by Mike Lawson
‘Next, we have Mr Nicholas Fine,’ Neil said. ‘Although you didn’t ask me to, I decided to take a quick peek at his data. Unlike his boss, Nick appears to be a very bright fellow, magna summa whatever from Princeton, which he attended on scholarship, not having a rich grandpa like Senator Bill. Financially, he’s in okay shape, but he’s not megabucks rich. His net worth is about two million, most of that being the equity in his home.’
‘How’d he make his money?’ DeMarco asked. ‘The Senate gig doesn’t pay that well.’
‘Most of what he has came from real estate deals, buying low and selling high. Bottom line with Fine is that he doesn’t appear to have enough money to finance the kind of venture we’re talking about, and I saw no substantial financial activity in any of his accounts.’
‘What about Broderick’s big contributors? What did you get on them?’
‘I was just getting to that,’ Neil said. ‘And because the good senator’s fans have grown significantly in the last two months, I want you to know that this took some effort.’
‘You’re gonna send me a bill, Neil, so just get on with it,’ DeMarco said.
‘Fine. I’ll spare you the details, but I want you to know that this is why I charge so much. But since you don’t care …’
‘I don’t,’ DeMarco said.
‘Kenneth Dobbler and Edith Baxter,’ Neil said.
‘The Edith Baxter?’ Emma said.
‘Who’s Kenneth Dobbler?’ DeMarco said.
Neil chuckled; confusion in others pleased him. ‘We talked earlier about money motives,’ Neil said. ‘You asked: How could anyone make money if Broderick’s bill was to become law? Well, Mr Dobbler has found a way.’
‘Which is?’ DeMarco said.
‘The federal government, as well as state and municipal governments and private companies, spends billions each year doing background checks on employees. They look at credit reports, criminal records, scholastic history, et cetera, et cetera. Mr Dobbler has a company, a profitable one, that does such background checks. Now imagine for a moment if Broderick’s bill were to pass and the government required that a background check be accomplished on every Muslim American. And keep in mind we haven’t even defined what a Muslim American is. One who practices Islam? Someone whose ancestors came from a Muslim country? Someone married to a Muslim?
‘At any rate, according to my trusty almanac there are almost five million Muslims in this country. Now I have no idea how that number was obtained, and I’m willing to bet that it’s low and out of date, but just for the fun of it, let’s say we’re going to do background checks on five million people. A background check performed on federal employees for a very basic security clearance can take up to eight hours. Now throw in the need to check people for overseas connections, connections in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran and Pakistan and you can triple the hours, which I think would be conservative. And then we’ll assume that Mr Dobbler’s company charges a mere sixty dollars an hour, which is less than most plumbers charge and, based on my experience, less than what other government contractors typically bill. But let’s just use sixty bucks an hour for the sake of argument and multiply that number by twenty-four hours and multiply the product by five million people.’ Neil paused. ‘That’s seven point two billion dollars. That’s billion, with a B.’
‘Holy shit,’ DeMarco said.
‘Oui,’ Neil said. ‘Even if Dobbler had to share a seven-billion-dollar contract with other companies, he’d still be looking at millions – maybe hundreds of millions – in profit.’
‘But what makes Dobbler think he’ll get the contract for doing the screening?’ DeMarco said.
‘Connections, of course, connections to people like Bill Broderick, to whom he contributes. But, to be fair, Dobbler does have extensive experience at this sort of work and his company is reportedly very good at what it does.’
‘Yeah,’ Emma said, ‘but is Dobbler the sort of person who would have Reza Zarif’s family killed to get a contract?’
‘That I don’t know,’ Neil said. ‘On the surface he just appears to be a shrewd businessman, not a criminal. But he does have the money motive that Joe was looking for.’
‘What about Edith Baxter?’ DeMarco said. ‘Why’s she supporting Broderick? I can’t imagine that she’s interested in some contract to perform background checks, and she sure as hell doesn’t need the money.’
Even DeMarco knew who Edith Baxter was. She was the poster girl for American businesswomen. She’d been the CEO of three Fortune 500 com panies, two of which she’d been brought in to save when the companies had been on the brink of bankruptcy. She was one of the big boys, commanding compensation packages – meaning salary and stock options and various costly perks – in excess of a hundred million a year. She’d had her picture on the cover of Time magazine twice and she was one of the people the chairman of the Federal Reserve called when he was looking for advice from the private sector.
Before Neil could answer DeMarco’s question, Emma said, ‘I think I know why she’s supporting Broderick’s bill, but are you sure about this, Neil?’
‘Of course I’m sure,’ Neil said, offended that his research would be questioned. ‘She’s the biggest financial backer that Bill Broderick has, and she hasn’t been the least bit subtle about how she’s been giving him money. And—’
‘But why’s she supporting him?’ DeMarco asked again.
‘Because of her son,’ Emma said.
‘Her son?’
‘Edith was married once,’ Emma said, ‘and she had a son from that marriage. His name was Craig Devon; the boy kept his father’s name. As you can imagine, with Edith’s career, she wasn’t a stay-at-home mom. I suspect she was around very little when her son was young, and when she and Craig’s father divorced, he got custody of the kid and Edith paid child support. At any rate, Craig was in Madrid when Muslim terrorists blew up the trains. His wife and daughter, Edith’s granddaughter, were killed, and Craig Devon lost an arm, both legs, and an eye.’
‘Jesus,’ DeMarco said.
‘But he didn’t die. They brought him back to the States and he was hospitalized for over three years, one operation after another, setbacks due to infection and transplant rejections and everything else that could possibly go wrong. When they finally allowed him to go home with his titanium legs and a hook for a hand and a patch over his eye and somebody else’s liver, he took a pistol in his good hand and killed himself.’
37
Fat Neil didn’t drink, at least he didn’t drink beverages that contained alcohol. But Emma, after hearing about Edith Baxter’s connection to Broderick, decided she needed a drink, so she and DeMarco left Neil’s office and drove into Georgetown. Emma was quiet as they drove, still thinking about Edith and her son.
DeMarco cruised around for a while trying to find a place to park – it’s easier to find a virgin in a whorehouse than street parking in Georgetown – until Emma finally snapped at him and told him to park in a lot, one that charged ten bucks an hour. Emma had a money-be-damned attitude when she wasn’t paying.
They went to Clyde’s, DeMarco’s favorite bar on M Street, and took a seat, and Emma ordered a Ketel One martini. When the waitress asked what DeMarco wanted, he hesitated. After a night spent drinking with a priest, could his liver stand any more? Yes, he concluded; hair of the dog, he told himself, and duplicated Emma’s order.
Emma sighed. ‘I’ve met Edith Baxter. She’s an incredible woman.’
‘How did you meet her?’
‘Fortune sponsored a most-powerful-women-in-business thing. They held it at the Four Seasons in Palm Springs, and Edith, of course, was the biggest name at the conference. It was a networking orgy, all these powerful women getting together, meeting each other, and hopefully in the future helping one another and the women they were mentoring.’
‘And you went to this conference?’
‘Yeah,’ Emma said. ‘It was the only thing like that I ever attended. The people w
ho arranged the event wanted a few women from government but not just politicians. I was at the end of my career at the DIA, had no pressing assignments, and the secretary of defense made me go. It was kinda funny. They printed up a little brochure for the conference that gave the attendees’ biographies. All mine said was that I worked at the DIA and everything else was classified. Anyway, I met Edith. She’s incredibly intelligent, principled, tough, driven, courageous. For some reason …’
Emma may not have realized it, DeMarco was thinking, but she’d just described herself.
‘… for some reason we took a shine to each other and had dinner alone one night. I really liked her.’
‘From what I’ve read about her,’ DeMarco said, ‘even with what happened to her son, it’s hard to believe she’d be supporting Broderick.’
Emma shook her head. ‘Imagine you’re a mother and your only son – a son you’ve probably neglected his entire life – is horribly disfigured. Then for months and months you watch him suffer as he recovers, knowing he’ll never be the same again. And then he kills himself. Don’t you think it’s possible you might be driven almost out of your mind with guilt and grief and hatred?’
‘I guess, but hatred for whom?’ DeMarco said. ‘Al-Qaeda? All Muslims? Lunatics who bomb trains?’
Emma plucked the lemon twist from her martini and nibbled off a piece. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but let’s say Edith decided to do something to avenge her son. And being Edith Baxter, she thinks big. She thinks she’s going to make life miserable for every Muslim in this country and she’s going to deport every one she can who’s already here and not allow any more to come in. She’s going to do her best to make sure that no other mother experiences what happened to her son. No more towers collapsing, no more planes crashing into the Pentagon, no more subway bombings.
‘And this thing with Broderick, this bill of his, maybe that’s just the first step. Maybe the next step is … hell, I don’t know. Maybe it’s crippling economic sanctions against every Muslim government. Maybe it’s getting the European Union to pass laws similar to what Broderick’s proposing.’
‘That’s a hell of an ambitious plan,’ DeMarco said.
‘Edith made her mark in the world executing ambitious plans.’
‘But Jesus, if you’re right, she was an accomplice to killing a couple of kids.’
‘There’s nothing to show she’s had anything to do with these terrorist attacks,’ Emma said. ‘All she’s done is support Broderick. But Edith lost her kid. Maybe she considers what happened to Reza Zarif’s family the price that has to be paid to get what she wants. Or maybe she …’
‘What?’
‘We’re still missing something here – assuming that anything we’ve learned is connected to anything. If somebody is forcing these people to commit acts of terrorism, there has to be an organizer, somebody who’s doing the detailed planning, arranging for the equipment. And neither Edith Baxter nor – and I’m guessing here – this businessman, Dobbler, has that sort of … of field experience.’
‘Jubal Pugh?’ DeMarco said.
‘No. Pugh’s too much of a bottom feeder. He’s a meth dealer, for Christ’s sake. If someone is orchestrating these attacks, it has to be someone a lot more sophisticated than Jubal Pugh. That doesn’t mean that Pugh isn’t involved, but there has to be someone else.’
DeMarco drained his drink. ‘So what do you wanna do?’ he said.
‘I want to talk to Edith Baxter.’
‘Why? Do you think she’ll tell you she’s behind all this stuff?’
‘I don’t know, but I need to see her.’
‘Okay. You go see Edith and I’ll go see Dobbler. I like money motives.’
38
The materials he needed hadn’t arrived, and he was furious.
He should have received the C-4 and the radio receivers and the transmitter and the blasting caps two weeks ago. The planning phase was over. The boy was ready. But the material for the devices had not arrived, and he had no idea what was causing the delay or how long he’d have to wait.
The materials were coming from Germany to Mexico, then across the Mexican border into Texas, after which someone would bring them to him in Cleveland by car. He couldn’t simply make a phone call to find out what had happened; they had to assume that all the lines were monitored by the NSA these days. The same with e-mail; they didn’t know the limits of American technology. So they communicated the old-fashioned way, by sending letters written in code and waiting for a response the same way. And the letters didn’t go directly to the recipient; they were mailed and then mailed again before reaching their destination.
If he had been in another part of the world – or had he not been an Arab – he could have picked up the C-4 easily, almost as easily as buying bread from one of the giant American markets – or super-markets, as they called them. Even their grocery stores were monuments to excess and decadence.
So he would wait. He would continue to mold the boy, to make sure his resolve stayed firm, although he wasn’t particularly worried that the boy would change his mind. His only task at this point was to make sure he wasn’t arrested and to plan, as best he could, for the next operation.
There was that other boy in Santa Fe he’d read about. The boy had received an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, which most likely meant that he was very bright. But the Air Force Academy had a large fundamentalist Christian faculty and was located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which had one of the largest evangelical churches in the country. The boy was harassed so relentlessly that he was driven from the academy, and when his father, not a rich man, tried to sue the air force, he and his son were humiliated by the government’s lawyers. The last article he’d read about the boy in Santa Fe said that he was working in a movie theater, serving popcorn, while he tried to save up enough money to attend another college. Would that boy have the same fire in his belly as this boy in Cleveland? He wouldn’t know until he saw him, until he looked into his eyes.
39
The Cuban didn’t know where the subject was going.
She’d arrived at Reagan National two hours earlier, where she’d been met by a man named Jorge driving a Honda SUV with tinted windows. She didn’t know Jorge. She’d asked a man she knew – someone she trusted about as much as she trusted anyone – to supply a driver who knew the city and would follow orders.
Except for the fact that he talked too much, Jorge was acceptable. He was ugly and he was big, six-three or six-four. He had a shaved head and a stupid-looking little strip of beard beneath his lower lip. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt – the sleeves pushed up to show off the tattoos on his forearms – baggy jeans, worn so low you could see the upper half of his plaid boxer shorts, and big unlaced Timberland boots that were a hideous yellow color. Around his neck were four gold-plated chains and on his left wrist was a fake Rolex.
He had a brain the size of a cashew.
The good news was that he did what he was told without arguing and she liked his size. One disadvantage of being a five-foot-six-inch woman who weighed one hundred and thirty pounds was that she wasn’t physically intimidating. Usually that was good but sometimes, particularly if you needed to control several people, it helped to have someone like Jorge around.
After he’d picked her up at the airport she told Jorge she wanted to see the subject’s house, and just as they arrived at the address in Georgetown, a car pulled out of the garage. She looked at the driver and compared his face to the picture in her hand, one taken from a DMV file. It was him: DeMarco. She told Jorge to follow the car. The man stopped at a restaurant on Capitol Hill, had breakfast and read the paper, then forty minutes later got onto I-95, heading north. When he passed through Baltimore, the Cuban began to wonder just how far he planned to travel. Not too far, she hoped.
Then she had an idea, one that was easy to execute. Lincoln had said that he wanted this man either killed or severely injured in some manner where it would not
be obvious that he had been singled out as the target. There were a lot of big trucks on the road, eighteen-wheelers, and today the highway was relatively clear so the trucks were traveling fast. She and Jorge were two cars behind DeMarco, and DeMarco was in the outside lane behind a big rig, a moving van. She told Jorge what she wanted him to do. She wanted him to pass the van and then cut right in front of it, so the truck driver would have to slam on his brakes. She was hoping the tractor-trailer would jackknife and that DeMarco would be caught up in the accident. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was easy to do, and if she was lucky she’d be back in Miami tonight.
Jorge, it turned out, was a better driver than she would have guessed and he executed the move perfectly. He cut in front of the truck so closely that she was afraid that they were going to get rear-ended, but the trucker reacted instinctively and, just as she’d expected, he slammed down hard on his brakes. She watched in awe as the trailer began to move side-ways and swatted a car in the inside lane that had been trying to pass the moving van. She saw the car go into the grassy median that separated the north and southbound lanes, and watched it flip over twice. And then the trailer tipped over, and a second later so did the cab. The cab and the trailer were now both on their sides skidding down the highway, throwing up sparks. The only problem was she couldn’t see DeMarco’s car and couldn’t tell if he’d been caught up in the accident or not.
* * *
DeMarco was flipping through a stack of CDs he had balanced on his thigh. He was trying to find one by Norah Jones that he knew was in the stack. He loved Norah Jones. He wished she’d marry him. Not only was she beautiful, but since she’d won about a hundred Grammys, she’d be able to support him in the style to which he’d like to become accustomed.
