Friends at Homeland Security
Page 10
On the credit side, Howard Everhart Marcus has a conscience and is utterly devastated by his own and his wife’s actions. When he learns that Anne is the contractor for the murder of their only son, he assumes full responsibility for both hers and his part in the terrible and destructive plot. He agrees to divulge the location of all of the money his bank unit illegally transferred and all of his own assets in return—strangely—for the government allowing McGee to be paid in full. He considers McGee to be the only man of his word in the whole affair and wants him to receive his due.
When Sybil gets back with Mazurkiewicz, she takes him to a secure and secret location in the relatively unpopulated portion of Loudoun County, Virginia, where the CIA maintains an ultra-secret, off-the-books interrogation center which Sybil had built during the case of the naval intelligence agency mole. Mazurkiewicz—once he was persuaded of the futility of resisting and of the meager benefits to himself—became an encyclopedia of information about the Russian mafia and its connections with al-Qaeda. As a result, several hundred mobsters and jihadists land in prison and in the embrace of Gitmo. Mazurkiewicz now languishes for the rest of his life known as prisoner #17227-039 in Federal Bureau of Prisons facility, ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado—the meanest prison in America. His life—if one can call it a life—is going to be spent in a windowless, cheerless cell in the solitary confinement.
Caitlin gets a scolding for having prematurely informed Anne that the private investigation firm, the FBI, and the NYPD have the goods on her. The last part of the scolding is the admonition by the boss to “live and learn.”
No one is the wiser about Sybil and her covert-ops team’s most recent adventure. She finds her inbox to be less full than usual, and arranges to take a short car trip with her husband Charles Daniels and her college-student daughter, Cerisse. The Daniels family has adopted a firm policy of “ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” which seems to work.
McGee’s reputation is at its zenith, and the firm attracts a fascinating and potentially very lucrative new client—a whistle-blower from a dictatorial religious cult—which may turn out to be a major tort case with McGee, Ivory, and Caitlin as the principal investigators.
-The End-