Dead on Arrival

by Mike Lawson

  Emma refused the doorman’s offer to get her a cab. She walked for half a block and then stopped and waited. Twenty minutes later a narrow-shouldered young black man wearing dreadlocks came in her direction. He was carrying a toolbox and wearing the cap and uniform of an AT&T employee. The young man’s name was Bobby, and he worked for Fat Neil.

  When Bobby reached Emma, she looked at him, and he nodded his head and continued on his way.

  Emma took out her cell phone and made a call. Someone answered.

  ‘Pictures of everyone going in and out of the building for the next twenty-four hours. If she leaves, follow her, but I don’t think she’ll leave.’ Then she made a second call and gave Fat Neil another assignment.

  41

  DeMarco met Emma at her house in McLean. When he entered her home, he looked around for Christine’s new pet and didn’t see the critter, but considering the size of the thing it could have been hiding in a tea cup.

  ‘Where’s the pooch?’ he asked Emma.

  Emma shook her head. ‘Christine took that animal with her to practice today. She put it in her purse. She put a little coat on it to keep it warm. I don’t know what’s gotten into her.’

  ‘Did you ever train it to do its business outside?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Emma said, a small self-satisfied smile on her lips. DeMarco figured that Christine’s dog had been subjected to some sort of military psych-ops technique. It had probably been brainwashed so thoroughly it sprinted for the door whenever it even thought of peeing.

  ‘Hey, since it’s so trainable,’ DeMarco said, ‘maybe you could turn it into some sort of miniature attack dog. Like if a robber snuck into your house, the dog could snap the guy’s Achilles tendons in half. You know, hobble the bastard? Then when he’s on the ground, it could sink its little fangs into his throat.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Emma said.

  ‘To compare notes. To see what you got in New York.’

  ‘The only thing I got in New York was the impression that Edith Baxter’s gone off the deep end. She looked like she was … unraveling. But I asked Neil to do a little more research, and he found out some things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I saw a bunch of books in Edith’s apartment and Neil discovered from a credit card statement that she made a sizable purchase from a bookstore in Manhattan. Neil hacked into the store’s inventory records and found out that she purchased every book they had dealing with Muslims and terrorism and al-Qaeda.’

  ‘So?’ DeMarco said.

  ‘Edith’s doing research. If she was engineering the takeover of a rival company, she’d know everything there was to know about the company. And if Edith’s initiated some sort of campaign against Muslims, she’d do the same thing.’

  ‘Big deal, she bought some books.’

  ‘She also hired a PR firm. They’re the ones that have been producing Broderick’s television ads. And based on the amount of money she’s thrown at them, they’re probably doing other things like direct mailings and phone polling. She’s also engaged a lobbyist in D.C., and through him she’s been making donations to a number of congressmen. The ones she’s been giving money to are those who appear to be on the fence when it comes to the bill, and she’s obviously trying to knock them over to Broderick’s side.’

  DeMarco shrugged. ‘She’s a rich person with a cause and she’s doing what rich people do. If she was supporting the Sierra Club on some kinda environmental legislation, she’d do the same thing.’

  ‘Neil also discovered that she sent a large check to a private security company.’

  ‘A security company? You mean like Dobbler’s outfit?’

  ‘No, I mean like mercenaries. This outfit supplies people to augment U.S forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They provide protection for Iraqi poli ticians, Halliburton’s operations, oil fields, any mission that the U.S military’s too thin to support. But they also work for people like Charles Taylor, that sweet fellow who used to be the dictator of Liberia. They’re not choosy about their clients.’

  ‘So what are they doing for Baxter?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But we were saying earlier that if Edith was involved in something like what you suspect, she’d need people with expertise. This company has the expertise.’

  ‘Yeah, but do you think she’d hire them so openly? I mean, write ’em a check with her name on it?’

  ‘No. That’s the part that doesn’t make sense. What did you find out about Dobbler?’ Emma asked.

  ‘A couple of interesting things but no smoking gun. He seems like a rotten guy who would do anything to get ahead, but I didn’t learn anything that would lead me to conclude he’s doing anything illegal. He told me he spent twenty years in the army and worked in military intelligence, whatever that means. His Web site says he retired as a colonel, so he had some rank, and he probably knows a lot of other ex-military types. If you add it all up, he’d have the experience to organize these attacks. The other thing is, according to a guy that works for him, Dobbler muscled out the competition in Philly when he first got started.’

  ‘Muscled them out how?’

  ‘He hired pros to break into buildings being protected by other security companies to ruin their reputations. Supposedly.’

  ‘Huh,’ Emma said. ‘Well, as for him being in military intelligence, that covers a lot of ground, but he couldn’t have been anyone of note or I would have heard of him. But I’ll check out his record. One other thing about Mr Dobbler,’ Emma said. ‘He called Broderick’s office after you visited him.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I have Neil tapping his and Edith Baxter’s phones.’

  ‘Jesus, Emma, do you know how much Neil charges? There are surgeons who bill less than him per hour.’

  ‘I’m sure the speaker’s budget can handle it.’

  That was true; the speaker’s budget, only part of which was visible to the General Accounting Office, was bigger than the GNP of some countries.

  ‘Anyway,’ Emma said, ‘he called Broderick’s office. But because of the way their phone system is set up, Neil didn’t know if he spoke to Broderick or Fine or someone else. On top of that, Dobbler and whoever he talked to were using STU-III phones.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘It means the call was scrambled – encrypted – and Neil doesn’t know what was said.’

  DeMarco shook his head. ‘We just keep getting these little pieces, pieces that might mean something but we can’t be sure. Did that girl ever call you back, Mustafa’s niece?’

  ‘No. So what’s next?’ Emma said.

  ‘I dunno,’ DeMarco said.

  They sat there in silence a moment. Then DeMarco said, ‘We have two things that are solid, or more solid than anything else. We have a fingerprint connecting Donny Cray to Reza Zarif, and Cray worked for Jubal Pugh, who, according to the DEA, is a white supremacist who kills people.’

  ‘Yeah, but Pugh can’t be the mastermind behind all this, Joe,’ Emma said. ‘That just doesn’t wash.’

  ‘Maybe not, but if he’s involved, he may know who is.’

  ‘Okay, but so what?’ Emma said.

  ‘Well, I think I have a way to nail Pugh based on something Patsy Hall, the DEA gal, told me.’

  ‘Nail him for what?’

  ‘Drugs. And if I can get him arrested for dealing drugs, that gives us the leverage to make him talk.’

  ‘How would you get him for dealing drugs when the DEA hasn’t been able to get him in five years?’

  42

  The Cuban watched the subject as he left the house in McLean. It was a beautiful place but she wondered how much the owner spent to maintain it. She thought it was foolish to own a home that size.

  Before coming to the house, DeMarco had had breakfast in the same restaurant on Capitol Hill where he had eaten the morning he had driven to Philadelphia. He sat at the same table he’d used the previous time, and based on the way the waitresses greeted him, he was clearly a
regular customer. This could be useful.

  When DeMarco had been in Philadelphia, the Cuban had ruled out the idea of bombing the bar he was in, but a restaurant on Capitol Hill was a different matter. The country was in a complete uproar because of what these Muslims were doing, and … well, it was like the politicians said. It was only a matter of when, not if. No one would be surprised if a bomb exploded in a restaurant visited by congressmen and their staffs. Yes, if a better idea didn’t occur to her, she might enter the restaurant while DeMarco was eating and attach a bomb to a nearby table.

  There were two good things about the idea. First, DeMarco would be the apparently random victim of a terrorist attack and there would be no reason to think he had been singled out. Second, she’d have plenty of time to get away. What she didn’t like was that she’d have to enter the restaurant and somebody might remember her. On second thought, why should she go into the restaurant at all? She’d make this fool, Jorge, plant the bomb for her. Yes, that would work. But planting the bomb wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that every cop in the country would be looking for her if she exploded a bomb on Capitol Hill, particularly because of what had happened in the last few weeks. So it was a viable option, but not ideal.

  Her second option was to make DeMarco a victim during a robbery. Last night, after he’d returned from Philadelphia, he’d stopped at a small grocery store near Georgetown and bought a couple of things. Like most men, he didn’t shop in bulk; he just bought whatever he needed on the spur of the moment, probably not even paying attention to the sales. So there was a good chance he might pop into the same store again this evening to buy something for dinner, and if he did, she’d walk in, a ski mask covering her face, clean out the cash register, and then execute the clerk and all the customers. She noted that in the grocery store where he shopped the windows were covered with advertisements, and a store like that wouldn’t normally have more than two or three customers at any one time. She liked this idea better than bombing the restaurant. A robbery was a fairly mundane sort of crime, even if two or three people were killed; it happened all the time. The downside of this plan was that the store was on a fairly busy street.

  There was always a downside when killing people.

  She was mulling all this over as Jorge followed DeMarco’s car. Where was he going now? She hoped he stopped at a convenience store, a 7-Eleven, someplace like that. She wanted to get back home. She hated being away from the restaurant for very long; she just knew her employees were stealing her blind when she wasn’t there.

  The subject drove over the Key Bridge, got onto the Whitehurst Freeway, and exited onto K Street. He drove to where 8th Street NW intersected K Street and started to make right-hand turns. He appeared to be looking for a place to park. He finally found one; then she and Jorge trailed slowly behind him in Jorge’s car until he entered a building on the corner of I and 8th Street NW. There were flags over the building’s entrance, and chiseled in stone above the entrance were the words DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION. Lincoln had not told her why he wanted this DeMarco person killed, but she found it odd that Lincoln would be involved in drugs. Drugs were so … she didn’t know what, but drugs just didn’t seem like something a dilettante like Lincoln would be involved in. But for whatever reason, DeMarco was visiting the DEA and now she had a third way to kill him, one that she liked and one that she could execute immediately.

  She could see DeMarco inside the lobby of the building going through a metal detector. There were two guards that she could see and a number of people were in the lobby, waiting for elevators or exiting the building. DeMarco cleared security and then waited for an elevator himself. After he had entered the elevator, she sat watching the lobby a bit longer and was pleased when a group of four people came out together. It was almost lunchtime. That was good too.

  ‘Do you have a gun?’ she said to Jorge.

  ‘Chur,’ he said, and flipped open the glove compartment and pulled out a chrome-plated automatic with an eight-inch barrel, the weapon as gaudy as the chains around his neck.

  ‘How many bullets does the magazine hold?’

  ‘Twelve,’ Jorge said. ‘Why? Wazzup?’

  She ignored him and checked the D.C. street map that she’d bought. The damn map had cost six dollars in a drugstore; even if Lincoln was paying for it, it was outrageous that they should charge so much. She found the location of the DEA building and then saw what she was looking for: a metro station. Even better, it was located only two blocks from where they were parked.

  ‘Jorge, how would you like to earn twenty-five thousand dollars?’ she said.

  She’d almost said fifty thousand but decided that twenty-five sounded more realistic, a large number, certainly more money than Jorge had ever seen at one time, but not so big he’d think she was lying to him.

  She was lying, of course. She didn’t plan to pay him a cent.

  DeMarco’s talk with Patsy Hall had gone just the way he’d expected. She’d loved his idea. It was complex and was going to be difficult to execute, and she wasn’t at all certain it would work – but she loved it.

  He now waited with another couple on the fifth floor for the elevator to arrive. On the way down to the lobby, two other guys entered the elevator on the fourth floor. DeMarco checked his watch. It was ten after twelve and he guessed all the narcs were heading off to lunch, which made him realize that he was hungry too. He had a sudden craving for a pastrami sandwich, one on that swirly kinda bread that was brown and white. Maybe he’d have a side of potato salad and a big pickle too. On second thought, he’d skip the potato salad and have a beer instead. He figured the beer and the potato salad probably had about the same number of calories, so that was a fair trade-off; the fact that the beer had little nutritional value was irrelevant.

  He was trying to remember if there was a deli nearby but couldn’t recall one. Standing next to him was the couple who had entered the elevator with him. They were both white and in their early forties, and he guessed they were DEA agents. The man anyway, he looked like an agent, an athletic, cocky-looking guy. He reminded DeMarco of Michael Keaton when he’d played a cop in that Tarantino movie Jackie Brown. The woman, she just looked tough, not bad looking but tough. If she was an agent, he’d bet she had a great big gun like Patsy Hall and she’d kick you in the nuts if you gave her any crap. Or, of course, the couple could just be a pair of DEA pencil pushers, but he didn’t think so.

  He turned and asked the man if there was a deli nearby. The guy said he didn’t know of one, at which point the woman jumped in and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mark, there’s one right across the street. You walked by it to get here.’ They must be married, DeMarco thought.

  It was good manners that saved DeMarco’s life. He was following the couple when they left the elevator, but as he and the couple approached the exit, a FedEx carrier was entering the building and everybody did a little dance to get out of his way, and DeMarco ended up being the first one to reach the door. He started to walk through but then the habits his mother had drummed into his head from an early age took over. He pulled the door open and stepped back as he’d been trained by his mom to allow the woman who was behind him to pass through the door first – and that’s when all hell broke loose.

  Suddenly glass was breaking all around him, and the woman slammed back into him, and at the same time DeMarco felt a stinging sensation along his left side. An instant later there was a sharper pain in his right leg, up high, on the inside of his thigh. He either collapsed to the floor or the force of the woman’s body being thrown backward pushed him to the ground. He was now on his back and the woman was lying on top of him; it registered in his mind that the woman’s left cheek was missing but all he was thinking about was getting out of the doorway. As another bullet struck the woman’s torso, DeMarco tried to push her off of him, to crawl out from under her, and that’s when the woman’s husband fell onto both DeMarco and the woman. He was now pinned down by the weight of two bo
dies. He could hear people screaming and more glass breaking and bullets ricocheting off the lobby walls. And he could hear – or maybe feel – bullets slamming into the bodies of the couple lying on top of him.

  The Cuban was confident that the incident would be reported just as she intended. A couple of gangstas had driven up to the DEA building and shot up the place. Why they did what they did was anybody’s guess. Revenge over some recent bust? Retaliation for the killing of a gang member? Who knows why these crazy drugged-up kids do what they do.

  She and Jorge had been parked in a loading zone right across the street from the entrance to the building. It was a fairly narrow street and the distance to the door was less than twenty yards. She got into the backseat and on her command Jorge was to power down the windows and start shooting at the security guards that they could see inside the lobby. She told him she didn’t care if he hit anybody; he was just to shoot as many bullets as he could as fast as he could.

  Jorge, the idiot, didn’t even ask how they planned to get away.

  What the Cuban had wanted was for DeMarco to come out the door with other people, and he did. She saw a man and a woman approaching the doorway and DeMarco behind the couple, and two other people, both men, behind DeMarco. Perfect. But then a damn FedEx guy, a chunky black hijo de puta, bounced up the steps, a box on his shoulder, and went into the building, momentarily blocking her view of DeMarco. Shit, she thought at first, but it turned out perfect: DeMarco was the first one to reach the door. He put his hand on the door, pulled it open, but then, goddammit, just as she was squeezing the trigger, he stepped back and allowed a woman to go through the door before him.

  The Cuban hit the woman but she also hit DeMarco. She was sure she hit him. She was positive. And even if she didn’t hit him with her first shot, the type of bullets she was using would pass right through the woman unless they struck bone. She saw the woman fall and she saw DeMarco go down under her and then she saw a man standing behind DeMarco fall. She fired five more shots into the pile of bodies and then screamed at Jorge to drive.