by Mike Lawson
And then he saw the brake lights flash on the big rig in front of him.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed and slammed down on the brake pedal, CDs flying all over the car. He was sure he going to rear-end the trailer – the bumper of which would go right through his windshield and turn his face to bloody pulp – when the trailer began to swing over into the left lane of the freeway, hitting a car that was just passing the truck. DeMarco didn’t see what happened to the other car because his car was now fishtailing, and he was struggling to control it, afraid he was going to roll over, but somehow, no thanks to any skill on his part, all four tires stayed on the ground. As he was fighting to bring his car to a stop, it barely registered in his mind that the eighteen-wheeler was now moving down the road on its side.
DeMarco’s car finally stopped skidding and came to a complete stop. His car was now perpendicular to the highway, the front tires on the paved part of the road, the rear tires on the gravel at the side of the road. Once his car had stopped, he immediately spun his head to the left, his eyes big as saucers, terrified that somebody was now going to plow into the side of his car. Luckily, the car that had been behind DeMarco when the accident started had been a safe distance back – not tailgating the way DeMarco had been.
DeMarco sat there for a minute with his eyes closed, his head on the steering wheel, breathing heavily. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t hit the truck or rolled his car or been smashed into from behind. Traffic was already starting to back up on the freeway, and four or five people had left their cars and were now running toward the wrecked vehicles to see if the occupants needed help. DeMarco’s hands shook as he undid his seat belt, then he slowly opened his door and walked unsteadily over to the truck that had overturned. He looked in through the front windshield of the cab and could see the driver was still in his seat, lying on his side. The driver was okay, not obviously injured, but madder than hell because he couldn’t get free of his seat belt or upright himself. Another man was talking to the driver, saying that he’d already called 911. DeMarco found out shortly that the man in the car that had been sideswiped by the trailer hadn’t been so lucky. He was dead.
Four hours after the accident, DeMarco pulled into a visitor’s parking space near the front entrance of Dobbler Security Systems, Inc. He had called Dobbler’s office earlier to say he’d been held up by an accident, and Dobbler’s secretary had become completely flustered, as if nobody, for any reason, was ever late for an appointment with her boss. When he walked into Dobbler’s office, the secretary – a skinny woman in her fifties with butterfly-frame glasses affixed to a chain around her ropy neck – informed him that, since he was late, Mr Dobbler had moved on to other things and DeMarco would have to wait. As she said this, she nervously twisted a Kleenex in her hands and little flecks of paper crumbled into her lap. DeMarco had the impression that the secretary was perpetually cowering, as if people screamed at her about two dozen times a day, and he could just imagine Dobbler calling out from his office for a cup of coffee and this poor woman’s ass going straight up, two feet off her chair.
He was finally ushered into Dobbler’s office an hour later. Three of the four walls in the room were devoted to certificates and plaques and photos obviously intended to impress Dobbler’s visitors with his deep charitable commitment to the City of Brotherly Love. There were testimonies from every fraternal do-gooder organization in Philadelphia; pictures of him posing with Little League teams he sponsored; a newspaper shot of him dishing out Thanksgiving turkey to a line of men who all looked like winos.
Dobbler in the flesh, however, didn’t strike DeMarco as a man with a large strain of human kindness running through him. He was a big florid-faced guy in his fifties, and DeMarco knew the minute he met him that his complexion would go instantaneously from red to purple whenever anything upset him. He had short-cut dark hair, a meat-eater’s jaw, and somewhat protruding dark eyes, as if his elevated blood pressure was slowly forcing his eyeballs out of his head. He was six-three, over two hundred and fifty pounds – the type who would crowd you in an argument and try to intimidate you with his bulk. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a cheap-looking blue tie with red stripes. DeMarco would have bet fifty bucks that Dobbler was wearing white socks and his shoes were plain black lace-ups, but he never got a chance to find out because the man never came out from behind his desk.
To get the appointment with Dobbler, DeMarco had almost told the truth. He said he worked for Congress and was doing a little legwork for a congressional committee that was interested in – and approved of – the type of work that Dobbler’s company did. The nonexistent committee had tasked DeMarco to interview Dobbler, obtain a few facts, and report back. DeMarco began by saying that he just wanted to hear a bit about Dobbler’s background, and after that he hardly had to say another word. It was clear that there was nothing Ken Dobbler preferred more than discussing his own achievements.
His beginnings were predictably Lincoln-like: born in a rustic backwater, surviving on table scraps, never wearing a thing that wasn’t a hand-me-down. He had a passel of underachieving siblings, a saint for a mother, and a worthless bum for a father. The military saved him, he said. He enlisted right after high school, his brilliance was soon recognized, and he was sent off to college on Uncle’s dime and turned into an officer and a gentleman. He had spent some time in military intelligence, he said, coyly refusing to tell DeMarco exactly what he did.
After twenty years in the army, he retired and launched his own company. The company started off by providing rent-a-cops for businesses in Philly, and he soon squeezed out the local competition and expanded into other cities. Next he ventured into building security systems and opened branch offices up and down the eastern seaboard. He began doing employee background checks for private companies and state and federal agencies five years ago.
‘I have a bunch of retired guys working for me,’ he said to DeMarco. ‘FBI, people from OPM, ex-military, ex-cops. There’s nobody that can do background checks on people better or faster than my guys. I’ve got the right computer systems, the right contacts, and the know-how.’
‘I’ve heard,’ DeMarco said, ‘that you’re a strong supporter of Senator Broderick’s proposed legislation, the so-called Muslim Registry Act.’
‘You’re damn right I am,’ Dobbler said, his eyeballs swelling. ‘Broderick’s the only guy in Washington who doesn’t have his head up his ass about those people.’
‘I’ve also heard that maybe one of the reasons you’re supporting Broderick is if his bill passes, your company might get the contract doing the background checks on the Muslims.’
DeMarco got to see that he was right about Dobbler’s face changing color. A flush started at the base of the man’s neck and spread up his face toward his hairline like an out-of-control brush fire. ‘Are you implying that I’m doing something improper?’ he said.
‘Oh, no, sir,’ DeMarco said. He then gave Dobbler his best impression of a D. C. insider’s smirk, added a conspiratorial wink, and said, ‘We all know that’s the way things work in Washington. One hand washes the other. We approve.’
‘Well, I’m not washing any damn thing,’ Dobbler said. ‘I’m just supporting a politician I believe in.’
‘Yes, sir, I understand,’ DeMarco said. To change the subject, he asked, ‘How many employees do you have?’
DeMarco left half an hour later without having come to any useful conclusion regarding Ken Dobbler. The guy was a pompous, self-satisfied, arrogant bully, but that didn’t mean he was coercing innocent Muslims into committing acts of terrorism to help pass Broderick’s bill.
He checked his watch. It was almost 5 p.m.: quitting time. He found the closest bar to Dobbler’s company. He was hoping a few Dobbler employees might stop in for drinks and that he might get some information from people who were less impressed with Dobbler than he was with himself.
The Cuban was patient – like a hunter in a deer blind – but being trapped in a car with Jorg
e for almost eight hours was beginning to grate on her. Earlier in the day he had tried several times to start up a conversation, the dimwit probably thinking he might be able to charm her into having sex with him. She’d seen tree stumps that were more appealing than Jorge, but even if he’d looked like Antonio Banderas he still wouldn’t have scored. Sex was simply not a priority for her. She finally told him to shut up, he was being paid to drive, not talk. So for the past four hours she’d sat in the car with him as he sulked, her only relief being when she sent him for food and coffee.
She’d been disappointed that DeMarco hadn’t been injured in the accident on the highway, but not really surprised. It had been an opportunity and she’d taken it, but it wasn’t an opportunity she had direct control over. Other opportunities would come along. They always did.
If all she’d been asked to do was kill the man, it would have been simple. She could have killed him from three hundred yards away with a rifle or from three feet away with a silenced pistol, just as she had done with Lincoln’s researcher Jeremy Potter. She’d also been trained by one of the best in the business in the use of explosives, and she could have blown DeMarco into tiny pieces when he started his car or opened his door or answered his phone.
She’d killed politicians surrounded by bodyguards and crime lords so paranoid they rarely left their fortified homes. Killing a man who had no training or protection, and had no inkling that he was a target, would normally be no more difficult than swatting a fly. But to kill him in the way that she’d been contracted to do – without making it obvious that he was the intended victim – well that wasn’t so easy, particularly in this country.
Like right now, he was sitting in a bar. If this had been Israel, she could have tossed a bomb into the bar and killed DeMarco along with a dozen others. The act would have been blamed on Hamas, and everyone would have thought that DeMarco, the poor schmuck, had just picked the wrong time and place to have a drink. But that wouldn’t work here, not in Philadelphia.
So she’d wait until the right opportunity presented itself. It always did.
It didn’t take DeMarco long to strike up a conversation with a Dobbler employee. He recognized the people in the bar who worked for Dobbler because they all had company ID badges on lanyards around their necks. When one man wearing a Dobbler badge started talking to the bartender about the Redskins’ chances of beating the Eagles on Sunday, he surprised DeMarco by saying that the Redskins were going to kick the Eagles’ green-clad butts. This surprised DeMarco for two reasons: the Skins’ chances of beating the Eagles were practically nil the way Washington was currently performing, and most folks in Philly were rabid Eagles fans. In fact, the word rabid didn’t come close to describing their fanaticism. For a man to stand in a Philadelphia bar and admit out loud that he wanted to see the Eagles lose was tantamount to a death wish.
But it gave DeMarco the opening he needed. He told the man that he was from D.C. and ‘Go Skins,’ and a bond was formed. They became two cowboys surrounded by heathens, standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be scalped, as they wished for the downfall of Philadelphia’s favorite team. Before too long, DeMarco got around to asking about Dobbler. DeMarco told the guy – his name was Chuck – that he’d had an appointment with Dobbler and that Dobbler had blown him off after he’d driven all the way from the capital. Chuck’s response to this complaint was that he wasn’t surprised because Dobbler was a prick. Yep, Chuck was his guy.
Chuck confirmed what DeMarco already suspected: Dobbler was ruthless, mean-spirited, tight-fisted, and cared more about his company than the people in it. Dobbler, Chuck said, would fire you if you looked cross-eyed at him. Chuck did mention one interesting thing. When Dobbler started up his company, there were four other security firms he was competing against. Three of these outfits went out of business because the buildings they were supposed to be protecting began to experience an unusually high number of successful break-ins. Dobbler went to the people who owned the buildings and said if they wanted to stop having their offices robbed and trashed, maybe they should hire somebody who knew what he was doing, so the companies did. The rumor was that Dobbler had hired the thugs who did the break-ins, but that was never proven.
When DeMarco asked Chuck if Broderick’s bill was going to be good for business, Chuck said, ‘Beat’s the shit out of me. I’m on the security systems side. But,’ he added, ‘I like what Broderick’s saying.’
40
Edith Baxter had three homes: an oceanfront mansion in Carmel, a four-thousand-square-foot ‘cabin’ at Lake Tahoe, and a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. Fortunately for Emma, Edith was currently in New York. The other two places sounded more fun to visit, but Manhattan was closer.
Emma didn’t call ahead. She showed up at Edith’s building and gave the doorman her name. Edith at first refused to see her. She spoke to Emma over the doorman’s phone, said she remembered her fondly but wasn’t feeling well enough for company. Emma hated to do it, but she told Edith the reason she wanted to see her had to do with her son, which in a way it did, but the half-truth bothered her.
The elevator doors opened into Edith’s home – her apartment occupied the entire floor – and she was standing in the foyer waiting for Emma. She was shoeless, wearing faded jeans and a long-sleeved blue blouse. The last time Emma had seen the woman, Edith had been slim, but in the way that a person who eats a healthy diet and has a personal trainer is slim. Now she looked gaunt: hollow cheeks, corded neck, her jeans riding low on narrow, bony hips. The skin beneath her eyes was smudged gray from sleepless nights, and her hair – which had always been carefully styled and shaded an attractive honey-blond – was streaked with gray, the ends brittle and split, as if she hadn’t visited her hairdresser in a couple of months. Her eyes, though, seemed the same. The strength was still there, the indomitable will, the extraordinary intellect.
Edith didn’t waste time on small talk. She didn’t even invite Emma farther into her home, beyond the foyer. She immediately said, ‘What do you have to say about my son?’
‘I wanted to say how sorry I was for you and that I wish there was something I could do to take away your pain.’
‘Thank you, but I don’t think you came here just to express your sympathy. You sent me a card. Why are you really here?’
‘Edith, when I first met you, you struck me as being fairly liberal, or at least as liberal as someone can be who’s held the sort of jobs you’ve held. You were particularly sensitive when it came to discrimination.’
‘What’s this have to do with—’
‘This week I found out that you’re a major contributor to Senator Broderick. I’d like to know why.’
Emma expected Edith to tell her it was none of her business, but she didn’t. She said, ‘Because he’s the only politician in Washington who understands that we must act, that we must do something to fight those people. Is that why you’re here? To try to convince me to stop supporting Broderick?’
‘Not exactly,’ Emma said. She paused before adding, ‘Edith, I have reason to believe that the Muslims who committed these recent terrorists acts were forced to do what they did, and they were not forced by al-Qaeda or some other group of Islamic fanatics. I think these so-called terrorist attacks have been engineered to help Broderick’s bill pass.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
Edith looked confused, but was she? During her career Edith Baxter had played boardroom poker for billions of dollars.
‘What I’m saying is that Reza Zarif was forced to fly his Cessna at the White House because someone made him. And whoever made him was doing so, at least in part, to advance Bill Broderick’s agenda. An agenda that you support.’
Edith studied Emma’s face for a moment. ‘Are you still with the DIA?’ she asked. ‘The last time I saw you, you told me you were retiring.’
Why had she asked that? Emma wondered. Was she trying to figure out if the government was investigating her activities? Emma opted for the truth.
‘I am retired,’ she said. ‘I’m not employed by anyone.’ Sorta, she added mentally, as Mahoney would have done.
‘Then I don’t understand. What authority do you have for questioning me?’
‘None. I’m here because I’ve always admired you and I want to make sure that you’re not involved in any way with what’s been happening lately.’
‘That’s absurd!’
Behind Edith, Emma could see a formal dining room table that would seat twelve. The table was piled with books and magazines and manila file folders. Emma assumed that Edith must have some sort of home office in her spacious apartment, probably a library too, and could only imagine that whatever Edith was working on had overflowed those spaces. But Emma was standing too far away to see the titles of the books on the table. She took a step toward Edith, hoping the woman would back farther into her apartment so Emma could get closer to the table, but Edith wasn’t the sort to back up.
‘Reza Zarif’s children were killed, Edith. An eight-year-old boy. An eleven-year-old girl.’
‘My child was killed!’ Edith screamed. ‘Do you think I give a damn if some terrorist killed his own children? I don’t know what you’re playing at here, but whatever it is, it’s a dangerous game. If you were ever to say publicly that you think I’m doing something illegal, my lawyers would destroy you. And the fact that I support Bill Broderick shouldn’t surprise anyone. Those people mutilated my son. They butchered his family and they drove him to despair and they killed him.’
‘Which people, Edith? Your son’s family died in Spain. No one in this country had anything to do with it.’
‘You don’t know that! We’re at war with these people, all of them, everywhere. They’d kill us all if they could. They’re all responsible, every last one of them. Now get out of my house!’
