A Knife Edge (30 page)

“So this is your man, eh?” said the SecDef, leaning back in his chair, appraising me like I was a suit on the rack that might possibly fit.

Chip Schaeffer said stiffly, “Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary. Major Vincent Cooper, currently assigned to OSI, formerly a special tactics officer in the CCTs.”

“At ease, gentlemen,” said an Air Force four-star who, like the admiral, was one of the people I didn't recognize.

At least the order to wear Class As now made some sense, even if the rest of it didn't. An Army four-star got to his feet and walked up to and around me. “Are you fit, Major?” he asked.

“He looks fit,” said a voice from the shadows down the end of the room.

The general was short, with big fleshy ears that reminded me of Yoda's. He smelled strongly of breath mints and cigar smoke. Those three words—”Are you fit”—gave me a tight feeling in my gut. Since when did physical fitness have anything to do with an ability to investigate crime? The Air Force had a basic fitness standard for its cops. Basically, you had to be fit enough to stand for ten minutes on line at a Krispy Kreme's.

“Reasonably, sir,” I said.

“Reasonably, eh?” the general said, half turning to the audience seated behind him.

“Get on with it, Henry,” said some rear admiral.

“Your record says you're thirty-four, Major.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hmm,” the general said, sucking in his top lip and then chewing on it. I read the name tag on his chest: Howerton. I knew the name. Henry Howerton was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, which explained who the rest of the brass were. The gray hairs of his eyebrows were long and met above the bridge of his nose where
they tangled like a kid's shoelaces. He was thinking hard, frowning. “Major, I want to see if you can do the APFT push-up requirement, plus eight to round it up to fifty,” he said.

“Jesus, Henry…” said the unidentified admiral.

Howerton turned and said, to no one in particular, “If the guy's not in shape, we can sort that out here and now and move on if we have to. Do we have time to screw around?”

“No,” said the SecDef.

“Well, then… Fifty push-ups, son,” Howerton said, speaking to me with his hands on his hips. “I don't reckon you can do ‘em, and neither does Ulysses S. Grant here.” He pulled his wallet from a back pocket, lifted out a fifty-dollar note, and slapped it on the table.

Whatever I might have been expecting, it wasn't this. The APFT was the Army Physical Fitness Test. I'd done it before for reasons I didn't want to think about.

“Go on… take his money, Major,” said the admiral from the shadows.

I found myself undoing my overcoat buttons, not because I wanted the fifty bucks but because majors don't say no to generals, not unless they enjoy a good kick in their performance reports and mine were already bruised enough. The room was cool but I was sweating anyway. I took the coat off and put it over the back of a chair.

“Make ‘em good ones, Major—straight back, chin up,” said General Howerton.

A little voice in my head told me this might be a good bet to lose. I got down on the floor and saw my nose reflected in the mirror shine of Howerton's shoes. With all the adrenaline in my system, I did thirty-five easy, without feeling them, Howerton keeping count, but I made the last five look like I was bench-pressing three years of pancakes with extra cream, and stopped at forty-eight, spent. It was a great performance. I got to my feet slow, sucking in the O
₂
. “Sorry, General,” I said, shaking my head. “Hit the wall.”

“That's OK, Major. I get to keep my money. This is what's known as a win-win.” He said all this with a broad grin.

My eyes narrowed.

“Like I said, the APFT says you only need to do
forty-two,
son. I just wanted to see with my own eyes. Satisfy myself and these good people here. See that you could do ‘em.”

“Gotta hand it to you, Henry; you read the Major right,” said the admiral with a chuckle. “The way you started out, Major, looked to me like you could go all the way to a hundred.”

Someone else said, “You sure about this, Henry?”

“Look, he's got the necessary experience. We can get him an Army Regulation 40-501 flight physical examination that falls within the specified time limitations. He meets the height and weight standards as set down in AR 600-9. He scrapes in with a few years to spare for age, he's a good thirty inside the two-hundred-forty-pound weight limit for MFF, and he's security-cleared for black ops. We can get him waivers for the rest. In other words, gentlemen, for the purposes of this exercise, Major Cooper here is good to go.”

The APFT?
MFF!
Hang on a second, good to go the fuck where? And for the purposes of
what
exercise?

“You look confused, Major. Don't worry, you won't be for too much longer.” Howerton put his hand on my shoulder. “Your orders will be cut this afternoon and given to Captain Schaeffer. Dismissed. Oh, and, Vin … good luck.”

T
he woman behind the counter had lost her figure a long time ago and what was left had about as many curves as a desert road. Her gray eyes were blank and the airborne fat combined with her own perspiration to oil up the skin on her face, causing it to shine. She asked me what I wanted with a raise of her eyebrows.

“Coffee, thanks,” I said. “Black, no sugar.”

She ambled off and pressed the button on the machine after placing a cardboard cup under the nozzle. I surveyed the food behind the glass. I was hungry, but not hungry enough to risk eating what at least a thousand customers before me had decided to pass on, and for good reason by the look of it. I'm not a food snob—in the military, you can't be—but I don't eat what I can't identify. The woman put the coffee on my tray and turned what little attention she had left on the customer behind me. I took a Snickers bar, put it on the tray beside the cup, and moved one place closer to the cashier. The cafeteria was still crowded, despite it being after 1400 hours. I found a vacant table.

I didn't want to think about the briefing, but, at the same time, I found it impossible to think about anything else. MFF, Military Free Fall, jumping out of a plane at high altitude. Given my issues with flying, that was bad enough. Worse would be the reasons for being made to do the course. What was I good to go
for, exactly? Obviously, it had something to do with Chalmers and Doc Spears and so there were clues right there. Worrying clues.

I ate the Snickers and watched people come and go. The guy I was hoping would turn up arrived, even before the coffee I bought to make occupying the table legit went cold. He stood in the line, ordered, and eventually found a table, maneuvering through the crowded area with some difficulty. He sat, and I made my way over. “How was Guam?” I said as I took the seat opposite.

I interrupted his lunch—light coffee, and something in a Styrofoam tray that looked like it had come from the sump of a blown engine. Chalmers looked across the table at me with flat lids drawn across his eyes. No Happy New Year from him, either. “Go fuck yourself, Cooper.”

“Do I look like a hermaphrodite?”

“What do you want?”

“How'd you break your leg?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

I took a breath and tried again. “Guam. I meant it. How did it go? You caught up with Al Cooke and ran him through his statement about the night Dr. Tanaka died, right?”

“This is how it went, asshole.” He tapped a crutch with his knife.

“You broke your leg on Guam?”

“Disappear, Cooper.”

“I'm sorry about your injury.”

“No, you're not.”

“Al Cooke—tell me about him,” I said, trying to break the cycle. In fact, I was interested in finding out how he broke his leg, but only because I wanted to know whether I could claim some credit for it.

“Why should I?”

“Because everyone keeps saying we're on the same team?”

“Jesus, Cooper,” he said, laughing sourly. “What goddamn shower did you come down in?”

“OK,” I said. “If you won't tell me what you know, I'll tell you what I think you found.”

“You sent me off on a fucking wild-goose chase, asshole,” he said, all the preppy Ivy League crap peeled back, revealing the genuine plastic core beneath.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“Put a dick in your ear.”

“You got to Guam and found Al Cooke gone.”

“What makes you think that?”

I ignored the question. “Did you check his bank account?”

Chalmers chewed and pointed to a cheek with his knife, indicating he wasn't going to speak with his mouth full.

“If you did, I'm guessing you'd have found a large unaccounted-for sum of money, recently deposited.”

He swallowed. “Why would we check the man's bank account? Cooke was a potential witness, not a suspect.”

“You did read his statement? The one I provided with my case notes, the one he provided over the phone, the one you went all the way over there to check? Didn't the statement strike you as odd?”

Chalmers shrugged and shoveled what appeared to be engine parts in brown grease into his face. “You got somewhere else to be, Cooper?” he said. “I can think of a few places, if you can't.”

“Does CIA want to know what happened to Tanaka, or not?” I said. I tried to ignore the tough-guy act. I had to remind myself that Chalmers was CIA, not a cop. Unless the subject wore a hand towel or a trench coat, he probably wouldn't know what to do.

“Not,” he said. “We're after bigger fish. What makes you think you know more now than you did before Christmas, Cooper?”

A reasonable question. “Because I've just been in a room with you and Dr. Spears and a whole bunch of brass. That tells me a few things right there. One of those things has to do with a certain DVD. It scared Spears bad enough to make her pass it on to me and then get the hell out of Moreton Genetics. She came to
that decision after I interviewed her about the relationship between Boyle and Tanaka. I saw it in her face.”

“Did you read her palm as well?” Chalmers shook his head and wiped his mouth with a napkin, which he tossed into the remains of his lunch. “Now, if you don't mind, fuck off.” He pushed his chair back and made like he was going to stand up. “Are you finished? Because I am.”

I was banging my head against a wall with this guy. His mind had the flexibility of a retiree with rickets. “I'm going to take another guess,” I said.

“My food tray can hardly contain its excitement. It's going to sit there all afternoon and listen to your bullshit,” he said, pulling himself up onto his crutches.

“That wallet found at the Four Winds supposedly belonging to Professor Boyle—five will get you ten Forensics have said it wasn't burned in the same fire that torched everything else around it. And that calls into question not only the identification of the body it was found under as being Sean Boyle's, but also makes me wonder who planted it.”

The slight hesitation in Chalmers's determination to leave told me I was right. Professional pride wouldn't let him ask me where these conclusions of mine had come from. I stood and tucked my card into his top pocket. “Just in case you get stuck,” I said as I walked out.

As I reached the exit, the cell buzzed against my leg. I pulled it out and reviewed the number before answering. “Arlen.”

“Hey, Vin. Where are you?”

“On thin ice, skating.”

“Well, bud, when you've stopped playin' around, you need to pay us a visit over here.”

“Andrews?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Your orders came through.”

“Already?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“Your old boss brought them over personally.”

“Chip Schaeffer?”

“Yep.”

Schaeffer must have left the Pentagon meeting and gone straight there. “I need to go home and change.”

“Chip told me to tell you to get ready to deploy immediately.”

“You know where to?” I asked.

“The orders are SPECAT.”

“SPECAT…” Special Category—no names, no destinations, lots of secrecy. Obviously Arlen knew, but he wasn't saying. A bad sign.

T
his time I was in and out of my apartment within twenty minutes. There was nothing to say good-bye to, except maybe the fridge mold. I didn't bother checking the e-mail, or the mailbox stuffing. I wasn't expecting anything anyway.

I saw that Kim and The 38th Parallel were still a week away from reopening, but there were signs of life in Summer Love, the vegan joint. A hippie, Summer herself probably, was mopping the floor. She glanced up and waved. I waved back. She had great legs and was attractive in an unshaved kind of way. Maybe I could get to like tofu burgers. Maybe I could take the tofu out. Maybe it was time to move.

The snow had stopped falling, though my fingers still ached, an indication the halt was only temporary. As I walked on to the street, a cab conveniently stopped a couple of doors away and a customer got out. I made the driver's day by taking him back into the city. Watching my breath condense on the window beside my face, I wondered what poo the Air Force had polished and put my name on.
MFF? Jesus.
I closed my eyes and settled in for a slow ride.

Forty minutes later I was sitting in an office at Andrews AFB, waiting for Arlen, staring at his gray filing cabinet. He walked in looking way too perky. “Having a good day?” I asked.

“Vin—how you doin', bud?”

“Having a ball. Before I forget, can you lodge this for me, please?” I put my will on his desk and said, “I'm leaving the Vegas casino to you.”

“Great, I could use one. You been in your office yet?” He picked up my will and put it in a tray with a bunch of other papers.

“No, why? What's in there?”

“A couple of suits over from the GAO, and they didn't look happy.”

I wondered if it was the same two guys. “Is one of them Asian?”

He nodded. “I take it you've tangled with them before?”

I nodded. Could this day get any worse?

“Man—you're a game son of a bitch. No one takes those General Accounting Office people on.”

“You got those orders there?” I asked.

Arlen opened a drawer and pulled out a thick envelope.