“You can be sure we’re on their agenda.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” he says. “I wasn’t invited to Supermax.”
“No, but as you say, we’re associated. I’d be surprised if you’re not in their thoughts and prayers.”
“Bastards!” says Harry. “If they’re gonna kill me, they at least owe me a spot on the Supreme Court.”
“We’ll talk about that later. For the moment it looks like I’ll be going to Colorado.”
“You know they’re not gonna let you talk to Betz unless they’re listening in. That’s a given,” says Harry. “In that place the closest you’re going to get to him is a window of solid acrylic eight inches thick, talking on a wall-mounted mic with the world listening in. The man may as well be a fish in an aquarium.”
“Probably. But it’s the only chance we’re going to get.”
“How do you know he’ll even talk to you?”
“I don’t. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Proffit said something about negotiations. He said he didn’t know the details, but that Grimes first referred to the matter as an appeal, then said no, it was a negotiation.”
“So maybe they’ve made him some kind of an offer?”
“Or getting ready to. If you think about it, it makes sense. They hit Betz hard, too hard. Alex said Graves called him the whistleblower. Betz was trying to cooperate with prosecutors, and, in fact, he did. He turned over information on taxpayers with offshore accounts from his old employer, the Swiss bank he worked for. But they were small fry. Then suddenly he becomes a little too helpful. Betz tries to put a cherry on it by telling them he had information on powerful political figures with offshore accounts.”
“The PEPs. What Korff told us,” says Harry.
“My guess is prosecutors were probably pretty excited about this at first. But then remember what Alex said? Betz, through his lawyer, the one that died flying his plane, made a proffer. They would have asked for some kind of a solid offer from the government, a short stretch in one of the federal country clubs or maybe straight probation. Who knows? But in order to get it, they had to make the proffer and show their hand.”
“And when whoever was supervising at Justice saw the scope of the thing, they probably had to pick him up and dust him off,” says Harry. “How do you go to your boss and tell him you want to indict half of Congress?”
“That’s when they started loading up the charges in order to keep Betz quiet, lock him away as long as possible. But one of them, either Betz or the lawyer, and I’m guessing Betz because he’s the only one still alive, took a look and realized that this was a problem.”
“Because of the scope,” says Harry.
“Exactly. If it went public with this many officials the political consequences alone could be catastrophic, to say nothing of the economy. Government goes down, markets tumble. Then think about what Korff told us. If investigators started looking at where this money came from, chances are some of it may track back to foreign governments. That goes public, it’s pretty hard to sweep it under the carpet. The implications get serious in a hurry, depending on what was sold.”
“And if European Union officials get drawn in, it grows like a cancer,” says Harry.
“So the deal with Betz was off, at least for the moment. Somewhere along the way he took out an insurance policy. Buried something somewhere. If anything happened to him it gets sent to a million sites on the Internet, every news outlet they can think of. So now the government is invested in making sure nothing happens to him. He’s OK for the moment. The reason he is where he is. It’s the only place they can keep him safe and at the same time keep him from talking.”
“They could try to defuse it,” says Harry. “Prosecute some of them. Put the fear of God in the rest, force them to resign or face the consequences.”
I shake my head. “If the government tries to cherry-pick the worst offenders, the defense lawyers will eat them alive. They’ll be demanding to see all the documents, unredacted, and asking questions about why Senator Smith was prosecuted when Senator Jones got a pass. They’d be arguing that the entire prosecution was nothing but politics at play. Worse than going after them all. Once the prosecution starts down that path they won’t be able to control the mess any longer.”
“Then why would the government offer a deal now, assuming they are?”
“Maybe they have no choice. They know they’ve overreached. If you check the charges and look at the guidelines you’re probably going to find out they’ve overcharged the case for sentencing purposes. And how do they justify holding him at Florence if at some point he decides to appeal, gets tired of sitting in a hole by himself. The writing’s on the wall. He’s like a grenade rattling around, waiting to go off. If he steps out and gets killed, whatever he has tucked away gets published and broadcast. So they want closure. Some deal.”
“What could they possibly offer him by way of a deal that would protect him?” says Harry. “Witness protection?”
“They may offer it. But in this case I’m afraid it would be an illusion. The problem is, no one can be sure who’s involved. For witness protection to work, you have to be able to trust the government. A mole buried in the Justice Department or some other agency and they’d have Betz’s location and his new identity before you could sneeze. He wouldn’t last a week.”
“Then what’s the answer?”
“I’m not sure there is one.”
“Then why would you go to Florence to talk to the man?”
“Because I don’t think we have a choice any longer.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t want you to stay up nights worrying, but . . . I’m afraid you and I are in the same fix Betz is, only we don’t have a prison cell to hide in.”
“You mean what you said before? Being in their thoughts and prayers?”
“You know they got pictures of the two of us shimmying out of that hotel, tripping over Korff’s body. And Ben at the motel, me with Graves. We may not have all the answers, but we know too much to be allowed to live. Don’t you think it’s strange we made it out of Lucerne?”
“We were lucky,” says Harry.
“No. I don’t think so. I think they could have killed us probably half a dozen times. But they didn’t want to. You said it, remember? The question is why? And we know the answer to that as well. Kiss of death,” I tell him.
“They were following us.”
I nod. “Right to Ben, to Graves, Korff, and they tried to get Alex twice, but they missed if the voice mail from Herman means anything. The kid must lead a charmed life.”
“It’s what I told you,” says Harry. “You said no.”
“Changed my mind this afternoon.”
“Why?”
“Proffit’s phone call. Why would Grimes want me to talk to Betz? I mean, knowing what we know. She has to know he has information. Graves called him the Holy Grail. Now we know why. Everybody else with any information is dead.”
“Because we led them right to their front door,” says Harry.
“The problem they’re having with Betz is they know where he is, but they can’t get at him.”
“So what do they want you to do?”
“They want me to get him out.”
“So they can kill him.”
“No, so that they can kill all of us. You, me, Herman, if they can find him, and Alex. You see, once we deliver Betz we will have completed our mission. I can’t imagine what other chores they might have for us.”
“So who’s doing all the killing?” he says.
“If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be downtown spilling my guts, everything I knew, to the D.A. But Graves gave me a clue. At the time I dismissed it. I don’t mean to say he named the perpetrator, but he identified the motive. The bad thing is it’s institutional, built into the system, dangerous,” I tell him.
“How do you mean?”
>
“Remember what Korff said about the PEPs, politically exposed persons? He said they presented special problems because they were susceptible to extortion, which in turn leads to violence.”
“That’s an axiom,” says Harry. “You blackmail somebody, especially if they see no way out, no end in sight, there’s a fair chance they will try to kill you. Either that or commit suicide.”
“Variation on the theme,” I tell him. “What Graves said. The Hoover Effect, remember? J. Edgar and his card catalogue of dirt. The dark secrets of the rich and powerful. As the story goes, Hoover used the information to advance the bureau and to protect himself. Stayed in office for forty years.
“Let’s say someone in one of the government agencies found out that a few members of Congress were on the take. They had undisclosed offshore accounts. Let’s say they were taking money overseas because it was easier and safer there than here. There’re fewer FBI agents in Portugal than Poughkeepsie. Uncle Sam’s reach may be long, but his resources aren’t unlimited. Who knows that better than members of Congress who control the budget? They would even know the best places to do this. Let’s say some of them have a field day. They start racking up money in foreign accounts. But someone finds out. Now the offenders are susceptible to extortion. They become PEPs. Whoever’s doing it starts squeezing them for votes on bills, maybe information if they’re on sensitive committees that meet behind closed doors.
“But then this person sees the possibilities. Why have just a few members in your pocket when you can have many? And why wait for them to be seduced by random events when you can orchestrate the seduction? Let’s say they take the venture private, leave government, and turn political corruption into a growth industry. Now they’ve really got something.
“They also have an investment to protect. If you have some dirty politician by the collar, you don’t want him taken out in the next election by some reform candidate. Let’s assume somebody starts poking around, a nosy reporter, for example.”
“Alex,” says Harry.
“And Graves. Or worse, some competitor who finds out about some of the sins of one of your wayward members and tries to horn in on your action. What do you do? Unless you want to sit around and wait hoping they get struck by lightning, you go into the accident formation business.”
“You think Serna was trying to squeeze somebody in Congress?”
“She was a lobbyist and the soul of ambition. If the opportunity availed itself, why not? Let’s say she found some dirt, decided to put it to use, only to find herself standing in line behind some really nasty people. She turns up dead in a burned-out car.”
“And Ives?”
“Why waste a good accident? Whoever’s pulling Grimes’s strings is probably an environmentalist. If they could, they would probably have put the whole lot of us on a bus and run it in front of a train. Save energy.
“Grimes could have gotten any lawyer she wanted to represent Betz if all they wanted was to spring him so they could kill him. But no, she wants me to do it. Why? Probably so they can line me up behind Betz and do us both with the same bullet.”
“So what are you gonna do?”
“I’m gonna go meet Mr. Betz. The man is still breathing because he’s smart.”
“He’s alive because he has insurance,” says Harry.
“And if we want to stay alive we better get a piece of his policy.”
Ana was trying to read his lips. She could only see one of them, Madriani. Something about members in your pocket . . . seduced by random events. She had him in her field glasses sitting in her car across the street from his house. She would have killed to know what they were talking about. For a moment she actually thought about the possibility in order to extract whatever they knew. Some clue, perhaps, as to who had the equipment. She didn’t consider it hers any longer, because she no longer had a use for it.
Ana had lost the contract on the corporate executive in Europe, and with it a very large commission. It was too late. They had hired someone else. She was too busy trying to protect herself, due to her connection with the French electronics, that she couldn’t take care of business. This hurt her reputation, and that made her angry.
The people who had the equipment were the ones using the lawyers, and they were being used; they were being followed. Ana knew this because of the Dumpster diver and the man she killed in Switzerland.
On her return from Europe Ana decided it was time for some technical assistance. She was alone, she was tired, and she needed sleep. At the same time she wanted to keep half an eye on the lawyers and where they went. She purchased four small devices known as Spark Nanos. Each about the size of a small cell phone, these were GPS trackers designed to allow parents to keep track of their children. What made the devices unusual was their battery life. The rechargeable lithium batteries could last for hundreds of hours on a single charge, depending on how the tracker was set.
Ana attached powerful magnets to the back of two of the devices. While the lawyers were inside the house talking, she slipped one of the trackers under the fender of each of their cars.
Using her laptop and linking her phone she had already set up geo fences. These are circular perimeters drawn on the Spark Nano’s GPS maps. She put fences around their law office, Madriani’s home, Hinds’s apartment, and a few other strategic areas, including the airport.
Whenever either of the vehicles crossed one of the fences Ana would get a signal on her cell phone. By setting the device to search every five minutes she gained two hundred hours of battery life. Whenever they moved she would know it. She could then track their movement on the GPS. In a week she could swap out the devices with fresh recharged ones and still have spare time on the batteries.
She couldn’t see Madriani’s partner in the house across the street. He was down low in the room somewhere below the opening, the pass-through to the kitchen. If she didn’t get a break soon, her hand would be forced. She would have to move on one or both of the lawyers.
The good news was she had picked up a client, a referral from some mutual acquaintances, a job in the area. At least her travel and her time would be paid for. The bad news was they were pressing her to get the job done. So far she had stalled them. But she knew she couldn’t delay much longer. She didn’t want to lose another job.
The problem was, if she used the same method to fulfill the new contract, having used an arrow in the San Diego area once already, authorities would connect the medical forensics in the two cases. A single arrow wound and one victim, a pathologist might classify merely as sharp force trauma. But a second victim with the same kind of wound in the same county crime lab, they would begin to see a pattern. With that they would start asking questions. It wouldn’t take them long to realize they were dealing with a bow and broad-head arrows.
Ana would have to dump all of her weapons, the compound takedown bow, the smaller crossbow, and all of the supplies for assembling arrows and bolts. She certainly couldn’t take the chance of carrying them through the airport. And keeping them in her possession was a risk if for any reason she was stopped and the police searched her car.
She would be bare, alone, and in a foreign country. She wanted to put some distance between herself and San Diego the minute she completed the new contract, so that by the time authorities went looking for sharp pointy objects she would be long gone. By then the alias she was traveling under would be smoke.
She had taken a room at the Del Coronado in order to be close to the law office. She would put this on the tab of her new employer. For now she would go back and get some sleep, and let her cell phone and the little Spark Nanos do the watching.
FORTY-EIGHT
The US Federal Penitentiary, Maximum Administrative Facility (ADX), goes by several names: Florence ADMAX, Supermax, and the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
It’s actually situated to the east of the Rocky Mountains on the downward slope in a ragged area leading to the Great Plains, dry and desolate, middle of nowhere.
It is there for a reason. It houses the most dangerous inmates in the federal prison system, people notorious for violence. Its occupants include members of the Mexican drug cartels, Islamic terrorists, and inmates who habitually cause problems in other institutions. Some of them are notorious escape artists.
Tonight I am doing research, working from home, looking for anything I can find on the Florence, Colorado, facility. I am also searching for background on Betz and his case. Harry has pulled everything he can find on the trial and is trying to locate a copy of the transcript.
Fremont County, where the town of Florence is situated, sits about one hundred miles from Denver and about forty miles south of Colorado Springs and the US Air Force Academy. Mostly rural, sparse grasslands, rolling hills and desert, it has a population of a little over forty-seven thousand people.
But in the fifteen hundred square miles that comprise the county there are thirteen prisons, including state, local, and federal correctional facilities. These house almost nine thousand inmates.
The people at ADX, the federal Supermax, are a veritable rogue’s gallery. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is there, as is Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber. Terry Nichols, who was convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing, is also incarcerated there. Ramzi Yousef, who was involved in the first World Trade Center bombing, and Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent turned Russian spy, are doing fifteen consecutive life sentences at Florence. In all, there is room for 490 prisoners. Nowhere on the Internet is the name Rubin Betz listed. He languishes below the radar, perhaps by government design.
On first blush I would say that housing Betz at Supermax is itself an act of cruel and unusual punishment. You would think it is also highly dangerous, given the informational powder keg he is sitting on.
According to what I’m reading, inmates at Florence generally serve solitary time, one man to a cell. They spend twenty-three hours a day locked up. They are allowed out for five hours every week for private recreational activity.
Each cell boasts poured concrete amenities: a fixed bed, a fixed concrete stool in front of a fixed concrete desk. The commode includes a basin and drinking fountain all built into one, and there is a built-in concrete shower. All of the water to the cells is on a timer so that inmates can’t flood the cubicles. A tiny opening the size of an arrow slit is the only window.
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