by Ed Kovacs
The limo pulled under a rear portico of the Uptown mansion. I guessed correctly; the driver ran around the back of the vehicle, and two whacks from my ASP collapsible baton knocked him out cold. As I swung open the rear passenger door, I looked into the startled face of Twee Siu.
Two pizza boxes sat in her lap.
We locked eyes and then she glanced at where I held something pointing at her from under my shirt tail.
“Cliff, glad you could stop by for pizza. You never met my son, Brandon, did you? Brandon, say hi to my good friend Cliff.” Twee was simply one cool customer.
Brandon, who I knew to be about eleven years old now, sat slumped down next to Twee, immersed in a video game on a tablet computer. Half Asian / half Caucasian, he looked up at me for a microsecond and said, “Hi,” then returned to fight the good video fight.
“Well?” asked Twee, pointedly.
I gestured for her to get out of the car.
I kept the drop on Twee while she set Brandon up with his dinner. I figured the limo driver would be knocked out for a good while. We adjourned to the study and she closed the solid mahogany doors. The room was heavy with bamboo, teak, and rattan furnishings and primitive carvings of wooden Buddhas. She had lived in this house with her former husband, Tommy Boudreaux, a guy who had shot me once upon a time and who died mysteriously before the FBI and NOPD could arrest him for numerous felonies. But they had raided this house looking for dope, and that’s how I knew the location. For whatever reason, Twee hadn’t moved out. Oh, yeah, and her ex had been her CIA handler, serving as New Orleans’s CIA station chief before Twee.
“Put the gun away; you’re not going to shoot me.”
“I’ll shoot you if I have to.”
Twee wore tight jeans and a soft-looking billowy top of a kind now trendy in Tokyo. Her hair and makeup were always done perfectly in a current fashion, and the femininity of her visage belied the tough-as-nails character that I knew resided within.
“Decon liked you. You found his apartment?”
I didn’t say anything.
“He wanted you to know, in case he didn’t make it. He had a premonition; he told me about it. I wrote it off to drunken absinthe talk.”
“So Harding gives me some bullshit story about Decon being a murder suspect, I track down Decon, then he gets me pregnant with the arms dealing.”
“You’re the best investigator in the whole city.”
“The best,” I mumbled with contempt. “The most dense, you mean. I was your stalking horse. I ran interference, fleshing out Brandt’s operation.”
“We knew most of it.”
“We?”
“You know my job description.”
“Which would seem to put you in bed with everything that was happening.”
“Exactly the opposite. Think for a second.”
I mentally hit rewind, cycling through key recent events. “Decon said there was one other person who trusted him, someone I knew. He gave me a whole bunch of clues, but I thought he was just full of beans.” I pulled the white envelope stuffed with Decon’s photos from a cargo pocket.
She shrugged with a knowing smile. “You’re like a freight train. Your investigation caused more problems for the Buyer’s Club than you can imagine.”
“So instead of the CIA shutting down Brandt’s operation, you made it out like I was shutting it down.”
There it was. Twee had manipulated me again, masterfully, like some kind of pint-sized Asian female Machiavellian spy-master. I dropped the white envelope onto the plush Oriental carpet as though it were tainted with E-coli. Decon had played me like a fool from the very first second we met.
And now his handler, a woman who had always elicited conflicted feelings from me, was deigning to explain just what a chump I had been.
“Decon was half-crazy and only a shadow of his former self, but he was still the most effective agent I ever ran,” said Twee. “He got sheep-dipped in the military; that’s why his prints didn’t come up for you. Worked for some exotic outfits like ISA.”
I didn’t say anything as I stared at the wall behind her. Part of me wanted to slug her. I was a wounded, beat-up mess, had almost been killed in her service, and I’m sure that didn’t concern her at all. In a city that needed all the unpaid volunteers it could get, I had been one, unknowingly.
“ISA is Intelligence Support Activity.”
“I know what it is,” I snapped.
As much as I wanted to storm out, catch a flight to some place fresh and clean, maybe sit at a café table with a smoke and a cold one overlooking a beach with some good jazz playing as I girl-watched with a nice sea breeze blowing, as much as I wanted some simplicity, some beauty, maybe some nurturing even, in other words, as much as I wanted to walk away from New Orleans and Twee Siu’s conniving, I wanted more to learn the facts.
“He had a mental breakdown, got a medical discharge.”
She was baiting me to continue the debriefing. After a long pause, I took the bait. “Why the breakdown?”
“Why do you think?”
“From what he saw, what he did.”
“He was consumed by guilt. Until he learned to sublimate it. After his discharge, he worked as an asset for DEA and got addicted to meth. Cleaned himself up but he was never the same. I mean, what kind of agent creates a cover where you live in a tomb in a cemetery? No other agency would touch him, even as an unofficial asset. But I got him down here to work for me in New Orleans.”
“It was no accident he went to work at Scrap Brothers right after the Storm.”
“Of course not. The previous forklift driver got a chunk of money and a one-way ticket to Detroit. So Decon showed up looking for work the day the other guy left town.”
“Decon was one hell of an undercover operator.” I wanted to be angry with the guy, but how could I? He was dead.
“It might take you a year or two to get that good.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Not interested.”
“Would you rather keep working for me without realizing you’re working for me?”
“I’d rather you left me out of it. The intelligence game is a dirty business.”
“So is every case you take on.”
“I like being my own boss.”
“You’re working for Chief Pointer again.”
“Part-time.”
“You’d be part-time for me after three months at Camp Peary for spy school. You keep the PI agency, keep working the occasional homicide case. I don’t want to just use you as an asset; I want you as an NOC, non-official cover. That would give you immense protection.”
“I say my prayers. Burn incense and sage. Meditate.”
“You’ve already agreed, you just don’t realize it yet. We’re not so dissimilar.”
“We’re a bit dissimilar. Better re-check my psych test.”
Twee flashed angry. “I have been loosely monitoring this whole enterprise that showed up at my back door right before the Storm hit. CIA was not even informed, can you imagine that? The Pentagon, with CI-3 assistance, brings foreign-intelligence agents into my area of operations and they don’t even give me a heads up?”
“So inter-agency cooperation sucks. What’s new?”
“What’s new is that I learned that Del Breaux was ready to turn traitor and sell the GIDEON secrets. I’d be damned if I was going to let that happen. But to be honest, I was fed up with Brandt’s game and wanted it shut down. How was I supposed to do that in a way that kept the Agency out of the picture? So I had Harding bait you with Decon.”
“The assumption being that my nosing around would bring exposure. Brandt would pick up his toys and leave, just like he’d done in Miami and elsewhere.”
“It was a good plan. But Breaux’s murder was not our doing. That surprised me.”
“Really? Decon planted a bomb in my house.”
“For two reasons. I knew hit teams ha
d been dispatched. I wasn’t sure I could stop them, so I wanted you to get the message to hunker down.”
“Second reason?”
“Publicity. CI-3 managed to keep your dope bust of Haddad out of the news, but they couldn’t cover up the bomb squad evacuating several blocks of the Warehouse District. At some point, news of the arms dealing had to go viral. Pieces of the truth get out, exposure becomes a real threat, and the dirty business stops for a second or two.”
Funny to hear Twee Siu talk about trying to stop dirty business. “And using the butterfly landmine was a way to fuel my anger toward the Buyer’s Club suspects.”
“Indeed.”
“So Harding is one of your assets.”
“Not exactly. The Bureau and the Agency don’t get along very well, but the ‘old girl network’ trumps everything. We help each other sometimes.”
I shook my head. “You’re like some kind of evil force, running around killing people and subverting justice.”
“I didn’t bring Tan Chu and Grigory Pelkov and their minions into town. They set up local intelligence nets. Spy rings. Waitresses at Chinese restaurants, a clerk at a federal building, truck drivers with access to secure facilities, local business owners, a professor at Tulane, scientists at sensitive facilities. Do I need to go on?”
I forced a chuckle. “You’re worried about waitresses?”
“When they’re sleeping with socially inept geeks with Top-Secret security clearances, yes. Chu was a direct threat to some of my operations. Pelkov too. But they were protected by another arm of the U.S. government. It boggles the mind.”
“How protected is Brandt?”
“Now? Not at all. He’s an embarrassment who will do hard time for the murder-conspiracy charge. He’ll plea on the federal rap, so there will be no trail where juicy details might emerge. He’s poison to the feds; they want him to disappear.”
“Why don’t you just disappear him like you disappeared Tan Chu and Nassir Haddad and about thirty other people? The laptop your boy Decon was so insistent on selling to the Chinese was a bomb, wasn’t it? Let me guess, you had someone on a small boat nearby who triggered it when the Osprey landed. Talk about murder? You’re a mass murderer!”
“Wrong again. That was pilot error.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Are you not aware of how unreliable Ospreys are? How many have crashed due to mechanical failures and pilots making mistakes? The Chinese pilot was attempting a night landing in rough seas and heavy winds, flying a tilt-rotor plane that is not exactly easy to fly. And he was loaded with munitions like those butterfly landmines.”
“You wanted Tan Chu dead. And Nassir Haddad.”
“I did not!”
“How stupid do you think I am? The laptop was a bomb!”
“Yes, it was a bomb! A cyber bomb!”
I blinked. A cyber bomb. Like the Stuxnet operation in Iran?
“Decon died getting that laptop onto the plane. And he died for nothing because of that crash.” I had seen it before; Twee Siu was tearing up. “Would you have done the same?”
“After what I’ve seen the feds do over the last week, probably not.”
“Please. Are you one of those cynical idiots who thinks the whole system is corrupt and worthless? The government is not a monolith. The CIA is not a monolith. There are plenty of good people trying to fight the good fight.”
“If you say so.”
“Oh, so it’s okay for you to break the rules when you’re trying to solve your cases, but it’s not okay for your country to do it when we’re trying to win at something, is that it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s okay for you to blow up a federal building—J-Nineteen—but it’s not okay for me or the CIA to break the rules as we fight the unsung fight, the battles your country has to fight, whether you or any ungrateful citizen likes it or not. Is that how you feel?”
“I always try to do the right thing—”
“As determined by whom? You? I got handed a lemon when Brandt showed up in town, so I tried to make lemonade out of it. I really wanted Tan Chu to get that laptop to China. But I’ll take a few dead Chinese and Russian agents, any day. Does that shock you? Repulse you?”
“Haddad was not an agent.”
“He was. For Israel. And if you think I would have anything to do with killing one of the best agents in the Mossad, think again.”
I remembered Haddad had told me about his “benefactor.” Was he referring to Tel Aviv? Talk about great actors; he and Decon would have to share my vote for the Oscar. But even if he were an Israeli agent, he’d attempted to commit espionage and get the GIDEON secrets along with Chu and Pelkov. And since the Osprey had attempted to rendezvous with Haddad’s ship at sea, the Egyptian had obviously cut a side deal with Chu that he neglected to mention to me. A deal that didn’t work out too well for him.
“I saw you got some nice press on TV,” Twee continued. “Which makes it hurt all the more that a real hero—Danny Doakes—will never get a plaque in the lobby at Langley for making the ultimate sacrifice.”
“Your operation was rogue? The DCI didn’t know?”
She took a few moments to compose herself. I hoped her grief was genuine. Faking it would place her beyond contempt.
“I couldn’t risk it,” she said at last. “The politics of money trumps everything. And I have to take orders just like everyone else. I had Del Breaux’s house and business wired and learned he was toying with the idea of selling the GIDEON secrets.”
“I found two of your bugs. In lamps.”
“Then you missed about twenty others. Decon broke into Breaux’s house, got his laptop while Del and Ty were asleep. We hacked it, downloaded the files, then returned it before they woke up. I worked behind the scenes with a friend in the Science Directorate. My friend created new files that we put into a duplicate laptop, altering the GIDEON formula in ways that would lead the Chinese, or whomever, down the wrong path and would also unleash a Trojan in their systems.”
I nodded slowly. Exactly like Stuxnet.
“I didn’t take delivery of that duplicate laptop until early last night,” Twee continued. “That’s why Decon had to sneak out of the Holiday Inn, to meet me. It would have been better if he could have bypassed you and sold it to Chu and Tong directly, but there was no time; they were leaving New Orleans last night.”
“But Harding and I were going to take them into custody.”
Twee fidgeted just a bit. “You were going to be detained at the staging area in Fat City. There wasn’t going to be a sting, just a sale.”
Talk about having the rug pulled out from under you. At this point I was ready to hear her say that Honey had been in on it, too.
As angry as I was at Twee Siu right now, though, she had just described the exact kind of reverse sting that I’d hoped the Pentagon had been doing in selling all the high-tech weapons systems. The Pentagon hadn’t done so, but Twee had, on her own initiative.
“Who killed Del Breaux, Ty Parks, Leroy and Jimmy Jefferson, Herbert Rondell, Grigory Pelkov, Eddie Liu, and Terry Blanchard?”
“Each of those men were guilty of federal offenses, multiple felonies. No great loss to humanity, and I won’t be shedding a tear for any of them. But I only know who killed Pelkov.”
“Who?”
She took a long time before answering and looked me right in the eyes. “I did. While you sat across from him in his sun-room.”
It took a second for me to digest that. “You murdered him. I was about to arrest him, but you shot him down like a dog!”
“I saved your life, is what I did. He was sending for another hit team to take you out. He wanted you dead from the moment he met you. That was a sanctioned kill I made. Moscow and those old-school Russian thugs at GRU had to eat it, because their agents are not allowed to order the executions of American police officers, especially while operating in America. We presented the Russians evidence that he had done exactly that. Pelkov
was off the reservation; the order was issued, and I executed it.”
I stood there reeling, waiting for the next verse in the Book of Revelations, and there was one more.
“I wasn’t about to let you get killed.”
“Yeah, I mean, puppets like me don’t come along every day.”
“I’ve made love to three men in my life. I’d kind of like the third one to stick around.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. Twee Siu had a soft spot for me? I was speechless.
“So maybe you should stop feeling sorry for yourself for a few minutes, man up, and figure out who the killers are.”
Twee stepped up close to me. Even with her heels on I towered over her, so she had to put a hand behind my head to bend it forward so our lips met. It was a tender yet insistent kiss. It spoke of all kinds of possibilities and caught me completely off guard.
“Dawson Hayward,” she whispered in my ear. “Decon’s real name. From Carbondale, Illinois. It was a privilege to have worked with him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I spent two days unpacking all of the boxes in my loft and straightening the place up. I had a new fridge put in and had the hole in my roof fixed, the one the Russians had cut in order to gain access. The kitchen repairs from all the shotgun blasts would have to wait, only because I needed peace and quiet.
I stopped drinking, except for coffee, juice, and lots of water. I spent an afternoon at the Hall of Records, which was still in bad shape from the Storm. My gold shield, badge 888, made some things happen pretty quickly out at Louis Armstrong Airport things that I needed to have happen. I subpoenaed phone, credit card, and e-mail records, ran background checks that we hadn’t run before, did a lot of research on the Internet. Oh, and I confirmed that Dawson Hayward, from Carbondale, Illinois, and one Decon Daniel Hawthorne Doakes were one and the same. At least Twee had told the truth about that.
I holed up for five days, sleeping for only a couple of hours, as I reviewed all the reports, interviews, physical evidence, photos, crime-scene forensics that had come back, and video- and audio-tapes that NOPD still had possession of. Actually, we possessed copies of everything we turned over to FBI CI-3. I reviewed the items of interest I’d taken from Decon’s crypt and apartment, and all of my illegally obtained stuff, such as the TDF files: everything Honey and I had gotten from the Scrap Brothers, from Brandt’s offices, security video from Breaux’s home and office, the files from his laptop. Lastly I retrieved an impounded white Mercedes S550 that I’d gotten permission from the chief to have Kerry Broussard do some special forensics on.