The Devil's bed

Kingman carried a tray of food. The man behind him brought a gun. Kingman set the tray on Moses’s lap and unlocked the cuffs. He left Moses’s legs shackled to the cot. Kingman stepped back and said, “I’ll take it from here.”

The other man nodded and left the room.

Moses looked at the food. Dry, burned toast. Scrambled eggs that could have used another two minutes over the fire. Mandarin orange slices from a can.

“You never learned to cook,” he said.

“Another talent you had that I could only envy,” Kingman said.

Moses began to eat, carefully. Almost any movement hurt him.

“I’ll give you more Demerol if you’d like,” Kingman offered.

Moses declined with a shake of his head. The pain was better than the fog of the Demerol. The pain kept him focused.

“Breakfast,” Moses noted of the food. “Must be-what?-around sevenA.M.”

Kingman returned to the door and leaned against it. He crossed his arms and scanned the windowless room for what might have given Moses a clue to the time. “What makes you think so?”

“You used to get up every day at five-thirty to work out for an hour. You’re in good shape, so I’d bet that’s still your routine. You’ve shaved. I can smell that damn Old Spice you use. And your hair’s still wet from the shower. What time is it?”

“Seven-ten.” Kingman smiled. “You’re some piece of work, David.”

“You had your moments, too, Walter. Still do, apparently. I’m impressed that I’m here. Wherever here is. They’re not looking for me?”

“We’ve taken care of that. What do you remember?”

“The hand-to-hand with that Secret Service agent.”

“Thorsen.”

“The next thing I know, I’m here.”

“You took a pretty nasty tumble. Fell at least fifty feet. You were lucky you didn’t die.”

Moses looked up from his eating. “How long’s my luck going to hold?”

Kingman didn’t answer.

“Was it luck you found me?”

“A little luck, a little careful planning.”

Kingman left the darkness near the door and stepped into the dim light of the lamp. He wore a white linen sport coat over a black T-shirt. Gray had replaced most of the brown in his hair. He looked a lot older than when Moses had seen him last.

“When you skipped out of that mental hospital,” Kingman said, “I asked to lead the team the Company sent to track you down. Picked my own people. We couldn’t find a trace. Then this Thorsen shows up, asking a lot of questions. When I realized the Secret Service was interested, and that the First Lady was in town, I put two and two together. I didn’t know what your interest in the First Lady was or even if Thorsen was on the right track, but it was all we had to go on. I put a man out front of Wildwood. I got myself a launch and watched from the river. That was the planning part. The luck was that I was there when the shooting started. When you fell off that cliff, I figured you for dead. Next thing I know, you’re crawling into the river, trying to swim away. You’re one tough bastard. You always were.”

“Wasn’t that why you recruited me?”

Kingman smiled. “I was surprised when I heard you were killed at Agua Negra.”

“The report of my death was greatly exaggerated.”

“Coates filed the report,” Kingman said.

“Coates.” Moses nodded.

“Maybe he was simply mistaken.”

With the back of his hand, Moses wiped a few toast crumbs from the corner of his mouth. “Didn’t you ever wonder why Coates would assign someone in my line to a place like Agua Negra? Some god-forsaken jungle camp manned by a bunch of bush-league drug agents.”

Kingman shrugged. “Your expertise?”

“My expertise was political sanction. Quiet, solitary work. Those guys were noisy, ill-trained, and brutal. It didn’t surprise me at all when we were attacked. Everybody died, cut in half with machine gun fire, or hacked up with machetes. Everybody except me. Me, they took alive. They locked me up in a hellhole and took their time trying to kill me with a daily dose of humiliation and torture. They almost succeeded.”

“Why didn’t they?”

“Because Coates made a mistake. The son of a bitch couldn’t help gloating.” He put his fork down and shoved his tray aside. “The captain of the guards was a guy we all referred to as La Cucaracha. A piece of shit on two legs. I had one of my weekly sessions with him on an apparatus the prisoners calledla Cama del Diablo.”

“The Devil’s Bed.”

“I wasn’t particularly lucid. I never was after a session. La Cucaracha grabbed my hair and lifted my head up so I could see. And there was Coates, standing beside that filthy guard like they werecompadres. They were both grinning. And do you know what Coates said to me? He said, ‘When you die, David, you’ll think hell is a vacation.’”

In that hellhole of a prison, when he understood that Coates had betrayed him, he’d entered a period of despair. He obsessed on the past and realized that his life had been nothing but one betrayal after another. First his mother and his grandfather. Then there were the lies told by two other people he’d once loved and trusted. Tom Jorgenson and his daughter Kate. And finally there was Coates.