by M. A. Lawson
Kay didn’t say anything for a moment as she walked along beside Callahan. She noticed he was breathing way too heavily for the short distance they’d walked. He needed to lose weight and stop smoking.
“If you’re right about Eli,” Kay said, “then there’s another player involved in this. I mean, if Eli didn’t program his own computer to steal the money, then somebody else did. So unless you think that Anna or Sylvia have the computer skills . . .”
“They don’t,” Callahan said. “Someplace out there is a computer guy who helped with all this.”
“Or computer gal, Callahan. I mean, if you think it was a woman who betrayed you, you shouldn’t be such a sexist.”
Callahan laughed.
“How would Sylvia or Anna have found the computer person to help them?” Kay said. “Do you have people on retainer?”
“Now, that’s actually a damn good question. We don’t have people on retainer, but I have access to some of the best computer people in this country, including some five-star hackers, but I’m the only one that has access to them. Sylvia and Anna would have to find somebody, and they sure as hell didn’t place an ad in the Help Wanted pages.” Callahan smiled at Kay and said, “I’m going to do the same thing one of them did to find a guy who could snatch money out of thin air.”
“Which is?”
“Don’t worry about that. I want you to go home and rest up. If I can get a lead on the computer guy, I’m going to have you run him down and deal with him.”
“Deal with him how?” Kay said.
Instead of answering her question, Callahan said, “And watch your back, Kay. Somebody’s tried to kill you twice now. They could try again.”
That was the first time she remembered him calling her Kay.
30 | Callahan left a message for Smee, telling the weasel he needed to talk to him. An hour later, he met with Smee in an office near Dupont Circle that had a FOR LEASE sign in the window. He told Smee what he wanted. He’d used Prescott’s people to do the financial reviews and to answer the computer questions, but now he wanted Grayson’s folks to help him find the computer guy. Grayson was in the right organization to do that.
Callahan returned to his office, poured a cup of coffee, then tipped a little bourbon into the cup.
Sylvia or Anna? Which one had killed the Khans?
Sylvia was the person who had the most motive, a lot more motive than either Eli or Anna. Callahan didn’t know anyone personally who lived in more miserable circumstances. She’d been caring for her sick mother seemingly forever—and Callahan knew her mother was a sharp-tongued, complaining, ungrateful hag. She didn’t have a husband, because what man would want to marry into a situation where he would become a full-time nursing partner? She made over two hundred grand a year as his top lawyer, but lived in a shitty apartment, drove a shitty car, and dressed in shitty clothes because her mother’s medical expenses had bled her dry. When she took vacation time, she did so when her mother was hospitalized for one reason or another. If Callahan had been in Sylvia’s situation, he would have smothered the old bat with a pillow years ago.
So did Sylvia do it? Had she finally been pushed over the edge? Had she finally decided it was time to live not just a normal life but a better-than-normal life to make up for all the years she’d sacrificed? Callahan had no doubt she had the brains to steal the money and plan the operation. And if she had the money she could escape from her mother and assuage her conscience by putting the old woman in the finest medical facility in the country. But kill five people? Would Sylvia do that?
No. She wouldn’t do that. And the reason he knew this was the sacrifices she’d made for her mother.
It was Anna who had betrayed him and killed Ara Khan—and admitting this just broke Callahan’s heart.
—
FOR SOME TIME, Callahan had sensed Mercer’s growing bitterness—which really wasn’t at all unusual for people like her when they reached middle age. People who have spent their entire careers serving the U.S. government—the people at the top, the admirals and generals, the intelligence people who protect the nation, presidential appointees responsible for billions of dollars managing federal programs—rarely made more than two hundred grand a year. So it wasn’t unusual at all for these senior people to grouse about the fact that Wall Street bankers, who had nowhere near their level of responsibility, made multimillion-dollar salaries. All senior civil servants, at some point in their lives, can’t help but think how much more they could have made had they taken their ideas and ambition to the private sector.
Some of these people, however, could at least take solace in the fact that the citizens they served knew who they were and what they did, and admired them. When a man said he’d been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, director of the CIA, secretary of defense or state—people knew that he’d been somebody who mattered. And these people, because of their fame and their past positions, were usually able to get lucrative private-sector jobs after they retired. Most civil servants, however, including Thomas Callahan and Anna Mercer, had no claim to fame. Nobody could tell you who had been the deputy director of some agency or the undersecretary at another. From the standpoint of public recognition, they were nobodies.
Callahan could see that all this began to grate on Mercer. Not only didn’t she make the kind of money she could have made if she’d taken her talents to Exxon or Pfizer or Morgan Stanley, the worst part was, she’d always been a second banana. She’d always been somebody’s deputy—as she was now Callahan’s. Moreover, because she worked for the Callahan Group, she wasn’t even allowed to tell folks what she’d accomplished; there’d be no book deals for Anna Mercer.
Callahan figured that sometime in the past year, Mercer decided that if she was going to be an invisible servant to an ungrateful nation, at least she was going to be a rich one. She was not going to settle for a time-share in Fort Lauderdale that she visited two weeks a year. She wasn’t going to drive a car until it had two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. She was not going to fly fucking coach.
Instead, she decided to steal fifty million dollars the government could never report as having been stolen. She wouldn’t get all the money, however—she’d have to share part of it with her cohorts—but Callahan was betting that she’d kept the lion’s share for herself. If she only kept thirty of the fifty million. . . Well, thirty million wasn’t chicken feed.
If all she’d done was steal the money, that would have bothered Callahan, of course, but she’d done more than that. What really bothered him was the reason she killed Ara Khan. She didn’t need to kill Ara to steal the money—she killed Ara because Ara’s death was all part of the smoke screen that Anna had to create to hide her involvement and make him think that the Taliban or someone in Kabul had planted the bomb.
Like he’d told Hamilton, Anna had been hoping that no one would be able to penetrate the secrecy and security of a Swiss bank and discover that the fifty million never made it into Sahid Khan’s account. She had to kill the Khans, because if they called their banker the day after the meeting, then they—and Callahan—would know the money had been stolen. So in case Callahan did learn that she’d stolen the money, she’d arranged things so Eli Dolan became the primary suspect. He felt bad now that he’d ever suspected Eli; he imagined Hamilton did, too.
So he knew it was Anna—but he didn’t really know. Like Hamilton had said, he needed proof, at least a little. But until he had some proof, he had to make sure that Anna didn’t run. As smart as she was, if she ran he might not ever find her.
Callahan’s thoughts were interrupted by an e-mail ding from his laptop. The e-mail was from Amazon; he’d bought one book from them two years ago and now he got six e-mails a day from a company that was trying to take over the world. The e-mail said his order would be shipped at six p.m., which meant that he would meet again with Smee at six to get the information he’d asked for.
>
He pondered what he was about to do next for a couple of minutes, then picked up the phone and asked Mercer to come to his office.
31 | Mercer wondered what Callahan wanted. She hadn’t seen him since he’d returned from Switzerland. He was on the phone when she entered his office, and all she heard him say was “That sounds good, honey. I’ll see you at seven.”
She wondered who he was talking to. She hoped honey wasn’t a future Mrs. Callahan, which would make her Mrs. Callahan Number 5. The last thing Callahan needed was one more ex-wife.
“You look terrible, Thomas,” Mercer said. “You really should go home and get some sleep.”
“Aw, I’m all right. I took a little nap on the couch. Anyway, I wanted to see how the Liberia thing was going. I hope it’s going okay, because I need to be able to give the president’s guy a little good news after what I told him yesterday.”
“What do you mean?” Mercer asked.
“Yesterday I had to tell him that fifty million U.S. dollars is now sitting in a dead man’s bank account and we’re not going to be able to get the money back—and that was the best news I had for him. I told him that with Sahid Khan dead there’s going to be a political dogfight in Ghazni Province to replace Khan, that we have no idea who his replacement might be, and our best chance to acquire the mining rights was blown up with the bomb that killed the Khans. He also wasn’t happy to hear that our best hope for placing an enlightened female in a ruling position in Afghanistan is gone.”
“Do you have any idea who planted the bomb yet?” Mercer asked.
“No. I mean, I’m pretty sure the old man whose throat was cut planted the bomb, but I don’t know who he was working for. The bomb could also have been planted by one of Cannon and Sterling’s people.”
“One of Sterling’s people?” Mercer said.
“Yeah. You know that guy who tried to rape Hamilton? I found out his name was Eric Nelson, and when I ran a background check on him, I found out he worked for Cannon and Sterling.”
“You’re kidding! Why would someone who worked for them try to kill Hamilton or be involved in the bombing?”
“Maybe because Nelson had a quarter of a million in a bank account that came from a mosque in Pakistan, a mosque that funds the Taliban.”
“I’m totally confused, Thomas. Are you saying one of Sterling’s people was working for the Taliban?”
“I don’t know, but it looks that way. Sterling told me the guy quit right after he came back from Afghanistan. So what all this could mean is that somebody over in Afghanistan found out about the meeting, found out that Sterling was providing security, and paid Nelson to plant or detonate the bomb.”
“I don’t know,” Mercer said, sounding skeptical. “I can’t imagine someone in the Taliban being able to turn one of Sterling’s people. How would they even contact the guy? And even if what you’re saying is correct, why kill Hamilton?”
Callahan made an unattractive snorting sound. “Because Hamilton—and I’m thinking about firing her ass for this—went to her old boss at the DEA and had her start looking at everybody’s bank accounts, including mine and yours. Hamilton figured that if somebody killed the Khans they did it for money, and she was checking out everybody’s finances, including Cannon and Sterling and all the people who worked for them. Somehow, whoever set this up found out she was poking around and sent Nelson to take care of her.”
“Could Sterling or Cannon be personally involved?” Mercer asked.
“I suppose,” Callahan said, “but they were looking at a contract that was going to make their company a ton of money. Why would they want to screw that up by killing the Khans?”
Callahan rubbed his face, as if he was trying to scrub away the fatigue. “So right now I don’t have a fucking clue who’s behind this, and I’m so tired I can’t think straight. All I know is the only evidence I have is pointing to one of Sterling’s mercenaries and it looks like he was working for somebody connected to a mosque in Pakistan.”
“I don’t know what to say, Thomas. I need to go think about all this. But why did you go to Switzerland?”
“To talk to Ernst Glardon. I wanted to see if he could have engineered this whole thing, and I wanted to look him in the eye while I was talking to him. I concluded he’s clean and he really didn’t have a motive for killing the Khans. Just like with Sterling, his company would have benefited from the mining operation. The other thing I did over there was try to verify that the fifty million really made it into Khan’s account, but I couldn’t get the bank to give me the time of day, even after somebody at the White House leaned on them. But the money has to be in the account. Eli told me he sent it and Hamilton verified that he did, so where else could it be?
“Anyway,” Callahan said, “the reason I wanted to see you was Liberia. Like I said, I’d like to give the president’s guy some good news for a change.”
The Liberia operation, which Mercer was handling mostly on her own, was relatively simple compared to the lithium op. The current president of Liberia, who happened to be female, had been elected by the narrowest of margins, but she was doing a good job of pulling together all the squabbling tribes. The woman also appeared to be incorruptible—and an incorruptible African politician was a truly rare bird.
The problem was the woman’s vice president, a man named Joseph Nyenabo. Nyenabo, who was more corrupt than past mayors of Chicago, was doing everything he could to undermine his president and was constantly bad-mouthing her in the press. As bad as that was, the American ambassador to Liberia had learned that Nyenabo had been in a number of backroom meetings with a couple of colonels and was now contemplating his own little coup. The president’s guy—or so Callahan had said—suggested it would be good if the Liberian vice president no longer occupied the office.
Mercer initially considered implicating Nyenabo in a crime, such as dumping a chunk of money into his bank account as evidence that he’d taken a bribe or embezzled. She ultimately rejected that idea, however. Trials in places like Liberia were always messy and drawn out, would distract the president for months, and when all was said and done, Nyenabo would still be around to cause mischief.
“I think I’ll have the situation resolved this week,” Mercer said.
“That’s good to hear. What’s the plan?”
“I’ve had people watching Mr. Nyenabo, and two weeks ago we discovered that he’s become infatuated with the fifteen-year-old wife of one of his bodyguards. I don’t know if the girl is equally smitten with him, or if she’s just afraid to spurn his advances. In any case, three times in the last two weeks, Mr. Nyenabo has given his faithful bodyguard some task to occupy him so Nyenabo could spend a couple of hours with the man’s young wife. The bodyguard, by the way, is known for his volatile temper, drinks on the job, takes drugs that don’t bode well for self-control, and is always armed.
“The next time Mr. Nyenabo visits his new mistress, we’re going to call the bodyguard and tell him what’s going on in his own bedroom. My hope is that he will burst in on his boss and his wife, and shoot his boss. I hope he doesn’t shoot his wife. If Mr. Nyenabo survives the encounter I’ll regroup, but if my plan works and if Mr. Nyenabo is killed, his death will be attributed to a simple act of passion and have no political overtones.”
“Good,” Callahan said. “I like it. And thanks for minding the store while I’ve been so preoccupied with the Khan thing. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
—
AFTER MERCER LEFT his office, Callahan wondered if she’d swallowed all the bullshit he’d just fed her—and he decided that he couldn’t take the chance that she hadn’t.
He heaved himself out of his chair and ambled slowly down the hall to the reception area, where Henry was seated—standing guard over an enterprise that was in shambles.
“I want a 24/7 net around Anna Mercer,” Callahan said. “Pull in anybody you n
eed. Trainees, instructors, whoever is here in D.C.”
Henry raised an eyebrow in surprise, but the only thing he said was: “Yes, sir.”
32 | Anna Mercer returned to her office, picked up Scarlett, and holding the fluffy white cat in her arms, began to pace—although she could only take about seven strides before she had to turn. That was another thing that had always pissed her off: an office the size of a prison cell, and windowless to boot.
“What should I do, Scarlett?” she whispered to the cat.
What she wanted to do was kill Nathan Sterling.
It had been a perfect plan until Sterling fucked everything up by trying to kill Hamilton. She’d found Finley and he developed the program to steal the money. She’d subtly steered the security contract toward Sterling’s company, knowing he was financially desperate, and then convinced him to help her. When Sterling reconnoitered the meeting place in Afghanistan, he acquired the materials to manufacture the bombs and one of his men constructed them. Sterling planted the bomb in the meeting room himself when Hamilton and Dolan were elsewhere in the house.
When Dolan hit the SEND button to transfer the fifty million to Sahid Khan’s account, Finley knew because of the program he’d installed to capture the money. Finley texted Anna, she texted Sterling, and Sterling texted the man who blew up the transformer. Sterling then called Dolan to get him out of the meeting room, and Sterling detonated the bomb. When the power was disrupted, Nelson snuck into the house and dispatched the old man. And while all these events in Afghanistan were taking place, Finley hid the money they’d stolen in accounts that would never be identified.
It had been a beautiful plan, an absolutely perfect plan, but then that idiot Sterling . . .
Enough. She needed to make a decision; she needed to decide if she should run or not.
If Callahan really believed, as he’d said, that the money was in Sahid Khan’s bank and that the Taliban had killed the Khans, there was no need to run. She’d wait at least a year, long enough to put the whole lithium operation in Callahan’s rearview mirror, then tell him she’d had enough of Washington and resign. After that, she’d move to someplace sunny—most likely Southern California—start up a small business and launder the money she’d stolen through the business—then she’d just sit back and enjoy her life.