by Mike Lawson
“Anyway,” DeMarco said, “in order for me to get more information on what Downing did in Peru, I’ll have to hire someone local and see if the guy can retrace Downing’s steps. And I wanted to check with you before I did that.”
Mahoney stood there a moment sipping bourbon, mulling things over in his big white-haired head. Finally he said, “You don’t need to hire anyone. Go yourself.”
“To Peru?”
“Sure, why not? It’s not like you got anything better to do.”
“But I thought you wanted me to—”
“That’ll wait. Go to Peru.”
DeMarco left Mahoney’s office, and as he walked down the hallway, he had an overwhelming urge to pound his head against a wall until he was unconscious. He did not want to go to Peru. He should never have said anything about Talbot until he had more information.
21
DeMarco, as a GS-13 civil servant, earned approximately four weeks of vacation time a year—and he used every bit of it. And when he took his vacations—if he had the money—he liked to travel to places like Key West, the Bahamas, and Hilton Head. Sunny places, places where he could golf. Occasionally, he’d make a trip out west to Las Vegas or Tahoe, where he could lose money at the craps tables after he played golf. And although he’d never been to Europe, the thought of going there had some appeal. But what he was not interested in doing, no matter how much money and time he had, was traveling to South America.
When he thought about South America, he imagined rotten roads and overcrowded buses filled with people who carried live chickens in crates on their laps. The water was unfit to drink, the cops were corrupt, and there were bandits on every corner. And kidnapping. Kidnapping was a cottage industry in South America. So he could just see it: He goes to Peru. He gets diarrhea, maybe malaria, too. He gets robbed and then he gets kidnapped—and the kidnappers whack off his ears and send them to his mother, who doesn’t have enough money to pay the ransom.
The morning after meeting with Mahoney, DeMarco called a travel agent he’d used before and told the agent he had to go to a place called … Shit, he couldn’t even pronounce it. He spelled it. P..i..n..c..h..o..l..l..o.
“Never heard of it,” the travel agent said.
He waited while she tapped on a keyboard and thought about that book Alive—and the possibility of his plane going down in the Andes and him being the main course for a rugby team that turns into a tribe of cannibals.
“The best thing to do is to fly into Lima,” the travel agent said. “They have a modern airport there and lots of flights into the airport. From there you can catch a flight to Arequipa, which is the closest major city to Pinchollo. Then, I guess, you can take a bus from Arequipa to Pinchollo but …”
“You guess?”
“… but it would probably be better to rent a car, something with four-wheel drive. And maybe you oughta get spare gas cans because gas stations might be pretty far apart.”
“Have you ever been to this place?”
“No. I’m looking at a Web site.”
Great.
“Is there a hotel in Pinchollo?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see one on this Web site.”
This just kept getting better and better.
“Tell you what,” the travel agent said. “Give me an hour and I’ll make some calls and see if I can get some more information.”
She called back forty-five minutes later and said, “Yeah, you’ll definitely need four-wheel drive. And maybe a sleeping bag and a tent.”
“A tent! Are you shitting me!” DeMarco said.
“Joe, Pinchollo isn’t a city. I’m not even sure it would be classified as a town. It’s a village. And by the way, June in the southern hemisphere isn’t the same as June here in D.C. It might get a little chilly down there.”
He told the agent to make him plane and car reservations and to e-mail him everything she had on the region. Then, after cursing Mahoney, he set about making a list of what he would need if he had to go to a place that didn’t have hotels. His idea of roughing it was a Hilton with slow room service—and he’d never been camping in his life. But the guy across the street—an IRS accountant who helped DeMarco with his taxes—was an outdoors nut. He and his wife—both in their sixties—did crazy things like white-water rafting and rock climbing, and one time they hiked a good portion of the Appalachian Trail. They were insane, but they were nice people, and probably had the gear he needed.
He walked across the street. The accountant wasn’t home but his wife was. He told her he had to go to Peru, to some godforsaken place that was probably in the Andes Mountains.
“Oh, my God! Peru!” she said. “Geez, I wish I was going with you.”
“I wish you were going instead of me,” DeMarco said. “Anyway, I was wondering if I could borrow a sleeping bag from you and anything else you think I might need.”
He decided not to take a tent. He could just seeing himself trying to erect the thing and then suffocating to death when it collapsed on him during the night. If he couldn’t find lodging, he’d sleep in his rental car. But he figured a sleeping bag might be a good idea.
She poured him a cup of fruit juice—her husband would have given him a beer—then told him to wait while she went down to the basement to find the stuff he’d need. While he was waiting, he used his cell phone to call Emma and told her what was going on, concluding with, “So Mahoney wants me to go to Peru.”
“Well, it’s beautiful there,” she said. “You should take a little extra time and see the country, particularly the Inca ruins.”
Screw the Inca ruins! If he wanted to see the remnants of a once great civilization he’d go to Detroit.
It took him two trips to carry home all the things his neighbor’s wife gave him: a sleeping bag, a little one-burner propane stove, some tin cooking utensils, dried food that came in pouches and that he had no intention of eating unless he was starving, and a set of her husband’s rain gear. As he was leaving, she said, “I hope you have a pair of good hiking boots. If your car breaks down and you have to walk, you don’t want to be wearing tennis shoes.”
Of course he didn’t have hiking boots. The farthest he normally hiked was from the lot where he parked to the stadium where the Nationals played. He also figured he’d better stock up on medicine, whatever you took to avoid diarrhea and malaria. And bug repellent. He wondered if they had snakes in Peru.
He finally decided to go to the shopping mall at Tysons Corner. There was a drug store there where he could get the medicine—he didn’t know if they sold quinine over the counter—and a sporting goods store where he could buy boots. And he was going to use his government credit card and get the most expensive boots they had.
Nelson sat in his car half a block from DeMarco’s house and watched DeMarco lug camping equipment from a neighbor’s house to his own. What the hell was going on? Was this guy going on vacation? A few minutes later, DeMarco backed his car out of his garage.
As he followed DeMarco, he pulled the cell phone off his belt and called the detective, Unger. “Go pick up the tape recorder at DeMarco’s house. Call me as soon as you’ve listened to it.”
When DeMarco went into a sporting goods store, Nelson stood outside the store and watched him try on a pair of hiking boots. Unger called back while DeMarco was trying on a third pair of boots.
“I listened to the tape,” Unger said. “He called a travel agent and it looks like he’s taking a trip to Peru. You want me to play the tape for you?”
Aw, shit. “Yeah,” Nelson said, and listened to the tape. This was bad. DeMarco was a dead man. And Unger might be, too.
Nelson called Kelly. He would let Kelly deal with Fiona.
Emma sat at her kitchen table, sipping herbal tea, thinking about Peru.
She’d only been there once, but she’d loved it
. Once you got away from Lima, a city of almost eight million, the country seemed pure, unspoiled. And the views of the Andes had been incredible. She went to her den and pulled out an atlas and saw that Pinchollo was located in the canyon country at the southern end of Peru—and these weren’t ordinary canyons. These were the deepest canyons in the world; the Colca Canyon was twice the depth of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Her curiosity piqued, she went online and did a little more research, looking mostly at sites that showed photographs of the region. It was breathtaking. She wanted to see those canyons.
Kelly was in a rental car, parked on Emma’s street, and knew he couldn’t sit there for long. This wasn’t like Georgetown where DeMarco lived, where you could barely find a parking space. This was a wealthy neighborhood; the houses were big, spaced far apart, and people parked in their garages. There were only three other vehicles parked on the street, and one of those belonged to a cable company. Plus, there was the fact that he was black. A lot of the folks in this neighborhood probably considered themselves liberals but he knew if he stayed where he was for very long, someone was bound to call the police.
As Fiona had expected, her headhunters had been able to find out more about Emma. Not only were the headhunters good—and extremely well connected because of their backgrounds—but they had gobs of Mulray Pharma’s money to throw at problems, and one of the things they learned was that she was ex-DIA.
“This woman had an awesome career,” one of the headhunters told Kelly. “I never heard of her when I worked at Langley because I was just too low on the totem pole to have any contact with her, but at the end of her career she was right up at the top in intelligence circles. I mean, talking to SecDef and the president’s national security adviser. And not only that, I heard a rumor that she still works for the agency occasionally, even though she’s supposed to be retired.”
A Pentagon spook, Kelly thought. This wasn’t good at all.
DeMarco, as near as he could tell, was just a low-level gofer on Capitol Hill. And although he was a lawyer, he’d apparently never practiced law, so he wasn’t even much of a legal threat when it came to getting Brian Kincaid out of jail. But Emma … She sounded bright, competent, and connected. And based on her house, she was rich, too. If she was an adversary, she could be a significant problem.
Kelly’s cell phone vibrated and he pulled it off his belt. It was Nelson.
“Aw, shit,” Kelly said when Nelson told him DeMarco was going to Pinchollo.
He called Fiona and gave her the bad news.
“Goddamnit all to hell!” Fiona shouted. “I want you to …” Then she stopped speaking. “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
Fiona walked over to a window in her office and looked out—although she wasn’t really looking at anything. She was trying to figure out what to do about DeMarco. She didn’t realize it but she was scratching her left forearm furiously.
Orson had told her not to kill DeMarco because he was afraid that if DeMarco was murdered, his death could lead back to Mulray Pharma. He had also told her she was not permitted to kill the man unless he gave his authorization. She thought about this for a moment and concluded: To hell with Orson and his authorization.
Orson was her boss in name only. Because of what they had done together, they were equal partners as far as she was concerned. And what was he going to do? Fire her if she disobeyed an order? No way was that going to happen. All she knew was that they were too close to the finish line—too close to her billion-dollar payoff—to allow DeMarco or anyone else to stop them. It was possible that DeMarco would go to Peru and find nothing—but it was also possible he’d go there and fuck everything up. She was not going to let that happen. She picked up the phone and called Kelly back.
“Take him out,” she said. “But you have to do it in such a way that it looks, I don’t know, random.”
“Random?” Kelly said.
“Yeah, you can’t make it look like he was singled out.”
“What do you want me to do, Fiona? Arrange for a lightning strike?”
“I want you to use your fucking head!” Fiona screamed. “We’re paying you and your no-neck partner ten million bucks, so earn it. Figure out a way to get rid of him where no one will suspect he was killed for any reason that can be connected to us.”
Kelly called Nelson and passed on what Fiona had said, including the no-neck comment, which made Nelson laugh. “Okay,” Nelson said, “I’ll look for an opportunity. But this guy’s leaving tomorrow, and I’m not sure we can set something up that fast. Maybe we should wait for him to get to Peru.”
“I don’t think Fiona would like that,” Kelly said.
After spending half an hour looking at Peruvian Web sites, Emma went back to the kitchen and poured another cup of tea.
As she sipped her tea, she thought about the last six months—and how they could have been the last six months of her life—and made up her mind. She picked up the phone and called DeMarco. He wasn’t at home and she didn’t bother to leave a message. She called his cell phone.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m at a sporting goods store. I need to get some boots for the trip. But, Jesus, these damn things are heavy. I got a pair on now and they feel like they weigh ten pounds apiece.”
“I’ll go,” Emma said.
“What?”
“I said, I’ll go to Peru for you.”
“Why would you do that?’
“Because I want to. Because I need to. I need to go someplace that’s … I don’t know. Pure. Wild. Untamed. Something.”
“What about your health?”
“I’m doing this for my health—my mental health.”
“Yeah, well, thanks, but I can’t let you do it. I mean, what if you got kidnapped?”
“Why on earth would someone kidnap me?”
“Because that’s what they do there.”
“You’re an idiot. I’m more likely to get kidnapped in Georgetown.”
DeMarco was pretty sure that wasn’t true, but he didn’t say so. “No,” he said. “I can’t let you do it. Phil Downing got killed after he went there and you could get killed, too, and I’m not going to have that on my conscience.”
“You don’t have any idea why Downing was killed,” Emma countered. “And if he was killed because he went to Peru, it’s because somebody knew he went there and knew what he found. But nobody knows that I’m involved in this thing.”
She was right about that, DeMarco thought, but before he could say anything, Emma said, “And let’s face it. I’ve got a lot better chance of finding out what Downing did in Peru than you do. I’ve got contacts there, and I speak Spanish and you don’t. What you need to do is check out Congressman Talbot and his chief of staff. You’re in a better position to do that than I am.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” DeMarco said, “but …”
“Look,” Emma snapped. “I’m going, and that’s all there is to it, and there’s no reason for both of us to go.”
DeMarco closed his cell phone. Should he or should he not go to Peru with Emma?
He finally concluded she was right. His time would be better spent trying to find a connection between the Warwick Foundation and Congressman Talbot, and she was more likely to learn something in Peru—and that was true whether she spoke Spanish or not. As for the danger of her going there, she was probably right about that, too. Hobson knew that he was interested in Downing’s trip to Peru, but no one knew that Emma was involved in his investigation.
He looked down at his feet, at the fourth pair of boots he’d tried on. He didn’t really need the boots now that he wasn’t going to Peru, but he kinda liked this pair. The other boots the salesman had shown him looked as if they’d been designed for nuts who wanted to scale Mount Everest—big, stiff, heavy clodhoppers. But these weren’t so heavy,
and they were lined with Gore-Tex and had rubber soles with some sort of tread that looked like you could walk up an ice wall. He decided to buy them. He had a pair of rubber boots he wore when it snowed, but these boots were much cooler than those.
Nelson watched DeMarco stomp around the sporting goods store in another pair of boots, the fourth pair the damn guy had tried on. It looked like he’d finally found a pair he liked, because he put the boots back in the box and took them to the sales counter.
When DeMarco left Tysons Corner, Nelson was a block behind him.
Christine’s reaction when Emma said she was going to Peru was predictable—she became almost hysterical. She said there was no way Emma should be going after what she’d been through with the cancer, and Emma explained, as best she could, that she needed to go.
She called a couple of DIA people she knew who were familiar with southern Peru, then went down to the basement and found an old knapsack. She tossed a baseball cap, lightweight rain gear, a couple changes of clothes, a jacket, and a pair of battered hiking boots into the knapsack. She wouldn’t take a tent or a sleeping bag; people in that region were hospitable and poor, and for a few dollars she’d find lodging. She went online to see about flights to Peru and saw that a United flight was departing for Lima in three hours. Damn. She had wanted to spend a little more time talking to Christine before she left, but now she’d have to hustle. She decided that rather than waste more time on the computer, she’d spend the time talking to Christine and buy her ticket at the airport.
She hugged Christine as she was leaving and told her not to worry. She said she’d call when she could but that cell phone coverage was bound to be spotty. Christine didn’t answer. She just stood there with her arms crossed over her chest. She was angry. Well, she’d get over it.
A Mercedes backed out of Emma’s garage, and Kelly looked at the woman driving and compared her with the photo Fiona’s headhunters had e-mailed him. It was Emma. He let her get a couple blocks ahead of him, then followed her down Old Dominion Drive and onto the Dulles Airport access road. When she parked in the long-term parking lot at the airport, he thought: This isn’t good.