BEFORE LEAVING THE TENT, I THROW A TYVEK SUIT OVER MY CLOTHES and, at Graham’s request, hand over my phone. Hetta does the same. It’s a secure site – no photographs, except by the forensic team. I didn’t take any pictures. Hetta erased hers.
We put on latex gloves and plastic overshoes and head into the cabin. The odor of decay has been replaced by the smell of chemicals and powders. The deer carcass has gone. The creosote lingers. The light from four arc lamps, each directed into a corner, is blindingly bright. A female specialist, lying on her back, is shining the beam of her flashlight up the chimney. Another, looking for hairs, prints and fibers, directs a UV lamp across the floor. A male photographer, standing on a metal ladder, shoots away at a cluster of images to the right of the fireplace, close to the inverted printout of the old man in the engraving. I can’t keep my eyes off the sketch of the office building which provided poor Jimenez with his vantage point, so have to turn before Graham spots my point of interest.
A catalogue is being made, I hear Graham explaining, as he gestures to the walls and the ceiling. Multiple cyber breaches and four deaths equals conspiracy, which has the Secret Service on high alert.
‘Once the images have been digitized they’ll be crunched through the PIAD mainframe, searching for patterns,’ Graham says. ‘Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.’
Patterns …
I look at Hetta.
She hasn’t told him.
Graham asks if anything is wrong.
‘I was wondering if you’d reached any conclusions about the imagery.’
His eyes narrow. ‘We’ve ID’ed three types. The bulk are printouts – images he’s pulled off the Internet. We found a laptop, a printer and a prepaid cell under the floorboards, and reckon he must have had a place in Blacksoil, a lock-up, where he could plug in, download and print this shit. The sketches are unquestionably his. Handwriting’s matched the strokes with known examples of his work.
‘And then there’s the third category.’ He points to the banal, everyday stuff – people at work, lying in bed; men and women sleeping, talking, picking their teeth in traffic, watching TV or scrolling down their phones. ‘They all lack definition, as if the device or sensor was lo-res or filtered.’
‘Our best guess is that they were taken by a surveillance system, a very sophisticated one – nano-drones maybe,’ Hetta says. ‘So how did he get a hold of them?’
We follow Graham to the sanctum wall.
The surface layer of pictures has been carefully removed and stored, to reveal what Gapes had hidden beneath it.
Somebody has pinned printed labels in two-inch-high lettering to the tops of the panels. I stop when I get to ‘Mac’.
Beneath the label is an intricate sketch of a fetus.
‘We checked with the Hillsborough Medical Examiner. The autopsy did not reveal the fact your wife was pregnant.’ Graham gives his pen another double click. ‘But her medical records show she attended a holistic clinic close to the beach where you used to live. And that they scanned her.’ He pauses, to give emphasis to what follows. ‘Gapes couldn’t have hacked the scan, because the clinic hadn’t at that time digitized its records.’
‘I told you, Graham – the dinner was a celebration of Reuben Kantner’s impending move to D.C.’ I look him in the eye. ‘Nobody knew about the pregnancy apart from Hope and me.’
It’s only in the helicopter on the way back to the airport that I realize that isn’t true. Reuben and Ted knew. I’m sitting next to Hetta, in one of the bucket seats. We don’t talk. We can’t because of the rotor noise, and anyway, she’s busy with her keyboard.
Graham sits opposite, his head against the bulkhead. As far as I can tell, he’s asleep.
Hetta passes me her iPad and indicates I should scroll.
Colonel, I’m off the investigation – back to number-crunching at HQ. And someone is out to bury you also. If this isn’t clear to you, it should be. Remember what I said about Cabot – about image, not substance? He doesn’t trust you.
He knows there is something going on – something between you, Kantner and POTUS. Cabot needs a quick win on this, a scapegoat, and you need to tell me what’s going on, about the deal the three of you made with SAIC Lefortz – then I can help.
I type: What deal? and hand it back.
She looks at me, pulls a face, then starts to type furiously: Lefortz assigned me to you that night. He never said why. You have history with Reuben Kantner. She stops, thinks for a second and adds: You’re the White House Doctor, but I don’t see you doing a whole lot of doctoring.
I type: OK.
She indicates I should scroll on.
Point Two. Did you notice anything different about the cabin?
I glance up. Graham’s eyes remain closed.
No.
She leans across me. I smell her hair. She’s showered – and used something a little more tantalizing than the stuff they provide in the field to fight off bacteria, parasites, fungus and chiggers.
Some of the images are different.
I respond: More images with numbers?
She shakes her head.
Different in what way?
She leans in to me again. Some of them have been removed.
They’re huddled at the bottom of the stairs, between a fridge and a shrapnel-scarred wall. Three women, all in black, and five children: three girls, two boys.
Our flashlights pick out the torn flesh on their legs, heads, bodies and arms.
‘Shit …’ Reuben drops his gun.
They’re all dead.
No, they aren’t.
I sense rather than see the movement.
The woman is lying on her back in a pool of blood, several meters from the others. She’s young. Eighteen or nineteen, maybe. She stares at me. Kohl is smeared across her face. She’s trying to say something.
I don’t speak Arabic, but I’m willing her to tell me.
She points to her stomach.
Reuben shines his light. I throw off my helmet and my Alice pack.
The guy who blew the hinges off the door is standing beside me. He’s still holding the shotgun. The one who tossed in the grenades is standing beside him. They both look like ghosts in the darkness. I point to the pack.
‘There’s a plastic sheet in there. Spread it. Find my instruments, place them on the sheet and pour spirit over them.’
Reuben does so.
I make a small cut in the abaya with my knife, then rip a hole in it.
She has a one-centimeter bullet wound in her abdomen and two other injuries that I can see: a shrapnel entry site in her right hip and another in her right thigh.
At that moment, she arrests.
I start applying CPR, but thirty seconds in I know I’m not going to get her back. She’s lost too much blood; she’s gone into hypovolemic shock.
Two minutes later, I call it.
Time and place of death: zero dark thirty, Fallujah, Iraq.
I sit in the silence, my back against the fridge, and close my eyes.
When I get to my feet, Reuben is still standing over the body. He’s numb with shock. Everybody is.
I can’t rid myself of the look on her face before she died. Eyes wide. Pleading.
Pleading.
‘Give me some light!’
For a moment, Reuben remains rooted to the spot. I yell at him again and he does so.
I make a vertical incision in her abdomen wall, from her navel to a point just above her underwear, then cut into her uterus. Hemorrhagic fluid washes out of it. There’s a liter of blood in the peritoneal sac. An intestinal perforation, too, because I can smell it.
Her baby girl is almost full-term. The 5.56 round entered her jaw and exited via her thorax …
For a moment, I have no idea where I am.
Then I hear the whine of the engines and the rattle of the overhead bins and slowly pull things into focus: the cigarette burns on the seat opposite, Hetta asleep in the one beside it, and Graham, his back to me, across the aisle.
I have relived this scene many times, in flashbacks and dreams, but never in a dream that was a flashback; because, like I told the President, dreams that incorporate flashbacks are vanishingly rare.
I only just make it to the head before I throw up. I try to flush it, then remember: damn thing’s broken.
The sights, sounds and smells of that night continue to haunt me as I sit in my office, trying to focus on the backlog of work that has built up in the thirty-six hours that I’ve been away. Molly comes and goes – she asks if I need coffees or sodas; if the thermostat is turned too high; whether I would like her to go talk to the Deputy Chief of Staff, who’s chasing me for updates on the Moscow medical mission. She doesn’t know I was present when Lefortz was killed – and, unless it leaks through the media, she never will. But she knows what’s wrong with me goes beyond the shock, pain and grief I feel for him.
I press the intercom button. She picks up before I hear her phone ring.
‘Is there still no word from Reuben Kantner’s office?’
‘No, Doctor Cain.’
‘But he is in today?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she says. ‘I spoke to his assistant. Five times, to be precise. He’s in. And he’s aware it’s urgent.’
‘And what about Admiral Byford?’
‘Her office is aware you’re trying to reach her, too.’
‘Is she in today?’
‘I do believe so, Doctor Cain, yes.’
‘Would you take a letter to her for me?’
‘I doubt she’ll see me, Doctor Cain.’
‘But you know her assistant, right?’
‘Olive-Ann and I are on first-name terms. What may I tell her?’
‘I have the results of her blood test.’
‘Blood test?’ Molly says. ‘Was that an appointment you made through me?’
‘No. Sorry. I should have told you, Molly. I took her bloods a while back.’
There’s a pause. She knows as well as I do there was no blood test. The note conveys a message of a different kind.
‘Very well, Doctor Cain. What should I say if Olive-Ann asks me about it?’
‘That her boss has nothing to worry about. But I’d like to drop around to speak with her all the same.’
‘At her office?’
‘No. At her home.’
‘You have her address?’
I don’t. Just that she lives in Alexandria. On the waterfront.
Molly appears, hands me the address and picks up my envelope. I hear the outer door close.
I try Reuben again.
Still busy.
When I look up, a big guy in an ill-fitting suit is standing by Molly’s desk. His back is to me and he has a phone pressed to his ear. The last time I saw DJ we swapped pathology notes over Gapes’s tattooed body.
‘Special Agent Wharton.’
He turns and hangs up.
‘Lefortz said I should come see you,’ he says.
‘Sorry, you’re going to have to back up.’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
‘Tell me what?’
‘That we got together before he picked you up at Dulles.’
‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Gentleman Jim and I go way back, Colonel Cain, and I know that he rated you highly. We shared a lot of data. I think I know pretty much everything he knew about the Gapes case. And I’m guessing you were there when he died.’
I say nothing. I promised Reuben and Cabot I wouldn’t.
Wharton holds his hands in the air and smiles awkwardly. ‘Listen, that’s OK. Of course there are things he was working on he couldn’t share with me. The President’s probe, for example …’
‘Probe, Agent Wharton?’
‘All I’m saying is, if you need Bureau support …’
‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘No. I’m here because Jim said I should come see you if the Assistant US Attorney and I got the proffer session in place.’
‘Proffer session?’
‘Between the Gapes family lawyer, Katya Dedovic, and the US Attorney’s Office.’
He taps his watch and says he’ll give me the details en route.