The Enemy

Trifonov smiled. We walked across the corridor and opened the private room’s door. The light was dim. There was a guy in the bed. He was asleep. Impossible to tell whether he was big or small. I couldn’t see much of him. He was mostly covered in plaster casts. His legs were in traction and he had big GSW bandage packs around both knees. Opposite his bed was a long lightbox at eye level that was pretty much covered with X-ray exposures. I clicked the light and took a look. Every film had a date and the name Pickles scrawled in the margin. There were films of his arms and his ribs and his chest and his legs. The human body has more than two hundred ten bones in it, and it seemed like this guy Pickles had most of them broken. He had put a big dent in the hospital’s radiography budget all by himself.

I clicked the light off and kicked the leg of the bed, twice. The guy in it stirred. Woke up. Focused in the dim light and the look on his face when he saw Trifonov was all the alibi Trifonov was ever going to need. It was a look of stark, abject terror.

“You two wait outside,” I said.

Summer led Trifonov out the door and I moved up to the head of the bed.

“How are you, asshole?” I said.

The guy called Pickles was all white in the face. Sweating, and trembling inside his casts.

“That was the man,” he said. “Right there. He did this to me.”

“Did what to you?”

“He shot me in the legs.”

I nodded. Looked at the GSW packs. Pickles had been kneecapped. Two knees, two bullets. Two rounds fired.

“Front or side?” I said.

“Side,” he said.

“Front is worse,” I said. “You were lucky. Not that you deserved to be lucky.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you? I just met your wife.”

“Foreign bitch.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s her own fault. She won’t do what I tell her. A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am. Watch.”

I swung my hand like I was brushing a fly off his sheets. Caught him with a soft backhander on the side of his right knee. He screamed and I walked away and stepped out the door. Found the nurse looking over in my direction.

“He is very sick,” I said.

We rode down in the elevator and avoided the guy at the triage desk by using the main entrance. We walked around to the Humvee in silence. I opened the rear door for Trifonov but stopped him on the way in. I shook his hand.

“I apologize,” I said.

“Am I in trouble?” he said.

“Not with me,” I said. “You’re my kind of guy. But you’re very lucky. You could have hit a femoral artery. You could have killed him. Then it might have been different.”

He smiled, briefly. He was calm.

“I trained five years with GRU,” he said. “I know how to kill people. And I know how not to.”

sixteen

We gave Trifonov his Steyr back and let him out at the Delta gate. He probably signed the gun back in and then legged it to his room and picked up his book. Probably carried on reading right where he left off. We parked the Humvee and walked back to my office. Summer went straight to the copy of the gate log. It was still taped to the wall, next to the map.

“Vassell and Coomer,” she said. “They were the only other people who left the post that night.”

“They went north,” I said. “If you want to say they threw the briefcase out of the car, then you have to agree they went north. They didn’t go south to Columbia.”

“OK,” she said. “So the same guy didn’t do Carbone and Brubaker. There’s no connection. We just wasted a lot of time.”

“Welcome to the real world,” I said.

The real world got a whole lot worse when my phone rang twenty minutes later. It was my sergeant. The woman with the baby son. She had Sanchez on the line, calling from Fort Jackson. She put him through.

“Willard has been and gone,” he said. “Unbelievable.”

“Told you so.”

“He pitched all kinds of hissy fits.”

“But you’re fireproof.”

“Thank God.”

I paused. “Did you tell him about my guy?”

He paused. “You told me to. Shouldn’t I have?”

“It was a dry hole. Looked good at first, but it wasn’t in the end.”

“Well, he’s on his way up to see you about it. He left here two hours ago. He’s going to be very disappointed.”

“Terrific,” I said.

“What are you going to do?” Summer asked.

“What is Willard?” I said. “Fundamentally?”

“A careerist,” she said.

“Correct,” I said.