by Mike Lawson
When DeMarco showed Blunt his ID and said he wanted to talk to him about the shooting on the shuttle, Blunt stared impassively for a second and then invited him into his home. He didn’t offer DeMarco anything to drink; he just pointed him at a dining room table and took a seat across from him.
‘Why are you here?’ Blunt said. ‘The TSA review board has already given me a clean bill on the shooting.’
Blunt had placed the magazine he’d been holding on the table next to him. It looked to DeMarco like a catalog for power boats.
‘Thinking about buying a boat?’ DeMarco said.
Blunt just stared at DeMarco for a moment and then said again, ‘Why are you here?’
‘I want to know how you happened to be on the same plane as Youseff Khalid that morning.’
‘I wasn’t on the same plane as him,’ Blunt said. ‘He was on the same plane as me. That’s the flight I was assigned to that day, and if things had gone the way they normally do, I would have caught a flight out of Reagan to Chicago, and then from Chicago back to New York.’
‘I’ve got calls out to people who will tell me if you requested that flight or if you traded flights with someone,’ DeMarco said. And that wasn’t a lie. DeMarco had asked his new buddy Jerry Hansen, at Homeland Security, to see if Blunt had had himself assigned to Youseff’s flight but Hansen hadn’t gotten back to him. But what he really wanted was to see Blunt’s reaction to his threat – and there was none.
Blunt just said, ‘That’s good.’
DeMarco figured that maybe somebody had killed Rollie Patterson to keep him from talking because Rollie seemed like the type who would cave the minute a cop placed him in the hot seat. Orin Blunt, on the other hand, wouldn’t talk if you put his nuts in a vice.
‘I understand you’re on leave and thinking about retiring,’ DeMarco said.
Blunt nodded his head. ‘Shooting that guy really shook me up. I don’t want to ever have to do something like that again.’
‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. ‘I can tell you’ve really been traumatized.’
There were many individuals, businesses, and organizations that contributed to Mahoney – and most of these contributors Mahoney was happy, even proud to name. But there were some who filled the speaker’s war chest that either Mahoney or the contributor wished to keep secret.
Bailey Flynn was one of these secret donors. Flynn represented several businessmen like himself who operated clubs where young girls danced barely clothed or not clothed at all. Mahoney, a true believer in the arts and the First Amendment, felt that these businessmen had a right to representation; he just preferred that places like Chucky’s All Nude Revue not be prominently listed among his supporters. And although its mission was certainly loftier than Bailey Flynn’s, the archdiocese of Boston also could not afford to be identified as a Mahoney booster. The Church’s tax-exempt status might come into jeopardy if it were seen to be emptying its collection plates directly into the speaker’s pockets.
And thus DeMarco’s reason for going to Boston: to meet those who directed the dancers and those who directed the choir – and take from them envelopes that he never, ever, looked into.
DeMarco dispatched Bailey Flynn in short order. He stopped at a club in Revere, took a seat, and ordered a Coke; he needed to keep his alcohol level on empty before meeting with Father Mike. A few minutes later Flynn joined him. Flynn was sixty, tall and perpetually morose, as if he spent his days embalming bodies. While Flynn told DeMarco that ‘those blue-nosed sons-a-bitches have ruined the Combat Zone in Boston, and Mahoney goddamn well better put a stop to that shit before the same thing happens everywhere else,’ DeMarco watched a girl with tassels on her nipples dance with as much enthusiasm as people display on their way to the dentist. Five minutes later he was on his way.
The thing about Jesuits, DeMarco knew from ex perience, was that they weren’t necessarily smarter than you but they were certainly better educated. Not only did these men go to college and spend several years in a seminary learning the priestly arts, they almost invariably had doctorates in more than one subject. And Father Michael Thomas Kelly was not only better educated than DeMarco, he was also smarter, but as he never made a point of this, there was no other man on the planet that DeMarco enjoyed dining with more.
DeMarco had never seen the priest in a Roman collar. Tonight he was dressed in a soft tan jacket made of something that looked like suede, a brown silk T-shirt that showed off his physique, and dark brown slacks that fit him perfectly. With the possible exception of Joe’s cousin Danny, Father Mike was probably the handsomest man that DeMarco knew. If he ever tired of being a cleric, he could make his fortune as a middle-aged model.
Although Father Mike never discussed his job, DeMarco had always suspected that the priest did for Cardinal Mackey what DeMarco did for Mahoney. If the Church had some sticky problem – and it had had more than its share of late – and if the problem couldn’t be handled through normal channels, Father Mike would be dispatched. DeMarco also suspected that beneath the thick layers of charm and wit and blarney there was a hard side to the priest that came out when called for.
Dinner began as it usually did with Father Mike: martinis, more than one. From there they proceeded to a bottle of white wine, followed by a bottle of red, followed by a snifter of cognac that was old and smooth and absurdly expensive. And between the martinis and the cognac they ate a meal that should have been added to the list of deadly sins.
During dinner, Father Mike talked. He talked about everything: sports, movies, books, and, of course, politics. His speech was filled with quotes from famous dead people and anecdotes about famous living ones, all of whom it seemed he’d met – the living ones, that is. And he was so skilled at the art of conversation that he made DeMarco feel as though he was actually contributing, though the reality was that DeMarco hardly spoke at all and didn’t mind that he didn’t.
At one point, DeMarco noticed a gorgeous woman in her thirties smile at Father Mike and he smiled back, a smile that almost certainly made the lady tingle all way down to her toes. DeMarco had no evidence whatsoever that Father Mike didn’t strictly adhere to his vow of celibacy; oddly enough, he believed sincerely that he did. But how he managed to do so the way women threw themselves at him, DeMarco couldn’t fathom.
Three hours after the dinner commenced, Father Mike drove DeMarco to a hotel near Logan Airport, stuffed an envelope into the breast pocket of his suit, and then mumbled something as he made a shoofly gesture in the air with his right hand. DeMarco suspected that he’d just been blessed – that a Jesuit had just asked God to keep a completely inebriated man from doing harm to himself as he staggered toward his bed.
34
They would have to alter the plan, but just slightly.
After two nights, he understood the pattern of the guards. One man, who appeared younger than the other two, left the guard shack at 11 P.M., 2 A.M., and 5 A.M. and patrolled for an hour. He patrolled erratically, never following a set pattern, but he tended to stay in areas that were well lit. The second guard began his patrols at midnight and 3 A.M. He would leave the guard shack and go to a small building fifty yards away, a building that looked like some sort of storage shed, and he would stay inside the shed for an hour and then return to the guard shack. The third guard, the one who had seen the boy, patroled at 1 A.M. and 4 A.M., and he either went to the spot at the southeastern corner of the refinery, where he sat and smoked and drank from a small flask, or he went inside the same maintenance shack where the second guard hid.
So the boy would enter the plant as soon as the first guard, the diligent one, returned to the guard shack. That would give him two hours in which to set the devices – twice as long as he needed. To enter the facility, the boy would dig a small hole under the fence. The ground was soft and the boy was small so it wouldn’t take long. Because the third guard, the man with the flask, sometimes sat close to the entry point that they had originally selected, the boy would move the entry point f
ifty yards up the fence line to a spot that was almost as good. After the boy had installed the devices, he would exit by the same hole. If he had time he would fill in the hole with dirt, and if he didn’t have time he’d place a piece of cardboard over the hole. The area around the facility was littered with debris; a piece of cardboard lying on the ground near the fence would not be noticed by anyone.
After the devices had been planted, the boy would wait near the refinery. He wouldn’t even need to hide; he would sit in the dark until sunrise, and when it was light out he’d just walk about innocently, a boy on his way to wherever boys go. Then at seven-thirty – when the day-shift workers began to stream into the facility, when the children were on their way to school, when the nearby buildings began to fill up with people, when the roads were crowded with cars – the boy would walk up to the main gate of the plant, declare his love for God, and detonate the bombs.
35
It was a hassle for Oliver Lincoln to contact the client, but to contact the Cuban all he had to do was go to a restaurant in Miami and have a nice dinner. The restaurant was very popular and very expensive, and the Cuban owned it.
She sat down with him after he had finished his dinner. He knew, in spite of all the business he’d given her over the years, that she’d charge him for the meal. She was, he was convinced, the most miserly person he’d ever known. She made a good income off the restaurant and an even better income from her other job, but she lived in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot home in a middle-class neighborhood in Miami; she wore off-the-rack clothes; and she drove one of those homely hybrids that got about fifty miles to the gallon. Lincoln suspected that the woman had millions stashed away in a bank in the Cayman Islands – or buried in a can in her backyard – but he had no idea what she was saving the money for. Lincoln couldn’t retire because he had such expensive tastes. The Cuban, on the other hand, could have retired years ago had she wanted to, but she didn’t. She loved money – not the things money could buy. Oliver Lincoln simply couldn’t relate to people like her.
The other odd thing about the Cuban was that she was a beautiful woman who seemingly had no interest in sex. He suspected she was near forty. She had a lush figure, a flawless light-brown complexion, and long lustrous black hair. Lincoln had certainly made the effort to bed her, but she refused to have anything to do with him in anything other than a business capacity. And because he needed to know about her for professional rather than personal reasons, he’d had her followed on a number of occasions. She may have had lovers when she was a teenager, but Lincoln had known her since she was twenty-five, and in all that time she had never dated or lived with anyone that he had been able to discover.
‘I want a man either incapacitated or dead,’ Lincoln said. ‘If he had some sort of accident that put him in the hospital for a couple of months, that would be all right, provided there was no doubt that what happened was an accident. You can kill him if that’s easiest, but you have to make certain that it doesn’t appear that he was the target; he must be collateral damage. For example,’ Lincoln said, ‘if a bus were to plow into a crowd standing on a corner and he was part of the crowd, that would be acceptable.’ Lincoln smiled when he said this; he didn’t really expect her to run the man down with a bus, but she didn’t smile back. She didn’t have a sense of humor either. He would really find her quite tiresome if she wasn’t so good at what she did.
‘How much?’ she said
That was always the first question she asked. No who or where or why or when, but always how much?
‘Seventy-five thousand,’ Lincoln said. Lincoln thought it appropriate to keep half of what the client was paying, and after she tacked on her expenses – and padded them – her bill would be close to a hundred thousand.
As if they were both reading from a script that they’d read from many times before, she said, ‘Plus my expenses.’
‘Don’t I always pay your expenses?’ Lincoln said.
‘Last time, when I asked you to pay for my shoes, you argued with me.’
‘Well, I thought that was rather petty of you, billing me for that item. It wasn’t my fault that you got Mr Potter’s blood on your shoes and had to burn them.’ Actually, Lincoln had given her a hard time about the shoes because it amused him to do so. She always presented him with a written expense report detailing every dime she spent on a job, and he always pretended to study it carefully before he paid her. Afterward she would destroy the report while he watched.
‘It was a job-related expense,’ she said.
‘If you say so,’ he said, just to tweak her.
She glared at him for a minute, then said, ‘When do you want this done?’
‘Immediately, of course. Why do you think you’re being paid so much?’
36
Upon his return from Boston, DeMarco’s small brain trust once again assembled in Fat Neil’s office to compare notes and report on what they’d learned.
Emma opened the meeting by looking at DeMarco’s bloodshot eyes and saying, ‘You look like hell.’
‘Thank you,’ DeMarco said, and proceeded to give his report. ‘Autopsies on both Rollie Patterson and Donny Cray were inconclusive,’ he said. ‘Rollie had a fresh needle mark in his left thigh, which could have been used to inject some heart-attack-inducing substance into his body. The problem is that Rollie was allergic to everything on the planet except oxygen, and he self-injected to keep from sneezing himself to death. Bottom line, no toxic substances were found in Rollie’s body.’
‘Which means nothing,’ Emma said. ‘I can think of three or four things that could cause a heart attack and not leave a trace.’
DeMarco wondered if Emma had considered using one of those ‘three or four things’ on Christine’s dog, but he didn’t ask.
‘As for Donny Cray,’ he said, ‘the ME’s report noted nothing inconsistent with an idiot not wearing a seat belt and wrecking his car. The problem here is the ME. The guy who did Rollie’s autopsy is supposed to be super good. The one who did Donny Cray’s lives in Winchester, Virginia, and is primar ily a pediatrician. Add that to the fact that Jubal Pugh is a violent character who lives near Winchester. There’s the possibility, if Pugh’s involved in this, that he might have influenced the ME’s report.’
‘Do you have any evidence that Pugh is involved?’ Emma said.
‘Absolutely none,’ DeMarco said. ‘Finally, the air marshal. I met with him, and it was like talking to a slab of granite. I know the guy’s planning to retire soon and when I met him he was looking at a powerboat catalog. I think he was tipped off about Youseff being on that plane and paid to blow him away, but nobody’ll ever get it out of him.’
‘Did the air marshal ask to be put on the same flight as Youseff?’ Emma asked.
‘No. I had a guy at Homeland Security ask the same question, and he was told that Blunt had been scheduled for three weeks to be on that flight.’
‘All that means,’ Emma said, ‘is that if someone forced Youseff to attempt the hijacking, they just made sure he got on Blunt’s flight.’
‘I guess,’ DeMarco said. The way his head felt, it was hard to make sense out of anything. ‘What’d you get on Blunt’s and Patterson’s finances, Neil?’
‘Nothing noteworthy, no large changes in either man’s accounts, which in the case of Rollie is problematic because it leaves open the issue of how he was able to buy his new RV.’
‘Both these guys could have been given a bucket of cash,’ Emma said. ‘And if Rollie was still alive, he’d say that he didn’t trust banks and had been saving for years to buy his RV and had been hiding the money under the bed.’
‘So in conclusion,’ DeMarco said, ‘I got shit.’ He almost added: and the worst hangover of my life, thanks to the Catholic Church.
‘I talked to Mustafa Ahmed’s niece,’ Emma said, ‘a sweet girl named Anisa. She wouldn’t tell me anything, but my gut says something happened to her. And I think she was recently garroted.’
‘Garrote
d?’ DeMarco said. ‘You mean strangled.’
‘Yes, with a wire, a garrote. There was a deep ligature mark around her throat. I gave the girl the name of a Muslim woman who would vouch for me, and I know Anisa called the woman a couple days later, but she never contacted me afterward. So to repeat what Joe just said, I got shit.’
‘What did you learn, Neil?’ DeMarco said.
In a cooler next to his desk, Neil kept Popsicles. He opened the cooler now and pulled a grape Popsicle from the box, taking his time in removing the paper. He just drove DeMarco nuts. As he sucked on his Popsicle, Neil gave his report.
‘Let’s start,’ Neil said, ‘with the good senator, William Broderick. If our assumption is that Broderick is paying somebody to cause these terrorist attacks, an assumption I personally find hard to accept, it would take a lot of money. So in the case of Broderick, I looked for cash outflows: large blocks of stocks liquidated, CDs cashed out, bank accounts substantially reduced, et cetera. I found nothing. The problem, of course, is Broderick could have sold something, like a home or a yacht, and put the cash from the sale in an offshore account or in an account under a false name, and I wouldn’t be able to see it.’
‘Isn’t the property he owns listed on his financial disclosure statements?’ DeMarco said. People above a certain rank and holding certain positions in government are required to file financial disclosure statements that identify investments and sources of income for the person and his spouse. DeMarco, however, wasn’t of sufficient rank or importance to be required to file such a statement, so he didn’t really know what was on one.
‘No,’ Neil said, in answer to DeMarco’s question. ‘Financial disclosure statements are designed, in theory, to see if government officials have sources of income that represent a conflict of interest. In the case of property, you’re required to list assets “held for investment or the production of income.” So a coal mine he’d be required to list, but he might be able to exclude a hunting lodge in Montana. At any rate, regarding Broderick, nada.
