by Dick Rosano
I knew that this could be accomplished by ol’ fashioned statecraft. Simple stuff like wearing latex gloves. And Alana knew this too.
“No,” she said finally, returning to her martini, and taking a sip. “It was to keep you out of the record altogether. As if you didn’t exist. Right?”
Again, I didn’t reply.
Chapter Twenty
April 18
Stephansplatz
I was on Stephansplatz in the afternoon, considering my next steps and getting a sausage sandwich at the Wurstelstand kiosk. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dryden walking briskly by. He seemed to be in a hurry and going in the direction of DFR-Wien, but I wanted to talk to him. I paid for my sandwich and spun on my heel to head toward a spot on his vector to intercept him. Better to approach someone from the side, I knew, rather than from behind.
As I drew near, Dryden stopped.
“Yes?” he said, turning to face me. “Can I help you?”
“I think we’ve met before,” I replied. “You’re American. Maybe from somewhere in the States?”
“No, I don’t think so,” and he turned to leave.
“Perhaps here, in Vienna. Wait, I know. You work at that bank, don’t you?”
I was comfortable with the direct approach and was now hoping that he was uncomfortable with it.
“I think you should mind your own business, sir. What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t. But it’s Priest. Darren Priest.”
“Uh, huh. Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“I was in the bank. Talking to Mr. Eichner. Maybe it was then.”
“Mr. Priest, I have an appointment,” he said with growing impatience. “If you have some business with me, please say so. Otherwise, please allow me to proceed.”
I didn’t need special powers to see through him. I did take a glance at his left hand. Dryden was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and suit jacket, but a part of a tattoo was still visible below the cuff of his shirt on his left wrist.
“But, wait,” Dryden said, stopping, and returning to me. “Priest, right?”
I nodded.
“Have you ever been to a place called Tall Cedars?”
Dryden is not the kind of guy who would be found in a commune. He was fifteen to twenty years older than me, which meant that he was too young for Vietnam and probably too old for the wars in the Middle East. Tall Cedars attracted that type of person, G.I.s looking for recovery and solace from the war.
“No,” I lied, but confident that he already knew the truth. It was time for us to play a game, and whether I lied was not important. Denying his suggestion, though, was essential for getting beyond this moment.
“Oh,” he continued. “I thought maybe I had seen you there. Bunch of crybabies, if you ask me.”
Then, Dryden turned once more and headed in the direction of DFR.
If he knew that I had been to Tall Cedars, there was only one way he could have found out. Aggie was a shipwrecked soul, still resolving the suffering from the war, but he wouldn’t talk to a guy like Dryden.
Would he?
Chapter Twenty-One
April 18
Marriott Parkring
Alana was sitting in the Marriott lobby when I exited the elevator.
“Let’s go,” she said, and we were escorted out by armed police.
“What’s up?”
“We’ve opened another file on your computer. It looks like a snuff film, but we have also figured out that it’s not yours.”
“Shit,” was all I could say. Finding a video on my computer of someone – probably a female – being murdered was very disturbing.
We drove the same route through the city that I had taken with the cops a few nights ago, although this time it was with lights on and sirens blaring. The driver pulled into an empty space at the station and we hustled inside. All the while, I wondered whether this new discovery had shaken Alana’s trust in me. We hadn’t exchanged any words on the ride from the hotel and I couldn’t easily judge her mood without sitting and facing her, a maneuver that was inconvenient in the backseat of the police cruiser. I took some comfort in her words that ‘it’s not yours,’ but needed more assurance, which I hoped to get when I viewed the clip.
We walked through the lobby and back into the same interrogation room that we had been in before.
Once seated, a cop entered with what looked like my laptop under his arm. There was no reason for me to suspect that they had switched instruments, but my radar was up, and I wanted to be sure. This was the time to reveal a little more about me.
“Can I see it?” I asked.
“Why?” Alana asked.
“I have a private marking on the surface of the laptop, a diagram of scratches that are essentially invisible, but which will prove to me that this is my computer.”
Alana looked at me for a beat, and then signaled for the officer to put it down in front of me. I rested the palms of my hands on the cover, then slid them to the edges, taking care to perform the same movement with both left and right hands. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from these police, but my whole career had taught me to disclose only as much as I needed to. As my left hand swept the left edge of the cover, my other hand swept the right edge across the placement of the pattern that I had scratched in the cover. It was there. This was my computer, and I told Alana that it was.
She shook her head lightly as if wondering when she should trust me but proceeded to open the computer and sign on to it. I had not watched the officer sign on to this laptop in my previous meeting with them, but Alana did not try to hide the keystrokes that would open the machine. She used “A16**B04^#.” This was clearly not my password, so I knew that the person who had stolen it had cracked my key and saved the computer to their own. This would prevent me from reopening the laptop if I retrieved it but would probably be cracked by the police organization and methods.
Alana moved the pointer to a file titled “aA$bon@18” and clicked on it. The window came to life with a video clip that was full screen.
“This has been taken with a body cam,” Alana commented, “with the same angle and resolution as the earlier one involving the robbery at the hotel cashier’s office.”
The man on whose chest the camera was could not be seen, except for his lower arms. He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt and white gloves and he was leaning down on a woman naked on the bed below him. She was smiling and behaving as someone would who was willingly engaging in sex, although it seemed apparent that this was an arranged encounter. There was sound, unlike the other video from the cashier’s office, and the woman’s voice could be heard encouraging the man.
“Come on, honey,” she cooed. “That’s great. That’s great. You can have all you want.”
The body cam was moving in sync with what I assumed were the man’s torso movements in intercourse, but he didn’t speak.
“What’s with the gloves, honey?” she asked with a giggle. “I don’t have a disease or anything. Besides, isn’t it kind of late to think of that? What’s with the gloves?”
Still, no words from the man, although some of the huffing sounds of sex were being picked up by the microphone. After a few more seconds, the camera rocked suddenly and the man groaned, then he calmed down and his torso ceased its movements. His heavy breathing could be heard on the tape.
Alana looked down at the keyboard, a little embarrassed perhaps to have to show this to others, but she still managed to maintain a detached, professional demeanor.
“Watch,” she said, and I focused on the film.
The man’s hands disappeared from the frame for a couple seconds, but when they reappeared on camera, he was holding a white, braided rope which he wrapped around the girl’s throat. She smiled at first, adding more evidence to my guess that she was a prostitute. She had probably agreed to this as part of the contract, a semi-violent encounter that she was expected to struggle against. But I immediately began to worry. Usually, sadism in sex was foreplay a
nd used to arouse the aggressor. This man had already completed the act and was past foreplay.
The prostitute didn’t think about this, so she smiled and pulled teasingly at the rope. Then she feigned concern but kept a watchful eye on the man. After a few more seconds, panic appeared on her face and her hand pulled more forcefully on the rope. The body cam was now very steady, suggesting that the man was leaning in and applying enough pressure to keep both of their bodies immobile while he tightened the rope around her neck.
The woman’s eyes bugged out, tears welled in them and trailed down her cheeks, and her mouth opened in a scream that didn’t come. After a moment of this, her hands dropped and her head fell back against the pillow, and the video ended.
“This is a huge problem, Mr. Priest.” Alana had returned to formal names in the presence of the other officers. Or was it because she had new doubts about me?
She moved the pointer over the same file again and clicked it open. I wasn’t interested in seeing it again, and I told her so, but she silenced me with a raised finger.
“Look at this,” she said, but she was advancing the video too fast for me to see it well. She got to a certain point, the moment just before the man produced the rope, and paused the video.
“Watch,” she commanded.
I watched the same segment again, once more disgusted by what was there. Then Alana put her finger right on the screen.
“Right there,” and she paused the clip.
The woman’s eyes and mouth were open, and she was in mid-struggle against the rope around her neck. But Alana’s finger was touching the man’s hand, just below the shirt cuff.
There was a faint black mark there, slightly visible between the cuff and the edge of the white glove that he wore, on his left wrist. It was too small to have any form, too slight to reveal any substance. But there was something there. It looked like a straight line, extending sideways across the back of his wrist, like a line that maybe was part of something bigger.
Alana clicked the video off and turned toward me. First, she reached for my left hand. I was wearing a short sleeve shirt, so my arm was bare. Once she confirmed that I had no tattoo, she lifted her chin to look up at me standing beside her.
“Why did you ask about any identifying marks from the earlier video?”
“Simple police work – start with the obvious.”
“You had something in mind, as if you were already trying to match this guy up with someone. Who?”
I didn’t have much to go on and, even if I was right and Dryden got arrested and charged with something, it would blow up my project. He’d be out of the picture but Eichner would freak out and shut down any activity.
“Lots of people have tattoos and this one is not even recognizable. I’ll continue to consult my notes and see what I can give you.
Alana clearly didn’t like my answer.
“Two things, Mr. Priest. I can lock you up now and give you time to ‘consult your notes,’ or you can just turn them over to me.”
I tapped my forehead.
“Most of my notes are here,” then indicating the laptop that Weber had on the table, I added, “and some are on there. Maybe you should try to open the rest of the files.”
“Don’t mess with me, Darren,” she said in open defiance. She stood up from the chair and, at my height, got in my face.
“This looks a lot like capital murder,” she added for good measure. “In case your lax laws in the States don’t recognize it as such.”
Then she slammed down the cover of the laptop.
“And you know what harboring a fugitive means, Mr. Priest?”
“Look, Inspector, I am cooperating, and I will continue to do so. If the wrong person gets implicated and my mission goes off the rails, we’re talking about a possible international ‘oh shit!’ haunting both of us for the rest of our lives.”
Weber folded her arms across her chest and huffed.
“We just have to do this right,” I added, “and we will both get the ones who are behind this.”
It was apparent that she didn’t like my argument, but she also calculated that it would be tough to hold me, unless she went against her earlier instinct and claimed the laptop – and all its files – were in fact mine.
“You know you’re being followed,” she said as a warning.
“Yes, but discreetly so. I appreciate that.”
“Well, they will be closing in a bit now.”
The added warning made me think I should sweep my hotel room every time I returned to it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
April 18
White House – East Wing
“Just an intimate little dinner,” Pendleton said to Claire, his wife. They were being served by the White House staff, so intimate might not have been the perfect word, but the President and First Lady occasionally experienced stress in their relationship. He wanted some private time without assistants or political advisors. In the relative fishbowl that the White House was – even in the East Wing’s private quarters – this was about as good as it gets.
“Yes, Mike. Intimate,” his wife responded, although her words reeked of skepticism.
The small table in the family dining room was set with white linens and napkins, then with classic china and crystal glasses. Pendleton meant to ask for a simple setting, sans china and crystal, but was caught up in matters in the Oval Office and didn’t get around to reminding the staff.
He did however find time to order just burgers and fries, along with the Stella Artois beer that he and his wife preferred. The cuisine didn’t exactly go with the Royal Dalton Harlow pattern on the plates, and the beer looked out of place in the tall crystal glasses, but they could ignore that.
Halfway through the meal, Claire took over the conversation, steering it away from affairs of state.
“I’m just glad they don’t know about your teenage years,” she began.
Pendleton had already been elected to the Presidency, yet he was facing another contest in his reelection. But his wife’s ominous comment hung over the dinner. He didn’t want to reply, even though the staff was gone, and he knew the private family dining room was not bugged. Talk of his youth always seemed to dredge up unpleasant conversations with Claire. Pendleton didn’t think he was that unusual for teenage boys of the 1960s, but she grew up in a traditional Christian household and frowned on the hints she had gleaned about his past.
“We met in college, right?” she continued. “Freshman year.” It was as if the President’s wife was trying to compartmentalize her husband’s past that she knew only fleeting details about. Limiting his years of wilding to those in high school gave her a sense of closure, as if anything that had happened before her husband was eighteen years old was consigned to some unopenable file of adolescence.
“There was this girl,” she said.
“Don’t,” was his terse reply.
“No, really. There was this girl you liked. What was her name?”
He remembered Becky and knew that he had told Claire just enough about that period of his life to regret ever having spoken. But he refused to speak her name at that moment.
“What’s she doing now?” Claire asked.
“How would I know?” Pendleton could see that this intimate little dinner, one that he had hoped to soften the edges of their relationship was only giving his wife an opportunity to pester him.
“Was she cute?”
No reply from Pendleton.
“Did you sleep with her?”
Again, no reply.
“Did I tell you about the CHIP program, and what Willy presented me?” Pendleton made a valiant effort to change the subject. Claire only shrugged. She had a different agenda.
Pendleton droned on for a few moments about CHIP, trying a filibuster to take over the subject and push forward with that. He abandoned hope that the private dinner was going to help them; he only wanted their private conversation not to hurt him.
When dessert was
served, a Secret Service agent appeared at the door.
“Excuse me, Mr. President. The Majority Leader would like a moment with you.”
The ice cream and warm caramel sauce would not wait, so instead of taking the meeting with Ebert in the other room, he simply instructed the agent to let Ebert into the dining room.
“And tell the chef to bring another dessert.”
Ebert then appeared and walked up to the table at the center of the room.
“Hello, Mrs. Pendleton.” He maintained the familiarity while the Secret Service agent was still in their presence. Once the man had left the room, Ebert relaxed.
“How are you, Claire?”
“Peachy.”
Her demeanor normally adjusted to the present company, but she knew enough about Ebert’s and her husband’s early years that she showed no interest in behaving.
“What’s up?” Pendleton asked the Senator as a bowl of the ice cream was slid onto the table for their visitor.
“Just a dust-up among the Democrats. They want us to reconsider some of your court picks.”
“I won’t. What are they talking about? What motivation do I have to reconsider Butler and James?”
“They claim that they will hold up funding for DHS, or some such thing.”
“Some such thing? What does that mean? And how can they hold up funding?”
Claire dipped into her ice cream even as her husband’s began to melt.
“They could challenge the funding based on the continuing resolution from last year, and the statement in the CR about flat-lining DHS’s line offices for eighteen months.”
“Bullshit. Move it, Willy.”
The President and Majority Leader spooned into their melting ice cream and there a pause from the conversation. That was all the opportunity Claire needed, since she had finished hers.
“So, Willy. Tell me about Becky.” Obviously, Claire didn’t have any trouble remembering the girl’s name.