by M. A. Lawson
“What I’m really disappointed about,” Grayson said, “is losing that young woman. I really believed she could have made a difference in that part of the world.”
Callahan didn’t say anything. He wasn’t going to keep saying he was sorry. The milk had been spilt, the water had passed under the bridge, the die had been cast; it was time to move on. It was time for revenge.
“What do you plan to do next?” Prescott asked, and Callahan told them. He noted, as usual, that they didn’t have any useful suggestions. It was all on him.
“I want status reports on this once a week,” Lincoln said. Then he added, unnecessarily, “Via Mr. Meece, of course.”
“No,” Callahan said. “I’m not going to waste my time doing that. When I’ve got something to report, I’ll let Smee know.”
Prescott slammed one of her bony hands down on the table. “Hey! You’ve already fucked this up beyond belief. Don’t you go forgetting who the hell’s in charge here.”
“Nobody’s in charge here,” Callahan said, looking directly into her dead-fish eyes. “I do the things you don’t want your own agencies doing, so all the risk will be on my head. But I don’t work for you—I work with you. Any time you want to start doing your own dirty work, all you have to do is cut off the money and I’ll go find another job.” Callahan had made this speech before, but it needed to be said every once in a while to make sure they understood. “Now I have to get back to Washington to clean up the mess in my own house.”
Callahan rose and started to leave the room, but before he reached the door, Lincoln said, “Callahan, can you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Stop calling Mr. Meece Smee. He keeps complaining to me about it.”
22 | At seven p.m., an hour before her meeting at St. Margaret’s, Kay stuck her head into Jessica’s room. She’d expected to find her daughter hunched over a book, doing her homework, but she wasn’t. She was lying on her bed, talking to someone on her cell phone, and Kay heard her say, “Oh, that’s just bullshit.” There was a brief pause, and Jessica let out a high-pitched laugh and said, “Now I know you’re a lying bitch! She’d never do that.”
Kay thought—for maybe two seconds—about giving her daughter a lecture on the unattractiveness of young women speaking in such a vulgar fashion, but knew she wouldn’t be able to manage the hypocrisy necessary for such a discussion.
Kay had met with Tanaka, Jessica’s guidance counselor, a handsome guy with spiky dark hair that gave him a bit of a rock-star vibe. He told her pretty much the same thing Jessica had said: He’d taken a special interest in Jessica and four other students who all had the test scores, the brains and, most important, the stamina and long-distance drive to become doctors.
“It’s a waste of time for kids like your daughter to spend another year in high school,” Tanaka had said. “As it is, she’ll almost be your age by the time she’s allowed to practice if she elects a specialty like internal medicine or neurosurgery.”
Jesus. Neurosurgery. “And you think you can get her into Duke?” Kay had said.
“Yeah, my family has some pull with the school. Actually, we have a lot of pull.”
“I’m curious,” Kay had said. “Why are you teaching in a high school if you have those kind of connections?”
“Because I like my job. I like being around bright kids like Jessica. Frankly, and I’m embarrassed to say this, but I don’t have the dedication to teach in some inner-city school where half the kids can’t read and they have metal detectors at every entrance. But a school like this, with the kind of students they admit . . . Well, it’s fun and it gives me hope for this country. But I won’t be teaching much longer. My dad’s getting old and he expects me to come home and run the business.”
“What business is that?” Kay asked.
“You ever heard of TanTech? It’s the largest privately owned medical research firm in the country. Which reminds me: If Duke becomes a financial hardship, give me a call. The family has a foundation that can help.”
Which made Kay immediately wonder, being the cynic she was, if what Tanaka was actually doing was recruiting her daughter for his daddy’s company. Nah, he didn’t seem like that kind of guy. But now here was the future neurosurgeon lying on her bed, gossiping like a typical goofy teenager.
“Excuse me,” Kay said. “I have to go out for a couple of hours. Set the security system after I leave.”
Her daughter gave her a distracted good-bye wave, and then said to whomever she was talking to: “No! She didn’t! In the chem lab? You gotta be—”
“And don’t stay up too late,” Kay said. There. That sounded pretty mom-like.
—
ST. MARGARET’S WAS a twenty-minute walk from Kay’s apartment, but it took her forty-five minutes to get there because she wanted to make sure she wasn’t being followed. When she left the apartment, she was wearing a white sweater, her hair was down, and she was carrying a large purse. She reversed directions abruptly several times to see who was behind her and to see if any of those people changed directions when she did. Half an hour after leaving her apartment, she went into a bar, and in the restroom she pinned up her hair, put on a baseball cap, and put on a dark nylon windbreaker. She then left the purse she’d been carrying in the restroom waste container and exited the bar looking completely different from the person who entered it. After almost an hour of evasive tactics, she was sure she wasn’t being followed but for some reason had a feeling she was being watched—which she knew was absurd. TV movies aside, you can’t feel someone following you, and she chalked up her apprehension to paranoia. She arrived at St. Margaret’s at exactly eight p.m.
She thought the main doors to the church might be locked, but they weren’t. If they had been, she would have met her person on the steps. Lucky for her, the Episcopalians apparently had a 24/7 rule when it came to allowing folks to talk to God—or more likely, being an urban church, they locked the church up later so it didn’t become a hostel for the homeless.
Kay had never been religious, but one of the things she’d always liked about churches and chapels was how peaceful they were when they were empty; she felt calmer as soon as she entered the place. It was dimly lit but bright enough to see, and there were a couple of small spotlights that illuminated a stained-glass window behind the altar and a gold-colored cross on the altar. That is, she assumed the cross wasn’t really gold—even Episcopalians couldn’t be that trusting.
She took a seat in a pew in the last row, close to the door. Ten minutes passed and she thought to herself: Shit. She’s decided not to come. She doesn’t want to get tangled up in this mess or she doesn’t want to tangle with the Callahan Group. Thirty seconds later, Barb Reynolds, her old mentor from the DEA, sat down next to her.
Barb reminded Kay a lot of Anna Mercer. Like Mercer she had short dark hair, and like Mercer she dressed well and looked incredible for her age. She was almost fifty but could have passed for a woman a decade younger, thanks to exercise, diet, and a wee bit of help from Botox. Her eyes were green, but a different shade of green from Ara Khan’s.
“I was afraid you weren’t going to come,” Kay said.
“I got here half an hour ago. I was waiting outside to see if anyone was following you. I think you’re clean.”
“Okay. Let me tell you what’s going on. But I’d like to know something first. After you fired me in San Diego, you hooked me up with the Callahan Group. I’d like to know how you even knew about the Group.”
“I knew about it because Thomas Callahan offered me a job a few years ago.”
“Why didn’t you take it?”
“For one thing, I like the job I have, and at the time I had over twenty years vested in a civil service pension and I wasn’t willing to give that up. I also turned him down because I was just a tiny bit leery about some off-the-books organization that does sneaky things for
the president. I didn’t want to end up being Thomas Callahan’s codefendant. I also suspected that Callahan’s story about working for the president might be a lie, which made me even more leery.”
“But you apparently didn’t care if I ended up being Callahan’s codefendant.”
“Hey! Don’t take that tone with me. You were unemployed and I thought I was doing you a favor. Nobody twisted your arm to make you take the job.”
“Sorry,” Kay said, although she wasn’t feeling all that contrite. “But how did you meet Callahan in the first place?”
Barb shook her head impatiently, meaning: What difference does it make? “We’ve both worked in this town a long time,” she said, “and our paths just crossed at some point.”
Hmmm, Kay thought. That sounded so deliberately vague that she wondered if Barb had ever had a fling with Callahan. Callahan couldn’t have always looked the way he did now.
But as there was no point pressing Barb on a question she didn’t intend to answer, Kay said, “Okay, here’s what’s going on”—and she proceeded to tell Barb about the lithium in Ghazni Province and how Callahan’s grand plan fell apart when someone detonated the bomb that killed Ara and her father.
“My God!” Barb said when Kay told her how she was alive only due to dumb luck and a substantial appliance. “I noticed you were limping when you walked into the church, but I had no idea.”
“My arm and ribs are healing fine, I’ve stopped having headaches, but my damn leg is taking longer to mend. Anyway, I’m okay.”
“So what do you need from me?” Barb asked.
The reason Kay had called Barb was that there was one thing her ex-employer did very well: They could follow a money trail even when people were trying to hide the trail.
There are basically three parts to narcotics trafficking: Making the dope is part one and selling it is part two. Part three is trying to figure out what to do with tremendous amounts of illegal cash that starts off as a crumpled bill in some junkie’s trembling hand and ends up as one of millions of similar bills all banded together and placed in cardboard boxes and safes. All this cash then has to be accounted for in some seemingly legitimate fashion—meaning it has to be laundered clean—so people don’t go to jail for income-tax evasion or have to explain to federal agents where all the money came from. After the money is laundered, it can then be placed in various institutions and invested in things that make more money. It was either launder the money or leave all that cash sitting in boxes moldering in a warehouse.
What the DEA had learned to do was follow the money. They were very good at tracing it to various offshore banks and battering down the paper walls of phony businesses that were empty shells erected solely for the purpose of hiding the loot. Kay, however, had never been involved in that side of the DEA’s operation; she’d been a gun-packing field agent, not a CPA.
“I figure,” Kay told Barb, “that if somebody killed the Khans, they were most likely paid to do so. I mean, maybe the Taliban killed them for some wacky, political, religious reason. Or maybe some politician in Kabul did it so he could be the one to negotiate the mining rights. But I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think anyone in Afghanistan knew what Ara and her father were doing. I think someone connected to the Callahan Group sold them out.”
“Sold them out to who?” Barb asked.
“I don’t know. To whoever can make money off lithium. There’s a fairly rare metal in the ground over there worth billions and somebody wants it. And since we’re talking billions, I think whoever killed Ara and stopped the deal from going through would pay whoever helped them millions. Nobody would do something like this for a few thousand bucks.
“So what I’d like you to do, Barb, is look into the finances of everybody that I know of who was part of this. That includes half a dozen people at the Callahan Group, including Callahan. I also want you to check out Cannon and Sterling and the men they brought with them to Afghanistan. I don’t have the names of all of Cannon and Sterling’s people, but I know they were all on the same flight from Dulles, traveling as a group, and they probably billed the flight to the same credit card. So I’m guessing you can get their names.”
“Okay,” Barb said, “but I can tell you right now that Thomas Callahan wouldn’t have killed Ara Khan for money. Callahan is a conniving, wife-cheating alcoholic, but he’s a patriot and not a murderer.”
“People change,” Kay said.
“Not Callahan,” Barb said.
“Well, I need proof, or as close to proof as you can get me. The guy I’m most suspicious of is Eli Dolan. The problem with Dolan is that he’s supposedly richer than God and it’s hard to imagine he would have done this for money. What I need to know is if Dolan’s as rich as everyone thinks he is.”
“What exactly am I supposed to tell my finance guys when they ask me why I’m investigating these people?”
“That’s easy. The Callahan Group and C&S Logistics are international outfits who do business in places like Afghanistan. You know, Barb, a place where they grow poppies and terrorists. You just tell your people that somebody whispered something into your ear about these companies and opium, and you want to see if anyone’s richer than they should be.”
“Yeah, okay. Is there anything else?”
Kay noticed that Barb didn’t ask her how she was supposed to get any warrants she might need. Barb had ways to deal with those pesky legal impediments, and the Patriot Act made her job even easier; the Patriot Act was actually used more often to investigate the finances of drug dealers than terrorists.
In answer to Barb’s question, Kay said, “Yeah, there’s one other thing. I want to know if the fifty million really ended up in Sahid Khan’s Swiss bank account. I’m assuming it’s there, because I saw Ara type in the account number and I watched Dolan hit the SEND button. But I’m bothered that the bombing occurred immediately after the transfer. I can’t understand why they waited until the money was transferred when they could have killed the Khans any time after the meeting started.”
“Do you have the account number?”
“No, just the name of the bank. Bonhôte & Cie in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. I heard Dolan say the name.”
“It may be a little difficult to find out if there’s fifty million in a Swiss bank without an account number. For that matter, even if I had the account number, I’m still not sure I can find out what’s in the account. There’s a reason people put their money in Swiss banks, and it’s not the interest rates.”
“Hey, just do what you can. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Anything else? Please tell me no.”
“No, there’s nothing else. I thought about asking you to check the phone records of all these people, to see if anyone made any calls to suspicious characters in Afghanistan or to somebody who might want the lithium, but these are people who would know better than to make calls that can be traced. So no, there’s nothing else. Just look into the money.”
“Okay,” Barb said, not sounding thrilled.
Kay handed her the list of people she wanted investigated and Barb started to rise from the pew, but Kay put a hand on her arm. “What did you mean when you said that Callahan’s story about working for the president might be a lie?”
Barb shrugged. “The story just doesn’t ring true to me. It never did. But that’s not based on anything I know for sure, just instinct and being around Washington for thirty years.”
“But somebody in the government must be helping him,” Kay said. “Callahan is getting classified information and large amounts of money from somewhere.”
“Yeah, but probably not the president. I never thought Bush was the brightest guy in the world, but I always thought he was honest. I don’t think he would have done what Callahan said he did. As for Obama, the Republicans are just looking for a reason to impeach him, and I think the last thing he’d do is get mixed up wit
h some rogue group like Callahan’s.
“The other thing that always sounded phony to me was the president’s guy, as Callahan calls him. He said one worked for Bush and another guy took his place when Obama took office. Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but turnover on the White House senior staff is higher than at your average McDonald’s. Hardly anyone ever sticks around for an entire term. I mean, Obama had five chiefs of staff in his first six years, so I can’t imagine the kind of guy Callahan said he met lasting four years on Bush’s staff, and another guy just like him sticking with Obama for six years. Plus, you don’t usually see the sort of continuity between two different administrations that Callahan is saying happened.
“The last thing is the White House is incapable of keeping a secret; the place leaks like a sinking ship, and half the time things get leaked because somebody wants to stab somebody else in the back. If people in the White House knew that Callahan existed, I think that would have come out years ago.”
“So if the president isn’t running Callahan, then who is?” Kay asked.
“My guess is some group in the intelligence community. Those sneaky bastards know how to keep a secret and they’ve been playing games like this for years.”
“Which agency?” Kay asked.
“It could be any of them, or more than one. There are sixteen organizations in this country tasked with intelligence acquisition, and half of those are engaged in covert ops. So it could be the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the NRO, even the FBI. Pick three letters from the alphabet. And it wouldn’t be the people at the very top of these agencies. Those folks get changed out every time there’s a new guy in the Oval Office. So it’s probably some old-timers, people who’ve been around forever and are able to control the money their agencies are given. Anyway, my gut tells me that the president has no idea the Callahan Group exists but somebody in the government does. Which means that Callahan’s not telling you the complete truth, which also isn’t surprising, knowing Thomas Callahan.”
