Wrongful Death: A Novel Read online

  Sloane assumed that officers would tend to be more reticent about giving information that could be harmful to the military. “And he’ll talk to me?”

  “Said he’d thought a lot about what happened that night. Ford was apparently the only guy he failed to bring home. I got the impression it still eats at him.”

  “Did you tell him I’m thinking about filing a lawsuit on behalf of the family?”

  “I told him you were Beverly Ford’s attorney. Most people figure out the lawsuit part on their own. I don’t imagine he thinks the family hired you to put together a scrapbook.”

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Sloane drove past Fort Lewis and exited the freeway. They descended a winding road into an area heavily wooded on both sides of the road. Rail spurs paralleled the pavement and eighteen-wheel trucks passed in the opposite direction.

  “Who does this guy work for?” Sloane asked.

  Jenkins handed him a scrap of paper from his coat pocket.

  “Argus International?” Sloane asked, reading.

  Jenkins wasn’t impressed. “You know it?”

  “Don’t you watch the news?”

  “Not if I can help it. It depresses me.”

  One of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world, Argus had recently been in the news for receiving a $1.2 billion-dollar reconstruction contract in Iraq. The contract sparked controversy because Argus had a long-standing penchant for hiring out-of-office, high-profile politicians and paying them large “retirement” packages when they found their way back into public service, usually in influential positions inside the administration’s cabinet. One of those former employees, an Argus president in the 1990s, was Frederick Northrup, the current secretary of defense.

  “The turn is coming up,” Jenkins said. “Slow down.”

  Given its prominence, Sloane expected Argus’s entrance to be grand, but the turnoff was marked by nothing more than a three-foot-high stucco wall bearing the company name in gold letters. Two hundred yards down a gravel road they came to a guard booth and a ten-foot-high chain link fence with barbed wire strung across the top. A black-and-yellow gate also blocked the road. It looked like a border checkpoint to a Cold War–era Soviet country.

  A guard in a starched white shirt and a blue polyester uniform stepped from the booth adjusting a police-style hat squarely on his head and tucking a clipboard under his arm. With reflector sunglasses he looked decidedly serious.

  “Can I help you, gentlemen?” The guard directed the sunglasses across the seat at Jenkins, then to the backseat before redirecting to Sloane.

  “We’re here to see Robert Kessler,” Sloane said.

  “Do you have an appointment with the captain?”

  “Yes, we do,” Sloane said, noting the guard’s reference to Kessler’s military rank.

  “I’ll need picture ID from both of you.”

  They fished out their licenses and the guard put them on his clipboard as he walked to the back of the car. In the rearview mirror Sloane watched him log the license plate, then circle the car looking through the windows into the interior before returning to the booth and picking up a telephone.

  Sloane looked to Jenkins. “What do they make here, enriched uranium?”

  Jenkins put a finger to his lips, turned on the radio, and pointed through the windshield to a long black rod atop a light pole just beneath a surveillance camera. “Someone’s watching, and listening—those rods are directional microphones.” He pointed to a disc inside the gate. “And that’s a satellite dish.”

  “Maybe they watch cable,” Sloane joked.

  Jenkins turned off the radio as the guard returned with their licenses and handed them white plastic cards dangling at the end of strings. “Wear these around your necks at all times while you’re on the property.” Straightening, he pointed down the road. “Take your first right and park in front of the third warehouse building on your left. Someone will meet you.”

  Jenkins leaned across the seat. “What number building is that?”

  “It’s the third building,” the guard repeated without elaboration. Then he stepped back from the car, pressing a button on his belt. The arm rose automatically and the chain link fence rolled to the right.

  Dropping the transmission into drive, Sloane drove onto the property. “The guy has the demeanor of a concrete wall.”

  Jenkins turned the radio back on. “The buildings aren’t numbered.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Around a bend in the road, Sloane saw a large industrial complex of corrugated metal buildings that looked like small airplane hangars. The railroad spurs ran behind the buildings, disappearing behind a large processing plant. Smokestacks emitted white steam.

  Jenkins pointed to vans and eighteen-wheel trucks parked in multiple loading bays. “No advertising on the trucks or the buildings. Understated entrance. They keep a low profile.” He flipped up his white card. “What do you want to bet these cards have sensors to track our location while on the property?”

  Sloane looked down at the card, reading the word “Visitor” upside down. “Do you think you’re being a little paranoid? Maybe it’s just to show we’re visitors. A lot of companies require this.”

  “Do those companies pick locations that butt up against a military base that limits access to designated checkpoints?” Jenkins asked.

  Sloane looked over at him.

  “This place abuts Fort Lewis,” Jenkins said. “I doubt they picked it by chance.”

  True to the guard’s word, as Sloane neared the third building, a woman stood waiting at the foot of two concrete steps. When they got out of the car, she approached Sloane with a rigidly outstretched arm.

  “Mr. Sloane? I’m Anne, Captain Kessler’s assistant.”

  Anne had the lean features and weathered skin of someone who ran long distances. It had aged her. Sloane guessed she was early thirties or younger but looked forty. Her handshake was rock solid. She looked at Jenkins as if uncertain about him. No wonder. With his sunglasses and black coat, he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of the Terminator movies.

  “Mr. Jenkins arranged my meeting with Mr. Kessler,” Sloane said, as if to explain Jenkins’s presence.

  Anne gave a pleasant smile. “I’ll escort you to the captain.”

  They stepped through a heavy metal door into a nondescript interior of paneled walls and a drop-down tile ceiling with dull fluorescent lighting and protruding sprinkler heads. It looked more like the interior of a construction trailer than the offices of a billion-dollar conglomerate. Because of Jenkins’s comment about the buildings not being numbered, Sloane looked for names and titles on the doors they passed, but found none. There were no name plates on the desk cubicles either.

  “What kind of business is Argus?” Sloane asked, playing dumb.

  Anne spoke over her shoulder. “We make agricultural chemicals.”

  “Pesticides?” Jenkins asked.

  “Some.”

  Anne stopped outside a closed door and knocked twice before turning the knob and entering. Sloane followed her. The man behind the desk waved them further in and gestured to two seats across from him. He looked to be talking to himself until he turned his head and Sloane saw a wireless earpiece.

  Captain Robert Kessler wore a cream-colored dress shirt pressed to perfection and looking like it should be emblazoned with medals. His tie was equally perfect, cinched tight, the knot flawless. As Kessler spoke, the muscles in his neck undulated, and a vein at his temple bulged. His close-cropped hair was more salt than pepper, a contrast to his youthful features and an indication that perhaps he hadn’t left the military completely behind. Behind him, a map of the world, marked with several dozen red triangles, hung on the wall.

  A beam of light drew Sloane’s attention to a pitch-black, floor-to-ceiling, plate-glass window. With effort he detected movement on the other side of the glass.

  “All right, that’s enough for now,”
Kessler said.

  A burst of light illuminated what appeared to be a village of flat-roof, stucco, and stone homes set behind exterior walls. Debris and the burned-out shells of cars and military vehicles littered potholed streets. It looked like the back lot of a Hollywood set.

  Kessler gestured to the window. “Welcome to Iraq.”

  But for the metal beams and ductwork crisscrossing the ceiling, the skeletal framework of a huge warehouse, the village looked just like pictures Sloane had seen in magazines and on the front page of countless newspapers. Half a dozen men dressed in black camouflage, their makeup smudged by perspiration, filed out from behind a wall carrying automatic weapons and wearing helmets equipped with night-vision goggles. Following them were men and women dressed in nightshirts and headdresses. Though almost all were Caucasian, they were obviously playing the role of Iraqis. The men’s arms had been bound behind their backs.

  “Take a break. We’ll run it again,” Kessler said. “We want to be consistent. Mistakes cause confusion, and confusion is what gets somebody killed. Make sure everyone is well hydrated. I don’t want anyone cramping.”

  Kessler removed the earpiece and clipped it to his shirt pocket as a motor hummed and a drape pulled closed across the glass. He pushed back from his desk and, to Sloane’s surprise, rolled toward them in a wheelchair of a design similar to ones Sloane had seen used by paraplegics to play basketball, a seat cushion atop two wheels. Straps held Kessler’s legs in place. Sloane recalled Katherine Ferguson’s comment that another soldier had been paralyzed the night her husband was blinded and Ford died.

  Sloane and Jenkins began to stand. Kessler raised a hand. “Please, sit. I am.” He smiled. “It’s a bad joke, I know.” He motioned to the now-curtained window. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. We were just finishing a training exercise and it ran a few minutes longer than expected.”

  Sloane gestured to the window. “Looks like a military exercise.”

  “Did you serve?” Kessler asked.

  “Marines.” After hearing the guard and the assistant, Anne, refer to Kessler as “Captain,” Sloane had wanted to impart his own military service early in the conversation, hoping it would give them common ground. He was glad for the opportunity.

  Kessler looked to Jenkins.

  “Vietnam,” Jenkins said, without adding, Special Forces. He looked to the drape across the window. “Where in Iraq is that?”

  “An exact replica of six square blocks in Mosul,” Kessler said. “Would you like a closer look?”

  Sloane nodded. “Sure.”

  Kessler turned the wheelchair and pulled open his office door. “You might want to leave your coats. It’s a hundred and thirteen degrees in Iraq.”

  Sloane draped his leather jacket over the back of his chair. Jenkins kept his on.

  Kessler wheeled to a metal door at the end of a hall and punched in a code on a sensor pad mounted next to it on the wall. That activated a buzzer, followed by the sound of a deadbolt sliding. When Kessler pulled open the door, a blast of heat greeted them as if someone had stuck a huge hair dryer in their faces.

  “We try to simulate the exact conditions,” Kessler said, wheeling onto dirt streets and adeptly avoiding debris and potholes. “We can even kick up a realistic sandstorm.”

  “Is it always this oppressive?” Sloane felt his shirt already sticking to his skin.

  “Actually, this is mild. It’s night. Temperatures in Mosul during the day can exceed a hundred thirty degrees. The residents sleep on their roofs because the interiors are just too hot. That’s important to what we do.”

  “Because people sleeping on roofs make sneaking up on a target more difficult,” Jenkins said.

  “The insurgents use cell phones,” Kessler said. “If one sees us coming he starts phoning. Pretty soon everyone is awake.”

  “Why would Argus need to run military maneuvers?” Sloane asked.

  Kessler stopped rolling. “Sorry, force of habit. Argus doesn’t run military maneuvers. We’re a civilian contractor. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that there is still a war going on and we’re in the middle of it. The military has its hands full with the insurgency. My job is to ensure our employees are safe and that shipments reach their designated end users.”

  “A private military force,” Jenkins said.

  Kessler wouldn’t go that far. “Most of the men here served in various branches of the military,” he acknowledged. “But they’re civilians now. My job is to keep their skills sharp by simulating the environment in which they could find themselves working.”

  “So if an Argus employee is kidnapped, for instance, they might be called to try and rescue them,” Sloane said.

  “You saw the map on the wall in my office? Argus has offices, or subsidiaries, throughout the world. We have projects in twenty-three foreign countries, employing sixty-five thousand people.”

  “The other warehouses have similar setups?” Sloane asked.

  “We have tunnels, rivers eight feet deep, a suburb outside Paris, and jungles so thick and hot you’d swear you were back in Southeast Asia.” He looked to Jenkins. “Care to have a look?”

  Jenkins shook his head. “Once was bad enough. I’ll take Paris in the spring.”

  Kessler gave them another minute to look around. Perspiration dripped down their faces.

  Kessler swung the wheelchair around. “Let’s get out of this heat.”

  “Have you had to extract any employees?” Sloane asked as they walked back to the entrance.

  Kessler repeated the process of entering a code on the sensor. “I can’t answer that. I’m sure you can appreciate that what we do over there can be sensitive. It doesn’t always make the news, and we try to keep it that way. Given the current climate, working over there is sort of like living with a tiger. You don’t want to be poking it with a stick, drawing its attention and making it angry if you don’t have to.”

  BACK BEHIND HIS desk, Kessler looked as normal as the next guy, but Sloane knew appearances could be deceiving. Despite Kessler’s upbeat demeanor and jokes, Sloane couldn’t help but wonder what happened to a man’s psyche when he lost so much so quickly, and how much of Kessler’s demeanor was an act for their benefit, part of the unwritten “man’s code” not to show weakness.

  “You wanted to talk about James Ford?” Kessler asked.

  “Mrs. Ford has asked me to look into James’s death. They have a lot of questions about what happened to him, about how he died. You gave a statement in some detail,” Sloane said. He pulled out Kessler’s witness statement from his briefcase and handed it to him. “The family obtained a copy. I assume it’s an accurate recollection of what occurred?”

  “Yes,” Kessler said, without giving the statement a glance. “And I’m aware that Mrs. Ford filed a claim.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “The claims office.”

  “So you understand Mrs. Ford takes issue with Mr. Ford’s body armor?”

  The vein in Kessler’s temple became more prominent, though his voice remained even. “I’m aware that Mrs. Ford is upset because in her mind James did not have sufficient body armor, yes.”

  “You don’t agree.”

  Kessler paused, as if to measure his response. After a moment he said, “I understand there were quite a few claims after that article that the new armor might have saved lives.”

  “You don’t agree?” Sloane asked again.

  “The article’s implication was that the soldiers did not have to die—that better armor would have kept them alive. In my opinion that’s just speculation.”

  Sloane decided to push him. “The report indicates the wounds were inflicted in areas left unprotected by the older armor. Why is that speculation?”

  “Because we could reach the same conclusion about every soldier who has died in every war. Soldiers don’t die unless they incur a wound in an unprotected area.” Kessler paused. “The fact is, there never has been and there never will be body armor
that will keep every soldier alive. If there were, we’d be in a constant state of war.”

  The latter comment surprised Sloane. “It seems the opposite would be true.”

  “Would it?” Kessler adjusted in his chair. “War is inevitable. I’m not a pessimist by nature, but you can’t ignore history. Men have been fighting since we could stand on two legs and throw a spear. If no soldier died, there would be no casualties, and as we all know, wars usually end when the casualties become unacceptable to one side or both.” Kessler looked at Jenkins. “You served in Vietnam; you’re familiar with the vests we used over there.”

  “Couldn’t stop a fart and weighed a ton,” Jenkins said.

  Kessler turned to Sloane. “They called them ‘flak jackets’ because that’s all they were designed to protect against, flak from shrapnel and other low-speed projectiles.”

  “I’m familiar with the term, and the jacket, Captain.”

  “Then you know they were the best we had at that time. They saved lives. Not enough, for sure. What we wore in Desert Storm wasn’t much better. The technology didn’t change until production of the Interceptor in 1999. It was supposed to be part of a ten-year plan to replace the flak jackets. Unfortunately, nine-eleven occurred in the fifth year of that plan, and we hadn’t produced enough to outfit every soldier before the invasion. You go to war with what you have.”

  It was an argument Sloane knew he could anticipate from an assistant U.S. attorney if he ever filed a complaint in federal court. He sensed that further argument would only make Kessler guarded, and what he really wanted was to better understand why the witness statements were so uniform.

  “What can you tell me about the night James Ford died?”

  Kessler shook his head. “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

  Sloane looked to Jenkins, but the big man appeared equally perplexed by Kessler’s sudden reticence. “I don’t understand. You knew we wanted to talk about James Ford.”

  “About his vest, yes, but I can’t talk about what happened to him that night.”

  “I thought you indicated to Mr. Jenkins that you were willing to talk to me?”