Ultimate Betrayal

by Joseph Badal

After a long silence, Ramsey said, “There’s only two ways I can think of how Bishop learned I was here. One, someone in this room talked. Two, someone with the Bethesda Police Department talked. If it was someone in Bethesda, I would put my money on a guy named Cromwell.”

  “The cop who was your partner?” David said.

  Ramsey nodded.

  “So, what do we do now?” David asked.

  “I got a couple ideas,” Cataldo said. “We’re gonna make the message in Gino’s note to Bishop come true. Especially the part about the bat and his ass.”

  CHAPTER 44

  One of the benefits of the Cataldo Family’s relationship with the Hospitality Workers of America Union was the ability to get jobs for the Family’s sons and daughters, nephews and nieces. Some of the beneficiaries of the Family’s influence got paid even if they didn’t show up for work. Others, however, worked diligently and advanced up the hotel organization charts. Lois Carbone, the niece of Tomasino Portello, the caporegime of the Cataldo Family, had graduated from New York University with a Hotel Management degree, and had received a number of attractive offers from some of the better hotels in the city. But she wanted to work at the most famous of all the hotels in the country—The Plaza. Lois wanted to get her foot in the door there. Given the opportunity, she was determined to make the most of it. So, Lois spoke to her Uncle Tomasino, who then talked to the head of the union. Lois started at The Plaza Hotel two days later.

  She’d worked first as a night clerk, then moved to the Catering Department. After only three years with the hotel, she became Director of Special Events, in which role she was now the hotel’s liaison with the White House to make certain the President of the United States’s dinner was a success. Her normal duties were aggravated by the involvement of the security people and White House staffers. But she’d been through that before. It was now all fairly routine to her. She was on her way to a staff meeting when her cellphone rang.

  “Hi, Lois,” Tomasino Portello said. “You doin’ okay?”

  “Sure, Uncle Tommy,” she replied. Why is he calling me at work? she wondered. This was a first. She sighed as she thought about all she had to do. She didn’t have time for personal matters.

  “Sweetheart, I need to sit down with you . . . as soon as possible. You think you could find time for your favorite uncle this morning?”

  Oh shit, Lois thought to herself. Any day but today. She wanted to say, I’m awfully busy, Uncle Tommy. But instead, she agreed to meet him. After all, she owed her uncle.

  “Let’s see. I got eight now. How about we meet in that little coffee shop down the street from the hotel in about fifteen minutes?”

  Lois made a couple quick phone calls, doled out assignments to underlings, postponed her staff meeting, and then hurried from her mezzanine level office, down the stairs to the hotel lobby, and out the front door. She was at the coffee shop when her Uncle Tomasino strolled in. She stood and they hugged affectionately. Lois truly loved her uncle and she knew he thought the world of her. He once told her, “You got bigger balls and more brains than most of the boys in the family.”

  After their coffees were served, Tomasino looked intently at Lois. “I need to know something,” he said. “This is very important or I wouldn’t ask. You understand?”

  “Sure, Uncle Tommy.”

  “You workin’ on this big dinner tomorrow night with all the hotshots from England, Germany, France . . . whatever?”

  Lois smiled. “That’s right. I’m in charge of the whole thing.”

  “Tell me what the program will be at this stravaganza.”

  Lois hesitated.

  Tomasino reached across the table and put his hand on her cheek. He looked into her eyes and said, “Don’t you worry about a thing, mio bambola piccola. You got nothing to worry about.”

  Lois took a big breath. “Well, you know, there will be a lot of boring speeches and all of the bigwigs will be introduced. A small orchestra will play at the dinner. And at the end of the dinner there will be a presentation.”

  “That’s when the video will be shown?” Tomasino asked.

  “How do you know about the video?” Lois tensed.

  “Sometimes I hear things, Bambina. Tell me about this video.”

  She hesitated a beat and then said, “The President has declared this the Year of the Child. So the White House put together a bunch of clips of some of the heads of state and senior members of the administration that show those people today and also back when they were kids. I think it will be fun to see what the most powerful men and women in the world looked like when they were small.”

  “What do they got, some guy from the White House to show the video?”

  “No, Uncle Tommy,” Lois responded. “The tape’s been given to Hal Norris, the head of the hotel’s Audio/Visual office. He’s the one who will set up all the equipment and play the tape. Why?”

  “It’s better you don’t know why. And don’t tell anyone we met this morning. Before I go, I gotta ask you one more question. Where does this Hal keep the video and when could someone maybe take a peek at it?”

  CHAPTER 45

  Scott Dundee had always had a look of authority about him. His six-foot, three-inch, two hundred-pound frame and military bearing had served him well for his seventeen years with the New York Police Department.

  He might have made it to the top floor of One Police Plaza if a drunk driver hadn’t plowed into his car one night. The collision left him with a chronic back problem which was still bad enough that he spent half-a-dozen days a month in bed. Surgery might fix the problem, but Dundee had a pathological fear of the operating table.

  After he took early retirement, Dundee opened his own private-detective agency. The business had barely survived until a night when he was in a bar in lower Manhattan. It had been kind of a slow night so Leo Brill, the bar’s owner, took the stool next to Dundee’s and struck up a conversation.

  Just before midnight, two cokeheads entered the bar. The taller one aimed a pistol at the kid behind the bar and ordered him to empty the cash register. The kid froze. The other cokehead waved his pistol at Dundee and Brill.

  “Take it easy, guys,” Leo Brill said. “You can have the money. Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  The shorter cokehead screamed, “Who you calling stupid, asshole?” and hit Brill on the side of the head with his pistol.

  The blow opened a gash from above Brill’s hairline down to his cheekbone, and knocked him to the floor. The guy pointed his pistol at Brill and, purple with rage, seemed about to shoot the dazed and bloodied bar owner. With both the robbers’ attentions now on Brill, Dundee pulled a .45 caliber pistol from a shoulder holster under his jacket and blew a hole in the center of the shorter robber’s forehead. The impact of the bullet sprayed blood and brain matter all over the other cokehead, who shrieked as though he’d been shot and dropped to the floor. The guy screamed and begged for mercy.

  Dundee walked over to the man and calmly took the pistol out of his hand. Then he kicked him under the chin, which broke his jaw and most of his teeth, and knocked him out.

  Brill, a “made man” in the Cataldo Family, saw to it from then on that the one-man Dundee Detective Agency had as much business as Dundee could handle. The latest in the family’s long string of jobs was for Dundee to “borrow” a flash drive from The Plaza Hotel’s Audio/Visual Department Manager’s desk.

  Dressed in a dark suit, Dundee arrived at the hotel at 9 a.m. The lobby was packed with employees, guests, and a large number of men and women with Secret Service pins on their lapels and radio buds in their ears. Dundee crossed the lobby as though he belonged there and went to a bank of house phones. He looked like a Secret Service agent, even down to the radio bud stuck in his ear and the fake pin on his lapel. Besides, he carried himself with unquestionable authority, albeit with a slight limp.

  He used
one of the house phones and asked the hotel operator to connect him to Hal Norris in the Audio/Visual Department. When Norris came on the line, Dundee introduced himself as Lyle Mason, a member of the Secret Service detail.

  “Can you and your assistant attend a security briefing for hotel staff in ten minutes? In the grand ballroom?”

  “Of course,” Norris said. “How long will it last?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

  After he hung up the phone, Dundee walked across the lobby and entered one of the elevators. He got off at the mezzanine level and walked along a row of offices until he found a door marked Audio/Visual Department. Hal Norris’s name was painted on the door. He waited twenty yards down the hall until a man and a woman walked out of the office, hustled down the hallway, and took the stairs to the lobby. Dundee moved to the Audio/Visual Department door. He knocked. No answer. He tried the doorknob. Locked. He pulled a shim from an inside jacket pocket, slid the tool between the doorjamb and the lock, and popped the lock. Then he cautiously opened the door and peeked inside to make certain the office was vacant. He quickly moved past a desk to an inner office. Hal Norris’s nameplate was on the desk there. Dundee opened the center drawer, but found nothing of interest. He tried the top side drawer, then the second drawer. Still nothing. In the third drawer he found a black flash drive in a Ziploc bag labeled “State Dinner-April 28.” He removed the flash drive from the bag and slipped it into a side pocket of his jacket. Then he took a handful of blank flash drives from a pocket, found one that best matched the one he’d removed, placed it inside the bag, and put the bag back in the desk drawer.

  Dundee closed the drawer and moved to the office door. He pushed the locking button in the inside door knob, shut the door, and left. Instead of exiting through the lobby, he walked to the end of the hall, went through the emergency exit door, and descended the stairs to the street.

  Outside, in a Jeep Cherokee double-parked sixty feet from the hotel entrance, Dundee’s friend and client, Leo Brill, waited with Sol Lesser, an audio/visual and computer expert. Dundee walked down the sidewalk, slipped between two parked limousines, and moved to the passenger side of the vehicle. He tossed the flash drive into Brill’s lap through the open window. Then Dundee passed by the nose of the Jeep and hailed a cab. He ordered the cabbie to take him to the parking garage where he’d left his own car. His back hurt. He would go home, chase a Percocet with a glass of scotch, and try to sleep.

  CHAPTER 46

  “Guten Morgen, Banque Securite Swisse,” a woman said. “Kann ich ihnen helfen?”

  “Kann ich Herr Muther sprechen?” David asked. “Hier ist David Hood.”

  “Ein moment, bitte.”

  “David, where are you,” Willy Muther asked with enthusiasm a moment later. “Are you here in Zurich?”

  “No, Willy. I’m in New York. How are Inge and the children?”

  “Great! Great! Everyone’s fine! How’s your family?”

  “Everyone’s fine here, Willy,” David lied. “I need your help and need you to trust me.”

  “David, we’ve done a lot of business together. When your company uncovered the embezzlement at my bank, you probably saved us tens of millions of francs. Besides, we’ve been friends for years. What can I do for you?”

  “Willy, I’ve got a list in front of me with dates and amounts of large deposits made to an account in your bank back in 2003 and 2004. What I don’t have is the account owner’s name.”

  Willy coughed. “Listen, David. Our banking laws are strict for a reason. We don’t give out that kind of information to a private citizen—even if he is a friend. You wouldn’t want me to get into trouble for breaking the law?”

  “No, Willy, I wouldn’t,” David said. “But if what I suspect is true, every dollar in that account is drug money. If that’s the case, your bank could be in real trouble.”

  Willy groaned. “Gott in Himmel!”

  David waited.

  “Give me the account number and a telephone number where I can reach you. I won’t promise to give you the name on the account, but I promise I’ll call you back before the end of the day.”

  “It’s Joey calling from New York.”

  It took Bobby Galupo a couple seconds to figure out which “Joey from New York” might be calling him. When he suspected it was Joey Cataldo, he said, “Hey, Joey, come va?”

  “Bene, e tu?”

  “Bene! Listen, I got to ask a big favor. You know that old friend of ours who’s got the market down your way?”

  Gino! Bobby Galupo had heard the news on television about Gino’s heart attack. “Yeah, of course. How’s our friend?”

  “Pretty damn good,” Cataldo answered. “It looks like he’ll recover. But our friend needs your help. You think you could send a car up here with a couple of your boys. Our friend’s driver tells me you got a guest down there who I need to meet. Maybe you could have your boys escort this guest of yours to my place.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Leo Brill and Sol Lesser drove to the Cataldo estate. They unloaded a heap of gear from Leo’s Jeep Cherokee and carried it to the mansion’s media room, a thirty-foot by forty-foot windowless enclosure equipped with multiple computers, two large screen televisions, a movie screen and projector, DVD players, and various stereo equipment.

  Cataldo ordered Cyril to find David and Peter and their three cop friends and bring them to the media room. Then he picked up his desk phone and called his man Vince and told him, “You and Sylvio bring Manny Segal to the media room. I’ll meet you there.” Cataldo stood up, adjusted his tie, and walked down the hall.

  Vince and Sylvio, with Segal in tow, arrived at the room as Cataldo got there. The others were already seated in plush theater seats. A chair sat in the middle of the stage, with a movie screen behind it.

  “Put Segal in that chair,” Cataldo ordered.

  Vince and Sylvio dragged Segal onto the stage and pushed him into the chair. The assassin appeared to have lost all of his poise, all of his arrogance. One of his eyes was badly swollen. He could barely sit straight in the chair. And he looked scared to death.

  Cataldo walked onto the stage and put his hand on Segal’s shoulder. “Hey, all you gotta do is tell the truth. You do that and you can walk outta here. You can go enjoy all the money you got put away.”

  Cataldo’s touch, his words, seemed to have a magical effect on Segal. He asked for a glass of water and, after he took a couple of swallows, said, “Okay, guys, let’s get this over with.”

  The Manny Segal Show was exactly what Cataldo wanted. The little killer’s words were chilling—made even worse by Segal’s penchant for detail and almost gleeful delivery. When added with David Hood and Dennis O’Neil’s earlier recorded comments, Manny Segal’s testimony became a part of a plan to ruin Rolf Bishop.

  Cataldo whispered to Vince, who left the room. Everyone in the room seemed exhausted. Segal had literally taken their breath away. All eyes were on Cataldo, the director of this film extravaganza, who just sat in his chair and ignored the others, one hand stuck in his pants pocket, a cigar in his other hand. He didn’t move until the theater door opened and Vince returned. He nodded at Cataldo and took a seat behind his boss.

  The sounds of footsteps came from the hallway. Then three men entered. Peter recognized two of the men: They were part of the armed Galupo crew that hid in his home and captured the guy who came to kill David. Then he muttered, “Oh my God!” when he realized the third man with the two Galupo soldiers was that same assassin. His face was badly bruised and his eyes swollen nearly shut. The big man glanced around furtively. He appeared spiritless and scared witless.

  Cataldo announced, “I’d like you all to meet Montrose Toney, the next star of our production.” Cataldo chuckled.

  By the time videographer Sol Lesser’s work was finished with Montrose Toney, it was nearly 6 p.m. He’d been at it for almo
st eight hours and had been rewarded with eyestrain and a killer headache. He handed Joey Cataldo six flash drives, including the original taken from The Plaza Hotel.

  “When will the others be ready?” Cataldo asked Lesser.

  “By noon tomorrow.”

  Cataldo handed him a stuffed zippered leather folio. “Don’t spend it all in one place.” He clapped him on the back.

  Cataldo gathered David, Peter, the two cops, Paulie Rizzo, and Leo Brill again in the media room. “Not a bad day’s work,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you what we got here. The video on this drive will raise holy hell. Leo, you take the original flash drive and have your private-eye friend put it back in the hotel office.” Brill immediately left the room with the original flash drive.

  Cataldo gave copies of the drive to O’Neil and Ramsey. “If I’m right about what will happen,” Cataldo said, “these drives could be very helpful for you in court—if it comes to that. Remember, you agreed you wouldn’t tell anyone about my involvement in this. If you are asked where you got that flash drive, you’ll say, ‘Someone sent it to me anonymously.’ ” He handed another flash drive to David. “I don’t know if you really want a copy. It’s full of sadness and bad memories.” He shrugged and then turned to Paulie Rizzo. “Paulie, this copy is for Don Bartolucci. Twenty-four hours from now this will all be over as far as I’m concerned. I had nothing to do with any of this and I expect each and every one of you to honor that. Nothing personal, but I don’t expect or want to ever see any of you guys again. I took risks here that could ruin me. I did it out of respect for Don Bartolucci. If I’m ever drawn into the aftermath of this, I will have the person responsible hunted down. Do you understand?”

  They all nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “It’s been fun. Oh, one other thing. You don’t show those videos to anyone for twenty-four hours.” With that, Cataldo walked out of the room, a smile on his face.