Justifiable Homicide: A Political Thriller (Robert Paige Thrillers Book 1)

by Robert W. McGee

  “What the fuck!” Gutierrez exclaimed. “Are things so bad in Washington that even Senators have to cut back on expenses and buy Toyotas instead of Lincolns?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here, Tomás. Let’s follow him and see where he goes. After we get out of the airport, pull up alongside him and see who’s driving. This is highly unusual.”

  Garrett’s car left the airport and turned toward Coral Gables. At least he was headed in the expected direction.

  “Pull up on his left side so we can get a good look at the driver, but not in the lane next to him. Pull two lanes over.”

  Gutierrez stepped on the gas and changed lanes. Wellington hit the lever to open the back window. As they drew parallel to the red Toyota, Wellington removed the blanket and placed the gun on his lap. It was his weak side. He was right handed but, from this position he would have to fire like a left hander, but it wouldn’t be a problem. All he had to do was come close. The Frag 12s would do the rest. His mouth was dry. He needed a drink of water, but now was not the time. He had a job to do first. He caressed the shotgun as he continued to look at the red Toyota.

  As Gutierrez pulled up, Wellington could get a clear view of the driver. “It’s a woman.”

  Gutierrez turned his head toward the back seat. “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know, but then I don’t know anyone from his staff.”

  “Maybe it’s his girlfriend.”

  “Or his wife.”

  “Or his daughter.”

  “Yeah, it could be any of them, but I don’t think it’s his wife. Too young. She looks like she’s in her 20s. Draw back and let me think about this for a minute. There’s too much traffic here anyway. Let’s follow them for a while until I can figure out what to do.”

  Gutierrez turned his head toward the back seat again. “What is there to figure out? Just whack them so we can go home.”

  “I don’t want to shoot if it’s his daughter. I don’t want to waste civilians if I can help it. Besides, killing his daughter would give the Sons of Liberty a bad name. It would cause some people to be against us, maybe even label us as terrorists instead of patriots.”

  Gutierrez volunteered to help him in the thought process. “If it’s a staffer, it’s no big deal. If it’s his girlfriend, it would add a little spice to the news reports – Senator Garrett and girlfriend killed on the way to a tryst.”

  “Yeah, that would make for good press, but it would also dilute the message we want to send – that the termite squad is on the job and that we won’t stop until all the termites in America are exterminated.”

  He knew his statement wasn’t true. They wouldn’t be able to kill all the people who were tearing at the fabric of America. But he also knew he wouldn’t have to assassinate all of them to be effective. All they needed to do was send a message that those who were tearing America down with their collectivist ideas and abuses of power were being targeted.

  “Let’s abort.”

  “What? He’s only a few feet away. Let’s get him now.”

  “No, we can do it another time. Let’s try for Sunday when he takes the flight back to Washington. Maybe he’ll have another driver.”

  Wellington had decided. Garrett could wait.

  84

  “We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

  Catherine Graham (former publisher of the Washington Post)

  Sarah took the spoon out of her mouth and turned toward Sveta. “I really like your borscht, Sveta. It’s very tasty.” The Wellingtons were having dinner at Sveta’s in Sunny Isles Beach.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I bought it at Kalinka’s and just added a few things.”

  Wellington dabbed his mouth with the cloth napkin Sveta had provided. “Yes, it’s very good. You’ll have to show us where this Kalinka place is. Bob, you’re a lucky man. I think she’s spoiling you.”

  Sarah immediately gave him a dirty look. She wasn’t pleased by his comment. He noticed and decided to shut up.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Robert, would you get that, please? I’m busy in here.”

  “Sure.” Paige walked to the door, and looked in the peep hole. It was Milla. In addition to her job at the front desk she also had a part-time catering business specializing in Haitian food. It helped supplement her income, since she and her husband never seemed to be able to generate quite enough money to pay all the bills. When she could fit it into her schedule, she worked a third, part-time job at Piman Bouk, a restaurant on NE 2nd Avenue and 59th Street in Little Haiti.

  “Hi Milla. Come on in.”

  “Hello, Mr. Robert. Where is Miss Svetlana?”

  He motioned in the direction of the kitchen. “She’s in the kitchen.”

  Milla knew where the kitchen was. She had delivered Haitian food to her many times over the years. She walked in and placed the bags of food on the table.

  “Hi Milla. I’d like you to meet my friends. This is John and Sarah.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  Sveta reached into her purse and came up with some money. “Thank you for the food, Milla.” She took it without making eye contact. “Thank you, Miss Svetlana.”

  Milla turned around and walked toward the door. “Good-bye, Mr. Robert.”

  Paige opened the door for her and closed it after she left. Paige and Sveta both felt good about doing business with her. She was a good cook and they knew she could use the money. She was always smiling and cheerful.

  Sveta took the food out of the bags and started putting it on serving dishes.

  Sarah picked up one of the dishes and started carrying it into the dining room. “Let me help you.”

  Wellington took a whiff as Sarah placed the dish on the table. “Hmmm. That smells good. What is it?”

  As Sveta walked into the room, she volunteered an answer. “That’s called griot. It’s deep fried pork chunks. I like the way Milla makes it. Crispy on the outside and moist on the inside.” She placed the bowl on the table. “And here are the rice and beans.” It was red beans and rice, cooked together, giving the rice the appearance of being red.

  Wellington took a sip of his Heineken beer, straight from the bottle, and leaned back in his chair. “Ah, this is a truly international meal – Dutch beer, Russian borscht and Haitian pork, rice and beans.”

  Sarah chimed in. “I don’t think I’m going to get on the scale for a few days.”

  As they ate, the conversation turned to current events.

  Paige turned toward Wellington. “Did you hear about the whack job on that Federal Reserve guy?”

  Wellington perked up and adjusted his glasses with his right index finger and thumb. “Yeah, I heard about that.”

  Paige decided to have a little fun with the topic. “What do you think about it?”

  Sveta jumped in. “I think it’s terrible. This is America. They shouldn’t be assassinating people.”

  Paige continued. “The mainstream media hasn’t said much about it, just that he got whacked and that there was a note or something.”

  Wellington couldn’t keep his mouth shut any longer. “Yeah. Actually, it was a message spread on the internet. He got whacked for debasing the currency. The Sons of Liberty took credit for it.”

  Paige was not surprised that Wellington knew so many of the details. He wondered how much detail he knew and how involved he was in the killing.

  “I don’t think those details were reported on TV. Where …”

  Before Paige could finish his sentence, Wellington cut him short. “I read about it on the internet. It’s the source of all truth, you know.”

  It was a joke Paige and Wellington had about the internet. Since the mainstream media had practically become the propaganda wing of the administration in Washington, most p
eople no longer trusted what got reported by the mainstream media. They got their news from cable stations and the internet.

  Wellington looked a little nervous. He fidgeted and didn’t look Paige in the eye. He looked like an Indiana prep school student about to be reprimanded by the principal.

  Paige picked up on it but didn’t say anything. He wanted to probe a little, without being too obvious. “Do you think there will be other assassinations? This Sons of Liberty group sounds like it has an agenda. Do you know anything about them?”

  “Just what I read on the internet.” His fidgeting became more intense. “Nobody seems to know who they are or where they’re coming from. Maybe they’re a rogue spinoff of one of the private militias in Florida.”

  One of Paige’s undergraduate minors was history. He especially liked American revolutionary history. “I’m familiar with the name – Sons of Liberty. That’s the group that dumped British tea into Boston Harbor a few years before the American Revolution. Do you think they’re connected to the Tea Party?”

  “Nah, I don’t think so. The Tea Party isn’t into violence. It’s not a homogeneous group. The only thing they have in common is the belief that the federal government has become too big. They take pride in being peaceful. I don’t think assassination is part of their platform, although maybe some individual members might like the idea.”

  Paige became more curious by the minute. He perceived that Wellington wasn’t telling everything he knew, but the dinner table wasn’t the place to push the point. He decided to wait until a more appropriate time and place. One thing Paige was especially curious about was why Wellington seemed so nervous talking about the subject. It wasn’t like him to get rattled so easily. He would push a little, but not now. He wanted to find out how deeply Wellington was involved.

  85

  “Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.”

  Benjamin Franklin

  “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

  George Orwell

  Sunday night. Time to kill Senator Garrett. Tomás Gutierrez would be Wellington’s wing man again. Jim Bennett needed a rest after a week of overtime at the FBI. His main assignment that week was to find Nelson Fuller’s assassin. It was the Miami office’s top assignment and they were getting heat from Washington to find the assassin before he could strike again. He had to go through the motions.

  There weren’t any solid clues, but if one turned up, he would try to throw the other investigators off the trail. All they knew was that the assassin was a man. The witness reports were conflicting. Some said he was tall. Others said he was of medium height. Some said he was Hispanic. Others said he was Anglo. It’s not unusual for eye witnesses to report incorrect information. That worked to Wellington’s advantage.

  Wellington liked working with Gutierrez. He was calmer and less prone to emotional outbursts than Santos Hernandez. He was easier to control and didn’t challenge orders, although he was worried that Gutierrez might balk at an order to assassinate a journalist or professor. He would cross that bridge when he came to it.

  Senator Garrett’s plane was scheduled to leave Miami at 8:07 pm. If he were a normal person, he would have to get there more than an hour early to go through security, but since he was a member of the privileged Washington elite, he could get there pretty much any time he damn well pleased. The airport staff would just have to deal with it. On several occasions, they had to hold the plane for him because he was running late. He always flew first class. Taxpayers would just have to pick up the extra $150 cost for his two and a half hour ride. He couldn’t be bothered flying in coach with the rabble he was representing.

  Since they didn’t know when he would be leaving for the airport or where he would be leaving from, they would have to guess and take their chances. The best guess was that he would be leaving from his home in Coral Gables in a black Lincoln Town Car with his regular driver about 90 minutes before flight time, but it was just a guess. If the woman who had picked him up in a red Toyota on Friday night was the one to pick him up today, Wellington had decided that they would abort the mission again and wait until his next trip to Miami, which would be a week or two later. He didn’t come home every weekend.

  Wellington and Gutierrez didn’t want to wait any longer. They wanted to cross him off the list tonight. They didn’t want to waste any more of their time on him. He was taking time away from their families. They resented it. The fact that Garrett also had a family and that his wife and children might miss him never entered their minds. You can’t think about those things if you want to be an effective assassin. If you think of your target as a human being you have already lost the fight. You have to think of them as an inanimate object, just a target that has to be hit on the first attempt.

  They started their mission two hours before flight time, just to be on the safe side. It paid off. They saw a black Lincoln Town Car drive past them a few blocks from the Senator’s home 97 minutes before flight time. Wellington saw it first.

  “There’s the Town Car. Let’s follow it just to make sure, but stay back so they don’t notice they’re being followed.” Gutierrez pulled out and followed, keeping about a hundred feet behind. A few minutes later it pulled into the Senator’s driveway. They drove by and parked a few blocks away, between the Senator’s house and the airport, and waited.

  The Town Car passed by five minutes later, going a few miles over the speed limit. Gutierrez turned toward Wellington. “It’s not far to the airport, and the closer we get, the more traffic we’ll run into. We’ve gotta do it soon.”

  Wellington rolled down both back windows and gripped the AA12 firmly. Then he shifted to the right and rested the gun butt on his left thigh. “Let’s get him on a side street, before he makes it to the highway. Pull alongside him when you get a chance, but keep some distance. I don’t want to get any blowback from the Frag 12s.”

  Garrett’s Town Car turned left, toward Le Jeune Road, which was only a few blocks away. Time was running out. Wellington could sense it. He started fidgeting in the back seat.

  “We have to get him before he gets to LeJeune Road. If we don’t, there’ll be too much traffic. We might get caught in a traffic jam.”

  “Gotcha, boss.” Gutierrez swung left and accelerated until they were alongside Garrett.

  Hopefully, the blasts from the Frag 12s wouldn’t cause Garrett’s driver to jerk to the left. They were positioned a little too close for comfort. Some of the blast might bounce back in their direction. It’s a chance they would have to take.

  Wellington caressed the AA12 shotgun and waited for the right moment. His mouth was dry. He stuck the barrel out the right rear window just as Senator Garrett turned to look at their car, which was hovering a few feet away. Wellington placed the gun butt on his left shoulder. It was his weak side, since he was right-handed, but it didn’t matter. At this close a range, he couldn’t miss.

  He squeezed the trigger. The blast from the shotgun in the enclosed quarters was deafening. Gutierrez jerked instinctively and slammed on the gas pedal. They didn’t think to wear ear plugs but it didn’t matter. In a few minutes they would be able to hear normally again, perhaps with a slight ringing in their ears.

  The shot hit its mark. The Frag12 exploded on impact with the window, causing it to shatter, and ripped off the Senator’s head. The explosion also took off the back of the driver’s head. The Town Car swerved to the right and went off the road into someone’s front yard. Some fragments from the blast hit their car but didn’t cause any damage. Gutierrez took the next right turn. They made a clean escape. It all happened so fast that none of the people in the other cars were able to give a clear description of them or their car. They rolled down the remaining windows so the smell of the gunpowder could dissipate.

  ***

  “Government does not create wealth; it redistributes it. Whatever you receive from government was taken from someone el
se.”

  Robert W. McGee

  After driving a few miles, and after making sure they weren’t followed, Wellington told Gutierrez to pull over. Wellington took out his laptop and sent a previously composed message to all the radio and television stations in the Miami and Washington, DC areas, as well as some political websites, explaining why Senator Garrett had been killed.

  Senator Tom Garrett was exterminated because he was guilty of crimes against the American people. His support of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and corporate bailouts wasted trillions of taxpayer dollars and helped destroy home ownership in America. He also set a bad precedent, that redistribution of wealth is an acceptable policy. It is not. Let this be a warning to the other members of Congress who waste taxpayer dollars and who advocate taking the wealth of those who have earned it and giving it to those who have not. We will deal with you, too. You are on our list and you will be exterminated … at the time and place of our choosing. The only way to remove yourself from the list is to resign.

  Sons of Liberty

  The assassination and the note to the media caused an uproar that resounded throughout Washington and the nation. The Garrett assassination proved that Nelson Fuller’s killing was not random. It was part of a larger scheme that probably involved other people, although it was not possible to say how many. The FBI suspected that the assassinations were localized, since they both took place in Miami, but they feared the executions would spur copycat killings in other cities. The frustration expressed by the Sons of Liberty was widespread. Millions of other Americans felt the same way. Many of them had guns. Several members of Congress resigned, but not Debbie Waterstein or Jack Lunn, who were next on the list.