The Consignment (2 page)

I watched him go.

“Fettners, yeah?” Rossiter, my boss. He’d left the others and now he was standing at my shoulder watching Dimitri thread his way through the suits.

I nodded.

“He see Trevanian over here? Worried he’s lost a customer?”

I nodded again as Dimitri disappeared.

“Guy’s a loser, right?” Rossiter put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You fucked him,” he said cheerfully.

The rest of the morning I spent catching up with old customers, fielding inquiries, and reining in the misplaced enthusiasm of young Micky Baker, our newly minted marketing grad. Around 1:00
P.M.,
people started thinking about taking lunch in the giant pavilion outside, and there was a general drift away from the hangar. Rossiter came across to the stand and ran a sharp eye over the morning’s paperwork: provisional orders, genuine inquiries, and a dozen leads that would probably come to nothing.

“Trevanian’s joinin’ us for lunch,” Rossiter told me, closing the file.

I rose and buttoned my jacket. “The woman?” When his eyes shot up, I lifted my hands. Casual inquiry, I said.

He laughed. “Keep your pecker in your pants. She’s gone back into town. Shopping her way down Fifth Avenue, something like that.” He remarked that we seemed to be getting low on brochures. I took the hint and volunteered to fetch a fresh box from my car before joining him in the pavilion.

The parking lot was surrounded by a high chain-link fence with barbed wire slung in three looping strands across the top. I went to my car, grabbed the box off the backseat, then I hitched the box under my arm and wove my way back through the rows of parked vehicles toward the gate. Halfway across I caught sight of Dimitri’s car, an unmistakable four-wheel-drive Mercedes with a black top and a Yankees sticker plastered midway down the rear window. My view was obscured, but someone—Dimitri?—appeared to be crouching by the driver’s door, doing what, exactly, I couldn’t quite figure. It seemed as good a time as any to confront him, so I moved toward his Mercedes, telling myself to stay cool, to let him have his say. Just possibly he might have a reason for his earlier display. Failing that, maybe an apology.

Two cars back from Dimitri’s I finally got a clear sight of him and I stopped like I’d hit a stone wall. His ass was propped on the footboard, both his legs were buckled up beneath him, and his right hand was up at the door handle. That’s the only thing that was holding him up, his right hand, it was jammed somehow, caught in the handle, his torso leaned away from the car, his head lay on his left shoulder, he looked like a puppet with all its strings cut or a man too drunk to stand up. But he wasn’t drunk. One eye was glazed, but the other one wasn’t even an eye anymore, it was just a bloody mess where a bullet had torn through to his brain. God knows what the back of his head looked like. The blood was pooled under him like an oil slick, there was a spray of pink lumps on a neighboring car.

I stood there with the goddamn box under my arm. I stood there some moments taking it in, absorbing the searing shock. It was Dimitri. That twisted body suspended there was my one-time West Point roommate, Dimitri Spandos. I felt myself going under, swayed, then managed to will myself back. Back to the world around me. To the parking lot. The arms fair. I went into automatic.

My hand, heavy as a lump of iron, rose. I touched my clammy fingertips to my forehead like I’d forgotten something. Then I turned and walked straight back to my car. There I put the box on the hood, unlocked the passenger door, and reached in to search the glove compartment. If anyone had been watching, if there was a security cam, then maybe—God help me—maybe my pause and retreat from near Dimitri’s car might be interpreted as the action of some dozy, forgetful sap who’d passed near the scene but noticed nothing. Palming the perspiration off my face, I grabbed an old garage bill from the compartment, then I stood up and made a show of folding the bill into my breast pocket. After relocking my car I set off with the brochure box across the parking lot again, keeping several rows clear, this time, of Dimitri’s silver Mercedes. When I went through the gate the security guy didn’t even look up from his comic.

The hangar had almost emptied, most stands were deserted now that lunch had started out in the pavilion. I dumped the box at the Haplon stand, then retreated to the johns, where I pulled a thick wedge of paper towels from the dispenser before locking myself inside one of the cubicles. I took off my jacket and shirt and hung them on the back of the door. Then I braced my arms against the wall, hung my head, and breathed deep—long and steady, in and out—and tried to quiet my wildly clamoring heart.

Jesus, I thought. Oh Christ.

The main door to the johns opened.

“Ned? Are you coming out the tent for eats?”

Micky Baker, he must have seen me come in. I raised my head.

“Yeah. But don’t wait. I’ll be along.”

I heard him wash his hands. He tried to strike up a conversation, but when I ignored him he got the message and left me alone. The door closed behind him. I finally pushed off the wall and took the paper towels one at a time and wiped them across my chest, under my arms, and everywhere else the perspiration was coursing off me. After a minute it seemed to be easing, so I balled the last few towels in my fist and swiped them over my neck and face, then I put on my shirt and jacket again. I collected up all the soaked paper and dumped it in the trash can on my way out.

I had to go through the motions, I knew that. I had to put in an appearance.

But on my way over to the pavilion I lingered a moment at the edge of the grass behind the hangar. Off to my right was the parking lot. Straight in front of me, fifty yards away, the grand pavilion. To my left, the temporary firing range, the red earth banked up like a levee, the last shots blasting off and echoing off the hangar wall. I looked from the range to the parking lot and saw Dimitri’s Mercedes two rows back from the chain-link fence. There was a direct line of sight from the firing range to Dimitri’s car, all a shooter would have had to do was turn around and fire. But that was a maneuver, of course, that would have been seen and prevented by the rangemaster and any number of other people standing near. A couple of yards farther on, the line of sight was blocked by several armored personnel carriers that had been parked between the hangar and the pavilion throughout the morning. While I watched now, the drivers began moving the vehicles out to the runway, preparing for a later demonstration.

Micky Baker called my name from over by the pavilion. I took one last look at the firing range, then went to join the Haplon team for lunch.

They found Dimitri sometime between dessert and coffee. A security guard hurried over to the Fettners table, then seconds later the toastmaster rose to make an announcement: Anyone and everyone who had fired weapons that morning was requested to report at once to the firing range.

“Oh, for chrissake,” said Rossiter, a chocolate mint halfway to his mouth. “For what?” He turned to me, his brow puckered.

Gillian Streiss, my deputy marketing manager, departed our table along with half a dozen others, there was a general air of annoyance that some unexplained screwup had spoiled lunch. A minute later there was another announcement, more a demand this time: It was imperative everyone who had used the firing range should report, the rangemaster had a list of names, it was necessary he speak to each one of those people immediately. Around the pavilion another twenty or more people got reluctantly to their feet. Rossiter tossed his napkin on the table.

“Look after Jack,” he told me in a peeved tone, then he excused himself to Jack Trevanian and went out to report to the rangemaster.

A small crowd was gathering at the Fettners table, Micky Baker went over to see what he could find out. I was left facing Trevanian over an untouched bowl of peaches. He raised a brow in question. I turned my head in dumb reply.

Micky came scurrying back a moment later. “Some accident on the firing range,” he reported. “One of the Fettners guys—” but that was as far as he got because then the sirens started. We got up and went outside to see.

Two squad cars and an ambulance were making their way through the parking lot. Word was already spreading out from the Fettners guys, Dimitri’s name was suddenly in the air. People were saying he was shot, badly wounded.

After a minute I left Trevanian with Micky Baker and went back into the hangar and sat down at the Haplon stand. There was nothing I could do then but wait. And so I waited. The next quarter hour, people wandered in and out of the hangar, the day unexpectedly cut loose from its moorings, suddenly drifting. The police gathered the Fettners team together and interviewed them all. The likes of Micky Baker started spreading the word that maybe Dimitri was more than just badly wounded. Around two
P.M.,
there was an announcement over the loudspeakers: The fair was closing early, anyone who wanted to could leave just so long as they checked their security tags at the main gate. Then four names were read out, none I recognized, three men and one woman who’d neglected to report to the rangemaster.

I delegated Gillian Streiss to pack up our stand, then I gathered my papers together and told Rossiter I was leaving.

At the main gate I checked my security tag, the guard consulted his clipboard and waved me on through. I drove out to the turnpike, put ten miles behind me, then turned off at a giant Wal-Mart sign and made my way over some speed bumps into the parking lot of a mall. I parked and reached into the glove compartment and took out my “scramble-and-squirt” device, a box of electronics the size of a book of matches. Then I reached farther back and took out a rubber cup and fixed it to the device. I put the whole thing in my jacket pocket and got out and crossed to a pay phone, where I picked up the receiver and fixed the rubber cup to the mouthpiece. Then I inserted two quarters and dialed. After two rings a machine at the far end came on and I got three long beeps, the signal that the machine was ready to receive.

I hung my head. I gathered myself, then spoke. “Blue Hawk is dead.” I repeated it once, then I dropped my finger onto the phone bar, breaking the line.

CHAPTER 2

Colonel Alex Channon sat silently through my recital of the sequence of events out at Springfield. His elbows rested on his desk, from time to time he raised a hand and tapped his knuckles against his mouth. When I was done his gaze slid on by me, and for several moments he contemplated the bare wall. Then he reached over and switched off the digital recorder. He looked like I guess I must have looked when I lost four men from my unit in the Gulf War. Diminished. At least partially broken.

“You called from outside the fair?”

A pay phone, I told him. Ten miles from Springfield.

He didn’t acknowledge my reply, just sat awhile staring at the recorder beneath his hand. In the twenty-something years since he’d walked to the rostrum in the West Point lecture theater and delivered the first lesson in Intelligence to me, Dimitri, and our fellow cadets, Alex Channon had climbed steadily into the upper branches of the Pentagon tree. He’d once been a military adviser to the National Security Council, one of the uniforms you sometimes glimpse ducking out of picture as the Secretary of Defense announces some policy shift to the media, and now he was the Pentagon’s place man in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA. But the years of his ascent had worn him. He remained lean, but his hair had thinned and grayed, and the lines of his face had deepened. He had large responsibilities and he carried them gravely. He was the kind of guy most people would be relieved to know still had influence down in Washington, but at fifty-four years of age he hadn’t made General, and his time was probably running out. Though he gave a few guest lectures at West Point each year, the small office there where we always met was really just his reward for climbing so far up the slippery slope at the Pentagon. Retaining close links with guys like Colonel Alex Channon gave the academy a certain clout around budget time.

After he turned my story over, Alex’s shoulders sagged. His crisp uniform shirt crumpled. “Holy hell,” he said softly.

“I’m not so sure the shot came from the firing range.” I mentioned the armored personnel carriers, and the fact that they’d been open for general inspection all morning. I told him about the way the gunshots from the firing range echoed off the hangar. “One or two stray shots, maybe a silencer. No one would have noticed.”

He looked up at me as if it was an effort just to concentrate on what I was telling him. Until that day, I would have said that Alex’s decision to send me and Dimitri undercover in the arms trade had worked out better than any of us had any right to hope, that the two years of Hawkeye had put some real numbers on the board. Hawkeye. Dimitri’s suggestion, as I recall. A big fan of
M*A*S*H,
he’d made the suggestion as a joke, but it stuck to the operation and became the official code name. After I resigned my commission, and Dimitri left Delta Force, we served some time training with a bunch of Defense Intelligence operatives, preparing for Hawkeye as if we were about to be dropped behind enemy lines. The operation was meant to be over in six months, but each quarter Channon had had the time extended. Now, between us, Dimitri and I had assembled a virtual encyclopedia on the ruses used by the arms trade to skirt the decrees of U.S. and international law. The Customs Service had found our background work invaluable. The Pentagon had been reassured that two of its own guys were on the case. Until that day, I really believed that our work was A1 quality, that we were doing just fine.

“Did Dimitri ever offer you money?” Alex asked me suddenly, leaning his forearms on the desk.

I squinted. “When?”

“Anytime.”

“No.”

“Have you ever been solicited to bribe a client?”

“Alex—”

He put up a hand. “Ever?” he said. His gaze was direct.

No, I told him. Never. “And if I had, you know I would have reported it to you.”

The way he looked at me, Alex Channon didn’t seem so sure. His focus narrowed. “Have you ever accepted a bribe, Ned?”

“No.”

For a few beats, his eyes stayed on mine. Then he muttered, “Best news for weeks,” and he slid the recorder into a drawer.

I cocked my head. I asked him, naturally, what the hell he meant by that.

“That guy you reported tailing you last month,” he said, ignoring my question. “Have you seen him again?”

“I said it was just a feeling.”

“First feeling like that you’ve had in two years.”

Once a month Alex flew up from Washington and received a face-to-face report from me. Between times, on a weekly basis, I used the tiny scramble-and-squirt recorder he’d given me to deliver my reports over the phone. It was a recent weekly report he was referring to. My first few months undercover I’d reported several tails, but as my undercover life merged with my real life, my sightings of these shadows dwindled, then disappeared. It was an unexpected and alarming moment, the month before Springfield, when I found myself leaving the local 7-Eleven and craning over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of someone I felt watching me. There was nobody there, but I reported the incident to Channon anyway. It was only later that it occurred to me the spectral figure was probably the projection of some more acutely personal anxieties.

“What would you say,” Channon asked me now, “if I told you Dimitri reported some guy tailing him too?”

“Are you telling me?”

He dipped his head and waited for that one to sink in. Dimitri had a tail and I had a tail. And now Dimitri was dead.

Channon rose and came around his desk and dropped into a chair. He grimaced and opened his hands. “Okay, here’s the story. A couple of months ago I got a call from Dimitri. Urgent. Priority one, he says, get my ass out to L.A. to see him. Which I do, of course. And I walk into the appointed hotel room at the appointed hour and Dimitri’s up on the bed eating pretzels, watching TV. Only he’s not alone in the room. There’s two guys in dark suits standing across at the window. I couldn’t believe it. Two guys I’ve never seen before. This is meant to be a safe meeting, just me and Dimitri. Then Dimitri introduces them. A pair of agents from the goddamned IRS.”

I squinted. Internal Revenue?

“Christ,” Channon went on. “Dimitri didn’t even have the guts to tell me himself. They had to do it for him.” The IRS, according to Channon, had picked up discrepancies between Dimitri’s tax returns and some investment accounts he had. His occupation led them to look a little closer. “They even put a tail on him for a few days. A guy going around after him picking up the paperwork on his transactions—credit cards, checks—they recorded his withdrawals from cash machines, got a fix on the times, and traced his account back through the bank.”

“That was his tail, the IRS?” I was thinking about that feeling I had at the 7-Eleven.

Channon nodded. “Makes you weep, doesn’t it? And by now they’ve got him by the shorts, they know something’s not right. So when they come knocking on his door they’re not just after back taxes, they want to know where this free money he’s got’s coming from. And the way they’re talking, Dimitri figures they’ve already got a fair idea. And he figures—correctly—that it’s not just a fine he’s looking at. So now he calls in the cavalry.” Channon thumbed his chest and screwed up his face. “The mystery man from Washington he’s told them about. Me. The guy he’s working for on government business. I was his escape route.”

“He didn’t need money.”

“Every gambler needs money, Ned.”

We looked at each other. Dimitri’s inability to restrain a corrosive gambling habit was what had led, years earlier, to the collapse of his marriage. I’d never told Channon that. Dimitri had sworn to me that he’d slain the demon, and I’d believed him. But from the picture Channon was sketching—a guy floundering out of his financial depth, grasping for cash—it sounded like Dimitri’s habit had risen from the ashes and gotten a disastrous new lease on life. Channon had clearly made some inquiries of his own. I was appalled.

“Why’d he set you up like that?”

“Why didn’t he warn me? Because once I was there I was real. I couldn’t deny I knew him. He’d whistled, I’d arrived on the next plane. What was I doing, just visiting? Dimitri figured once I was there I’d have no choice, I’d have to lie for him. I’d have to say the money was the government’s, anything to get him out of the IRS’s clutches.” He shook his head. “Hell, he was in dreamland. The IRS had their teeth in him up to the gums, they weren’t going to let go. Once I produced my bona fides, they showed me what they had on him, stuff they hadn’t shown Dimitri. Jesus, you didn’t have to be Columbo. Dimitri was some kind of bagman—at it for at least a year—giving and taking bribes, cutting a piece for his own commission.” Channon lifted his eyes and spoke with real bitterness. “So that’s the story. Two years too late I find out you’ve recruited me a goddamn crook.”

I flinched. A few weeks after the collapse of the World Trade Center and the strike on the Pentagon, Channon had summoned me down to Washington and made me an offer. It was a strange time. The usual civil restraints on the Pentagon and the federal agencies had been temporarily brushed aside, their leashes were off. The DIA decided to take the opportunity to do something about the increasing amounts of U.S.-manufactured materiel turning up in the wrong hands internationally. Alex, somewhere in the back of his mind, must have made a connection with me.

During the Gulf War, one of the emplacements in our unit took a direct hit from the Iraqis, four grunts were killed but there were no identifiable remains. Our ordnance guys did some forensics on the wreckage. Their conclusion was checked, rechecked, then finally buried in some obscure Pentagon file while the U.S. Army set about the more urgent business of getting a few hundred thousand battle-weary troops back home. But I knew. And my fellow officers, including Dimitri, all knew. The missile that had taken out our men came from one of the biggest and best arms manufacturers in the world. It was top-quality product, made in the U.S.A. It wasn’t just Iraq we were fighting out there in the Gulf. The truth is, we were joined in battle against the weapons of every major arms-manufacturing country on earth, including our own. On our return home, Dimitri and I visited the bereaved families of those four men to offer what solace we could. Brave sons, killed in the line of duty. Death instantaneous. No suffering. One mother refused to let us into her house, but mostly there was a stoic acceptance from the families that was humbling, and which I recalled often during the weeks of flag-waving and welcome-home parades that followed. I wrote a letter to Channon, the only senior figure I knew at Intelligence down in the Pentagon at the time, berating the folly of trading our weapons into the hands of our enemies. He was kind enough to phone me. He assured me he sympathized, and that my concerns were widely shared down in Washington, and he told me why nothing could be done. When I cornered him in his West Point office years later, and pleaded with him to open a door for me back into active service, that earlier memory must have been stirred.

He summoned me down to Washington in October, put Hawkeye before me, and told me the operation needed one other operative, a second make-believe arms salesman. The first person who occurred to me was Dimitri. As cadets at the Point we’d been close, then we’d served together in the Rangers. Back then Dimitri had been more than just a supremely good soldier, he’d been a friend. I’d seen him through the collapse of his marriage, watched as the emotional impact of that rupture finally killed his gambling habit, and I’d listened a year later to his self-lacerating admission that he had only himself to blame for the loss of his family. That was when he told me he was trying out for Delta. He’d totally screwed up his personal life, he knew that. From that point on his professional life meant everything to him. He hadn’t succeeded as a husband or father, but as a soldier he knew he could be one of the best. When Delta Force took him in, he proved it. He accumulated medals and battle honors from missions all over the world, his reputation in Delta was second to none, even in the ranks of the elite he stood out.

I used to hear about him, though my contact with Dimitri during those Delta years was intermittent. Most Delta operatives tend to stick with their own. But the summer prior to 9/11 he’d called to tell me that his operational career had come to an unexpected end. He’d taken a bullet in the shoulder during some mission down in Colombia, his shattered collarbone had to be pinned. It hadn’t healed well enough to go back on active service immediately, and he told me that if it didn’t improve fast, Delta was going to offer him a place as an OTC, an Operators Training Course instructor. He said he was going to turn the offer down. He’d thought about approaching the CIA to offer his services, he told me if they didn’t want him, he’d try his luck in the real world. The timing seemed fortuitous. I called him in October, he thought about it for a week, then signed up for Hawkeye.

“Ned.” Now Channon lifted a finger warily. “Do you promise me you didn’t know Dimitri was screwing around like that?”

I gave him my word that I hadn’t known. Channon studied me, and finally nodded to himself. I asked if the IRS was tailing me. He conceded that it was possible.

“Not that I’ve breathed a word about you to them,” he said. “But that’s just me. Christ knows what Dimitri’s been telling them.” Channon rose from his chair, agitated by the thought of Dimitri in private session with the IRS. “There’s a part two to the story,” he said, facing me over his desk. “Dimitri cut a deal with the IRS. They were coming down on him so hard, he knew the only way he might crawl out from under was to offer them something real.” What Dimitri had offered them, Channon explained, was a chance to bring the hammer down on the arms companies actually giving and receiving the bribes. “Dimitri got the IRS to cut him some slack till the next fair. He told them that’s where he could do the spadework, set some bad guys up for the IRS to knock over later.”

“The next fair,” I said.

“Right.” Channon made a face. “Springfield.”

A new light suddenly illuminated Dimitri’s death. That morning, and for the previous few weeks, Dimitri hadn’t been working solely on Hawkeye.