Persuader Part 4

"This whole thing is off the books," she said.

"So how are you working it?"

"I'm a team leader. n.o.body's looking over my shoulder day to day. I'm pretending I'm working on something else. But I'm not. I'm working on this."

"So n.o.body knows this woman is missing?"

"Just my team," she said. "Seven of us. And now you."

I said nothing.

"We came straight here," she said. "We need a break. Why else would we fly up here on a Sunday?"

The room went quiet. I looked from her to Eliot and back to her. They needed me. I needed them. And I liked them. I liked them a lot. They were honest, likable people.

They were like the best of the people I used to work with.

"I'll trade," I said. "Information for information. We'll see how we get along. And then we'll take it from there."

"What do you need?"

I told her I needed ten-year-old hospital records from a place called Eureka in California.

I told her what kind of a thing to look for. I told her I would stay in Boston until she got back to me. I told her not to put anything on paper. Then they left and that was it for day two. Nothing happened on day three. Or day four. I hung around. I find Boston acceptable for a couple of days. It's what I call a forty-eight town. Anything more than forty-eight hours, and it starts to get tiresome. Of course, most places are like that for me.

I'm a restless person. So by the start of day five I was going crazy. I was ready to a.s.sume they had forgotten all about me. I was ready to call it quits and get back on the road. I was thinking about Miami. It would be a lot warmer down there. But late in the morning the phone rang. It was her voice. It was nice to hear.

"We're on our way up," she said. "Meet you by that big statue of whoever it is on a horse, halfway around the Freedom Trail, three o'clock."

It wasn't a very precise rendezvous, but I knew what she meant. It was a place in the North End, near a church. It was springtime and too cold to want to go there without a purpose but I got there early anyway. I sat on a bench next to an old woman feeding house sparrows and rock doves with torn-up crusts of bread. She looked at me and moved to another bench. The birds swarmed around her feet, pecking at the grit. A watery sun was fighting rainclouds in the sky. It was Paul Revere on the horse.

Duffy and Eliot showed up right on time. They were wearing black raincoats all covered in little loops and buckles and belts. They might as well have worn signs around their necks saying Federal Agents from Was.h.i.+ngton D.C. They sat down, Duffy on my left and Eliot on my right. I leaned back and they leaned forward with their elbows on their knees.

"Paramedics fished a guy out of the Pacific surf," Duffy said. "Ten years ago, just south of Eureka, California. White male, about forty. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest. Small-caliber, probably.22s. Then they figure he was thrown off a cliff into the ocean."

"He was alive when they fished him out?" I asked, although I already knew the answer.

"Barely," she said. "He had a bullet lodged near his heart and his skull was broken. Plus one arm and both legs and his pelvis, from the fall. And he was half-drowned. They operated on him for fifteen straight hours. He was in intensive care for a month and in the hospital recuperating for another six."

"ID?"

"Nothing on him. He's in the records as a John Doe."

"Did they try to ID him?"

"No fingerprint match," she said. "Nothing on any missing-persons lists. n.o.body came to claim him."

I nodded. Fingerprint computers tell you what they're told to tell you.

"What then?" I asked.

"He recovered," she said. "Six months had pa.s.sed. They were trying to work out what to do with him when he suddenly discharged himself. They never saw him again."

"Did he tell them anything about who he was?"

"They diagnosed amnesia, certainly about the trauma, because that's almost inevitable.

They figured he might be genuinely blank about the incident and the previous day or two.

But they figured he must be able to remember things from before that, and they got the strong impression he was pretending not to. There's a fairly extensive case file.

Psychiatrists, everything. They interviewed him regularly. He was extremely resolute.

Never said a word about himself."

"What was his physical condition when he left?"

"Pretty fair. He had visible scars from the GSWs, that's about all."

"OK," I said. I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky.

"Who was he?"

"Your guess?" I said.

".22s to the head and chest?" Eliot said. "Dumped in the ocean? It was organized crime.

An a.s.sa.s.sination. Some kind of hit man got to him."

I said nothing. Looked up at the sky.

"Who was he?" Duffy said again.

I kept on looking up at the sky and dragged myself ten years backward through time, to a whole different world.

"You know anything about tanks?" I asked.

"Military tanks? Tracks and guns? Not really."

"There's nothing to them," I said. "I mean, you like them to be able to move fast, you want some reliability, you don't object to some fuel economy. But if I've got a tank and you've got a tank, what's the only thing I really want to know?"

"What?"

"Can I shoot you before you can shoot me? That's what I want to know. If we're a mile apart, can my gun reach you? Or can your gun reach me?"

"So?"

"Of course, physics being physics, the likely answer is if I can hit you at a mile, then you can hit me at a mile. So it comes down to ammunition. If I stand off another two hundred yards so your sh.e.l.l bounces off me without hurting me, can I develop a sh.e.l.l that doesn't bounce off you? That's what tanks are all about. The guy in the ocean was an army intelligence officer who had been blackmailing an army weapons specialist."

"Why was he in the ocean?"

"Did you watch the Gulf War on TV?" I asked.

"I did," Eliot said.

"Forget about the smart bombs," I said. "The real star of the show was the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. It scored about four hundred to zip against the Iraqis, who were using the best anybody ever had to give them. But having the war on TV meant that we'd shown our hand to the whole world, so we better get on with dreaming up some new stuff for the next time around. So we got on with it."

"And?" Duffy asked.

"If you want a sh.e.l.l to fly farther and hit harder, you can stuff more propellant into it. Or make it lighter. Or both. Of course, if you're stuffing more propellant into it, you've got to do something pretty radical elsewhere to make it lighter. Which is what they did. They took the explosive charge out of it. Which sounds weird, right? Like, what's it going to do? Go clang and bounce off? But they changed the shape. They dreamed up this thing that looks like a giant lawn dart. Built-in fins and all. It's cast from tungsten and depleted uranium. The densest metals you can find. It goes real fast and real far. They called it the long-rod penetrator."

Duffy glanced at me with her eyelids low and smiled and blushed all at the same time. I smiled back.

"They changed the name," I said. "Now it's called the APFSDS. I told you they like initials. Armor Piercing Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot. It's powered by its own little rocket motor, basically. It hits the enemy tank with tremendous kinetic energy. The kinetic energy changes to heat energy, just like they teach you in high school physics. It melts its way through in a split second and sprays the inside of the enemy tank with a jet of molten metal, which kills the tankers and blows up anything explosive or flammable.

It's a very neat trick. And either way, you shoot, you score, because if the enemy armor is too thick or you've fired from too far away, the thing just sticks partway in like a dart and spalls, which means it fragments the inner layer of the armor and throws scabs of scalding metal around inside like a hand grenade. The enemy crew come apart like frogs in a blender. It was a brilliant new weapon."

"What about the guy in the ocean?"

"He got the blueprints from the guy he was blackmailing," I said. "Piece by piece, over a long period of time. We were watching him. We knew exactly what he was doing. He was aiming to sell them to Iraqi Intelligence. The Iraqis wanted to level the playing field for the next time around. The U.S. Army didn't want that to happen."

Eliot stared at me. "So they had the guy killed?"

I shook my head. "We sent a couple of MPs down to arrest him. Standard operating procedure, all legal and aboveboard, believe me. But it went wrong. He got away. He was going to disappear. The U.S. Army really didn't want that to happen."

"So then they had him killed?"

I looked up at the sky again. Didn't answer.

"That wasn't standard procedure," Eliot said. "Was it?"

I said nothing.

"It was off the books," he said. "Wasn't it?"

I didn't answer.

"But he didn't die," Duffy said. "What was his name?"

"Quinn," I said. "Turned out to be the single worst guy I ever met."

"And you saw him in Beck's car on Sat.u.r.day?"

I nodded. "He was being chauffeured away from Symphony Hall."

I gave them all the details I had. But as I talked we all knew the information was useless.

It was inconceivable that Quinn would be using his previous ident.i.ty. So all I had to offer was a physical description of a plain-looking white man about fifty years old with two.22 GSW scars on his forehead. Better than nothing, but it didn't really get them anywhere.

"Why didn't his prints match?" Eliot asked.

"He was erased," I said. "Like he never existed."

"Why didn't he die?"

"Silenced.22," I said. "Our standard issue weapon for covert close work. But not a very powerful weapon."

"Is he still dangerous?"

"Not to the army," I said. "He's ancient history. This all was ten years ago. The APFSDS will be in the museum soon. So will the Abrams tank."

"So why try to trace him?"

"Because depending on exactly what he remembers he could be dangerous to the guy who went to take him out."

Eliot nodded. Said nothing.

"Did he look important?" Duffy asked. "On Sat.u.r.day? In Beck's car?"

"He looked wealthy," I said. "Expensive cashmere overcoat, leather gloves, silk scarf. He looked like a guy who was accustomed to being chauffeured around. He just jumped right in, like he did it all the time."

"Did he greet the driver?"

"I don't know."

"We need to place him," she said. "We need context. How did he act? He was using Beck's car, but did he look ent.i.tled? Or like somebody was doing him a favor?"

"He looked ent.i.tled," I said. "Like he uses it every day of the week."

"So is he Beck's equal?"

I shrugged. "He could be Beck's boss."

"Partner at best," Eliot said. "Our LA guy wouldn't travel to meet with an underling."

"I don't see Quinn as somebody's partner," I said.

"What was he like?"

"Normal," I said. "For an intelligence officer. In most ways."

"Except for the espionage," Eliot said.

"Yes," I said. "Except for that."

"And whatever got him killed off the books."

"That too."