Andy lowered his eyes, looked into his nearly empty snifter, and gave it a few twirls as if the gesture would conjure a refill. “We’re both civilians now. This is friend to friend. What I say to you stays with you, okay?”
“Of course, Andy.”
“A lot of it is conjecture, and it’s going to sound pretty crazy.”
“Crazy is something I’m used to.”
“The investigators found Rondo’s dog tags. I never saw them. I’m sure you’re wondering how they got there. Or if they were ever there in the first place.”
“Christ, Andy, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that maybe the blast was a convenient solution to a vexing problem. Colonel Doerr is an ambitious, connected man with a five-generation military pedigree, in line for a general’s star. Better if your son is killed in action instead of being an AWOL psychiatric discharge who murdered an important military ally.”
Sam was so staggered, he couldn’t form any words for a moment. “Frame his own son’s death and leave him in the desert to die? That’s outrageous.”
“It is, but you don’t know Colonel Doerr. I do. He’s a death over dishonor guy. Best case scenario, Rondo was looking at life in prison—the death penalty if defense couldn’t argue a solid mental incompetency case. In my mind, it’s within the realm of possibility.”
“But the AWOL and the psych report were out there already, on record. Rondo was the obvious suspect for Raziq’s murder.”
“I filed my reports, truthful to the letter. After that, it went up the chain and was out of my hands. Along the way, things went missing. Like the AWOL and the psych report.”
Sam shook his head in disbelief. “Nobody can bury a murder.”
“Unless you have two interested parties with a lot at stake. A day after Raziq’s murder, the Afghan military released a statement saying it was the result of a personal grudge, conducted by one of his lieutenants. They had things to hide, too, like his taste for children. On our end, everything leading up to it suddenly got classified at the highest level in the interest of national security. Same thing with the blast investigation, including the forensics that would prove Rondo wasn’t on that convoy. I was gagged. Anybody who knew anything about it was, and frankly you and I are pretty much the only ones left alive who did.”
“Jesus Christ.” Sam pressed a palm against his forehead, trying to fend off the first serious headache he’d had since the night at Rolf’s.
What do you see? What do you remember?
Was the unrelenting voice of his dreams another repressed memory? An informal interrogation that had occurred when he was half-dead and out of his mind on painkillers and God knew what else at Walter Reed? “I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around any conspiracy, Andy, let alone one of this magnitude. It can’t be true, there’s another explanation.”
“Maybe I’m as crazy as Rondo was. The thing is, if you’ve been in-country long enough, you realize almost anything that happens there is a mirage—and if it’s not, it will be. And everything you ever believed in goes to shit. After that, anything can ride.”
“Were you threatened during the debriefing?”
He lowered his head. “If I’d pursued further action while serving, I would have been destroyed. They didn’t have to threaten me.”
Once again, Sam felt like the ground beneath his feet was crumbling away into a vast, bottomless chasm. “That’s why you left. And why you’re running for Congress.”
He nodded absently. “This has been killing me, Sam. I had to find a way to do some good. I fucking hate politics, but it can serve a greater purpose.”
“Does Lee know?”
“He’s been in Washington a long time. Field incidents don’t rise up to that high-water mark.”
“If you’re working with him, you need to tell him. He’s a good man, Andy, he can help you.”
“I don’t know if anybody can help me. I could use another drink, how about you?”
Sam found the bottle of Courvoisier in the outdoor bar cabinet and refilled their glasses. “I’ve always had a lot of respect for you, Andy.”
“Even now?”
“Even more now. You’ll find a way to do what’s right. I’m with you, and Lee will be, too, believe me on that. But tell me this, do you think Rondo could still be alive?”
“It’s not possible, Sam. He was a head case who fled with no supplies into a desert wasteland. If the climate didn’t kill him, the Taliban did. Kev, Shaggy, and Wilson—three good men—died for him, and you almost did, too. If I thought he was still alive, I’d hunt him down and kill him myself.”
* * *
After peach tart and coffee, Sam joined his mother in the kitchen while Lee dosed out the last of the Courvoisier. “Drink up, Captain. We have reason to celebrate. Our boy is going to get through this, too. I can’t say I’d be standing so tall.”
Andy watched Vivian behind the glass patio doors, putting her kitchen back together. Sam was trying to help, but she kept shooing him away. “He’s got good people behind him. Vivian is a force of nature, isn’t she?”
Lee chuckled and clipped a fresh cigar. “Anybody in her orbit is lucky to be there. What did you and Sam talk about while I was helping get your desserts on the table? It looked like an intense discussion.”
“He’s trying to put things together from the time around the blast. His memory is still shot.”
“That might not be such a bad thing.”
“We all deserve the truth.”
Lee fired a cigar. “The truth is a funny thing—we all want it, but we’re not always ready to hear the answers.”
Chapter Eighty
SAM PULLED THE SHELBY OVER TO the curb by Brookside Park near his childhood home and slid down in his seat, watching families and lovers, joggers and dog walkers pass by. Regular people with regular lives, but he knew they all had secrets, big or small, and he wondered what they were. He envied them because they knew their own secrets. Sam didn’t, didn’t even know if he had any. He hadn’t for two years.
He might never know what had really happened back in the desolate, ruined country of Afghanistan or satisfactorily fill in the blanks in the vast swath of mental wasteland residing in his skull. But he knew Andy wasn’t the violent, demented killer of Raziq that the schizophrenic Rondo specter had proclaimed him to be, and he trusted Andy more than his twisted dream.
Rondo was your subconscious. Why would your subconscious tell you Andy was Raziq’s murderer?
“Because I’m FUCKED UP,” he hissed, slamming his palms against the steering wheel. A few passers-by looked over their shoulders in alarm, and he sank deep into his seat, trying to disappear. He took deep breaths and wished he had that damned Maneki Neko cat sitting on his dashboard right now.
He tried to martial whatever remaining rational, cognitive brain cells he had, abandoning all psychoanalytical confusion. What if Rondo hadn’t been a dream? What if he’d managed to survive the desert and the Taliban and somehow got himself back here under the radar by jumping the Mexican border? His mental derangement would never allow him to take responsibility for a murder, so he would project it onto someone else, an authority figure—somebody like Andy or his father—whom he’d also implicated as a villain. If Sam had learned anything in life, it was that you couldn’t discount any possible truth, no matter how improbable it seemed.