The Black Box

alone.”
    “Okay.”
    “I guess I’m just being paranoid. With O’Toole obviously checking on my every move . . .”
    “Yeah, I don’t think it helped, you calling him out like you just did. As your defense rep, I don’t think you should be—”
    “Fuck him. I gotta go down. You’ll watch?”
    “I’ll stay right here.”
    “Thanks, pal.”
    Bosch hit him on the arm and walked away. Jackson called after him.
    “You know you’re the most paranoid guy I know.”
    Bosch narrowed his eyes in mock suspicion. “Who told you that?”
    Jackson laughed. Bosch took the elevator down and walked directly across the plaza to the woman he had spotted from above. Up close he saw that she was in her midthirties, athletically built, with a short no-nonsense cut to her auburn hair. Bosch’s first take was that she was most likely a seasoned federal agent.
    “Agent Wingo?”
    “You said two minutes.”
    “Sorry, I got stopped by my supervisor and he’s a pain in the ass.”
    “Aren’t they all.”
    Bosch liked that she said it as a statement, not a question. He sat down next to her, his eyes on the file she was holding.
    “So, what’s with the secret agent stuff and the meet-up out here? I remember our old place, nobody wanted to visit because it was going to pancake next time we hit a six on the Richter scale. But we’ve got a brand-new place now. It’s guaranteed safe. You could come in and I’d show you around.”
    “Rachel Walling asked me for the favor, but she could only vouch for you so far, you know what I mean?”
    “No, what did she say about me?”
    “She said trouble follows you and I should be careful. But she didn’t use those words exactly.”
    Bosch nodded. He guessed that Walling had called him a shit magnet. It wouldn’t be the first time.
    “You girls stick together.”
    “It’s a boys’ club. We have to.”
    “So, you did run the gun numbers?”
    “I did. And I am not sure I’m going to be much help to you.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “Because I think the gun you’ve recovered has been missing for twenty-one years.”
    Bosch felt the adrenaline charge immediately start to ebb. He regretted having put so much hope into believing that the gun’s serial number would open up the case’s black box.
    “It’s where it’s missing from that makes it interesting,” Wingo added.
    Bosch’s thoughts of regret were immediately replaced with curiosity.
    “Where did it go missing?”
    “In Iraq. Way back during Desert Storm.”

19
    W ingo opened the file and read her own notes before going any farther.
    “Let’s start at the beginning,” she said.
    “Do I need to take notes or are you eventually going to give me that file?” Bosch asked.
    “It’s all yours. Just let me use it to tell the story.”
    “Then, go ahead.”
    Bosch tried to remember exactly what he had told Rachel Walling about the case. Had he told her that Anneke Jespersen had covered Desert Storm? Had she told Wingo? Even if Wingo had known, it wouldn’t have changed the trace and she couldn’t have known how this one piece of information—that the gun went missing in Iraq—turned things in a new direction for Bosch.
    “Let’s begin at the start,” Wingo said. “The ten serial numbers you gave me belong to a lot manufactured in Italy in nineteen eighty-eight. Those ten weapons were among three thousand weapons manufactured and sold to the Government of Iraq’s Ministry of Defense. Delivery of the weapons cache was on February first, nineteen eighty-nine.”
    “Don’t tell me, the trail disappears after that?”
    “No, actually not quite yet. The Iraqi Army kept some limited records that we have gotten access to since the second Persian Gulf War. A little benefit that came from the distribution of records confiscated from Saddam Hussein’s palaces and military bases. Remember the search for weapons of mass destruction? Well, they might not have found any WMDs but they found a shit pile of records involving lesser weapons. We eventually got access to it.”
    “Good for you. What did they tell you about my gun?”
    “The entire shipment of guns from Italy was distributed to the Republican Guard. The RG were the elite soldiers. Do you know the history of what happened back then?”
    Bosch nodded.
    “I know the basics. Saddam invaded Kuwait, and after the atrocities started, the Allied forces said, enough.”
    “Right, Saddam invaded in nineteen ninety, right after receiving these weapons. So I