Текст книги "Surviving Ice "

Автор книги: K. A. Tucker

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

I toss the thing onto the passenger seat. I don’t do this. I don’t ask questions. I trust Bentley and I do my job. But I’ve also learned not to question my gut, and none of my other assignments have left my gut feeling unsettled like this.

I’m ready to call Bentley and tell him I have the videotape and the assignment was successful, but I pause and stare at the tape for a moment longer. That will tell me if what Royce and Scalero and who knows who else did over there was worth the end goal.

If people really needed to die over this.

If it’s worth Ivy spending the rest of her life with no answers, no closure to her uncle’s death.

I’ll know why I’m here, in San Francisco. It’ll prove to me that what I do matters for the greater good.

A white corner of paper peeks out of the case. I shake the tape out, and a folded note tumbles out along with it. A man’s scratched handwriting fills the page.

Ivy-If something should happen to me, send this video to Dorris Maclean at NBC. People need to know about this. And don’t tell anyone you have it. ~N.

I need to look up this Dorris Maclean, but my guess is she’s an investigative reporter. So at least Ivy’s uncle had some idea that what he was doing might be risky. Which likely means that he was desperate for the cash he presumed this blackmail scheme was going to get him. He must have already been under threat from whomever he owed money to.

People need to know about this.

What exactly did Ned think people need to know about?

If I phone Bentley now, I have exactly an hour and a half—the time it will take to drive to his Napa home—to produce the tape before he grows suspicious.

And then answers to any questions will be lost to me.

I stare long and hard at the tape.

I can’t believe they still sell these fucking things, but thank God they do.

I push the tape into the machine and cross my fingers that the cables the department store sales guy said would work on this shitbox motel television actually do. At first, all I see is static and I curse the idiot for being wrong. But after jogging the wires a few times, the screen wobbles, then clears, and the inside of the tattoo shop appears.

At the bottom of the screen is a time stamp of 4:00 p.m., October 21 of this year. About three weeks ago now. A Willie Nelson wannabe—Ivy’s uncle, from the pictures that I’ve seen—is hunched over a woman’s arm with his tattoo gun, working away quietly.

I grin as Ivy saunters past the camera with her case in hand, her narrow hips swinging casually. “You want me to come by with dinner for you later, Ned?”

“Nah. I’ll call Fez.” He has a deep, guttural voice. Not the most friendly-sounding guy.

“I thought he drove you nuts.”

“Ya see . . . Me and Fez, we have an understandin’.” Now he glances over his shoulder at her, and I can just make out the crinkles around his eyes, telling me he’s smiling at her. “He don’t talk and I like ’im.”

She laughs. “I wish I could figure out how to get him to do that for me.”

“You gonna be home later tonight, girl?”

“At some point.”

With a sigh and shake of his head, he mutters, “Stay out of trouble,” as she pushes through the front door.

He continues working in silence. There’s nothing valuable here, from what I can see, so I begin fast-forwarding through, watching the customer pay and leave, Ivy’s uncle clean up his area and reset it, the pizza delivery guy to show up—I slow down for that, to see that the uncle’s not lying; Fez says nothing but hello and goodbye and “That’ll be six forty-two, sir.” There’s a good two-hour time lapse of Ned Marshall sitting in his desk chair with his feet up as the sun goes down outside. I’m beginning to wonder if this is the right tape after all.

Finally, the door pushes open and Dylan Royce marches through. I recognize him immediately from the newspaper clipping.

This is definitely what Bentley is after.

I slow the tape in time to see Ned reach out and shake his hand. “Royce! How’s the arm?” he asks.

Royce holds out his arm to display the partially finished sleeve. Some parts are outlined, others are completely filled in. I’m guessing Ivy’s uncle had been working on it over a few sessions. He and Royce had probably gotten pretty chummy.

I watch the screen as the two men go through the usual bullshit niceties and paperwork. It’s nice to have audio. A lot of surveillance videos that I’ve watched don’t have it. Then again, Bentley did say that it’s the conversation he’s after.

“Okay, we’re all set.” Ivy’s uncle pulls out a transfer he must have prepared earlier. Royce pulls his shirt off to reveal a hardened body that’s seen plenty of hours in the gym, and likely some war-inflicted injuries, from the small scars across his rib cage. He’s a big guy, bigger than Scalero. But Scalero had a gun and I’m guessing he didn’t waste time using it on his former comrade’s head.

Royce settles into the chair that I just helped pitch the other day and positions his arm. I turn the volume up to catch their words, which are surprisingly clear for that retro surveillance system. He tips his head back, giving the camera a good angle of his eyes, glossed over. He’s high, I’m guessing. Bentley did say he had a problem with both Vicodin and smoking pot. It would make sense that he’d do it before sitting under a needle for hours.

I sip away on my coffee—caffeine is one of my few vices, and a godsend at the moment, given how tired I am—and listen to them talk. All this Medal of Honor recipient seems to do is complain: about his asshole neighbor’s annoying dog that he wants to poison because it keeps shitting on the sidewalk in front of his house; about his mother, who won’t let up on him about his breakup with his cheating cunt of a girlfriend who was fucking some guy on the side while he was away. About the Marine Corps, and how he misses those years and wishes he had stayed, hadn’t been swayed by the opportunity to make more money.

About the private military company where he worked until four months ago, and how they’re a bunch of money-hungry dicks who should be bowing down to him for what he’s done for them, but instead fired him for some lame-ass excuse about violating company policy with drug use.

The Vicodin is legit, he swears. To help manage the ongoing pain in his shoulder from a bullet wound that never healed properly. And it’s the stress of that job that made him start smoking. Never touched the stuff before and then he goes into Afghanistan as contracted arms for Alliance and comes out needing a spliff every night just to fall asleep, and sometimes to get through the day, when he’s especially anxious. That’s another aftereffect of the job, he says. Severe anxiety. But if he violated company policy, why’d they also make him sign a gag order and give him a bunch of money to make sure he kept his mouth shut? And why’d all this happen a month after he put a formal complaint in about his coworkers?

They paid him off to keep quiet about things, but not nearly fucking enough, according to him.

“Alliance, you say?” Ned murmurs, his head down and focused on the new outline on Royce’s forearm. “I think I heard of ’em.”

“Probably.” Royce tips his head back and closes his eyes, his voice nasally and annoying. “They were big in the news two months ago over a civilian shooting near Kandahar.”

“Thought that war was over.”

The expression that takes over Royce’s face is one I recognize well. In his mind, he’s drifting back into it. He can’t help himself. It happens to the best of us. “As long as American troops are there, that war will never be over. And bad shit will keep happening to good people.”

“I guess that’s war, though, right?” I can’t tell if Ned is actually interested in this conversation or just going through the motions because Royce is his customer.

Royce chuckles—a wicked, bitter sound. “Have you ever been in a war, Ned?”

“Nope. Glad to say I was too young for Nam.”

“Well, let me tell you something about war. It can last forever, if there’s enough money to keep it going. As long as war is profitable for companies like Alliance, they’ll be there, front and center. You know our government gave Alliance a billion dollars in contracts to go over there?”

Ned lets out a low whistle.

“Exactly. They handed them that much money and sent them over to basically govern themselves. It’s a privately owned company. No one knows what’s going on inside because nothing’s released. No one’s checking on them. No one’s telling them what they can and can’t do. There’s an actual legit immunity law that protects them. With that kind of money, they’re above the law over there. Or at least they act like they are. They’re a bunch of fucking mercenaries is what they are.”

“What are they supposed to be doin’?”

“ ‘Maintaining security.’ Which means all kinds of things. Protecting American diplomats, training troops, guarding prisoners.” He pauses, his voice growing softer. “Questioning insurgents. That’s what I was there to do.”

Ned sits up for a moment, stretches his arms, twists his neck as if he has a kink, and then hunkers down over Royce’s arm once again. “Sounds rough.”

Royce takes a deep breath. “They were some of the longest, worst days of my life.”

Silence hangs through the shop as Ned works to the subdued tune of Willie Nelson and Royce stares up at the ceiling, facing down his demons, I’m sure. I’ve been in his place.

“You heard of Adeeb Al-Naseer?” Royce suddenly asks.

“Probably. Can’t keep those foreign names straight, though.”

“He was the leader of the terrorist cell that bombed that office building in Seattle seven years back.”

“Oh, yeah . . . I sure remember that one.”

“I helped catch him, you know.” Royce’s eyes flicker to Ned’s furrowed brow. “A battalion brought in a guy with cryptic messages written out on paper and taped to his body. They couldn’t get him to talk, so they told us to have a go at him. See what he’d tell us.” He hesitates. “So we did. And he talked, all right. By the time we were done with him, he told us everything we needed to know.”

Ned pauses to peer up at his customer for a brief moment, before ducking back down. “What does that mean? What’d you do to him?”

“You name it. Slapped him around, electric shock, hung him from his wrists, grabbed his balls and gave them a good twist,” the hand on Royce’s free arm clenches. “Broke his leg, his arms . . .” He goes on, listing techniques that have been used more times than anyone cares to admit.

Some that I’ve used to get people to talk.

I’ve never enjoyed a second of it, never reveled in scaring another human being, of causing pain. But I’ve done all I had to in order to get the answers, and justice, that I needed. And I’ve felt the weight of it on my shoulders afterward.

I have no doubts that what Royce is admitting to doing right now is the cold, harsh truth.

And, by the disgusted look on his face, he didn’t enjoy a second of it either.

“Jesus,” Ned mutters. “What finally broke him?”

Royce hesitates, swallows. “The two guys I was working with went out and found the man’s fourteen-year-old daughter and took turns raping her in front of him. That’s what broke him,” he says quietly.

Ned is silent.

“These two other former Marines that I was stationed there with, they were something else. I don’t know where Alliance found them, but they should never have been hired. One of them, this guy Mario, he was seriously fucked in the head. He’d always be the first one in line to interrogate, to start smacking someone around. He loved to take on guard duties and go into the city. I think it was just so he could hold his gun to people’s heads and make them piss their pants.”

“Sounds like a real asshole,” Ned murmurs.

“He’s sadistic.”

“Sounds like it.” I can hear a distinct shift in Ned’s voice, from indifference to at least mild concern.

Royce’s jaw clenches. “That girl they raped? She wasn’t the only one. One night I caught him and Ricky in an interrogation room with a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been brought in on suspicion of aiding in a terrorist plot. She died the next day. Found out later that she was completely innocent.”

I hit Pause on the VCR as my stomach sinks. Bentley said that everything Royce was claiming was pure lies. But I’ve met Mario, and my ten-second gut read is that he’s a nutcase, and someone I don’t trust. He went against Bentley’s orders just by approaching me, and he seems hell-bent on not being tied to any crime, either overseas or here. Plus, he basically admitted to what’s on the tape as being true. And if that’s the case . . .

Bentley didn’t create Alliance to rape innocent young women. That isn’t for the greater good.

Taking a deep breath, I let the tape keep playing.

“He get into trouble?” Ned asks.

Royce smiles, and it’s not at all pleasant. “Who’s gonna give him trouble?”

“You said this was a private company, right? Ain’t the owner worried about employees doin’ that kind of stuff?” Ned has obviously been listening—and understanding—far more than he’s let on.

“John Bentley doesn’t give a fuck what happens over there as long as the contracts keep coming in. That’s why I got paid off and told to keep quiet.”

My stomach clenches. That’s got to be the bullshit Bentley was talking about. I know Bentley well enough to know that he would care about rape.

“Don’t nobody say nothin’?”

“This is war. It’s so easy to cover that kind of shit up, and all the other shit. And people there are scared. Say the wrong thing and you may find yourself with a bullet in your head. Enemy fire, of course.”

“But you’re back home now.”

Royce pauses. “Nobody in America wants to hear about how a Medal of Honor recipient stood by and watched women get raped.”

Ivy’s uncle works away and listens, dropping a question here and there, as Royce spells out countless other horrific things he saw while working for Alliance, all the times that basic human rights were clearly violated by Mario and Ricky and other employees—not to protect American lives or interests, but for pure, sadistic enjoyment.

But what about Royce? Did he partake? Is he saying he was always just an innocent bystander?

Their conversation eventually shifts to menial things, and then nothing at all, and after four hours in the chair, Royce is passing over a wad of cash. “I’ll wanna come in next week to finish this piece up here,” he says, tapping the top of his shoulder. “Same time, same day?”

“Sounds good.”

Ivy’s uncle sits at his desk and stares at the door for a while, long after the guy has left. Processing everything Royce just admitted to, I’m sure. Clicking a key on the keyboard, he waits for his computer monitor to light up. Then he types something into Google. I can’t see what it is, but when a website comes up that I know like the back of my hand—with a black background and a picture of founder and CEO John Bentley on the left-hand side—I know that the wheels have begun to churn in Ned’s head.

He gets up to pull the metal screen across the entryway, locks the front door, and disappears down the hall, to the back where there is no surveillance.

And then the tape cuts out.

And I’m left staring at my reflection in the monitor.

Royce may have deserved to be punished for his part in all this, but he didn’t deserve a bullet to his head to shut him up.

And Ned . . . well, he was a fucking fool to get involved, but he definitely didn’t deserve to be killed over this either.

But Bentley was telling the truth about one thing: If this confession—from a Medal of Honor recipient, no less—gets into the hands of the American public, Alliance is finished.

The bigger question is: Do Bentley and Alliance deserve that end? Is this just a case of a contractor or two going rogue? How often is shit like this happening over there? How many of these guys, with God complexes, are doing inexcusable things to innocent human beings?

I’m about to hand over the only evidence that might ever spark an investigation into those questions.

Dammit.

I shouldn’t have watched the tape. I can’t simply unsee that, unknow that.

And yet Bentley’s paying me to do a job.

I need to finish it.

The sun is just cresting over the horizon when Bentley meets me at the front door of his Napa villa. I wordlessly hand the tape to him and his shoulders sag with relief, while mine hum with tension.

“Where did you find it?”

“Her tattoo kit, which she brings everywhere. Her uncle taped it to the inside, under the foam.” So obvious.

He snorts, shaking his head. “And she had no idea?”

“None.”

He heaves a sigh. “As always, you’re the most proficient man I know at getting the job done.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed you felt that way as of late.” I don’t hide the sarcasm.

He hangs his head and offers me a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry about that. It was a moment of panic, I suppose. I just finally squashed that civilian shooting issue, so having this to worry about was more than even I could handle.”

Because this will destroy everything you’ve worked hard to build .

“I’ll have the money wired to your offshore account in the next hour. You can go back to your Greek haven, and we can get back to regularly scheduled programming.” He turns to head back inside.

“What about Scalero?”

Bentley stops. “What about him?”

“Is he going to cause any more issues?”

Bentley turns slowly, his face expressionless, impossible to read. “What issues?”

“He made contact yesterday in a restroom.” I hold up his wallet as evidence. “Made some comments about her being a loose end that he needed to tie up.” I watch Bentley closely, looking for a sign that tells me he already knew about this.

He holds my gaze. “He had strict instructions not to go near you or the girl.”

“And yet he broke them.”

“I’ll deal with him.”

“Like you dealt with him before?” If Royce’s confessions to what he saw are true and Bentley knew about it, that means he brought me in here to help bury evidence that would put him and his company in the wrong, and rightfully so. Nothing about what I heard last night is what we stand for, why I do what I do. None of it is for the greater good of our country.

It’s for the greater good of Bentley’s pockets.

I’m struggling to believe that this could be true. That’s not the man I went to war with. That’s not the man whose life I fought to save.

That’s not the man I’ve trusted all these years, when I’ve trusted no one else.

“If he comes near Ivy again, I’ll assume it’s to hurt her.” I give him a knowing look. I shouldn’t have to spell out what’ll happen. I’ve never killed an American soldier before, but the more I learn about Mario Scalero and his partner in crime, the more I believe they need to be put down. And, for once, I don’t feel the need to be ordered to make that happen.

Bentley raises an eyebrow. “Ivy?”

“She’s not a threat.”

“She’s a witness.”

“Who didn’t witness enough to be a threat to them.”

He presses his lips together and offers me a curt nod. “As long as it stays that way . . .” He holds out his hand. “Peace offering?”

I toss the wallet into it. I don’t need it anymore. I’ve already memorized Scalero’s driver’s license info. I know exactly where he lives.

“How soon will you be on a plane?”

“Not sure yet.” I pause, wondering if he’s going to keep tabs on me. Wondering why he cares. “I may stay for a while. Visit my parents.” The thought flickered briefly through my mind, but I haven’t committed to the idea.

Sympathy passes over Bentley’s face, but I see the distrust lurking there. He doesn’t believe me. “Good, Sebastian. I think that’s a great idea. You need to hold on to the people who are important, who keep you grounded. Let me know what you decide. And don’t worry about Scalero. I’m sending them overseas again soon, on another contract that’s about to come in, so they won’t even be around to cause any issues for you, or for her. Now get some sleep; you look like shit. You know what to do.”

Drop my piece into the bay and leave the car in a long-term parking lot for pickup. Yeah. I know the drill.

Just like that, my official purpose for being in San Francisco is over. I’m free to slip back into anonymity, to find a little slice of peaceful paradise and detach myself from human connection. To live simply and without feeling.

Normally, I rush to get the earliest flight out.

But for the first time, I don’t feel the same urge to run.