‘Why don’t we ask The Man?’ I suggested, and then called out in Lockhart’s direction, ‘Hey, nice place you have here!’
Lockhart turned. He was preoccupied with the driver; it took him a moment to place us. ‘Why thank you,’ he said. ‘And that’s a nice piece of ass you’ve brought with you.’ He leered at us. ‘She could Leila with me anytime, you know what I’m sayin’?’
Lame joke. Maybe this guy was a colonel when he was in Special Forces.
‘The boys and I were just wondering what goes on here,’ I said, throwing out a line.
‘You mean, what we’re doing down here, ol’ Uncle Supply and Demand?’ he asked.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘The usual,’ he said. ‘We train our side to go out and teach the other side where and how to smarten up so that they can kill our side right back.’
‘And who is our side killing, generally speaking?’
‘Generally speaking, the enemy,’ he said with an easy smile.
‘And who’s that?’
‘Nosy for a PSO, aren’t you?’
‘This is just my day job,’ I said.
His eyes flittered over the words ‘Special Agent’ above my nametag.
‘You’re a cop. So you’ll understand me when I say — move along, nothing to see here.’
And that often means there’s something you really should see and it’s mostly dead, but I didn’t press it.
Lockhart’s smile went someplace else. ‘Well, looking forward to tonight’s concert. If you’ll excuse me…’
Cassidy stood aside. Lockhart squeezed past him and trotted toward the supply building.
‘Make friends easily, skipper?’ Rutherford asked as we watched the man’s back.
Lockhart opened a door and disappeared behind it. My natural curiosity was getting the better of me, probably because Arlen had provided next-to-no detail on this place. But asking questions wasn’t my gig here, as Lockhart had pointed out.
A couple of Americans rolled past, wearing jeans and t-shirts and smoking cigars.
‘They don’t look like regular military,’ said West.
‘Contractors,’ said Cassidy.
‘Kornfak & Greene turf,’ I reminded them. ‘They’re mercenaries.’
‘Speaking of turf, they should rip all of it the fuck up.’ Rutherford pulled his Ka-bar, leaned on West, and prized away the orange mud accumulated on the soles of his boots. ‘This shite is like wet concrete.’
‘Smacks of deniability,’ said West, looking around. ‘If things go wrong — it weren’t us, no sir.’
Possibly, but there were enough people at the command level here parading around in US Army battle uniforms — Firestone, Holt, and the rest — to make plausible deniability difficult to pull off. The truth, whatever it was, would still escape. Truth had a habit of doing that.
We walked for another twenty minutes and saw nothing that we hadn’t seen at countless other camps and bases. It began raining again; not hard, just a steady, sapping drizzle. We made our way over to the stage, which had been built adjacent to the camp’s HQ, a two-story structure with a couple of flagpoles out front: a blue, yellow, and green-striped flag — I guessed the national flag of Rwanda — hanging limp on one of them, the Stars and Stripes on the other. A luxury Mercedes 4×4 followed by a Toyota Kluger pulled up outside the HQ. Fancy vehicles for a place like this, I thought. Two men got out of the Mercedes, one white, one black. Five large black men with nervous eyes exited the Toyota and formed a loose diamond around the two from the Mercedes — PSOs. Then Lockhart came out of the HQ, armed with a couple of umbrellas. This guy got around. The Mercedes combo took refuge beneath them and they all made a dash for the building.
‘Vin, wait up,’ a voice called behind me. It was Ryder. He was out of breath, something urgent on it.
‘What’s up?’ I asked him.
‘Twenny Fo wants a word.’
‘What about?’
‘No idea,’ he said.
‘He still rehearsing?’ I asked.
Ryder nodded.
‘I’ll catch up with you later,’ I said to Cassidy and the others.
Ryder and I walked back to the mess. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked him.
‘Gonna be a great show,’ he said.
‘How’re the principals getting along?’
‘Great.’
‘As long as they’re not breathing the same air,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
So far, the only danger I could see on this detail was getting caught in the crossfire between those two.
When I walked into the mess, Leila had the floor. She was singing a song I was familiar with about a guy with a big gun — I figured not of the Smith & Wesson variety. It was slow and sexual, as though the tune itself were riding on its own lubricant. A bunch of US Army folks, including Firestone, Holt, and his security team, were somehow managing to watch without panting.
‘Over here,’ said Ryder.
I followed him to a far corner, where Twenny Fo, wearing white Nike sweatbands on his head and wrists, was trying on a US Army combat uniform, a tailor pinning it here and there in an attempt to wring what he could from the performer’s scrawny, free-range street physique.
‘Yo, Tee — that look the biz on you, man,’ Boink complimented him.
‘You be The Man’s secret jungle weapon,’ said Snatch, massaging his goatee and holding his tightly braided head at an angle. He saw me coming and said, ‘Heads up, Tee. Ghost Man in da house.’
Fo looked across and acknowledged me with a lift of his chin, then walked away from the tailor as if the guy didn’t exist.
‘Wanna ask you sommin’, man,’ he said, his brow furrowed as if he were weighing the answer to an important question.
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.
‘You know my tunes?’
‘One or two.’
‘What about “Fighter”? Choo know that one, homes, right?’
‘I’m familiar with it, sir,’ I said.
‘Yo,’ he called to Boink. ‘You got it on you?’
‘Ai.’ The big man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a white rectangular piece of paper. He lumbered over to Fo, sweat rolling down his forehead, and handed it to the celebrity.
‘I want choo to picture this, you feel me?’ He put one hand in the air and then looked up at it as though a vista of the future were about to project from his fingertips. ‘This is what I thinkin’, man. At the end of the song, we gonna have a lot’a smoke, yo. It be pouring out, man, drifting across the stage while I do what I do. Then, we gonna turn on the back lights — big white searchlight motherfuckers. That’s when people gonna see the silhouette of a man standing on stage with his weapon in the crook of his arm like so,’ he said, striking the pose he was after, his arm the weapon. ‘This man be you. And then we’re gonna put a front light on you, you know, so everyone can see yo’ bad-ass motherfucker ghost face.’
He flipped over the rectangle of white paper that Boink had given him. It was Fallon’s cell phone photo, the one taken of me in Kabul. Christ, Arlen was right, the goddamn thing was following me around the world.
‘We gonna make you up,’ Fo said, ‘just like this.’
‘I spoke with Ayesha,’ said Ryder, chipping in behind me. ‘She says she can do a great job: white powder on your face, a little black around your eyes, crimson lipstick for the lines of blood across your mouth. Easy.’
‘No, thanks,’ I said, without hesitation.
‘Choo not sure, right? Well, think on this,’ Twenny Fo said, gesturing at Snatch. ‘Yo, give the man three.’
Snatch reached into his pants pocket, extracted a roll of cash, and began peeling off notes, his fingers translating ‘three’ into three thousand dollars. He held the moist wad toward me.