Merriwell reached back into the car for a weathered caramel-colored briefcase and I walked him over to Ellen, whom he thanked several times. She tried to gossip about a mutual friend, a former MIT classmate of Howard’s who now taught there, but Merry had little to say on that score, and she realized, with visible disappointment, that she had no option but to say good-bye. I hugged her farewell with profuse thanks of my own. Tonight, I’d be on my way back to Bosnia, via JFK, to meet with Madame Professor Tchitchikov and Goos at Barupra.
Merriwell watched her clack her way down her driveway.
“Truly your ex-wife?”
“Truly.”
He shook his head in amazement.
“Not in this lifetime,” he said. “And you trust her discretion?”
“Completely.” As the wife of a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Ellen took pride in her ability to keep secrets, and even after our divorce she had never spilled any of them, even the juiciest about prominent folks around town.
“And what about you?” I asked Merry. “Are things any better with your ex-to-be?”
“No improvement,” he answered wearily, “but despite that, I am far better.” He looked it. He sported a vacation tan and appeared far less tired. Gesturing to the guesthouse, he suggested we get started, because he had to head back to the airport in two hours. “As usual the world is falling apart,” he said.
The guesthouse was compact and tasteful, clearly the work of the same architect who’d designed the main house. Upstairs there were two small bedrooms, each with its own bath. Downstairs it was all open space off the beautiful kitchen, with its gorgeous hand-tooled cabinetry in some reddish South American wood. The windows were large, to catch the astounding light off the lake, and were dressed in billowing scarlet roman shades raised with surgical precision to half height. A small dining table separated the living area from the kitchen, and there Merriwell and I placed ourselves in leather Breuer chairs with chrome arms.
I served coffee and put out a basket of muffins Ellen, despite my protests, had asked a caterer to deliver this morning. I’d also taken the precaution of borrowing a bottle of scotch, which I’d positioned innocently at the far corner of the kitchen counter, but Merry never even seemed to look that way. He put the briefcase on a chair he pulled beside him. It was one of those wonderful old valise-type bags lawyers used to carry when I started practice, with a hinged brass mouth that opened wider than the compartment below, and a leather strap that fit into the lock on the other side to close it.
To start, I told him that I had not authorized or engineered the leak to the Times, but he waved that off. Merriwell was a veteran of domestic political wars as well as the ones we got into overseas, and seemed to regard both the leaking and the denial as part of the game.
As we turned to business, there was a notable change in Merriwell’s air, which instantly struck me as not simply businesslike, but dour and solemn. He secured a sheaf of papers about three inches thick from the case.
“I’ve brought what I’ve received,” he said. “There is more coming, but you’ll be interested in what’s here. Because time is limited, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of what you’re bound to figure out on your own, so you can ask questions now. No bar on more later.”
“Any overall comment?” I asked him.
Merry stopped to frown, a lip puffed up, the expression drawing deeper grooves in his narrow face.
“Overall, I am chagrined and surprised,” he said. “And still disbelieving.”
The concession was enticing, but I waited politely. From the shiny edges at the top of the stack, I could tell there were a number of 8-by-10 photographs.
“Your request for official photography was quite brilliant,” he said.
I told him it wasn’t my idea.
“Never fail to take credit for the accomplishments of your staff,” he answered, and smiled. “All right,” he said. “At Eagle Base they photographed everything, including the playing of reveille, retreat, and taps. Here’s taps on April 27, 2004.”
It was a flash photo of a bugler at the base of the empty flagpole. The shot was in color, and the figure against the blue night made a striking image, but on first glance the picture seemed otherwise unremarkable.
“Back here,” said Merriwell.
At the top of the photograph, rising up the page, there was a line of lights moving off sinuously in the distance.
“Convoy?”
“So it appears.”
I looked more closely. The red taillights were visible on one or two of the vehicles, and the headlights appeared as a swath of brightness in front of them. The vehicles—trucks I’d say—were departing. I counted, although the last of them were little more than a blur.
“About twenty?”
“Give or take.”
“And what time was this photo taken?”
“Taps is twenty-two hundred hours.”
Ferko said the first men arrived at Barupra a little before midnight. Travel time to the village would have been no more than ten or fifteen minutes, even on the bad roads of those days.
“Any theories about what they might have been doing with an extra hour and a half?” I asked.
“I’m happy to explain what you see in front of you, Boom, but I’ll have to keep any speculations to myself.”
“Well, if I said that was enough time to change uniforms and rehearse an impending operation, is there any obvious reason I’d be wrong?”
He shook his head tersely—either indicating that I was right or that he wouldn’t be drawn into commentary—then reached back to the stack.
“Here, I’m afraid, is what will most interest you.” He pulled several photos off the piles. They were black and white, clearly enlarged many times. To me, at first it was like looking at an ultrasound, just lines and blurs and dark spots, although one little rectangle looked whiter than the rest.
“This is a satellite photograph,” Merry said.
“Wow,” I said. “You can get recognizable forms from a hundred miles?”
“It’s an impressive technology.”
“I’ll say.”
“You asked for records of the GPS transponders. As you know, they are worn by our troops and were standard issue even then on operational equipment, like trucks or tanks or aircraft. Whenever they are off-base, the satellite will follow the transponders and photograph their location. There are several more photos here, but they all focus on one truck.”
“As opposed to the troops?”
“Correct.”
“So the soldiers had removed their transponders?”
“Or weren’t our soldiers.”
“But someone neglected one truck?”
“I don’t know why one transponder was left functioning, but by the time the satellite made its next orbit ninety minutes later, there are no photographs.”
“Clearly an oversight that got corrected,” I said. Merry refused to respond.
Beyond the one truck that was automatically highlighted, the others appeared in the photo as grayer boxes with white bumps in front of them, the projections of their headlamps. When I lowered my nose to the page, I could also make out distinct ant-like grains.
“Are these people?”
“That’s my interpretation.”
There were hundreds, once I understood how to recognize the forms. And at the top of the photograph was a stripe of black—the valley that led down to the Cave.
“So this is the residents of Barupra being rounded up?”
“Again, I leave the ultimate explanations to you.” But his face was pouty and somber.
At the first sight of the photograph my pulse had quickened considerably. The skeptical piece of me, the trained professional, had yearned for solid proof to back up Ferko. I would have been jubilant if I did not recognize that this was a visual record of four hundred people being marched to their deaths. Merry and I said nothing for a second, as I took on his grave mood.
Although the satellite could have been in range only for a few minutes, there were at least a hundred photos. The last showed three trucks, apparently fully loaded, turning toward the winding dirt road that led down to the Cave.
“What do the truck logs we asked for show?”
“Those,” said Merriwell, “you will have to retrieve from our friend Attila. But CoroDyn has been asked to provide them, and Attila called Friday to assure me they should come along shortly. Apparently there were two motor pools, one operational, one logistical. She wanted to know if we needed the records of both and I said yes.”