by Mike Lawson
It didn’t sound like Sharon Palmer was going to win any awards for Mother of the Year. Nor did it sound like Phil Downing had been the man of her dreams, and whatever grief she’d experienced upon his passing had certainly diminished over time.
“Why do you think Kincaid killed him?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea, but they probably got into one of their screaming matches over some dumb thing, and Phil … Well, he could be nasty when they argued, real insulting. Or maybe Phil shoved Brian or took a swing at him. He outweighed Brian by at least thirty pounds and maybe Brian got scared, got his gun, and shot him. Although I never knew Brian kept a gun in the office.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say. Seeing that her glass was empty, he asked if she wanted another Manhattan. She looked at him for a moment, and he got the impression she might be thinking the same thing about him that she’d thought about Phil Downing: that he wasn’t completely unattractive and that spending the night with him would be better than spending it with her daughter.
“Sure,” she said. “Maybe just one more.”
“Were either of them having any trouble with their clients before Phil died?”
“Brian wasn’t, at least not that I ever heard him say. But a few weeks before Phil was killed, he was all down in the mouth one night, and when I asked him what was wrong, he said Warwick was thinking about switching to another firm.”
“Really?” DeMarco said. This was new information. There hadn’t been anything about this in Gordon’s reports.
“Yeah, and if they’d dropped Phil, he would have been screwed, because Warwick was the only client he had left. In the end, Warwick decided to stick with him—but then the poor guy goes and gets killed.”
“Did you tell anybody about this during Brian’s trial or when the police were investigating?”
“You mean about Warwick thinking about switching firms?”
“Yeah.”
“No one ever asked. And all this happened more than a month before Phil was killed and it didn’t seem relevant.”
“Did you ever get the impression that Phil had something on Warwick?”
“Had something on them? What do you mean?”
“Could he have known something about the foundation that he might have held over their head, something he could have used to force them to continue to retain him?” DeMarco didn’t want to use the word blackmail.
“Geez, if he did, I don’t know what it could have been.”
“What exactly did he do for Warwick?”
“He lobbied for anything having to do with foreign aid or the government funding NGOs to help out during catastrophes. He’d even pay attention to real general stuff, like tax laws affecting nonprofits and charitable donations.”
She reached out and gave DeMarco’s hand a little pat. “I think we’ve talked enough about Brian and Phil, don’t you, Joe? Tell me about yourself. Do you have a girlfriend?”
Until two months ago, DeMarco did indeed have a girlfriend, but she was gone now and her departure was still somewhat of an open wound. And he hadn’t had sex since she left. He thought for a moment about making the effort—and he knew it wouldn’t take all that much effort—to get Sharon Palmer to spend the night with him. It would be an uncomplicated one-night stand. Fortunately, his willpower was able to get a grip on his panting libido.
The fact was that, aside from the sex, DeMarco didn’t like one-night stands. He always felt like some sort of greasy lounge lizard, sneaking out of a woman’s bedroom at dawn knowing he had no intention of ever returning. He’d been married once, and he’d actually liked being married until his wife started cheating on him, and he wouldn’t have minded getting married again if the right woman came along. Consequently, he preferred to go to bed with women who at least had some possibility of being the next Mrs. DeMarco. He could tell, after less than a half hour with her, that Sharon Palmer wasn’t even a remote possibility.
There was no point saying this, however, as he might need her cooperation in the future. Instead, being a gallant gentleman, he lied. “I don’t have a girlfriend but, unfortunately, I have to get going. I have to meet a guy for dinner. You know, a business thing.”
Then he ran for the door before he could change his mind.
DeMarco lived in Georgetown, on P Street, in a narrow, two-story town house made of white-painted brick. It wasn’t a large place, and when he was living with a woman, there were times when it seemed too small for two people. But now that he was alone again, there were some nights when the place seemed cavernous and the silence felt like it was crushing him. This was one of those nights—so he decided to have dinner in a noisy Georgetown bar where he’d be surrounded by others of his species.
He walked to a place in Georgetown called The Guards. He liked The Guards because it wasn’t a college kid hangout and adults his age tended to gather there after work. He took a seat at the bar, a couple stools away from two good-looking women dressed in suits with short hemlines. They were drinking some kind of cobalt-blue drink served in a martini glass, and he thought about asking them what they were drinking just to start a conversation—and then realized he didn’t really want to start a conversation. It suddenly seemed like too much work to be sociable and charming; he should have stayed at home.
He ordered a steak and a salad for dinner, preceded by a Grey Goose martini. As he sipped his martini, he thought about the fact that it hadn’t been a very good year for him or anyone associated with him. He had lost his lover. Mahoney had lost the Speaker’s job. And then there was his friend Emma’s problem—a problem he didn’t fully understand but which he knew was significantly larger than his and Mahoney’s problems combined.
Angela DiCapria, DeMarco’s lover for the past two years, worked for the CIA. He met her on a case where an agent was killed because one of Mahoney’s cronies in Congress had leaked the identity of the agent to the press. When he met Angela she was married to an asshole; six months later she was living part-time with DeMarco and, three months after that, moved in completely. DeMarco wanted to marry her; but Angela, too recently stung by a bad marriage, wasn’t ready to take that step.
All was going well until her employer sent her to Afghanistan. When she returned, she was different. She couldn’t tell DeMarco what she had done over there, but whatever it was, it affected her significantly. She couldn’t sleep, would often just sit in the dark for hours, and eventually began seeing a psychiatrist. DeMarco didn’t know anything about post-traumatic stress disorder—but he suspected that’s what his girlfriend had.
Angela eventually stopped seeing the shrink, but she became obsessive about her work—or, to be accurate, more obsessive. She did something terrorist-related at Langley—something classified in such a manner that she couldn’t tell DeMarco exactly what she did—but after returning from Afghanistan, she didn’t spend a mere ten or twelve hours a day at work; she began spending sixteen or eighteen hours there, and some nights she didn’t come home and slept on the couch in her office. Or maybe she slept at her office because she didn’t want to sleep with him. Whatever the case, she came home one evening and told him she was being transferred back to Afghanistan. When he asked her if there was anything she could do to get out of the assignment, she told him she’d asked for the transfer.
11
Kelly and Nelson had wanted to fly from Nairobi directly to their ranch in Montana—they had a lot of things to get done on the place before winter—but Fiona ordered them to take a small detour. To Peru. They were dreading the trip because what they had to do in Peru was, without a doubt, the most difficult part of their job. Given a choice between going to Peru and battling bloodthirsty teenagers in Africa armed with machetes and AK-47s, they would have chosen the teenagers.
Knowing what lay ahead of them, they barely spoke on the long flight to Are
quipa, a city in southern Peru and the second-largest in the country.
They took a taxi to a private garage a few miles from the airport. Inside the garage was a four-wheel-drive Jeep Cherokee packed with a tent, sleeping bags, a satellite phone, food, spare gas cans, binoculars, night vision goggles, and gas masks. Kelly had to admit that when it came to pulling together what they needed for their missions, Hobson did a good job.
The drive from Arequipa to their destination took several hours, and the journey was unremarkable except for the occasional vehicle that came speeding down the narrow mountain road giving no thought to the possibility that another vehicle might be coming the other way. The scenery, which they had seen several times before, was magnificent, although neither man commented on it.
Approximately ten miles from the small town of Pinchollo, they pulled the Cherokee off the main road and into a picturesque mountain meadow. A small, fast-moving stream ran through the meadow, and they had an unobstructed view of the mountains. They didn’t select the meadow because of the view or the stream, however; they picked it because it was large enough and flat enough to accommodate a helicopter.
While Kelly erected the tent and rolled out their sleeping bags, Nelson filled a pot with water from the stream and made a fire. The area was so sparsely populated they doubted they would encounter anyone, and if they did they’d just say they were a couple of crazy American tourists. If anyone tried to rob them, which was unlikely, the robbers would be in for a surprise. Even without automatic weapons and grenade launchers, Kelly and Nelson were extraordinarily lethal.
Nelson made them a quick meal, boiling freeze-dried food that came in pouches. Then they had some time to kill, because they couldn’t start their mission until approximately midnight and it was only seven p.m. They were both tired from the long flight from Nairobi, followed by the drive from Arequipa to their campsite, so Kelly set his wristwatch alarm for eleven thirty p.m. and they went inside the tent and took naps so they’d be fresh for the work ahead.
At midnight, they filled knapsacks with the equipment they would need, then took off in the Jeep, with Nelson driving; he had better night vision than Kelly. Their camp was ten miles from the village of Pinchollo and the Warwick Care Center was twenty miles beyond the village, situated about a mile off the main road. There were no streetlights in Pinchollo and the town’s inhabitants were early-to-bed, early-to-rise types, and consequently the town was completely dark when they drove through it and they saw no one on the streets. Nonetheless, they drove through the town with the headlights off.
Forty minutes after leaving the meadow, they took the turnoff for the Warwick Care Center and drove until they were within half a mile of the facility, then proceeded the rest of the way on foot, Nelson leading the way. They had flashlights and night vision goggles in their knapsacks, but didn’t use either. The half-moon and stars provided light and they were careful treading across the rocky ground. If one of them sprained an ankle, it would complicate the mission.
The Warwick Care Center consisted of two large Quonset huts and several smaller enclosures. The two large huts were the sleeping quarters for the residents—one hut for the males, the other for females—and these huts were equipped with heating and ventilation systems. In between the two large huts was a smaller hut where the nurse lived. Two Honda generators were in a third enclosure and supplied electricity for the facility, and they could hear one of the generators running.
Kelly went to the small hut where the nurse lived. He put on night vision goggles and took a pistol from his knapsack. He slowly turned the doorknob and found it unlocked as he’d expected; in this part of the world, people rarely felt the need to lock their doors. He cracked open the door and listened, and when he could hear the nurse snoring, he stepped into the hut and shot the nurse in the back with a tranquilizer dart. He waited two minutes, then pulled the dart out of the man’s back. Tomorrow the nurse would wonder about the sore spot on his back but would otherwise suffer no ill effects from the tranquilizer—or so Kelly had been told.
While Kelly was darting the nurse, Nelson shut off the generator that provided power for the ventilation system in the Quonset huts. When Nelson returned, Kelly made a hand signal and proceeded to the large Quonset hut where the male subjects slept while Nelson went to the females’ hut. Kelly took a quart-sized metal canister from his knapsack, opened the door to the hut, placed the canister on the floor, turned a small valve on it, and shut the door. Nelson did the same thing in the women’s hut.
Although the people inside the two huts had most likely been sleeping when Kelly and Nelson released the gas, some might have been awake. The subjects often slept poorly and woke frequently during the night, and the gas would render them all unconscious in about fifteen minutes; it was an effective anesthetic but not fast-acting. The best thing about the gas was that the side effects were minimal—mild headache, dizziness, slight nausea. Or so Kelly had been told.
After half an hour passed, Kelly turned to Nelson and said, “Let’s get this done.”
Kelly took a device out of his knapsack and they entered the Quonset hut where the males slept, then Kelly walked down the aisle between the cots looking down at the device in his hand. He was holding an RFID reader.
Radio-frequency identification uses radio waves to communicate between a reader and an electronic “tag” or “chip.” Similar to bar-code systems, the technology is used for managing inventories and keeping track of parts; it’s used in E-Z Pass systems to charge drivers on toll roads; casinos install RFID transmitters in poker chips to prevent counterfeiting; and when mad cow disease was discovered, RFID tags were attached to cows’ ears so individual animals could be tracked from birth to slaughterhouse. Incredible amounts of information can be stored on RFID chips and, as is usually the case with electronics, the chips had gotten smaller over time and the amount of information that could be stored on them had increased dramatically.
When René Lambert selected the test subjects, there had to be a foolproof way of tying the subjects to the drugs and subsequent tests and biological samples. Therefore, each subject—with the subject’s consent—had a microchip a bit bigger than a grain of rice inserted into his or her upper arm. The chip contained all the relevant information—age, race, sex, medical history, et cetera; it contained everything but the subject’s name. Instead of a name each subject was given an alpha-numeric code number. The names of these people were—on so many levels—completely irrelevant.
Holding the RFID reader in his hand, Kelly pointed it at each sleeping patient, and when he was about halfway down the aisle the reader emitted a soft beep—indicating that he had located a subject who met certain criteria established by Dr. Ballard. Kelly stood there looking down at the sleeping man for a moment, for no other reason than to delay what he needed to do. He and Nelson had flipped a coin before they left their campsite—and this time Kelly had lost the coin toss.
Knowing he couldn’t stall any longer, Kelly took out of his knapsack a small plastic bottle marked with the brand name of a popular nasal spray. He inserted the tip of the container into the man’s right nostril and squeezed. And that was it. The man would be dead in less than five minutes.
Kelly continued down the aisle pointing the RFID reader at the sleeping, snoring men until the reader beeped again, then he repeated the procedure with the nasal spray dispenser, this time with no hesitation. Kelly didn’t hesitate when he killed the third subject, either—a female in the second Quonset hut—but it was harder for him than killing the two males.
Kelly and Nelson walked in silence back to their vehicle and didn’t speak during the drive back to their campsite. Had they been different men, they might have tried to rationalize what they had just done. They might have said: Well, at least they didn’t suffer. They were going to die pretty soon anyway. But they didn’t say those things—nor did they think them.
When they met Fio
na for the first time in Afghanistan and she told them why Mulray Pharma was willing to pay them so much, Kelly had asked, “Are any of these people kids?”
“No,” Fiona said.
“And how many people are we talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Fiona said, “and what difference does it make? If you’re willing to kill a couple of people, why not a dozen, why not ten dozen? All you need to understand is that the risk of being caught is virtually nil. These people will die in medical facilities, their deaths will be attributed to natural causes, and the local authorities won’t investigate.”
And that’s when Kelly had told her that he and Nelson needed to be alone to talk things over—but they really didn’t talk that much.
Although Kelly was black and Nelson was white, they came from similar backgrounds. Kelly had been raised by his grandmother in a mining town in Kentucky. His father had been killed in a mining accident when he was two, and when he was four his mother went out to dinner one night with a tool-and-die salesman and never came back. His grandmother was a stern, unemotional woman and Kelly couldn’t remember her ever hugging him, even the day he left to join the army; he did remember her beating him with a belt when he misbehaved. From the time he was ten, he fished and hunted to provide additional food for their table; he ate a lot of squirrel, possum, and coon when he was growing up.
Nelson was also a hunter. He’d been raised on a farm in South Dakota that produced no crops, and his family’s only source of income was a government disability check his father received. Both his parents were beer-guzzling alcoholics. They didn’t abuse him; they were just completely indifferent toward him. Nelson recalled a day when he was thirteen and it was twenty degrees below zero—thirty below when the windchill factor was taken into account—and the school bus broke down. The other kids called their parents to come pick them up, but Nelson’s family didn’t have a functioning automobile at the time, so he decided to walk home, and was lucky he didn’t lose his fingers and toes to frostbite. But his parents’ only reaction when he entered the house—his skin blue, his teeth chattering so hard he couldn’t speak—was to complain that because he was late and hadn’t been there to knock the snow off the satellite dish, they’d missed one of their favorite TV shows.