Evan circled to the nightstand and opened the drawer. There lay the gleaming handgun he knew all too well, its image having been branded onto his twelve-year-old brain. In the intervening years, he’d been able to retrospectively identify the weapon, a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .357. He lifted it from its place beside a box of tissues.
The Mystery Man looked up at him, helpless to intervene. His etched skin was crepe-paper-thin, mottled with bluish patches, shiny with sweat. A gurgle accompanied his exhalation, rising in volume until Evan was worried that he’d die here and now before giving up any answers.
But he coughed a few times, partially clearing his throat.
“They call it the death rattle,” he said. “Fluid buildup in the lungs.”
“The cigarettes?” Evan asked.
“Yeah. But it was worth it. My one true love.” He smiled weakly. “Now it’s metastasized in my brain. You’re lucky you got here in time to kill me. A week or two later, you’d’ve missed your chance.”
“I’m here for something else, too.”
“I figured as much.” His finger rose a half inch, pointed at the television bracketed to the wall. “I watch the news. It’s about all I do anymore.”
“Bennett came to see you twice. Last October and last month. What about?”
“About 1997.”
Evan hadn’t expected him to arrive so directly on the point, but maybe dying made a man less circuitous. Evan’s relief was quickly undercut by gnawing dread for what was to come. “My first mission.”
“Yes. I was involved. As was Orphan A. Bennett needed to know that we were airtight, every last loose end severed.” His chest rattled up and down, the good eye fixing on Evan pointedly. “Of course, one remains.”
“I killed a lot of people,” Evan said. “Unsanctioned kills, cutout jobs, no U.S. footprint. Each mission is a live grenade, top-level classified. What makes ’97 so threatening?”
“I’ve spent most of the days of my life with information in my head that I can’t unknow. I don’t have anything to care about anymore. Not my life, not protecting the past, certainly not Jonathan Bennett. But I can protect you, especially after I cost you so much.” He gazed up at Evan, and Evan could smell his breath, sour and sickly, the smell of death itself. “You know what you did. But you don’t want to know what you really did.”
“Tell me.”
The Mystery Man lay there, his lips pouched.
Evan hefted the revolver in his palm. “I know you’re in pain. But there can always be more pain.”
“You’re the best there is, X, but you got nothing on cancer.”
The Mystery Man breathed for a time, and Evan let him.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was an undersecretary of defense. He was an ambitious soul with designs on the throne. But he was also greedy. Not for money but for power. He understood that the more of the former he accrued for the right people, the more of the latter he’d inherit.”
“Who are ‘the right people’?” Evan asked.
“Think, boy. I’ve been watching the news. Have you?”
Evan turned his head to the television screen, though it was dark. “The congressional subpoena,” he said. “A multibillion-dollar investigation into Bennett’s relationships with defense contractors.”
“Relationships that date back to his early days at the DoD.”
“I understand,” Evan said. “But so what? We both know that’s how the game’s played. Influence, money, and war have always gone hand in hand. So the administration’s moves a half century ago benefited the military-industrial complex and vice versa. That kind of quid pro quo can always be covered up and spun, buried beneath half-truths and fake news. Any moves Bennett made would have been conducted behind a haze of full deniability. Illegal and immoral, sure. But why does it constitute a clear and present danger now?”
“What if we’re not talking about illegal and immoral?” the Mystery Man said. “But about treason?”
“Treason?” Evan eased back a step and slid the gun into his waistband. “How do you get to treason? The powers that be wanted a hawkish foreign minister dispatched—”
“The foreign minister you assassinated was publicly hawkish, yes. Beating the drums about nukes. Lots of carefully cultivated sound bites to the media. That’s how he rose to power. But in private? He was willing to accede to our demands.”
“He was under U.S. influence?”
“Yes. And he also happened to be very close to Milo? evi? . In fact, he was plotting his execution. With our help, no less.”
“But the president decided to change course?”
“No. The undersecretary of defense did.”
Evan’s skin tightened against the cool of the room. “You’re telling me that as undersecretary of defense, Jonathan Bennett ordered a political assassination in violation of the wishes and policy directives of the sitting U.S. president?”
“I am telling you precisely that.”
“And no one found out?”
The Mystery Man’s hand pulsed around a wandlike control, releasing another hit of morphine. He sighed, relief mixed with pleasure. “That’s the point of black programs,” he said. “No one can see them.”
Evan pictured the minister’s wife in her billowing aubergine dress, her mouth stretched wide, a scream of primal grief. He forced down a swallow. “Bennett would take that risk just to line the pockets of his defense-contractor cronies so they’d … what? Put him in the Oval Office one day? How much financial gain can be had from the murder of one foreign minister?”
The Mystery Man’s cracked lips stretched in a smile. “All the gain in the world,” he said. “Thanks to you, Slobodan Milo? evi? was not killed. We lost our opportunity—and our window. Weeks after you dispatched the foreign minister, Milo? evi? expanded his title from president of Serbia to president of Yugoslavia. And we know where that led. You see, Bennett and his backers didn’t want an ally in the foreign minister. They required an enemy in Milo? evi? .”
“Why?”
“Had the Butcher of Belgrade been killed in 1997, that would have precluded the need for the bombings in Serbia a year and a half later.”
“They can’t have known that,” Evan said. “No one could have predicted that.”
“Not that specifically. But if you were a warmonger with chips to bet in 1997? You would’ve put every last one on a madman despot in the Balkans.” A smile moved the cracked lips. “Do you recall that bombing campaign?”
Evan wiped his mouth. “NATO ran thousands of air strikes. Almost every single town was targeted. Combat aircraft fired four hundred twenty thousand missiles and dropped almost forty thousand cluster bombs. They used graphite bombs to take down the power system.”
He paused to regain his composure. When it came to ordnance and war campaigns, Jack had drilled into him an aptitude for specifics. His head swam with them now: 25,000 housing units damaged or destroyed, 500 kilometers of roads, 600 kilometers of railways, 14 airports, 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 44 bridges, 87 schools.
He found his voice again. “More than four thousand dead, thirteen thousand injured, half civilians, children. A billion dollars of damage to the infrastructure.”
“Ah,” the Mystery Man said. “But it made much more than that.”
Evan’s face slackened with disgust.
“Not just the bombs and the planes, the armored vehicles and the artillery,” the Mystery Man continued. “But you have to understand, you can’t buy a testing grounds like that. Our defense firms finally got to flex their muscles, haul all that gear out of R&D and see what it could do. Ordnance and explosives testing in a real theater at zero cost. And that was just the start. You remember what was politically noteworthy about the bombing campaign, don’t you?”
The answer spun just out of reach, like a flicked coin. And then it settled, and Evan saw the face of it. “It was the first time NATO ever used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council.”
“Correct. Which allowed the Pentagon, on the heels of that attack, to seize a thousand acres of land in Kosovo. They built a colossal U.S. military base there, one of the biggest in the world.”
“Camp Bondsteel.”
“We’re talking seven thousand troops, fifty-two helipads, twenty-some Black Hawks, a few dozen tanks. The contracts that were awarded then ?” The Mystery Man gave a weak whistle. “More commas than a Russian novel. And the thing is? We don’t even need it. We never did. It’s not an air base. It’s not connected to the sea. It doesn’t hold a strategic position. Truth is, we should’ve mothballed it years ago. And yet we’ve been paying to supply it for nearly two decades.”
The recycled air with its whiff of rubbing alcohol and iodine was making Evan feel sick.
“So let’s return to your question,” the Mystery Man said. “How much financial gain can be had from the murder of one foreign minister?” He tried to lift his head again, but it just rustled dryly against the pillowcase. “A kingdom’s worth.”
Evan took an unsteady step back and sat on the sill of the box window.
The Mystery Man read his face. “You were a nineteen-year-old kid.”