Clean Hands

by Patrick Hoffman

  “You’d think Liz might have shared some of that information with me,” said D’Angelo.

  “Come on, you know these lawyers. They share what they think needs sharing. If it was up to me, we would’ve been coordinating the whole time,” said Valencia. “I tried to let Liz loan you out to us when we first came on board, but she didn’t go for it.”

  D’Angelo watched a college-aged couple walking hand-in-hand across the park. “Would’ve made more sense,” he said.

  “You got a good nose for this shit,” said Valencia. “Ever since we worked on that Hammoud thing. I’m not saying this to be nice, either. There are some people who see it, and there are some people who don’t. You see it.”

  “I appreciate that,” said D’Angelo. “It’s mutual,” he added, feeling oddly sentimental.

  “So, do you think you’re going to continue looking for this Chinese dude?” she asked, sounding almost mirthful, like it would be a fun little escapade to get involved in.

  “What am I, crazy?” said D’Angelo. “When Elizabeth Carlyle says you’re done, you better be done.”

  “Well, if you ever do look into him, give me a call,” said Valencia. “I’d do it for free. These things have a way of grabbing my attention.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said.

  “We should have dinner sometime,” said Valencia. “Go somewhere nice, drink some good wine.”

  “I’d like that,” said D’Angelo, smiling.

  They said their goodbyes and hung up.

  D’Angelo stayed seated for a moment. He watched the workers walking home. Looked at the trees and saw that the leaves were about to emerge. It did make him feel better to speak to her. At least somebody in this godforsaken city appreciated him.

  Even after the call ended, Valencia kept the phone up near her face and considered her best course of action. She’d just jumped in the back of an SUV for a rolling meeting. The phone call had been completely unexpected. The vehicle she was in continued down East Forty-Sixth Street. The traffic in Midtown was barely moving.

  After a moment, when she felt fully composed, she turned her head so she could look into Jonathan Redgrave’s eyes. “See?” she said. “He’s got no imagination.”

  Redgrave’s face didn’t betray anything. “Has he ever called you before?”

  “Not that I remember,” said Valencia. She tried to read Redgrave’s face to see what he was thinking, but the man had a facility for masking his thoughts.

  “I’m not worried about him,” said Redgrave, shaking his head and bending down so he could look out the windshield of their SUV. “The guy is zero on my list of worries.”

  Valencia had been instructed to leave CDH’s office on foot at 4:10 p.m., walk up Madison Avenue to East Forty-Sixth, make a right, and continue on the north side of the street. If she wasn’t picked up by the time she finished walking the length of that block at her normal pace, she was to understand that the meeting had been canceled and that she should wait for further instructions.

  But they did pick her up. Before she’d made it halfway down the block, the SUV pulled to the curb and stopped fifteen feet in front of her. The back door popped open, and Valencia walked over. She looked in and saw Redgrave on the far side of the backseat.

  Thirty seconds after getting in, her phone buzzed. Redgrave told her to put it on speaker. Now, with the call finished, Redgrave pointed out the windshield. “We gotta make a quick stop.”

  Valencia leaned toward the middle of the seat, but she couldn’t see where he was pointing.

  “He wants to find our guy?” said Redgrave.

  “I guess so,” said Valencia, shaking her head like they were sharing a joke.

  “Good luck with that one,” said Redgrave. He pointed to their left. “Here we are.”

  Redgrave’s driver steered the SUV into a parking garage. Valencia had no idea where they were going. Her nervousness clicked up a level. The attendant, sitting in his booth, raised the boom barrier without checking any credentials. It appeared he was expecting them.

  They drove to the very back of the garage, a darkened corner, and then—with wheels screeching quietly—made a few efficient turns before backing into a spot.

  “Hop out,” said Redgrave. Valencia got out. The driver joined her and told her to lift her arms. Then, looking for wires, he swept and scanned her with two separate handheld devices, one at a time. He frisked her—not in a rough way, but thoroughly.

  While he did this, Valencia casually set about memorizing his face. The man looked Latino, but it was hard to say what country he was from. He had scars on his face, high up on his right cheek, near his temple. She noted his eye ratio, the pattern of his scarring, his nose type, height, weight, hairline, smell, and movement profile. She memorized it all.

  When he finished sweeping her, he gestured toward the back door, and then opened it for her like a gentleman. She got back into the vehicle and saw that Redgrave had an open briefcase on his lap.

  “Put your phone in here,” he said. She placed the phone in the briefcase, and he shut the thing, snapped some snaps closed, and passed it forward to the driver, who put it on the floor in the front.

  “So tell me,” said Valencia, as they made their way toward the garage’s exit, “who’s number one on your list of worries?”

  Redgrave studied her face in a lecherous way. He seemed to love this kind of banter. “You are babe. You know that.”

  Valencia couldn’t help noticing a tiny speck of yellow discharge in the inside corner of his eye. The man was foul. Still, she batted her eyelashes at him and smiled.

  When they emerged from the garage, the driver began looping back toward Madison Avenue.

  “What about Chris Cowley?” asked Valencia, probing for information. “What number is he?”

  “Shit, he’s down there with D’Angelo,” said Redgrave, shaking his head, squeezing his lips together, and holding his hand low on his chest like he was illustrating the size of a short man. “Down in the zero range. Subzero. Not a worry anymore. Debriefed him earlier. He’s free and clear.”

  “And Elizabeth?”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Redgrave. When he touched her thigh with the back of his hand, Valencia noticed a ring on his finger. She tried to imagine the woman who would marry this man, and the only thing that came to mind was a mail-order bride. She’d asked Danny to run a full background on Jonathan Redgrave, but none of the individuals he found were a match. There was nothing; the man didn’t exist.

  “Anyway, listen”—Redgrave adjusted his voice to signify that the joking and flirting were over—“the agenda for the coming week is simple. It’s gonna move fast. More stories will come out in the press. I’m talking every day.” He tapped his fingers on his palms. “The stories will make Calcott’s stock fall. Did you have somebody short them for you?”

  “That would be insider trading,” said Valencia, aware that he might be recording this conversation.

  Redgrave rolled his eyes, and continued. “Anyway, stock will fall, your girl Elizabeth will be blamed. And you—pretty lady—will nudge her all week long. You’ll nudge all of them—Carlyle, Driscoll, Hathaway—the whole gang, until they decide that the only path forward is to go to Calcott’s in-house and recommend withdrawing the case.”

  He paused for a second and looked out the window at a man screaming into his phone. “Listen to me, everyone needs to just stand down. Case needs to be withdrawn. I’ll leave the approach to you. Handle it however you see fit. That’s why we hired you. You’re the best, right?”

  “Best nudger in the business,” said Valencia, smiling, shaking her head, and pressing her thumbnail against her finger.

  “You brought your shit?”

  She reached into her breast pocket and handed a small envelope to Redgrave. Inside the envelope, scrawled in her neat handwriting on a greeting card, was her thirty-four-character address for Bitcoin deposit.

  “What if they won’t drop the case?” asked Valencia.r />
  “Then the stories will get worse and worse and their stock will continue to fall until they bottom out and get chopped up and sold for parts. It’s not a question of if they’ll drop it—it’s when.” He shrugged and shook his head like he didn’t care.

  “And Emerson?” asked Valencia, glancing out the window and watching a masked delivery man on an electric bike riding next to them. “What if they don’t drop their side of the case?”

  “Shit, we’re way further along with them, right?” Redgrave asked the driver.

  The driver looked in the rearview mirror, shook his head by way of an answer, and looked back at the road.

  Redgrave turned his attention back to Valencia. “Don’t worry about them. We’re all just little pieces, doing our little parts.” He sounded like he was imitating some singer. The reference was lost on Valencia.

  Redgrave continued: “Elizabeth Carlyle—that’s all you have to worry about. Make her see the light. Preach to her. Tell her stories. Isn’t that your thing? Didn’t you say that somewhere?”

  Valencia couldn’t recall if she’d ever said that.

  “She respects you,” said Redgrave. “That’s why you’re here. That’s why you get paid the big bucks.”

  Valencia pretended to yawn. The vehicle came to a stop. They all stared at a taxi that had stopped and was blocking their way.

  Valencia felt her blood pressure tick up a few bars as she prepared her next question. “And this is still authorized by the colonel?”

  “You keep asking the same question, and the answer remains the same: yes,” said Redgrave. “Authorized, fully DS7’d all the way up. Straight from the colonel.”

  Colonel Pollock was the U.S. Army full bird colonel in charge of N14—Redgrave’s group. N14, as far as Valencia was able to find out, was operating out of NORTHCOM. It was a Department of Defense group and had no crossover coordination with Langley. Her sources told her that N14 was set up for quote-unquote domestic operations. The “quote-unquote,” when she heard it, implied true, high-level black bag operations inside the United States. None of this was remotely public information; it was, as her source told her, “Stovepiped, DOD bullshit.”

  When she asked her old boss about Colonel Pollock, she was told, “He’s Montana—not Colorado—that’s all you need to know.” She understood this to mean that N14 was fully off the books, completely unrecognized, unknown to Congress. Even the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence wouldn’t have any idea who they were.

  “Can you do me a favor, and I mean this seriously,” Valencia said, mirroring him and touching his thigh the same way he’d just touched hers. “Can you please tell Colonel Pollock that if he ever comes to New York I’d like to have a drink with him?”

  “I’ll do that,” said Redgrave. “Or you can call him yourself. He’s listed in the phone book.”

  Valencia smiled at that.

  “Any problems, leave your bathroom blind open and Manny-boy will reach out.” He looked at the driver. “Right?”

  “That’s right, sir,” said Manny, looking in the rearview mirror.

  “If you need immediate attention,” said Redgrave, “call the messenger service. Ask for Raul. They’ll say wrong number, and you’ll hang up. That’s emergencies only. We’ll reach you within thirty minutes.”

  “Sounds good,” said Valencia.

  “One other thing,” said Redgrave. “No more asking about us. No more talking to Stockton or any of them. You did your due diligence, now you gotta shut the fuck up. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She smiled. The conversation she’d had with her old station chief, Bildad Stockton, had been face-to-face. She’d traveled, unannounced, to his house in Georgetown. She hadn’t sent any emails or made any calls. She was being warned that she was under surveillance. “Had to ask,” she said.

  “But you’re done asking.”

  “Message received,” she said.

  “Good,” said Redgrave. “We’ll get rolling then.”

  Redgrave spent the rest of the drive bragging about his sailboat and the brave solo trips he’d made. Valencia listened, smiled when it was called for, and asked questions to keep him talking. She felt—even as he carried on about his boat—that he was really trying to tell her something else, that he was playing some other kind of mind game.

  Her attention would shift to Manny occasionally; she’d try to catch his eye and read his feelings, but he was too focused running surveillance-detection maneuvers, second-lane turns, and mid-block stops and starts.

  By the time they got near her apartment, she was feeling claustrophobic and hot. She pointed at a wine store, two blocks from her front door. “Drop me right here, please. This is good.”

  After getting her phone back and saying goodbye, she got out and watched the SUV drive away. She resisted the urge to look up and instead looked at the red mark she’d made on her finger. For good luck, she spit on the ground, something her grandmother used to do, and then she went into the wine store.

  Two hours and forty minutes before that meeting, Valencia’s underling, Billy Sharrock, had left his cell phone on his office desk, grabbed a walkie-talkie, and set out for the Bronx. He took a circuitous route and ran surveillance detection the entire time. First, he hopped on a downtown A train and jumped out right before the doors closed at Fulton Street. He skipped up the stairs to the exit. From there, he walked south on Broadway for a few blocks, dodging slow-moving people as he went.

  At a light, he hopped into a taxi without waving at it and passed sixty dollars forward to the driver. “Drive around for a little, I want to lose some asshole who’s following me,” he said.

  “You want me to drive around?” asked the cabbie. He counted the money and then turned and looked through the dirty partition.

  “Yeah, yeah, just go,” said Billy, waving him forward.

  “You want me to go fast?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but not so fast you’ll get a ticket, just loop around down here for a little bit. Keep the change.”

  The driver pushed the gas and hit a hard right on Cedar Street. The little street was free of cars, and the driver raced down it. He rolled a stop sign and cranked a left. They sped past a construction site. With his hand on the ceiling, Billy had turned in his seat and was watching out the back window. He couldn’t see anyone following him. “Okay, okay, slow down.”

  The driver didn’t seem to hear his passenger. He ran a red and made a left onto Rector and a quick left onto Trinity Place. After a bicyclist yelled at him, he finally slowed down and looped back toward the station. Before getting out, Billy pulled on a beanie and took off his coat, folded it up, and tucked it under his sweatshirt. He then sped down the stairs into the station, swiped his way back in, using a card previously purchased with cash, and caught an uptown 4 train.

  In the train, he sat next to an old Indian woman who was eating a piece of corn on the cob. Billy, breathing slightly more heavily than normal, took his time examining every passenger. He felt un-followed.

  During his ride uptown he thought about Valencia and wondered what the hell she was getting them into. Eight days earlier she’d told them that they were in “war mode.” She instructed them to be careful on any phone and to assume they were being monitored at all times. She said it wasn’t a big deal—they just had to keep their eyes open. Thinking about it now, Billy had to shake his head. He’d hate to see what counted as a big deal.

  At Eighty-Sixth Street, he got out, exited the station, ran a four-block surveillance-detection route, and then went back into the station and got on an uptown 6 train. He got off in Mott Haven in the Bronx at 138th Street.

  A few blocks from the station was a lube shop. A windowless Sprinter van was parked in front of the shop on 138th Street. Billy approached it slowly and knocked on the back door. A second later, the door slid open.

  “You made it,” said Colter Jacobson. He looked over Billy’s shoulder, then stepped out. He pointed to the front of the van. “Let
’s go,” he said. Billy walked to the passenger door and waited to be let in.

  A kid rolled by on a BMX, rapping about how many guns he had. When Billy got in, Colter told him to buckle up.

  They drove a few blocks over to a self-storage lot that sat right next to the Harlem River. The gate had a keypad and Colter got out, bent down, and punched in the code.

  When he got back, he told Billy he was friends with the owner, and that one of the best signals in New York City could be found there. Billy took out his walkie-talkie, found the appointed band, and tested it: “Blue Dove, Blue Dove,” he said. A moment later, he heard Milton answer, “Blue Dove, Blue Cat.”

  They parked near a clearing that faced the river, hopped out, and got in the back of the van. Billy looked at the floor and admired the rubber matting. He stepped to the shelves and looked at the welding. Every tool had its place. Billy could only shake his head with jealousy.

  They had about forty-five minutes to kill before the operation started, and they spent it talking first about the Knicks, and then a little bit about Billy’s time in Afghanistan. Then they talked about the weather.

  Colter’s pilot was back in White Plains. When the drone was up, Colter told Billy that they had to keep it at about 4,400 feet to avoid the NYPD. They watched on the monitor as the pilot flew it above Harlem. Colter took control of the camera from his computer, and he zoomed in on different practice targets.

  “Good camera,” whispered Billy.

  “This thing,” Colter answered modestly, like he was embarrassed by any kind of praise. He then tapped the back of his head, and they both stared at the monitor.

  The pilot flew toward Midtown, and Colter set the camera on Carlyle, Driscoll, and Hathaway’s building. They had ten minutes before Valencia was supposed to walk out. In order to make herself easy to spot, she’d worn a bright yellow coat that day. They looked at everyone who emerged from the building. Twenty seconds after 4:10 p.m., Colter spotted Valencia. He zoomed in and pointed at the screen.

  Billy took his walkie-talkie, and in prearranged code told Milton that Valencia was on the move and headed north: “Blue Dove, South, North, East, West.” He repeated it once.