The Consignment Read Online Free Page B

like Colonel Alex Channon gave the academy a certain clout around budget time.
    After he turned my story over, Alex’s shoulders sagged. His crisp uniform shirt crumpled. “Holy hell,” he said softly.
    “I’m not so sure the shot came from the firing range.” I mentioned the armored personnel carriers, and the fact that they’d been open for general inspection all morning. I told him about the way the gunshots from the firing range echoed off the hangar. “One or two stray shots, maybe a silencer. No one would have noticed.”
    He looked up at me as if it was an effort just to concentrate on what I was telling him. Until that day, I would have said that Alex’s decision to send me and Dimitri undercover in the arms trade had worked out better than any of us had any right to hope, that the two years of Hawkeye had put some real numbers on the board. Hawkeye. Dimitri’s suggestion, as I recall. A big fan of
M*A*S*H,
he’d made the suggestion as a joke, but it stuck to the operation and became the official code name. After I resigned my commission, and Dimitri left Delta Force, we served some time training with a bunch of Defense Intelligence operatives, preparing for Hawkeye as if we were about to be dropped behind enemy lines. The operation was meant to be over in six months, but each quarter Channon had had the time extended. Now, between us, Dimitri and I had assembled a virtual encyclopedia on the ruses used by the arms trade to skirt the decrees of U.S. and international law. The Customs Service had found our background work invaluable. The Pentagon had been reassured that two of its own guys were on the case. Until that day, I really believed that our work was A1 quality, that we were doing just fine.
    “Did Dimitri ever offer you money?” Alex asked me suddenly, leaning his forearms on the desk.
    I squinted. “When?”
    “Anytime.”
    “No.”
    “Have you ever been solicited to bribe a client?”
    “Alex—”
    He put up a hand. “Ever?” he said. His gaze was direct.
    No, I told him. Never. “And if I had, you know I would have reported it to you.”
    The way he looked at me, Alex Channon didn’t seem so sure. His focus narrowed. “Have you ever accepted a bribe, Ned?”
    “No.”
    For a few beats, his eyes stayed on mine. Then he muttered, “Best news for weeks,” and he slid the recorder into a drawer.
    I cocked my head. I asked him, naturally, what the hell he meant by that.
    “That guy you reported tailing you last month,” he said, ignoring my question. “Have you seen him again?”
    “I said it was just a feeling.”
    “First feeling like that you’ve had in two years.”
    Once a month Alex flew up from Washington and received a face-to-face report from me. Between times, on a weekly basis, I used the tiny scramble-and-squirt recorder he’d given me to deliver my reports over the phone. It was a recent weekly report he was referring to. My first few months undercover I’d reported several tails, but as my undercover life merged with my real life, my sightings of these shadows dwindled, then disappeared. It was an unexpected and alarming moment, the month before Springfield, when I found myself leaving the local 7-Eleven and craning over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of someone I felt watching me. There was nobody there, but I reported the incident to Channon anyway. It was only later that it occurred to me the spectral figure was probably the projection of some more acutely personal anxieties.
    “What would you say,” Channon asked me now, “if I told you Dimitri reported some guy tailing him too?”
    “Are you telling me?”
    He dipped his head and waited for that one to sink in. Dimitri had a tail and I had a tail. And now Dimitri was dead.
    Channon rose and came around his desk and dropped into a chair. He grimaced and opened his hands. “Okay, here’s the story. A couple of months ago I got a call from Dimitri. Urgent. Priority one, he says, get my ass out to L.A. to