by Mike Lawson
He turned the corner and looked down the hallway—but the cop wasn’t at his station. At first he thought that maybe the cop had gone to the restroom or was bullshitting with the nurses. Then he noticed that the chair where the cop sat wasn’t in the hallway. What the hell? He continued up the hallway and pushed open the door to Nelson’s room. The lights were out in the room, but the hallway lighting provided enough illumination that he could see someone lying in bed and could hear him snoring. Kelly smiled. Nelson had always been calm before a mission, but Kelly figured he would have been wide awake tonight.
He walked over to the bed and poked Nelson, and the man turned his head and opened his eyes—and Kelly realized it wasn’t Nelson. The guy in the bed looked about eighty years old—and for just a moment, Kelly thought he was looking at one of the old men he’d killed in Peru. He recovered from the shock immediately and realized they must have moved Nelson to a different room, maybe to a different floor. Son of a bitch!
He walked out of the room and directly to the nurses’ station. One of the nurses was a young gal who looked like she might be Filipino. The other nurse was a fat, tough-looking black woman. The Filipino was saying, “So I go see his teacher, and I ask her how come—”
Kelly interrupted her. “Where’s the guy who was in Room 526? The guy with the gunshot wounds who was being guarded by the cops?”
The black woman frowned, probably not liking Kelly’s tone of voice or maybe the wild-eyed way he looked. “Who are you?” she said. But the Filipino said, “He’s gone. They discharged him today.”
“Discharged him?” Kelly said.
“Yeah, I heard they took him to prison,” the Filipino nurse said.
“Why are you asking about the patient?” the older nurse said, but Kelly turned and walked back to the elevator without responding.
What the hell was going on? What did she mean they took him to prison?
Kelly was livid. He was going to give Nelson’s lawyer a beat-down when he saw him, he was gonna beat him like he’d never beaten anyone in his life. He realized then that he didn’t know where Conroy lived; he always met the lawyer in the underground parking garage in the building where the lawyer worked. He pulled out his cell phone, planning to call directory assistance to get Conroy’s address, then stopped. Slow down, he told himself. He didn’t know if Conroy had a wife and kids who lived with him, and if he went to the lawyer’s house he’d have to deal with them, too. It was two-thirty in the morning. The lawyer would show up at his office in a few hours—and Kelly would be there when he did.
As soon as Conroy stepped from his car, Kelly exited the van—the van that he’d bought to transport Nelson. There was no one else in the parking garage when Conroy arrived, but Kelly wouldn’t have cared if there had been. He strode toward Conroy aggressively, and Conroy must have seen the simmering rage in his face because he said, “Wait, wait, wait a minute.” Kelly didn’t wait. He grabbed Conroy by the throat and slammed him up against his Lexus. Then, because he was so pissed, he slammed him again, practically breaking Conroy’s back.
“What happened to Nelson?” Kelly said. “A nurse at the hospital said he was taken to prison.”
Conroy tried to talk but all that came out of his mouth was a squawk, and Kelly realized he was squeezing the man’s throat so hard he couldn’t speak. He relaxed his grip and the lawyer croaked, “They arraigned him yesterday.”
“Arraigned him?”
“Yeah,” Conroy said. “The county prosecutor said they couldn’t afford the expense of continuing to guard Nelson in the hospital, so he brought a judge to his hospital room and they arraigned him and the judge refused to give him bail.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you call me yesterday and tell me this?”
“I didn’t know about the arraignment until a half an hour before it happened. They sprung it on me. It was an ambush. And I did call you. I left a message on your cell.”
“Bullshit,” Kelly said, and he pulled his cell phone off his belt and saw he had a voice mail waiting. The lawyer must have called when he was in the shower or maybe he just didn’t hear the phone ring. He’d suffered some hearing loss on a mission in Iran. “Where’s Nelson now?” he asked.
“Wallens Ridge. The prison at Big Stone Gap.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Kelly muttered. “So what happens next?”
“He’ll go to trial. The court hasn’t set a date yet but it’ll be at least four or five months from now.” He saw the anger flare in Kelly’s eyes and quickly added, “Look, I’m sorry, but the prosecutor is being completely unreasonable. I called him yesterday to see what kind of a deal I could get for Nelson, and he said he wouldn’t make a deal. He said he has no doubt he’ll win at trial and that the judge—the same asshole who refused to give him bail—will throw the book at him. And there’s something else.”
“What?” Kelly said. What more bad news could there possibly be?
“There was a guy at Nelson’s arraignment yesterday, a guy named DeMarco, and—”
“Shit,” Kelly said.
“Do you know who he is?”
“Yeah. He’s a lawyer who works for Congress.”
“Congress? Well, I don’t know what Congress has to do with this, but yesterday I saw DeMarco talking to the judge and the prosecutor, shaking their hands and patting them on the back, like he was telling them they’d done a good job. The prosecutor was definitely kissing his ass.”
Goddamnit, Kelly thought. It looked like somebody had decided that Nelson was the guy to squeeze to find out what Mulray Pharma had done—and it looked like DeMarco was the one applying the pressure. DeMarco had started off as a guy halfheartedly poking into Phil Downing’s death and had somehow ended up exposing everything. And now he was trying to fuck up Nelson’s life. It was time to kill DeMarco.
His first priority, however, was to see if he could come up with a way to get Nelson out of Wallens Ridge—but he knew freeing him from a prison was going to be a thousand times harder than springing him from a hospital.
His jabbed two fingers into Conroy’s chest. “You get your ass down to Wallens Ridge today and see how Nelson’s being treated, see if they’re taking care of him the way they’re supposed to. And if they’re not, you fuckin’ well better do something about it. Call me this afternoon.”
39
Bernie Poole placed his small feet up on his desk, laced his small hands behind his balding head, and asked himself a question: What did he know about Bill Hobson?
He knew Hobson had a dog and spent a lot of money on it. He had an ex-wife in Dayton, Ohio, a son in Toledo, Ohio, and a daughter in Lexington, Kentucky, but he hadn’t phoned any of them in years. He rented movies from Netflix, shopped at Safeway, and bought pizzas from a place called Tacconelli’s.
He had almost four hundred grand in cash. The money had been transferred from an account in the Caymans to a Philadelphia checking account and then Hobson had cleaned out the Philadelphia account. He wasn’t using his credit cards or his cell phone, and he hadn’t bought an airline ticket. Not much to go on, Bernie had to admit—but he’d found people knowing a whole lot less than he did about Bill Hobson.
While employed at the CIA, Bernie had spent most of his time in front of a computer. He never operated in the field, never carried a weapon, and, except for a couple of classes he attended, never left Langley. At Langley, he started out as an intelligence analyst, but following 9/11, he found terrorists—and people who knew terrorists and sent money to terrorists. Bernie suspected that half the people he tracked down weren’t terrorists at all but just guys unlucky enough to be stuck with names like Ali or Mohammad. Whatever the case, Bernie spent ten years finding people who didn’t want to be found—and he was good at it.
Upon retiring from the agency, he and two other guys from Langley decided to set up their own shop. They weren’t private detectives, and the
y weren’t licensed as such. They didn’t advertise—you had to have connections in the right places to know about them—and on their tax returns they listed their occupations as corporate consultants. And, depending on your definition of the word corporate, that was somewhat true. But headhunters, as Fiona thought of them, was a more accurate job description, although even that word didn’t capture the total scope of Bernie’s services or the nature of his clients, or the depths he’d go to satisfy them.
Some of what Bernie and his pals did was rather mundane. For example, if a company was planning to hire an executive for several hundred thousand dollars a year, Bernie and his associates would make sure the executive’s resume matched reality; too many guys claimed to have graduated from Harvard when they really hadn’t. Or if you were a party boss and wanted to be sure the candidate you were backing was as squeaky-clean as he claimed to be, Bernie was the man to assist you; it was better to learn of your candidate’s past transgressions from Bernie than from an article in the New York Times. Then there were clients like Mulray Phama. When Fiona needed to locate a charismatic, debt-ridden, foreign-born physician to help test drugs in an unorthodox manner, and an ex-convict capable of managing a relief organization—Bernie was the man she came to.
But Bernie’s services went beyond simply researching people’s backgrounds. He and his pals were literally headhunters. They had found crooked accountants who had dipped their sticky fingers into the till, drug mules who’d absconded with bags of white powder that didn’t belong to them, and bigmouthed mobsters who ratted out their pals and thought they were safe in the arms of the Witness Protection Program. It didn’t matter how far they ran, how deep and dark the hole in which they tried to hide, Bernie and his buddies found them all. Eventually.
What made Bernie so good at his job was that when he was at Langley he developed contacts in a lot of organizations, both private and public—organizations like credit card companies and telephone companies and law enforcement agencies. People in these organizations helped either because the government forced them to or out of a sense of patriotism. Now that he was retired from the CIA, he discovered that these same people would still help. It just took cash—and a client like Mulray Pharma had buckets of that.
The way Bernie found folks most often was by tracking banking transactions, credit card charges, and cell phone calls. A credit card and cell phone were, from Bernie’s perspective, almost as good as a GPS device strapped to a sex offender’s ankle. And the first thing he did to find Hobson was look at his credit card and cell phone records, which was how he knew about Hobson’s dog and his preference for Tacconelli’s pizzas. The other thing people invariably did, even when they were on the run, was call friends and relatives, and Bernie would monitor the friends’ and relatives’ phone records.
The problem with Hobson was that he didn’t seem to have any friends and he never called his relatives, and when he saw that Hobson wasn’t using his credit cards or cell phone, he knew that finding the guy was going to take some time and effort—and Fiona had indicated that she didn’t have a lot of time. Actually, Fiona had screamed at him that he’d better find Hobson in a hurry or she was never going to use his useless ass again. Fiona was not the ideal client. He’d worked for drug dealers who were more civil.
Bernie figured his best chance for finding Hobson was through his dog. According to his credit card records, a veterinarian on Girard Avenue in Philly cared for Hobson’s mutt, and every three months he paid the vet about a hundred bucks. And every month there was a sixteen-dollar credit card charge to PetMeds.com. So it looked like Hobson bought some sort of medication for his dog, though Bernie couldn’t understand why he paid the vet every three months. Quarterly checkups? That seemed kind of excessive.
Finally he just called the Philadelphia vet. He told the young lady who answered the phone that he was Bill Hobson’s neighbor and that Hobson had left his dog with him.
“Bill was called away,” Bernie said, trying to sound flustered. “Some kind of big emergency. But he was so rattled by whatever was going on, he didn’t explain very well about the medicine I’m supposed to give the dog, and he said if he was gone very long, I had to take it to your clinic. I don’t know what to do.”
Bernie figured animal doctors wouldn’t be superconcerned about patient confidentiality since the patient was a four-legged critter—and he was right. The young lady told him all about Hobson’s pet. She said the animal suffered from a mild form of epilepsy and took phenobarbital to control seizures, and you just mixed a pill in with the dog’s food.
“The thing is,” the young lady said, “phenobarbital can cause liver problems and Mr. Hobson insists that we test the General’s liver function every three months, which really isn’t necessary, but he’s a real mother hen when it comes to his pet.”
The general? Bernie thanked the lady—and figured she’d just given him what he needed to catch Bill Hobson. At some point, Hobson would contact his Philadelphia vet and have his dog’s medical records sent to wherever he was staying. Or maybe he’d have to contact the vet to get authorization to refill his dog’s prescription and, since he wasn’t using his credit cards, wouldn’t be able to get the medication online. What Bernie would do was start watching the veterinarian’s phone records—he could get those—and start looking for calls coming from and going to out-of-state pharmacies and out-of-state vets, and he’d eventually figure out where Hobson was staying and track him down.
Hmmm. Yeah, that would work, but it was going to take way too long. The dog—The General?—wasn’t due for a liver test for another fifty days. No way would Fiona stand for that. He had to come up with a faster way to locate Hobson.
And then Bernie got lucky.
Hobson got a speeding ticket in Morristown, Tennessee, for going thirty-two in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. A small-town revenue generator in the form of a speed trap, and Bill Hobson put his foot right in it. And for some reason, the cop who stopped Hobson contacted the police in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol, and the Pennsylvania DMV to see if Hobson had any outstanding warrants. When the cop contacted the Pennsylvania DMV Bernie was notified, because one of the first things he had done to find Hobson was talk to a source there to get information about Hobson’s car—and his source told him about the inquiry from the Tennessee cop. The great news about the speeding ticket was that Bernie now knew the general direction Hobson was traveling. He also knew that Hobson wasn’t driving the Taurus that was registered to him but instead had a Toyota Camry.
Bernie pulled out a United States road map and found Morristown, Tennessee. It appeared that Hobson was heading in a southwesterly direction—not due south toward Florida or due west—and this made Bernie wonder if Hobson might be going to Texas and was planning to cross into Mexico. If he crossed the border, it would be harder to find him, because Bernie didn’t have contacts in Mexico like he had in the U.S. He did, however, have numerous contacts in Homeland Security from his days at the CIA, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection worked for Homeland. Maybe, Bernie thought, he could convince his pals in Homeland that Hobson was a fugitive and get them looking for him at the Mexican border crossings—assuming Hobson was planning to cross the border, which was a big assumption. And then Bernie had what he considered to be a brilliant idea, the word fugitive having given him the idea.
He called Fiona and said, “I’ve got a way to track Hobson down in a hurry, but it’s going to cost a bundle and it’ll involve the cops.”
“What’s your definition of a bundle?” Fiona said.
“Fifty K.”
“Shit, is that all? What’s your plan?”
Bernie told her.
One of Bernie’s contacts from his days at Langley was a guy who worked at the Hoover Building in D.C. The guy wasn’t an agent—he was an IT weenie—and he helped Bernie by looking things up in the FBI’s databases, and Bernie repaid these favors wi
th a case of single malt or good seats at a Redskins game. What Bernie wanted this time, however, was going to cost a whole lot more than a case of Glenfiddich.
“Jesus, Bernie! I’ll lose my job if it’s traced back to me,” the guy said when Bernie told him what he wanted. “Hell, I could go to jail.”
“Can’t you think of a way to do it without having it traced back to you?”
“Maybe, but I’m not gonna take the chance.”
“Twenty-five thousand,” Bernie said.
His FBI pal didn’t say anything for a long time. “Give me a couple of hours to think about this and I’ll get back to you.”
Bernie thanked him, then spent a few minutes thinking about how he would spend the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d just made.
Two hours later Bernie called Fiona and gave her an update.
“We’re all set. The FBI is going to e-mail a bulletin to all law enforcement agencies located in the direction I think Hobson is traveling, which is southwest, toward Texas. The bulletin will say that Hobson was last seen in Morristown, Tennessee, is a convicted child molester, and is suspected of kidnapping a five-year-old girl in Pennsylvania. The bulletin will include Hobson’s DMV photo and the make and license plate number for his car and will say that he’s traveling with a dog. Now if the cops spot him, he’ll be detained and questioned, but at some point the cops will notify the FBI and, when they do, my guy at the Bureau will know and he’ll call me. But the thing is, the call won’t go directly to my guy. It’ll go to an FBI hotline number and whoever is on the hotline will pass the information on to the Bureau’s kidnapping guys and somebody will eventually figure out the bulletin’s a fake and the FBI will tell the cops to let Hobson go. What this means is that you’ll have maybe an hour—two at the most—from the time Hobson is picked up until he’s released.”