by M. A. Lawson
Kay had finally looked up the OMB: It stood for the Office of Management and Budget. According to OMB’s website its core mission was to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch—whatever the hell that meant. As near as Kay could figure, the OMB helped the president develop a budget and then spend the money. She also learned that when Dolan said he spent “a little time over at OMB” he actually meant he ran the organization for a year.
“. . . I learned quite a bit more about how money gets moved around in Washington, which is what made me attractive to Callahan.”
“How’d you meet him?” Kay asked.
“I can’t get into that. All I can say is that he needed somebody like me for a specific job one time, told me about himself and what the Callahan Group does, and I agreed to help him.” He hesitated before he added, “It almost makes me blush to say this, but I wanted to give back to my country. My family has been very fortunate, and so have I, and since I never enlisted in the military, I decided to join him. The other reason I signed on with him is, quite frankly, it sounded like fun—and it has been.”
Fun? Maybe figuring out a way to get lithium out of a place like Afghanistan and putting a guy like Sahid Khan in a position of power so he could be controlled by the U.S. government was his idea of fun, but it certainly wasn’t Kay’s idea of fun. She remembered one time in Florida when she was part of a team sent into the Everglades to bust a guy with a meth lab protected by pit bulls and guarded by idiots with assault rifles—now, that had been fun. It was like the difference between a man who liked chess and a woman who liked . . . well, hockey.
She asked him one last question about himself, deep into her second martini: “Are you married? I mean, I can see you’re not wearing a ring, but . . .”
Kay’s last long-term relationship, which had gone on for over a year, had been with a married man—an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego. In some ways, before Jessica moved in with her, she preferred affairs with married men, as they tended not to be particularly clingy and rarely wanted to marry her. Kay had been married once, for eight months when she was twenty-three, and had no desire to get married again. After Jessica started living with her, however, she didn’t feel right about sleeping with some other woman’s husband—she couldn’t say why this was so, but that’s the way it was—and she stopped seeing the assistant U.S. attorney.
The fact was, her sex life was in the toilet and it was a situation she needed to rectify. She didn’t feel comfortable bringing men home for one-night stands—not with Jessica sleeping in the next room—and in the short time they’d been living in D.C., she hadn’t met anyone that she thought would be anything more than a one-night stand.
Eli Dolan, however, might be a whole different story. He intrigued her. He was smart and funny and incredibly good-looking—and rich. He was a catch, as her late mother used to say.
In answer to her question about being married, Eli said, “No, I’m not married. I was married for about five years to a girl I met in college—my parents adored her—but we went our separate ways.”
“Why?” Kay asked.
Dolan hesitated. “I guess, to be completely honest, after we’d been married for a while I found out she just wasn’t that interesting to be with and I couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life with her.”
Hmm. Kay didn’t know how she felt about that answer.
After all the personal stuff was out of the way, he told her about the Swiss connection, and to hear Dolan tell the story, what he’d done was quite simple, although it didn’t sound simple at all to Kay.
“We obviously need a mining company to get the lithium out of the ground, but like Callahan told you, we wanted to be able to control the company. Our objective is to stockpile lithium, not to turn a profit. We also didn’t want to use a U.S. company, because of anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan. The company we finally decided to use is an old Swiss company called Glardon Mining. It has experience with international mining, mostly in Africa, and good engineers. But the main reason we selected Glardon was because it was vulnerable.
“The company was founded by a man named Gustav Glardon and has been around for seventy years. Gustav’s son, Ernst, now runs it. Unfortunately for Glardon’s employees, Ernst is an idiot who has run the business into the ground. Not only that, he’s also an incompetent crook who’s been embezzling from his own company. In the last six months, the Callahan Group acquired the controlling interest in Glardon and I’ve sat down with Ernst and explained to him that he’s now working for me and if he doesn’t do what I tell him, he’ll spend several years in a Swiss prison.
“It was easy,” Dolan concluded.
13 | When Alpha called Bravo and said they needed to talk privately, Bravo knew Alpha’s name, because they’d spoken before when the Callahan Group was investigating companies to provide security for the mining operation. Bravo was surprised, of course, by the meeting place, but agreed without complaint. Bravo needed the money too much to argue with a potential client, no matter how strange the client’s demands might seem.
Meeting with Finley hadn’t been dangerous. Finley’s only weapon was his mind, and he wasn’t physically impressive. Had it been necessary to dispatch Finley, Alpha had no doubt that would have been possible, even easy. Bravo was a different story. Bravo was a trained killer.
And where Finley had been motivated by arrogance and the technical challenge of the job, Bravo could only be swayed with money. And if Bravo had a conscience, which seemed unlikely, he might report Alpha to Callahan. A more likely possibility was that Bravo would demand a bigger slice of the pie and he might even think, considering his role in the operation, that he was in charge and Alpha was working for him instead of the other way around.
All Alpha knew for sure was that if Bravo didn’t agree to cooperate, he’d have to be killed. Bravo couldn’t leave the meeting place knowing Alpha’s plan. But killing the man was not going to be easy. Alpha had no practical experience when it came to murder, whereas Bravo had a lifetime’s worth of experience and there was no doubt, considering his profession, that he would come to the meeting armed. To make matters worse, if it became necessary to kill him, then it would also be necessary to deal with the logistics of committing a capital crime: making sure no evidence was left behind, that no witnesses existed, and figuring out what to do with the body.
It was with all these considerations in mind that Alpha chose the meeting place: a five-hundred-acre state forest near Strasburg, Virginia, with the ominous-sounding name of Devil’s Backbone. The forest was about halfway between Bravo’s company in West Virginia and Washington, D.C., and therefore convenient for both parties. The main reason Alpha selected the place, however, was that it was a research forest, not open to the general public, and one particular campsite was especially isolated. Devil’s Backbone was, in other words, a good place to murder a man and dispose of his corpse.
—
ALPHA ARRIVED AT the campsite an hour early; it wouldn’t do for Bravo to get there first. The campsite was surrounded by trees, the small clearing for pitching a tent was overgrown with brush, and there was nothing else there but a fire pit covered with a rusty barbecue grate and a dilapidated, wooden picnic table. It didn’t appear as if the site had been used in years, and it was unlikely that anyone would decide to use it today—or so Alpha hoped. When Bravo arrived, Alpha, as planned, was already sitting at the picnic table and the gun was in Alpha’s lap, obscured by the top of the table.
Bravo was in excellent physical condition, and he moved with the grace of a large, powerful feline as he walked toward the table. He sat directly across from Alpha as expected. The gun in Alpha’s lap was a Heckler & Koch P30 9mm pistol equipped with a silencer, and, if necessary, Alpha would fire under the table, never showing the gun. If the first shot didn’t kill Bravo, the next one would.
Like with Finley, A
lpha began with a discussion of Bravo’s abysmal financial situation. He immediately became angry that his privacy had been invaded—although almost all the data was a matter of public record. Alpha knew what really angered him was that he was a proud man and humiliated by his circumstances.
Alpha’s whole argument boiled down to that old saying: Which would you prefer? A bird in the hand or two in the bush? It was really that simple. If Bravo’s company was awarded the security contract, and if things went as Callahan planned, the company would eventually make a lot of money—the important words being if and eventually. The problem was that there was no guarantee that Callahan would succeed and eventually could be two or three years down the road.
Alpha pointed out that even if Callahan was successful, it was going to be a long time before the mining operation actually started—and during that time, Bravo’s company would have nothing to protect and, therefore, no large amounts of money coming in. Furthermore, it was always possible that the boys in Kabul would manage to screw everything up and the security contract could be given to somebody else, in which case Bravo would be left out in the cold. The last thing Alpha told him was that the money from the security contract would go to his company—not him personally—and it would be visible to the gnomes at the IRS. The taxman would never see the money Alpha gave him.
So which did he prefer: the bird in hand or the two in the bush?
It actually didn’t take him very long to make up his mind—no more than ten minutes. He was a man used to making decisions, and Alpha had been sure before sitting down with him that the bloodshed wouldn’t bother him. He’d killed before and in large numbers. Killing, after all, had been his job. He was moved by the money; the amount Alpha was offering was simply too much for him to pass up.
After he made his decision, they began to talk about the details of how to execute the plan—and Alpha relaxed and put the gun back in a pocket. Bravo actually proved to be quite helpful; he was an experienced tactician, not merely a killer.
14 | Kay wore a badge that allowed her to roam around the United Nations building without an escort. Ara Khan had arrived in New York the night before and Kay had been following her all day. She now watched as Ara left the UN building with three other Muslim women.
Ara had come to the United Nations to attend a symposium on women’s issues: equal opportunity, infant mortality rates, birth control, AIDS, education for girls—all the usual things. Many of the attendees were from Muslim countries, and there were women from Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a host of African nations. Ara was one of two women representing Afghanistan. Kay didn’t know if the purpose of the symposium was to simply sit around and bitch about the way things were, or if the intent was to get money from the richer nations to aid their efforts. She suspected the latter.
What Kay needed was a chance to get close to Ara and talk to her, but so far the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Ara had been in meetings and lectures all day, and when she left for lunch, she was accompanied by other people. It was now four p.m. and Kay watched in dismay as she and the other three women jumped into a cab. Kay waved down another cab and followed the group to the Hyatt near Grand Central, where many of the delegates were staying. She watched as Ara walked through the lobby with her friends, glancing once over at the packed lobby bar, and entered an elevator. When Ara had looked over at the bar, Kay got the impression that she wanted to join the noisy crowd in there.
When they’d been prepping her to talk to Ara, Mercer had emphasized that ideally Kay should find a way to approach Ara in a social setting, and somehow get her alone and establish some rapport with her. They didn’t want her to go straight at Ara and bluntly lay out the Callahan Group’s proposal.
“Why not?” Kay had asked.
“Because if you just walk up to her and say you want to meet with her, she’ll ask why. And then you’d have to say you want to talk to her about the lithium reserves in Ghazni Province, and she’ll most likely refuse. She won’t talk to a stranger about something like that, and she’ll suspect that you’re trying to use her in some way. So you have to find a way to . . . I don’t know, ease into it, to get her to like you first.”
Kay found the idea of conning Ara into liking her distasteful. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t conned criminals before—she’d done that fairly often when she worked for the DEA—but Ara Khan wasn’t a criminal. Sensing what she was thinking, Mercer had said, “Look. If you have some sort of moral objection to this assignment, you should resign. You’re no longer in the black-and-white world of law enforcement, and if you can’t handle the . . . the ambiguities of this kind of work, we’ll find someone else.”
Maybe Kay should have walked out the door right then, but she didn’t. And by the way, she’d almost said, law enforcement wasn’t all that black and white.
“I thought about staging a mugging,” Mercer had said. “You know, a junkie tries to steal her purse and you save her. But that’s just too Hollywood, and Ara would probably see right through it. She’s not a dummy. But we need to devise some sort of scenario where you can get next to her.”
In the end, Callahan told Mercer to quit trying to orchestrate the initial meeting and let Kay play it by ear. Mercer didn’t like this at all; she was a control freak and she wanted a situation she could control, but Callahan said, “Look, it’s a sales job, pure and simple. You walk into a showroom and the salesman approaches you, and if you don’t like him, he couldn’t sell you a Cadillac if he was selling them for a buck. But if you like the salesman, and even if you don’t want a Cadillac, you’ll listen to his pitch, and who knows, you might end up buying one. So Hamilton just needs to look for an opportunity to approach Ara, make Ara like her, then pitch her. And don’t forget the amount of money we’re offering; that’ll get Ara’s attention even if she doesn’t like Hamilton or the pitch.”
—
KAY TOOK A SEAT in the lobby of the Hyatt, wondering if Ara would venture out again that night. It was only five p.m. She was afraid, however, that if Ara did go out, it would be with her Muslim friends. Fortunately, she turned out to be wrong.
Twenty minutes later, Ara stepped out of the elevator. The Ara who had gone up in the elevator twenty minutes earlier had been wearing a flowing robe with a colorful scarf over her head. She’d looked like a Muslim woman. The Ara who exited the elevator was wearing a short, black leather jacket, tight-fitting blue jeans, and red high heels. Her long black hair flowed down to her shoulders. She looked like any other chic New Yorker who came from money and had excellent taste, except she was better-looking than most New Yorkers. There was something exotic about her.
Kay followed her out of the hotel, relieved that Ara didn’t catch a cab. It was rush hour and it was going to be hard to get a cab to tail her. But it appeared as if all Ara wanted to do was stretch her legs and walk around the city where she’d gone to college, and it was a lovely October evening, more like summer than fall.
Kay watched as she went into one shoe store and spent ten minutes looking at the shoes—the expensive ones—but she didn’t try anything on. She left the shoe store and walked around Times Square for about ten minutes, ordered a hot dog from a street vendor, and ate it as she walked, being careful not to spill relish onto her jacket. Kay got the impression she enjoyed the hot dog more than a multicourse dinner at some five-star establishment.
After she finished eating, she surprised Kay when she took the stairs down to a subway station. She was familiar with the MetroCard ticket system and seemed comfortable riding the crowded train. She exited the train in lower Manhattan, and when she was back out on the street she moved with a purpose, not dawdling along, window-shopping, as she’d done earlier. She finally entered a place called the Ulysses Folk House on Pearl Street.
Ara walked past the bar and back toward the restrooms, and Kay guessed she was going there to repair her lipstick after eating the hot dog. As she waited fo
r Ara, Kay looked around. The Ulysses Folk House was near the Financial District and appeared to be filled with Wall Street types: young men and women, mostly men, with expensive haircuts and expensive suits, drinking martinis and bragging—and probably lying—about how well they’d done that day gambling with other people’s money.
Ara came back from the restroom and took a seat at the bar. Kay waited until Ara had a drink in front of her, then took a bar stool one seat away from her. She intentionally didn’t take the seat next to her.
The bartender came over and asked what Kay wanted, and she said, “Gee, I don’t know.” Turning to Ara, she said, “What’s that you’re having?” Ara’s drink was a pale blue color served in a martini glass.
Ara said, “It’s called a cool blue martini. It’s made with blue curaçao and vodka or gin. I prefer vodka.”
To the bartender Kay said, “One of those, just like hers with vodka.” To Ara she said, “Thanks. Never hurts to try something new. By the way, I love your shoes.” And she did.
“Thank you,” Ara said. “They’re Dolce & Gabbanas.”
Kay knew that. She also knew she couldn’t afford the seven hundred bucks they cost. “Well, I love them,” she said. “Why did you decide to stop in here tonight?”
“I love to people-watch,” Ara said. “I used to come here when I was in college. Did you ever read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities?”
“No, I’m not much of a reader. But I saw the movie with Tom Hanks.”
“Then you know what I mean. These are the people Wolfe was writing about, the ones who think they’re the masters of the universe.”
“Well, personally, I’d prefer a Mr. Universe type,” Kay said. “You know, a guy with six-pack abs instead of a portfolio.”