by M. A. Lawson
“But are they the kind of men who would do something like this? I didn’t like Cannon or Sterling when I met them, but just because they seemed like assholes, that doesn’t mean they’re killers.” Kay was playing devil’s advocate—particularly when it came to Sterling—but she wanted to hear what Barb thought.
“I called a guy I know at the Pentagon, because I wondered the same thing,” Barb said. “Cannon wasn’t made a general mainly because he didn’t have the charisma or the political savvy to operate at the one- or two-star level, so he just retired. Sterling, however, was forced to retire. They threw his ass out.”
“Why?” Kay asked.
“You remember the deck of cards in Iraq? You know, Saddam was the ace of spades, Chemical Ali was the king of spades?”
“Yeah.”
“Sterling found out that one of the cards—the jack of diamonds or some damn thing—was hiding out in an apartment building in Basra and he sent in some troops to kill him. Well, it not only turned out that the guy wasn’t there, but Sterling’s men killed about a dozen civilians, including a couple of women and kids. Collateral damage is one thing, but a complete disregard for the civilian population is a different story. Sterling wasn’t court-martialed, because the army didn’t want the publicity, but they bounced his ass out of the service as fast as they could. Now, does that mean that he’d be willing to kill Ara Khan? I don’t know, but to me he’s a better candidate than Cannon both in terms of his personality and his finances. Plus, didn’t you tell me that Cannon wasn’t at the house where the meeting took place?”
“Yeah, he was supposedly checking out the dry salt lakes. But I still can’t eliminate him, because everything was done with cell phones. Cannon could have blown up the transformer and then called Sterling or somebody back at the house to detonate the other bomb and kill the old man.” Kay paused for a moment, then said, “I assume you didn’t find a large amount of money sitting in either Sterling’s or Cannon’s account.”
“I did not,” Barb said. “We’re still checking out the men they brought with them to Afghanistan, and I’ll let you know if we find something. Now, that’s enough business. Let’s have another martini and you can tell me about Jessica and your love life. Bob really is out of town.”
Kay didn’t bother to tell Barb that her love life blew up the same day Ara Khan was killed.
“I don’t know,” Kay said. “I really should get back home. I hardly ever see my daughter.”
“You will not be a party pooper. I will not stand for it.”
—
THE MORNING AFTER spending the evening drinking with Barb Reynolds, her head aching like the Rose Bowl Parade had walked over it, Kay dutifully showed up at her Farsi class. She’d just taken her seat and put on her headphones when her phone beeped the signal for a text message. She looked at the screen. The message was from Barb and it said: GOTTA MEET. ASAP. MY OFFICE.
Kay didn’t know what was going on, but the fact that Barb wanted to meet right away and was no longer concerned about keeping her meetings with Kay secret, probably meant that something bad had happened.
Kay left the campus and took the Metro to the Pentagon City stop and walked over to the DEA’s headquarters. She told the guard at the security checkpoint that she was there to see Barb and handed over the Glock she’d been packing ever since returning from Afghanistan.
As soon as she was in Barb’s office, Barb shut the door and said, “There was a trip wire on the accounts we looked at and somebody pinged us.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Kay asked.
“It means that when we looked at the financial records of people connected to Thomas Callahan, somebody had set an alarm, an alert, a trap, a trip wire, whatever you want to call it. The alarm was designed to tell whoever set it that some unauthorized person was looking at those accounts. The second thing the security system did was trace it back to us—and by us I mean the DEA.” Barb paused before she said, “Kay, anyone with half a brain will know that only one person working for Callahan has a DEA connection.”
“Aw, shit,” Kay said.
“We don’t know who set the trip wires. For all I know, Callahan could have set them. By that I mean, maybe Callahan had one of his nerds set up a system so he would know if anyone was prying into the private lives of his employees. The other possibility is somebody involved in this mess in Afghanistan set the trip wires so he would know if someone was poking around, and he placed trip wires on everybody’s accounts, including his own, so it wouldn’t be obvious that he was trying to protect himself.”
“So what do you think I should do?”
“Talk to Callahan. You have to trust somebody, Kay. Have you told Callahan that the fifty million never made it to Khan’s bank?”
“No. He’s not in Washington,” Kay said. “I don’t know where he went, I was just told he was out of the country. But even if he was here, I’m still not sure I’d tell him. I don’t trust him. Plus, if he knew I was digging into this on my own and got you involved, he’d fire me.”
“Kay, listen to me. You can trust Callahan. He doesn’t give a shit about money. You’ve seen the way he dresses, and I know college students who live in nicer apartments. Callahan cares about power. He cares about political intrigue. He genuinely cares about this country, and he loves what he does. He has no desire whatsoever to be a multimillionaire living in the lap of luxury. The laps of various females is a different story. Anyway, you need to tell him what you’ve learned.”
Kay shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”
“Kay, the other thing you need to understand is that you may be in danger. Somebody out there knows you’re mucking around in their financial affairs and trying to find out what really happened in Afghanistan.”
“That means you’re in danger, too.”
“Not like you. I belong to a large, very lethal government organization. I have assets I can deploy to protect me, and I will. And even if somebody knows that you and I are friends, my personal computer wasn’t used to investigate the bank accounts. The computer involved sits in a room where a dozen people work. What this means is that whoever traced this back to the DEA knows that other people know what I know.
“But you’re in danger because you’re on your own and working outside the Callahan Group. If you weren’t flying solo, you wouldn’t have come to the DEA for help. The other thing is, you were there when the bomb went off, and someone might think that you know more than you really do and more than what I’ve passed on to you.”
“Yeah, all right. I’ll talk to Callahan when he gets back.”
“No! Call him today! I’ve heard there’s this marvelous new invention called the cell phone. Even a Luddite like Callahan has one.”
Kay wasn’t going to call Callahan. She had to do this face-to-face. She had to look into Callahan’s bloodshot eyes to see if he was telling the truth.
“Okay, I will,” she lied to Barb.
24 “We’ve got a problem,” Alpha said.
“What’s that?” Bravo said.
“Hamilton. She’s conducting her own investigation and she’s talking to people outside the Callahan Group to get information.”
“Goddamnit, I knew something like this was going to happen. And remember, you’re the one who said to leave her alone.”
Alpha ignored Bravo’s I-told-you-so complaint.
“Who’s she been talking to?” Bravo asked.
“Her old friends at the DEA. She’s got them looking at the finances of everyone involved in Afghanistan.”
“Son of a bitch! How do you know this?”
“Because I do. And you don’t need to know how.” Alpha wasn’t going to tell him how Finley had set up the trip wires on people’s bank accounts.”
“Does she know the money never made it to Khan’s account?”
“I don’t kno
w,” Alpha said. “All I know is that she’s looking at our bank accounts, probably to see if anybody’s richer than they should be. She won’t find anything since none of the money was transferred to our existing accounts, but what I want you to do is put somebody on her. I want to know where she goes and who she talks to.”
“What we should do is get rid of her before she has a chance to fuck things up.”
“No. Killing her could make matters worse, not better.”
“How could killing her make things worse?”
“Because her death will be investigated by professionals, and you can never tell where the investigation will lead. We’re not in Afghanistan, where law enforcement barely functions. If she’s killed, Callahan will get a forensics team involved, and I don’t know what else he might do.”
“She has a daughter. Maybe we can control her through her daughter if she becomes a problem.”
“Do you know what happened to the last person who tried to use Hamilton’s daughter to control her?”
“No.”
“Hamilton blew the guy’s head off. I mean, she literally blew it off.”
“I can handle Hamilton.”
“You just do what I tell you and watch her.”
“Maybe. We’ll see.”
“Goddamnit, I’m telling you not to take any action against her. Don’t cross me on this.”
“Oh, yeah? What are you going to do if I do?”
25 | He didn’t like this. He didn’t like having to do a job when he hadn’t been given adequate time to plan. The military way—the professional way—was to do extensive recon, take photos, then sit in a room, analyze the situation, and plan the op down to the last detail—including contingency plans if something went wrong. But the boss said there was no time for that.
He’d gotten inside the building by holding the door open for a tenant whose arms were filled with grocery bags, then found Hamilton’s apartment. He immediately saw he had two problems to deal with: The door had a good lock and there was an ADT security sticker on the door, meaning the apartment had an alarm system. It usually took the cops fifteen or twenty minutes to respond to an alarm, and fifteen minutes should be enough time to do what he needed to do, provided he could pick the lock, which he wasn’t sure he could. He was a guy who normally bashed down doors without trying to unlock them.
Before he left the apartment building, he went to one of the side doors and blocked it open so he’d be able to get back inside the building quickly, then went back to his car to think. In the short briefing he’d been given, he was told Hamilton had a kid and the kid went to school, which meant the kid should get home before Hamilton. When he went to school, classes usually let out at three or four, and he doubted that Hamilton got home before six.
He had a picture of the kid—he didn’t know how the boss had gotten it, Facebook probably—and he knew what Hamilton looked like so he didn’t need a picture of her. If he saw the kid go into the apartment building, he’d go back inside the building and just knock on Hamilton’s door. He’d tell the kid he was a maintenance guy or a gas company guy or some fucking thing—how hard could it be to con a kid?—and when the kid opened the door, he’d be in. Then he’d take care of the kid—the boss said he didn’t care what happened to her—then wait for Hamilton to come home.
—
KAY CALLED CALLAHAN’S OFFICE and was informed that he still wasn’t back from wherever he’d gone to. She wondered where the hell he was. Not knowing who else to call, she called Anna Mercer and asked if she knew when Callahan might return.
“Why do you want to know?” Mercer asked.
“Because I need to talk to him about something.”
“About what?”
“Something personal. So can you tell me when he’s getting back?”
“No. You don’t have need to know.”
What a bitch.
She went to her Farsi class after talking to Mercer, which was good, because the language was enough of a challenge that it forced her to concentrate on the words being force-fed into her brain through the headset—as opposed to thinking about Eli Dolan and what she was going to tell Callahan. After class, she usually went to the gym for a workout. Her arm and her ribs were fine, but she was still feeling some pain in her leg. The leg was really beginning to annoy her. She was a person who needed to exercise—she felt fat and sluggish when she didn’t—and the leg was keeping her from going all out like she usually did. She figured, for the sake of her leg, it would be best to skip the workout and go home. She looked at her watch; if she hurried, she could be home before Jessica and be the one who made dinner for a change.
—
THERE SHE WAS—at least, he thought it was her: a short blond girl with a knapsack, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He glanced at the photo again. Yeah, it was the kid. He wondered how old she was.
He’d give her ten minutes, enough time for her to pick up the mail, disable the alarm, and relax a little. While he waited, he stuck the Beretta in his waistband and zipped up his jacket so it wasn’t visible. Then he stepped out of the car and put his wallet and cell phone inside the trunk, in the well where the spare tire was. He could just see his wallet falling out or his phone coming off his belt while he was taking care of business. Wouldn’t that be a bitch?
He was just starting across the street when he saw Hamilton coming down the block. He’d recognize that body and the long blond hair anywhere. Shit! What the hell was she doing home from work so early? He turned around and went back to his car; now he needed to come up with a different plan.
—
WHEN KAY GOT HOME, she was surprised to find that Jessica, instead of studying that night, was going to do something that normal kids do: It was Friday night and she was going out for a pizza with some of her girlfriends, then to a Dave Matthews concert at the Verizon Center. An hour later, Jessica left—still dressed as she’d been for school—in jeans and a sweatshirt. The girl had no sense of fashion.
Since Jessica was going out for pizza, there was no need to fix a nice dinner for the two of them, as she’d planned. Instead she had a beer, watched the news, and had a Lean Cuisine. Then she had a second Lean Cuisine.
She checked out the drivel on the tube and rejected the offerings; she picked up a novel that Jessica had recommended, then put it back down because she knew she’d never finish it. The damn book was almost five hundred pages long! She spent five minutes looking over her shoulder into the bathroom mirror and concluded her ass was expanding even though she knew she hadn’t gained a pound.
She decided to go for a run. She needed to move. As she changed into sweatpants and a long-sleeved jersey, she told herself that she’d take it easy and wouldn’t push the leg too hard. She grabbed her keys and opened the door, then stopped.
Don’t be a dummy.
She went back into the bedroom and opened the gun safe in the closet. Inside the safe was her Glock—Kay’s weapon of choice and the type she’d carried when she worked at the DEA—and a little short-barreled .32 that fit in an ankle holster. She’d purchased both guns in Virginia and had bought the .32 only because it was on sale and would fit easily in her purse—and because she thought it was cool.
When Jessica had first moved in with her in San Diego, she’d kept the gun safe locked. After her daughter was kidnapped—and after she realized Jessica was ten times smarter than she’d ever be—she decided to leave the safe unlocked so Jessica could get to a weapon quickly if she ever needed one. She wasn’t concerned about Jessica accidentally shooting herself or anyone else. When they moved to D.C., she forced Jessica to go with her to a range one day to shoot the guns. Her daughter—being the pinko, liberal communist she was—accompanied her reluctantly, but insisted she’d never use the guns, no matter what. She said if she ever found herself in a situation where she needed a weapon, she’d call a cop—and Kay almost gave her an
other NRA bumper sticker quote: A gun in your hand is better than a cop on the phone. Then she figured why bother to have another gun-control argument with a teenager who would start quoting Gandhi.
Kay Velcroed the .32’s holster to her right ankle, which she realized wasn’t the smartest thing to do because her right leg was the one that had been wounded and the gun just added extra weight. On the other hand, she didn’t want to strap it to her left ankle since she was right-handed. She reminded herself again that she was going to take it slow.
—
HE SAW the car park in the loading zone in front of the apartment building, and a moment later the kid came out and got into the car. Shit. If the kid had come outside alone and hadn’t jumped into a car, he might have been able to snatch her and then use her as a hostage to force Hamilton to open her apartment door. But that wasn’t going to happen now.
So what should he do? He reached for a cigarette in his shirt pocket—then laughed. He’d stopped smoking over a year before and was glad he had; it was a nasty, disgusting habit. But at a time like this, when he needed to think, a cigarette would have been good.
Maybe what he should do was wait until the kid returned and see if he could grab her before she went back inside. Or better yet, go into the building now and hide out near the elevator, and when the kid returned, no matter when that was, get her going into the elevator and then use her to force Hamilton to open the door.
Wait a minute! Hamilton had just opened the door to the apartment building. She was dressed like she was going for a run. Yeah, now she was stretching. He hated to keep changing the plan, but maybe this was a good thing. Maybe he could make this work.
—
IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE, but Kay could see okay; there were streetlights, not to mention passing cars. She stretched for a few minutes, then picked a direction: up Connecticut, toward the National Zoo.
