The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Nice. So this guy comes packing bio?”

  “Lab says it was probably ant poison, which in soluble powder form is based on a cholinesterase inhibitor. Nerve agent, in English. Get it at any home-supply store.”

  “Wouldn’t you taste or smell that shit?”

  “Not, apparently, if you boil it first.”

  “Our boy’s been to some interesting schools, then,” Swamp said. “So how do you want to play this at the bank?”

  “We’re on the Ballard homicide. I’ll tell him you’re along because it’s international. Mention of the Secret Service tends to make foreigners straighten right up. Plus, in Saudi Arabia, that term has a totally different connotation, if you follow me.”

  Swamp smiled. It surely did. “More like gestapo,” he said. “And above all, we want a description, plus anything they can tell us about who this guy is and why they gave him money?”

  “Right,” Jake said. “This looks like the place.”

  They pulled up in front of an elegant stone building with a circular driveway. A pair of security types were sitting in a large Mercedes parked at one end of the arc. Jake turned into the driveway, followed by Howell. The security guards were out of their car to meet them as soon as the cops got out of their respective cars. Swamp halfway expected some guff, but the guards, large men who looked like Germans to him, told them in excellent English that the managing director was expecting them. One of them began mumbling into a small radio.

  Inside, the lobby was unlike any bank Swamp had ever been in. It looked more like someone’s gracious town house, with gorgeous carpets on marble floors and a huge vaulted ceiling. There were three service desks at one end of the lobby, all manned by men. Two very handsome young men in glistening Armani suits appeared to escort them back through ten-foot-high rosewood double doors to Emir Mutaib’s office. When the four of them were seated on sofas in an anteroom, two servants dressed in white uniforms brought out a coffee service on a silver tray. Once everyone had coffee, the servants withdrew, the doors to the inner office opened, and Mutaib made his grand entrance. Swamp had been expecting a dark-skinned, bearded, beefy individual in white robes and headdress, but instead, a slim man of medium height with professionally styled dark hair appeared. His face was long and narrow, with delicately arched eyebrows, dark brown eyes, bright white teeth, and taut olive skin descending into a carefully groomed pointed black beard. He was wearing an elegant double-breasted tweed suit, a white shirt with a regimental tie and a tie pin, and dark cordovan wing tips. He greeted them in what Swamp recognized as an upper-class British accent, Oxbridge-anointed, complete with a hint of the softened r’s affectation. Mutaib sat down in a large chair, shot his French cuffs, crossed his legs, and beamed at them expectantly. The two young men, one of them holding a small folder, hovered attentively just behind him.

  Jake made introductions, and Mutaib formally recognized each man there, repeating their names but not shaking hands. He gave Swamp’s face an extra second of inspection when he heard mention of the Secret Service. Or maybe it’s just my lovely mug, Swamp thought. People often looked twice, or even three times, furtively, though, as if afraid of being turned to stone.

  “Gentlemen. How may the Royal Kingdom Bank be of assistance to you today?” he asked.

  Jake took the lead, explaining the circumstances of the investigation in very broad terms, then described the purchasing of the Suburban. “Basically, as I said on the phone, we want to know who this individual is, and we’re curious why the Royal Kingdom Bank would cut him a preauthorized check like that.”

  Mutaib raised his right hand, and one of the young men sprang forward to deliver the slim folder to his outstretched hand. He opened it and read for one or two seconds.

  “This individual was named Erich Hodler,” Mutaib began, still reading from the folder. “He is a German national with a valid passport. He came into the bank with twenty thousand Euros in cash and requested a preauthorized bank draft, made out to the automobile merchant in question. He said he had found the automobile he wanted to buy, and he requested that we send the bank draft via messenger service to the merchant.”

  “And you just did it?”

  “Well, of course, Detective Sergeant. Why not? His identity papers were in order. The Euros were genuine. He was willing to pay our fee for such services.”

  “But he’s a foreigner,” Howell said.

  “And so are we, Detective Sergeant,” Mutaib said with a faintly patronizing smile. “We reported the transaction to the appropriate authorities here in Washington, of course, because of the cash, but I must say it was an entirely routine transaction. Has this individual done something wrong? Is he a criminal?”

  “We don’t know,” Swamp said, speaking for the first time. “But we want to speak to him. Can anyone here give a description of this man?”

  “A description?” Mutaib looked perplexed for a moment.

  “Yes,” Jake said. “What’d he look like?”

  Mutaib looked pained. He turned his head in the direction of one of his attendants and muttered something in Arabic. The young man left the room immediately, punching numbers into a tiny cell phone as he hurried through a door.

  “We shall see if anyone remembers,” Mutaib announced. “Although it’s hardly likely.”

  “Are there security tapes? A video system for your service desks?”

  Mutaib nodded. “Yes, of course. But they are—what is the term? Ah, yes, they are ‘looped,’ I’m told. One day’s recording is made right over the top of the previous day’s recording, unless, of course, the nightly audit surfaces a problem of some kind. Bad check, a forgery. Then we would keep them. The tapes, I mean.”

  “Do you have the tapes from the day all this happened?”

  Mutaib consulted the folder. “Thursday last. The twelfth. Yes. The transaction in question occurred on the twelfth. But no, we would not have kept that day’s tape. There were simply no incidents.” He beamed at them. “There rarely are, you see. We have excellent and visible security.”

  The young man came back in and shook his head once. “I am so sorry, gentlemen, but we do not have a description for Herr Hodler. We do have his passport number and your American visa numbers, of course, and we have the serial numbers of the Euros.”

  “So you do not know this individual, Mr. Mutaib?” Jake asked.

  “Me? Of course not.”

  “Because he asked that both the title and the registration for this vehicle be sent here to the bank. Now we can understand the title—that’s your collateral. But the registration?”

  Mutaib was shaking his head. “There is no collateral, Detective Cullen. This was not a loan. It was currency conversion. Euros for dollars, the dollars being in the form of a preauthorized bank draft. Any balance after price, taxes, and fees to be refunded by the dealer to the buyer in dollars.”

  “So why would he have the papers sent here?”

  “I have no idea, sir. I assume he means to come back here to pick them up. P’raps he does not yet have a permanent address in this country.” Mutaib looked back at his assistants for ideas, but they were equally baffled.

  Jake looked at Swamp, but Swamp couldn’t think of anything but the obvious. “Well, if he does come back to pick them up,” he said, “we would still like to talk to him. He left no address on any of your bank forms? No way to contact him?”

  Mutaib shook his head. “None at all. The only address we needed was that of the automobile merchant. He brought in cash, you see. Now, if he had brought in a letter of credit, or another bank draft…well, that would have been quite different. But cash?” He shrugged elaborately.

  “And you have no other information on this individual?”

  “None at all, sir. But didn’t your government issue this man a visa? Surely the appropriate department would have information.”

  And that would be the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in my very own Department of Homeland Security, Swamp thought, his face flu
shing slightly. The original bureaucratic black hole. “It was a travel visa,” he said, lying. “A list of destinations, but no addresses.”

  Mutaib shrugged again. Obviously not his problem. He raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, Is there anything else?

  Swamp realized they were stymied. The bank had been nothing more than a fancy money changer in this little deal. He was a little suspicious of that story about the security tapes, but then, why would they keep them if there’d been no trouble? He shot Jake a look, stood up, and everyone else did, too. “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Mutaib,” Swamp said. “If we have follow-up questions, may we call you?”

  Mutaib got up gracefully and handed Jake the folder. One of the assistants raced to open the door. “But of course, my dear fellow,” Mutaib said. “Anything at all, to be sure.”

  Heismann stood in the woman’s kitchen and listened. He had heard and watched her leave for work earlier that morning, bustling down the sidewalk with a large fabric bag full of books and papers, a clear plastic trash bag wrapped over the top to keep out the icy rain. As soon as she was gone, he’d begun smashing down the wall between the two town houses. He’d first gone into the basement, but the foundation was made of limestone, which would take much too long to penetrate. There was a hall closet just outside the upstairs master bathroom. He knew its twin should be on the other side of the fire wall. He’d gone in there, ripped the plaster and lathe down to expose the brick, and then, using a small sledgehammer, knocked out all the brickwork on his side of the fire wall. Then he punched a four-foot-high, three-foot-wide hole through the partition, exposing the brickwork on her side of the fire wall. He’d battered through that until he had the plaster wall exposed. He then made a hole low in the plaster and shined a flashlight through. There appeared to be a stack of cardboard boxes in the totally dark space on the other side. He’d then used a handsaw to cut a duplicate square hole in her plaster wall, pulling that ragged square of plaster and lathe through into his closet.

  Moving some of the boxes to one side, he’d squeezed through the hole and opened the closet door, its position in front of the bathroom the mirror image of his closet. The closet being full of boxes was good—it wasn’t likely that she would be moving them. Then he went through her entire house, taking care to pull shades down so he could not be seen from the street while he examined the place. He spent a half hour going through her clothes, slipping a couple of dresses over his head to see how close the fit was. The dresses, all below the knee in length, were too large, but not too long, so they would do, depending on which costume he chose. Her underwear drawer had a collection of slips, so he was set in that department as well, although he still had the nurse’s. His best find was a box of wigs. He had seen his neighbor emptying a bag of trash into the alley containers, and her dark hair had been quite short. But this morning, it had been of medium length. He patted his own stubbled bald head and smiled. This would be perfect. He’d come back the night before the attack to get what he needed. He made a mental note to acquire some more gasoline containers, so that he could get a fire going in this half of the duplex at the same time as his half.

  He went back through the house, adjusting shades to their original positions, turning off any lights he’d turned on, and ensuring drawers and closet doors were all as he had found them. He made a mental note of where floorboards squeaked. He took a bottle of cooking oil and went around the house, putting a drop or two on the hinges on every interior door in the house. Then he reset the stack of boxes to present a blank cardboard wall to her closet door, while still allowing enough room for him to get into and through her closet without making noise. He crawled around them, then stepped back across the two holes. He retrieved the square of plaster and lathe and positioned it back into its hole on her side. He knew it wouldn’t bear close inspection, but the stack of boxes would hide most of it, and he’d unscrewed the closet’s lightbulb just in case she happened to open the closet to look for something. It had to stand up for just three more days.

  As he stepped back out into his own hallway, he saw the white footprints his shoes had left on the rug. He swore at himself. Plaster dust. Were there white footprints over there, too? He took the square of plaster back down and laboriously retraced his route. And there were indeed two faint white footprints out on the rug in front of the closet. He took off his shoes and then went through the house a second time, finding a couple of white smears here and there on her bedroom rug. He cleaned them all up before returning to his house again.

  Details, he reminded himself. As the attack draws near, details will increasingly matter. He went back down to his kitchen and consulted his lists. Lumber supplies to reinforce the bedroom floor. Gasoline for starting the fire. He added a note to get extra gasoline containers. The television—no, he had that. The materials to modify the skylight. He felt a moment of panic—was there enough time to do all this? The newspaper was full of the preparations for the inauguration and all the constraints on local movement that were coming. Streets physically blocked with something called Jersey barriers. Dense police patrols. Dogs. Helicopters. Television and all other media coverage of the Capitol area and the ceremonies restricted to four networks, one being CNN. Airports closed. Union Station closed. No Metro trains running. “The vacuum-sealed inauguration,” as one newspaper called it.

  He looked at his watch. Three and a half days left to prepare. He decided to call Lady Mutaib and get some logistical help. He wondered if the poncey princeling had his own collection of female clothes, or if all those robes did it for him.

  The cops dropped Swamp and Gary off near the OEOB, and they stopped in a sandwich shop for lunch before going back to the office. Afterward, Swamp went straight to McNamara’s office, but the boss was at a departmental briefing in preparation for an upcoming National Intelligence Committee meeting. When he returned to his cubicle, at 1:30, Gary was waiting for him.

  “Check this out,” he said, handing Swamp a classified communiqué. “It’s from Interpol—their file on Heismann. Look at the alias list.”

  Swamp scanned down the message until he found it. “Hodler. Erich Hodler. I’ll be damned. We should relay this to Jake Cullen.” And now I need to call Lucy, he thought. The rest of the report paralleled what they’d received from his friend Bertie. He wondered aloud why the CIA report did not have the list of aliases.

  “No idea, sir,” Gary said. “No mention of that. The Interpol photo’s pretty close to what we got from the Agency, though. And I talked to Immigration—they did issue E. Hodler a visa, but it was eighteen months ago.”

  “For God’s sake!” Swamp exclaimed. “Who gets an eighteen-month visa when he’s in the Interpol database?”

  “Anyone who asks?” Gary said. “Anyway, I faxed them Interpol’s photo, and they say it’s a match from his passport scan. I think we can say Hodler is Heismann.”

  “They fax back their file on Hodler?”

  “Negative. Said they couldn’t do that without a court order.”

  “Goddamn it,” Swamp said. “I thought we were past all that crap. We’re in the same damned department!” He studied the photograph. A Hollywood Nazi. Plastered blond hair. Pronounced cheekbones. Long, straight Nordic-looking nose over flat, sneering lips. Ice blue eyes, approving the latest oven improvements in his death camp, no doubt. “But what’s he look like now? I wonder,” Swamp said.

  “Second item,” Gary said. “Remember the warrants you wanted so we could search the Pakistani doctors’ homes?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I took a call for you from your friend Mr. Walker. Wanted to know how it was going.”

  “Yeah, I was supposed to keep him in the loop. I need to call him.”

  “Well, I took the liberty of filling him in, but then I asked him why they didn’t have the same alias list for Heismann that Interpol had. He sorta waffled on that, but he had a useful suggestion—that I should check with our own Immigration people in DHS, because foreigners running a business in thi
s country have to register yearly. And foreign doctors also have to requalify their medical licenses with HHS once a year.”

  “And?”

  “The visa people sent me to Immigration’s business records section. And guess what? Those doctors did not entirely own that business. A certain foreign bank had a major piece of their action.” He raised his eyebrows dramatically.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Not a pound, boss. The Royal Kingdom Bank owned a stake in that clinic. That Pakistani doc ran it, but the RKB held some major purse strings. The American docs did own their piece of it and the building.”

  “Well, now we have something. Can you find out from Cullen if Ms. Wall is back among the living?”

  After Gary went off to contact Cullen, Swamp sat down at his desk and reorganized his notes for his brief to McNamara. Gary came back almost immediately. “I forgot—the cops’re all at the funeral. I’ll try that hospital up in Garrison Gap.”

  Swamp put a call in to Lucy. He would have preferred to wait until he’d had time to brief his own boss, but now that they had a second link between the Interpol name and the likely pursuer of Connie Wall, and probable killer of Lieutenant Ballard, he really wanted some Bureau resources put on to the problem of reconstructing a working physical description. If nothing else, Heismann/Hodler had some questions to answer about the death of the police lieutenant, even if their own theories about a bomb plot were all wrong.

  In the event, Lucy VanMetre was not available. When Swamp tried to pursue it, the PRU receptionist stonewalled him. She told him Ms. VanMetre was not available, then asked if he wanted her voice mail. When he said no, she told him he could leave name and phone number. No idea when she would be available.

  Defeated, he gave up. Previously, they would have told him that she was in a meeting, out of the office, at lunch, whatever, but this was as if he’d been put on an “I don’t want to talk to this guy ever” list. Had she gone in to see Hallory prematurely? He thought about sending her an E-mail, then wondered where their “agreement” stood just now.