Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  “What’s the difference between Islamist and Islamic?” I slurped syrup and water through a straw. It tasted like cough medicine.

  “Islamics pray to Allah. Islamists only get on their knees to blow an arms dealer. Not the official definition, but accurate.”

  “What’s that got to do with funny money?”

  “Same thing as cigarette smuggling. Anything that generates a steady flow of untraceable cash is potential funding for weapons.”

  “Most smugglers are grifters. They wouldn’t know how to find Iran on a map.”

  “I’ll give Jeff Starzek a geography test. Why didn’t you tell me yesterday you were looking for him too?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “That’s so twentieth century. Now the burden’s on the citizen to come forward and tell what he knows.”

  “You carry the burden. My leg hurts.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “I hired myself.”

  “That isn’t what you told Finlander.”

  “I didn’t like Finlander. He looks like a cigar-store chief.”

  “You only tell the truth to people you like?”

  “Sometimes not even them.” I pulled a shred of soggy coleslaw out of my burger and laid it on my plate. I prefer my side dishes on the side.

  “I don’t like to snap people in the ass with the flag,” he said. “Ever do a stretch in Milan?”

  “I came close once. I understand the food’s better in those federal pens.”

  “It’s a shithole. Worse when you’re being held on an open-ended charge of being a reluctant material witness in a national-security investigation.”

  “It’s all tied up with my getting shot,” I said.

  “I wondered about that.”

  “Everyone does. You’re the only one who didn’t ask about it.” I told him about Grayling, all of it, including Jeff Starzek. He listened with his arms folded on his side of the table. He hadn’t ordered anything.

  “You helped out a friend because he saved your life,” he said when I finished. “What makes your hide worth more than your country’s?”

  “I just learned how to program my VCR.” I wiped my hands on a napkin the size of a lens wiper. “How long would you have gone on wandering all over your sales territory if I hadn’t given you that circular?”

  “How long would you have hung onto it if you hadn’t jammed yourself up with the law?”

  “It’s a chronic condition. Don’t tell me you didn’t pull my file.”

  “It reads a little like Victor Hugo. What’s a vet with a bachelor’s degree in sociology doing crawling over transoms and walking exercise yards?”

  “The Peace Corps wasn’t hiring. What’s a hipster like you doing chasing guys in skirts and sandals and talking into his shoe?”

  “How are the fries here?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He plucked one off my plate, scooped up some ketchup, and ate it in two bites. “Could be crispier. Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay, you’ve made more progress on this case in twenty-four hours than my people have in three months. Your last contact with Jeff Starzek is more recent than anyone’s I’ve talked to, and without a little thing like due process to slow you down, you’ve found something that’s been missing almost a year.”

  “The circular? Paul Starzek had a whole stack.”

  “More than just a stack. Did you know Treasury paper isn’t paper?”

  “Don’t tell me it really is lettuce.”

  “Okay, so you know.” He frowned. We seemed to be saying okay a lot. “All those holograms and infrared ink in the new bills are basically bullshit. It’ll slow down the counterfeiters, but only as long as it takes the old bills to wear out and stop being passed from hand to hand. The printing stock’s our only real defense. No one’s figured out a way to duplicate it in a couple of hundred years of trying, and hijacking’s out because it has better security than the president. A single blank sheet is worth as much as the biggest denomination you can print on it. With modern methods and the right material—” He unfolded his arms and sat back.

  “It might as well be genuine.”

  “It is genuine. The printing image can be copied within a gnat’s whisker of the original. Even the authentic article varies microscopically. No two fifty-dollar bills are exactly alike.”

  “Like snowflakes.”

  “It’s a lot less obvious than that. You need a couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth of optical equipment to track the generations.” He refolded his arms and leaned on them. “Civilian technology caught the District with its pants down, big time. We should’ve introduced the new bills twenty years ago, when we had the hardware and no one else did. It would have bought us some time to stay ahead. There are still billions of the old-style in circ, and one percent is fake.”

  “That’s still just a few million, printed on toilet paper.” I looked at the circular. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it. “Oh.”

  “We’ve given the counterfeiters time to catch up with the new design, and now we’ve given them the stock to go on duplicating the old one and finance the research.”

  He stopped talking. A middle-aged couple and a boy of about ten, dressing out to six hundred pounds total in bulky quilted overcoats, had begun to transfer sacks, paper cups, and a twenty-piece set of plastic utensils from a tray onto the next table. We stared at them hard until they became aware of us, packed up, and decamped to another part of the restaurant. I felt like a bully in a junior-high cafeteria.

  “You can’t steal Treasury paper,” Clemson said. “It’s not like knocking over a bank or an armored car. It isn’t transported the conventional way, and the guards are troops in tanks. Direct assault is out; if it looks like an attack will succeed, the sentries have orders to destroy the shipment. There’s more, but I can’t tell you about it, because I don’t know myself. My clearance only goes up to the attorney general.”

  “So how’d they steal it?”

  “They had an accomplice named Uncle Sam. Same lazy bureaucracy that let five hundred tons of fissionable material drain out of the federal stockpile over ten years.”

  “My mother wanted me to take the civil-service exam,” I said. “I kept putting it off.”

  “No one’s ever failed it. Eleven months ago, someone too new to know how things are done in Washington decided to do an inventory in San Francisco and Denver. He lost his job, naturally. But not before it was discovered a ton of stock had disappeared from the United States Treasury.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Not so much, in volume. You know how much paper weighs?”

  “My old man drove a truck. He made regular deliveries of bound copies of newspapers to University Microfilms in Ann Arbor. Dock boss blew his whistle when the trailer was still three-quarters empty. The truck was already overweight. But that was paper.”

  “Cheap newsprint at that. Linen stock like they use for currency would’ve tipped those scales much earlier. Can you give me an idea how big that stack was you saw in Paul Starzek’s church?”

  “I’d say about the size of a double bed.”

  He nodded. I heard his brain ticking. He’d said he wasn’t an accountant, but intelligence is a right-brain operation.

  “That’d be a day’s run in Denver,” he said. “At a guess, fifty billion dollars.”

  “That’s plenty of attrition. Who was minding the store?”

  “Some foreman, just like your old man’s. A bunch of them over who knows how many years. Sheet at a time, say, like Johnny Cash’s Cadillac. At the end, enough to bankroll every paperhanging operation in North America.”

  A yellow schoolbus snorted to a stop outside the window. The black legend along the side branded it the property of a Baptist Bible study school in Monroe. The door cranked open, spilling out a matron in a fleece-lined coat and the first of half a hundred children in bright-colored snowsuits. The place was about to get noisy.

&nb
sp; “What’s their game plan?” I asked. “Flood the economy with phony scrip and bring it to its knees?”

  “Some of my superiors think so. The Germans tried it once. You can’t fault their reasoning; they saw what happened between the wars, when you needed a wheelbarrow full of deutschemarks to buy a stick of gum. It didn’t work here. Our economic system’s pretty sound, no matter what you hear during elections. A ton of paper won’t push it over. But it’ll buy enough weapons and sabotage to keep the jihad going for decades.”

  THIRTEEN

  The church kids trundled in, with the matron shouting above the din for silence. I dumped my debris in a chrome bullet trash can and we left.

  Young Deputy Keppler had driven my Cutlass from Old Carriage Lane to the restricted zone in front of the substation. The oyster-colored Chrysler parked behind it was invisible except when the sun pierced the overcast. That would be Clemson’s. We stood waiting in blowing snow for a break in the traffic before crossing.

  It would be a while. The community was a church, an extinct movie theater advertising Red Wing shoes on the marquee, and a row of brick two-stories joined by common walls on either side of a state highway. The traffic lights were timed to burn as much fossil fuel and run over as many impatient pedestrians as possible. Bitter little flakes swarmed in the high-beams coming from both directions.

  “I can buy Paul Starzek’s little church fronting for terrorists,” I said. “The martyr they chose for their symbol is just the sort of overripe set piece those gibbering types go for. Now tell me why he printed his circulars on Treasury stock.”

  Clemson didn’t seem to be in a hurry. His leather-clad fingers squeaked as he worked them deeper into the gloves, a sound that never failed to make my fingernails shrink back into the cuticles. “He must have gotten it mixed up with his everyday stock. Did you find a printer?”

  I shook my head.

  “Whoever took away the paper probably took that too. No professional shop would ever take credit for that circular.”

  “Amateur’s one thing, stupid something else. That’s a whale of a mix-up.”

  “The one time I interviewed Paul I didn’t get the impression his ski lift went all the way to the peak. His name didn’t cross with any of the legitimate schools of divinity in the FBI database, by the way.”

  “Phony preachers are as common as funny money. The old lady in the convenience store around the corner from Starzek changed a bill for me yesterday with a fake twenty, printed on common stock. It had to be part of the same mistake. But he did okay for a dope. He didn’t buy that marble statue with Camel Cash.”

  “Recent purchase, or he’d have dumped the store mannequin by now. We’ll trace it. There can’t be many sculptors in the country doing that kind of work, if it’s as good as you say.”

  “Maybe he signed it. I didn’t look that close.”

  He didn’t seem to be listening. “Of course Starzek was paid to store the stock until they came for it. He couldn’t resist printing a little on the side. He had the equipment, for his circulars. That’s why they killed him.”

  “Why didn’t you haul him in as a material witness when you talked to him?”

  “Same reason he screwed up. He was too dumb to trust with covert information, anyone could see that. The professionals may talk like fanatics, but they don’t mix rhetoric with work. The rest—the five hundred virgins and the rotten poetry—is theater. They just underestimated his greed.”

  “That’s kind of encouraging.”

  “Not really. They learn from their mistakes.” He flicked a snowflake off an eyelash. “Paul was routine when I interviewed him, a family contact for a man who had no other family. We knew counterfeiting was involved. I wanted Jeff and his cargo. They were probably still on the road then.”

  “You better hope. It won’t look good if that stuff was out behind the house the whole time you were grilling him about his brother.”

  “I forgot my bolt cutters,” he said. “Also a warrant for probable cause to search the place. We go through channels, no matter what the civil libertarians say.”

  It was the first time he’d sounded less than ironic. I wondered if he really thought Jeff had no family apart from Paul. I was starting to feel like a cricket on a fishhook.

  I said, “Paul wasn’t so dumb he couldn’t lie to you and make it stick. On the telephone he called Jeff a foul trafficker. He might call him anything else after fifteen years with no contact, but not that. The trafficking came later. Unless you told him.”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “Actually I don’t.”

  He looked at me with the cold gray lines of the Milan Federal Correctional Facility in his expression. Then the cars thinned out and we started across, Clemson on the trot, me propelling myself with the cane in broken hops. I was getting better at locomotion. Give me six more months and I’d be outracing ice-cream trucks.

  “I should’ve put Paul’s place under surveillance,” he said. “We’d have rounded up the whole ring and the Treasury paper when they tried to move it out. We’re still a small agency; you need more than a hunch to tie up a detail twenty-four-seven indefinitely. Now we have to start pumping our informants all over again.”

  “You might also have prevented a murder. As long as we’re dreaming.”

  “Speaking personally, I mourn a life lost. Professionally speaking, he can go to the part of hell where they keep the rich evangelists. My agency deals in whole populations.”

  A flatbed pickup hauling a pair of snowmobiles shushed between us, stranding me in the center lane with my shoes full of slush. I waited for it to pass, then gunned the cane to catch up. It was like skiing with one pole. “You think Jeff killed him?”

  “Someone was bound to, a liability like Paul. Right now I don’t know anyone killed him. Tomorrow I’ll fly in a team of pathologists from Quantico and open him up. I’m sure these local medical examiners are competent, but the best is the best.”

  “He ought to be thawed out by then.”

  “You should’ve come to Finlander and let him do the digging. What are you, some kind of ghoul?”

  “My physical therapist said I needed exercise.” I was panting.

  “Well, the crime scene is federal property now. There’s no higher authority to bail you out if you set foot on it.”

  “And you feds have such a good track record in court.”

  We reached the opposite sidewalk. Little gray jets shot out of his mouth like water rockets. I was leaking steam all over like Old Number Nine. I hobbled over to a parking meter and leaned on it. Up there they put them against the buildings to clear the snow lane. “Which of your informants tipped you Jeff was involved?”

  “That was fieldwork. I’ve been tracking that stolen stock all over my territory. That false twenty the old lady slipped you had relatives, all in this area. It might have been a trial batch before they committed the genuine paper. Who better to spread it around than the local cowboys?”

  “Too thin. In my office you came on like you had him dead to rights.”

  “What, you never ran a bluff into day money?”

  “You’re bluffing now. Who’s your man inside?”

  “I couldn’t answer that even if I had one. Why ask?”

  “Was it Paul?”

  Snow grizzled his dark curls. His expression didn’t change. It was still filled with bars sliding on tracks like theater flats. “If it was, he’d be alive now. We look after our people better than that.”

  “I didn’t mean that. Maybe he doubled back on you and your people downsized him.”

  “You must buy your fiction off remaindering tables. We retired all the death squads under Gerald Ford.”

  “And reinstated them under George W. Bush.”

  “You’re just a goddamn lone rider, aren’t you?”

  “By default. Most of the time I can’t get anyone to ride with me.”

  “Paul wasn’t one of ours,” he said. “Our recruiting pool’s a bit less
polluted than the enemy’s.”

  “I’ll run with that for now. I’ve only got two shoulders to look over.”

  “You don’t have to look over either of them. You can go back to Detroit and work the private sector.” He got out his keys and pressed a button. The Chrysler’s lock opened with a falling note. “If I tell you how we got onto Jeff Starzek, will you do that, or do I have to take two hours away from defending America processing the paperwork on your arrest?”

  “No.”

  He blinked. “No to what? You won’t give it up, or I won’t have to take you into custody?”

  “The first. Two hours or two years. Four weeks ago I didn’t have two minutes.” I tapped my leg with the cane.

  I didn’t hear his response. He spoke under his breath and a car was passing behind him ten miles above the limit, spraying fantails of snot. But I saw the plume of vapor escape between his teeth and knew it was one syllable. He crossed the sidewalk and leaned in close. For a man who didn’t shave every day he used expensive cologne.

  “Jeff’s our informant,” he said. “Tell that to anyone—anyone, and I include your lieutenant lady friend in Detroit—and the FBI will open you up right next to Paul Starzek.”

  FOURTEEN

  Most physical therapists are built like Bluto. Mine was a scrawny-looking five-eleven, 140, with Barton Fink hair combed straight up from the scalp and glasses with old-fashioned two-tone frames, black over transparent plastic, Buddy Holly-type metal inlays in the upper corners. Sometimes he reported to work in sweats, others in scrubs. Today it was hospital whites, with a blouse that buttoned at one shoulder, and navy deck shoes with thick white soles. He looked like a mad scientist and could bench-press a BMW.