William Krueger - The Devil's bed

“My doing. I wanted you alive.”

“Why?”

Kingman knocked on the door. The other came in, gun drawn. Kingman approached Moses. “Your hands,” he said. He cuffed Moses to the bed and took the tray. As he turned to the door, he said, “You’re not the only one who’s ever been betrayed by the people he trusted.”

The next day Kingman opened the door and came in. He carried a rifle in one hand, a small cardboard box in the other. On his hands, he wore black leather gloves. Another man hung back at the door. Kingman set the rifle and the cardboard box on the metal table. He unlocked the cuffs that shackled Moses’s hands to the frame of the cot. He turned to the table, picked up the rifle in his gloved hands, and held it toward Moses.

“Take it, David,” he said.

The man at the door had what looked like a P-series Ruger, probably a nine millimeter, trained on Moses’s heart. Moses took the rifle. It was an M40A1, a sniper rifle, forty-four inches in length with a twenty-four-inch barrel. Weight 14.5 pounds. Muzzle velocity 2,550 feet per second. Maximum effective range 1,000 yards.

“Not the latest technology, but it was always your favorite,” Kingman said. “Grip it hard.”

Moses tightened his fingers around the stock.

“Now pull the trigger.”

Moses did. Kingman reached out and took the rifle. He laid it back on the table, opened the cardboard box, pulled out a rifle scope, and handed it to Moses. It was a Trijicon ACOG military scope, excellent for night shots over a long distance.

“Good,” Kingman said after Moses had put his prints on it.

He took the scope from Moses and set it back in the box. Next he extracted five cartridges and held them out for Moses to take. They were. 308 Winchester loads, a good precision caliber. Moses handled each round and gave them back to Kingman. Kingman cuffed him to the cot frame again, then nodded to the man at the door. The man, who also wore gloves, holstered his Ruger, picked up the rifle and the cardboard box, and left the room.

As Kingman slowly shed his gloves, Moses was thinking. He’d believed it was the Company who’d tracked him down and taken him after Wildwood. He figured their stake in him was the embarrassment factor. If it became known that a former operative of the United States government had attempted to assassinate the First Lady and her father, the Company would suffer tremendous public embarrassment, one more in a long line. Taking him quietly and disposing of him in secret was a much preferable scenario.

But he hadn’t been disposed of. Not yet. The reprieve was Kingman’s doing. Moses was beginning to wonder how much the Company really knew about what Kingman was up to. “This isn’t Company business,” Moses said. “Who are you working for?”

Kingman sat down beside the cot. He smiled. “Remember Budapest?”

“I remember everything.”

“I’ll bet you do. A long and troubled recollection. But Budapest is a good memory. For me, anyway. A time when I still trusted the Company.”

Moses just stared at him.

“We believe in our country,” Kingman began. “We believe in the ideals it was founded on. But the ideal and the reality are worlds apart. You know it, too. Look at you. Consider all you risked and all you gave up, and in the end, those you trusted betrayed you. We’ve all been betrayed, all of us who are now brothers and sisters.”

“You? Betrayed?”

“I had a daughter.”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy.” Kingman nodded. “For her high school graduation I gave her a trip to Europe. Her and her best friend, three weeks on the Continent. She was so excited. I saw her off at Dulles. It was the last time I saw her alive. She was in a cafe in Marseilles ten days later. A car bomb went off in the street outside. The flying glass tore her apart.”

Kingman looked toward the dim lamplight. There was a gloss to his eyes.

“The bomb was planted by a man who called himself Abu al-Afghani, working on behalf of the Group Islamic Army. It was meant to kill an Algerian diplomat who was also dining in the cafe. The Company knew beforehand about the bombing, but they did nothing to stop it. You see, sometimes al-Afghani worked for the Company.” He shook his head. “They could have told me, David. They could have warned me to keep Lucy away from Marseilles.”

“You used the past tense with al-Afghani.”

“We got him.”

“There’s that ‘we’ again. Are you a mole now or what?”

“Not in the way you think of it. However, my loyalty has shifted.”

“What do you want from me?”

“It’s simple enough. You tried to kill the First Lady, right?”

“Yeah.”

Kingman looked him hard in the eye. “You still want to?”

In the quiet of the church, Bo heard the blower kick on, and a cool draft touched the back of his neck. It was not as cold as the muzzle of the gun Moses held there.

“You declined their offer?” Bo asked.

“If offer it was. They didn’t need me. They had my prints all over the weaponry. If in fact they wanted me to pull the trigger and put the round into her, it would have been the last thing I ever did. So I took my leave.”

“Just like that?”

“When I was stronger, they exchanged my handcuffs for a strait-jacket. A mistake. It was a Posey,” he said. “Posey makes four kinds. The one they chose is the simplest to escape. The weakness is the buckles. You work them against any sharp, hard edge, the frame of a cot for example, and you can knock them loose pretty quickly. Took me three minutes. Houdini could do it in less time and while he was hanging upside down. Now there was a genius.”

Moses resettled himself in the pew behind Bo. The kiss of the gun barrel ended, but Bo knew the weapon was still trained on him.

“You continue to have resources,” Bo noted.

“An elementary piece of any stratagem. Always have a backup cache somewhere,” Moses said. “What I’ve been wondering since I read about your crime spree in the papers is what’s the connection. I’d guess the people who framed you are the same ones who nabbed me.”

“What difference does it make?”

“I hate a puzzle with missing pieces. Who are these people, Thorsen? Why do they want the First Lady dead?”

“Why do you want the First Lady dead?”

“I have a pretty good reason. And I think you know it.”

“You’re wrong.”

“About you knowing?”

“About the good reason. About what really happened that night on the bluff at Wildwood twenty years ago. What you think went down didn’t. It wasn’t Tom Jorgenson with Kate. It was his brother, Roland. All this time you’ve hated the wrong man.”

“Of course you’re lying. Your job is to save her.”

“Think about it for a minute. Two brothers very similar in build and appearance. One, a man committed to peace. The other, an artist with an unconventional lifestyle. One, a father. The other, an uncle who’d been generally distant. Think about the strength of the man you fought. A politician or a worker in iron? Ask yourself who was more likely to have been with Kate that night.”

The blower shut off and the church lapsed again into a deep silence. Moses didn’t speak. The figures in the stained glass windows were dark images now, barely discernible as human.

Bo said, “It was incest no matter how you cut it, but Tom Jorgenson wasn’t guilty. The guilty one is dead.”

“Why didn’t she tell me this herself?”

“You never gave her a chance. I was there. Every time she tried to explain, you cut her off. You didn’t want to hear. But you know what? I also think you didn’t really want her dead.”

“Didn’t want her dead? I should have killed her years ago, and her father.”