by Brian Haig
I said, “What is this bullshit, Belafonte? You’re not allowed to talk to me? You checked with the Arlington police and they confirmed they didn’t investigate the double killing? Is that what you were signaling him?”
“That’s what it meant,” he admitted, avoiding my eyes, which was a good thing because they would’ve caused his whole body to explode in flames. He added, “And there’s no bodies in the Arlington County morgue.”
“So this is really weird,” I said, as much to myself as them. “Look at the blood on that pen,” I ordered Michaels. “If I’m lying, whose blood and brain matter is that?”
He stared at the pen. “You tell me.”
It was my turn to shake my head. Interrogators are taught to never, ever lose control of the interrogation, no matter what. That “you tell me” was his half-assed attempt to regain the upper hand. I was now asking the questions and his procedures said he couldn’t allow that.
“It belonged to a guy who was hired to murder my co-counsel.”
“And where’s his body?”
“How the hell do I know? We ran off before anybody came. But the cops came to the killing in my parking lot. I talked with them and I saw a meat wagon, and I’ve dealt with enough cops to know they were the real thing. The detective was named… uh, Christ, I can’t remember his name. But I can describe him.”
Michaels’s nose was sticking in my face. “No need. We already know what he looks like. A middle-aged detective in a suit who asked a lot of questions, right?”
I rubbed my forehead. I fought the temptation to tell him what a stupid ass he was. This wasn’t easy. “Somebody tried to murder me and Miss Mazorski because they want to keep the lid on something we discovered.”
“And what would that be?” he asked, and from his tone I knew there was no way in hell he was going to believe a word I said, much less the exorbitant tale I actually had to tell.
I pushed aside my reservations and said, “We discovered that my client, Bill Morrison, is probably being framed for treason. We talked to a lot of people and left a lot of impressions in our wake, and somebody wants to erase some of those impressions.”
“Uh-huh,” he said dismissively. “Let’s get back to these guys you killed. Who were they?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t check their wallets? Didn’t get their names?”
“I said I don’t know.”
“But you told Special Agent Belafonte you knew things.”
“Have you been listening to me?”
His expression did not alter the slightest bit. “You mean about the three dead guys that don’t exist?”
I gripped the edge of the table. I gave him my screw-you look. “Michaels, let’s rearrange the bidding here. They were professional hits.”
“And their bodies disappeared? Come on, Major, you’ve got to do better than this. Help me out here. Convince me you killed these three guys.”
Michaels and Belafonte exchanged quick glances, and while I wasn’t sure what they meant, it was so characteristic of these things, and so condescending, it pissed me off even more.
“Are you going to charge me?”
“We’re exploring that option right now,” Michaels said, very cavalierly, like, Why don’t you give me a hand here, because I’m having a tough time putting my finger on what crime you did.
I stood up.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
“No. Unless you’ve got a warrant, I’m out of here.”
Michaels looked at Belafonte, and Belafonte looked at me. In a very convivial tone he said, “Sean, maybe you should tell us more about the attempts on you and Miss Mazorski? What do you think happened to their bodies?”
I walked for the door, and Belafonte stepped in front of me.
I said, “Belafonte, move before I send your gonads into your ears and you spend the rest of your life with your earlobes getting hard every time you see a pretty girl.”
He studied my eyes to see if I was kidding. I wasn’t. I most definitely wasn’t. He almost jumped aside.
I walked into the hallway and began swinging open every door I could find. Two or three rooms were filled with suspects and interrogators and lawyers, and they all looked up in astonished shock when I stuck my enraged face in.
I finally hit the one with Katrina and her interrogator, a woman with a big ass who looked like Michaels’s twin sister, vulture nose, droopy eyes and all. She started yelling at me.
I walked in, grabbed Katrina’s arm, and dragged her out of the room, while her interrogator howled. We walked down the hall to the elevator, took it down five floors, then walked out of the building.
The telling thing was that nobody tried to stop us. No guys in blue or gray suits came running after us, waving guns and shields and frantically screaming at us to halt or else.
I said, “That was bullshit.”
She said, “Don’t you have any real friends?”
“I barely knew him. We went through the JAG course together. He always was a conformist jerk. What the hell was I thinking? So how far did you get with your story?”
She was shaking her head. “The bitch didn’t believe a word. She said there were no bodies.”
“Yeah,” I said, waving my arm for a taxi. “It was damned strange. Too strange.”
“Speaking of strange, what happened to the bodies?”
“You’ve got two options. One, the police have them and there’s some kind of monumental paperwork screwup. If it was just the D.C. police, what with their record on homicides, okay, maybe. But not at Arlington, too.”
“And option two?”
“We’re being played. Somebody in the U.S. government is hiding those bodies and suppressing the truth. Somebody in the FBI told those two interrogators to jerk us around and stonewall us. We’re being set up, Katrina.”
“Option two.”
“Right. They were watching us this morning. When the hit on me went wrong, they policed it up and made it look like it never happened.”
“Why didn’t they just kill you then?”
“I’d already attracted attention. We were in the parking lot of a big apartment building, and when the gunman’s piece went off, the noise probably drew a hundred gawkers to their windows. So the cops pull up and what are they going to do? Shoot me with all those witnesses? No, they’re going to go through all the normal rigmarole, take away the bodies, take my statements, and then drive off and act like it never happened.”
“Obviously a repeat performance at my place.”
“Right. Had we stuck around, some D.C. detective would’ve run us through the drill and then told us to go on our way.”
She watched the passing traffic. “I think our mole knows we’re coming and has more grease than we do. I’d say our mole is probably in the CIA and has been working with the FBI on the mole hunt, and she somehow wrapped the Fibbies around her little finger.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I finally flagged down a taxi and had the hack drive us to the heart of the Virginia suburbs and drop us at the Tysons Corner mall, which came to an astonishing total of sixty dollars. And do you believe the taxi driver had the balls to look at me expectantly, like, Hey, where’s my tip?
Tysons happens to be one of the biggest malls in the world, a huge, sprawling complex with multiple escalators and over a hundred stores that are always crammed with jostling crowds. It being late November, with Christmas around the corner, the crowds were twice as thick. We rushed through several shops, buying enough clothes and shoes to last for several days, several wigs, some hair dye-your basic disguise paraphernalia-and a big goddamn hunting knife for those unexpected eventualities that seemed to be falling our way.
I used my charge card, because I wasn’t the least bit worried about giving away our location. Why should I be when we were already being followed? I didn’t see them, but they were there. They’d been there this morning to see me almost get killed, and near Katrina’s apartment to see her a
lmost get killed.
Who were they? I had no idea, but they were pros. I assumed they were Fibbies, though that wasn’t necessarily correct. They might be CIA people, although that would be odd, because the United States has all these quirky laws about how the CIA isn’t supposed to do domestic operations. Not that the CIA always respects those laws. And I assumed it was Mary moving the chess pieces around on the board.
In my former life as a member of the outfit, we’d had pretty good instruction on how to elude followers. Since we were sometimes forced to operate incognito in places we weren’t supposed to be, it was expert training. Of course, it always helps when the trailers aren’t aware that you have these skills, because that lets you exploit their underestimations.
I explained to Katrina how we were going to do this, and then we promenaded into Lord amp; Taylor. She yanked a dress off the rack and went into the women’s dressing room as I stood by the entrance like your typically bored suburban husband. About ten minutes went by with women passing in and out, while a flock of other bored husbands gathered around me, each of us avoiding one another’s eyes, the way guys do when their wives are spending them into bankruptcy.
I finally walked away. I moved swiftly, knowing that if the followers were serious, there’d be plenty of them in the mall, each with those little earphone and hidden microphone thingies, squabbling back and forth as they handed us off to one another. And at that very instant, some of those watchers would be wondering what the hell had happened to Katrina, which was the heart of the plan: to get the watchers screaming at one another, frantically trying to hunt down Katrina, while I did my thing.
I dodged into the ground floor of Nordstrom, then trotted up the escalator to the second floor. I ducked down low, hiding in the clothes racks as I raced swiftly through the women’s section and dove into the women’s dressing room, where I immediately dodged into a stall.
A minute later I waddled out between two other women, looking not the least bit bewitching in my paisley muumuu dress with bags of clothing tied around my waist, a red wig on my head, and a large pair of women’s glasses, grasping two other bags of clothes to hide the whiskers on my jaw. I wobbled ungracefully toward the entrance, praying this worked. I had this nightmare of a bunch of Fibbies converging on me, drawing a big crowd, and there’d I be, exposed as a transvestite with pitiful tastes.
I went straight for the hot dog store in the middle of the mall, where a svelte blonde dressed in tight jeans and a black butch T-shirt and motorcycle boots sat munching a king-size dog, watching for a supremely ugly redhead in a muumuu. The muumuu was Katrina’s idea. I’d never forgive her. I looked like a cow. I mean, if you’re going to do this cross-dressing thing, it hardly seems fair to have to look like an elephant in a tent.
I went for the exit; she waited a minute, then followed. On my way out, I saw a guy dressed like an overage surfer looking frantically around. A thingie was stuffed in his ear and he was talking into his chest. He watched me waddle past doing my act, grimaced, and looked elsewhere.
I went into the covered parking garage, and a minute later Katrina sneaked up behind me. How did I know this? She had the nerve to pinch my fanny and say, “Hey, doll, looking for a good time?”
I flinched and grumbled, “Yeah, ain’t I the friggin’ hottie?”
She chuckled.
“Wheels next,” I said, and we walked across the street and down to Route 7, where the local suburbanites make all the car dealers congregate along one long road, each within sight of one another, trying to filch one another’s customers. Liar’s Alley, the locals call it. I dodged into the restroom at the Chevy dealership and changed into jeans and a button-down dress shirt, with Top-Siders, and then emerged looking like your typical suburban yuppie.
Katrina and I walked over and ogled a 1996 BMW four-seater convertible parked in the lot. Out of thin air a guy dressed like a Miami Vice cop appeared.
“Hey folks, like it?” he asked, with the prototypical smile and unctuous manner of his breed.
“Depends how it drives,” I said, stroking the paint job. “Even brought the wife along, ’cause we’re serious. I’m not looking, I’m buying, and if you convince me, you’ll get a fat check as I’m driving off in this thing.”
He beamed. He caressed me with his eyes. He then eyed Katrina, because I was already bagged, and all he had to do was to charm the little woman into wanting it too.
“Hal Burton,” he said. “Just a sec and I’ll run in and get the keys. It’s an incredible car. You sure you can handle it?”
“Born to it,” I said, one overtestosteroned jerk to another.
He winked and then ran in to get the keys.
Katrina said, “Is there a point to this?”
“You like it?”
She stared at the car. “Not my style.”
Hal came trotting out with the key. He winked again as he tossed the key across the hood, like we were a couple of real swell pals, weren’t we now?
He got in the back while Katrina and I climbed in the front. It started up with a throaty roar. We pulled out into traffic and headed straight for the Beltway, Hal babbling about what a titsy car it was, how frequently and expertly serviced, how beloved and pampered by its previous owner, how much the car was… well, us.
I hit the GW Parkway exit and began heading toward D.C. Hal in the back said, “Smooth, ain’t it? Like the way it drives?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, nodding enthusiastically.
He said, “Hey, sorry to mention this, pal, but the dealership’s gotta rule about staying within a five-mile limit. Not that I don’t trust you, ’cause you look like swell folks, but rules are rules.”
I said, “Gee, Hal, I’ll try to get off at the next exit.”
Hal grinned. That grin died when I zipped right past the next exit.
“Hey, uh,” he said, bending forward and tapping my shoulder. “You missed that exit.”
“Sorry. The way this thing drives, you get caught up in it. How much did you say it cost?”
He leaned back. He grinned. He imagined where he’d spend his commission. “List at eighteen five, but you’re obviously a man of the world, so you know that’s negotiable.”
While he droned on about everything he was willing to do to fit us into this car, I took the Key Bridge exit. He grinned and was still prattling about what a swell car it was, and what a swell couple we were, when we came to the stop sign at the end of the exit. I put the car in park and looked over at Katrina.
“Don’t you just love this car?”
“I told you earlier, it’s not my type.”
I looked back at Hal. “Sorry, pal. The little woman doesn’t care for it.” I tossed a twenty in his flabbergasted lap as we got out. “For gas. Incidentally, the car’s got one broken shock, and it needs a valve job.”
We left him fuming and cursing as we began walking across Key Bridge toward the Georgetown section of D.C.
Katrina said, “I’m sure you have a really good reason why we did this the hard way?”
“We arrived in a cab, so the watchers were expecting us to leave in one. If they’re CIA or FBI they’d know five minutes after we called the cab company, and they would’ve been waiting for us at the other end.”
She grinned. “Aren’t you the clever one?”
“The trick in modern society is avoid anything electronic. The police are spoiled. Between charge cards, ATMs, e-mail, telephones, car rentals with computers, hotels with computers, airlines with computers, the feds have these software programs that sweep through all that clutter, and they find you. If you’re electronically invisible, they’re bewildered.”
“And I suppose you know what to do next?”
“No, actually, I don’t. From here on in, we’re on the fly.”
She scratched her head and said nothing for a minute. Then, “Do you trust Alexi?”
I had to think about that. I guess I did, within limits. Yes, he had an extra bat in the belfry, but as I mentioned, tha
t didn’t mean he wasn’t a decent guy. There was no question how she felt about him. After all, she’d done the big swami dance with him.
“What exactly do you have in mind?” I asked, sort of a delicate way of not answering her question.
“Let’s call him.”
“Why?”
“So he can hide us.”
Oddly enough, the idea of calling a Russian intelligence officer to hide us from the American government had a certain ironic charm. Added to our lack of other workable options, I thought why not.
“Okay,” I said, “but let me do the talking.”
We walked into a grungy-looking record store filled with teenage kids combing through the stacks, hunting for the latest hip-hop hit. I approached the girl at the counter.
“Hey,” I said, “we’ve got an emergency and I don’t have a cell phone. How about if I pay you to use your phone to make a call?”
She snarled, rolled her eyes, and started to say, “Store policy is-”
I whipped out of my pocket the thick wad of money that I took off the thug that morning. “Two hundred bucks.”
Her lips froze. She handed me the phone. I handed it to Katrina. “You got his number?”
Her hand went into her purse, digging for it. I said, “Just talk to his secretary. Tell her we lost a briefcase and we’re wondering if Alexi had any idea where it is. Give her the number for this store and ask for him to call us.”
Katrina dialed the number and in Russian gave Alexi’s secretary our message. When she was finished, I handed the girl the two hundred bucks, then told her we’d be getting a return call any minute. She smiled and licked her lips, and I saw two of those little silver beads sticking through her tongue. We stood by the counter for twenty minutes watching a procession of young kids dressed almost identically in baggy jeans and oversize sweat shirts, nearly all of whom had dyed hair, tattoos, and earrings or small silver beads punched all over their faces. Katrina fit right in. I looked like a guy who mistook this place for a tofu bar.
It sucked being young in this era. In my day we only had to look like fancified dorks in disco drag. At least we didn’t have to get stabbed and tattooed. I mean, those old disco clothes, you send them to Goodwill and glide gracefully into becoming a fat, balding, middle-aged guy. Just throw out all your old pictures and your kids will never know what a jumbo jerk you used to be. All those holes and tattoos-they’ll know.