Страница 93 из 112
“What is he doing?” she said. “That’s my husband!”
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” the guy on the couch said. “We’re doing a house-to-house search. It’s his job. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”
“Who are you?” Rita said, remaining on her feet, twisting the folds of her navy blue skirt in her hands.
“I’m Brigadier General Darryl Elliot, and this is Mr. Chynsky,” Elliot said. “I’m from JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg. Mr. Chynsky is counterterrorist director for the NSA. That gentleman in the kitchen is Dr. Ken Beer, a chief investigator from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He has presidential authority to search your house, ma’am.”
“Fine,” Rita said. “Let him.”
“Dr. Beer, I’d start upstairs and work down,” the one named Chynsky said. The guy in the spacesuit nodded at him and headed up the stairway.
“Mrs. Gomez,” General Elliot said, “I know this is a tough time for you. I’m sorry. But I have to talk to you regarding some things our investigators have turned up since your late husband’s death and cremation. We don’t have a lot of time here.”
“Whatever I can do to help.”
“Thank you. Did your husband exhibit any unusual behavior in the weeks leading up to his death?”
“He was drunk a lot. Nothing unusual about that.”
“Any strange new habits? Disappearances?”
“If he wasn’t sleeping he was over at the bar at the X pounding Budweisers.”
“Any new friends or associates recently?”
“He only had one friend. He wouldn’t know what an associate was.”
“Friend’s name?”
“Sparky. Sparky Rollins.”
“Yes. The guard posted on what used to be Tower 22.”
“That’s him.”
“Did you ever overhear any unusual conversations between the two of them?”
“Sparky never came here. Gomez always went over to Sparky’s apartment at the BOQ. So they could watch the Playboy Cha
“Please try to think, Mrs. Gomez. Was there anything, anything at all, that struck you as different or unusual about your husband in the last month or so?”
“Well, Julio Iglesias did start calling here about a month ago. That was fairly unusual.”
“I beg your pardon? Julio Iglesias? You mean the singer?”
“Well, he called himself that. But he sure didn’t sound like any Julio Iglesias I’ve seen on TV, believe me.”
“What, exactly, did he sound like, Mrs. Gomez?”
“Cuban. Very strong Cuban accent. Tough guy.”
“How often would he call?”
“Every now and then. He’d call at all hours. I think there were two of them.”
“Two?”
“Two guys both pretending to be that singer. Their voices were different, you know?”
“Mrs. Gomez, this could be very important. Did you ever accidentally overhear or eavesdrop on any of those conversations?”
“No. I wouldn’t do that. Besides, he always took the calls in another room.”
“Ira,” Elliot said to Chynsky, “we need the log on all incoming and outgoing calls from this number in the last two weeks. Thanks.”
Ira got up, went into the kitchen, and got on the phone. Elliot opened his leather bag and pulled out an object in some kind of freezer bag.
“Have you ever seen this object before, Mrs. Gomez?”
It was a metal box, about the size of a brick. Little buttons on it. Banged up. It looked like it had been dropped from a ten-story building.
“Mrs. Gomez?”
“No. I’ve never seen it before. What is it?”
“Did your husband have any hobbies? Like model airplanes or model boats?”
“I already told you. His hobbies were beer and the Playboy Cha
“This is a radio control device, Mrs. Gomez. You could use it to fly a remote control airplane. Or you could use it to, say, program a bomb.”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“It was found in the mud, a hundred yards from your husband’s body.”
An hour later, Rita and her two daughters were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for Mrs. Nettles to pick them up. The girls had on their best dresses. They had four pieces of luggage. Three suitcases plus an old bowling ball bag for Gomez.
The two suits from Washington and the CDC investigator had finally left, but not before the spaceman scared the kids half to death when he went out to the garage. They’d come ru
“Granma,” he said. “The Cuban daily, Havana edition. Dated five weeks ago. Heavily folded and imprinted. Looks like something cylindrical was wrapped in it.”
“Bag it,” Elliot said.
When Elliot started asking her questions about a bunch of old newspapers, that’s when she’d told them, hey, old newspapers, big effing deal, pal. B.F.D. She’d had enough. She’d spent all morning at her husband’s funeral. Now she only had half an hour to pack up all her family’s stuff and head to the Ke
He thanked her for her time and tried to be nice. She guessed he was only doing his job. But if he thought Gomez had anything to do with anything at all that was a Special Report on CNN, he was flat crazy. Gomez wasn’t smart enough and certainly not sober enough to pull off anything as big as this big magilla thing seemed to be.
Lost in a jumble of thoughts, she was startled by the sound of a car horn. A big white Chevy Suburban cruised right up to the curb, flags flying from all four windows. The passenger side window slid down, and Cindy Nettles stuck her head right out. She had her blond hair in pigtails, with big red, white, and blue ribbons.
“Hop in, guys! C’mon! Mom says we’re go
Gi
The traffic, once they got going, was a nightmare. MPs and marines wearing gas masks were at every intersection trying to keep the endless converging lines of private vehicles and buses full of evacuees moving. Rita was grateful that no one was honking or yelling, no one was trying to cut in front of them. If she had expected panic, she saw none. These were military families, Navy families, and they acted like it.
There was confusion at various checkpoints over who was going where. Gi
At Wharf Bravo, there was a sense of barely controlled chaos on the pier. In the massive shadow of the famous warship, endless rivers of women, children, and the elderly were streaming up various gangplanks. Rita watched them disappearing with agonizing slowness into the many cavernous mouths in the Ke
Seated behind a long table were six officers checking the evacuees’ identification before admitting them aboard. At either end of the table were Marines armed with machine guns. The six officers checked every piece of identification carefully, Rita noticed, even Gi
Little Cindy presented herself alongside her mother and handed the officer a pink plastic wallet. It matched the pink plastic suitcase she was carrying.
“Okay,” the officer said, opening the wallet. “Let’s see who you are, young lady.”
“Lucinda Nettles,” Cindy said. “My daddy is Admiral Nettles. Do you know him?”