by Tod Goldberg
“Which car?” Sam asked.
“The gray Taurus,” Peter said. He pointed down the street where there were maybe five gray Tauruses parked.
“Okay,” Sam said, “but make it fast. Every minute you take is another minute we’re closer to a terrorist action, you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he said and scampered off.
Sam walked over to the parking lot where Sugar’s car still smoldered. It was unlikely that Sugar’s name was associated in any way with the car, since Sam had a hard time imagining Sugar either going to a dealership to purchase the car or executing the actual act of mailing off a check each month for the payments. And there was no way Sugar was mentally capable of keeping up with his registration and insurance. He was sure the car had those things in the glove box and he was just as sure they were forgeries.
A young detective stood next to the car and wrote notes down on his notepad. Sam couldn’t figure out what it was about young detectives that made him edgy, particularly since they were both fighting the same war, at least metaphorically speaking. Sure, maybe Sam blew things up in the middle of the city periodically, and, sure, maybe he’d done some work over the course of the last couple years that straddled the line between legal and illegal, but it was all for the greater good. Anyway, it was probably that this batch of new detectives dressed like they were in a commercial for self-tanners and polo shirts.
“Help you with something?” the detective said.
“Finley,” Sam said and extended his hand toward the detective, who in turn just stared at it.
“You a reporter? If so, we’ve got no comment, okay?”
“Not a reporter, son,” Sam said. “I’m in from Langley.” He let that sink in for a moment but when the detective didn’t seem to show any recognition, he added, quietly, because these CIA guys tended to be all monosyllabic and quiet, “Langley, Virginia. Where the CIA lives? Maybe you’re familiar with it?”
The detective straightened up a bit but still didn’t seem to be a hundred percent invested in believing Sam.
“You got some ID?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “The Department of Homeland Security just hands out badges that say TERRORIST LIQUIDATION OFFICER on them. Listen, son, I’ve got about five minutes of time here and either you’re going to help your country or you’re going to hurt it. Which is it going to be?”
The detective looked over his shoulder at the smoldering building. “This terror-related?”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine. This car stolen?”
“Yes, sir,” the detective said.
“And the office, it was the notary?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That makes fifteen,” Sam said.
“Fifteen what?”
“Classified,” Sam said. He took out his pen again and this time wrote “15” on his forearm. “This place owned by Henry Grayson?”
“That’s right,” the detective said.
“Find him?”
“No, not yet.”
“Good. Good. How many men you got on him?”
“None as yet. We’ve been calling his known numbers and getting disconnects. The insurance guys say he’s behind on payments, which they’re thrilled about.”
“Fucking carrion,” Sam said. “Pardon my Greek.” He stepped around the detective and looked into Sugar’s car. There wasn’t anything inside it now that could ever be tied to anyone—it was just ash and melted leather inside a metal frame. “Stolen, right?”
“VIN is for a Chevy van stolen in Orlando three months ago,” he said.
“Same guy, then,” Sam said. The insurance agent had made his way back and was waiting patiently a few yards away. He had a fancy clipboard, one of those that was encased in metal and had a flip top. Impressive. “Here’s what I need from you, Detective, and I don’t have time to wait around for an official report, you understand? For America?”
“I do,” he said. He stood up a little straighter. No matter the situation, in Sam’s experience at least, you ask cops to do something for America and they have an atavistic response that requires them to be completely honest and to improve their posture by at least twenty-five percent “What’d they use to blow up the building? C-4?”
“Shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Don’t know the make yet. But looks like maybe an M90.”
Shoulder-mounted rocket. Jesus. “Expected,” Sam said. “Same with the car?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right,” Sam said. “What’s your name, Detective?”
“James Kochel.”
“You ever think about working in something that is actually challenging?”
“Yes, sir, I have.”
“Good,” Sam said. “We’ll be in touch.” He stepped away and then did a quick pivot, added a touch of military flair to his persona (while, he noted, tweaking something in his calf) and addressed the detective again. “This Grayson fellow. You got anything on him with organized crime?”
The detective licked his lips in a way that reminded Sam of the guys he played high school football with but who, clearly, were never going to be as important later in life as they were then. Guys like that always licked their lips before something exciting. It freaked Sam out in high school and it freaked him out now. “Fact is,” the detective said, “I probably shouldn’t even be saying anything, but we’re all on the same team, right?”
“America’s team,” Sam said. “Like the Dallas Cowboys. Just one big interdepartmental huddle, Jimmy.”
The detective liked that. He leaned in toward Sam and then lowered his voice. “A year ago we had this place under surveillance. Thought he was running a high-stakes book out of it. Never got him on anything, but he had shady guys coming in and out at all hours.”
“Any Al-Qaeda?” Local cops loved to feel like they were just inches away from finding Bin Laden sitting inside the local Dairy Queen.
“No, no. Local talent.”
Sam looked at his hand and then licked his lips, too. Let him know they both had the same tic, make him think he’d fit in over in Langley. Though his godforsaken Dockers never would. “The name Big Lumpy mean anything to you?”
“It does.”
“The word ‘Hamas’ mean anything to you?”
“It does.”
“Good. Keep away from Big Lumpy for the near future—you got it?”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that,” Kochel said.
“Sleeper cells all over the place.”
“But didn’t he go to MIT?”
MIT? Sam tried not to show any surprise. He couldn’t imagine anyone presently called Big Lumpy ever attending MIT, but clearly Kochel knew something he didn’t.
“You tell me, hotshot,” Sam said. The beauty of ignorance mixed with authority (real or imagined, in this case), Sam believed, was that people tended to feel like they needed to impress you with their own importance. It’s what makes criminals think they can talk their way out of jail or convince a jury of their innocence on the power of personality alone. In the wrong hands, well, it’s clinical narcissism. In the right hands, it’s essentially been American foreign policy since Vietnam.
“When ATF was out here last year, that’s what they told me, anyway,” he said. “That’s how he got the nickname Big Lumpy, because he’s actually very skinny, right? But his brain, it’s big and lumpy, right? I heard he had an MRI when he was in college or something and it just stuck. But that could all be myth, right?”
Big Lumpy was the nickname of his brain? Oh, Sam thought, this is just getting more and more weird.
“That’s right,” Sam said. “Now, how many guys you think are in Hamas who have a degree from MIT and who can get hold of the kind of money he has access to? Starting to make sense?”
“Wow,” Kochel said. “Wow. Yeah. Wow.”
The problem with local cops wasn’t that they were ineffective, because Sam was sure they must be pretty good at solving something, though certainly they’d never put the pieces tog
ether on any of the cases he and Michael had worked on, which made them perhaps blind and deaf, particularly since half the time they helped someone, Sam ended up blowing up half a city block. No, Sam thought, the problem with local cops everywhere was the same: They wished they were doing something more exciting. So all anyone really had to do to get them to spill what meager information they might have was to, well, ask them. Cops were the very worst confidential sources on the planet.
“Keep that information on the down low now, okay? It’s national security level. You’ll notice I confirmed nothing. And I was never here, got it?”
“Yes, sir.” Sam could tell Kochel had something eating away at his conscience. His voice had gone all timid. These guys always thought guys like Sam—or, well, guys like who Sam was pretending to be—had all the answers. “Can I ask you a shop question?” Kochel asked.
“Sure, hotshot, but make it quick.”
“Maybe you don’t know this, but I have to ask . . .”
Sam waved the detective off in midsentence. “It was Oswald. He acted alone. The guy on the grassy knoll was one of our guys.”
Before Detective Kochel could respond, Sam thanked him and then made his way back to Peter Handel and his metal clipboard. No sense prolonging the experience or answering anything about Area 51. “What do you have?” Sam asked Handel once he reached him.
“Bare bones? Guy hasn’t made his last payment, so on the record, this isn’t on us to pay out on the hazard insurance or fire or anything. Now, off the record, he’s been a client for ten years, so maybe he sues and says, Okay, I’ve made enough payments that if I’m forty-five days late, you’re not going to honor my account? Take it to mediation, we’d probably settle, but we’d make him sweat it. It would be a bad beat, but we’d take it.”
“You’re a prince,” Sam said.
“It’s the business,” Peter said.
“What else?”
“Well, again, off the record, he actually took out a life insurance policy three weeks ago. Pays out two million five to his son in the case of his death. Paid the premiums on that two years in advance.”
Two years. Savvy, Sam thought. He also began to rethink how awful he considered Henry to be. He’d left his son to deal with this shit but also left him set up for the rest of his life.
“He just sent in a check?”
“No, paid by credit card over the phone.”
Smart again, Sam thought.
“Off the record?”
“You’re talking to a federal agent, Handel. None of this is off the record.”
“Right. Right. I just . . . guess . . . Well, I guess here’s the weird thing. He paid for the premiums using a VISA gift card. It’s basically the same as cash, but he puts close to six grand on it and buys life insurance. It was very unusual.”
And very smart, Sam realized. He could have purchased the gift card at any time and loaded the money on it over the course of a very long time, which would essentially render it traceless in the event he needed to use it to disappear. No usable trail of the money transfer if he did it early, no usable trail of the credit card purchase if he did it early, either. And if he’s smart, he called using Skype and thus no way to triangulate his location until long after he was gone, not that the insurance company would have been looking to do that. But if you’re angry enough, Sam knew, any information could be bought. And it seemed like these bookies were angry.
“Tell me something, Concerto-boy, before this month, was Grayson regular on his payments?”
“He’d usually pay a year in advance. Sometimes in cash. Come by our office on Grand Street and hand over an envelope. We don’t encourage that, but some people in Miami are . . . eccentric.”
“What’s his full loss payout?”
Handel flipped through his pages. “Not a lot,” he said. “Just the base minimums. A notary, all he really needs is his satchel of stamps, plus the books he has to keep for the state; that’s why most of them are mobile now. No sense keeping an office unless you got something else going on. Most of our clients in this business are pretty lucrative, really, because they’ve got PO boxes or UPS operating out of the shop, or maybe they’re also a greeting card place or, we’ve got this one in Doral that’s a soft-serve joint, really strange.”
Handel went on then, at length, about other odd notary businesses, which was fine. It gave Sam a moment to gather his thoughts. First, he decided that if he ever had the choice between going into the insurance industry or being eaten alive by fire ants, he’d look long into the fire ant angle. Second, he saw how odd it was that all Grayson did was run a notarizing service out of his office. Rents were high in the neighborhood and Sam had a hard time believing the notarization business could sustain the roof, even with his gambling. No, Sam thought, there was probably something more. Something Henry Grayson’s son, Brent, didn’t, and probably shouldn’t, know about.
“That’s all fascinating, Handel,” Sam said.
“See a lot of crazy things in this business,” he said.
“One last thing,” Sam said. “Was there anything on his policy that was unusual?”
“Here? No. But on his home policy, yeah.”
“You cover his house, too?”
“Yeah, didn’t I mention that?”
“No,” Sam said. “Anything else you’re holding out on me? Or should I just call the IRS right now and have them start your audit while we chat?”
Mention the IRS to anyone, even the guy in charge of the IRS, and immediately people get that look on their face like someone just unscrewed something in their bowels.
“He had an unusual amount of televisions in his house,” Handel said.
“What’s unusual?”
“Ten.”
That was unusual and it dovetailed into what the detective had said about Grayson possibly, at least at one point, running his own book. It didn’t make him any easier to find, but it gave Sam a few ideas about what his next step might be after he and Michael met with Big Lumpy.
“All right, Handel,” Sam said. “I’m going to do some checking into things on my end, both on Mr. Grayson and on you. I like what I see, I lose your Social Security number. I have concerns, you’ll be hearing from someone. You understand?”
Handel looked grave, so Sam gave him a wink . . . which was probably hard for Handel to see since Sam still had on his sunglasses, but karmically Sam felt closer to even.
5
Taking on a disguise is not about changing the way you look. It’s about changing the way you think. Someone who has never met you before and doesn’t have access to DNA technology is going to have a difficult time identifying you as anyone other than who you say you are, so when you take on a new identity, you have to make sure you know all the possible angles of inquiry. If, for instance, you say you’re from the South, you should have more than a passing knowledge of grits, college football and sweet tea and you should probably still have a strong opinion about the Civil War . . . or the War of Northern Aggression, as it were.
You also need to be aware of the knowledge base of the person you’re hoping to deceive. If he’s also a spy, your cover needs to be more than rock solid—you need a fake mother, a fake sister, a fake wife and two fake dogs, one dead, one still alive. Fiona was going to get as close to Drubich’s local operation as possible using whatever cover she deemed best. Being an attractive woman often requires only that a very short skirt be utilized in the building of a backstory, so she had it easier than I did, though I assumed dealing with someone named Big Lumpy wouldn’t require much in the way of world building, either.
Or at least I assumed that until Sam got to my loft that next morning.
First, he filled me in on everything that he’d learned about Brent’s father—most of which was a surprise to Brent, particularly the $2.5 million he stood to earn upon his father’s death—and the more upsetting news that the Russians hadn’t just casually destroyed his office but had actually brought a rocket launcher with them. No
t exactly the kind of thing you pack as an afterthought.
“Brent,” I said, “did these guys give you any indication that they’d be coming to see you with weapons of mass destruction?”
“No,” he said. He was curled up on the floor in front of one of his laptops downloading all of the information I’d asked for from him: the voice mail and e-mail from Drubich’s people, Brent’s correspondence, a trail of every dollar he’d spent (I had a feeling this would be difficult, but I wanted to make sure he wasn’t omitting anything that might cause all of us trouble down the line) and the text of all of his Web pages. “They just said either they’d get what they paid for or they’d kill me.”
“And so you thought Sugar could fix that?” I said.
“Sugar and Sam,” he said. “But I didn’t think they were serious. I mean, you know, we’re businessmen.”
“Really?” I said.
“Well, sort of.”
“Neither you nor the Russians are businessmen. You’re both fakes. You just happened to piss off a fake named Yuri Drubich who typically does business with Chech-nyans and the odd Afghan warlord moving poppy seeds.”
“Cool,” Brent said.
“No,” I said. “Not cool. Not cool at all.”
“I didn’t mean it was cool literally. I just, I guess, think it’s kinda crazy that I’m involved with people like that. It was just a Web site.”
It was just a Web site, true, but it was also a fantastic idea for a new way to move information, even if it was one born out of total fantasy. That someone like Drubich found it and wanted a piece of it said a lot about Brent’s idea and about his actual smarts. Even if his smarts didn’t exactly pop up on display in casual conversation.
It occurred to me that I’d failed to ask him perhaps the most important question. “How did Drubich know to send his men to your father’s office?”
Brent stopped typing for a moment, but didn’t look up from his computer. “I made another mistake,” he said quietly.
“Let’s just settle on the fact that this is all one huge mistake and be honest with each other, okay?” I said. “I need you to be a man, Brent. And that means owning up to your mistakes. Don’t be your father.”