WINNER TAKES ALL: A Dylan Hunter Justice Thriller (Dylan Hunter Thrillers Book 3)

by Robert Bidinotto

  “Please look at me, Miss Haight.”

  It took a few seconds. Her eyelids fluttered, and more tears fell. But she turned to face him.

  “Thank you. Here,” he said, offering his handkerchief. She dabbed her eyes with it.

  “Look at my face. Look in my eyes and see if I’m lying to you. I am promising you that whatever you tell me about him won’t get you in any legal trouble, or be used against him, to arrest or prosecute him. You know, the other cops here would arrest me if they heard me saying this to you. My own partner, Paul, would turn against me if he knew I was doing this.

  “But I’m making you this promise because a part of me actually admires the guy—even though I hate his methods. Look around you . . . That’s right. You see what I mean? Hunter has been leaving bloody scenes like this since at least last September. Nine months of killing. Of slaughter. And it’s got to stop. You do see that, don’t you? Maybe you and I, together, can convince him to stop. Will you help me do that? Can I count on you to help me, Miss Haight?”

  She searched his eyes. Swallowed. Cleared her throat.

  “It’s Julia, Detective Cronin.”

  He felt a surge of relief. He smiled.

  “Then call me Ed.” He held out his hand, immediately feeling stupid about it.

  But she took it. It was the first time he’d ever shaken hands with a gorgeous movie star. He thought of his wife. Ell was a big fan. She would kill to be here. Or maybe she would kill him if she knew about this. He would never tell her.

  Julia looked at the other cops working the crime scene.

  “We should go to my office to talk privately,” she said, keeping her voice low.

  “Yeah, let’s do that.”

  She stood. “I have a great deal to tell you about my husband, and why this happened, Ed.”

  He rose to his feet, too.

  “I bet you do, Julia.”

  2

  Garrett entered the hospital room just after ten a.m. He nodded at them, a twinkle in his eyes.

  “You look like the bearer of news,” Annie said.

  “Yes, indeed,” he said, taking a visitor’s chair and crossing his long legs. “Good news and bad news. As soon as you finish healing, you’ll be getting a medal in a special ceremony from the deities in the front office.”

  “I assume that’s the good news. What’s the bad news?”

  “As usual, you won’t get to wear it home. It stays locked in a vault.”

  “So I can’t even sell it on eBay?”

  “No. But by tradition, you get to keep any cake you eat at the party.”

  She laughed, and Hunter clapped. “Brava! Since I won’t be allowed there, I’ll give you your round of applause now.”

  “Is that all?” Garrett asked. “I can do you one better.”

  He got up, walked to the bed, leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  “I can’t tell you how proud I am of you, my girl,” he said softly, pushing an errant lock of her hair aside with his forefinger.

  “Thank you, Grant. That means a lot.”

  As he was settling back into his chair, Hunter asked, “Will she be charged with failing to let the FBI handle the takedown of Sokolov and Spitzer?”

  “Even if they wanted to, nobody in the Agency or Bureau wants the embarrassing details of this fiasco to come out in a courtroom or congressional hearing. Besides, I told them Annie was simply following Spitzer and got involved in a firefight accidentally, in self-defense, when they spotted her. Naturally, the new FBI guy running CIC’s counterespionage didn’t buy it, and the Bureau is fuming that she stepped on their turf. But this will blow over. Everywhere in the Agency, you’re a heroine, Annie.”

  She grinned. “I’m just glad I didn’t become another star on the wall in the lobby.”

  “Me too,” Hunter said, raising and kissing her hand.

  “As for you, mister, how in hell did you ever figure it all out?” Garrett glanced at his watch. “I’ve got some time.”

  “With a little logic and a lot of dumb luck,” Hunter began. “For a long time I was confused. So I had to start with what we already knew. I knew the Russians wanted desperately to stop American fracking. Lasher unknowingly supplied me information linking that fact to other things. He admitted he was a contract killer hired to silence Muller. So, whoever hired him had to be working for the Kremlin. He also boasted he was the guy shadowing me that day outside the EPA. Which meant two other things: first, that his Russian boss knew about my meeting schedule that day; and second, that his boss had to be somebody high up in the anti-fracking network I was investigating.”

  “Reasonable logic, so far,” Garrett said. “But there had to be lots of suspects in that network. How did you figure out the Russian agent had to be Trammel?”

  “By degrees. First, when I visited his home, he had a security team of Russian contractors. Hard guys, pros. That was bizarre. The second big clue was when I uncovered his connection to Gazprom.”

  “The Russian energy company?” Annie asked.

  “Majority owned by the Russian government,” Garrett interjected. “Putin cronies are in charge. So, how did you find out about that?”

  “I learned Trammel had been making annual trips to Berlin to speak at ‘alternative energy summits’ hosted by a German environmentalist organization. When I researched the group, I saw its officers included Russian oligarchs tied to Putin—and one of them was a top Gazprom official. I dug deeper and found the group was getting huge donations from Gazprom. It wasn’t a leap to deduce the organization was just a front group for Moscow.”

  “Lots of people besides Trammel attend those conferences,” Garrett pointed out. “That doesn’t seem particularly suspicious.”

  “True. But in every investigation, I create a timeline of events, and I noted the dates of Trammel’s conference appearances. Later, while checking out federal financial reports, I noticed an interesting thing. He gave big, annual, tax-deductible donations—about a half-million dollars at a time—to his Trammel Foundation. He listed them as income derived from ‘speaking and consulting fees.’ The dates of the donations rang bells for me. I checked the timeline, and sure enough: He made those contributions to his foundation immediately after his Berlin speaking engagements.

  “So I had Wonk sift through federal grant forms, and he noticed another intriguing coincidence. Within a week or so of receiving each of his donations, his Trammel Foundation turned around and made their own huge grants of nearly identical amounts to the Currents Foundation. The grant forms listed their purposes as ‘energy awareness advocacy’—a euphemism for propaganda and activism against fracking.

  “But a lot of that activity was really run by groups working against Roger Helm. Currents money funded outfits running pro-Spencer voter registration drives. Groups holding protests at Helm’s headquarters, rallies, and the homes of his top donors. And something called the Progressive Media Alliance—a network of press shills who colluded online to push daily anti-Helm narratives. Oh, and guess what political communications outfit the Currents Foundation hired to coordinate all those efforts?”

  “Let me guess: Lucas Carver’s company,” Annie said.

  “What a coincidence, huh? Carver is Spencer’s chief communications strategist, while his Vox Populi company—funded by Currents, with money supplied by Trammel— runs the national campaign to smear and destroy Helm.”

  “So the Russians were laundering millions of dollars through Trammel into those Currents groups—”

  “—which, in turn, funneled those millions into the campaign to elect Carl Spencer and defeat Roger Helm. That’s the bottom line, Annie: illegal Russian interference in an American presidential election. That is what Arnold Wasserman discovered. Somehow, he picked up a loose thread and followed it through the network right back to Moscow. As a good reporter, he would have interviewed people inside that network, maybe Trammel himself. When Trammel realized he was getting too close to the truth, Wasserman had to die. And when
CAP followed in his footsteps, they had to go, too. Eventually, so did I.”

  Garrett squinted. “That’s a lot of conjecture. The Russian funds were laundered and co-mingled, so you still had little hard evidence of their direct involvement.”

  “There was more, though. Trammel’s wife—Julia Haight, the actress—found out Trammel was having an affair with someone. So she started checking up on him and managed to sneak into his office. That’s when she found out the ugly truth about Avery Trammel.”

  He picked up a thick file folder.

  “And it’s all here.”

  Over the next ten minutes, with the aid of the photographed documents supplied by Julia, Hunter told them the story of little Avis Tremills—son of the infamous Soviet spy John Avery Tremills. He explained how, motivated by obsessive hatred of America, the country he blamed for his parents’ deaths—and for his own traumatic childhood—Tremills became Avery Trammel, a KGB sleeper agent. Then, with their secret backing, a billionaire investor, and finally a politically powerful Kremlin agent of influence.

  “I first met Julia when I visited his estate. I could tell she was troubled about something, so I left my card and told her to contact me if she ever wanted to talk. But when she found and photographed this stuff, she was too scared to tell anyone.

  “That changed when the cops visited their apartment to question him after the murder of Senator Conn’s widow. That’s when she realized his secret mistress had to have been Emmalee Conn.”

  “What?”

  “Just wait, Annie—it gets better. Anyway, Julia knew her husband was lying through his teeth to her and the cops. She was certain he was behind Emmalee’s murder. So she decided to give all this to me.”

  Garrett was still frowning. “But how did you figure out Lasher was working directly for Trammel, as his hired assassin?”

  “Because being an arrogant psychopath, Lasher couldn’t stop boasting and also unwittingly revealing things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as being a hired hitman—going after Muller at the safe house—following me at the EPA. He admitted all that. And when I was targeted during the hit on Helm, that told me he had to be the shooter—which meant the assassination attempt had to be an SVR op, contracted by his boss. Without realizing it, Lasher was sketching for me a map of Russia’s involvement.

  “But his worst slip-up was threatening to come after my ‘girlfriend.’ He was able to describe Annie, yet he didn’t know her name. Only one other enemy of mine had seen me with her: Avery Trammel. He knew what Annie looked like, but didn’t know her name, either. That was just too great a coincidence. I knew right then Lasher could only have learned about her from Trammel.”

  “Which meant Lasher’s boss had to be Trammel,” Garrett interjected.

  “Exactly. And if that were true, then everything else made logical sense.”

  “So Avery Trammel was behind everything,” Annie said. “Protecting Russia’s CIA moles. Promoting Moscow’s campaign to stop fracking. Throwing the election to Spencer. And killing anyone who became a threat.”

  “But there’s one last thing I cannot understand,” Garrett said. “You say Trammel was a megalomaniac, playing a double game even against his Russian handlers—that his plan was to take over the country, first by throwing the election to Spencer, then by controlling things himself. How in the world did he ever expect to manage that?”

  Hunter had been holding back the last item in the folder—a large manila envelope.

  “This is how.”

  He opened the envelope, slid out the photos, and spread them on the blanket covering Annie.

  “Oh my God,” Annie whispered.

  “Just to reassure my disbelieving eyes—that is Emmalee Conn and Carl Spencer, right?”

  “Grant, I didn’t know about this until after the firefight, when I tossed Trammel’s office. They were inside a briefcase he meant to take with him in his getaway—probably as his insurance policy, to force Spencer to protect him in the future. I think he’d already used the photos to blackmail Spencer and get him under his control.

  “But when Trammel later had Emmalee murdered, these would have become even more devastating. Imagine: A presidential candidate has kinky sex with a woman not his wife, and scandalous photos are taken. That’s bad enough. But the woman is the widow of his recently murdered political rival—and then she is murdered, too. Now, this candidate is in the White House, and he’s the most powerful leader on the planet.”

  Hunter tapped one of the photos.

  “Except he isn’t. Avery Trammel is. These photos could be used to frame the President of the United States for two murders. Holding these over Spencer’s head, Trammel could have forced him to do pretty much anything. He could have caused the nation catastrophic harm.”

  He looked off into the distance.

  “So yes—I think Trammel actually might have been able to pull off his insane, lifelong revenge fantasy against the United States.”

  Annie broke the long silence that followed.

  “Would you please get those disgusting pictures off my blanket?”

  “Sorry.” Hunter slid them back into the envelope, and shoved it back into the file folder.

  “Goddamn,” Garrett said at last. “Dylan, I still can’t believe how you figured out everything.”

  “Not everything.” Hunter said, nodding toward Annie. “What I couldn’t know was who was running the moles in the Agency. Nor could I possibly know that their Russian handler, Sokolov, was the same SVR illegal also running Trammel. They were all part of the same cell. And you cracked that part of it, Annie.”

  “That she did,” Garrett said. “Brilliantly, too. This past year she took off the board three Russian illegals doing tremendous damage to our country.”

  He looked at them both with a mixture of disbelief and awe.

  “I have seen a lot of incredible things during my years wandering in the ‘wilderness of mirrors,’ but this tops them all. Here you are, Dylan, unmasking Russian manipulation of the election. Meanwhile, Annie is uncovering Russian moles in Langley. We assume you’re conducting totally unrelated investigations. But they turn out to be different parts of a single conspiracy. You two were just following all the links from opposite ends of the same chain.”

  “And we met in the middle,” Hunter said, turning to her and laughing.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  Not laughing.

  Apparently noticing, Garrett plunged back in.

  “We’ve stopped the immediate threat. But others remain. The public questions about your real identity, Dylan. The investigations into the terrorist attacks, Helm’s shooting, Emmalee Conn’s murder, the firefight at Trammel’s estate. The Russians will pull out all the stops to whitewash themselves.”

  “Of course,” said Hunter, “because what they did is an act of war.”

  “And to avoid an unthinkable war,” Garrett continued, “a lot of Americans—probably starting with Spencer—will want to believe those lies. Truth is likely to be another casualty.” He looked away, then added: “However, given the stakes, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

  “Well, what can be proved, anyway?” Hunter asked. “I can prove the Russians ran and funded Trammel. I can make a pretty persuasive case that Russian money went into the election campaign, using Trammel as the conduit. Those things will go into the Inquirer articles next week.

  “However, I—we—also know a lot of things we can’t prove—not beyond a shadow of a doubt, anyway. We know the Russians ran Shishani, and that Shishani organized the terrorist conspiracy in Washington. But the terrorist I questioned has lawyered up now and isn’t talking. We know Lasher worked for Trammel—his body was even found on the estate. We know Lasher murdered Wasserman, Shishani, Emmalee Conn, and the poor old man who owned the apartment overlooking the park. We know he shot Helm, and tried to murder me. And we know Moscow was behind all of that.”

  He shrugged.

  “We know
it—but we can’t prove any of that. Trammel kept no incriminating records anywhere about his actual ops—only his fake IDs, tradecraft items, some stuff tying him to Sokolov, and sentimental family albums showing his background with communism and Russia.”

  “We know Trammel blackmailed Carl Spencer,” Annie pointed out.

  “But we can’t prove that, either,” Garrett replied, “because Dylan took the blackmail photos from Trammel’s briefcase. If he hadn’t, when investigators found them there, that would have incriminated Trammel and his Russian handlers—and also knocked Spencer out of the race. Hell, Dylan, that would have been a trifecta. But you blew it by taking away the photos.”

  “No, I took them on purpose,” Hunter said. “Think it through. Imagine what would happen if these got out. The country has already lost two candidates to violence: Conn and Helm. Losing Spencer now would turn the election into a one-man race with Tom Waller the sole candidate—a total farce. The chaos would destroy the last bit of confidence people still have in our political system.”

  He tapped the envelope.

  “When I saw these, Grant, I realized that nightmare would be everything Avery Trammel ever dreamed of. Even after death, he would have won his final victory over America.” He shook his head. “No way I was going to let him win it all.”

  Garrett grunted. Then said, “You’re right. Moscow would have loved it, too.”

  They sat reflecting on it for a while.

  “Meanwhile, what about you and me, Grant?” Annie interrupted. “Where does all this leave us?”

  “It’s total bedlam at HQ now. They’ve been penetrated by moles and failed to foresee terrorist attacks on Washington. There will be congressional investigations, finger-pointing, heads rolling, and more reshuffling of our organizational chart. There’s a ton of work to do.”

  “That’s for sure,” she said. “I honestly don’t know where we begin.”

  Garrett fixed her with a cool, unblinking stare.

  “‘We’ don’t do anything. You, both of you, have done quite enough. Now it’s my turn. My top priority will be to stop World War Three with the Russians, which just might happen if their role in all this is unmasked. Second, to make sure Carl Spencer, as president, won’t cause us future grief, now that he’s unleashed from Trammel. Third, to try to salvage what is left of the Agency. But fourth—and hardly least important—to protect you, Dylan.”