The Consignment
Authors: Grant Sutherland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Psychological Thrillers, #Suspense, #Psychological, #Fiction
Table of Contents
Wisdom is better than weapons of war:
but one sinner destroyeth much good.
Ecclesiastes 9:18
ONE
PROLOGUE
C
hristmas that year we went up to the mountains, just Fiona and Brad and me. There were a few inches of snow on the ground when we arrived Christmas Eve, but the sky was clear, so after we’d unloaded the car Fiona and I took a walk together down by the river while Brad chopped some logs for the fire.
We went down the track, stepping over fallen branches, the bare woods were quiet all around us, even the murmur of the river was muffled by the snow. There were deer tracks beside the river, we waited awhile but the only creature we saw was a squirrel; it scurried along the leafless maple branches overhead, showering us with heavy white snowflakes. Fiona bent forward and shook her hair. I wrapped my arms around her waist, pretended to pitch her toward the icy river. She shrieked, then struggled, and we fell back on the soft white blanket. She laughed and scooped snow into my face. As I got to my knees, she shoved me and I went down again, and she ran, laughing, up through the woods.
Fiona laughing. I can still remember that.
Back at the shack, Brad already had the fire going, he was stretched out on the sofa, his head in a book. Fiona hung up her jacket, telling him he should get out while the weather was good.
Weather’s fine right here, Mom, he said.
She rolled her eyes at me, then went to the kitchen to unpack the food and drink. Christmas Eve in the Rourke family. I didn’t have the heart to bring it down. Christmas morning, we unwrapped our presents, then Fiona drove down to the store to make a call to her mother in Cleveland while Brad helped me with some minor repairs to the shack. Since starting college, Brad seemed to have spent every vacation on a field trip out of state, it had been a while since we’d shared any real time together. When he was a boy, he’d been proud that his father was a soldier. When he became an adolescent, my profession turned into something of an embarrassment for him. That phase passed too, but nothing since had moved into its place, except, maybe, uncertainty. An unsureness of where to position me in the scale of adult relationships, at what point to fix me between hero and villain, friend and foe. So that Christmas morning the two of us crawled over the porch, hammering down loose nails, making small talk, and circling the possibility of some new connections between us that might replace the ones that, through the passage of time, we’d lost. When Fiona returned from the store, we set down our tools, with the real work not even begun.
Maybe that had something to do with why, after lunch, I found myself setting out alone up the hill behind the shack, and, after twenty minutes, turning up the path toward the mountain pool that was sheltered by a ring of boulders. The pool where my father, one summer, taught me to swim. Now I scrambled around the snowcapped boulders and looked down at the iced surface, surprised at how small it seemed. I picked up a rock and threw it, it bounced on the ice.
My father had once been a soldier. He’d fought in France when he was Brad’s age, then returned home and gone to college on the GI Bill, and after that he spent his working life in insurance. When I turned eighteen, and told him and Mom that I was going to enlist, he took me aside and confided to me that it was only meeting Mom that had stopped him from reenlisting after college. The Army, the way he spoke, seemed to be the life he’d missed out on, the one he thought maybe he should have had. Their support for me never wavered. Through my cadetship at West Point, my first commission in the Rangers, then the Gulf War, and on through my hospitalization after Mogadishu, they stood by me. For Fiona it wasn’t so easy.
When we married, I promised Fiona I would leave the Army sometime around my thirtieth birthday. I told her that by then I would have fulfilled my youthful ambitions, I would have served my country and experienced life as a soldier, yet still be young enough to launch myself into a civilian career. I told her I was not an Army lifer.
I was, it turned out, plain wrong. By the time I went out to serve in the Gulf War, I knew in my heart that I didn’t want any kind of civilian career. The life I wanted was the life I already had. But when I returned from the Gulf I found that Fiona had other plans. She wanted to talk about the future. From the wives’ circuit, she’d learned that a number of my fellow officers were resigning their commissions. She gave me their names. I attempted to sidestep the issue. She reminded me of the promise I’d made when we first married. I told her that my feelings had changed. We argued, and in the heat of one exchange she revealed that she’d been seeing a shrink ever since my departure for the Gulf. She said she simply couldn’t cope with the idea that I might be killed.
The awful truth was apparent to both of us. Over the years of our marriage we’d each made discoveries about ourselves: me, that I was born to be a soldier; Fiona, that she was not born to be a soldier’s wife. But when I stayed in the Army, she stuck with me. We still loved one another. If Mogadishu hadn’t occurred, we might have been okay.
But in Mogadishu I took a gutshot during a firefight in the backstreets of the city, I was flown home and hospitalized. It was while I was convalescing in the military hospital after surgery that Fiona laid it on the line to me. She wasn’t going through that again. Never again was she going to sit glued to CNN, watching Apache helicopters firing missiles, and wondering whether her husband was dead or alive. Never again was she going to be taking handfuls of pills just to get her through the day. Never again was she going to be breaking down in tears during a regular evening session with her shrink. She wasn’t mad at me, it was simpler than that. She just couldn’t take it anymore. I could either accept the instructorship at West Point she knew I’d been offered, or she wanted a trial separation. If I went on active service again, she would divorce me.
When I came out of the hospital and told her I’d taken the West Point job, she was so happy she cried. I was okay with it too, at first. It was only as the years passed, and the graduation ceremonies started to blur, that it started to eat at me.
It wasn’t just that I got jaded. Guys I’d served with in the Rangers had moved on with their careers, some in the Regiment, others to the Pentagon, and a few, even, to Delta Force. They were out in the world doing things I might have done, while I carried on the same old routine, drilling the latest intake of cadets on the West Point range. I got to feeling that I’d repeated my father’s mistake, that I’d inadvertently sidelined myself from my own life. Without telling Fiona, I started applying for other postings. But everywhere I applied, I found I was joining the end of a very long line. The military was downsizing, the scramble for permanent positions was on in earnest, making a vacancy for a West Point instructor wasn’t high on anyone’s list of priorities. I knocked on every door. I proposed myself for any kind of deployment. I was turned down everywhere. I felt beached, stranded midlife and midcareer. On my thirty-ninth birthday, I gave myself another year. One more year, I promised myself, and if the Army couldn’t find another place for me, I would see what the civilian world still had to offer.
A month later the World Trade Center came down, the Pentagon was hit, and for me, like for so many others, everything changed.
Looking down at the iced pool Christmas day, three and a half months later, I remembered my father and his lingering regret for the soldier’s life he’d almost led. Now he rested alongside my mother in a California graveyard, while his own son’s son, Brad, was already a man.
I tossed another rock onto the pool, and the ice cracked, a hazy white web across the water. Then I scrambled back around the boulders and retraced my steps down the hill through the snow.
I took my boots off on the porch, went inside and hung up my jacket. Brad was lying on the sofa, reading. Fiona was in the armchair by the fire, her legs tucked up beneath her, perusing a magazine. I got myself a whiskey, then I came out and stood near the fire and told them what I had to tell them. That I’d resigned my commission. That I’d taken a job in the civilian world, that I was embarking on a new career. They received the news, as I guessed they might, in stunned silence. The fire blazed high. The snow on the roof shifted. I swirled the whiskey in my glass and told them exactly what it was I was going to do. Brad gave it a moment, then he closed his book and got up and left the room. Fiona stared up at me like someone very close to us had died.
CHAPTER 1
“You’ll recognize Trevanian?”
“I’ll know him,” I said.
“Tell him who you are, background history.”
I looked up from my coffee to Milton Rossiter, the major shareholder and president of Haplon Systems, my employer.
“Who I am?”
“Ex-Army, that bit.” He skirted around behind our stand, sucking in his gut, then he came back out with a big cardboard cutout of a rifle and propped it against the table. He clicked his fingers and pointed at me. “Hey, didn’t he have somethin’ to do with Grenada? Maybe give you two somethin’ to talk about.”
“I was never in Grenada.”
Rossiter frowned and went on adjusting the cardboard cutout; standing back, then stepping in to adjust it some more.
The doors of the airfield hangar had been open half an hour, the buyers were streaming down the aisles, there was a lively buzz of business in the air. It was my second fair at Springfield, and my second year in the employ of Haplon Systems. The basic layout of the fair hadn’t changed. The buyers entered through the main doors onto a quarter acre of royal blue carpet, where a collection of young women greeted them, offering glossy brochures. From there the buyers moved down one of six aisles into a gridlike array of stands where suited men like me plied them with information and stats, then ran videos to show the materiel in action.
“Trevanian won’t be signing up for anything right now,” Rossiter told me. “But I don’t want him walking away from here thinking we’re not interested in his money.”
He held up the PC lead and looked faintly bewildered. I went over and stuck the plug into the adapter, then leaned across and switched on the screen. Rossiter nodded as a Mercator projection of the earth appeared, explosive flashes of light bursting and dying across war zones where Haplon weapons were currently in use. Rossiter touched the PC screen as if he were trying out the latest Nintendo—push here for nuclear Armageddon—while I went back to my coffee.
I’d been marketing manager for Milton Rossiter’s company for more than a year by this time, I think I knew him pretty well. Normally he dealt munitions the way a stockbroker deals shares, without a second thought. But that morning at Springfield he seemed anxious. His father had founded Haplon in the aftermath of World War II, buying up surplus rifles from redundant arsenals in Europe, then selling them into the U.S. sports market. After that, Haplon rode a wave of profitability through Korea and Vietnam, expanded into production, and when Milton finally inherited the business he’d already been his father’s right-hand man for fifteen years. His aim ever since had been to keep Haplon profitable and growing, ready to be handed over to his children, three unmarried women in their twenties whose only interest in Haplon Systems seemed to be the dividend check they each received quarterly.
With his long background in the business, Milton Rossiter’s self-belief was normally total, but in the months leading up to Springfield some of his usual arrogance had deserted him. Partly, I suppose, because the construction of the new Haplon plant out in California was falling behind schedule. Not a disaster on its own, but along with some recent Pentagon cutbacks and the shrinking Haplon order book, the situation was causing heartburn in a few of Rossiter’s bankers. They were pressuring him to refill the order book. He was relaying the pressure down the line to us.
He left the PC and came back to me.
“Ned,” he said, making a face. He set his hands on the table and leaned toward me. “Ned, you look like shit.” He shook his head while I looked down at my shirt and tie. “Not your fucking clothes. You. Jesus Christ,” he said quietly, the customers flowing down the aisle behind him. “Place has been opened twenty minutes, you’ve been sittin’ there nursin’ coffees, rubbin’ your goddamn eyes.” He clicked his fingers near my face. “Come on. Wake up.”
I raised my eyes slowly.
“Jeez,” he said.
I got out from behind the table.
“Christ, it moves. You going all giddy like that? Maybe you want to sit down again.” Someone in the crowd of buyers caught Rossiter’s eye. Rossiter hailed him over the passing heads, then pistoled his fingers at me before moving off through the suits. “Stay sharp, Ned. You miss Trevanian, I will personally fucking slay you.”
Around midmorning I saw Trevanian. He was joking with someone down on the Scitex stand, looking relaxed and tan. Clean-shaven and sandy-haired, not quite six feet, he looked just like the mug shots I’d seen of him, only he wasn’t in uniform, he was wearing a blazer and tie. When he left the Scitex stand and came in our direction I signaled for Micky Baker, our junior salesman, to rescue me from a Paraguayan time waster, a colonel wearing full battle dress and shades who was requesting a rerun of our artillery video.
By the time Trevanian arrived at our stand, I was pretending to study one of our brochures. He offered me his hand, we did the introductions, then he beckoned forward a striking black woman in a beige slacksuit. She slipped her Gucci purse beneath her arm. As we shook hands, her collection of chunky gold bracelets clinked.
“Cecille Lagundi,” Trevanian said. “My associate.”
I smiled. Associate. Colleague. Partner. In the arms business, all flexible terms. Straight to the point, Trevanian said they’d like some information on the P23. I sat them down, then slid two leaflets across the table, launching into my spiel. “The P23’s an excellent close-range weapon. Probably Haplon’s top line. We’ve been shipping them twelve months”—I gestured toward the PC, the bursts of light and accompanying sound effects—“they’re battle tested—”
Trevanian lifted a finger. “We don’t need the pitch,” he said mildly.
We looked at each other. His eyes were pale green.
“The numbers,” I said, reaching over and touching the leaflet beneath his hand, “are on the back.”
He flipped over the leaflet and studied the numbers, the P23’s vital stats. Dimensions. Rate of fire. Range. Everything you could know about the weapon short of using it. While he was doing that my eyes cheated across to Cecille Lagundi. She was looking at the numbers on her leaflet too, but casually. How did I figure her? A female friend picked up by Trevanian on an African tour of duty? One of his U.S. employees?
Jack Trevanian was ex–British army, a free agent who ran his own private military company. This is one aspect of the peace dividend the average citizen never hears about, the swelling band of Jack Trevanians running private companies of mercenaries around the globe. Freebooters who wade into trouble spots where Western governments no longer care to venture. Rebels and insurgents repressed, all checks to Switzerland. When not buying weapons for their own companies, guys like Trevanian spend their time advising tin-pot regimes on how best to equip their ragtag armies. I figured Trevanian’s connection with Cecille Lagundi was probably professional, but there were other possibilities. Her security badge said
DEFENSE CONSULTANT,
but she didn’t look like any other defense consultant roaming the fair. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. Her skin was a perfect, unlined ebony.
She raised her eyes and caught me studying her. She kept her eyes on mine as she slid the leaflet back across the table.
“So tell me why I shouldn’t buy it,” said Trevanian.
The gun’s weaknesses, he meant. I told him that we’d engineered them all away on the draftboard.
“You believe that?”
“No weapon’s perfect.”
He raised a brow. “You going to tell me what’s wrong with the gun or shall I just move on and see Fettners.”
Fettner & Sons were our main competitor. We both dealt in the same sort of equipment, a niche too low-tech for the likes of Hughes or McDonnell Douglas and too high-tech to be undercut by the cheap foreign manufacturers. If Trevanian had gone down to the Fettners stand and placed an order, Rossiter would have skinned me alive.
“It’s not great over distance,” I admitted. Gesturing behind me, I offered to take them behind the screen and show them the weapon. “If you want, we can take it out to the firing range, you can let off a few rounds.”
Trevanian remarked dryly that the Springfield firing range—a temporary structure bulldozed out of the earth beyond the hangar—was only fifty yards long. Not exactly a rigorous test for a weapon whose weakness, as I’d just told him, was over distance. I shrugged, conceding the point.
Trevanian seemed to relax some then. He tossed his head toward the screen. “What else you got back there?”
Opening a hand, I invited them into the Aladdin’s cave behind me. We went through the door in the rear screen, up a ramp into a cargo container that had been fitted out especially for fairs like Springfield. Milton Rossiter had even employed an interior designer to ensure we got the appropriately masculine, high-tech effect. The walls were black beneath a polished aluminum ceiling; spotlights mounted on two chrome tracks ran the length of the container. Haplon product was racked on chrome tubing along the side walls. The heavier equipment—the antitank gear, launchers, mortars—was lined up on the steel-plated floor.
Cecille Lagundi seemed slightly lost; she folded her arms and looked around.
I unracked the P23. Trevanian asked if we could strip it, so we moved to the rear of the container, where I got down on my knees and dismantled the gun, talking Trevanian through each stage, answering his questions. When I was done pulling it apart and then reassembling it, I handed the gun to Trevanian. He weighed it in his hands, raised it to his shoulder, and sighted along the barrel to the rear wall.
“Good feel,” he said, passing the gun back to me.
We talked some more about the gun. He had that clipped Brit way of speaking, direct, and he asked all the right questions. He probably thought we were getting along fine. After a while he tilted his head.
“You ex-Services?” he asked me.
“Army.”
“Poor bastard,” he said, and smiled. Then he touched Cecille Lagundi’s arm. Give us two minutes, he told me, and the pair of them walked down to the front of the container, talking quietly, while I reracked the gun. I’d been in the business long enough by that time to know when I’d made a sale, and I knew right then they were hooked. They came back to me after a minute’s whispered conference.
“We’re interested in the gun.”
I nodded. Good decision. Wise choice.
“Also these,” he said, and she handed him a list and he gave it to me.
Glancing down the list, I felt my heart flutter like a startled bird in my chest. Gatling miniguns, mortars, rockets and rocket launchers, night-sights—and beside each item was a number designating quantities required. A major shipment. I looked up.
“How soon would you need delivery?”
He gestured vaguely, brushing my question aside. Then looking around the container, he asked me to show them what we had on site.
I went and told my sales team that the container was off-limits for the next hour, then returned inside and worked my way through Trevanian’s list, talking him and Cecille Lagundi through each item. Trevanian asked the questions, but he always deferred, in the end, to Lagundi, making sure she was satisfied before moving on to the next weapon. I still couldn’t pin her down. Her accent sounded improbably Irish, a soft burr. My best guess by this time was that she was some kind of representative for whoever was financing Trevanian’s spree, there was just too much firepower on his wish list for it to be going to any private military company. He must have been buying on someone’s behalf. Cecille Lagundi must have been making sure Trevanian’s client wasn’t getting screwed. That’s how I figured it.
When we were through, we reemerged from the container to the front of the Haplon stand, and I gave Trevanian my own sales file, the one with the prices and volume discounts clearly marked. He seemed to appreciate the gesture. He put my file beneath his arm, gave me his card, and took mine. He shook my hand, then she shook my hand.
“We’ll be in touch,” he told me, and that was it, the pair of them walked away. They passed the Fettners stand without pausing.
Milton Rossiter immediately appeared at my side. When I explained what had happened, his smile nearly split his face. He clapped me on the back and told me I was a goddamn star. My palms were sweating. My heart thumped hard. While Rossiter went over to the rest of the sales team to blow the trumpet, inspire them to sell more guns, I opened a drawer and searched for a new sales file.
“Hey.”
When I looked up, Dimitri was looming over me, his hands braced on the table. I hadn’t seen Dimitri face-to-face for at least six months, a brief encounter at an arms fair out in Kuwait. Back then I’d been surprised by how he’d suddenly let himself go. Now as I looked him over, I wasn’t so much surprised as alarmed. His face was puffy. His stomach pressed over the belt of his pants. The rigors of army life, it was pretty clear, were fast becoming a distant memory to his body. In Kuwait, I’d wondered if he wasn’t turning himself into one of those salesmen who do most of their business in bars, lots of backslapping and hearty laughter, then a trawl through the raunchier nightspots after midnight. But I couldn’t really believe it. That wasn’t the Dimitri I knew.
“Dimitri,” I said flatly.
“Have they placed an order with you?” His tone was surprisingly belligerent.
I lifted a brow. Order?
He stabbed a finger on the tabletop. “Trevanian and Lagundi were back in your candy shop a full hour. Don’t jerk me around, Ned. Did they give you the order or not?”
“As I recall, you still work for Fettners.”
He thumbed his chest. “That’s my order. My order.”
I’d heard some talk that he’d started leaning on the bottle, but I hadn’t taken it too seriously. Now I wasn’t so sure.
“I haven’t taken the order,” I said quietly. “But you’re asking for my professional opinion, I’m going to. Now get lost.”
His eyes filmed over. “You haven’t taken it.” I jerked my head sharply in the direction of the Fettners stand. Dimitri finally seemed to get a grip on himself. “Right,” he said, nodding as he backed away. “Okay.” Then he turned and hurried back toward the Fettners stand.