Dead on Arrival

by Mike Lawson

  ‘Jesus,’ Clark said. It didn’t take much of an imagi nation to visualize the terror experienced by Reza Zarif’s wife and young kids.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jubal said. ‘Randy really spooked that Arab guy.’

  ‘He was an American, you idiot,’ Clark said,

  ‘Whatever,’ Jubal said. ‘Anyway, Randy told the guy that after they raped his family a couple times each, they were gonna tie ’em all up and pour gasoline on ’em and burn ’em alive.’

  But Randy said if Reza Zarif cooperated, and since his family couldn’t identify Randy and Donny, they’d let Reza’s family go. So they gave Reza a choice. He could either allow his family to suffer painfully before they died, or kill himself by flying his plane at the White House. Reza made the only choice he could.

  ‘After that,’ Pugh said, ‘Randy followed the guy to the airfield and waited until he took off. Then he called Donny, and Donny killed them little ragheads.’

  It took a lot of willpower for Myron Clark not to hit Jubal Pugh.

  ‘What happened to Donny Cray?’ Clark asked. ‘And don’t tell me he died in a car accident.’

  Pugh said that when the FBI found Donny’s fingerprint on the bullet box, Mr Jones sent Pugh an e-mail saying Donny had to go and told him how he wanted him to die. Because Jubal could be tied to Cray, Pugh agreed, though he felt bad about it.

  ‘Donny,’ Pugh said, ‘could be a little ornery at times, but he’d give you the shirt off his back if you were a friend.’

  ‘So how’d you kill this guy who’d give you the shirt off his back?’

  Pugh said he had Harlan Rhodes snap Donny’s neck and then he bashed the head of Donny’s skinny girlfriend against the windshield of Donny’s truck.

  ‘That Harlan,’ Pugh said, ‘he looks fat, but he’s stronger than a gorilla. Then him and Randy drove Donny’s truck to a good spot, put the bodies in the front seat, and pushed it down a hill.’

  ‘How did Jones know the FBI had Donny Cray’s fingerprint?’ Clark asked.

  ‘Beats me,’ Pugh said. Then he smiled, ‘If I had to guess, I’d say that maybe Jones has one of you Hoover boys on the payroll too.’

  ‘Do you have any facts or any specific infor mation that a member of the FBI was involved with this Mr Jones?’ Clark said.

  ‘Well, no,’ Jubal said.

  ‘Then shut the hell up about the Bureau being involved in anything, you ferret-faced shit.’

  ‘Hey, I’m sor—’

  ‘Now tell me what you did to get Youseff Khalid to hijack that airplane.’

  Two hours later, Myron Clark thought he had the whole story. In the case of Youseff Khalid, and un beknown to the FBI, Khalid had had a mistress, an African American woman named Athena Warner. Pugh’s men waited until Khalid visited his mistress at her home in the Bronx and threatened to rape and kill her if Khalid didn’t attempt to hijack the plane.

  ‘His mistress?’ Clark said.

  ‘Yeah, I guess Jones followed him or something, found out that boy had hisself a piece on the side. I told you he researched these people good.’

  ‘Where’d the plastic gun come from?’ Clark asked.

  ‘Jack. He gave it to Randy. Don’t know where ol’ Jack got it, but that was a pretty slick piece of hardware.’

  In addition to threatening to kill Khalid’s mistress, they showed Khalid pictures of his two older children, entering their respective schools, and said they’d also be killed if Youseff didn’t attempt the hijack.

  Pugh said that before boarding the plane in New York, Youseff was allowed to speak with his mistress so he’d be assured she was still alive, and Randy told Youseff the same thing he’d told Reza Zarif: since Youseff’s mistress had never seen Randy’s or Harlan Rhodes’s faces, they wouldn’t kill her if Youseff did what he was supposed to do.

  ‘But they killed her, didn’t they?’ Clark said.

  ‘Yeah,’ fraid so. And they had to rape her a little before they did. You know, so it’d just look like your ordinary big-city crime.’

  Clark stood up. ‘Jubal, we’re gonna take a break now. I’m afraid if we don’t stop for a minute, I just might break every bone in your face.’

  They were keeping Pugh in a cabin at Quantico, and the cabin was in the woods on a piece of land that Clark wished he owned. The setting was so peaceful you’d never guess it currently housed a piece of human flotsam like Jubal Pugh. Clark took in the aroma of the pines and let the cold air blast his cheeks red, then he called a number and told an agent to get the details on Athena Warner’s death. Following the call, he just sat there looking into the woods for five minutes. When he felt Pugh was safe from him, he went back inside.

  ‘Okay,’ Clark said, ‘now tell me what you did to Mustafa Ahmed.’

  ‘Who?’ Pugh said.

  ‘The cabdriver. The Capitol Hill bomber.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. I have a hard time keeping all them sand niggers’ names straight in my head.’

  Clark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘I swear, Pugh, that if you don’t show a little more respect for these people you killed, I’m gonna—’

  ‘Hey, sorry. Didn’t know they was friends of yours. And I didn’t kill nobody.’

  Clark just shook his head and made a get-on-with-it motion with his hand.

  Pugh said the same ploy was used again: Mustafa and his niece were captured, and Mustafa was told to act like he was going blow up the Capitol or the girl would be killed, and if she talked her mother and younger brother would also die.

  Then Clark realized what Pugh had just said.

  ‘What do you mean, act like he was going to blow up the Capitol?’ Clark asked.

  ‘Jones said to tell those people,’ Pugh said, ‘that they didn’t actually have to kill anyone. All that Youseff guy had to do was try to hijack the plane: you know, get the gun on board, wave it around. Same way with the cabbie. He just had to put on the bomb vest and show it to the guards. He was told the bomb wouldn’t go off.’

  Now it made more sense to Clark. If he was given a choice of either seeing his family killed or blowing up the Capitol and crippling the United States government, would he do it? He didn’t know. But if the choice was only to sacrifice himself to save his family, it would certainly be an easier decision. So now he understood. In all three cases the Muslim Americans involved knew in advance they’d be killed before they could actually harm other people. Or maybe they didn’t all know that they’d be killed. Reza Zarif certainly did; he knew his plane would be shot down. But it was possible that neither Youseff Khalid nor Mustafa Ahmed knew they’d be shot. Youseff had been told only that he had to attempt to hijack the plane, and Mustafa was told the bomb vest wouldn’t explode.

  ‘So why didn’t your men kill Mustafa’s niece?’ Clark asked Pugh. ‘They killed Zarif’s family and Khalid’s mistress.’

  ‘’Cause Jones said not to. He said not to hurt her at all.’

  Clark figured that by not killing Anisa Aziz there was no way anyone could claim that Mustafa had been coerced to commit an act of terrorism, provided Anisa was too afraid to talk, which she had been. And in the case of Khalid’s mistress, no one even connected her death to Khalid.

  ‘What pissed ol’ Randy off,’ Pugh said, ‘was havin’ a juicy little college girl like her all tied up naked and not bein’ able to poke her one.’ Pugh laughed and added, ‘He did tell me he got a little stinky-finger, though.’

  Clark hit Jubal Pugh in the nose with the palm of his right hand. He didn’t know if he broke Jubal’s nose or not. He did know that he didn’t care.

  Myron Clark finished his initial interrogation of Jubal Pugh, Pugh answering the remaining questions with cotton balls shoved into his nostrils. Clark would question the man several more times in the days to come, asking the same questions over and over again to make sure Pugh’s story didn’t change, but right now he was briefing a senior agent named Merrill Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons was the Bureau’s current point man on the terrorist attacks, the last point man h
aving been fired because he’d failed – with five thousand agents at his disposal – to figure out that it was Pugh and not al-Qaeda who was behind the attacks.

  ‘And you think Pugh’s telling the truth about the Capitol Hill cop?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said. ‘Pugh’s guys had nothing to do with his death or with paying him to shoot the cabdriver.’

  ‘And the air marshal?’

  ‘Same thing. Jones arranged that on his own.’

  ‘And this guy Jack?’ Fitzsimmons said.

  ‘Pugh doesn’t know who he is, just someone Jones assigned to make sure Pugh’s guys followed orders. He’s obviously somebody with a lot more discipline than Pugh’s people.’

  ‘And the senator, who the hell killed him? Congress is goin’ nuts over that. We’ve got so goddamn many agents looking for Broderick’s killer, we’re hardly doing anything else.’

  ‘Pugh says he doesn’t know who killed Broderick and I believe him. Maybe it was this guy Jack or somebody else. I mean, Jones sounds like some kinda organizational genius. Killing Broderick, if he killed Broderick, could have been a separate operation.’

  ‘Christ!’ Fitzsimmons said. He looked for a minute as if he was going to take out all his frustration on Myron Clark, but he didn’t.

  ‘Well, sit Pugh down with an artist,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘and let’s see if we can get a lead on Jack.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said, although he’d already arranged for that.

  ‘And we’ll talk later, Agent Clark, about you losing control with the prisoner.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said again.

  60

  Mahoney had requested that the FBI brief two of his associates, Emma and DeMarco. Mahoney didn’t tell the Bureau why they should brief these two civilians, nor did he explain their relationship to him, but at the present time nobody in Washington was refusing Mahoney anything. And Special Agent Merrill Fitzsimmons, the man assigned to brief them, acted unusually humble. At some point the Bureau would go back to being the arrogant, insular organization it had always been, but for the moment the egg stains on the agency’s face were still all too evident.

  Fitzsimmons was a tall lean man in his fifties with gray hair. He was soft-spoken, cool, and collected and had been with the Bureau almost thirty years. DeMarco could tell that Agent Fitzsimmons was a fellow who was normally quite pleased with himself.

  Fitzsimmons told them everything they’d learned from Jubal Pugh and then said, ‘As you know, Pugh met with a man who called himself Mr Jones in a waffle house in Winchester, and Pugh’s boy, Randy, took a picture of the guy. Here’s the photo.’ Fitzsimmons pushed a button on a laptop sitting on the table in front of him, and a picture flashed onto a screen at the other end of the table. The picture showed a man with long black hair and a full black beard, wearing sunglasses and a Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball cap. The only feature that could be clearly distinguished on the man’s face was his nose, and in the picture the man was sitting against a plain white wall.

  ‘We gave that photo to the wizards,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘They stuck it in a computer and removed the hat and the sunglasses and the beard, and here’s what they came up with.’ Fitzsimmons tapped his laptop again and now, next to the bearded man in the baseball cap, was a photo of a handsome beardless man with short dark hair and full sensuous lips. The man’s arrogance was apparent even in a picture.

  ‘That’s the man who met with Pugh,’ Fitzsimmons said.

  ‘So who is he?’ DeMarco said.

  ‘His name is Oliver Lincoln,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘and I’ll tell you more about him in a minute. But those photos, both of them, are useless in terms of evidence. Pugh’s not in the first photo, the one where Lincoln’s disguised, so all we have is Pugh’s word that he met with Lincoln, and Pugh’s word isn’t worth its weight in shit. Plus the photo was taken with Lincoln up against an unadorned wall so we can’t even use it to prove Lincoln was in the restaurant. As for the second photo, the one that shows Lincoln minus the beard. … Well, it was made by manipulating pixels, so it’s not going to stand up in court either.’

  ‘Can’t that guy Randy corroborate Pugh’s story?’ DeMarco said.

  ‘He could, but Randy’s not cooperating. At all. He literally hasn’t spoken a word since we arrested him. He reminds me of McVeigh.’

  ‘What about Harlan Rhodes, the guy my cousin shot?’ DeMarco asked.

  ‘Rhodes is in a coma, and the docs are saying he’s not going to come out of it.’

  ‘Shit,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘But don’t worry. The minute we saw that reconstruction,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘we knew Lincoln was the guy who managed Pugh. We knew this because half a dozen agencies in this town have either hired Lincoln or encountered him when he was working for other people. And he is exactly the kind of guy who could have engineered these fake terrorist attacks.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ DeMarco said.

  ‘Lincoln’s a fixer,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘He’s worked for some of the biggest mining, oil, and pharmaceutical corporations in this country – although none of those companies will ever admit they hired him. And he’s worked for the U.S. government, the military, and the CIA, on more than one occasion – and they won’t admit they hired him either.’

  ‘What’s he fix?’ DeMarco asked.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ Fitzsimmons said.

  Then Fitzsimmons explained. Say you were a major U.S. oil company and wanted to drill a couple of wells in Chile, but the Chilean government wasn’t cooperating. In comes Oliver Lincoln. Within a few months, the atmosphere in Chile has changed dramatically toward U.S. oil. To achieve this turnabout, some people were bribed or blackmailed or forced out of office. Some even died, usually in tragic accidents.

  ‘He’s very good,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘He’s a master at planning and organizing complex operations. He goes into a place and figures out where the pressure needs to be applied, who needs to be greased, and who needs to be removed. And he rarely does anything himself. He develops the plan, hires people to do what needs to be done, and directs the people he hires. Just like he did with Pugh. And he’s one of those people who’s completely at home, even in West Africa or South America or the new Russia. He’s been doing what he does for over twenty years, and the array of contacts he has in governments – both ours and foreign ones – and among criminals is enormous. ‘But here at home,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘Oliver’s a pillar of the community. Gives to charities, supports the arts, all that bullshit. He has a beautiful home in Key West, he drives beautiful cars, and he sleeps with beautiful women. He collects wine and rare brandies and antiques. He lives large and well, and his only motive for doing what he does is money.

  ‘So,’ Fitzsimmons said, sitting back in his chair, ‘now it’s just a matter of tying Pugh to Lincoln and then tying Lincoln to whoever paid him. And we will.’

  ‘You might want to see if there’s any connection between Lincoln and a man named Kenneth Dobbler or a woman named Edith Baxter,’ Emma said.

  ‘The Edith Baxter?’ Fitzsimmons said.

  ‘Yes,’ Emma said, then she explained.

  ‘How’d you people find out that Dobbler and Baxter were contributing to Broderick?’

  ‘That’s not important,’ Emma said. ‘Just check them out and you’ll find the same thing we did.’

  Fitzsimmons studied Emma and DeMarco for a minute, seeing them in a new light – and not necessarily liking it. But, because they were the speaker’s friends, he restrained from lecturing them on the inadvisability of civilians meddling in criminal matters.

  ‘At any rate,’ Emma said, ‘one of the things we learned about Dobbler was that he was in military intelligence. I pulled his file …’

  ‘You pulled his file?’ Fitzsimmons said.

  ‘… and found out that he spent a lot of time in South America, fighting the so-called war on drugs. So there’s a possibility that he may have known – or used – Oliver Lincoln when
he was in the military. And Edith Baxter, as you well know, ran multi national companies located in political hot spots all over the world, and she may have known Lincoln as well. I never thought Edith was the type to employ someone like him – and I still don’t – but then I never thought she’d support Broderick’s politics either.’

  ‘Well, we’ll check them out,’ Fitzsimmons said, making a neat notation on the legal pad on his desk.

  ‘The other possibility is that Broderick himself hired Lincoln,’ Emma said. ‘Broderick was an ambitious man, and everything Pugh did advanced his agenda.’

  ‘But then why was Broderick killed?’ Fitzsimmons said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emma said.

  ‘Well, right now we don’t have anything to show that Lincoln or Pugh had anything to do with Broderick’s death,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘When that bomb went off, all Pugh’s guys were down on Pugh’s farm, getting arrested by the DEA. And Lincoln, as I just stated, never kills anyone personally and we have nothing at this point to tie him directly to Broderick. But if Pugh’s telling the truth, there’s somebody else helping Lincoln kill people, like that Capitol cop. It could be this guy Jack who directed Pugh’s men or it could be someone else. Lincoln knows lots of killers. Or maybe – and we’re afraid to say this out loud right now – but maybe some Muslim really did kill Broderick just like that note in his car said.’

  Fitzsimmons gave them a small smile that was meant to reassure. ‘So that’s where we are right now,’ he said. ‘We’re after Oliver Lincoln. We have a lot of leads to follow, and we’re gonna get him.’

  And DeMarco believed him. FBI agents are dedicated and competent and well trained, and there are a lot of them. And behind those agents is an enormous support network: a legion of computer geeks and wiretappers and accountants and crafty lawyers. They have laboratories filled with high-tech gizmos and psychologists who understand the workings of the criminal mind, and they have millions of dollars at their disposal. There was nothing Emma and DeMarco could do that the FBI couldn’t do bigger, better, and faster.