by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric
In other words, Garrett Unger’s wife and children.
“Wait!” said Garrett Unger. He’d just lost his older brother, but the photograph helped him understand he was a brother second, a husband and father first. He began collecting himself. He took a couple of deep breaths and said, “This information doesn’t leave the room, okay?”
I don’t know what type of people Unger was used to dealing with, but I hoped to hell they occupied a higher rung on the honesty ladder than Sal, Big Bad, Quinn, and me.
“You have my solemn word.” I said, solemnly.
Big Bad laughed out loud.
Quinn said, “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”
Sal said, “Talk or fly.”
Unger nodded. “Okay, okay. I can give you his name.”
That comment surprised me. “Whose name?” I said.
“Arthur Patelli.”
“Who?”
“The guy who set fire to the house. That’s what you’re after, right?”
I shook my head. “You can’t be this stupid, even for a lawyer. But I don’t have the time to straighten you out right now.”
I looked at Sal. He held up his hands and said, “Lawyers, Christ Almighty. What you gonna do, huh?”
I said, “Garrett, look at me.”
He did.
“You want to save Joe DeMeo or your family?”
“What?”
“DeMeo or your family. Which one?”
He looked down at the picture in his lap. “How can you even ask that question?” he said.
“Well, you’re an attorney.”
He nodded. “I’ll do anything to save my family. Please don’t hurt them. Just tell me what you want.”
Sal said, “Guys, I don’t wanna—whatcha call—eat and run, but you just tossed a law partner out the window, and even if no one in this fancy shithole saw it, someone on the street did.”
I looked at him. “Good point. We’ll take Garrett with us and trust you to come up with a cover story for DeMeo.”
Sal asked, “You brought a car?”
I shook my head. “We’ll take Chris’s car.”
Sal said, “If you had his car keys you could.” He laughed. “Who’s gonna jump out the window and get the keys?”
“My guess, they’re in his desk drawer,” I said. “In my experience, a man who wears an Armani suit doesn’t want bulging pockets.”
Big Bad slid the desk drawer open, fished out the car keys, and dangled them from his ham-sized hand.
“Good call,” Sal said. “Don’t forget the cameras. They get us coming and going.”
“Quinn will take care of the cameras,” I said.
Speaking to Quinn, I said, “Augustus, will you do me a favor and clean this mess up while I get Garrett in the car? I’ll send the elevator back up for you in a minute.”
I grabbed the mumbling Unger, and we followed Sal and Big Bad into the private elevator and down to the partners’ parking garage. Big Bad found Chris’s Mercedes by pressing the remote and following the chirp. He opened the trunk and helped me toss Garrett inside. I scanned the garage for external security cameras and found none. I guessed the partners didn’t want video proof of their meetings with criminals or perhaps dalliances with call girls. I didn’t ask what happened to Chris Unger’s secretary, but I had a feeling Sal’s car had plenty of traction in the back.
Augustus joined us a moment later, and we drove out of the garage and into traffic. I called Beck Building security and said there was a bomb in the building set to go off in two minutes.
“Who are you!” the security guard demanded.
“In the quad cage, I’m known as Double X,” I said.
I gave them a few minutes to complete the evacuation of the building. We hit the interstate heading north on 75, and Quinn placed a call to the detonating device.
From the interstate, we had a wonderful view of the top of the building as it exploded and burst into flames.
Big Bad called and said, “Double X gone to that big quad cage in the sky.”
41
“What about my family?” Garrett Unger asked.
We were at headquarters in Bedford, Virginia, in the interrogation room. Lou stood by the door with his arms crossed, wearing a bored look on his face. Quinn was listening to a jazz mix on his iPod. I tossed Unger a disposable cell phone.
I said, “You’re going to stay here as my guest until you get a call from Joe DeMeo. If Joe’s smart, he’ll give you a password to some of his numbered off -shore accounts. Lou already set one up for me. When you get the passwords from DeMeo, you’re going to transfer the funds from DeMeo’s account into mine. When Lou gets confirmation that the money’s where it should be, I’ll remove the threat to Mary and the kids.”
We all waited for him to ask the question we knew was coming. He didn’t disappoint. “What about me?” he asked.
“That’s a toughie,” I said. “On the one hand you were plotting to kill me a couple hours ago, and that displeases me. On the other hand, I need you alive in case someone at the bank requires oral or written confirmation for the transaction. As DeMeo’s attorney, I’m sure you can produce whatever is needed to affect the transfer.”
He was looking at me in a pitiful way.
“I won’t lie to you, Garrett,” I said. “You were a major player in the killing of Greg, Melanie, and Maddie Dawes. Because of your participation, Addie’s life has been shattered.”
“Killing me won’t bring them back,” Unger said. “All I did was allow it to happen. If I hadn’t, DeMeo would have killed my family.”
“You were in a tough spot,” I said, “and you’re still in a tough spot. As you say, killing you won’t bring them back. But money’s the great healer, and enough money will help all of us cope with the loss.”
“I’ll do whatever you ask,” he said.
I thought about that for a minute. “Garrett, we’ll see how it all plays out. If you help me get at least twenty million dollars from Joe DeMeo, I won’t kill you.”
He looked at Quinn. “What about him?”
“Same thing.”
“You’ll let me walk?”
“Hell, I’ll even have someone drive you home.”
“Can I take a cab instead?”
“That’s fine, whatever.”
“Can I call my family?”
“Not until this is over.”
He nodded. “In the meantime,” he said, “where will I sleep?”
I said, “Quinn and I are going out of town in a couple hours. Until I get back, you can sleep in my bed.”
“That’s very generous,” Unger said. “Thank you.”
I waved my hand in a dismissive manner. “Think nothing of it,” I said, wishing I could be there to see his face when Lou escorts him to my subterranean prison cell for the night.
42
Colby, California, was a small town, and it wasn’t unusual to spot Charlie Whiteside coming out of his shrink’s office on Ball Street. It was no secret that Charlie’s depression had gotten him washed out of the Afghanistan war. Used to be, pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, had it easy. Charlie could sit in an air-conditioned room at Edwards Air Force Base and launch remote-controlled killer drones while munching fast food. He’d put in a day’s work studying live surveillance footage, lock onto the occasional target, press the button on a joy stick—and be home in time for dinner with the wife and kid.
In fact, it seemed such an easy way to fight a war that in the early weeks of therapy, it had been difficult for his shrink to understand just what it was Charlie was whining about.
“You’re a guy,” she said, “who’s had to deal with frustration and ridicule your entire life.”
Charlie had closed his eyes as he ran the highlight reel through his mind. “And much worse.”
Charlie wasn’t exaggerating. While his parents had been normal, it had taken Charlie many years to grow to his full height of thirty-two inches. His father, having dreamed of spawning a sc
holarship athlete, found it impossible to derive joy from any of Charlie’s accomplishments. For her part, Charlie’s mother had accepted his condition from the beginning—but with a stoic detachment and much embarrassment. While neither parent clinically abused him, neither did they embrace or nurture him. They took care of him in a casual way, met his physical needs. But had anyone cared to notice—and none did—it would have been clear that Charlie’s role in the family dynamic had been relegated to that of accessory in his parents’ lives.
It was in public school that Charlie Whiteside first learned true pain and suffering. But that was a different issue, and his shrink, Dr. Carol Doering, had been satisfied early on that Charlie had made peace with his childhood. He’d overcome the neglect, the taunting, the bullying on his own, without therapy, and had somehow managed to put those terrible formative years behind him without carrying any serious emotional scars into his adulthood.
Which is why this whole depression thing about flying killer planes from a comfortable armchair five thousand miles removed from the action seemed out of whack with Charlie’s coping mechanism.
In the early sessions, Dr. Doering had found it difficult to identify with Charlie’s condition because she had an emotional connection to the very subject of his complaint. She tried to keep her personal connection out of the therapy, but one day she let her guard down and it just popped out.
“Charlie,” she said, “let me tell you something. My brother’s an F-16 fighter pilot stationed in Iraq. He dodges enemy fire all day, and at night he sleeps in a tent in blistering heat under constant threat of attack.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Charlie had said. “I’m not meaning to compare my service to his. He’s a true patriot. While I love my country, I’m simply not physically able to serve overseas, so this is the only job I could take where I felt I could make a difference.”
Carol Doering felt her face flush. “I didn’t mean to imply …”
“It’s all right ma’am, I know what you mean. Does your brother have a wife and kids?”
“He does. Let me just apologize for my temporary lack of professionalism and get us back to your situation.”
“It’s connected,” Charlie said.
“How so?”
“I understand that your brother is putting his life on the line every day to help preserve our freedom, and I mean him only honor and no disrespect.”
“But?” Carol said.
“But when your brother approaches a target at six hundred miles per hour, he drops his payload and keeps flying and never sees the result.”
Carol cocked her head while pondering the thought. She still didn’t have a grasp on his point. After all, no one was shooting at Charlie when he fired his missiles from a desk at Edwards Air Base.
“When I fire my missiles,” he’d said, “I watch them from release to impact. They’re quite detailed, ma’am. I see the actual result of what I did.
“I see them all,” he continued, “the bodies of the guilty and the innocent. The terrorists and the elderly. The women and the children.
“Then I drive straight from work to my daughter’s piano recital.”
That had been their breakthrough day, and Charlie punctuated the event by adding, “We all serve in our own way. I’m just having trouble with my way.”
Dr. Doering helped Charlie get reassigned to a civilian job, where his experience could be put to good use. Charlie’s attorney threatened the military into helping with the transition. They installed in Charlie’s guestroom, free of charge, all the computer equipment necessary for him to fly UAVs for the California Coastline Weather Service.
In return, Charlie signed a release. It had been a rare concession on the military’s part, but Charlie’s attorney explained what would happen if Charlie wound up on a witness stand: military records would be opened to public scrutiny, particularly classified photographic evidence depicting the graphic details of Charlie’s armchair service.
Charlie settled into his new career with enthusiasm but quickly found the job excruciatingly boring. While the horror of his military job had taken its toll on his emotional well-being, he now realized that being a significant part of the War on Terror provided a constant adrenalin rush he was not likely to find studying cloud formations.
Which is why when Charlie was offered an interesting proposition by a fellow little person, it wasn’t the financial component that caught his interest so much as the idea of adding excitement to his professional life.
Two hours after accepting Victor’s proposition, Charlie verified his checking account balance and thought, Now that’s what I’m talking about! The next morning, he flipped the switches and fired up one of the company’s weather drones. His drone began the flight in the usual way, following a typical coastal flight pattern, filming video, and capturing raw data for analysis by the weather crew. Charlie had been with the company long enough to know when the ground guys were just going through the motions, when they took their breaks, what they found interesting and what they didn’t.
He knew he could divert the drone ten miles inland, make several passes over the DeMeo estate, and be back chasing clouds before anyone was the wiser. Just to hedge his bet, Charlie had previously videoed thirty minutes of boring coastline that he now transmitted directly to the ground crew while his drone was recording footage of Joe DeMeo’s estate. The DeMeo job would take less than ten minutes, which would give Charlie almost twenty minutes to get the drone back to the area of coastline where the fake footage had been recorded. Then he’d replace the fake footage with live shots from the drone.
43
“It’s a large area to cover,” Charlie Whiteside said, “and there appears to be a lot of activity.”
We were at his place, reviewing the surveillance videos and stills he’d downloaded from the weather drone.
The photos revealed a nice setup for Joe, what I’d call a luxury fortress. His twenty-thousand-square-foot residence was situated on top of a prominent hill. If you were picturing a target, the house would be the bull’s eye. The next ring of the target would be the ten-foot-tall reinforced concrete wall that protected the main house and two guest cottages and enclosed about two acres of land. The target’s next ring was cordoned off by a chain link fence that guarded roughly ten acres. That fence was surrounded by more than two hundred acres of wooded scrub worth tens of millions of dollars.
The land ranged from gently rolling to steep drop offs. The outer acreage was thickly wooded with sparse underbrush, a cleared forest with a carpet of soft grass and pine needles.
According to Lou Kelly, it had once been a top-flight corporate retreat due to its proximity to the old highway, its raw physical beauty, and its isolated, tranquil setting.
Joe’s residential compound was accessed by a dirt and gravel road maintained by the state. The entrance to the property was a scant eight miles south of Ventucopa, fourteen miles northeast of Santa Barbara, near the center of what most people think is part of Los Padres National Forest.
Charlie was right about the level of activity. Joe DeMeo was running scared, and the proof could be found in the number of gunmen guarding his compound. From what I’d heard, Joe’s place had always been well guarded, but this was a ridiculous amount of security. We knew he had about a dozen guns, nine of which had surrounded the cemetery where I’d met him less than a week ago.
The drone showed he had another eight men stationed between the chain link and concrete fences. These eight had guard dogs on leashes, which told me they were on loan from a private security company. Joe was paying the big bucks and taking no chances.
It would have been nice to have someone on the inside, so I had Sal offer Joe some of his shooters. But Joe wasn’t in a trusting mood and felt it wouldn’t be prudent to invite a rival crime family inside his inner walls.
Especially one that had recently survived a bombing.
After the Beck Building went up in smoke, DeMeo voiced concerns about Sal’s loyalty. Sal gave a
n Oscar-winning performance of indignation, replete with threats. In the end, Joe DeMeo had no good reason to doubt his story, and one reason to believe it.
Sal had told DeMeo that I must have followed Garrett Unger all the way from New York to Cincinnati, because by the time Sal’s driver got him and Big Bad to the Beck Building, the place was in flames and the whole block had been roped off.
Joe DeMeo cursed extensively before saying, “You telling me you weren’t even there? You never made it to the meeting?”
“That’s what I’m sayin’,” Sal said. “You don’t believe me, you can check the tapes. I been there before, and Chris had cameras all over his private suite area. You call security and check the tapes. I ain’t on them.”
“That’s a pretty convenient test,” Joe DeMeo said, “considering the security cameras were destroyed by the explosion.”
“No shit!” said Sal. “What a rotten break.”
DeMeo’s reason for believing Sal’s story: just before the meeting, Sal had called Joe and said he wanted to bring Big Bad to the meeting, since the Ungers had a bodyguard.
“I just want—whatcha call—détente.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Joe had said.
“You need to clear it with the Ungers first?”
“Fuck the Ungers. Just get to the meeting.”
“I’m on my way,” Sal had said.
A few minutes passed, and Sal had called Joe to tell him he was sitting in his car a block away from the Beck Building but the area was roped off because the Beck was on fire.
“I just called Chris Unger,” Sal had said, “and he ain’t answering.”
Joe had tried with the same result.
It was a plausible chain of events. The way Joe figured it, Sal wouldn’t be making demands about bringing his bodyguard if he didn’t intend to show up at the meeting. But that didn’t mean he trusted Sal.
A few hours later, they had had another conversation.
DeMeo said, “According to witnesses, Chris Unger jumped—or was thrown—out of his window.”