Nothing to Hide drm-3

by J. Mark Bertrand

  I open my eyes. She’s holding all the files in a thick stack, her knuckles white. From across the room, her sinewy, boyish muscularity and the random twists of hair spouting around her temples make me think of a kid in school, stumped by the test.

  Sometimes my thwarted fatherly instinct comes out. I’ll find myself connecting, albeit awkwardly, to substitute children like Carter Robb, maybe even Cavallo. Not that I’m old enough to have fathered either of them, but I can imagine Carter as the grown-up son I never had, imagine Cavallo as the daughter who was taken from me. It’s stupid, I know, but maybe it explains some things.

  Looking at Bea, I feel none of that. Her broad, unlined face is just a cipher. She could just as easily be carved from stone. And the funny thing is, I bet if I asked about her job, how she gets along with her colleagues, what they think of her, I’d hear a story not unlike my own. We’re a lot alike, I suspect, and that’s why we can sit in a room together and both feel alone.

  “You know something-”

  She silences me with a finger, then tilts her head toward the door.

  I rise quickly, moving across the room, positioning myself inside the bathroom while Bea sets aside the stack of files and slips into the corner to the right of the door. We make eye contact. Bea holds a collapsible ASP baton in her hand, a wicked smile on her lips.

  Here we go.

  The door swings open. A short, plump woman laden with plastic shopping bags walks through, heading straight to the kitchenette. She hoists the bags onto the counter, peels off her sunglasses, and pauses. Her head turns toward the bed, toward the stack of files.

  “Hello, Hilda,” Bea says, pushing the door shut.

  In the photo I’ve been carrying, Hilda Ford is a hard-looking, ashen-faced woman with demon eyes. In real life, she has a dimple on one cheek and a crooked smile. She gives off a comfortably aged, grandmotherly vibe, and if she’s shocked to find two unexpected visitors in her safe house, she doesn’t let on.

  “Hello yourself,” she says, dragging the words out like she’s trying to recall a forgotten appointment. “Bea. And you-” she turns my way-“I recognize you. You’re Roland March.”

  “That’s right. You made a file on me.”

  “And I see you’ve been sneaking through my files.”

  “You got careless, Hilda,” Bea says, moving forward, slapping the baton against the palm of her hand. “You thought I wouldn’t find you.”

  The older woman shrinks back at Bea’s approach, and I have a terrible premonition of sudden violence, Bea’s arm lifting and the baton crashing down. I edge myself between them to head off the possibility. Seeing this, Bea smirks.

  “Why don’t you have a seat, Hilda?” I ask. “We need to have a little talk.”

  “You set me up,” Bea says. “You lied to me.”

  “That’s not true-”

  “You told me Brandon was dead.”

  Hilda smiles sweetly, her palms turned up. “I thought he was. I only told you what I believed myself. I was trying to help.”

  “Then why did you disappear?”

  “Not because of you, dear,” Hilda says.

  She trails past the bed, glancing around as if the room is unfamiliar, finally settling herself on the chair I recently vacated by the window. She wears a flowery capped-sleeve top, stretched tight across her thick arms, and boot-cut jeans with little sparkles down the side. There’s nothing threatening about Hilda, nothing to even suggest the sort of work she’s done or the secrets she must have been privy to over the years.

  Bea puts the tip of her baton on the arm of the little sofa and makes a show of collapsing it back to its original size. Then she slumps onto the cushion, leaving the last chair for me. I scoot it over, positioning myself between Hilda and the door. It’s force of habit. I don’t anticipate her making a run for the exit.

  “I knew Andrew Nesbitt,” I tell her. “Were you aware of that?”

  “Yes, I was. But I’m surprised you are. He went looking for you a couple of years after your first meeting, to see if you had ripened up. And lo and behold, you were out of the military and working as a Houston cop. He didn’t have any use at that time for a Houston cop, but he kept you in mind. He told me he figured he could make something out of you.”

  “I’ll bet. Do you know what it was he wanted to give me?”

  She strokes thoughtfully at the fold of skin beneath her chin. “I have an idea what it might have been, but no more than that.”

  “Can we back up a minute?” Bea says. “Who are you talking about?”

  “I’ll let Hilda explain.”

  “Andrew Nesbitt was my boss,” she tells Bea, “before you were my boss.” She’s using the slow, clear enunciation of a first grade teacher. “It was Andy who brought our little family together, and Andy who gave us work to do.”

  “He worked for the CIA,” I say.

  Hilda tilts her head, acknowledging this might be so.

  “And so did you?” I ask.

  She smiles. “I’ve done some things here and there. I give people new lives. I’ve been doing it a long time. It’s gotten harder in some ways and a whole lot easier in others. Documents are a snap. It’s all the computers that pose the challenge now. That’s why I called to warn you, Bea, because I knew that my work for Brandon was only going to hold up for so long. If the police dug past the middle of 2002, things would look a little fishy. And if they ran his DNA, well, like all my boys, Brandon was ex-military. They were sure to find out who he was.”

  “Only we didn’t,” I say. “The database came back with the fake identity.”

  “Which is why I had to disappear. There are people who can fiddle things like that, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. You shouldn’t, either.”

  “You’re talking about Tom Englewood? I’ve met him.”

  Her smile hardens and she doesn’t reply.

  “Again,” Bea says, “why do I feel like I’m the only one who’s not in the picture?”

  I explain to her about my meeting with Englewood, watching Hilda’s face for any reaction. For context, I have to bring in Nesbitt’s shooting and the investigation that followed, along with the official denials and the conspiracy theories. Hilda sits through this placidly. When I start talking about the headless body in the park, she leans forward a bit. The pointing finger puts a frown on her face. Once I’ve traced the line between the finger and the stretch of road where Nesbitt was killed, her jaw is hanging open. I’ve got Hilda’s attention.

  “On that same stretch,” I say, “on the same night I met with Englewood, Brandon Ford and the other men in those files of yours took a shot and me and ran me off the road. They were either trying to kidnap me or kill me, and I imagine either scenario would have ended up the same way.”

  “In that case, you’re lucky to be here.”

  “What Bea and I both want to know is, what’s going on?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “At the beginning.”

  CHAPTER 20

  After 9/11, Hilda says, Andrew Nesbitt offered her good money and steady work if she would relocate to Texas, where he’d set up a private security company and started selling his services back to the government. He needed her particular skill set because one of his sidelines involved putting together a team of ex-military operators for contract work, men whose records were dubious enough to raise red flags on a background check. He was also keen to keep a low profile, and not just because secrecy came second nature to him. His presence in Houston would draw resentment from a much larger and longer-established rival, Tom Englewood’s firm, which had for years offered the benefit of his rich network of international contacts to the city’s oil oligarchs. The more successful Nesbitt was, the more pressure Englewood could be expected to exert. If the new company intended to operate under his nose, they would need to be discreet.

  During his time spearheading U.S. efforts to suppress the drug growers and traffickers of Latin America, Nesbi
tt had done a lot of talent scouting in the pool of military and intelligence personnel. Having once observed the man who would become Brandon Ford whip a handful of Colombian conscripts into a ruthlessly efficient counterinsurgency squad, Nesbitt decided to build the new team around him.

  Because he was paranoid by nature, Nesbitt also chose to limit his face-to-face exposure, instead using Hilda as the go-between. For convenience, she wove her own new identity and Brandon Ford’s together. No one on the outside would question constant contact between a mother and her son. Ford’s profession as a dealer in exotic firearms served a similar end. He could legally acquire whatever equipment was needed without raising undue suspicion. Plus, he enjoyed the work. The rest of the paramilitaries were fixed with similarly flexible occupations, jobs they could leave for weeks, even months at a time without making a ripple.

  Hilda became their de facto den mother, organizing their living arrangements, seeing to their needs. She’d never married or had children, but when Brandon indulged his ill-fated relationship with Miranda Ford, fathering two kids whom he subsequently abandoned, she embraced the grandmotherly role.

  “I was a better grandmother to those boys than he was ever a father,” she says, but with a smile that reveals real affection for her pseudo-son. I can only imagine the strange emotions at work in that chain of relation between the true and false parents.

  Hilda’s feelings about Brandon became very conflicted. On the one hand, she grew fond enough of him to run interference with Nesbitt whenever there was friction between them. On the other, she resented the source of that friction, which was Brandon’s ambition. Where Nesbitt wanted him to operate in a clearly defined cell, he aspired to larger things. There was more opportunity, he told her, in the intelligence side of the company, building networks and selling the information gleaned in the form of reports and analyses. Nesbitt jealously guarded that aspect of the operation, however. The more Brandon pushed, the more suspicious his boss became.

  “These arguments could be very awkward for me,” she says. “What I wanted was to keep everyone in our little family happy.”

  Listening to her describe what sounds to me like a criminal organization or at the very least a mercenary one, I am struck by how normal it all seems to Hilda. For her, the nature of the work never changed, only the employer did-and even there, it was more a change in status than degree. She had worked for Nesbitt when he was government-sanctioned, and she continued after he went freelance. Not that different, I suppose, from a cop who retires only to hang out his shingle as a private investigator. Not that different apart from the secrecy and the lawbreaking, that is.

  For Hilda’s “little family,” the status quo was disrupted not by conflict but by opportunity. Nesbitt was presented with a chance to bring down the competition, Englewood’s firm, and this led him to overreach.

  “What kind of opportunity?” I ask.

  “He never confided the details to me. What I gathered, though, was that someone had information to sell, and he wanted to be paid in services. If Nesbitt would do a certain job, he would get the information. What the job was, I never knew. Whatever it was, Andy kept me out of the loop and he kept Brandon out, too. The first effort failed, so he had to come up with Plan B, and that’s when we got involved.”

  Plan B resulted in the creation of an intelligence network. Why this was necessary, or even relevant to the quid pro quo deal that inspired it, Hilda doesn’t know. But Nesbitt managed to place someone deep inside the Gulf Cartel, using Brandon as an occasional courier to collect reports. And what reports they were! The quality of this intelligence stunned them all, as did the appetite for it in government circles. Nesbitt’s insider mapped the internal workings of the cartels with so much precision it began to seem that no aspect of their operations was off-limits to him. Needless to say, his reports became a hot commodity.

  Although he was the natural person to use, Brandon turned out to be a bad choice to use for courier. His first taste of intelligence work whetted his appetite. He started coming up with a host of new angles, insisting that Hilda pitch each one to “the Old Man” only to have them shot down. Selling weapons to the cartel and then selling intelligence about the transactions to law enforcement was Brandon’s big idea, one that he revived once Nesbitt was out of the picture.

  “And now we come to the point,” she says. “Andy’s death.”

  He was a victim of his sudden success. There was no way to keep what he was doing quiet once every decision maker in Federal drug enforcement was on the distribution list for his reports. With the exposure came increasing paranoia. Nesbitt brought new people into the organization. He took extra precautions when making contact with Hilda and discussed the possibility of cutting Brandon out of the loop entirely. He was preparing a new courier, he said, and taking measures to guarantee that his network wouldn’t get away from him.

  “Why was he so concerned?” I ask.

  “Because someone put it into his head that he was going to be assassinated. And he was convinced it was the police who would carry it out.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Even so,” she says, “look what happened.”

  “I have looked. I watched the video over and over.”

  “Whatever you think really happened, Andy believed his life was in danger. So did Brandon. He told me someone was gunning for all of us. All I know is that Andy was murdered, and then when Brandon tried to take over, he was murdered, too. At least that’s what I was told.”

  Before his death, Nesbitt entered into a negotiation with a contact at the FBI, essentially offering to hand his network over in return for protection and a financial consideration. Hilda waited two weeks after the shooting to get in touch with the contact herself to renew the offer. She handed over herself, Brandon, and the anonymous insider in Matamoros, who was known only by the code name Nesbitt had given him: INFERNO. She kept the rest of Nesbitt’s operation, including the men in her files, out of the spotlight.

  “Your people have a lot of faith in you,” Hilda says, turning to Bea. “They told me we’d be in good hands, that your record with drug intelligence operations was unparalleled. You were an iconoclast, a rule breaker. I liked the sound of you right away.”

  “Great.”

  “If I had realized what Brandon was up to, honey, I would have warned you. I guess he saw the opportunity to expand his role, so he took it.”

  Bea clears her throat. “He told you about. . us?”

  “Eventually. I suspect what attracted you to each other was what you both have in common: ambition. You could use each other and neither one of you really minded. It would have been better, though, for all of us, if your bosses had put somebody less ambitious in charge. Somebody who could’ve shot Brandon’s ideas down instead of falling for them.”

  “Who told you March’s headless victim was Brandon?” Bea asks.

  “One of them,” Hilda says, nodding toward the stack of dossiers. “He called me in a panic, sounded very convincing. I actually cried-which I didn’t do for Andy. He told me Brandon was dead and that the rest of them were going to disappear. They didn’t need my help, which I thought was strange and a little ungrateful, but then I’d been guilty of leaving the boys in limbo since Andy’s death. Of course, we were all in limbo after that.”

  “So you called Bea to warn her-?”

  “I called her because Inferno, the insider, had stupidly vouched for Brandon to the cartel. If they were watching the investigation, and it came out that Brandon wasn’t really who he’d said, if you made his real name public along with his military record. . well, let’s just say that Mr. Inferno would have found himself in some hot water. I owed it to him to prevent that, if I could.”

  “And then you disappeared yourself.”

  “Partly,” she says, glancing across the room. “I am on my way. If you had shown up here a week from now, you would have found the place vacated. I’d tell you where I’m headed, but. . You understand.”


  “We already found your bag of passports,” Bea says.

  “Those are old lives,” Hilda replies. “I’m moving on to something new.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, not anymore.”

  “You can’t arrest me, dear. I haven’t done anything. And besides, if you did slap me in cuffs, there are parts of my story I don’t think you’d want your superiors to hear.”

  To my surprise, Bea doesn’t respond to this. She buries her face in her hands, shaking her head. She is ambitious, and Hilda is right. A story like this would end her professional rise, if not her entire career. Losing some expense money, even such a big chunk of it, hardly compares to jeopardizing a major intelligence asset like Inferno.

  “Whatever anxiety Bea might have,” I say, “the fact is, I didn’t track you down for a history lesson. I’m looking for a murderer. I want to know who took the skin off my John Doe’s hands and cut his head off, and I want to know where I can find the men in your files-your ‘boys.’ They killed a good cop, and tried to kill me, too.”

  “And what, I’m supposed to do your job for you?” There’s a flash of anger in her eyes, the first I’ve seen, a glimpse of the cornered animal behind her innocuous act. “I’ve already told you more than you could ever have figured out on your own. This is not something you can drag into a courtroom, Detective. This is not something you could ever document, let alone prosecute. And even if you could, before you got that far, there are people who would stop you. That’s not a threat. It’s a simple fact.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But I can’t let you walk out of here without giving me more. Where do I find Brandon Ford, for example?”

  “How would I know? I think we’re both aware of the fact he’s switched allegiances. You should go and ask your new friend, Mr. Englewood.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Tell me about this courier business. He was traveling down to Matamoros, you said? Where’d he stay down there? What kind of transport? Where did he like to stop for gas? There are all kinds of things I bet you could tell me, and we have plenty of time.”