by Mike Lawson
“Yes,” Claire said. “They had hard-to-get, encrypted, military com gear. Then you have the lingo: roger this, roger that, return to jump-off. And the discipline. When Transport didn’t respond, the guy-in-charge never lost his cool, and when the two males showed up, instant damage assessment. Told his guys to beat feet and they did, no backtalk, no nothing. We’re talking serious discipline here, the kind that gets pounded into soldiers.”
Dillon waggled a hand, exposing a monogrammed cuff link. “Maybe,” he said, “but not definitive. What else?”
“Well, just the obvious. This was a hit. They knew Carrier was meeting Messenger. They may have been following Carrier. They went high-tech on the radios because they were afraid someone might intercept their chatter, maybe somebody like us, which further indicates they could be military or part of the G.”
Dillon nodded. No disagreement so far.
“This conversation took place at approximately one A.M., and I think this means that the meeting between Carrier and Messenger was intended to be secret. It was two people, for whatever reason, sneaking around in the dark. And now I’m winging it here, going totally from my gut, but I think Alpha and Bravo took long shots. I’m seeing snipers with night-vision scopes, sound suppressors, the whole enchilada.”
“Could be,” Dillon said.
Dillon, as Claire knew quite well, didn’t place much stock in gut feelings, even hers. He may have acted perpetually flippant but he preferred data.
“After they made the hit,” Claire said, “they were planning to take the bodies but Transport didn’t show. They got Messenger’s body but not Carrier’s, so for some reason getting Messenger was sufficient. If it hadn’t been, I think they would have popped the two males.” Claire stopped and took a breath. “And that’s it. End of speculation.”
“Do you have a location for this event?”
“Just the greater D.C. area. We couldn’t get anything better.”
“Why not?”
“We’re looking into that. We could have a software problem.”
“I don’t see how the software—”
Before Dillon could say more, Claire interrupted him. She didn’t have time to get embroiled in some nerdy technical discussion, and sometimes Dillon could be as much of a geek as her technicians. “Look, I’ll deal with the location issue, but do you want me to follow up on the intercept or not?”
Dillon hesitated and she knew why. Two people may have been killed, but solving homicides wasn’t his job—or hers. They could have solved a lot of homicides had they wanted to, but simple murder, at least from Dillon Crane’s perspective, wasn’t really all that important. On the other hand, the fact that these particular killers had been using encrypted radios and might be U.S. military personnel put a whole different spin on things. It could mean some other agency was keeping something from his agency.
And that was a no-no.
“Yes, let’s follow up on it,” Dillon said.
4
DeMarco got a bucket of balls and carried his clubs over to a slot on the driving range between two women in their fifties. His plan was to spend the next two hours whacking golf balls, concentrating particularly on his pitching, because he couldn’t pitch for shit. He was gonna play a lot of golf in the next seven days, and as he hadn’t played since last fall, he wanted to get the kinks out of his swing before he played an actual round.
Normally, he wouldn’t have a week to devote solely to golf, but he did at the moment because the two most important people in his life—and, therefore, the two people who most often prevented him from doing what he wanted to do—were both out of town. The first of those people was his boss.
His boss was inconsiderate and selfish and never gave a moment’s thought as to how his decisions adversely impacted DeMarco’s life. He was also cunning, conniving, corrupt, and unscrupulous—and, if all that wasn’t bad enough, he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. Now had his boss been a used car salesman, all those negative character traits might not have been so surprising—or maybe even expected. But his boss wasn’t a used car salesman. His boss was John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
DeMarco was, for lack of a better term, Mahoney’s fixer. He was the guy the Speaker assigned when he had some shady job he didn’t want to give to a legitimate member of his staff, jobs that were often morally questionable if not downright illegal. Jobs such as collecting undocumented contributions from Mahoney’s constituents or finding things out about other politicians that Mahoney could use to control their vote. There was very little DeMarco liked about his job, but when Mahoney was not in D.C. DeMarco was often left to his own devices, and right now his employer was lying in a hospital having his gallbladder removed—and no doubt complaining mightily to anyone forced to care for him.
DeMarco had no idea what function the gallbladder performed, but he presumed it wasn’t anything too important if they were simply plucking it out of Mahoney’s corpulent corpus. He wouldn’t have been surprised, however, if the surgeon removed several other organs as well. Mahoney not only drank too much, he also smoked half a dozen cigars a day, and DeMarco figured a heart-liver-lung transplant was overdue.
The second person currently absent from his life was Angela DeCapria, his lover—who also happened to be an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. They met last year when DeMarco was trying to figure out which member of Congress had leaked a story to a reporter that resulted in a CIA agent being killed. When they met, Angela had been married; she was now divorced and living part-time with him.
Unfortunately—and unlike DeMarco—Angela was serious about her career, and when her boss told her she had to go to Afghanistan for a while, she packed her bags without hesitation and flew away. And because she worked for the CIA, she couldn’t tell DeMarco exactly what she would be doing, how long she’d be gone, or how to reach her—all of which annoyed him. He was sure his annoyance would be replaced by loneliness—and horniness—within a few days.
So for at least a week he was on his own, and he intended to take advantage of the situation by doing only things he liked to do—one of those things being golf. He took his place on a square of green Astroturf, placed a ball on the rubber tee inserted into the carpet, pulled his driver from his bag, and made a couple of practice swings to loosen up. Wham! The heavy-set grandma on his right hit a ball—smacked it about a hundred and fifty yards. Using a three iron. Jesus! He wished he’d found someplace else to stand. He stepped up to take his first shot of the year—and his cell phone rang. Shit!
“Is this Joseph DeMarco?” the caller asked.
“Yeah,” DeMarco said, relieved it wasn’t Mahoney calling from his hospital bed to make his life miserable.
“This is Detective Jack Glazer, Arlington County Police. I’d like to talk to you.”
“Police? Why?” DeMarco said.
“Hasn’t the FBI called you or been to see you?” Glazer asked.
“No, why would they?” DeMarco said.
“Huh,” Glazer said. To DeMarco it sounded as if Glazer was surprised the FBI hadn’t already contacted him.
“What’s this about?” DeMarco asked.
Glazer hesitated. “Mr. DeMarco, I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, but Paul Russo was killed last night. You were listed as an emergency contact on a card he had in his wallet.”
“Paul Russo?” DeMarco said—and then he remembered who that was. Geez, he hadn’t talked to the guy in three, maybe four years.
“Are you saying you don’t know him?’ Glazer said.
“No. I know him. He’s like a second cousin or something. His mother was my mother’s cousin. How was he killed?”
“I think it would be better if we talked about this face-to-face. Would you mind coming to my office?”
Glazer’s office turned out to be a desk in a room filled with half a dozen other desks—and the room was bedlam. Guys in shirtsleeves that DeMarco assumed were detectives were sitt
ing at some of the desks, shouting into phones, and four uniformed cops were also in the room. Two of the uniformed cops were holding on to a guy who had a shaved head and tats all over his arms. The guy’s hands were cuffed behind his back and he was screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs.
DeMarco told one of the detectives that he was there to see Glazer, and the detective pointed to a man sitting at a cluttered desk at the back of the room. When DeMarco introduced himself, Glazer stood up, said, “Let’s go someplace where we can hear each other talk,” and led DeMarco to a small, windowless space equipped with a table and four metal chairs. DeMarco noticed a surveillance camera mounted high on one wall, pointed down at the table, and assumed he was in an interrogation room, which, for some reason, made him feel uncomfortable.
Glazer was a stocky, serious-looking guy in his fifties. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt, his tie was undone, and he appeared harried and tired. After he thanked DeMarco for coming and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee, which DeMarco declined, Glazer told him that Paul Russo had been found dead last night at the Iwo Jima Memorial, killed by a single gunshot wound to the head.
“He was shot?” DeMarco said, unable to believe what he was hearing.
“Yeah. What can you tell me about him?” Glazer asked.
Still stunned by what he’d been told, DeMarco said, “I barely knew him. He moved to Washington about five years ago. He said he wanted to get out of New York and try someplace else, that he needed a change of scenery. When he got here, he looked me up, probably because my mother told him to, but, like I said, I hardly knew him. When we were kids, I didn’t have much to do with him because he was younger than me, and the only times I ever saw him were at family things—weddings, funerals, things like that.”
“So why would he have your name in his wallet as an emergency contact?”
“I don’t know, but I’m the only relative he had that lives around here. He wasn’t married, both his parents are dead, and he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so maybe he couldn’t think of anyone else to write down. When he first moved here, we had lunch one day and I showed him a few areas where he might want to rent an apartment, but that was about it. I spoke to him a couple times on the phone afterward, but I never saw him again.”
“Huh,” Glazer said.
DeMarco wasn’t sure what that meant. “Huh” seemed to be something Glazer said whenever he heard something that didn’t match what he was thinking.
“Was your cousin wealthy or famous or connected to someone important?”
“Famous? No, he wasn’t famous. He was just a nurse, as far as I know. Look, I appreciate you calling me, but if you’re thinking I can help you figure out who killed him, I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help.”
“And you said the FBI didn’t contact you?”
“Yeah, I already told you that. Why would they? Are they involved in this?”
“Yeah,” Glazer said. “Actually, it’s their case.”
“Then why are you—”
“Like I said, Russo was shot at the memorial, which is in Arlington County, and when the body was discovered the Arlington P.D. responded. But the thing is, the park’s federal property and it was sort of a toss-up as to who had jurisdiction, us or the feds. Well, I had just gotten to the scene—this was about two A.M.—when an FBI agent shows up and takes the case away from me. And that’s what I don’t get, Mr. DeMarco. I mean, if your cousin had been some kinda big shot I could understand it, but based on what you’re telling me, he wasn’t. So why’s the FBI so interested in him?”
“I have no idea,” DeMarco said, but what he was really thinking was: since there wasn’t anyone else to do it, he was going to have to get Paul’s body and arrange for a funeral. Shit.
“One thing I didn’t tell you,” Glazer said. “When we found your cousin he had cash in his wallet and his credit cards hadn’t been taken, so he wasn’t killed in a robbery. So there’s a possibility—no offense intended—that he might have been pedaling meds. I mean, since he was a nurse he probably had access to all kinds of medications and maybe he was dealing painkillers, tranks, things like that. But—”
“Narcotics? Paul? I kinda doubt that. Like I said, I didn’t know him too well, but he always struck me as being pretty straitlaced.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right, and that’s what I was going to say. He didn’t have a criminal record, and guys who get killed over narcotics usually do. Which made me wonder if he was a witness involved in some sort of federal case.”
“Well, if he was, I wouldn’t know,” DeMarco said. Glazer started to say something else, but DeMarco interrupted him. “Detective, if this isn’t your case, why do you care why Paul was killed or why the FBI’s involved?”
Glazer rubbed a hand over his face as if trying to scrub away the fatigue. Finally he said, “Because he was killed on my turf, DeMarco. And because there’s something strange going on here. If your cousin was just some ordinary schmuck who had the bad luck to get shot, the feds wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him and would have insisted I take the case. But that’s not what happened and it bugs me. I was hoping you could help me figure out what the hell’s going on.”
It sounded to DeMarco like this was some sort of pissing contest between the local cops and the Bureau, and he had absolutely no interest in it. “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” he said. “Unless there’s something else, I need to get his body and make arrangements for a funeral.”
“You’ll have to talk to the FBI about that,” Glazer said. “And they won’t release the body until an autopsy is done. The agent in charge is a guy named Hopper.”
5
Charles Bradford didn’t like the expression shit happens because too often fate was blamed for poor preparation and execution. But sometimes, shit did happen. Sometimes, the best-planned operations went awry for reasons the planners could have never imagined. The attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1980 was one of the best examples he could think of.
In 1979, the American Embassy in Tehran was taken over by an Iranian mob, fifty-three Americans were held hostage and, after almost a year of attempting to negotiate their release, the president finally authorized a military mission to free them. The mission was planned for months, all possible intelligence was collected, the best personnel were selected—and then everything went to hell. One helicopter had an avionics system failure, another had a hydraulic system failure, and an unexpected sandstorm occurred. The mission finally ended in total disaster when a refueling plane crashed into a third helicopter, killing eight U.S. servicemen.
Shit happens.
Bradford knew something similar had happened with Levy’s operation. John Levy was a careful man, a man who thought things through. He had worked for Bradford for a long time and had always performed admirably under the most difficult conditions. So even before Levy gave him the details, Bradford was sure that whatever had gone wrong had been totally out of Levy’s control—an act of God, if you will. As it turned out, he was right.
“A drunk hit the ambulance I had staged for moving the bodies,” Levy said. “It was a … a total fluke.”
“Why didn’t you have the ambulance right at the scene?” Bradford said.
“I thought it might stand out and somebody might remember it. And it was only two blocks away, less than a minute away. But this drunk? He takes a corner going about sixty and hits the ambulance head on. The drunk was killed, a woman with him is in critical condition, and my man was injured.”
“What sort of injuries?”
“Internal injuries and major head trauma. He’s in a coma. I have someone inside the hospital, and if he comes out of the coma I’ll be called immediately. I’ll make sure he doesn’t talk to anyone, but it may take a few days to get him out of the hospital because—”
Bradford interrupted him. “John, you know what’s at stake here. This man poses a significant risk. He may talk and not even realize he’s talking. I know h
e’s a good man, but—”
Bradford stopped speaking and just stared at Levy. Finally, Levy said, “Yes, sir. I—I understand.”
Bradford could see the fate of the driver bothered Levy—and this was understandable. Levy wasn’t a demonstrative man, but neither was he without compassion. Nor was Charles Bradford. Nonetheless, and as Bradford had said, Levy knew that the life of a single man couldn’t be allowed to compromise everything they were doing.
John Levy was tall and broad-shouldered and had a marathon runner’s physique: no excess fat, long ropy muscles. His hands were huge and his wrists were the size of two by fours. Levy had the most powerful-looking wrists Bradford had ever seen. He wore his dark hair short and his face was long and somber with sunken cheeks and dark circles under deep-set, morose brown eyes. He looked like a man who rarely slept and never smiled; Bradford sometimes visualized him in a Franciscan monk’s brown cowl, the hood covering his head, shadowing his face. But Levy wasn’t religious, at least not in the conventional sense. What he was, above all else, was a patriot.
“Does the driver have a family?” Bradford asked.
Levy shook his head. “No wife or children. His mother and father are in Kansas. Farm people.”
Salt of the earth, Bradford thought.
“Have him die somewhere overseas, in combat,” Bradford said. “I don’t want his parents to think their son was wasted in a senseless traffic accident.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And the rest of your team?” Bradford asked.
“They’re already on their way out of the country.”
“Good. And the two men who stumbled upon the scene?”
A second act of God, those two men showing up near the Iwo Jima Memorial at that time of night.
“I had Hopper interview them,” Levy said. “They didn’t see anything. They don’t know anything. They’re not a problem.”
“Good,” Bradford said. He said nothing more for a moment as he analyzed everything Levy had told him. “I think the only thing I’m concerned about was bringing in Hopper too fast. Taking the case away from Arlington and giving it to Hopper was the right thing to do, but it might have been better if you had delayed that a bit.”