Debt of Honor Read online

  “It’s her.”

  “Concur, John,” Chavez observed huskily. “It’s her.” Pause. “Shit,” he concluded quietly, examining the face for a long moment that made his face twist with anger. So, Clark thought, he sees it too.

  “Got a camera?”

  “Yeah.” Ding pulled a compact 35mm out of his pants pocket. “Play cop?”

  “That’s right.”

  Clark stooped down to examine the body. It was frustrating. He wasn’t a pathologist, and though he had much knowledge of death, more knowledge still was needed to do this right. There ... in the vein on the top of her foot, a single indentation. Not much more than that. So she’d been on drugs? If so, she’d been a careful user, John thought. She’d always cleaned the needle and ... He looked around the room. There. A bottle of alcohol and a plastic bag of cotton swabs, and a bag of plastic syringes.

  “I don’t see any other needle marks.”

  “They don’t always show, man,” Chavez observed.

  Clark sighed and untied the kimono, opening it. She’d been wearing nothing under it.

  “Fuck!” Chavez rasped. There was fluid inside her thighs.

  “That’s a singularly unsuitable thing to say,” Clark whispered back. It was as close as he’d come to losing his temper in many years. “Take your pictures.”

  Ding didn’t answer. The camera flashed and whirred away. He recorded the scene as a forensic photographer might have done. Clark then started to rearrange the kimono, uselessly giving the girl back whatever dignity that death and men had failed to rob from her.

  “Wait a minute ... left hand.”

  Clark examined it. One nail was broken. All the others were medium-long, evenly coated with a neutral polish. He examined the others. There was something under them.

  “Scratched somebody?” Clark asked.

  “See anyplace she scratched herself, Mr. C?” Ding asked.

  “No.”

  “Then she wasn’t alone when it happened, man. Check her ankles again,” Chavez said urgently.

  On the left one, the foot with the puncture, the underside of the ankle revealed bruises almost concealed by the building lividity. Chavez shot his last frame.

  “I thought so.”

  “Tell me why later. We’re out of here,” John said, standing.

  Within less than a minute they were out the back door, down the meandering alley, and back on a main thorough-fare to wait for their car.

  “That was close,” Chavez observed as the police car pulled up to Number 18. There was a TV crew fifteen seconds behind.

  “Don’t you just love it? They’re going to tie up everything real nice and neat ... What is it, Ding?”

  “Ain’t right, Mr. C. Supposed to look like an OD, right?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You OD on smack, man, it just stops. Boom, bye-bye. I seen a guy go out like that back in the old days, never got the sticker out of his arm, okay? Heart stops, lungs stop, gone. You don’t get up and set the needle down and then lay back down, okay? Bruises on the leg. Somebody stuck her. She was murdered, John. And probably she was raped, too.”

  “I saw the paraphernalia. All U.S.-made. Nice setup. They close the case, blame the girl and her family, give their own people an object lesson.” Clark looked over as the car pulled around the corner. “Good eye, Ding.”

  “Thanks, boss.” Chavez fell silent again, his anger building now that he had nothing to do but think it over. “You know, I’d really like to meet that guy.”

  “We won’t.”

  Time for a little perverse fantasy: “I know, but I used to be a Ninja, remember? It might be real fun, especially barehanded.”

  “That just breaks bones, pretty often your own bones.”

  “I’d like to see his eyes when it happens.”

  “So put a good scope on the rifle,” Clark advised.

  “True,” Chavez conceded. “What kind of person gets off on that, Mr. C?”

  “One sick motherfucker, Domingo. I met a few, once.”

  Just before they got into the car, Ding’s black eyes locked on Clark.

  “Maybe I will meet this one personally, John. El fado can play tricks. Funny ones.”

  “Where is she?” Nomuri asked from behind the wheel.

  “Drive,” Clark told him.

  “You should have heard the speech,” Chet said, moving up the street and wondering what had gone wrong.

  “The girl’s dead,” Ryan told the President barely two hours later, 1:00 P.M., Washington time.

  “Natural causes?” Durling asked.

  “Drug overdose, probably not self-administered. They have photos. We ought to have them in thirty-six hours. Our guys just got clear in time. The Japanese police showed up pretty fast.”

  “Wait a minute. Back up. You’re saying murder?”

  “That’s what our people think, yes, Mr. President.”

  “Do they know enough to make that evaluation?”

  Ryan took his seat and decided that he had to explain a little bit. “Sir, our senior officer knows a few things about the subject, yes.”

  “That was nicely phrased,” the President noted dryly. “I don’t want to know any more about that subject, do I?”

  “No reason for it right now, sir, no.”

  “Goto?”

  “Possibly one of his people. Actually the best indicator will be how their police report it. If anything they tell us is at variance with what we’ve learned from our own people, then we’ll know that somebody played with the data, and not all that many people have the ability to order changes in police reports.” Jack paused for a moment. “Sir, I’ve had another independent evaluation of the man’s character.” He went on to repeat Kris Hunter’s story.

  “You’re telling me that you believe he had this young girl killed, and will use his police to cover it up? And you already knew he likes that sort of thing?” Durling flushed. “You wanted me to extend this bastard an olive branch? What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  Jack took a deep breath. “Okay, yes, Mr. President, I had that coming. The question is, now what do we do?”

  Durling’s face changed. “You didn’t deserve that, sorry.”

  “Actually I do deserve it, Mr. President. I could have told Mary Pat to get her out some time ago—but I didn’t,” Ryan observed bleakly. “I didn’t see this one coming.”

  “We never do, Jack. Now what?”

  “We can’t tell the legal attaché at the embassy because we don’t ‘know’ about this yet, but I think we prep the FBI to check things out after we’re officially notified. I can call Dan Murray about that.”

  “Shaw’s designated hitter?”

  Ryan nodded. “Dan and I go back a ways. For the political side, I’m not sure. The transcript of his TV speech just came in. Before you read it, well, you need to know what sort of fellow we’re dealing with.”

  “Tell me, how many common bastards like that run countries?”

  “You know that better than I do, sir.” Jack thought about that for a moment. “It’s not entirely a bad thing. People like that are weak, Mr. President. Cowards, when you get down to it. If you have to have enemies, better that they have weaknesses.”

  He might make a state visit, Durling thought. We might have to put him up at Blair House, right across the street. Throw a state dinner: we’ll walk out into the East Room and make pretty speeches, and toast each other, and shake hands as though we’re bosom buddies. Be damned to that! He lifted the folder with Goto’s speech and skimmed through it.

  “That son of a bitch! ‘America will have to understand,’ my ass!”

  “Anger, Mr. President, isn’t an effective way of dealing with problems.”

  “You’re right,” Durling admitted. He was silent for a moment, then he smiled in a crooked way. “You’re the one with the hot temper, as I recall.”

  Ryan nodded. “I’ve been accused of that, yes, sir.”

  “Well, that’s two big ones we
have to deal with when we get back from Moscow.”

  “Three, Mr. President. We need to decide what to do about India and Sri Lanka.” Jack could see from the look on Durling’s face that the President had allowed himself to forget about that one.

  Durling had allowed himself to semiforget another problem as well.

  “How much longer will I have to wait?” Ms. Linders demanded.

  Murray could see her pain even more clearly than he heard it. How did you explain this to people? Already the victim of a vile crime, she’d gotten it out in the open, baring her soul for all manner of strangers. The process hadn’t been fun for anyone, but least of all for her. Murray was a skilled and experienced investigator. He knew how to console, encourage, chivvy information out of people. He’d been the first FBI agent to listen to her story, in the process becoming as much a part of her mental-health team as Dr. Golden. After that had come another pair of agents, a man and a woman who specialized more closely in cases of this type. After them had come two separate psychiatrists, whose questioning had necessarily been somewhat adversarial, both to establish finally that her story was true in all details and to give her a taste of the hostility she would encounter.

  Along the way, Murray realized, Barbara Linders had become even more of a victim than she’d been before. She’d built her self up, first, to reveal herself to Clarice, then again to do the same with Murray, then again, and yet once more still. Now she looked forward to the worst ordeal of all, for some of the members of the Judiciary Committee were allies of Ed Kealty, and some would take it upon themselves to hammer the witness hard either to curry favor with the cameras or to demonstrate their impartiality and professionalism as lawyers. Barbara knew that. Murray had himself walked her through the expected ordeal, even hitting her with the most awful of questions—always preceded with as gentle a preamble as possible, like, “One of the things you can expect to be asked is—”

  It took its toll, and a heavy toll at that. Barbara—they were too close now for him to think of her as Ms. Linders—had shown all the courage one could expect of a crime victim and more besides. But courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits. Just the waiting, the not knowing when she would have to take her seat in the committee room and make her opening statement in front of bright TV lights, the certainty that she would have to bare her soul for the entire world ... it was like a robber coming into the bank night after night to steal from her hard-won accumulation of inner resolve.

  It was hard enough for Murray. He had built his case, had the prosecutor lined up, but he was the one close to her. It was his mission, Murray told himself, to show this lady that men were not like Ed Kealty, that a man was as repulsed by such acts as women were. He was her knight-errant. The disgrace and ultimate imprisonment of that criminal was now his mission in life even more than it was hers.

  “Barb, you have to hang in there, kid. We’re going to get this bastard, but we can’t do it the right way unless ...” He mouthed the words, putting conviction he didn’t feel into them. Since when did politics enter into a criminal case? The law had been violated. They had their witnesses, their physical evidence, but now they were stuck in a holding pattern that was as damaging to this victim as any defense lawyer might be.

  “It’s taking too long!”

  “Two more weeks, maybe three, and we go to bat, Barb.”

  “Look, I know something is happening, okay? You think I’m dumb? He’s not out making speeches and opening bridges and stuff now, is he? Somebody told him and he’s building up his case, isn’t he?”

  “I think what’s happening is that the President is deliberately holding him in close so that when this does break, he won’t be able to fall back on a high public profile as a defense. The President is on our side, Barb. I’ve briefed him in on this case myself, and he said, ‘A criminal is a criminal,’ and that’s exactly what he should have said.”

  Her eyes came up to meet his. They were moist and desperate. “I’m coming apart, Dan.”

  “No, Barb, you’re not,” Murray lied. “You’re one tough, smart, brave lady. You’re going to come through this. He’s the one who’s going to come apart.” Daniel E. Murray, Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reached his hand across the table. Barbara Linders took it, squeezing it as a child might with her father, forcing herself to believe and to trust, and it shamed him that she was paying such a price because the President of the United States had to subordinate a criminal case to a question of politics. Perhaps it made sense in the great scheme of things, but for a cop the great scheme of things usually came down to one crime and one victim.

  16

  Payloads

  The final step in arming the H-11/SS-19 missiles necessarily had to await official word from the nation’s Prime Minister. In some ways the final payoff was something of a disappointment. They had originally hoped to affix a full complement of warheads, at least six each, to the nose of each bird, but to do that would have meant actually testing the trans-stage bus in flight, and that was just a little too dangerous. The covert nature of the project was far more important than the actual number of warheads, those in authority had decided. And they could always correct it at a later date. They’d deliberately left the top end of the Russian design intact for that very reason, and for the moment a total of 10 one-megaton warheads would have to do.

  One by one, the individual silos were opened by the support crew, and one by one the oversized RVs were lifted off the flatcar, set in place, then covered with their aerodynamic shrouds. Again the Russian design served their purposes very well indeed. Each such operation took just over an hour, which allowed the entire procedure to be accomplished in a single night by the crew of twenty. The silos were resealed, and it was done; their country was now a nuclear power.

  “Amazing,” Goto observed.

  “Actually very simple,” Yamata replied. “The government funded the fabrication and testing of the ‘boosters’ as part of our space program. The plutonium came from the Monju reactor complex. Designing and building the warheads was child’s play. If some Arabs can do a crude warhead in a cave in Lebanon, how hard can it be for our technicians?” In fact, everything but the warhead-fabrication process had been government funded in one way or another, and Yamata was sure that the informal consortium that had done the latter would be compensated as well. Had they not done it all for their country? “We will immediately commence training for the Self-Defense Force personnel to take over from our own people—once you assign them to us for that purpose, Goto-san.”

  “But the Americans and the Russians ... ?”

  Yamata snorted. “They are down to one missile each, and those will be officially blown up this week, as we will all see on television. As you know, their missile submarines have been deactivated. Their Trident missiles are already all gone, and the submarines are lined up awaiting dismantlement. A mere ten working ICBMs give us a marked strategic advantage.”

  “But what if they try to build more?”

  “They can’t—not very easily,” Yamata corrected himself. “The production lines have been closed down, and in accordance with the treaty, the tooling has all been destroyed under international inspection. To start over would take months, and we would find out very quickly. Our next important step is to launch a major naval-construction program” —for which Yamata’s yards were ready—“so that our supremacy in the Western Pacific will be unassailable. For the moment, with luck and the help of our friends, we will have enough to see us through. Before they will be able to challenge us, our strategic position will have improved to the point where they will have to accept our position and then treat us as equals.”

  “So I must now give the order?”

  “Yes, Prime Minister,” Yamata replied, again explaining to the man his job function.

  Goto rubbed his
hands together for a moment and looked down at the ornate desk so newly his. Ever the weak man, he temporized. “It is true, my Kimba was a drug addict?”

  Yamata nodded soberly, inwardly enraged at the remark. “Very sad, is it not? My own chief of security, Kaneda, found her dead and called the police. It seems that she was very careful about it, but not careful enough.”

  Goto sighed quietly. “Foolish child. Her father is a policeman, you know. A very stern man, she said. He didn’t understand her. I did,” Goto said. “She was a kind, gentle spirit. She would have made a fine geisha.”

  It was amazing how people transformed in death, Yamata thought coldly. That foolish, shameless girl had defied her parents and tried to make her own way in the world, only to find that the world was not tolerant of the unprepared. But because she’d had the ability to give Goto the illusion that he was a man, now she was a kind and gentle spirit.

  “Goto-san, can we allow the fate of our nation to be decided by people like that?”

  “No.” The new Prime Minister lifted his phone. He had to consult a sheet on his desk for the proper number. “Climb Mount Niitaka,” he said when the connection was made, repeating an order that had been given more than fifty years earlier.

  In many ways the plane was singular, but in others quite ordinary. The VC-25B was in fact the Air Force’s version of the venerable Boeing 747 airliner. A craft with fully thirty years of history in its design, and still in serial production at the plant outside Seattle, it was painted in colors that had been chosen by a politically selected decorator to give the proper impression to foreign countries, whatever that was. Sitting alone on the concrete ramp, it was surrounded by uniformed security personnel “with authorization,” in the dry Pentagonese, to use their M 16 rifles far more readily than uniformed guards at most other federal installations. It was a more polite way of saying, “Shoot first and ask questions later.”