PART IV A SUDDEN DEATH
PART IV
A SUDDEN DEATH
THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
It is not easy to adopt the opponent’s view of the chessboard or of the battlefield.
– Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky
From their paper: ‘Availability: A Heuristic
for Judging Frequency and Probability’
THE Four Seasons Hotel
Houston, Texas
9 October
Six days later, I was back at the Four Seasons in Houston working on the Saudi case again.
After the excitement of the LaToya Martyn shootout, my world had settled into its old routines and I’d returned to surveilling the Saudis. Even though the Saudis’ attempt to assassinate Dr Eric Cartright had failed, my employers were still concerned and so had kept me on the case.
I won’t lie. Stake-outs can be kinda boring.
That morning, however, the tedium was broken at 5:45 a.m. by the pinging of one of my surveillance bugs.
The bug was attached to the same white GMC Savana van that had snatched Dr Eric Cartright a week earlier.
Today, it emerged from the hotel’s parking garage and headed toward the airport.
The van was being driven by Mohammed Fasar, a security guard at the Four Seasons.
Mohammed was a junior man, a gopher, an errand boy.
He was also a simple man with the simple tastes of your average single Saudi expatriate male—bars, strip clubs, off-track betting. His internet searches overflowed with porn.
His errands, however, were often peculiar, so I followed him.
I trailed him from the Four Seasons to the private jet terminal at George H.W. Bush Intercontinental Airport, where I watched him and three workers load two large Samsonite cases from a private plane into the back of his GMC van.
Mohammed then drove back toward downtown, stopping on the way at his favourite strip joint—at 7:55 a.m.
As Mohammed went inside, I took the opportunity to pick the lock of his van’s rear doors, slip inside and quickly examine the contents of the two sturdy cases.
‘Whoa . . .’ I breathed.
The first case contained six wads of RDX explosive, all covered in warning stickers in Arabic.
I closed it and opened the second case.
Scuba gear.
Unusual scuba gear: high-pressure deep-sea mixed-gas tanks fitted with rebreathers that didn’t emit telltale bubbles.
The kind of scuba gear professional saboteurs used.
High explosives.
Scuba gear.
Maybe the Saudis were thinking of a different way to hobble my employer’s operations.
I shut the case, hopped out of the van—I must admit the GMC Savana was a nice van—and relocked its doors behind me.
This was certainly alarming but calling the cops on a foreign power (whose van you’ve broken in to) is a tricky thing. I figured the best I could do for now was let my employers know about the RDX wads. Until the Saudis actually used the explosives against them, I had nothing.
I’d have to wait and be patient.
Luckily, I’m very patient.
In the hours I spent in my suite waiting for the Saudis to make their next move, I scrolled through the news, both national and local, on my iPad.
On that sixth day after we’d found LaToya Martyn, I saw an article in the Shreveport Times that caught my attention. It was headlined:
CONFEDERATE STATUE TO BE REMOVED
FROM PINE HOLLOW TOWN SQUARE
Another old statue of a Confederate general was to be removed from a Southern square.
The statue in question was of General P.G.T. Beauregard and the organisation trying to prevent it being removed was the Southern Christian Ladies Garden and Historical Society.
I sat up.
I knew that group. It was connected to the Kingman family.
I read the article.
As usual, the Garden and Historical Society had waged a long and expensive legal battle to keep the statue in its original place.
When it’d finally lost the case—having almost reached the Supreme Court—the ladies’ group had agreed to move the statue themselves and at their own expense to a private location in DeSoto Parish. It would be taken there in two days.
The article read:
A spokesperson for the SCLGHS, Ms Clara Montpierre, provided the following statement: ‘While we are most saddened by the removal of this memorial, we accept that the town square of Pine Hollow has become unsafe for it. It has always been our desire that such memorials be kept in places of honor but also in places that keep them secure.’
Of course, as I knew, Ms Clara Montpierre was actually Mrs Clara Kingman.
I noted the very deliberate wording of her statement.
Her group was removing the statue not because of the grave offence it caused but to protect the statue.
This was standard practice for organisations like her Southern Christian Ladies Garden and Historical Society.
For, in the end, they existed to pursue one singular goal: to keep alive a twisted version of American history, namely, that the Civil War—far from being about slavery—was simply a squabble about federal government overreach against the noble citizens of the God-fearing South.
Basically, to rewrite history.
It reminded me of the quote by the Nazi, Joseph Goebbels: ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’
Thinking about Clara Kingman’s failed lawsuit regarding this statue reminded me of another lawsuit involving the Kingman family: the one that the missing private investigator Bill Brewster had filed against Tad Kingman and which had been suppressed by a District Court judge—
No, Sam.
I mentally kicked myself.
Let it go.
Of course, elements of the LaToya Martyn case still lingered in my mind, even after its dramatic ending.
Finding LaToya on Eli Gage’s barge might have solved her case but it didn’t resolve the other question of women and their investigators disappearing at roughly thirty-year intervals over the last 150 years.
Crazy Eli didn’t seem like someone who was a part of something that—
Don’t overthink it, Sam. Take the win and move on!
And that was the truth of it. It was done. Over. I’d won and had to move on.
Then my phone rang.
It was Audrey Mills.
‘Hiya, Sam. What’re you up to?’
‘On a job in Houston, trying not to get dismembered. You?’
‘Dismembered?’
‘I’m surveilling some Saudis.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Well . . . get this . . . I’m sitting at Dallas airport about to fly to D.C., to FBI headquarters.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘I just got offered a job in Counterintelligence at the Bureau. I’m getting out of Victim Services and going to the big leagues as a full agent.’
‘Congratulations,’ I said. I was genuinely happy for her. She’d said this was her dream.
She added, ‘I also wanted to let you know that FBI Forensics went back into the evidence from my friend’s “single-car accident”.’
I recalled the circumstances of Audrey’s friend, Harriet White’s death: she’d apparently drowned after crashing her car into the Acheron River near Victorville.
Audrey said, ‘They found Eli Gage’s DNA—the same autosomal DNA that was found in the baby by the way: it was his child—on Harriet’s clothing.
Couple of drops of blood. They -figure she encountered him when she came snooping around; they fought; she drew blood; but he overpowered her, drowned her, then made it look like she’d driven her car into the river at the local accident black spot. Ties it all up neatly.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Very neatly.’
Audrey sighed. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Sam, but not everything is a conspiracy; sometimes crimes are just crimes. I saw it a lot in human trafficking. The bad guys try to cover up their original crime with another and it isn’t too sophisticated.’
‘I get it, but what about the other missing women and investigators?’
‘They weren’t our case, Sam. They’re, I don’t know, a historical matter that no-one but you knows about.’ She paused again. ‘Sam, we won. You should take the victory.’
‘I know, you’re right . . .’
‘Anyway, I just wanted you to know about the Bureau. Good luck, Sam Speedman. Hope to see you again sometime.’
I liked it that she’d added that final phrase: Hope to see you again sometime.
She didn’t have to say that.
She could have just said goodbye, but she’d added that she’d like to see me again.
For some reason, that made me smile.
‘Hope to see you soon, too, Audrey.’
‘And Sam, try not to get dismembered.’
An hour later, my phone rang again.
It was a number I didn’t know.
‘Hello?’
‘Mr Speedman? Mr Sam Speedman? My name is Amelia Kittson of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I work for Special Agent Michael McCarthy, the new chair of the intake board.’
‘How can I help you, Ms Kittson?’ I said.
‘So, Mike and the board have been reassessing a whole bunch of previous intake decisions and, well, there’s no other way to say it, but the FBI would like to offer you a place in our upcoming class at Quantico.’
I blinked.
I’m not often surprised, but this was completely unexpected.
‘I thought I failed the personality tests,’ I said.
‘I’m just Mike’s executive assistant. I’m not on the intake team or privy to their deliberations. All I know is the team has reconsidered your application and they want you to be an FBI agent.’
I was silent for a moment, quite literally speechless.
Finding my voice again, I said, ‘I’m . . . thank you, Ms Kittson . . . and please thank Special Agent McCarthy for me. I’m . . . thrilled.’
She left her details and a number for me to call and we hung up.
My mind whirred.
This was beyond exciting. It was thrilling, momentous and incredibly satisfying.
Then my phone rang again.
It was LaToya Martyn’s parents at the hospital. They were distraught.
LaToya was dead.
I got to the hospital thirty minutes later to find LaToya’s bed empty and her parents sobbing.
‘They said she was too starved,’ her father Darnell said. ‘Had a reaction to the nutrient drip. Called it “refeeding symptom” or something.’
‘Refeeding syndrome,’ I said.
It was common with victims of starvation. It had most famously occurred at the end of World War II when Allied soldiers had come upon the German concentration camps.