The Kingmaker sd-3

by Brian Haig

  I said, “You did good back there. It took nerve to pull out that spray while he came after you.”

  “Practice, practice, practice. Grow up in TriBeCa back in the good years and life was always exciting.” Her eyes wandered around the shop, then she said, “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re not going back to our apartments. We’re not going back to our cars. We better assume they’re very well connected and getting more desperate.”

  “The police? The FBI?”

  “Eventually. But not until we figure out what to tell them.”

  She nodded at that, because we were both lawyers, and the first thing every attorney thinks of is how much not to disclose to the police. Not that either of us would consider lying, but there’s always the tricky question of how high you want to stick your ass in the air. We’d introduced ourselves to the CIA’s most closely held secret asset, hid the truth when somebody tried to kill us in Moscow, fled from a crime scene, and possibly committed a few other misdemeanors-littering even-the sum of which could get us in very ugly trouble with the law. I had not the slightest doubt what General Clapper was going to do to me when this story came out. If I didn’t have so many other things on my mind, I would’ve been contemplating what I wanted to do after I left the Army.

  However, we were obviously long past the point where our legal careers were our overriding concerns. I said, “Do we agree we’ve stumbled onto something important enough to cause our deaths?”

  She automatically said, “Agreed,” which, considering the circumstances, wasn’t any stretch.

  “Do we agree Morrison’s probably innocent, that somebody’s trying to keep us from proving that?”

  She hesitated, and in a very lawyerly tone said, “Explain that.”

  “The evidence suggests Morrison’s been framed. By whom is debatable, but whoever did it wants to keep it that way. You and I have somewhere, somehow, touched something that puts us at risk.”

  “Okay,” she admitted, very practically.

  “What is it we touched?”

  “You’re the one with the theories. Tell me.”

  “Try this,” I said, and she bent forward, her eyes searching my face. “What’s this whole thing about? What was Mary working on all those years? What did Morrison’s arrest solve?”

  “The mole hunt.”

  “Right. The CIA and FBI knew somebody was giving the Russians things… important things… sensitive things. They caught lots of small fish, and even some big fish-Ames and Hanssen-but that didn’t tie all the knots. The molehunters were still stubbornly plugging away, still following clues, still tracking their prey. Eventually, they’d catch him-or her. It was just a matter of time and circumstance. So the Russians fed them Morrison. They framed him with enough things and in such a way that almost any open questions would be answered.”

  “So the mole is still operating?”

  “And somehow, we’ve touched something that puts him or her at risk.”

  The girl behind the counter called out my number, so I went up and got our pizza. We sat and munched for a while. What I’d said made sense. It wasn’t necessarily correct, but it made sense. There were other explanations, but if I was right about Morrison being innocent then you had to seriously consider this possibility.

  And if you agreed with that, you’d agreed with this, too: Whoever did the job on Morrison had gone to a lot of time and trouble. They had had somebody tip off the CIA in the first place. They had planted documents covered with his fingerprints in that vault in Moscow, then released them to the CIA.

  All of which added up to this: Whoever did this was an intelligence professional with extraordinary resources, somebody in the CIA or the SVR who knows espionage intimately. Possibly, maybe even definitely, somebody with tentacles in both intelligence services.

  Katrina finally said, “The FBI won’t believe a word of it. They’ll think we’re a couple of sleazy attorneys trying to get our client off.”

  “Yes, they probably will,” I agreed, digging into a particularly greasy slice of pepperoni with sausage, struggling to ignore its resemblance to the gruesome stuff that had splattered out of the killer’s eye an hour before.

  She asked, “Any ideas how to handle that?”

  Instead of answering that, I said, “How much do you know about lie detectors?”

  “What I learned in law school. They’re considered fairly valid. Some study was done that gave them something like a ninety-eight percent accuracy rate.”

  “Do you remember what accounts for the other two percent or so?”

  “Remind me.”

  “Lie detectors work by sensing changes in your body temperature and normal body rhythms. There are chemicals that fool the machine. Supposedly, you can even train yourself to defeat them, like Buddhist meditation techniques, where you disenfranchise your mind from your body.”

  “Your point being?”

  I swallowed hard once or twice. “Let’s talk about Mary.” My face turned dark as I added, “I went over and had a chat with her last night. It wasn’t pretty.”

  “How ugly was it?”

  “She admitted she helped take down her husband. They approached her months ago. I don’t know how big her involvement was, but it had to be substantial because they were reporting back to her on what they were finding.” I squirmed around uncomfortably, then added, “She, uh, well, she also admitted she’s one of Eddie’s witnesses.”

  Katrina was toying with a slice of pizza and generously avoiding my eyes. “Do you think there was more to it?”

  “I don’t know. She said the Agency had a source that tipped off his treason. I don’t know if she was telling the truth or not, and I’m having a little problem trusting her right now.”

  Left unsaid was a great deal, but Katrina was a smart girl and could fill in the blanks. For instance, why did Mary beg me to take this case in the first place? Perhaps because she knew she had an emotional grip on me. Perhaps because I was the kind of sucker every schemer dreams of, the lovelorn loser who was so easily manipulated that he refused to see the forest for the trees.

  Katrina was wisely not saying anything, so I finally broke the ice. “So, let’s consider Mary.”

  “All right, let’s. One, nobody was in a better position to frame her husband. Yes, she was telling him everything she was doing, but he was telling her everything he was doing, too. Two, she could pass in and out of his office every day, steal documents, take whatever she wanted, and never have to worry about a security check. Three, Morrison’s deputy attache said she was involved in everything in the office. She had all kinds of weapons to use against him.”

  “When I confronted Mary last night, as I mentioned, she admitted the phone tappers and the trackers were reporting everything back to her. She had her finger on every pulse. She knew exactly what buttons to push, exactly how to make it work.”

  Katrina broke eye contact with me and began staring at the tabletop, like she was suddenly distracted.

  I said, “What?”

  “You met with her last night, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And she knew we were in Moscow, right?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  Katrina didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to say anything. She’d given me the hints and knew better than to draw the painful conclusions for me. They were, after all, inescapable, unavoidable, and emotionally crushing. Mary had arranged the hits against us. She certainly had the reach and resources. As the former station chief in Moscow she no doubt knew enough hoodlums she could hire to take us out. And as a resident of the D.C. area all her life, she wouldn’t have any trouble locating some street scum to kill us. Money sure as hell wasn’t a problem.

  But why? What had I done that would cause her to want me dead? Was she worried I might expose Alexi? Or perhaps she sensed that Katrina and I were closing in on her? Or both?

  Katrina was studying a paper napkin. “Well, what do you want to do next?”

&nbs
p; “We’re in way over our heads. We have to tell the FBI.”

  She nodded, and I added, “I know a guy. He used to be a JAG officer, got out, tried a big firm, never got picked up for partner, so he signed up with the Feds. Jimmy Belafonte… I haven’t seen him in seven years, but last I heard he’s working in the headquarters here. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’ll do.”

  I went to the pay phone and asked the operator for the number to FBI headquarters, then asked the Bureau’s operator to put me through to Belafonte. A secretary answered, “Money-laundering Division.”

  “Sean Drummond for Jimmy Belafonte, please.”

  I was immediately switched. “Special Agent Belafonte,” a voice answered.

  “Jimmy, Sean Drummond. I don’t know if you remember me?”

  “Sure. JAG School, right? And according to the news, you’re doing the Morrison case.”

  “Same Drummond. I need to meet you-privately.”

  “Catch up on old times, huh? Love to, buddy, only I’m busy the rest of this week. How about next Thursday?”

  “How about in forty-five minutes somewhere outside your building? I killed three guys this morning and I need to talk about it.”

  “Some reason we can’t meet here?” he asked, sounding suddenly alarmed.

  “Yeah, I don’t want to get shot by a sniper walking in the front door of your building. I know that sounds paranoid, but believe me, I’ve got good reasons. I’m calling because I trust you, Jimmy.”

  “There’s, uh, uh, there’s a Barnes amp; Noble with a coffee shop on M Street in Georgetown. How about there?” he asked, sounding tentative.

  “Forty-five minutes. I’ll be there,” I said before he could back out on me.

  Until this moment, I’d been stupid beyond words. I’d been playing in other people’s sandboxes, and I was the only guy too blind to recognize I was out of my depth. Everybody had warned me: my client, Mary, Alexi. My libido was too puffed up to hear them. I’d nearly gotten myself killed, and Katrina also.

  Somebody was making a point of showing me my own limitations.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Jimmy was not an impressive-looking guy. Soft brown skin, average height, average build, average face, all of which added up to pretty honest advertising, since on Jimmy’s best day, he was just an average guy.

  He was sipping from a big Starbucks coffee as he noodled through the history section when Katrina and I walked up behind him.

  I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hi, Jimmy. This is my co-counsel, Katrina Mazorski.”

  He spun around, nodded, and his face looked alarmed. He immediately whispered, “What’s this about three killings this morning? Tell me about that?”

  “Between eight and ten this morning, somebody tried to arrange two murders. I was attacked by two thugs in the parking lot of my apartment, and some ersatz homeless guy tried to whack Katrina with a butcher knife while she was walking to her car.”

  He studied my face to see if I was kidding and came to the obvious conclusion I wasn’t. “This isn’t my bailiwick, Sean. I’m a financial guy. I do money-laundering and bank fraud, not murder, or espionage.”

  “Yeah, but I know you, so I trust you.”

  “Any reason you don’t trust the rest of the Bureau?” he asked, appropriately suspicious.

  “Working on my client’s defense, I’ve discovered there is probably a mole somewhere in our government. Somewhere very high up, a mole with extraordinary resources. I’m not saying Morrison wasn’t a traitor-I don’t know about that. I’m saying there’s another mole, and that’s why somebody tried to kill us.”

  Jimmy was nodding his head. “And this mole is working for the Russians?”

  “Right.”

  “The attempt on your lives? What happened?”

  “Mine was set up like a robbery that went wrong. Only the killers screwed up and gave themselves away, so I, uh, well, I killed them. The guy who tried to take out Katrina, he didn’t expect me to show up.”

  “And you killed him, too?”

  “I had to. He was swinging a butcher knife.”

  He nodded, as suddenly six men and women came running at us from other nearby stacks. Before Katrina or I could do a thing, Jimmy was holding a pistol in his hand, and Katrina and I were getting our hands cuffed behind our backs, our rights read, our dignity trashed.

  I was swearing at Jimmy, who was obviously wearing a wire, and he held up a hand. “Drummond, take it easy. I’m a federal agent. When you said you killed three guys this morning, I had to tell my boss. You gave me no choice.”

  It obviously wasn’t supposed to work this way. In the movies, you see guys in desperate positions like mine, they call some old buddy and the old buddy cherishes the sacred bonds, protects their confidentiality, and takes care of everything. Either those movies are horsecrap or I’d overestimated my popularity.

  Katrina and I responded like lawyers naturally do, keeping our mouths shut, although I’d already crossed the Rubicon, because Jimmy had me admitting on tape to killing three guys, and all hell was going to break loose.

  Katrina and I were next led outside to two shiny Crown Victorias waiting beside the curb, as a crowd of gawkers and gapers gathered to watch a real-life arrest go down. This was a fresh and incredibly unwelcome experience for me, parading in front of folks like a common felon. Katrina was guided into the back of one car, and I was shoved into the other one.

  On the ride to the garage under the FBI building, I contemplated the charges they could throw at me: conspiracy, manslaughter, fleeing a crime, hiding evidence. And those were merely the charges I could think of. The FBI and Justice Department have all those highly imaginative guys with Ivy League degrees who are geniuses at thinking up charges. No doubt they could do better than me.

  We parked in an underground garage and then took the elevator to an upper-floor interrogation room. Jimmy hung around while a new guy entered the room. He had that weaselly look of the professional interrogator: long, skinny face, deadpan, droopy eyes, and a mouth with no wrinkles around the edges, like he never smiled or frowned or had orgasms. He walked hunched over, with his chin protruding out and a big, beaklike nose that poked suspiciously through the air.

  He sat in front of me and said, “I’m Special Agent Michaels. Do I need to read you your rights?” Belafonte, the traitorous prick, leaned against the wall. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why Belafonte remained in the room. I’d made my confession to him, and his presence was to remind me I’d already spilled the big beans, so let’s not niggle over the gravy.

  I shook my head. “Already done.”

  He leaned toward me like this was some kind of melodramatic moment. “We have you on tape admitting you killed a man in Washington and two men in your apartment parking lot earlier this morning.”

  “All that’s true,” I admitted, since it seemed damned silly to deny what I’d already admitted.

  He leaned back and stroked his chin. “However, we have a bit of problem here.”

  Technically, we didn’t have a bit of problem. I did, and not a bit of a problem, a mountain of a problem. I said, “I know.”

  He continued in a perfectly dry tone. “The problem, Drummond, is nobody reported any deaths. Unless you want to count a lady who got shoved off the subway platform at the Fourteenth Street station this morning. Only the D.C. police caught the guy who did that. Or would you like to confess to that killing, too?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What I just told you, Drummond. No dead guys showed up near your apartment building. And no dead guys showed up near Miss Mazorski’s apartment, either. So what the hell’s going on here?”

  “That’s impossible. This morning, at my apartment, the police came. I was interviewed by a detective. He took my statement.”

  He was nodding, like, Yeah, sure, tell me more, convince me.

  I said, “I’m not jerking you around. I walked out to my car and two guys approached me w
ith a knife and gun. It was meant to look like a robbery, only it wasn’t. It was a hit.”

  He was still nodding, only now he was biting his cheek. “And what happened to the bodies?” he asked, scratching the side of his nose, like, Gee, no shit, throw in a few Nazi spies and quit boring me?

  “A meat wagon got them. It was an Arlington County Hospital ambulance. I watched them load the bodies.”

  “What time?”

  “Shortly before eight.”

  He nodded at Belafonte, who nodded back and left.

  “And tell me about that second attack,” he ordered.

  “It happened right around the corner from Miss Mazorski’s apartment. Around nine-thirty… maybe ten. She was walking to her car and a guy who was made up to look homeless went after her with a butcher knife.”

  “And you stopped him?”

  “Only barely. Actually, she nailed him with some pepper spray and that blinded him.”

  “And you what? You shot him?”

  “No. I stabbed him.”

  He was doing that head-nodding routine and scratching that big goddamn nose again, and I wanted to reach across the table and jackslap him. He was trying to be grating, and even though I knew that, and knew I should rise above his provocation, I was emotionally entangled.

  I took three long breaths, then grinned. “Okay, asshole, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  “I love surprises. What do you have?”

  I reached into my pocket and whipped out the trusty Bic pen that was crusted with dried blood and specks of gray matter around the tip.

  I tossed it on the table between us and announced, “This is the pen I killed him with. I stuck it in his eyehole.”

  It was one of those moments when you wished you had a Polaroid camera. He stared down at the pen but refused to touch it, partly because he knew better than to get his fingerprints on it, and partly because it grossed him out.

  I couldn’t resist. “I believe it’s your turn, Special Agent Michaels.”

  The door opened and Jimmy Belafonte, the big skunk, walked in. He looked at Michaels and shook his head.