“Come with me,” she’d said in a businesslike tone.
They were standing in the safe house’s backyard. A winter wind blew through his clothes; this was how he explained to himself the full-length shiver that swept through him at that moment.
His fantasy and the culmination of his fears. “What?”
“Request a new identity and come with me. We’ll start over together.”
She knew-they both knew-that this was nothing short of a proposal of marriage. Where she was going, it was permanent. Once into WITSEC, there was no going back, no reconnection to one’s past. It was a case of self-invoked amnesia. Suddenly it seemed to Larson that on so many levels they barely knew each other. Could he make this decision without thinking it through, without a chance to say some important good-byes?
Adding to the difficulty was his insider’s knowledge of how difficult-impossible-WITSEC could be on the protected witness. Even the most hardened criminal cracked when shut off from all contact with family members. Many ended up attending baptisms, weddings, or funerals, exposing themselves, breaking the anonymity of their protection, risking their lives for a few minutes of the familiar.
How long would Hope hold up? What if he gave up the years of his training and employment only to have the relationship self-destruct six months into the struggle to remake themselves? How well would he hold up?
He didn’t speak any of this, didn’t voice his concerns, but he clearly wore them on his face, for she grew pale, turning away from the wind and him along with it.
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s not that… It is just so out of the blue is all…”
“Is it?”
“Me joining the program? WITSEC? Yeah, it is. It’s like a doctor becoming a patient. The warden becoming a prisoner. It’s just something you don’t ever see happening to you, when you’re on this side of protection.”
“Well, I’m asking you to see it.”
“Will they even let me? I doubt it.” He had no idea how such a request would be treated. Fraternization was discouraged, sometimes punished. All deputies were instructed to avoid what most protected witnesses wanted most: safety in the form of friendship with the marshals. “It’s complicated.”
“No, not really,” she said. “It’s about as simple as it gets, Lars. You either see us together or you don’t.”
He coughed out a nervous laugh, and this hurt her. He wished he could take it back.
“There’s a lot to get done,” he said.
Her face brightened. He knew it was the right decision.
She came into his arms eagerly but tentatively, like a child asking a parent for forgiveness. “I’m not asking you to suffer with me, I’m asking you to live with me.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll suffer plenty with me in your life,” he teased, returning the hug.
“Penance I’ll gladly endure.”
“I have to make some calls, say some good-byes. Clear this through channels.” The list grew longer in his head.
“What if they refuse you?”
Only then did he fully understand the extent of her proposal, and he had to wonder if this was her original intention all along. “I can’t do that, Hope.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Sneak you out of here somehow? Run away with you without the… the firewall… of WITSEC to protect us? I’m one person. It doesn’t work like that.”
He realized immediately she underestimated WITSEC’s importance to her-to their-survival. This, in turn, caused him to reassess his own willingness to destroy Roland Larson in the coming twenty-four-to-forty-eight-hour period, all in the name of love. A love less than three months old. A love fashioned under the threat of death and in the heat of battle.
“Rotem will try to talk me out of it. At the very least they’ll make me meet with a psychologist or psychiatrist. There will be papers to sign, releasing them of responsibility. It’s not a matter of breaking out the champagne and waiting to be relocated.”
“Second thoughts?”
“It’s too soon to have second thoughts. These are original thoughts,” he said. “I just need a little time to think it through and put it together.”
“There isn’t any time, is there? Do you think they’re going to warn you before they take me off? Do you think they’re going to warn me? No way.” She was right. It would be done in the dead of night, like a criminal act. Two or three vans all leaving at the same moment, all heading different directions. She’d be inside one of them, gone for good. She’d already been placed on the fast track. Her new identity would arrive any moment.
He explained his situation again, detailing his need for a day or two at least. “I do love you. But I owe some explanations. I won’t leave my friends in false grief. I’ve seen enough of that.”
They kissed, though for the first time without passion, and that kiss would haunt him as he told Rotem of his plan to join her, and later considered her offer through the night, phone off the hook, his bed not slept in.
In the morning, his mind made up, he returned to the farmhouse.
He found it empty and deserted. Even the tire tracks had been swept out of the dirt, as if no one had been there in years.
He blamed Rotem, though never to his face. He blamed her for waiting so long to ask. He blamed himself forever for wavering, for leaving her side, even for a moment, that day.
Touchdown returned him to the present and delivered the requisite black Navigator to the jet’s stairs. This kind of service made Larson feel both important and uncomfortable, neither of which pleased him. The three federal employees were whisked off by a driver, who also carried Justice Department creds. Larson was once again reminded of how serious this must be.
Uncle Leo. It was little more than a name to Larson, but it carried weight, of legendary import in the realm of WITSEC. Uncle Leo had had something to do with the witness protection program’s modernization which had begun in the mid-1990s. Leo’s name spoke as much of secrecy as anything else, as did so much of the WITSEC program’s overhaul. It was the equivalent of the program’s very integrity, its security, and the security of its protected witnesses. Uncle Leo’s predicament had rallied the big hitters. It might be nothing more than an unscheduled vacation, or a trip to a hospital, but Uncle Leo had disappeared and Rotem had obviously been ordered to move heaven and earth, along with a sizable private jet, to find the man. It was as if WITSEC and FATF, separate entities, with one rarely having anything to do with the other, would be working together. The presence of these Justice agents spoke volumes. This was the varsity squad; if Larson was being called off the bench, as it appeared he was, then people wanted Uncle Leo found. The desk jockeys were ready to sit back and watch people like Larson work.
This particular October night in Princeton, New Jersey, left Larson wishing he’d brought a sweater, rather than the black jeans and black blazer he’d been wearing at the play. The smell was of car engines and tire rubber as he climbed out of the Navigator, stepping onto a blacktop driveway alongside a modest, unremarkable home in what was probably called a “nice neighborhood,” a place where kids could ride bikes and skateboards at any hour but the current hour of four A.M.
Larson, for no reason other than his own experience, had been expecting a crime scene-local cops, a crime scene unit, maybe an effort to hold back the press. Instead it was the Navigator, a Town Car, and one other Navigator, also black. The house was dark, and it took him a minute to realize someone had taped black Visquine or garbage bags over the interior windows. He followed his two escorts inside.
He was struck both by the hideous color of the living room’s yellow carpet and the abundance of printed matter-books, magazines, and more magazines. The owner was a reader. The place was a litter basket. The furniture wanted to be contemporary but stopped at modern and so looked like the before-shot of a custom-renovation ad. A ’50s ranch for a scientist who belonged in Back to the Future, judging by the few shots of Uncle Leo and various di
gnitaries and politicians that hung on the wall amid copies of Warhol lithographs and some fairly decent black-and-white portrait photography that included John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
“He knew everybody, once upon a time.” Scott Rotem, forty-one or -two going on fifty-five. He sported bulging eyes a comedian would kill for if they’d been capable of carrying any expression at all. A patch of missing hair cried out for Rogaine. Rotem was all right if you liked your bureaucrats with zero sense of humor, a mean streak burnished into a crease between the eyes, and the vague aura of foot odor following one about. The man not only woke on the wrong side of the bed, he also willingly entered it from that side, too. Not simply a stick-in-the-mud, but a phone pole, pile-driven at that. Larson liked him, though it confounded him exactly why this was. It might have been the beauty and polish of Rotem’s stubborn persona, that never-give-an-inch, bastard-at-a-glance attitude that made him both an asshole and yet someone Larson could rightfully respect. Rotem was consistent, if in a vaguely pernicious way, and that struck Larson as a noble attribute in this day and age.
“You owe me half a performance of Much Ado about Nothing. Your guys pulled me at intermission.”
“Come in here.”
Larson followed. Whenever possible he took the high ground against Rotem, took it early and fought to hold it, because the man had a way of getting under his skin, getting him to do things, to take assignments he didn’t want. Larson would say yes before he meant it, even if the one time in his life he should have, he hadn’t.
The moment he entered the side hall, now passing framed snapshots of what had to be family, he smelled the blood. Once you’ve been around it a few times, your nose can pick it up at a distance, and Larson had been around it more than a few times, so the memories attached to that odor like ticks. Each step down the hall was a step down memory lane, only the snapshots on the walls of his recollection were all of victims.
He found the silence of the house disturbing. He wished Rotem would say something. He caught himself humming and wishing he could carry a tune better than he could.
The smell grew riper now. All of a sudden, it reeked like someone had opened a long-ignored trash can. It hit Larson like twisting the cap off a bottle of ammonia. Hit him in the eyes and deep up into his sinuses where he knew it would lodge and remain for hours to come. Days perhaps. It came from a Macy’s parade balloon, facedown in a vanity bathroom, fallen to the linoleum floor, the body so swollen and distorted that the wrists puffed out above the shirt cuffs, straining the buttons. Two to three weeks. Decomposition so advanced that the skin on the back of the neck had split as it swelled, leaving a set of narrow trenches running from the shirt collar up under the hair.
“It’s not Leopold Markowitz,” Rotem informed him.
“Not Uncle Leo?” Larson asked. “Then this was…?”
“One Emerson Brighton Doyle. Name’s not important. A graduate student. Markowitz’s personal assistant. Against the university’s bylaws-unpaid personal assistants-but fairly common practice, especially for the emeritus types like Markowitz. He did consulting for Princeton, Markowitz did. Consulted all over the place. We’re collecting that information now.”
“Did or does?” Larson sought to clarify the tense.
“You catch on quickly.”
“You wanted me to see Emerson Brighton Doyle in person. I don’t get that.”
“A picture wouldn’t have done it,” Rotem said.
“Aromatherapy?”
“Come around this side.”
As Larson stepped across the pale log of a khaki-clad leg, Rotem continued. “The moment they move him, disturb him, some or all of this will be ruined. He’s going to come apart like an overcooked brisket. You’re right about me wanting you to see this. But it’s not as if I’d wish this upon anybody,” he said, displaying what was for him a rare moment of humanism.
“Then why?” Larson asked, as it turned out, a little prematurely. For by then Rotem had pointed toward the head, which looked more like a horrific beach ball. Larson backed off a step, his back now pressed against the coolness of the wall between the corner sink and toilet, his left arm on the roll of toilet paper like an armrest. That chill found its way through the blazer and shirt and into his skin and bored down into him like a dentist’s drill. Rotem was right, moving the body would have likely destroyed it. At first blush, it looked like nothing more than another of the series of chins-Larson counted nine or ten of the folds despite the heavy bloating. But the pink one just below the man’s right earlobe was more than a tear or a split. It was too precise, the slight smile of a curve that started at the ear. Too intentional.
“Benny the bus driver,” Larson finally said. “Christ almighty. The Romeros?” Hope rose in his thoughts again. Hope and her long history with the Romeros.
“We can’t be sure,” Rotem said, but his heart obviously wasn’t in it.
The medical examiner had written up Benny’s sliced throat as a precision cut intended to sever the trachea while simultaneously laying open the carotid arteries. An extremely efficient cut for someone wishing to both silence and kill a man. Benny had bled out while drowning in his own blood, his larynx cut and inoperable. Larson hadn’t seen anything like it in the past six years.
“Can’t call it a signature cut,” Rotem continued.
“Can’t we?”
“But I wanted you to see it.”
“Scott, maybe I’m punchy because it’s four-thirty in the morning, or maybe it’s from all the chitchat with the two wonderful conversationalists you sent to abduct me, but I’m squatting by this pile of stink looking at what it is you brought me here to look at, and I’m telling you it is a signature cut, which must be exactly what you want to hear, or why would you bring me? So if you know something else, would you just fucking say it?”
Larson wanted out of there. He wanted to find Hope-tell her the Romeros were on the move again. On the move? They had Leo Markowitz! Good God.
“Leopold Markowitz wrote the code for Laena.”
Larson had assumed as much. Laena was the name given to WITSEC’s master witness protection list, the most carefully guarded database in the Justice Department. Larson’s insides did another little roll. Anything and everything to do with the identity and location of Hope Stevens was contained in Laena.
“Laena became inoperable yesterday afternoon at around four, eastern. They can’t open it; they can’t access it.”
“So they’ve got the list,” Larson said.
“The list, but maybe not the names on the list.” Seven to eight thousand people, including dependents-women, children, spouses and relatives. “The encryption’s a significant obstacle.”
“Not for Markowitz, though,” said Larson. “Right?”
“Even for Markowitz, decrypting Laena will take time.”
“We’ve been tapped to find him.”
“You have. By me. Yes.”
Larson held his breath, disentangled himself from the toilet paper roll, and leaned forward to study the cut more closely. There was too much rot and decomposition for him to determine if a razor blade had been responsible, though he knew this would ultimately be the judgment of the coroner or medical examiner. It all proved a little overwhelming. He stood, hurried out of the bathroom, down the hall, and outside where he gasped for clean air, or what passed for it in New Jersey.
Rotem was right there behind him, more agile and quick than Larson might have given him credit for.
The treetops fluttered and stirred in a breeze, swaying back and forth like a gospel choir.
Larson coughed up a clam and spit it into a nearby shrub and heard it glob down from twig to leaf and finally trickle into the sodden mulch. The taste lingered at the back of his throat, hanging barely above his retching point. “Fuck,” he muttered.
“Judging by this, he has a two-week head start on us,” Rotem said. “Three at most.”
“So does he have the names or not?”
“I’m told b
y WITSEC that it’s possible but doubtful. Not yet, but any day now. Not only is the master list encrypted, but each individual record within it as well. Think of it as a safe-deposit box inside a bank. Markowitz not only has to break into the bank, but then open each and every safe-deposit box in order to win a protected witness’s identity. Three weeks to a month, and only then with the fastest computers out there-the Crays and Silicon Graphics. Gives us a week to ten days more to find him.”
“Which means finding the Romeros. I thought they up and vanished after Donny checked into our federal facility.”
“We know better than most, Larson,” Rotem said, “that no one ever fully disappears.” He paused. “Excepting maybe Hoffa.”
With Donny’s initial conviction on fraud charges, Pop, Ricardo, and others had gone to ground. If the government knew where to find them, it was news to Larson. The remaining Romeros had never been prosecuted, leaving Larson wondering why. Hope’s testimony would be enough to convict; she remained a living threat to the family.
Rotem added, “Any one of the big families would kill to have that list. Pay millions. Why not the Romeros? If Markowitz gives them Laena-every assumed identity of every protected witness in the WITSEC program…” He let it hang there. Then he said, “That’s a lot of motivation.”
“But the point of making the list digital was to make it bulletproof,” Larson said.
“Right. And the Titanic’s unsinkable. Listen, WITSEC is reassembling the list through paperwork, but it’s a hell of a lot of paperwork.”
“There’s got to be some kind of backup, right?”
“I suppose they might get it back online. What do I know? We’re supposed to find Markowitz. Period.”
“We do this in secret?”
“You do everything in secret,” Rotem said.
“Yeah, but something this big… It’s gonna be a task-force effort, right? FiBIes, us, ATF… who else?”
Cut and Run Page 3