“That’s why you were against the wall?”
“That’s it. It would cut illegal immigration to a trickle, and we can’t live with that.”
Cheney Kopp pushed his plate back. He stared at Westfall from under his bushy eyebrows. “What if you lose the blacks and Hispanics? Blexit? What if they start voting Republican?”
Westfall frowned again. “That would be disaster. We can’t let that happen. We’ll do anything we have to do to prevent it. A black voting for a Republican is betraying his race. Ditto the Latinos. That’s the message we must get across. That’s the message we need your help getting across.”
“Harlan, I want you to understand exactly where Life is coming from. My personal politics don’t enter into it. I get paid to run a business and I do it to the very best of my ability. We want young, hip, educated audiences who spend every dime they can get their hands on. That’s the demographic the ad agencies pay the most for. As it happens, those young, hip, educated people are liberal… but if that ever changes, Life will also change. Life Network is a for-profit business.”
“It will never change,” Harlan Westfall said, a pronouncement he certainly hoped was true.
“Change is the one constant,” Kopp said, reaching for his wallet to pay the tab. “Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was the fervent defender of human slavery in America. All those nasty Confederates were Democrats.”
“Young educated people won’t change their political outlook in our lifetime,” Westfall insisted. He wished he hadn’t discussed immigration with Cheney Kopp.
The network mogul plopped his credit card down on top of the bill folder. He eyed the senator and said, “Young black people abandon the Democrats because the big cities, which the Democrats rule, are cesspools of hopelessness, welfare, and crime. Blacks are the victims, the road-kill, of one-party politics. If young white Americans abandon the Democrats, it will be because of illegal immigration. To the extent that you and Judy Mucci succeed in opening the borders to vast numbers of uneducated, unskilled people that these young, hip, educated white workers will have to pay more taxes to support—to that extent, you will have helped kill liberalism. Destroying your political opposition and making America into a one-party nation will lead to tyranny and eviscerate democracy.”
Kopp handed the bill folder and his credit card to the waiter. “Liberalism did America a lot of good,” he said. “Social Security, racial justice, human rights, clean air, clean water… If liberalism dies, I, for one, will cry at the funeral. Yet if the Democrats succeed in transforming America into a one-party state, I’ll be out there with a rifle beside the Republicans manning the barricades.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sarah and I each drove our own vehicles out to Langley, which was routine for us. Neither of us knew when we would be done for the day, and sitting around twiddling thumbs waiting for the other didn’t make much sense. We parked side by side in the CIA lot.
As we walked for the door, I said to Sarah, “That phone that belonged to Paul Hockersmith, the ag pilot who wanted to be an assassin. We need everything you can get out of it as soon as you can.”
“Do you think the same person tried to hire Korjev’s murder, and perhaps Grafton?”
I stopped and stood with her watching the usual morning crowd heading for the entrance. “That’s too big a leap. Let’s concentrate on Korjev. The telephone trail leads to Senator Westfall, but one doubts if he had anything to fear from Korjev. The Silvas certainly did. And I just can’t see Westfall getting into a conspiracy to murder anyone with those clowns on the telephone trail.”
“He’s evil enough,” Sarah said. She had been reading his transcripts.
“Evil, but not stupid. I think Jesse Hughes probably talked to Hockersmith about drugs—he wanted to buy some. Hughes and Edwards, perhaps the same subject. We drop around and Kevin Edwards called Westfall, his senator, perhaps because he was scared and wanted some handholding. That’s one possible explanation.”
Sarah stood amid the cars thinking it over. “Paul Hockersmith smuggled drugs for a living. Whoever hired him knew that. They knew if the money was right Hockersmith was stupid enough to push everything out onto the come line. You think it’s on the cell phone?”
“I am hoping it is. We need you to put names and addresses to Hockersmith’s telephone numbers. One of them may be our man, the guy who convinced Hockersmith to try to permanently silence Korjev. It may be the same guy who decided Jake Grafton would be better off dead, or it may not.”
“What’s the case for thinking it might be the same person?”
“Whoever wanted Korjev dead knew where to find him, and that information had to come from inside the company. That same someone knew Jake Grafton was on the job and obviously feared him. There could be more than one someone, but it doesn’t feel right: life doesn’t work that way.”
“I’ll give that telephone a good look as soon as I can.”
“Thanks.”
We were admitted through the door and Sarah went her way while I went mine. My way led to the executive suite and the EA’s office, where I shared a desk with a guy who had immigrated from Poland back when he was young and now spent his days poring over news from the Vatican and Warsaw. I don’t know that it takes all kinds to make a world, but we certainly have all kinds.
About nine o’clock I went to Jack Norris’ office and talked to his receptionist, gave her my name and said that last night the great one said he wanted to see me this morning. She said she’d call me. I wandered off for coffee, then stood around the pot with the other EAs talking about Jake Grafton.
At 9:35 I was admitted to Norris’ office. “Tommy, I want you to write a report, everything you can remember about the interrogation of Yegan Korjev and the attempted assassination at the Utah ranch. Justice is making noises.”
“Yes, sir. When do you want this report?”
“Everything you can remember. Tomorrow?”
“Got it,” I said, and made my departure.
I stuck my hands in my pockets and kick-started the brain as I walked along. I wasn’t stupid enough to actually believe Norris’ BS… Justice didn’t know diddlysquat about the interrogation of Korjev, the antics of Paul Hockersmith, nor that I potted him. Norris wanted me busy and out of the way. I wondered why.
I went down to Sarah’s office in the basement, the boiler room with a dozen people monitoring telephone calls and eavesdropping, reading transcriptions, making spread sheets of telephone numbers. I was in there taking it in when I saw Sarah answer the telephone. She looked at me as she talked. It was a short conversation.
She came over to the door where I stood. “That was Norris. He wants me upstairs for a report on where we are.”
“He’s going to shut you down,” I said.
She eyed me. I explained about my report.
“Why don’t you and I blow this joint and go over to your house and get on the internet. We need to know a lot more about Norris, fast.”
“Like what?”
“We need to find a connection between Norris and Paul Hockersmith, the Utah ag pilot, if there is one. Without that we can’t prove anything.”
“If it was Norris. It might be someone else.”
“My gut says Norris.”
“Let me get my purse.”
“And Hockersmith’s cell phone. Then go upstairs and get your marching orders. He’ll figure we’re busy for a day or two and leave us alone. I’ll meet you by the Starbucks on the main floor.”
When she came down, we got coffees, then walked straight out of the building. “You were right. He wanted me to stop the phone project and write a report.”
We got in our vehicles and disappeared. We rendezvoused at the lock shop I co-owned just outside the district in Maryland. Willy “The Wire” Varner was drinking coffee, eating doughnuts, and reading the newspaper when we walked in. Willy is my co-owner. Actually, I put up the money for the shop and he does all the work. Every now and then he gives me a
twenty as my share of the profits. If I eat at McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A I can get two lunches out of that twenty.
Sarah sat down at the computer and logged on while Willy attacked me. “Says here Jake Grafton got hisself shot yesterday morning. How come I read about this in the paper and you haven’t tol’ me?”
“Man, I called everybody I know when it happened. Must have missed you.”
“He dead or alive this morning?”
“Alive, barely.”
“How’s his wife takin’ all this?” Truly, one of the reasons I like Willy is because he gets right to the real nub of things fast.
“We saw her at the hospital last night. She’s one tough cookie, but she looked like road kill.”
“I’ll bet. When’s he gonna retire?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask him sometime.”
“Ought to be soon or he ain’t gonna collect a damn penny of his pension. Too many people don’t like him.” He waved the front page of the paper. The political news was grim. Willy instinctively understood one of the Washington truths—this town was about power, and the director of the CIA had it. When things were going well he had enemies. When things were going badly, such as now, he had more enemies, worse ones. Most of them didn’t shoot at him, thank God, but if he got run over by a garbage truck they weren’t going to cry at the funeral.
We batted things around a bit, then Willy went out to the van and took off to rekey the door locks for a woman who had thrown her spouse out of the house. I dug Hockersmith’s cell phone from Sarah’s purse and turned it on. It needed a password. “What’s the password?” I asked Sarah, who had figured this out days ago.
“Six Zero One Nine Quebec. That was his airplane’s registration number.”
Even though Sarah was scary smart, she was dynamite in bed. I kid you not.
I typed the password in and… “It’s only five digits. I need one more.”
“Add a zero.”
Voila!
Sure enough, Hockersmith had five calls from Jesse Hughes in the two days before I shot him down. I looked at the other telephone numbers, all from area code 801, which was the Salt Lake City area. Sarah had worked on them with the company database, and if she couldn’t pull them up they were probably local numbers; bill collectors or telemarketers or even, God forbid, Hockersmith’s wife.
I checked his contact list. I was hoping for at least a senator, or even a congressman, but just 801 area codes.
So who was Jesse Hughes?
Sarah and I talked. She got on the internet. Facebook bios are a great place to start, then Wikipedia. Then you can do a search of the guy’s criminal history, real estate holdings, county tax records, and if you do this stuff at the graduate level, you can search data bases that you need a password or government access to view. And, of course, there are commercial services that say they can find anyone if you are willing to pay their fee.
Finally she said, “Hughes is a retired civil servant. Retired two years ago from the Justice Department.”
“He’s a lawyer?”
“No. He was an investigator. Whether civil or criminal or both, I don’t know.”
I saw a glimmer of light. “Check Jack Norris’ bio on the company website. Didn’t he spend a few years on a drug task force in Mexico?” Mexican drugs were in the FBI’s bailiwick, but now and then the politicians wanted every federal agency to send representatives to ‘liaise.’ CIA, Justice, Homeland, everybody.
Three minutes. “Yes, he did. Then a department head, now assistant director.”
She made eye contact and shrugged. “It’s possible.”
“Possible, not probable.”
“How are we going to find out?”
“Go see Jesse Hughes and ask. He lives in Ellicott City.”
We locked up the shop and set forth in my pickup, which is a fine ride. We went around the beltway and up U.S. Route 29 to Ellicott City on the Patapsco River. It’s an old town in the river gorge, probably because there was a mill there once upon a time before automobiles were revealed to our ancestors, before farms became “raw land.” Now the flats above the river gorge are subdivisions of tract houses.
We parked across the street from Hughes’ building and looked at the old wreck. Big trees laden with leaves cast the house and the little twisty two-lane street in shadow. Traffic was terrible, as usual.
“How are we going to do this?” Sarah asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that. Go in and scare the shit out of them, I suppose.”
“Tommy, Jesse Hughes could go to prison for the rest of his natural life if he admits that he arranged a murder for Jack Norris. If he denies he knows Norris, what then?”
“Money. You know he did it for money. We’re investigating the money.”
“So he starts lying. His mother’s older sister kicked the bucket.” She pounded the dashboard. “We’ve got absolutely nothing to sting him with.”
“Suggest something.”
“Call him. Tell him Jack Norris has been arrested.”
“He’ll ask who I am.”
“Norris told you to call to tell him to clear out. The FBI is after him. He’d better save himself.”
She and I thought about it as cars and trucks whizzed by. “It might work,” I admitted. “What’s his number?”
She had that memorized too. If men didn’t have that Y chromosome, women wouldn’t need us at all.
I called the number. It rang and rang, then eventually the answering machine picked up. I hung up.
I tried again fifteen minutes later. Still no answer.
“Maybe they aren’t home,” I suggested.
“Let’s go knock on the door,” Sarah Houston said.
Well, why not?
I dug in the center console for the lock picking set, pocketed it, then we got out and I locked up the truck. When we got a break in traffic we jaywalked.
We hiked up to the third floor and knocked, but there was no answer. We knocked repeatedly.
Then I heard the dog yapping inside.
I got out the picks and got busy on the lock.
Took a little more than a minute, then the lock released. I opened the door and stepped inside.
The dog came running.
Jesse was lying on the floor in the main room, near the door. His lover was lying in the door to the kitchen. Both had been shot.
Sarah made a noise behind me. “Take the dog for a walk while I look around,” I told her.
She picked the damned thing up and went out, pulling the door shut behind her.
I am certainly no expert, but I’ve seen a few corpses. These guys had been dead for some hours: at least three or four would be my guess. Putting the back of a wrist on an arm gave you a sense of how much they had cooled off, which was a lot. Both appeared to have been shot once in the chest, probably a heart shot, then shot again in the head in a coup de grace to make sure. Maybe early this morning.
I looked in the kitchen. Breakfast stuff still on the table… toast sticking up from the toaster… Coffee pot still on. A bowl of cereal with milk in it.
I took one last look. The heads were intact, so he had probably used a low-power bullet, perhaps 9mm, probably suppressed.
I stopped to examine the door. It had been locked when I opened it with the picks, so Hughes had opened it, the guy had come in, shot them both, then pulled the door shut behind him on the way out and it locked. I made sure the door would not lock behind me. Went down the stairs to the sidewalk. Sarah was standing there with the dog.
“It’s peed,” she said.
I took the pooch and carried it back upstairs, opened the door and put it in, then punched the button so the door would lock, pulled it shut and wiped the knob. Stood there trying to decide if I’d touched anything inside. Naw, I am not that stupid.
Went down, collected Sarah, and we walked back to the truck.
“They’ve been dead since this morning.”
“Who did it?”
“
Three guesses.”
I handed Sarah my phone. “Dial Nine One One.”
She did so and passed the thing to me. I squeaked off the address in Ellicott City in my best falsetto. “Better hurry,” I added. “I think they’re dead.” Then I pushed the button to kill the thing. I started the truck, got into traffic, and headed for I-70.
Two miles along she said, “Pull over.”
I did. She unfastened her seat belt, opened the door, leaned out, and puked. After a bit she spit a few more times, then sat up and took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said as she pulled the door shut, “let’s go.”
Robert Levy, director of the FBI, was ushered into Senator Harlan Westfall’s office. He found that Senator Franky Konchina and the Speaker of the House, Judy Mucci, were there. The aide who did the ushering closed the door behind the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. He nodded at everyone, didn’t bother shaking hands, and dropped into a seat on the couch.
Westfall skipped the social pleasantries. “Who shot Jake Grafton?”
“Damn if I know,” Levy said. “We’ve got a dozen scientists working on that parking garage, and so far they have come up with zilch. Not even a booger that we can mine for DNA.”
Konchina spoke up. “This morning’s Post said that there are security cameras in that garage.”
“Reporters,” Levy said, sneering. “There ought to be a bounty on them. There is a security camera system, but someone cut the cable feed last Wednesday.”
“Can’t you check the last video and see who did it?”
“The video goes off-site to an office building where the eleven parking garages owned by that company are monitored. The recording system is a closed loop, so video is only retained for twenty-four hours, then recorded over. Eleven parking garages, samples of six cameras a garage, that’s a lot of server memory.”
The Russia Account Page 24
