“If this leads to anything, I think we owe that busboy a lunch.”
“I told him we’d put in a good word for him with the INS,” Art said. “He’s been trying to naturalize for a couple years now. Anyway, so we have two shooters who knew their intended victim and who wanted something from same.” His eyes asked for Aguirre’s read of the situation.
“Contract hit,” she observed flatly. “But still, why Portero?”
There were several possibilities that Art could think of, and probably a dozen more he knew would crop up along the way. “Okay, all the primary participants are Hispanic. One is from Florida.”
“Could have some OC involvement,” Frankie surmised, the activity of investigation easing the pain of grief. “There are several Cuban crime families that are trying to expand their influence, and they’re pretty ruthless from what I remember of the briefings.”
“Salvadoran and Panamanian, too,” Art added.
Frankie drained her first cup and slid it back for a refill. “That gives us a few thousand suspects, not counting the million or so we haven’t thought of yet.”
“Slow and steady. That’s how we win this race.” Art had come across that lesson after much grief. His natural tendency was to push, push, push. Getting past that sometimes destructive trait had been one of the biggest hurdles in his life. “We’ve got ten teams slated to run down things once we get a little more from Miami.”
Art’s phone rang. “Jefferson.” He smiled at Frankie. “Speak of the Devil. How’re you doing, Luke?... Yeah, it’s appreciated. He was a good kid. You have anything?” It took a minute for the Miami agent to relate the information. “Well, that is interesting. Sure appreciate your help. Hey, get some sleep. Bye.”
“Well?” Frankie inquired, wanting desperately for there to be something they could start with.
“Francisco Portero fled from Cuba earlier this year,” Art explained. “He came over on that commuter flight that just hopped across the Keys. There were a couple other flights that did the same thing back in ‘92 or ‘93. Can’t remember which. Maybe both. But that isn’t even the frosting.” His partner’s eyes scolded him for the pause in his release of the information. “Portero, up until he left, was translator for the Cuban ambassador to the UN.”
“So this was a defection,” Frankie observed, a question immediately coming to mind. “What language?”
“Lang—” Art smiled with embarrassment. It was the little things, the nuances, that he missed. He was a global thinker, while Frankie saw the trees in the forest. “I forgot to ask. I’m sure it’ll be in the hard copy he’s faxing.”
“Kind of a new spin on things,” Frankie commented. “A former Cuban diplomatic type defects and ends up dead before year’s end. Hit from home?”
It couldn’t be ruled out, Art thought, but the evidence didn’t point that way. “I don’t know about that. The busboy said the guy who called to Portero didn’t trill his R’s. He said it was pure gringo talk. If it is the case, though, then it points toward a silencing. Like Portero knew something that someone at home didn’t want him to tell.”
“Or he had something they wanted,” Frankie countered, remembering what the busboy had seen. “Or both.”
“Two places to check,” Art said. “INS and State. Portero would have automatically been granted asylum because of where he came from, so he would have had an interview with the immigration boys. They might know if he made any declarations when he came in, or if he asked to meet with any of the exile groups. That’s pretty common. They all offer some sort of assistance to newcomers. There might be something in there to help us.”
“And State?”
“I want to know what Portero did over the years, what sort of information he might have had access to. What other positions did he hold? Who he knew? Anything that could point to what he had that they wanted.”
Art jotted the requests for information down and had them taken to the office’s communication room for immediate transmittal to the respective government agencies.
“Good morning, folks.” It wasn’t, Special Agent Dan Jacobs knew. As supervising special agent of Technical Services in L.A., he had been there for the duration of this one. He had seen where Thom Danbrook had fallen and had made the tragic discovery of why the young agent’s gun had malfunctioned at the moment of truth. Bad news all around. But now he brought what could be some positives to the morning. “You want some leads?”
“What do you got?”
Jacobs pulled the first item from a manila envelope. “First is this.”
Art took the item, a business card advertising a place called Tony’s Tacos on Pico. He flipped it over, finding the real clue. “No area code,” he commented, handing the card with the scribbled phone number on the back across to his partner.
“The exchange is right for this area code,” Frankie observed. Her fingers squeezed the flimsy card. It was moist. “What’s with the dampness?”
“That brings me to number two.” Jacobs removed a clear plastic cassette tape from the envelope.
“Is that condensation?” Art inquired, noticing the fogging inside the unmarked protective plastic housing.
“You’ve got it. We found it balled up in a napkin on the table, like the dead guy had been trying to dry it off. The card was in his left-front pants pocket, and there was a good deal of wetness there. From what I could tell, he might have spilled some water on himself. There was a glass a little less than half-full still on the table. My guess is that the tape was in his pocket with the card, some water got on it, and he took it out to dry it off.”
“Any chance of getting to hear what’s on it?”
Jacobs nodded confidently to Art. “Luckily it was just water. We should be able to clean it up and at least get something off of it.
“Finally we have this.” He handed over a see-through evidence bag with tiny shards of clear plastic captured at the bottom. Several were stained dark by what appeared to Art to be blood. “We pulled these out of his shirt pocket.”
Bingo. “Shirt pocket. You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” Jacobs assured him. “They’re fragments of the same kind of cassette you have there. Identical, actually. Same manufacturer. There were also the same type of fragments in the wound right behind the pocket.”
Art looked to Frankie. “I think we’ll add that lunch to the ‘thank yous’ we give that busboy.” He turned back to Jacobs. “So we can assume that there was a similar tape in his shirt pocket that was hit by a bullet?”
“I think so,” Jacobs affirmed. “Oh, we also got the caliber of the guns. Three fifty-sevens.” Revolvers, unfortunately, did not give up their spent shell casings, requiring analysis of the bullets recovered from the victims. “I should have some model information later today, maybe tomorrow.”
“Great.” Art handed back the tape and the bag with the fragments. “Can I hang on to the card?”
“No prob.” Jacobs laid a hand on Frankie’s shoulder. “Hang in there.”
Frankie smiled and reached up, touching Jacobs’s hand with hers. “Thanks.”
Art called over two teams of agents after Jacobs had departed and tasked them with checking out the establishment on the card. Someone at Tony’s Tacos might recognize the photo taken from Portero’s driver’s license. An employee or patron might know him. Or it could be a cold trail.
But there might be a hot one to pick up on. “So our shooters took a tape.”
“And left one,” Frankie pointed out. “Why do you suppose that was?”
“Well, let’s assume they came for a tape, and to shut Portero up. Both of those are more ‘probable’ than ‘possible’ now. If they came to do what they did, I’d sure bet they’d have a complete wish list.”
“Then one of the tapes might have been, what? A decoy? Maybe just another tape? A duplicate? Which one?”
Art thought back to what Jacobs had given them a minute before. “It would have to be a decoy, something he could give up easily i
f challenged. You ever read some of the travel guides for New York? They suggest keeping a second wallet with a twenty-dollar ‘mugger’s fee’ in an outside pocket.”
“Like a shirt pocket,” Frankie said. “And keep the real thing in your pants pocket. The front one.”
“Right where the one we have came from.” Art smiled with satisfaction for the first time in eighteen hours. The others had been motivated by nervousness. “Our shooters may have gotten the wrong tape.”
“Which means they may be back for the real one.” Frankie knew that a question was inevitable. “But back where?”
Art held the business card up, flipping it over and over before stopping the motion with the number facing his partner. “Our freaked-out blond hostess said Portero was there to meet someone, and I doubt it was the two who showed up.”
“The card was in the same pocket as the tape,” Frankie carried the thought on. “You want to do a reverse search on it.”
“Why bother the phone company?” Art mused, scooting his chair forward and lifting the handset to his ear. “Fingers crossed it’s a two-one-three number.” He punched the seven numbers and waited.
“City desk,” the female voice answered on the other end.
Art’s face puzzled over the words. “City desk?” Oh, boy. “Uh, what paper is this?”
There was a quiet laugh. “The Los Angeles Times, sir.”
He hung up without carrying the conversation further. Just another wrong number. “It looks like Portero might have been about to give something to the Times.” The silencing theory was gaining credence exponentially.
“Let’s hope we have whatever it was,” Frankie said. “And now?”
Art stood and put his jacket back on, ready to go do some real work. “We visit an old friend.”
“Of whose?” Frankie gathered up her purse and followed her partner out of their cubicle, getting the answer only after they were in the elevator.
* * *
The car pulled up around the corner from the yellow bungalow in one of Los Angeles’s disappearing nice, quiet neighborhoods, its two occupants exiting and checking their surroundings before walking off.
They were dressed nicely, the elderly woman noticed, and very neat in appearance. But it was very early for anyone in the neighborhood to have visitors. Maybe they were police, she thought, as she muted the television, leaving the morning news anchor without a voice. As chairperson of the neighborhood watch, she was ever-vigilant. The gangs had stayed away from the middle-class area she had lived in for fifty years, but of late there had been gunshots at night in the distance. What was the world coming to?
So, from her early-morning perch behind the huge bay window her late husband had installed as a birthday present some twenty years before, she watched as the two strangers disappeared around the corner. They were walking normally, not hurried, not overly cautious, but it was her duty to watch over the block. There was no reason to call the police. They were busy enough with emergencies, she knew. But she did do a simple thing that the very pleasant lieutenant from the local police station had suggested when unknown visitors appeared in the neighborhood.
CHAPTER THREE
SKIRMISH LINES
The West Wing of the White House was built as a much-needed addition to the executive mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1902, forty years before the smaller East Wing was completed during the Second World War, and had developed into the second tier of power in the executive branch. The various working spaces of the President’s executive staff are there, spread over two levels, none more than a quick jaunt from the Oval Office in the southeast corner. Traditionally the ground floor housed the offices of the closest and most visible advisers, with the upper level saved for policy and council positions designated by the President. Located in the northwest corner of the roughly square wing, the office of the President’s national security adviser was farther in steps from the Oval Office than any of the close crowd on the ground floor. Only a few policy assistants one level up had to travel as far, though they were unlikely to ever have the access to the President that Bud DiContino had. That was something that transcended being simply “near” the Man. Bud had his ear, and his trust.
Sitting behind his dark wood desk in the office that he had spent more hours in than his own bed during the previous year, the NSA noted the time. The morning meeting called the night before by DCI Anthony Merriweather was not completely unexpected considering the fireworks that had erupted in Cuba within the last twelve hours. Bud’s head had barely hit the pillow in the wee hours when the call came notifying him that “something is going on in Cuba.” He was a bit surprised that the call had come not from Langley, but from the National Security Agency out at Fort Meade, the government monolith that did amazing things with communications and cryptographies. Signal intercepts of chaotic communications between Cuban military units had been the first indication of a “Significant Event,” to use intelligence parlance.
Why the word hadn’t come from the Agency, however, could be summed up in one word—Merriweather. The DCI had not taken anything close to a liking to Bud, who often found himself arguing the opposite side of positions held by the former senator from Massachusetts, who had also chaired the Joint Congressional Committee on Intelligence Oversight. That had been his path to the position he now held; that and some strategic arm-twisting by friends of the President on the Hill. Others should have been considered before Merriweather, Bud believed. Greg Drummond, for one, though his “junior” standing in the Agency had worked against such a move. The same for Pete Miner, the CIA’s number-two man. This had been a political appointment, it was clear. A return of favors not yet performed. Those would be delivered in two years— campaign time.
This was D.C., after all.
The NSA took his briefing folder and jacket and walked into his deputy’s adjoining office. “Nick, I’m heading over.”
Deputy NSA Nicholas Beney looked up from the computer. “Good luck.”
“Thanks. Don’t fry your eyes on that thing,” Bud said.
His boss was computer paranoid, which was funny considering the high-tech work he had done in the Air Force. Or maybe because of it. Beney found it quite amusing. “I can order one up for your office.”
“That’s all I need,” Bud said, turning away and beginning the same walk—right turn, left, then right again— he had made twice that morning already. One was for the President’s daily intelligence briefing—nothing much on the platter, other than the scant information on the fighting down South—and the other for a brief update on the modernization of the Russian BMEWS about to begin in earnest. He had handled both well, as usual.
Bud was last to enter the Oval Office. The President, DCI Merriweather, and DDI Greg Drummond were already there. There was a good-sized security case resting upon the single coffee table to the left of the President’s desk, its contents obvious to the NSA. Imagery. The Agency must have turned the cameras on Cuba real fast to get pictures this quickly. It wasn’t really a surprise. Ninety miles south of Florida there was, according to preliminary reports from the intelligence services and the four major networks, intense fighting. That was close, and worth keeping an eye on.
“Bud, good morning again,” the President said, standing as his NSA came in. The others stood also. “Have a seat.”
A couch was aligned along one side of the low table and two chairs along the other. The President sat at the head of the table, nearest the room’s center, in a chair the woodworking of which dated to the late 1700s. The DCI and his deputy were on the couch, leaving a simple choice for Bud, who took the chair closest to the President.
Drummond gave Bud a subtle nod and a smile. The DDI was a straight shooter and knew the NSA well. They had worked closely during the first six months of Bud’s tenure but not much since Merriweather’s arrival. The new DCI had pulled his people in, in an effort to define their roles more clearly as he saw them. In reality it was a semi smart move, as Congress was trim
ming the intelligence agency’s budget with a sharp, unselective budget axe. To make the Agency lean and productive was essential, as some on the Hill were trumpeting for the dissolution of the Agency, arguing that it should be consolidated into some pseudo-diplomatic/information-gathering arm of the State Department. The idea was a crock, but at least Merriweather was playing smart to stave off any serious effort to do away with the CIA. Despite the director’s aloof manner with him, Bud had to credit the man with having some foresight.
“James, you’re looking good,” Merriweather commented, looking up while laying the case flat and zipping it open. His eyes were a foggy brown, with small black centers that were further miniaturized behind the thick glasses he wore. The old-fashioned thick black frames looked awkward on his small head, which was covered by a full crop of short hair that matched closely the color of his gray tweed jacket. By appearances he could have been a college professor or a car salesman.
“I’m getting back into my morning jog.” And the name is Bud. The DCI took his educational and social lineage, which stretched from Exeter to Yale, quite seriously. Nicknames were not among his repertoire of verbiage, and only recently had he taken to calling those Agency personnel closest to him by the more casual forms of their given names, much to the delight of “Gregory” Drummond.
The DDI looked up from his own set of materials. “We’ll have to do that crack-o’-dawn run thing again.”
“None of that sprinting crap at the end like you did to me last time,” Bud insisted with a chuckle. “I’ve got almost a decade on you, remember.”
The DDI smiled. “Old men need motivation.”
The President watched the exchange with amusement. His advisers were normal people, just like him, though his California background had not lately manifested itself in the kind of relaxed, playful banter he was witness to. Just a week shy of his thirty-ninth birthday, he was the youngest President ever to serve, and, if all went well, in two years he would be the youngest elected. Age, though, had been warped during his short tenure. To look at him was to see the aging process accelerated, just as it had for each man to hold the highest elective office in the land. Responsibility brought with it work, and worry, and planning, and so many other elements of the job that he was certain his main recollection of his term in office would be the constant state of tiredness.
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