Текст книги "Flat Spin"

Автор книги: David Freed

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

FOURTEEN

“I always wanted kids,” Savannah said. “Probably too late now.”

“You never said anything about wanting kids when we were together.”

“You just weren’t listening, Logan. Six years, I never heard you say a word about wanting a family.”

I checked my side view mirror again. Nobody on our tail. We were on the 101, heading toward Los Angeles, the Pacific to our right. Savannah was driving. Traffic was light. The Jag was pushing eighty. I leaned my power leather seat back and watched a pod of at least twenty dolphins swimming parallel to the shoreline.

“Arlo didn’t want more kids,” she said. “He said one was enough for him.”

The thought of Savannah having a baby with Arlo Echevarria, or anyone else for that matter, made my stomach cramp. She was right about one thing, though: I was no family man. The instincts just weren’t there. Maybe it was because of how I grew up, the lack of role models, shunted among foster parents after the oncologist told my mother that there was nothing more he could do for her. My father was long gone by then. For years, I’d kept a photo of him in an old cigar box, a Polaroid snapshot of a young, unsmiling soldier on border duty in West Germany that came with the one and only birthday greeting he ever sent me. “Money’s tight,” it said, “times are hard, here’s your stupid birthday card.” I was eight. Not that I’m making excuses for myself. I just didn’t care to be a father. I didn’t know how to be one. And, apparently, given how his own son turned out, neither did Arlo Echevarria.

“You should be grateful you didn’t have a kid with that guy,” I said. “He was an abysmal failure at fatherhood.”

“And I suppose you wouldn’t have been?”

The blood was pulsing in my neck. “What makes you think you’d make such a great mother? All you cared about was your career. Now that the phone’s no longer ringing off the hook, you think it might be fun to go shopping at Gymboree and learn all about potty training? Gimme a break.”

Savannah’s eyes were wet with tears. Once again, I’d gone too far.

“I didn’t mean that,” I said.

“Yes, you did. Every word.”

A stylist needs 1,600 hours of formal training before he or she can legally trim a single head of hair in the state of California, but you don’t need five minutes of instruction to bring another human being into the world. Nobody knows whether they’ll be worth anything as a parent until they’re already on the job, and by then, it’s usually too late. I thought about sharing my observations with Savannah on the subject, but I knew she didn’t want to hear them.

* * *

The intimate West Hollywood lounge I remembered as the Wet Spot was no more. It was now a discothèque called Propaganda. Gone were the leather banquettes and piano bar, replaced by a throbbing dance club done up all in red, with mirror disco balls hanging from the ceiling, and Bolshevik-chic posters of Lenin on the walls. The cocktail waitresses wore glossy jackboots and red leather, form-fitting Commie uniforms that showed plenty of thigh. The only element that apparently hadn’t changed, aside from the name over the door, was the clientele. There was still plenty of chest hair and Eurotrash. Techno tunes pounded from the speakers, loud enough that I could feel the bass throbbing in the pit of my throat. Propaganda was mobbed. It wasn’t even happy hour.

“They make a mean apple martini here,” Savannah shouted over the music.

“You’ve been here?”

“Once or twice.” She headed off toward the bar, through throngs of gyrating dancers.

A bouncer dressed like a Soviet infantryman stood guard near the door. I walked over and asked if Gennady Bondarenko was still the owner. He leaned closer and touched his ear like he couldn’t hear me. I repeated myself, only louder.

“You want to see Mr. Bondarenko?”

I nodded. His accent was working-class British. A Sig Sauer pistol rode his right hip in a pancake holster.

“And what, if I may ask, is the purpose of your visit?”

“I’m from Publisher’s Clearing House,” I yelled into his ear. “I’m here to give Mr. Bondarenko his million dollar grand prize. I left the balloons in the van.”

The bouncer leaned his head back and laughed. He had no fillings. He asked me to turn around with my hands on the wall, and gave me a quick pat down. I’d left my revolver in Savannah’s car. Along with the balloons.

“Who shall I say is here to see him?”

“Tell him a friend of Laz.”

The bouncer typed a text message on his iPhone. Two brunettes in hip-huggers and spandex tops strutted past us to go have a smoke outside. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back despite my better self.

The bouncer’s phone beeped. He read the response to his text message. Then he yelled in my ear. “Straight back, up the stairs. There’s a door marked, ‘Private.’ Off you go.”

I nodded my thanks and started working my way through the club. The dance floor was packed with young women and stylishly unshaven young men all trying desperately to look their sexy best, gyrating and toasting each other with shouts of, “Za vas!”—“To you!”—when “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees began playing and everybody started cheering wildly like they’d all just won the lotto. A gym rat with too much gel in his hair started to rock out and backed straight into me.

“Watch the fuck where you’re going, gramps,” he said.

We both knew he was in the wrong. We both knew he was trying to impress the young lady he was dancing with. We both knew that the situation would quickly escalate were I to let it.

“My mistake,” I said with a smile and kept walking.

I couldn’t decide if it was the Buddha’s influence or me mellowing with age. Either way, I had to admit, it felt kind of good, not forcing the issue.

I reached the stairway the bouncer directed me to. I looked back for Savannah but couldn’t see her through the crowd. I climbed the stairs and walked down a short hallway to a door marked, “Private.” I knocked.

“You are the one who is friend of Laz?” The voice on the other side of the door was Russian, female, older.

“We used to work together,” I said, “for the same company.”

“You have photo ID?”

I got out my driver’s license and slid it under the door. A few seconds went by, then the door bolt turned, followed by a second lock. A hand slid the security chain from its track. The door opened a crack, revealing a thick, low-slung, middle-aged woman in a pink velour warm-up suit. Her hair was the color of carrot juice. She was puffing on a Virginia Slim.

“I am Anya,” she said, handing me back my license, “sister of Laz.”

“Cordell Logan. I’m a friend of Laz. I’m looking for Gennady Bondarenko. Is he around?”

“Gennady is my husband.” She glanced furtively behind me to make sure no one else was coming up the stairs, then gestured. “You will please to come in.”

Anya Bondarenko locked the door behind me and slid the safety chain back in place. Inside the office was an executive desk made of burl wood with a matching filing cabinet, a freestanding bank safe, and a foldout couch. A sixty-one-inch plasma television hung from the far wall. A big, square-jawed twenty-year-old in camouflage fatigue pants and a sky-blue UCLA T-shirt lounged on the couch, nursing a Heineken and watching Jerry Springer. He had close-cropped hair the color of night and three days’ worth of facial stubble black enough to be blue.

“This is Marko. My nephew. He is here to visit from Omsk.”

The kid didn’t respond, transfixed as he was by the TV.

“His English is no good,” Anya said, eyeing me through a tobacco haze. “You look familiar to me.”

“I used to come in once in awhile. Years ago.”

“Would you care for cocktail?”

“Alas, those days are behind me.”

“Too bad for you.” She inhaled what was left of her cigarette, blew the smoke out her nose, and dropped the butt into a Diet Pepsi can, which hissed, then poured three fingers of Absolut into a crystal tumbler.

“So,” she said, “I call Laz, but he has heard nothing.”

“Nothing about what?”

She looked at me like I was a slow learner. “Laz. I call him. ‘Have you heard from Gennady?’ He tells me no. He says, ‘I will make calls.’ This is yesterday. Now, you come. So, you tell me, where is my husband?”

I explained that her brother Laz and I hadn’t spoken in a few years. My visit and Gennady’s apparent disappearance, I said, were mere coincidence.

Anya Bondarenko slumped into the chair behind the desk and looked down at her glass mournfully. “I thought my brother sends you. Now I am thinking my husband has left me for another woman.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“I have not seen Gennady for five days.” She lit another Virginia Slim, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. “You have business with him?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“You work for government?”

“Used to.”

She shrugged. “What is it you do now, your job?”

I gave her my business card.

She squinted at it through the smoke. “Cordell Logan, CFI. What is this, CFI? You are on TV?”

“Not CSI,” I said, correcting her. “CFI. It means I’m a certified flight instructor.”

“You are pilot?”

“According to the FAA.”

“What is FAA?”

“The sorriest excuse for a bureaucracy on this or any other planet. Listen, Mrs. Bondarenko, if you see your husband, tell him I need to speak with him. It’s important.”

“If I see him,” said, “the first thing I will do is give him the back of my hand for scaring me this way. Then I will tell him.”

“Spasiba.”

“Puzhalsta.”

She walked me to the door.

“Dasvidaniya, Marko.”

Anya Bondarenko’s nephew fired a chilly glance over his shoulder at me, conveying his displeasure at my interrupting his TV-watching. I understood his annoyance. That Jerry Springer is quality entertainment.

* * *

Savannah was sipping an apple martini at the bar. The same gym rat who’d backed into me on the dance floor was putting the moves on her. She was doing her best to ignore him, but he would not be ignored.

“One drink. It’s not like I’m asking you to blow me or something.” He was leaning into her, shirt unbuttoned, giving his pheromone musk a chance to work its seductive magic.

“Having fun?” I said as I walked over to her.

“Thank God,” Savannah yelled at me over the music. “Where’ve you been?”

“Playing Kojak.”

The trip was a bust, I told her. The man I’d come to see wasn’t in.

“So what do you want to do?” she said.

“Go back to your place and regroup.”

“She’s with you?” the gym rat said, like he couldn’t believe it.

“For the moment, anyway,” I said.

Savannah shot me a disdainful look as I followed her out.

The gym rat grabbed my arm. “The chick’s into me, man. I can feel it. If she’s really not with you, why don’t you just be cool and step off.” His cologne smelled like something a wolverine might excrete in the middle of mating season.

“Trust me, my friend,” I said, “on your best day, you couldn’t handle it.” I tried to go around him, but he wouldn’t let me.

“Dude, nobody walks away from me. We’re talking here.” He was suddenly in my face, shaking out his arms, like we were about to go three rounds. His glowering eyes and cold, Mike Tyson-like smile were meant to convey the potential for unbridled mayhem. I noticed he was wearing braces on his teeth. Difficult to sell the stone cold-killer persona when your mouth looks like Radio Shack.

“Nice grillwork,” I said, unable to hold back. “What kind of reception do you get with those bad boys?”

“You come in here and make jokes about me? Dude, you got no fucking idea who you’re dealing with.”

“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea, actually. Have a nice day.”

I tried to go around him once more. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward him, looping a sloppy roundhouse punch that I slipped easily. I rotated left and fired a shovel hook to his left ear that sent him crashing back into the bar, knocking another guy and his date off their stools like they were bowling pins. The pulsing techno music suddenly stopped. The gym rat was out cold on the floor.

The bouncer came sprinting over. “Everybody cool it!”

Savannah was incensed. “We’re here twenty minutes and you get in a fist fight?”

“The term ‘fight’ conveys fighting. This was more self-defense.”

She didn’t buy it. Neither did the two people I’d knocked from their barstools.

The guy wore glasses and a rayon aloha shirt with little woody wagons on it. A CPA’s version of Sunset Boulevard chic.

“What is your fucking problem, buddy?” he wailed at me, struggling to help his woman off the floor.

His date was a powerfully built woman with stringy brown hair who outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. In her right hand was a nine-millimeter pistol, which she pointed in my face. In her left hand was a six-pointed gold star that said, “Deputy Sheriff, Los Angeles County.”

“Turn around,” she said, her lower lip bleeding, “and put your filthy hands on your head.”

* * *

Compared to military MREs, dining at the West Hollywood jail is haute cuisine. My fellow inmates and I enjoyed well-seasoned, perfectly breaded fish sticks for supper and scrambled eggs for breakfast with Tater Tots cooked just right. Even my amiable cell mates, the outlaw bikers Bad Dawg and his brother, Mad Dawg, both agreed that when it came to in-custody meals, West Hollywood rated four stars.

“LAPD, you get powdered eggs,” Bad said.

“That’s cruel and unusual punishment, right there, Dawg,” Mad said.

“No, Dawg. Cruel and unusual are them mystery meat sandwiches LAPD feeds you for lunch.”

For habitual recidivists who looked like charter members of the ZZ Top fan club, the Dawg brothers could not have been more hospitable. That I’d been booked into their cell on suspicion of assaulting a peace officer only upped my personal stock as far as they were concerned.

I asked them what they were in for. Their tag-team explanation took nearly an hour to tell, a rambling tale about an abusive father and a drug-addled mother, dirt-bag running buddies, cheating women, evil cops, crooked attorneys, corrupt judges, and how never to rob a Wells Fargo bank located across the street from an FBI field office.

“Especially on FBI payday,” Bad added.

“Good to know,” I said.

We spent the night debating why Johnny Cash always wore black and dozed on stainless-steel cots under fluorescent lights, while some guy two cells down kept screaming that Dick Cheney was trying to kill him. Shortly after breakfast, one of our jailers appeared and informed me that I was to be released forthwith without bail. The Dawgs called me a lucky sumbitch and told me to keep in touch. I promised them I wouldn’t.

The jailer escorted me to the booking cage just inside the rear door of the sheriff ’s station where I signed for my belt, cell phone, keys and wallet. I was made to count my money to make sure it equaled the amount I’d been booked in with, and then escorted to the station’s main entrance.

Savannah was waiting for me in the lobby. She was with Detective Czarnek.

“I called him,” Savannah said, “like you asked.”

I thanked them both for coming.

“You lucked out,” Czarnek said, chewing nicotine gum. “My captain and the under-sheriff played basketball together in high school. Got him to drop your case as a favor. That lounge lizard you decked? He had a warrant outstanding out of Long Beach. Failure to appear on a moving violation. Long as we make that go away, he never saw you.”

“And the deputy who took a tumble, she’s cool with that?”

“Aside from you fucking up her love life. The guy she was out with didn’t know she was a cop.”

“What did he think she was – a Romanian weightlifter?”

Czarnek grinned. “Tell you what, I certainly wouldn’t mess with that chick. She could kick my ass in a heartbeat.”

“You guys are awful,” Savannah said.

We walked out of the sheriff ’s station and onto San Vicente Boulevard. The morning air felt heavy and smelled of rain. A rare treat in Los Angeles. Czarnek’s plain-wrap Crown Vic was parked in a red zone at the curb. He’d looped the microphone cord of his police radio over the rearview mirror to let the meter maid know the car belonged to a detective, but either the meter maid didn’t see it or didn’t care. A parking ticket was wedged under the left wiper blade.

“Fuck.”

Czarnek snatched the ticket off the windshield and stuffed it in his sport coat. He was wearing a different coat than when I saw him last. This one was brown.

I asked him why he was so willing to help me get out of jail.

“Quid pro quo,” Czarnek said. “I need you to take a ride with me.” He got in his car and cranked the ignition.

I told Savannah I was sorry for my behavior the night before. She made a remark about me not being a very good Buddhist. I agreed.

A city bus roared past, racing to make the light at Santa Monica Boulevard. The slipstream mussed her hair a little. I reached out impulsively and tamed a wild strand. She didn’t stop me.

Czarnek lowered the passenger window and said, “Take your time. What the hell. I got nothing else to do.”

Savannah was looking at me. She was too beautiful and I was a damn fool for feeling what I was feeling at that moment. I told her to go home and lock her doors. I’d be there when I could.

She said, “Is that a promise or a threat?”

I smiled.

* * *

We turned at the light and drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard. It started raining. Big, greasy drops smeared the windshield, just enough to leave a blurry film whenever Czarnek worked his wipers.

“That’s the problem with Los Angeles,” Czarnek said. “Either it rains too much or not enough.”

“LA can be accused of many things,” I said, “but moderation is not one of them.”

We passed a bus stop where two elderly African-American women sat with plastic grocery bags over their heads. Impromptu foul weather gear. I asked Czarnek if he’d seen the poem Micah Echevarria had posted on YouTube about his father. Czarnek hadn’t. He said he’d check it out when he got a chance.

“Maybe it’s just me,” I said, “but who drives 400 miles on their motorcycle to shoot their father, then turns around, drives back and waxes poetic in cyberspace about how much they’ll miss not having the chance to know him better?”

“People do all kinds of crazy shit,” Czarnek said. “I had a lady once stabbed her husband twenty-two times with a steak knife – I mean, sliced and diced this guy – then rents a billboard on San Vicente with their wedding picture on it that says, ‘Beloved Marvin, the best of the best.’ ”

The detective reached into the ashtray without taking his eyes off the road and pried a fresh square of nicotine-laced gum from its plastic wrapper. I asked him where we were going.

“Coroner’s office,” he said, popping the gum in his mouth. “There’s a body I’m hoping you can help us ID.”

“Who’s the lucky stiff?”

“That Russian friend of yours you went to go see. At least we think it’s him.”

“How’d you know I was going to see Bondarenko?”

“Your ex. She told me when she called to say you’d been taken into custody. Said you’d gone to this club in West Hollywood looking for some guy named Baskin Robbins who possibly had information on Echevarria.”

“Bondarenko, you mean.”

“Close enough.”

Czarnek said he’d never heard of Bondarenko – not that he necessarily would’ve, working garden-variety homicides in the Valley. He ran the name through the LAPD’s Detective Case Tracking System as well as the California Department of Justice’s missing persons database. He found that Bondarenko showed up not only on a recently filed missing persons report, but was also the focus of long-standing interest among members of the LAPD’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau. On a hunch, Czarnek said he called the coroner’s office to see if anyone fitting Bondarenko’s description had been brought in. Among the seven unclaimed John Does in the medical examiner’s current inventory, one matched Bondarenko in approximate weight, height and age.

“There was other identifying evidence,” Czarnek said.

“What kind of other evidence?”

“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell us.”

He sprayed the windshield, smearing raindrops across the glass.

“Fucking LA,” he said.

FIFTEEN

The Winnebago was stolen out of West Covina, set ablaze, then rolled down into an arroyo less than a mile from the Rose Bowl. By the time the trucks got there, it was burning like a funeral pyre. Firefighters quickly foamed down the motor home and checked inside for possible victims. The charred corpse of a man was found, its hands missing. Marks on the wrists suggested that a power saw with a serrated, reciprocating blade had been used to remove them.

“They wanted to hide the decedent’s identity,” pathologist Doug Roth said as he led Czarnek and me into the elevator at the LA County Coroner’s Office. “No fingerprints. A total CSI. I love my work.”

Czarnek looked down at his rubber-soled oxfords and tried not to roll his eyes. Dr. Roth was in his late thirties, autopsy-ready in turquoise scrubs. His sideburns flared below his earlobes. A bushy cookie duster flourished below his lower lip. He punched the down button.

“Detective Czarnek tells me you have an interesting work history,” Roth said.

“Detective Czarnek wouldn’t know the truth if it ran over him with a semi.”

“A regular Seinfeld, this guy,” Czarnek said, chewing his gum.

The elevator doors opened. Dr. Roth led us down a hallway and into a dressing room. There were shelves stocked with scrubs, caps, gloves, and protective booties.

“You know the drill. I’ll be right back,” Roth said to Czarnek, and left.

We put on surgical smocks and fabric booties over our shoes.

“I never knew death could be so contagious,” I said.

“They don’t want you getting anything on your street clothes,” Czarnek said. “Lawyers, they’ll sue for anything. Which reminds me. If you drop a child molester and an attorney off the Empire State Building, you know which one hits first?”

“Who cares.”

“Exactly.”

Roth returned and handed us each a respirator equipped with an N-100 hepa filter. “Standard procedure, strictly precautionary,” he said. “Nothing to get freaked about.”

“I promise I won’t sue,” I said.

Czarnek tossed his gum in a receptacle for toxic waste. We pulled on our surgical gloves, masked up and followed Roth to a windowless stainless-steel door marked, “Security Floor, Authorized Personnel Only.” Scotch-taped to the wall beside the door was a sheet of green construction paper announcing the coroner’s office’s upcoming annual holiday potluck: A-through-I, bring meat; J-through-R, a side dish; S-through-Z, soft drinks or dessert. The announcement was adorned with stickers of Christmas trees and Stars of David. Roth tapped an entry code on a computerized keypad. The electronic lock clicked. Roth held the door for us.

“Welcome to the show,” he said.

* * *

The dead are not conveniently stored in stainless-steel pull-out drawers at the LA County Coroner’s Office, as they are in Hollywood’s version of reality. There are too many cadavers for such cushy accommodations. Most bodies don’t even rate body bags. A decent quality bag can cost upwards of sixty bucks apiece these days. In the cash-strapped City of Angels, corpses are instead packaged like 7-Eleven burritos in opaque plastic sheeting – Saran wrap, only beefier – then stacked floor-to-ceiling in an oversized walk-in cooler. When room runs out in the cooler, the human burritos are stacked in the corridors.

Business was brisk that day at the coroner’s office. The newly departed lay all around. One body in particular caught my eye. It was on a gurney. Brown. Slender. Young. It was shirtless and wearing oversized chinos, the kind favored by Latino gangbangers. Its hair was buzzed short, close enough that I could read the letters “VNE” tattooed on the scalp in Old English script. There was a symmetrical bullet wound the size of a dime in the back of the skull. There was another hole the size of a fist where the nose used to be. The left eye dangled from its socket by the optic nerve like a handset on an old wall phone. A coroner’s technician in scrubs and a mask was fingerprinting the dead boy. The boy’s hand was still supple. No rigor. Not yet autopsied.

“Hey, Doc,” the tech said to Roth as we strode past, rolling the tip of the boy’s left thumb on an electronic, handheld scanning device, “why don’t blind people skydive?”

“Because it scares the crap out of the dog.”

“You heard it already, huh?”

We walked past three autopsy rooms where postmortem examinations were in full swing – pathologists sawing skulls and weighing internal organs on hanging scales like so many tomatoes at the grocery store. In one room, a doctor was stitching up the gaping, Y-shaped incision he’d made in the chest of a young girl, tugging on the catgut with both fists as though he were lacing up a hiking boot. The cadaver flopped limply on the stainless-steel table like a rag doll.

“This way, gentlemen,” Dr. Roth said.

He led us into what looked to be a converted meeting room. The conference table and chairs were pushed to one side, replaced by a flat metal table on wheels. On the table was the charred body of a man laying on its back. Its hands were missing.

“He was shot, then torched postmortem,” Roth said. “They obviously burned him and sawed off his hands to make it harder to ID him.”

The bullet had left a perfectly neat hole just above the dead man’s left ear. The pathologist had removed the skull cap to retrieve the fatal round and examine the victim’s brain. The man’s head had been sawed in half, like an orange.

“Single GSW to the left temporal lobe, 40-cal, copper jacket,” Czarnek said. “The round matched the ones we pulled out of your friend, Arlo Echevarria.”

“The plot thickens,” I said.

Czarnek unwrapped a fresh square of gum. “You recognize this guy?”

“His own mother wouldn’t recognize him,” I said.

A patch of blackened skin had been scraped clean from the body’s right shoulder during the pathologist’s examination, revealing a tattoo – a miniature martini glass bearing what looked to be the initials, “WS.”

“The missing persons report his wife filed indicated he had a ‘WS’ tattooed on his left shoulder,” Czarnek said. “I checked corporate DBA’s. Baskin Robbins owned a lounge called the Wet Spot. The tattoo’s on his right shoulder, so, obviously, Mrs. Baskin Robbins got that part wrong, but, I mean, what are the odds?”

“It just goes to show,” I said, “how well do we truly know the people we’re married to?”

The tattoo was confirmation enough as far as I was concerned that the otherwise unrecognizable crispy critter I was standing over was Bondarenko. Poor Gennady. I always kind of liked the guy, even if he was an old school Commie. Always good for a free drink and the occasional tidbit of actionable intelligence. Looking down at what was left of him, I couldn’t say I was surprised by the terrible violence that had marked his end of days. His arena had been one of sketchy characters, a landscape of ever-shifting loyalties bought and sold. The crowd he’d catered to and curried favor with embodied the very definition of dangerously unpredictable. Sometimes, when you run with the bulls, you get gored.

“If you already knew it was Bondarenko,” I said, “why’d you bring me here to ID him?”

“Show him,” Czarnek said to the pathologist.

Roth picked up the surgically removed chest plate like the lid from a garbage can and set it aside. Bits of blackened skin flaked off like burnt bread crumbs.

“I was dissecting the soft tissue adherent to the posterior plate,” Roth said, “when I first noticed it.” He flipped the breastplate over and set it on the table beside the body. Rib bones branched outward from the exposed sternum like the truncated legs of a scorpion. “At first, I thought it was some sort of new pacemaker or insulin pump, but it’s different from any medical device I’ve ever seen. Plus, its placement is substantially lower than normal implantation sites. That’s it, right there.” He pointed. “Very unusual. Never seen anything like it before.”

I leaned in for a better look: a metallic object the approximate size and shape of a matchbox, with a two-inch-long wire lead protruding from it, was affixed between the lower ribs, held in place by titanium surgical screws.

Czarnek said, “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a remotely triggered explosive device.”

“A bomb?”

“Give that man a cookie.”

“Jesus.” Dr. Roth backed away fearfully from the autopsy table. So did Czarnek.

“Not to worry,” I said, “it’s most likely inert.”

“You sure about that?” Czarnek said warily.

“It’s got a thermal safety to prevent accidental detonation. If the core temperature of the host body drops below a certain point – say, upon death, for example – the weapon automatically disarms itself. Plus, the battery’s probably already dead if it’s been in for any length of time.”

I’d seen an identical device in postmortem photos of another man, a well-known contract killer. NSA had intercepted communications indicating that a certain North African despot intended to assassinate a professor at American University in Cairo whose writings, the dictator felt, blasphemed the teachings of Mohammed, peace be upon Him. Arrangements were made through a network of cutouts working for German intelligence to have the killer check into a luxurious boutique hotel on the banks of the river Nile the night before the hit. There, he was told, two runners-up from the Miss World pageant would be waiting in bed for him – an allexpenses-paid pre-assassination assignation, courtesy of the appreciative dictator. Alpha’s orders were to take the would-be assassin alive so our interrogators could identify and roll up his handlers. The plan didn’t quite work out that way. He smelled a trap in the hotel parking lot and went for his gun. Echevarria shot him dead. The body was stashed in a rental car and flown to Dover Air Force Base, where the bomb was discovered during autopsy, removed and analyzed extensively.

We learned later that the Russians had implanted such weapons in perhaps as many as a dozen intelligence assets without their knowledge during appendectomies, hernia repairs and other routine surgical procedures requiring general anesthesia. The theory was that these assets could then be maneuvered within lethal range of targeted foreign enemies while arousing little suspicion because they appeared otherwise unarmed. Packed with highly explosive G2ZT, a nitrogen-based tetrazole refined in the laboratories of a Stuttgart-based chemical weapons conglomerate Deiter-Becker-Deutsche, the explosive could then be detonated by radio signal from as far away as a half-mile. The bomb itself was said to have a killing radius of ten meters.