoight was not one of those men. He went to pieces under pressure. He was slow and clumsy, and overly emotional. But if I had to point to a man who probably did have those skills, I’d point to you. I think you have those skills and some to spare. What do you say, Corporal?”

  “I’d say you’re probably right, Harry.”

  “Did the colonel send you to try and spook me? Was this some kind of stupid test?”

  “You’d have to ask her that, wouldn’t you? I can’t discuss my mission parameters with you.”

  I stepped close, so there were just inches between us. “You go tell the colonel she got it wrong, again. I am not a murderer, or a common criminal. I do my job how I see fit. You tell her if she has questions for me she can damn-well come and ask me to my face! And you tell her the next time she sends some intruder into my house, I will exercise my right under the law and I will gut him and throw him out of the goddamn window.”

  He didn’t look impressed. He looked mildly amused. I gave my head a small shake.

  “Don’t bother. I’ll go tell her myself.”

  I brushed past him and headed back through the soft, cold rain, the way I’d come. His voice stopped me at the edge of the clearing.

  “Sergeant Bauer.”

  I stopped dead and turned back, frowning. “Corporal?”

  “I have often wanted to ask you, why didn’t you intervene at Al-Landy? Why did you do nothing, and just let those people be massacred?”

  I went cold. A trickle of cold water ran down the back of my neck. “Son of a bitch.”

  An old colleague, the brigadier had said.

  “I mean, you could have done something, right?”

  “There was nothing we could do.”

  “I heard there were children, raped and murdered.”

  “All of them.”

  “While you just lay there and watched.”

  “If we had moved in…”

  “They’d been feeding you, right? The villagers. They’d been risking their lives, leaving food and water out for you. And that was part of what got them killed.”

  “They were killed because they had installed a TV in a café.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know how you were able to do it. Just lie there, in the sand, and watch it happen.”

  “You’d better shut your mouth, Corporal. You’d better stop talking. We were a squad. There were four of us. There were over a hundred Taliban, armed with RPGs and heavy machine guns. If we’d moved in they would have killed us in minutes and then proceeded to massacre the village anyway. We had a mission to search and destroy high-value targets. Which we went on to do, and then we caught ben-Amini. Don’t ever talk to me about that subject again, Corporal. You know fuck all about it.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I had a friend in that village. A little girl of four. The following month would have been her fifth birthday. We’d pass by that way sometimes and I would take her chocolate. You must have seen her. Because, you were watching while she was raped and murdered.”

  I could barely hear my voice when I answered him. “There was nothing I could have done.”

  He nodded. “Right. Well, I’ve told you now, haven’t I? got it off my chest. So there’s no fear of my breaking into your house or stalking you. But Sergeant? If ever it came to it, and you tried to gut me and throw me out of the window, I wouldn’t be overconfident about the outcome, if I was you.”

  I turned and walked away with my heart pounding. When I got to the Land Rover I called the brigadier.

  “Yes, Harry.”

  “Brad Hoight is dead.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No! Goddammit, sir! I am not a murderer! I am a soldier! I do not go around murdering every damned asshole who happens to piss me off!”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I didn’t say you were.”

  “Where is the colonel, sir? Is she still in New York or did she go back to DC?”

  “She’s still here. Why? What is this about, Harry?”

  “She detailed Corporal Phil Turner to watch me and make sure I didn’t murder Hoight. I think she ordered him to break into my house too. He has the skills, which I never believed Hoight had. Hoight had some private beef with me, that had to do with McDonald, that’s obvious. But he could never have got into my bedroom without waking me. He could never have moved the way that intruder moved. That was Turner under the colonel’s instructions.”

  “That is one hell of an allegation, Harry.”

  “Turner told me as much just ten minutes ago.”

  “This thing has got to stop between you two.”

  “There is no ‘between,’ sir,” I growled. “I did my job and I wanted to talk to Hoight to see why the hell he was stalking me. It turns out the one who was stalking me and breaking into my house was working on the colonel’s orders because she now believes I am a homicidal maniac!”

  “All right, calm down, Harry. I’ll talk to her and arrange a meeting. Make yourself available this evening.”

  “Sir, I will make myself available, but if I don’t get a call in the next couple of hours, I will find her myself and drag her to HQ in Pleasantville and have her tell you and me what the hell she is doing. And while I am at it, sir, tell the colonel to tell Corporal Turner that the next time he mentions Al-Landy to me, I am going to shove his head so far up his ass he’ll be looking through his own mouth!”

  “All right, Harry. Enough. Go home. I’ll be in touch in the next couple of hours.”

  Seventeen

  I climbed into the truck and slammed the door, and sat a while trying to relax and drumming on the steering wheel, watching the grayness grow wetter outside.

  There are a lot of problems with women. The worst one is that they infect you with their craziness and suddenly, before you know it, you can’t think straight anymore and you lose the ability to see what is right in front of your nose.

  I pressed the ignition, rolled out of the parking lot and headed back slowly toward the City. My mind went back to that night when I awoke, aware that somebody was there in my room. I remembered lying very still, trying to appear like I was sleeping. I always have the drapes and the window open, but he had managed to close them without waking me. That meant he had stood a foot or two from me and I had not sensed him.

  And when I had slipped from the bed, hunkered down and peered around the end of the bed, he was gone. He had left in absolute silence. That is a skill, a very hard skill to master. I wasn’t sure I had mastered it completely.

  I remembered going after him down the stairs with the P226 in my hand. I remembered the ghostly light from the stained-glass window and the shadow that moved across it. I froze the image in my mind. Outside the car, gray, wet mist rose between the moving vehicles, but in my mind all I could see was the frame-by-frame image of that shadow moving in the dull, stained-glass light.

  I had checked every bedroom on the second floor one by one, starting by the stairs and moving along the landing. I had seen nothing, heard nothing. Yet he had been there, watching me. He could have killed me in my bed, he could have killed me then, as I searched for him, but he hadn’t. Because the colonel had told him not to.

  I felt a hot surge of rage and betrayal in my belly. So if he was not supposed to kill me, what was he supposed to do? Spy on me? To prove what?

  I had sprung after him, bellowing, “Stop! Stop goddammit!”

  I saw him in my memory, just a few feet ahead of me, vaulting the banisters in a single, fluid movement. I remembered him in the clearing, strong, powerful, confident. I remembered him walking away from the stoop, back toward the van, the same powerful confidence in his movements. I recognized the hot madness of jealousy eating at the edges of my reason and fought to control it. But the truth was there to be seen. I had risked my life, traveled halfway across the world to find her and save her, and she, in her gratitude, had refused to see me, refused even to attend briefings with me, and had now taken up with this damned thug to spy on me.

  “God dammit!” I pounded the wheel and bellowed without realizing it. “That stupid, damned woman!”

  I had just passed under Castle Hill Avenue and was approaching Exit 53, when my cell rang. It was the brigadier.

  “Yeah!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Bruckner Expressway, approaching exit fifty-three. Headed home.”

  I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to be with Angel, pack a couple of cases, bundle her in the TVR and escape to Vermont for a month in bed and huge log fires, with the occasional walk through drifts of autumn leaves.

  “Take the exit. Come to headquarters at Pleasantville. The colonel is here. I hope you arrive ready to resolve this once and for all. This situation between you two ends today.”

  “I was ready to do that a long time ago, sir. I hope you are ready to accept my resignation. Because I have had just about a bellyful of this BS.”

  “Keep your hair on, Harry. Please let at least two of us behave like adults.”

  I grunted and hung up. At the exit I came off onto the Bruckner Boulevard and just after Soundview I made the three big loops and took the Bronx River Parkway north, with a bitter anger in my gut, resigned to the fact that after I had been through hell and back to save her neck, the colonel had finally managed to kick me out of COBRA.

  It took me just over half an hour to get there, but as late afternoon was turning to copper I turned up Apple Hill Lane and made my way to the large, iron gates that gave onto the sweeping parkland and apple orchards that surrounded, and camouflaged, COBRA HQ.

  I drove up the winding, gravel drive and came finally to a genuine English Jacobean manor house which some crazy tycoon had shipped over brick by brick in the 1920s, gables, tall chimneys and all.

  I was admitted electronically to a stone-flagged hallway, about ten-foot square. The walls were stone too. Directly in front of me there was another, massive wooden door with a screen and a keypad on the wall beside it. I punched in a code and six green lasers scanned my face and my eyes. There was a metallic clunk and the door swung inward.

  I was met by a butler in a white coat who smiled and bowed and said, “Please follow me.”

  I did and he led me through a large lobby with a checkerboard floor and high ceilings supported on wooden rafters. We climbed an elegant staircase up to the next floor. There, down a red-carpeted corridor, he tapped on a wooden door and, without waiting, opened it and stepped in.

  “Mr. Bauer, sir.”

  I knew the study. I had been there before. It had all the Old World elegance of the brigadier and smelled of open fires, furniture polish and pipe tobacco. Books lined the walls on dark wooden bookcases, leather armchairs and sofas stood on genuine Persian rugs, and tall, leaded, gabled windows overlooked sweeping green lawns.

  The colonel was sitting in one of those chesterfields, staring at the dancing flames in the grate. She had a glass of whisky in her hand. She didn’t look at me.

  Over by the window the brigadier rose from behind his desk, smiled and crossed the room to shake my hand.

  “Harry, come on in, take a seat by the fire. Drink?”

  “Thanks.”

  He poured me a generous measure from a decanter and another for himself, and we both sat either side of the colonel, by the fire. She didn’t move but continued to stare at the flames. I made a question with my eyebrow and looked at the brigadier. He said:

  “You are both aware why we are here, and I am afraid we are going to stay here until this problem is resolved one way or another. Now, before we get started, I am going to lay some ground rules, which will be observed by all of us. I want to hear from both of you, and there will be no interrupting, bullying or pulling of rank, except by me.” A ghost of a smile that did not invite a smile in return. “You are both valued, and invaluable, members of my staff, but I am afraid that over the last few months there has been behavior from both of you which has been frankly adolescent. It has to end, here, today. I need you both back working and professional.”

  He waited. I gave a single nod. The colonel continued to stare at the fire. The brigadier addressed me.

  “Harry, I believe you have something to say.”

  I wanted to thank him for giving me a glimpse of what his prep school must have been like. Instead I turned to the colonel.

  “I had a talk with Corporal Phil Turner. I believe he killed Brad Hoight in Huntington Woods. He told me that you, Colonel, had instructed him to follow me. He told me you liked to run a tight ship, that delivering on a contract was one thing, and another was, and I quote, ‘performing an unsolicited public service.’ He told me that you, Colonel, were worried that I might be doing that, delivering unsolicited public services, and that I might do that to Hoight. So what? You had him killed so I wouldn’t murder him?”

  I saw her jaw move, like she was going to say something, but I cut in.

  “I haven’t quite finished yet, Colonel. He said you were worried I might kill Hoight because he was harassing me.” I took a second to repress the hot anger that was brewing in my gut. “I believe your…,” I bit hard on my teeth for a moment, “…your—I am not really sure what to call him, Colonel—your Corporal Phil Turner, has reported to you that I did not kill Hoight. That Hoight was already dead when I arrived. So,” I could not keep the bitterness from my voice, “whoever the murderer is, Colonel, it is not me. The only other person I know of who was there was your Phil.”

  Now her head turned slightly and her eyes swiveled to look at me. I met her eye and let her see the anger and the betrayal I felt. She turned back to the fire.

  “I am almost done. I have to mention the fact that he also raised the issue of my wanting to execute Mohammed ben-Amini in Afghanistan, and I don’t know where he got that information from. After he had mentioned that, he also accused me and my squad of cowardice for not intervening in the Al-Landy massacre. Again, I don’t know how he knew I was there, or whether that view of me as a coward is something you both share and discuss.”

  The brigadier cleared his throat, like he was warning me of something, and the colonel turned and glared at me.

 

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