Stafford showed the cop his DCIS credentials. “Mr. Carson was here to meet me,” he explained. “I’ll stay with him. I don’t think we’ll need paramedics.”
The security men backed off, and Stafford helped Carson over to one of the benches near the line of baggage carousels. Carson sat down heavily, then put his head in his hands for a moment. Eventually, he looked back up. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. Had a touch of the flu the past couple of days. Must not be over it. Are you Stafford?”
Stafford nodded. “Right,” he replied. “Dave Stafford. DCIS Washington.
If you’re okay, let me go get my bag. You stay here and rest a minute.”
Stafford left his briefcase with Carson before walking back into the crowd by the baggage carousel to look for his suitcase. He. kept an eye on Carson, who looked like someone who had just been seasick, all pasty-faced and with shaking hands. The woman and the girl walked by him just then, each pulling a suitcase. The woman gave him a quick look of recognition but kept going. The girl stared straight ahead as she struggled with what appeared to be a very heavy suitcase. There was a sticker on the side of her suitcase that proclaimed graniteville, georgia, an all-american town. On impulse, Stafford called after the woman. She stopped, a look of mild apprehension on her face. He checked to make sure that Carson couldn’t see them talking.
“I’m David Stafford,” he said, flashing his credentials. “I’m a federal investigator. Do you know that man who fainted back there?” “No,” she said immediately, looking around for the girl in the crowd.
The girl had kept going for a moment, but now she had stopped a few feet away and was looking back in their direction.
“Does your daughter there know him, by chance?”
The woman frowned. She was almost as tall as he was. Her luminous eyes flashed a hint of impatience. “She’s not my daughter, and, no, she does not know him. Please, we must go.” Her voice was husky and had a hint of a southern accent.
Stafford was almost positive that Carson and the girl had been staring at each other just before Carson fainted. “It’s just that—” he began.
“Well, look, ma’am, here’s my card, in case you think of some reason why that happened back there. Will you call me if you do? It might be important.”
She took the card, frowned at it for a moment, and then closed her hand over it. He noticed she wore no rings or jewelry of any sort. Her hands and fingers were long, with the same smooth complexion of her face. She was his age — maybe a year or so either way.
“Thank you,” he said before she could come up with a reason to hand back his card. He turned back toward the baggage carousel, watching them out of the corner of his eye as they made their way to the exit doors and stopped to have their claim tags checked. The girl glanced back once in his direction, but the woman took her arm and propelled her out of the baggage claim area. That’s an unusual-looking woman, he thought, and there’s something very strange about that girl. He thought again about what he had seen just before Carson collapsed, but then he noticed his bag coming around the carousel and, for the moment, put the two of them out of his mind.
Carson had recovered, at least outwardly, by the time he swung the government sedan in alongside the curb outside. He had had a shaky five minutes there on the bench while Stafford went for his bag. It was bad enough to have a Defense Department cop showing up like this on short notice, but to faint dead away in a public place? Jesus, what was happening to him? He shook his head as his heart started to race again.
He tried deep breathing to calm himself down. Then he saw Stafford coming toward the car.
Stafford opened the back door with his left hand, struggled to get his bags in, and then climbed in front with Carson.
“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Stafford asked. “You want, I can drive, and you can navigate.”
“Thanks, but I’m okay. You hurt your arm?”
“Yeah, gunshot,” Stafford replied. “Took out some nerves. Most of the time it sort of just hangs there. I’m doing physical therapy, but it’s slow going. By the way, who was that girl? Was that someone you knew?”
Carson thought fast. “What girl was that?” he said, making a show of concentrating on traffic.
“I was on the other side of the carousel when you keeled over. I thought you and that girl standing near you were looking at each other.”
Carson made a left at the end of the overpass and accelerated into the eastbound lanes of the Atlanta Perimeter. “It was pretty crowded in there,” he said. “I don’t remember any girl, or anybody else, for that matter. I was just standing there, waiting for you, then woke up on the floor. Probably forgot to breathe or something. Like I said, I haven’t been feeling well the past couple of days.”
Stafford nodded absently, seeming to accept Carson’s explanation. “Her bag had a sticker on itsomething about Graniteville. I thought maybe you knew her.”
“Nope.” Carson concentrated on his driving, desperately willing Stafford to get off the subject of the girl.
“Where is the Atlanta DRMO?” Stafford asked.
“Aren’t they usually on a base of some kind?”
“That’s right, although Fort Gillem isn’t really a base. It’s a small Army post. A lot of it is shut down. Kind of a hodgepodge of stuff there now: the local Army bomb squad, several Army transport repair shops, an Army-Air Force Exchange Service distribution center. That kind of stuff.
Army’s trying to hang on to it. Developers are drooling over the fence while they work out which congressman to bribe.”
“That shouldn’t be hard,” Stafford replied as they crossed over 1-75.
“How big is the Atlanta DRMQ?”
“Forty employees, ten warehouses. We move maybe twenty, thirty million dollars worth of material a year through the reutilization and public auction process. Are you familiar with the DRMO system?”
“Barely,” Stafford said.
Carson thought, If Stafford is down here on a DLA matter, surely he has been briefed. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “Isn’t there a DCIS office right here in Atlanta?” he asked. He already knew the answer.
He’d looked it up in the DOD phone book when the call from Washington had come through.
“Yes, there is,” Stafford answered, still looking out the window. Carson took the State Road 42 exit and continued east, driving through wall-to-wall trucking terminals. “Look, I’ll give you a full brief once I see your DRMO. That way, you can answer my questions untainted by knowing why I’m down here.” Carson said okay and continued the rest of the drive in silence.
Untainted. Right. Bastard knows I’m dying of curiosity. But to be safe, he knew he’d better play it Stafford’s way until he had some idea of what this was all about. Please, God, not the cylinder. And damn that business at the airport! Graniteville — maybe I need to remember that name.
They drove through the unguarded entrance gates of Fort Gillem, then went about two miles through the post to the edge of what looked like an abandoned airfield, where they turned left into a warehouse complex. The buildings had been there a long time and showed their age. They parked next to a railroad siding, where a dozen rail cars carrying truck trailers were parked. An elderly yard engine sat rumbling by itself on a second siding, gracing the air with dirty diesel exhaust. In front of them was a single-story brick building. A sign above the door proclaimed it the home of the Atlanta Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office.
Behind the brick building was a warehouse complex. Carson took Stafford to his office in the administrative area. The first thing Stafford asked for was a vehicle. Carson told one of the secretaries to requisition a sedan from the base motor pool. Carson offered coffee, but Stafford declined. The investigator stood by the window for a moment, looking out at the rail sidings. Carson confirmed his initial physical impression: medium-big guy, big shoulders, good suit, large, purposeful-looking hands — or one of them was, anyway — short military-style haircut. He wondered if DCIS investigators carried guns.