“The other thing,” he said, “is that I have a family. An ex-wife and a son. If I’m in danger, they might be too. And I can’t have that.”
“Even more reason to go back to the police.”
“I have nothing else to bring them right now. That’s where you could help.”
She felt it then, the first buzz of excitement, chasing away her uncertainty, skepticism. Wondering what was going on here, what it would take to find out.
He mistook her silence. “Are you interested or not?”
“I believe you,” she said. She picked up the card. “I’m going to keep this.”
“I’d be curious to know what you find out.”
“I’ll look into it, based on what you tell me. But I’m not a private information service. This is quid pro quo. You’re going to need to come up with a lot more than you’ve given me. If we can help each other, fine. If not…”
“I understand. So are we off the record?”
“For the moment. And only for the moment. Going forward’s a different matter. When things change, they change. And they might change quick.”
She moved the recorder closer to him, pushed the Record button again. The light went green. He looked at it, making his decision.
“Off the record?” he said again.
“Right now, totally. Later on, we’ll talk about it.”
“I guess I’ll have to settle for that for now.”
“That’s right,” she said. “You will.”
Alysha was waiting for her when she got back to the newsroom. The glass offices were dark. There were editors around the night desk, but most of the reporters’ cubicles were empty.
“I thought you were going to call,” Alysha said.
“Rick go home?”
“Just missed him.”
Tracy sat, took out her notebook. After they’d left the diner, she’d stayed in the car and tried to write down everything she remembered from their conversation, adding it to what she already knew about Mata and San Marcos, trying to organize it all in her mind.
Alysha pulled a chair into her cubicle. “Speak it, sister.”
“Everything I have is on background. But it’s pretty good. I mean like really good.”
“Are we writing anything tonight? ’Cause if so, I need to give the desk a heads-up.”
“Not yet.” She took out a pen, double-clicked it, then picked up the notebook, flipped through pages. Start from the beginning, she thought. Take your time. Make the connections that are there to be made.
“If this guy’s right,” she said, “it’s all related. The body in the vacant, Dugan’s, everything.”
“Slow down.”
“Okay, big picture. This is what we’ve got: Emilio Mata—our decomp who turned out to be a murder—is from San Marcos.”
“We knew that. It was in your story.”
“In the early ’90s there was a coup there. The president—Eduardo Herrera—was forced out.”
“I remember that.”
“Herrera was a dedicated anti-American anti-imperialist, and San Marcos wasn’t a domino anyone in Washington wanted to see fall. His people loved him, though—at first. Then oil prices dropped and everything went to hell, the economy tanked. Eventually there was a coup against him, led by one of his generals from the other end of the political spectrum.
“Herrera was deposed, but not before a lot of people got killed on both sides. Soldiers caught him at the Guyana border, beat him, made him beg for his life, then executed him on the spot. Filmed the whole thing. There’s video of it floating around out there. It’s pretty ugly.”
“I think I’ve seen it.”
“The new president, General Ramírez, started purging the country of Herrera loyalists. At least that’s how it started. Then he moved on to just about anyone who disagreed with him. In this case, a lot of the opposition were students, intellectuals, priests, nuns, anybody that spoke out against the government. So the left-wing dictatorship became a right-wing dictatorship. But Ramírez was easier to deal with than his predecessor, so the U.S. looked the other way.”
“And this source you met with—”
“His name’s Raymond Devlin. I saw his license.”
“—figures in how?”
“He and Roarke worked for a private security company based here in the States. They helped train Ramírez’s men. Devlin says they tipped the balance in the fighting, paved the way for the coup. Without them, Ramírez couldn’t have pulled it off. Herrera would still be in power.”
“And this Mata or Marota or whatever his name is?”
“He was Herrera’s brother-in-law, and a close adviser. He jumped ship, sold him out. Mata couldn’t stay there, though, even after the coup, because he had too many enemies. He resettled here in the States, with a new ID.”
“‘Esteban Marota.’”
“You got it.”
“And one of his enemies from back home tracked him down anyway?”
“Maybe,” Tracy said. “Weird it took so long, though.”
“Devlin and Roarke both worked for this security company?”
“And a third man, Bell. He’s dead too.” She took the recorder from her coat pocket. “I got it all here.”
“But off the record.”
“For now. But we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
“Us?”
“I need a partner on this who knows what they’re doing. Rick will clear you, won’t he?”
“I don’t think we can take that for granted.”
“He will when he hears what we’ve got to tell him. We’re talking seven dead men now, counting Mata. Eight, if you include Bell.”
“All of which may be entirely unrelated.”
“We taking bets?”
Alysha shook her head. “All I’ll bet on is you’re about to make our lives very complicated.”
“Someday,” Tracy said, “you’ll thank me.”
Nineteen
Lukas was squeezing out his fiftieth push-up when he heard the low beep from the wall console, saw the blinking red light. It meant a car had turned into the private road that led to the house, tripped the sensors there. It would be Tariq. The road branched off from a county two-lane, ran back into the woods for a quarter mile, and ended at the house. No one came back here by accident.
He stood, arms swollen with blood, toweled off, and pulled on a sleeveless T-shirt. He slung the towel over his shoulder, picked up the Beretta 9 from the coffee table, eased off the safety. The shotgun and the Ruger had gone into the Delaware River on the drive back the day before. The Crown Vic was in the garage on the side of the house, parked next to his Lexus, and covered by a tarp.
At the front door, he saw headlights coming up the driveway. Tariq’s Jeep SUV pulled up outside, triggered the floodlights in front of the house. They lit the yard bright as day.
Lukas unlocked the door, opened it. Tariq got out of the SUV carrying a brown paper bag. Lukas heard bottles clink.
Lukas held the door for him. “Money came through a little while ago. I transferred your share already.”
“How much?”
Lukas took a last look into the yard. Moths flitted in the floodlights. He closed and locked the door. “Fifty K total, as promised. Twenty-five each.”
Tariq had gone through into the kitchen. Lukas heard the refrigerator door open and close, then the sound of a bottle being uncapped.
He tossed the towel onto the weight bench in the corner of the room, slipped the safety back on the Beretta.
Tariq came out of the kitchen carrying a bottle of Budweiser. Lukas had let him stay here for the last six months, given him the whole top floor. But he was drinking more often now, and Lukas knew he’d have to watch him carefully for slipups, mistakes.
“Doesn’t seem like much, does it?” Tariq said. “For what we did.”
“It’s what was agreed on.” Lukas sat on the couch, set the gun back on the table.
Tariq took a chair, drank from
the bottle.
“That’s poison you’re putting in your body,” Lukas said. “What would the Prophet say?”
“What would your Jesus say about some of the things you’ve done?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask him when I see him.”
Tariq leaned over, took the remote from the table. “When I was a kid, Baghdad was full of liquor stores. Even after the invasion.” He turned on the wide-screen TV. A World War II documentary. Black-and-white footage of German tanks moving across a blasted landscape.
“GIs in Camp Marlboro—the old Sumer cigarette factory—would give me money to go out and get them beer. I’d ride back and forth on my bike. That was before the curfews—and the car bombs.” He took another pull at the beer.
“You want to talk?” Lukas said.
Tariq shook his head, looked at the screen.
“You don’t like what happened yesterday, I get that,” Lukas said. “But we’ve come this far, haven’t we? Doing what needs to be done?”
“This was different.”
“Why? Because of those others? It was their bad luck, wasn’t it? Wrong place, wrong time.”
Tariq didn’t look at him.
“Think about it,” Lukas said. “They didn’t have to be there, but they were. That’s fate, isn’t it? Is it any different from what happened to our families? The people we lost, did they deserve it?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing. We had a job to do, and we did it. End of story.”
On the table, Lukas’s phone began to vibrate. He saw Farrow’s number, picked up the phone.
“Are you back home?” Farrow said.
“Yeah,” Lukas said. “It’s done.”
“I saw. You going to tell me there wasn’t a better way?”
“I made a field decision.”
“It was a bad one. And what do you know about field decisions anyway?”
“I’m the one taking the risks. Not you. It was my call, and I made it.”
Tariq was looking over at him.
“We need to talk about that, and some other things,” Farrow said. “The old man wants to see you as well.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow night. At the Towers.”
“Not the house?”
“What did I say?”
“I’ll be there. I have something to give him too.”
“What?”
“He’ll see,” Lukas said.
When Lukas got off the elevator, there were bodyguards waiting in the mirrored foyer. Kemper owned this hotel in Chevy Chase through a shell company, kept the penthouse for himself. From the foyer, a long carpeted hall ran down to the main room, where floor-to-ceiling windows gave a view of the lights of the city.
The guard named Bishop, with a shaven head and weightlifter’s shoulders beneath his suit jacket, nodded to him. He had a lightning-bolt tattoo on the side of his neck, wore a plastic earpiece. This time Lukas raised his arms, let him pat him down.
Farrow came down the hall toward him, gestured to an open door. Lukas followed him into a room with a bank of closed-circuit TVs showing views of the apartment, the hall outside, the elevator interior, and the lobby. Two guards in blue Core-Tech uniforms with holstered guns sat at the console.
“Out,” Farrow said. “Shut the door.”
When they were gone, he said, “You want to tell me what you were thinking?”
“I thought we were done with that. I had to make a decision. I did. I could have wasted days, weeks, watching that guy, waiting to make a move. Instead, I saw my opportunity, and I took it.”
“You made CNN, and just about every newspaper across the country, I’d imagine.”
“And they all called it a robbery, right?”
“So far. But it’s not just that. It’s the other one too. Mata. They found his body. It was in the paper.”
Lukas shrugged. “Nothing ties him to us, or anything else.”
“It would have been better if he’d never been found.”
“So he was. What difference will it make?”
“You seem pretty casual about all this, considering the colossal fuckup you perpetrated a couple days ago. With all that’s going on now, the last thing we need is the police—or some reporter—looking into our business. Especially with Devlin still running around loose.”
“One down, two to go.”
“Just one now,” Farrow said. “Bell’s dead.”
“You know that?”
“It was in the news down there. Florida. The police must have been holding it back at first. Some kind of struggle. Self-defense, from what I read online, which wasn’t much. It was Devlin.”
“Then it went the way I guessed. Your guy got lit up, rather than the other way around. What you get for using amateurs.”
“He wasn’t an amateur.”
“Either way, one less thing to worry about, right?”
“You need to find Devlin and tie this off.”
“Be a little suspicious, wouldn’t it? All three of these guys get done in what, two weeks? What if someone makes that connection?”
“We’ll have to take that chance.”
“I don’t get it,” Lukas said. “You have a whole organization at your disposal. You could track this guy down, put him under surveillance, tap his phone, anything. And still you’re coming to me.”
“We can’t use Unix resources for this. This is separate. It needs to be contained.”
“And deniable, right?”
Lukas looked at the screens—the two guards bored in the hall, an empty elevator, three angles on people milling around the lobby.
“A hundred,” he said.
“Too much.”
“Not for what you’re asking. There are risks involved that weren’t there before. This Devlin has to know someone’s coming for him next. It changes the game. And from what you said, it sounds like he still has a few moves left in him.”
“The old man’s not happy about all this either. I had to tell him.”
“Worse comes to worst, it’s all on me anyway, isn’t it?” Lukas said. “It doesn’t go any higher. That’s what you pay me for.”
Farrow nodded, looked away, then back at him. “A hundred. But only when the work’s done. And no public spectacles this time. I don’t want to see it on the news.”
“You won’t.”
“Come on,” Farrow said. “He’s waiting for you.”
They went out past the two uniformed guards and down the hall to the living room. Winters was there, standing by the windows. There were three other men in the room, none of whom Lukas knew. All the same type—short hair, thick necks, suit jackets with no ties. Two of them sat on a couch watching a basketball game on television, the sound low. They looked at him, then back at the screen. The third man sat in a chair, reading a tablet. He gave Lukas a nod.
“He’s in the office,” Farrow said.
They went down a side hall, stopped near a half-open door.
“You’ll need to make this quick,” Farrow said. “He’s got an early flight tomorrow. He’s in New York the rest of the week. That’s why he’s seeing you now. You should appreciate that.”
“I do,” Lukas said.
Farrow knocked lightly on the door, then opened it wider, said, “He’s here.”
The room was a smaller version of the study at the Virginia house, but more functional, without the warmth. A desk and chairs, couch against the wall, a filing cabinet and a safe. The single painting on the wall drew Lukas’s eye. It was of a nineteenth-century sailing vessel, waves breaking over the side, nearly capsizing it. A full moon shone brightly through a gap in the clouds.
“You like it?” Kemper said. “It’s yours.”
He’d been at the desk, writing on a sheet of unlined paper. Now he stood, came forward. They embraced briefly, and Kemper gestured to a chair. Farrow stayed in the doorway.
“It’s okay, Gordon,” Kemper said. “We’re fine.”
>
“Outside if you need me,” Farrow said, and closed the door.
They sat. Kemper had lost weight since the last time Lukas had seen him. His hair was thinning, and the skin beneath his jaw sagged. But the ice-blue eyes were still sharp.
“You spoke with Gordon?” He took off a pair of rimless glasses, set them on the desktop.
“I did. We straightened some things out.”
“Good.”
“You look well.”
“Sixty-eight. All I can do at this point is try. I heard you were at the house a few days ago. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“My fault. I should have called first.” He nodded at the door. “A lot of new faces around I don’t know. And they don’t know me.”
“Gordon does most of the hiring, at least for private staff. I move around a lot more these days, so I need more people. He also has his own core group he likes to keep around him, and that’s fine with me. Loyalty should be rewarded.”
“Any of these new faces worth what you’re paying them?”
Kemper smiled. “I’d hope so. Not compared to you, though, if that’s what you mean.”
“Quality versus quantity, right? One man on his own, properly trained and motivated, with the right skills and equipment, is better than any team. That’s what you used to say.”
“I did. And it’s still true.”
“About that thing in Philadelphia…”
Kemper raised a hand, shook his head.
“Sorry,” Lukas said. “How did the party go?”
“Party?”
“For the senator.”
“It went. Isabella likes to entertain, so she was happy.”
“Raise a lot of money?”
“A drop in the bucket for what he’ll need. More of those events to come, I’m afraid. He’s nowhere near where he should be moneywise. I’ve lent him some of Unix’s marketing people to work on his fund-raising strategy.”
“One of the reasons I’m here,” Lukas said. He reached into his jacket pocket, drew out the envelope full of money, set it on the desk.
“What is that?” Kemper said.
“My contribution to the senator’s war chest. He needs all the help he can get, right?”
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