PATCHES OF DIRTY SNOW CATCH IN OUR HEADLAMP BEAMS ON A road that seems to unwind forever. The storm stayed east of the Appalachians and as we head west, the snow on the ground all but peters out. The occasional vehicle sweeps past from the opposite direction as we pass through a succession of small settlements. In the glow of the dash, Hetta’s face remains a ghostly presence at the periphery of my vision.
She and I agreed last night that we’re looking at a case of mistaken identity that’s almost certainly deliberate. We met after we left work in the underground parking lot used by the Secret Service on the edge of Lafayette Square.
I stare out the window. Apart from the singing of the tires, there’s little sound to disturb my thinking. Hetta doesn’t like the radio. She doesn’t like music. She was quick to let me know this when she picked me up outside my apartment at 5 a.m. She likes to use drive time to focus.
OK, so let’s do that. I crack my knuckle joints and bring my tablet back to life.
I pull up Gapes’s medical notes, which she has transferred to me.
The brain injury that Kate Ottoway identified caused Gapes crushing headaches, speech and walking difficulties and an inability to recognize everyday objects when blindfolded. In addition, he was wrestling with delusions and hallucinations, but didn’t take well to a prescription of Clozapine, an anti-psychotic.
I scroll down, find very little else, and nothing at all about the evenly spaced lesions around his head. Was he receiving electroconvulsive therapy, perhaps? Did that account for his memory loss?
From the notes, it’s impossible to draw any conclusions.
There’s no mention of a coloboma either.
After we left the lot, Hetta went back to see Kate. Guido’s eyes are blemish free. She and I checked the image put out by the MPD, however, and Mo’s right: under intense magnification, you can see it – a small, keyhole-shaped flaw in his left eye.
Gapes’s recovery support specialist makes no mention of how he came to be recruited by the Army from the Marines. He or she ought to have. Local Veterans Centers are concerned primarily with rehabilitation.
The fact that the Maryland center was just down the street from the Army’s Intelligence HQ at Fort Meade … was that a factor, or just happenstance?
I can’t escape the feeling that somewhere along the line, these notes have been doctored.
If that’s the case, we also need to know what the military holds on Master Gunnery Sergeant Matthew L. Voss. Who is – or was – the guy they tried to palm off as Gapes? I’ve left this with Hart, though I guess Voss must be dead or something would have come up.
I close the file and open the next.
Boonchatz was set up so rural communities can monitor local news and events, but it has morphed into quite possibly the world’s vilest bile and vitriol exchange.
‘Skylar Pyles is nothing but a two-bit piece of white poon trash …’
‘Rylee McKibben has six dirty kids and counting. She spends all her husband’s assistance money in bars …’
Boonchatz is giving us a heads-up on Blacksoil, population 4,521, and the third worst crime index in West Virginia. If you’re lucky enough to have a job, the median annual income is $23,575. If you’re not, chances are you’ll be out of work for a good long while.
The coalmines that had sustained the area for 140 years closed down in the late 1990s and the unemployment rate hovers around nine per cent.
On the city’s eastern perimeter lies an almost road-free area of the Monongahela National Forest called the Laurel Forks. It’s billed as one of the least visited federal wildernesses in the United States, but is less than three and a half hours from the capital by road. Hetta’s 4WD Lexus is taking us there on US-48.
I turn back to Boonchatz and start reading aloud.
‘Cody Wyatt is the world’s biggest deadbeat and a worthless ass druggie dad …’
‘Makaylah Nuckles – let’s just say it’s not what you know, it’s who you blow—’
‘OK,’ she says, ‘back up. Right there. That’s him.’
To many, a connection between Cody Wyatt and Duke Gapes would appear paper-thin at best. Not to the Service, however.
The earliest it is possible to track their association is almost twenty years ago, when Wyatt friended him on Facebook. But we know they attended the same school – Boulder View – and that, during what Katya described as a dark period in Gapes’s life, in the years after his father died, they hung out, did what kids in Blacksoil liked to do (and according to Boonchatz, still do): drinking beer, smoking weed, jacking cars and racing on the outskirts of town.
A trawl of the NCIC database throws up Wyatt’s social security number, state criminal identification number and arrest record.
The Pentagon makes little effort to track down military personnel who abandon their posts in war or peacetime; it simply doesn’t have the resources. It’s barely able to keep tabs on the numbers. Hetta has pulled the data from the Pentagon’s Office of Personnel and Readiness. I had no idea of the scale of it. None. Over the past fifteen years, they’ve listed in excess of 23,000 people as missing across the four services. The real figure is believed to be twice or three times that.
When the AWOL epidemic was at its height, shortly before our forces withdrew from Afghanistan, a Rutgers University research team set out to discover where people go when they run from the military. Almost eighty per cent of them end up in the area they regard as home.
After thirty days, the soldier’s name is dropped from the rolls – the roster of personnel listed as duty-ready – and a federal warrant is listed for his or her arrest. The deserter becomes a felon. But the military doesn’t have the personnel to pursue them, so becomes reliant on the civilian authorities.
The truth is, a whole lot of deserters never get stopped for running a red light or pulled over for parking ticket violations, which means they’re left untroubled for weeks, months – decades, sometimes.
Gapes’s personnel file shows that he was unluckier than most.
Several days after he was posted as missing, a couple of MPs showed up at his mom’s trailer in the North Country Acres Mobile Home Park.
When they didn’t find him, they looked around town for his known associates.
Cody Butler Wyatt, a thirty-eight-year-old, blue-eyed, white-skinned, six-foot-one, 260-pound male living half a mile away, dinged up in a beat when Hetta entered Blacksoil into the Service’s Counter-Surveillance Unit Reporting database.
‘Eight months ago, he was overheard in the Coalhole Bar ’n’ Grill – a dive on the edge of town near the abandoned railroad depot – making threatening statements about President Thompson.’
She glances at me as we branch off US-48 onto the WV-42 South.
‘He said Thompson’s campaign pledge to disengage America from the multiple wars it was fighting against terrorism amounted to betrayal of his country. And that now that he was President, the only thing that was good for him was “a bullet through his worthless faggot brain”.’
She trots out verbatim what Gapes had shared with me: that ‘the plan’, whatever it is, was well planned, advanced and would be well executed, unless we moved to stop it.
Is that what we’re dealing with here, she asks me. A bunch of wacko nationalists?
The GPS tells us the dark smudge on the far horizon is the Monongahela National Forest and that Blacksoil lies beyond it.
I push my seat back and ask Hetta where she’s from.
‘Northeast Philly.’
‘Your dad a cop?’
She glances at me. ‘My dad a cop?’
‘I figured you’d come from a family of them.’
‘You going to send me your bill when we’re done?’
I smile. ‘It’s called a conversation.’
Her eyes remained fixed on the road.
‘My brother’s a cop.’
‘There you go.’
‘My folks ran a bar. Had done since before I was born. Another brother runs it now. It’s a family business. I helped out till I went to college.’
‘You joined the Service from college?’
‘I joined the Feds, then the Service.’
‘What did you major in?’
‘Computer science.’
Of course. ‘Big family?’
She gives a shrug. ‘We’re Catholic.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Tell me about them – your family. So, one’s a cop and one runs the bar. That it?’
‘There’s seven of us.’
‘Seven?’
‘Another brother’s got religion – he’s a priest. My sister has her own family. And I got two other brothers, both still in school. That’s it.’
We follow an old railroad and a boulder-strewn river, swollen by the recent rains and melting snow.
Fifteen minutes go by. I try again.
‘So, why the Service?’
‘When I was a kid, I saw patterns in things. I liked puzzles.’
‘That was your reason for joining the Service?’
‘No. I caught a guy my parents trusted to help them run the bar. He was skimming profits. It made me so mad I swore that’s what I would do.’
‘Hunt down fraud?’
‘Big as it came.’
‘So, it was the investigative side?’
‘I guess.’
‘But you can handle a weapon, too.’
She seems to grip the wheel a little tighter. ‘It looks good when there are female agents protecting the President. I was a statistic in PPD’s diversity quotas.’
‘When Cabot came in?’
‘Cabot is all about how things look. He doesn’t give a crap about the President, honest to God. He was brought in to reform the Secret Service. He delegated the task of protecting POTUS to SAIC Lefortz.’
The silence stretches between us.
‘You want to tell me what happened back there?’
She doesn’t bother to ask how I know. My information can have come from one of two sources: Reuben or Lefortz. And Lefortz is too much of a gentleman to peddle gossip.
‘They were taking bets. The jackpot went to the ape who could fuck me first.’ She pauses. ‘That was Director Cabot’s idea of locker-room fun.’
There’s a flash of pre-dawn light in the wing mirror as the road bends to the right. Then it straightens again and the white line unwinds into darkness once more.