The Price of Blood Part 5

Broker shrugged. "We'll see."

Eisenhower nodded. Decided not to push it. "Get lost, heal up. You going up north?"

"Yeah."

"How's your dad doing?"

"Okay."

"I'll tell BCA to send your checks to Devil's Rock. Rodney and his crew were good for thirty machine guns statewide. A new record for you. Good job, Broker."

Nina and J.T. were waiting in the hall outside the office. Merryweather's droll sneer approximated a smile. "Day is getting closer. Somebody like John's going to put you in one of these office chairs, put you back in uniform, put you through die-versity training and get you trampled by the poe-litically correct pygmy armies like the rest of us."

"I love you too," said Broker.

"Don't forget to write." J.T. blew a kiss. He shook Nina's hand and strolled back into the office.

Without comment, Broker walked directly to the police garage. Nina quick-stepped to keep up, dragging her luggage. He pulled a tarp from his Lincoln Green '94 Cherokee Sport. In contrast to the house on the north end, the car was scrupulously clean.

"Are you in trouble?" she asked.

Broker shrugged and grumbled, "They all think I've been under too long, want to bring me in. Probably figure I'm suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Starting to identify with the a.s.sholes."

"So what do we do now?" she asked.

"We?" said Broker dubiously.

"Somebody followed me from New Orleans. Remember."

"Okay...and what were you doing in New Orleans?" Broker recited in a tired voice, remembering the green nose of the Saturn peeking around the corner and its stealthy withdrawal, knowing full well that her personal devil, Cyrus LaPorte, lived in New Orleans.

"I guess Jimmy Tuna sent me."

"Oh yeah?" Broker felt a sinking sensation that it wasn't going away this time.

"We're buds now that he's dying of cancer."

Broker raised an eyebrow. The Tuna he remembered had the const.i.tution of an Italian mule.

"Bone cancer. Came on real quick. Real nasty. He, ah, sold me something, you could say." She reached in her portfolio and withdrew a wrinkled printed page and handed it to Broker.

He unfolded a page from an April copy of Newsweek, a page of news briefs. Two pictures were circled in black magic marker. One showed the spare, distinguished features of Gen. Cyrus LaPorte, U.S. Army, Ret. The other was of a sleek, white, unusually outfitted ocean-going vessel. The headline said: COLD WARRIOR MAKES AMENDS.

Broker read the lead, "Gen. Cyrus LaPorte of Vietnam fame and scion of a wealthy New Orleans family has been playing Cousteau. His latest project has him loaning his personal oceanographic vessel, the Lola, to Greenpeace to conduct pollution surveys off the coast of Vietnam in the wake of stories of unrestricted oil drilling..."

"He sold you?" Broker narrowed his eyes as he scanned the rest of the article.

"That's right. That page, for five grand. And this note was in the envelope he left me." She handed Broker a folded sheet of notebook paper. It contained three stark sentences scrawled in a shaky hand: "Find Broker." Under it. "Have Broker find Trin. All arranged." Numbers. And one more word, underlined, like a punch in the nose: "Hue."

Trin. Jesus Christ. Broker staggered back a step, blinking.

"So here I am," said Nina with a shrug. "I found you but I just lost him."

"Tuna?"

"He skipped town on me. He's out, early medical release because of the cancer. He disappeared with five thousand bucks of my money."

"You got robbed by a guy dying of cancer in prison. Wonderful."

"I wrote him a check. For his funeral expenses, I thought. He switched release dates on me. When he didn't show up I thought he might be in New Orleans..."

He stared at her. She wasn't dumb. Yesterday people could have been hurt, maybe killed, as a result of her cavalier walk-on appearance. No. It's just that her wild fantasy was more important.

She went to the back of the truck and tried to open the hatchback door.

"What are you doing?" Broker demanded.

"Loading my stuff."

"Uh-uh. Not this time. Look. My dad's...busted up. He and Irene are in a real financial jam. I need to spend some time alone with them-"

"You're alone with everybody always!" She stepped forward and lifted her chin aggressively. "I talked to J.T. while you were in the office. He says you're so far out there they're thinking of sending you to a shrink. You haven't had a performance review in two years because you refuse to show up at your supervisor's office. I wonder? Could it have something to do with what happened twenty years ago? That you refuse to deal with. You could be anything, but you make a career of hiding out and setting people up, gaining their trust and then busting them."

Unconsciously, Broker patted his chest pocket for a cigarette. Nina reached in her purse and pa.s.sed him the crumpled Gauloises. Hennessy cognac and the French f.a.gs-Broker had a precise memory of the last time he'd seen Ray Pryce take a Gauloise from the gold cigarette case that his wife, Marian, had given him. They were standing on the rolling deck of a Vietnamese minesweep that lay off the coast of Vietnam; it was April 29, 1975.

Just like Ray used to do, Broker tapped the short, fat French cigarette on his thumbnail and put it to his lips. Nina clicked the lighter and stated, "Dammit, don't you get it. General LaPorte's been over there posing as an environmentalist taking pictures of the bottom of the South China Sea."

Broker inhaled the strong tobacco and tightened the bolts on his masking smile to ward off Nina's raving attempt to raise the dead. More than that, he resented her confident quick-study routine. Her zeal. Her confidence. She was starting to have that effect on him. The urge to prove her wrong was almost a sneer behind his lips.

"He found it, that's what Tuna's getting at," she a.s.serted. "I have a map with a coordinate. I have a sonar image of a wrecked U.S. Army Chinook helicopter, laying in one hundred feet of water off the coast of central Vietnam. I snuck it from LaPorte's office last night in New Orleans. That's why he's after me. The genie is out of the bottle, Broker."

"The Hue gold," said Broker in a hollow voice.

"The Hue gold. Ten tons of it. Which my father did not steal."

11.

FOR ALL HE KNEW, THE HUE GOLD REALLY WAS A myth. He had, after all, never actually seen it. No one had. But that one elongated syllable-gold-got stuck in his ears and reverberated in the drafty acoustics of the underground garage.

And, d.a.m.n, the confident look on her face p.i.s.sed him off. Watching him nibble around the hook. Finally he put the note in his pocket and grumbled, "You better come with me."

She nodded, loaded her bags, and hopped into the Jeep.

Broker pulled into a FINA station, filled the Cherokee with super unleaded and continued through town without speaking. Tuna alone he could discount. But Tuna and Trin...He stopped at a tobacco shop and bought a carton of cigarettes, American Spirits.

"Starting smoking again, huh? You nervous?" said Nina.

"They don't have chemical additives. They're good for you."

"I get it. Health food cigarettes-"

"Shut up," said Broker.

At his place, he ignored several neighbors who came out to stare at him. Stepping around smashed furniture, Nina heated water and made instant coffee. They took the coffee into his backyard and gazed down the river valley.

"Aren't you going to clean up?" she asked.

"Up north."

"What about breakfast?"

"We'll stop on the road. Right now I just want to get out of town."

"Oh. Look."

Five carnival-striped hot air balloons, which had launched out of Lakeland, south of town, sailed low up the river. Absurd embellishments presented on the day, Broker thought that they should trail Monty Python's Flying Circus captions. Like the number five written in the sky...

There had been five of them. Ray was dead. Tuna was dying. That left three...What would it be like, seeing LaPorte after all these years?

He had glimpsed him occasionally on television. Usually on MacNeil-Lehrer, brought on as a military expert during Grenada, Beirut, Panama, the Gulf War. He had a reputation as a frosty critic of the overreliance on technology in the touchy-feely volunteer army.

Slowly Broker withdrew the folded piece of notebook paper from his pocket and smoothed it on his thigh.

Find Trin.

He looked up. Nina watched him carefully fold the note and tuck it in his chest pocket. "Well, I'm going to take a shower, after I pour some Spic 'n' Span in the tub," she said.

Alone in the backyard, he lit a Spirit and sipped his coffee and watched the airs.h.i.+ps trail over him like gaudy pageantry. Their shadows billowed over his shrubbery and one shadow swallowed him briefly before it pa.s.sed on.

Broker had accustomed himself to pulling the blinds of his life to ply his trade in darkness. Now, with Nina's sudden intrusion in his life, he was confronted with the naggingly obvious thought he always avoided: The darkness might just be a shadow cast by an object, in this case, an unresolved event.

Even calloused by almost two decades of police work, he had never made peace with Ray Pryce's desertion. He had come to view this as an emotional difficulty that flew in the face of evidence. It was probably the motive behind his continued a.s.sociation with the dead man's crazy daughter. Now maybe he had a chance to lay it to rest. Remove the object. The thought was too big. Magical in its simplicity.

But Nina's a.s.sertion that LaPorte was somehow to blame was sheer fantasy. Broker had seen LaPorte literally sacrifice his career at the inquest in an attempt to salvage Pryce's reputation.

Even Jimmy Tuna, who had joked about growing up in a New York Mafia family, and whom LaPorte had expertly kept on a leash, never struck Broker as being capable of deserting a buddy in wartime.

Trin...

On the night of April 29, 1975, Broker had gone into Hue City to rescue the always mysterious Colonel Trin...or so he thought at the time.

Gold. There was that syllable again. What if LaPorte was on a treasure hunt.

Maybe I could cut myself in. He had Nina's paranoia as an entry. Somebody had to return LaPorte's maps...

He shook his head, annoyed at the way his imagination broke into a canter. And he was suddenly angry that these men, living, dying, and dead, whom he had known on two brief occasions, were still the planets exerting an influence on his life.

He took out the note again, got up, went into the destroyed kitchen, and stared at the telephone. He c.o.c.ked an ear and determined that the shower was running upstairs. His hand shook as he picked up the phone and punched information and worked through the voice tapes until he had an overseas operator.

"What country?"

"Vietnam, Hue City," said Broker in a dry voice.

"You can dial direct."

The parts of Broker that lived in the present collided with the parts he kept ice cold on meathooks. He lit another Spirit off the half-burned stub of the one he had going. A film of sweat formed on his palms as he found the international code in the phone book. Just written right there. Vietnam: 11. What do you know. He punched in the number.

Seconds later a Vietnamese voice said h.e.l.lo on the other side of the world. Some hotel, "Hue," he recognized.

He slammed the phone into the cradle as though it was hot.

Crazy.

But he copied the number onto several cards in his wallet for safe-keeping. Broker stored his pa.s.sport in the freezer of his refrigerator as a precaution against losing it. He opened the icebox and retrieved the frozen doc.u.ment and weighed it in his palm. Then he slid it into the back pocket of his jeans. Now what? He seesawed back and forth. Planets in a tug of war.

It was too much. Twenty years of habit squirmed at this budding heresy and he retreated into the comfort of denial.

She was nuts. Probably still bent out of shape from the army thing.

On the second day of Desert Storm, Capt. Nina Pryce, in charge of a military police company trailing the advance of the 24th Mech. across the Iraqi desert, strayed in a sandstorm, got separated from her troops, and had driven her humvee into a nasty situation that had developed between a lost company of the 24th and a bypa.s.sed Republican Guard battalion.

It was an unusual, low-tech close-quarters fight for that "clean" desert cakewalk. A meeting engagement in the blinding sand. Nina arrived to find the company commander and his lieutenants down. A lucky shot had taken out the command vehicle. Communications were snarled. The Iraqis were encircling.

As ranking officer, and by force of example, she took command and proved to be utterly ruthless in action. Instinctively, she led the company in a charge through the encirclement, and reversed the tactical situation and attacked the Iraqis in the rear. The Iraqis, surprised when their pincers closed on empty desert, disintegrated. It took less than an hour. When communications were restored, Nina's M-16 was smoking hot, she had wounds in her left hip and over one hundred Republican Guards were dead and three hundred were prisoners. She lost five men, and took twenty-three wounded, six of whom she had personally dragged out of the line of fire.

Word got out and CNN found her in an unpleasant mood at an aid station after she'd been chewed out for exceeding her authority by a colonel who didn't have the full picture. Nina, always more salty than demure when her ire was stirred up, made a crack, not realizing that the video was rolling. A reporter asked what had happened out there. Nina replied, "Not much, except that if I had a d.i.c.k I'd probably be a major."

The remark wouldn't die and was rebroadcast endlessly in the media. Sometimes bleeped, sometimes not. It hounded her, but she kept her professional cool, refused to comment, just doing her job. The real firestorm torched off months later. A ranking congresswoman joined forces with some retired generals and used Nina as a stalking horse to pose an inevitable question.

Nina had brilliantly commanded infantry in close-quarters ground combat, even after sustaining wounds. She had personally killed some of the bad guys and had saved some of the good guys and she had won.

They recommended that she be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge for her actions in the Gulf. Fed by rhetorical gasoline from army hard-liners on the one side and Tailhook-impa.s.sioned feminists on the other, the dispute rocketed onto national television. More than one TV commentator remarked about Nina's "star quality."

The U.S. Army wasn't impressed. It closed ranks. Someone in the Pentagon took the low road and fed the media a murky snippet about how her father died in the process of deserting his comrades under fire.

The high-road resistance simply stated that a woman had never been awarded the CIB. Technically, Nina wasn't eligible. The award was reserved for infantry and women weren't allowed in the infantry. She could have her Silver Star and her Purple Heart but the CIB was high sacrilege. It would crack open the combat arms to the libbers. Two hundred years of tradition fell on Nina Pryce.

Approached by the press, she coolly pointed out that there was a lot of medal inflation in the Gulf ground war, which had lasted all of four days against human sea attacks of surrendering Iraqis. Her dad, she said, had spent six months under fire against a real army to earn his CIB in Europe. Her response prompted questions about her father and rumors of secret hearings. Her father, she charged, had been falsely convicted in absentia. After laying down that challenge to the army she quietly resigned her commission.

Broker wanted to believe that the combined effect of her resignation and her mother's pa.s.sing had snapped her. He shook his head. He didn't really know her.

He did know that when she arrived she set up dominion. She was somebody. And she had something that was taking on an irresistible momentum.