Sideswiped: Book One in the Matt Blake legal thriller series

by Russell Moran

  ***

  “We’ve forgotten to talk about one thing, Rick, one big thing,” said Dee. “Matt and I want to get married as soon as possible. No big wedding, obviously, but we want to make it happen soon. Ever hear the expression, ‘life’s too short’ ”?

  “You mentioned that on the plane, Diana. I have a federal judge friend who makes house calls. Bennie and I have huddled over this. So let me suggest this coming Saturday. We can have the ceremony in your lovely rooftop garden. Bennie and I can be your witnesses. He insists that he wants to be referred to as your best man, Matt. I’ll get the papers for the application for your marriage license and I’ll notarize your signatures. Neither the marriage license nor the wedding certificate will be filed with the county clerk, of course. They’ll be locked in a safe in my office.”

  “Why do we have to keep that stuff in a safe?” asked Diana.

  “Remember, you two do not exist.”

  ***

  Matt and I unpacked the few belongings we brought with us. I took a photo of my late husband and placed it on the mantel.

  “Oh shit, I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking, Matt. I’m sorry,” I said as I removed the picture.

  “No, baby, you put Jim Spellman right back up there. I’ll put this photo of Maggie next to him. Jim and Maggie are our guardian angels. They’ll keep us from fucking up.”

  I wrapped my arms around him and put my face against his chest. I said nothing.

  “So what do you think, Dee?”

  “I think I love you.”

  Chapter 45

  I gradually acclimated myself to our new location and so did Diana. The large trunk in the exercise room intrigued me so I looked inside. It was filled with various pieces of athletic equipment, including two new outfielder’s gloves and a couple of baseballs. I took the gloves and a baseball from the trunk and closed the lid.

  I walked up to the rooftop garden where Dee was sitting on a lounge chair reading a book.

  “How about a game of catch, hon,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” she shouted. “We have gloves and a ball?”

  “You like to play catch?” I said.

  “I don’t like it. I love it. My Dad used to throw the ball to me every day when I was a kid. I was the son he never had. After a while, playing catch became part of my life, but a part that’s been lost for a while. I absolutely friggin love to play catch.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I played catch all the time with my father when I was a kid. I really miss it. The last thing I remember throwing was a hand grenade.”

  She got up from her chair, grabbed the smaller of the gloves from my hand and kissed me. She moved her hand around. The glove seemed to fit perfectly.

  I stood with my back to the Plexiglas shield on the east side of the roofline and threw my opening pitch to Diana. I tossed it gently.

  “Hey, Matt, put some heat on it,” Dee said as she hurled a blistering fastball ball straight at my glove.

  “Not bad, lady. You have a hell of an arm.”

  “You mean I don’t throw like a girl?” she said with a laugh.

  “So what do you like so much about playing catch, hon?” I asked.

  “I really don’t know. It’s sort of like a meditation with a little sweat involved. I just love it. It calms me down.”

  “Well, given our circumstances, I think we’re going to be playing a lot of catch from now on.”

  “Have I mentioned that I love you?” Dee said as she threw a wicked knuckleball.

  ***

  It was beautiful early October weather for the day of our wedding. Judge Earl Lonergan, Federal District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, showed up at 3:30 p.m. for the ceremony. The guests for our small wedding included Bennie and his wife Maggie, Rick Bellamy and his wife Ellen, the judge, and us. Ellen volunteered to be the maid of honor. She and Diana had hit it off as friends in the past few days. At 4 p.m. Judge Lonergan began the service.

  ***

  Bennie handed us the wedding rings, which our personal shopper had picked up for us. I felt so happy I almost cried. Bennie did just that.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  After we kissed, Diana leaned into my ear and said, “I really love those words ‘forever and ever until death do us part.’ ”

  I thought about the death part and swallowed hard.

  Our caterer and server—a couple of FBI agents with guns on their hips—brought out the food and drink.

  Bennie, my best man, proposed the toast. “To the bravest, most loving couple I’ve ever met. Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Blake. Mazel Tov.”

  Diana and I raised our glasses and sipped our Perrier.

  This is the happiest moment of my life, I thought. Then I remembered that Diana and I are murder targets. I’ll worry about that tomorrow, or maybe Monday.

  ***

  On Sunday, my new wife and I got used to our new digs. We began the day with what would become our daily ritual—we played catch.

  “Hey, hon, if we save up our money, maybe we can even buy a change of clothes,” Diana said.

  “Not to worry, babe. Rick is sending over a private shopper this afternoon, the lady who got the wedding rings for us.”

  “On Sunday?” Diana said.

  “The FBI works on its own calendar.”

  Rick Bellamy thought that the two of us going shopping was too risky for the time being. Our private shopper, FBI Agent Gladys Benton, took over. She wore a Colt 45 strapped to her hip. The following day we would have a completely new wardrobe. We didn’t get new baseball gloves because the ones I found in the trunk worked just fine. We did ask for some new baseballs, however. We also asked for a couple of baseball caps, a Cubs hat for me, and a White Sox cap for Diana.

  ***

  At 11 a.m. on Sunday, FBI agent Gladys Benton appeared at our apartment to help us with our new wardrobes. Gladys obviously had a lot of experience in the apparel industry. She showed us three catalogs from upscale retailers. She even took our measurements with a cloth tape. I’d never been measured by a clothing shopper with a pistol on her hip before, but I figured we’d be having a lot of new experiences for a while.

  On Monday we would take our planned three-day honeymoon—at our secret undisclosed location in Greenwich Village.

  We began our new life in the Witness Protection Program.

  Chapter 46

  I love my new name, Diana Blake. I also love the man who gave it to me. Matt and Diana Blake, a couple of former alcoholic junkies, are now husband and wife. And lovers. And best friends. And baseball-catch buddies. Our lives have taken on a weird new turn. Being murder targets definitely focuses you on some negative energy. But at the same time, we’re both happy. I intend to keep it that way, and I know Matt feels the same. One day at a time, as we learned in rehab.

  I walked to my new office in the FBI Counterterrorism Bureau at 26 Federal Plaza, accompanied by my body guards. It’s only a ten-minute walk from our beautiful new apartment, so it also provided for some additional exercise, for me and my sidekicks. As a writer and college professor, I’m having a ball with my new title as FBI agent, even though I can’t use my name. My job is as simple as it is complicated. I have to pour over Jim Spellman’s voluminous writings and look for clues. Just as Matt always refers to Maggie as his guardian angel, I’ve chosen to think of Jim that way too. I like to think that our angels, Jim and Maggie, brought Matt and me together. And I think they’re happy they did.

  I huddled with Rick Bellamy to discuss my research project. With all due respect for my friend and new boss, nobody has to teach Diana Blake how to research. I decided to approach Jim’s writings in chronological order, until I find a new direction that would be dictated by the words as I saw them. I would create new electronic files as I saw necessary, and would copy and paste Jim’s writings into the appropriate file with annotations from me. I had to laugh at Jim’s vulgar way of making notations. It also made the job easier, because it emphasize
d what Jim thought was important. My recollections came back to me the more I read. I worked with Jim on a lot of this stuff years ago as his informal editor. If I hadn’t been blasted on booze and dope for a couple of years after Jim died, I probably could have made more of this stuff sooner.

  “A NUKE – A FUCKING NUKE” read one of Jim’s notations. He always added his reflections in all caps. I read further.

  “Dumbo seems to think that a suitcase nuke or more likely a series of suitcase nukes, is the way to go. He thinks this may be more likely than attacking underwater oil caps, like Deep Horizon. This could make Deep Horizon look like a flat tire. DUMBO IS CLOSING IN ON SOMETHING. HE GOT THIS FROM AN INSIDE SOURCE. His source told him that they already have the raw materials, and it’s just a matter of assembly and picking targets. BUT WHERE THE FUCK IS DUMBO? I HAVEN’T SEEN HIM IN A MONTH, AND HE DOESN’T ANSWER EMAILS. IS DUMBO OKAY?”

  The word ‘nuke’ got my compete attention. Who is DUMBO? I thought. What’s his real name? Jim often gave nicknames to people he interviewed. He had a photographic memory, but I just wished he would have provided a lexicon of the names. I did a search of the word DUMBO across the entire hard drive, and there it was, an entry that said “DUMBO (Jay Clayton).” I marked my place and copied and pasted the entry into a file I had created called “DUMBO.” I looked at a few other random nicknames, such as Pluto, Dopey, Sleepy, and Coyote. Jim liked to pick cartoon characters as his nicknames. I was on to something. As I searched for each nickname, I would find a real name in parentheses, just like DUMBO. Great, I thought. I now have an operational process for sorting out the names. I prepared a list of characters with their cartoon nicknames and real names. I put the names into Word and also Excel, so that we could use them as a database in the future. The IT people at the FBI could take my Excel entries and convert them into whatever database they use. It took me four hours just to make up a list of only the first 20 names, but it would save me an enormous amount of time going forward. Then I realized that I still had over a gigabyte of documents to look at. This could take weeks, if not months. I needed help. I buzzed Rick Bellamy’s line.

  “Rick, it’s Diana. Can I see you for a couple of minutes with one of your IT people?”

  I showed Rick and Grace Jennings, the head of the IT department, what I had come up with. Grace freaked.

  “My God, this could be the Rosetta Stone,” Grace said. “Your approach is perfect, but it would save time if you entered this information right into our database.”

  “I’m going to need some help,” I said. “A lot of what I’m doing is rote data entry. I could use a couple of people to work with me. I should be in the same room with them so they can ask me about Jim’s way of making notations.”

  “We have an empty room with three terminals downstairs in IT,” Grace Jennings said. “Maybe Diana should relocate there?”

  “That should be no problem,” I said. “Recently I’ve become an expert in relocating,”

  Rick laughed at the wisecrack from the newest member of his Witness Protection Program.

  ***

  I had just sat down next to Grace in my new office in the IT department when my phone buzzed.

  “Diana, it’s Rick. Put on your blond wig. We’re taking a road trip.”

  Chapter 47

  Mike Delancy strode into the office of Dwight Conklin in Houston, Texas. Conklin was the Vice President of Facilities Management of Gulf Oil. He was also responsible for all vehicles owned or leased by the company. He kept an extensive database of vehicles of all sorts, and detailed information on the people assigned to them. Delancy was on a few days leave from his job on the Secret Service team that guarded President Reynolds. Because of his age, 55, he seldom was assigned as a direct body guard for the president, but was more in charge of planning and details.

  Delancy was single, having married only once. His wife died after they were married for two years under mysterious circumstances. Her body was found in a wooded ravine about ten miles from their home. The case surrounding her death was never solved, but the autopsy confirmed that she died of blunt trauma to the head. It is still an open file as an unsolved homicide. Delancy was a former college classmate of James Blake of Blake & Randolph. He had a spotless record, which is normal for a Secret Service agent. There was nothing in his file that indicated that he was anything but a clean-cut public servant.

  But his spotless record masked a man without a soul. He once ran over a dog as he was pulling up to his apartment. Apparently he had broken the dog’s leg as he rolled over it, and the animal was howling in pain. He got out of his car, calmly looked around, and kicked the dog into a storm drain along the curb. He could have called Animal Rescue, which would have immediately dispatched a vehicle to try to save the dog. Why bother, he thought. He had other things to do. Although he was armed, he didn’t shoot the animal to put it out of its misery, he simply kicked it into the drain. At least the howling was now muffled, he thought. As he strolled up to the entrance to his building he casually checked emails on his cell phone. Bennie Weinberg would have diagnosed Mike Delancy as a psychopath, a human being without normal compassions. Mike Delancy cared about one thing—money. And he was constantly aware that his government agent job afforded little of it.

  Delancy and Conklin worked together on a series of projects for years. Like Delancy, Conklin was fond of material wealth. Even though his job a Gulf Oil provided him with a large salary, it wasn’t enough for Conklin. At age 42, he had divorced two years earlier, and had no children. He did, however, have a beautiful 26-year-old mistress from Australia who shared his love of money. His objective in life was to become wealthy enough so he could live out a life of leisure with his young woman friend.

  Delancy walked into Conklin’s office and sat in a chair facing him. Conklin got up, walked over to the door and locked it. He made sure that the intercom on his desk was disabled so no one could overhear their conversation.

  “Does working with these fucking jihadis give you the creeps or what?” said Delancy.

  “Yeah, they give me the creeps, but the money’s good and that’s all I care about. All I have to do is make sure my company looks the other way when one of our thousands of pickup trucks gets into a car accident. For that I collect $5 million. And they sure as hell get into a lot of accidents.”

  “You know, Dwight, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Chicago, checking up on that big Spellman lawsuit against Gulf Oil. You’re aware that the case settled, I guess. I have no idea how much Gulf Oil settled for, but I’m sure it was a few million.”

  “Well, Mike, they had to settle it after the star defendant, the guy who wrecked so many Gulf Oil cars, got whacked.”

  “Do you think our Middle Eastern colleagues killed him?”

  “I have no idea and no opinion, Mike. All I know is I have my money and my work just got easier.”

  Delancy didn’t mention his role in the attempted assassination of Diana Spellman. Al-Qaeda’s strict rule for hired operatives like him and Conklin was that they could not to speak about any of their operations. The only reason Delancy knew about Conklin’s role in the car collisions was because of his constant spying on the Spellman case. But Delancy was worried. He was still tasked with keeping tabs on Diana Spellman and her fiancé/lawyer, but they completely dropped out of sight after the restaurant massacre. His al-Qaeda handler assured him that it was not his fault she avoided death — the traffic jam on I-80 was responsible for that. But he was worried that his services may not be needed after Diana Spellman disappeared. Delancy was paid $5 million for setting up the attempt on Diana Spellman’s life.

  Chapter 48

  Working remotely for Blake & Randolph wasn’t bad. I was in the middle of writing an appellate brief. The case was Philips v. Droge. Scotty Jenkins, one of our talented associates at Blake & Randolph, had recently nailed an excellent jury verdict of $10 million in a case involving a car passenger who lost the lower part of his right leg. The appeal concerned the
excessiveness of the jury verdict. A defendant can appeal a verdict if it’s so large that it “shocks the conscience of the court.” My job, in writing the brief, was to argue that the verdict should not shock the conscience of the court, but that it was fair and adequate based on the facts. Blake & Randolph is famous for getting huge jury verdicts, and I could write an appellate brief on the subject with my eyes closed. We get a lot of these.

  The phone rang. I saw it was Diana’s line at the FBI office.

  “Hi, sweetie, how’s Mrs. Blake doing on her first day on the job?”

  “Rick wants to go to FBI Headquarters in D.C. this afternoon, including you and me. Put on your beard and glasses, honey. The car will pick you up in 20 minutes to take us to the airport.”

  The Gulfstream left the runway at 2 p.m. I was dying to know what all the excitement was about.

  “We’re going to meet with Sarah Watson, Director of the FBI, as well as Bill Carlini, CIA Director,” said Rick. “Diana’s research has blown the lids off a lot of secrets. Diana, I just thank God you’re with us. I chased down the first 20 names that you researched, and found some startling stuff. You may be interested to know that each of the 20 people Jim wrote about is dead. Every single one of them. They all died in accidents, or at least in crashes that were made to look like accidents.”

  “Any particular pattern to the accidents?” I asked.

  “Yes, very interesting patterns. Of the 20 events, 14 of them involved sideswipe collisions, just like the one that killed Diana’s late husband. All of the sideswipe ‘accidents’ involved a vehicle that had a steel cage around the driver, just like a stunt car or military truck. In other words, these events now look like they were obvious murders, although nobody connected the dots until you two came along. It looks like a sideswipe collision is becoming somebody’s preferred method of taking care of business. I know it’s only hindsight, Diana, but I wish you would have come to us a couple of years ago with this information.”