Gone Tomorrow

‘We need help,’ Lee said. ‘We can’t live like this indefinitely.’

‘We can if we want to,’ I said. ‘I’ve lived like this for ten years.’

‘OK, a normal person can’t live like this indefinitely. We need help. This problem isn’t going to go away.’

‘It could,’ Jake said. ‘From how you were figuring it before. If three thousand people k new, it wouldn’t be a problem any more. So all we have to do is tell three thousand people.’

‘One at a time?’

‘No, we should call the newspapers.’

‘Would they believe us?’

‘If we were convincing.’

‘Would they print the story?’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘Who knows what goes on with newspapers now? Maybe they would check with the government about a thing like this. Maybe the government would tell them to sit on it.’

‘What about freedom of the press?’

Lee said, ‘Yes, I remember that.’

‘So who the hell will help us?’

‘Sansom,’ I said. ‘Sansom will help us. He’s got the biggest investment here.’

‘Sansom is the government. He had his own guy trailing Susan.’

‘Because he has a lot to lose. We can use that.’ I took Leonid’s phone out of my pocket and dropped it on the bed next to Theresa Lee. ‘Text Docherty in the morning. Get the number or the Cannon House Office Building in D.C. Call Sansom’s office and demand to speak with him personally. Tell him you’re a police officer in New York and that you’re with me. Tell him we know his guy was on the train. Then tell him we know the DSM wasn’t for the VAL rifle. Tell him we know there’s more.’

FORTY-NINE

Theresa Lee picked up the phone and held it for a moment like it was a rare and precious jewel. Then she put it on the night stand and asked, ‘What makes you think there’s more?’

I said, ‘Overall there has to be more. Sansom won four medals, not just one. He was a regular go-to guy. He must have done all kinds of things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Whatever needed doing. For whoever needed it done. Not just the army. Delta guys were loaned out, from time to time. To the CIA, on occasion.’

‘To do what?’

‘Covert interventions. Coups. Assassinations.’

‘Marshal Tito died in 1980. In Yugoslavia. You think Sansom did that?’

‘No, I think Tito got sick. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a back-up plan, in case he stayed healthy.’

‘Brezhnev died in 1982. In Russia. The Andropov, pretty soon after that. Then Chernenko, real quick. It was like an epidemic.’

‘What are you? A historian?’

‘Amateur. But whatever, all that led to Gorbachev, and progress. You think that was us? You think that was Sansom?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But whatever, none of that kind of stuff relates to March of 1983 in Afghanistan.’

‘But think about it. Stumbling into a Soviet sniper team in the dark was a totally random chance. Would they have sent a go-to ace like Sansom walking around in the hills, hoping for the best? A hundred times out of a hundred and one he would have come up empty. That’s a massive risk for very little reward. That’s no kind of mission planning. A mission needs an achievable objective.’

‘A lot of them fail.’

‘Of course they do. But they all start out with a realistic target. More realistic than blundering around in a thousand square miles of empty mountains hoping for a random face to face encounter. So there must have been something else going on.’

‘That’s pretty vague.’

‘There’s more,’ I said. ‘And it’s not so vague. People have been talking to me for days. And I’ve been listening. Some of what I heard doesn’t make much sense. Those federal guys snarled me up at the Watergate in D.C. I asked them what was going on. Their reaction was weird. It was like the sky was about to fall. It was way out of proportion for some technical trespass twenty-five years ago.’

‘Geopolitics isn’t simple.’

‘I agree. And I’m the first to admit I’m no kind of an expert. But even so it seemed way over the top.’

‘That’s still vague.’

‘I spoke to Sansom in D.C. At his office. He seemed sour about the whole thing. Gloomy, and kind of troubled.’

‘It’s election season.’

‘But grabbing up the rifle was kind of cool, wasn’t it? Nothing to be ashamed of. It was all about what the army used to call dash and daring. So his reaction was wrong.’

‘Still vague.’

‘He knew the sniper’s name. Grigori Hoth. From his dog tags. I figured he had the tags as souvenirs. He said, no, those tags were locked up with the after-action reports and everything else. It was like a slip of the tongue. And everything else? What did that mean?’

Lee said nothing.

I said, ‘We talked about the fate of the sniper and the spotter. Sansom said he had no silenced weapons. Which was like another slip of the tongue. Delta would never set up for clandestine nighttime incursions without silenced weapons. They’re particular about stuff like that. Which suggests to me that the whole VAL episode was an accidental byproduct of something else entirely. I thought the rifle was the story. But this thing is like an iceberg. Most of it is still hidden.’

Lee said nothing.

I said, ‘Then we talked about the geopolitics. He saw a danger, for sure. He’s worried about Russia, or the Russian Federation, or whatever it is they call themselves now. He thinks they’re unstable. He said things could blow up big, if the Korengal part of the story gets out. You hear that? The Korengal part of the story? It was like a third slip of the tongue. It was effectively a direct admission that there’s more. Direct from the horse’s mouth.’

Lee didn’t answer. Jacob Mark asked, ‘What kind of more?’

‘I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s information-intensive. Right from the start Lila Hoth was looking for a USB memory. And the feds assume there’s one out there somewhere. They said their task is to recover the real memory stick. Real, because they took a look at the one I bought and assumed it was a decoy. They said, it’s empty and it’s too small anyway. Hear that? Too small? Which means there are some big files in play. Lots of information.’

‘But Susan didn’t have anything with her.’

‘True. But everybody assumes she did.’

‘What kind of information?’

‘I have no idea. Except that Springfield talked to me here in New York. Sansom’s security guy, at the Sheraton. In a quiet corridor. He was very uptight. He was warning me off. He chose a specific metaphor. He said, you can’t afford to turn over the wrong rock.’

‘So?’

‘What happens when you turn over a rock?’

‘Things crawl out.’