“‘91.”
“Sure. I’m wrapping up here, can’t talk. But I can meet you at Jimmy’s on 19th in half an hour. I’ll be the tall good-looking blond at the bar.” He laughed and hung up.
Derek checked his watch. Yeah, that might work.
Jimmy’s was two blocks down from the Walter Reed complex. Derek had expected a yuppie bar with ferns, but got instead an old-fashioned dark hole filled with wall-to-wall medical types more intent on drinking than socializing. He glanced at the bar and zeroed in on the guy he thought was Austin Davis. He was right. The tall good-looking blond at the bar. Austin Davis had gone anti-military. He wore his dirty blond hair long past his shoulders, and had a thick beard, reddish with gray making inroads. Tall and lithe with concert pianist fingers that tapped nervously on the tin bar, he wore a green scrub shirt and faded jeans. Derek verified who he was and showed him ID.
“You’re Simona’s ex, right?”
“Yes.”
Parker eyed him suspiciously. “Hey, I guess it can happen to anybody, but from my angle, you must have lost your mind to let her go.”
Derek silently agreed with him, but his response was, “Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure. Gin and tonic.”
Derek placed the order with the bartender, adding a coffee for himself.
“Teetotaler?” Davis said, a question whose subtext Derek assumed was actually, Are you an alcoholic?
“I expect to be up all night,” Derek said, and explained what he wanted. He was halfway through his explanation when Davis said, “Richard Coffee.”
Derek turned away from the bar to stare at Davis. “You remember.”
“Hell yes, I remember. I’ve always wondered when something about this guy was going to come up. Now it has.”
“Why do you remember?”
“Huh. Well, one, he was the only one I’ve ever run into. It’s not every day you get a patient exposed to biological and chemical warfare agents. The others I saw in Iraq were in a morgue and they were usually Iraqi. Dead from being caught near their own shit when we dropped a 500-pound bomb on their heads. So do I remember Coffee? Yeah, you bet.” He nodded to someone who walked by.
“Is that why you thought the subject would come up someday?”
“Huh? Oh, the BCW exposure? No. Just that there was some serious weirdness there. I mean, I was off-shift when he died, but I wasn’t familiar with the name of the doctor who signed the death certificate. I asked who he was, was told he was a specialist in that kind of treatment, but I’d never heard of him. Never met him, either. Supposedly he flew in special from Saudi or some such bullshit. The rumor was he was somebody from USAMRIID or something, but I think that was just a crock. I don’t think the guy existed.”
Derek waited. When Davis didn’t continue, Derek prompted him. “Meaning?”
“Meaning I didn’t think Coffee was that bad. He had burns on his face from whatever the gas was, and there seemed to be some minor lung involvement and maybe some nerve trauma, but someone gave him a shot of atropine immediately and got him out of there. I thought Coffee would get some treatment for the chemical burns, spend some time breathing oxygen for the lungs and have a little therapy and he’d be okay. Next thing I know some doc I’ve never heard of signs off on his death certificate and the body is out of there.”
The bartender brought them their drinks. Derek took a sip of his coffee and set it down on the tin bar. It tasted like it had been made with lawn clippings. “Do you remember the name of the doctor?”
“No,” Davis said.
“Do the names Frank Halloran or James Scully ring a bell?”
“Nope.”
“How about Benjamin Zataki?”
“Yeah, rings a bell. He’s at USAMRIID now. But that wasn’t the name. I’m sorry, I just don’t remember.”
“Sure.” Derek thought for a moment. “Well, what do you think happened?”
“No idea.”
“Guess.”
“What’s this about, Mr. Stillwater?”
“I can’t say, but it’s important. It’s of national security proportions.”
“I see. Well, if I had to guess, I’d say for some reason they wanted people to think Coffee was dead. Like they were going to reposition him somewhere with a new identity.”
“Sounds… I don’t know, Doctor. That sounds a little farfetched.”
Davis laughed. “You been in the military long? Were you ever in the military? Farfetched covers a lot of it. But you want to know what my bottom line is?”
“Sure.”
“Richard Coffee, to the best of my medical knowledge, was nowhere near death. Now, that isn’t to say I haven’t had seemingly healthy patients drop dead without warning. Maybe that’s what happened. But Coffee just seemed too healthy. He’d been exposed to some serious shit, but he got lucky. He seemed strong, clear, wasn’t having problems with his lungs or anything else. My biggest concern was long term.”
“Long term?”
“Yeah. You’ve been exposed to a mix of weird chemicals. You recover. Good for you. Then ten years later you get cancer. Or something else. I’ve heard neurologists speculate that some of this stuff could lead to mental problems, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorders, stuff like that. Cancer’s the easy shot, long term. But we know from a history of organophosphate case histories of pesticide research, that there’s more to it. And most chemical warfare stuff got their beginnings in the pesticide business. That stuff affects the nervous system, big time. Expose somebody to low-levels of some BW weapon and ten years later you might get a raving paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur.”
“Swell,” Derek said. “Well, Doctor. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.”
“Hey, no problem. Can I ask what this is about?”
“Oh, I just thought I had run into Richard Coffee.”
“Yeah? He seem okay to you?”
“No, Doctor. I wouldn’t say that at all. Thanks again.”
Davis knocked back his gin and tonic. “No problem. I’ll walk out with you. Got to go work out before I go home.”
Derek tossed a bill on the bar and followed the doctor outside. They began to walk down 19th Street. Derek handed him a card. “If the name of that doctor comes back to you, give me a call.”
Davis took it. “Sure, no—”
Davis staggered backward, slamming against the redbrick wall of Jimmy’s before sliding to the ground. A blossom of scarlet appeared on his green scrub shirt. Derek glanced around, started to reach for Davis, when another bullet whined past him, tugging at his collar, chunking into the wall. He dived to the concrete, rolled, came up running. Another bullet ricocheted off a parking meter in front of him.
He slid behind a mini-van. Glass exploded above his head. The tire, only inches from his hand, sagged with a hiss. He was being bracketed.
He held his breath. Glancing back, he saw Davis was dead, blood everywhere. Somewhere somebody screamed. Another bullet whocked into the fiberglass body of the mini-van just inches from his head.
He sprang to his feet and sprinted down the sidewalk, bullets peppering the walls behind him.
To his left he saw motion, a Chevy Blazer. The woman at the wheel shouted, “Get in! Hurry!”
Another bullet ripped past him. He dived into the Blazer and it peeled away before he could get the door shut.
12
Agent Aaron Pilcher snapped his phone off and stared out at the three white vans parked against the far wall. Beyond the vans was the main airstrip. As he watched, a small jet, probably a Lear, roared down the runway and lifted into the hazy dusk. Night was coming on.