Backfire (10 page)

Cheney said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Sue will drop the ball cap; then we could try the FRP. One last note: We still don’t have anything about our missing prosecutor, Mickey O’Rourke. We’ve talked to his prosecution team, his co-workers, his family, his friends. We have him on camera leaving the Federal Building by himself late Thursday morning, though he never told anyone in his office he was going out. We’re examining his phone records, his credit card bills, but as of yet we don’t have anything very helpful. His wife, as you can imagine, is a mess.

“Her name’s Melissa. She told us Mickey had seemed distracted the last week or so, but he wouldn’t tell her what was wrong. She did remember he kept asking his two daughters where they were going and when they’d be home every time they stepped out of the door, which makes it sound like O’Rourke was frightened. Because of the Cahills or this Sue? We don’t know if he skipped or if he was taken by someone, but the longer he’s gone, the worse it looks.”

Hoover Building

Washington, D.C.

Saturday afternoon

Agent Dane Carver studied the young man sitting opposite him and Agent Ruth Warnecki Noble in one of the small interview rooms on the third floor of the Hoover Building. Ted Moody was bouncing his leg up and down, and kept his eyes on his bouncing leg, as if afraid if he looked them in the eyes they’d shoot him.

Dane sat with his arms crossed over his chest, his expression hard. “You don’t look like a street punk, Mr. Moody, but I’ve been wrong before. How long have you been doing crap like this?”

The young guy flinched, raised his head, his eyes blinking furiously. “I didn’t do anything wrong, not really. I mean, I don’t know why those agents came and forced me to come with them. I have to get to work or Mr. Garber will fire me.”

Ruth said, “I spoke to Mr. Garber, told him you were assisting us, so your job is safe. But you did do something you shouldn’t have done.”

Dane said, “It’s called a felony, and you’re a criminal, Mr. Moody.”

“No, I’m not, sir, Agent, I’m not a criminal. Maybe you think—no, I—nothing I did was wrong.”

Ruth leaned over the table, put her hand over his and smoothed it out. He had long, slender fingers and fairly clean fingernails today, but his hand was moist with sweat, he was so afraid, mostly of Dane, who looked perfectly ready to shove his tonsils into his sneakers.
Good.
“Ted—may I call you Ted?”

He whispered, “My mama calls me Teddy even though I’m grown up and even have my own apartment now, since last April, over on Washburn Street. It’s not much, but I pay the rent on it all by myself, and I’ve got a bed and a couch and a TV.”

“Teddy, then,” Ruth said in the same gentle voice she used with her eldest stepson when he lost a ball game. “We really need your help. We need to know who hired you to deliver that envelope into the Hoover Building and recite that story to the security guards.”

“But I don’t know, I mean—is it national security?”

Dane opened his mouth to blast him again, but Ruth gave him a look she made sure Teddy saw, and Dane made do with a silent message to Teddy:
Fear me.

Ruth kept touching Teddy’s hands, kept her voice gentle. “Teddy, was it a man or a woman who gave you the envelope?”

Teddy shot a look at Dane, grabbed Ruth’s hand like a lifeline. “All right, ma’am, I’ll tell you. It was a man. Look, I really needed money because I lost most of my pay in a poker game and I didn’t want to have to ask my mom to help me with the rent. He offered me two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, and all I had to do was deliver that envelope here. I didn’t have to run over anybody or break any laws, nothing like that, which I wouldn’t do anyway.”

Ruth beamed at him, patted his hand. “Tell us about this man. What did he look like? Was he young, old?”

Teddy leaned really close to Ruth. “I never saw him, I swear.”

Bummer.
Both Dane and Ruth knew he was telling the truth, so there was no reason for Dane to pound the table and yell at him.

“Then how do you know it was a man, moron?” Dane asked him, sitting forward.

“He sounded like a man on the phone. I mean, why would a woman do something like that? Really, he sounded like a man—honest.”

Dane said, “All right, then tell us how you happened to connect with him.”

Teddy said, “You know I work at the Union Seventy-six gas station over on Bowner Avenue. Mr. Garber hired me because I’m real good at figuring out what’s wrong with a car, so anyway, this guy called me on my cell phone—said he’d seen me work, said he’d heard people say they could count on me, that I was reliable.” Teddy Moody tried not to puff up, but he did. “Really, ma’am, Agent ma’am, I don’t know anything about him, but he said he knew I was good to the bone, and he surely admired responsible young people like me, that’s what he told me, exactly. My mama’s always telling me I was good, but you can’t always believe your mama.”

And that made all the difference, Dane thought. It was strange logic, but he understood it. A nerdy twenty-year-old kid with one shining skill and the guy had the brain to praise him, drew him right in. That was clever.

“So then he told me what he wanted me to do, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it, I swear I didn’t.”

Ruth said, “He called you only once?”

Teddy nodded.

“Did he tell you his name?”

“I asked him who he was, and he laughed. He said people used to call him the Hammer, but his name didn’t matter. He told me he would mail me an envelope inside another envelope, and in the second envelope there’d be two one-hundred-dollar bills and a script—that’s what he called it, ‘my script’—and all I had to do was tell the security guards in the lobby exactly what he’d written on the script.”

“And that was, exactly?”

Teddy closed his eyes and repeated word for word the conversation Ruth and Dane had heard on the security tape.

“That’s very impressive, Teddy,” Ruth told him.

“The Hammer told me to practice the script in front of the mirror until I had it memorized and it sounded all natural, and so I did. That was all, Agent ma’am, I swear.” Teddy’s eyes shimmered with tears. “He promised I couldn’t get into trouble. He said it was only a joke on this Agent Dillon Savich. He said no one would ever even find out who I was. How could they? I’m a law-abiding person, and I could just walk out. I believed him. I was in this knot of tourists and everything happened like he said it would. I simply slipped back into the crowd when the guards were talking about the envelope.” He dropped his head again, studied his hands. “I wanted to believe him, you know? I mean, I really did walk out and nobody said a word to me. And there were the two brand-new hundred-dollar bills—I really needed that money. What was in that envelope? Was it bad?”

Ruth said, “Yes, very bad. The Hammer wasn’t trying to help you out, Teddy, and deep down, you knew that, didn’t you?”

Teddy swallowed. He looked scared and miserable. “Yeah, I worried about it, Agent ma’am, but it was two hundred bucks and I didn’t think it could be that bad. I mean, it was only a dippy white envelope, nothing lumpy in it, like a bomb or anything. I’m sorry, I really am.” He looked from one to the other. “Am I in real bad trouble?”

The kid looked so scared Dane hoped he wouldn’t pee his pants. He said, “Let’s see if you can redeem yourself. Agent Warnecki asked you if the guy sounded young, older, or really old. Tell us what you can and we’ll see.”

Teddy’s head snapped up, hope beaming out of his eyes. “He sounded—well, I never knew my pa or my grandpa, never had either one of those, though I guess everyone has to, even if they’ve never met them, right?”

Ruth smiled. “So he sounded what, forty? Sixty? Eighty?”

“In the middle, I guess.”

“Did he have an accent?”

Teddy shook his head. “No, he didn’t sound like anything I recognized, and his voice was kind of raspy, you know, like a longtime smoker’s voice, not very deep, but scratchy, like I said.”

“Do you have the script the Hammer sent you?”

Teddy shook his head. “I’m sorry. He told me as soon as I memorized it I had to burn it, and so I did. It sounded kind of neat, you know? Kind of like I was a spy or something, and so I borrowed Mr. Garber’s Redskins lighter and burned it out in back of the station.”

Dane pushed over a sheet of blank paper. “Was the script written in pencil or pen, or on a computer?”

“He handwrote it—a pen. It was black ink.”

Dane pulled out his pen and handed it to Teddy. “I want you to copy his handwriting the best you can. Write the script down as close to the way it looked. Take your time, Teddy. This is very important.”

Dane’s unspoken message this time was
Do it well and I might let you live.
After five minutes Dane and Ruth studied the script. The lettering was cramped and slanted really far to the right, like the Hammer had fisted the pen and written nearly upside down. A left-hander? Or someone who was trying to deceive?

Dane said, “Not bad,” and Teddy looked suddenly like he might survive.

Ruth said, “Now, Teddy, I want you to write down everything the Hammer said to you when he called you on your cell, from beginning to end. I know it’s been a couple of days. Do the best you can.”

Teddy scrunched up his face and labored. After another five minutes he had written phrases, some single words, and some complete sentences, enough for them to see exactly how he drew the kid in.

Ruth said, “Think a moment, Teddy. What was your impression of the Hammer? What I mean by that is what did you think while you spoke to him? Did he frighten you? Did he make you laugh? Was he sincere? Did you believe him?”

Teddy fiddled with Dane’s pen as he thought about this. Finally, he said, “He sounded like I always thought my daddy would sound if I’d ever known him.”

Good enough,
Ruth thought. Confident, probably some hardnose expecting obedience, and he’d gotten it from Teddy Moody.

Teddy said, “I didn’t think you’d ever find me. I mean, I know there are cameras everywhere, but I’ve never even been arrested for anything, and why would anyone in the lobby know me? The Hammer told me you’d never find me, since I was just another tourist. See? I wrote that down, right there.” And he pointed. “How did you find me?”

Dane said, “An agent who watched the security video saw something black under a couple of your fingernails. Once we enlarged your hands, we saw it was something thick and oily. We had photos of you. All we did was show them around some of the gas stations and body shops in the area. There aren’t that many. We found you on the third try.”

Teddy Moody blinked. He looked from Ruth to Dane and back again. “That is so cool,” he said simply. “I’d sure like to do stuff like that.”

Ruth smiled at him as she patted his shoulder. “You’re still too young, Teddy, but maybe in ten years or so, if you don’t take any more money from strangers, you could try out.”

Dane leaned over the table close to his ear. “You better keep your poker game stake at fifty bucks, Teddy, no higher. You don’t want any more Hammers searching you out. If something had gone wrong, believe me, he would have slit your throat and walked away, whistling.”

Teddy looked like he was going to faint. “But you’re not going to arrest me or anything, are you, Agent sir?”

“Not this time,” Dane said.

Teddy gave both Dane and Ruth a blazing smile. “I got rent money and I won’t have to go to jail, either. What a great day.”

Ruth and Dane’s eyes met when the elevator doors closed on Teddy Moody and the security guard who was escorting him from the Hoover Building. They both smiled.

“That’s one lucky kid,” Dane said. “And so are we. I have an idea where to look for this guy.”

California Street

San Francisco

Saturday afternoon

Harry carefully steered his Shelby into a parking space in the California Street garage of the Mason Building, which housed Milo Siles’s law firm. He looked over at Eve. “Savich told me he hates driving that rental car, says it hurts his soul.”

Eve laughed, flipped her hand one way, then the other. “Well, red Porsche, uck-tan rental—tough choice.”

Harry cut the engine, fiddled with his keys. “Congratulations, by the way, on what happened with Cindy and Clive. You did good.”

“It was Dillon who told me to rattle her. I’ll tell you, though, when she spit out Sue I nearly fainted.”

Harry fiddled some more with his keys. “I guess I never made her mad enough. Yeah, I scared her, but she never stopped trying to play me, and all the while Clive sat back and grinned like a fathead, and watched her work me over. What she did to the other agents who interviewed her was just as sad.” He hit his fist hard against the steering wheel, then looked closely to see if he’d done any damage. Luckily, he hadn’t. What, Eve wondered, would he do if he’d wounded his baby?

He looked out the window, watched Savich pull the uck-tan Taurus into a parking slot. “I’d like to have been there when she lost it.”

Eve grinned. “She claimed right away she’d made it up, then she tried to provoke me back. She’s really pretty good at it. What I liked best was when she asked me what I’d do with a difficult man, like Savich. He’d turned her off, you see, and she saw he wasn’t interested, and couldn’t stand it.”

“You can tell me later how you answered that,” Harry said, getting out of the Shelby. He said to her over the roof of the car, “But none of that means you need to be along on this interview.”

She tilted her head, swinging her ponytail, and one of her eyebrows went straight up. “What? You don’t want my incredible brain at work on Milo Siles? Hey, he might spit out Sue’s name, too. How can you afford to miss out on that chance?”

Harry was being a dog in the manger. He knew it and wanted to punch himself out. He sighed and stepped away to join Savich.

Savich said, “I like the Shelby, Harry, it oozes style. How do you like driving a stick in San Francisco?”

“Newbies around here tend to pray hard when they have to stop on a steep incline, but not us old-timers. All we old-timers ever worry about is how often we have to buy new tires.”

Eve poked him in the ribs. “You’re telling me you never pray when you’re stopped dead on one of those Pacific Heights inclines?”

He shook his head and gave a tug on her ponytail. “I guess you drive a wuss automatic.”

“And I’m proud of it.”

“Siles’s law firm has the entire eighteenth floor,” Savich said. “There are a total of ten equity partners, a gazillion assistants, lawyers, and secretaries on salary. I verified Siles is in, but I didn’t make an appointment; better to catch him by surprise. It seems a lot of folk work on Saturdays, including Silas’s secretary. Harry, this guy knows you very well. Eve, how about you?”

“The Cahills’ trial is the first time I saw him in federal court. I doubt he’ll recognize me. I always sat in the back of the courtroom.”

“Harry, any advice?”

“He’s fast on his feet, and trying to pin him is like nailing Jell-O to a tree.”

Savich grinned. “We’re here to try anyway. Harry, Cheney says you do contempt and scorn really well. Feel free. A little fear couldn’t hurt, either. Eve, go with your gut, depending on how he reacts to you.”

“And what will you do, Dillon?” Eve asked, as she swung her black bag over her shoulder.

He thought about that for a moment. “If you guys leave any blanks, I’ll try to fill them in.”

They were greeted on the eighteenth floor by a stylish young woman with dark hair, the only receptionist manning the large, curving mahogany counter on this fine Saturday.

Savich looked at her name badge, smiled, and showed her his creds. “Alicia, we’d like to see Mr. Siles.”

Alicia drew back, alarmed. “Do you have an appointment, Agent? Ah, Special Agent?”

Savich said, his smile warm, “We don’t need one. Isn’t that handy?”

She looked at Harry, then at Eve. “Who are you?”

Eve and Harry showed her their creds.

“But—”

“Point us to his office, Alicia.”

They followed her along a wide hallway with polished wooden floors to the end office, both Savich and Harry admiring her red power suit, her stiletto heels, and her walk. Eve poked Harry in the ribs.

Before Alicia could precede them into Siles’s office, Savich gently pushed her to the side and opened the door himself. “Thank you, Alicia. Please hold his calls and any clients that show up.”

Milo Siles shot to his feet when the three of them walked into his bragging-rights corner office with its magnificent San Francisco Bay view. The fog had burned off earlier, and it was a postcard day, warm by San Francisco late-fall standards, in the upper sixties.

Milo liked hypermodern, Harry saw, like his own ex-wife. Show Nessa any piece of furniture that combined glass and chrome in a weird shape, and she’d embrace it, while Harry hunched over with a belly cramp.

Savich introduced the three of them to Siles.

Siles said, “I recognize Deputy Barbieri. She sat at the back of the courtroom during our very short trial. I didn’t know you were a marshal. I pegged you as a TV reporter.

“Of course I also know Special Agent Christoff. I believe I’ve seen him perhaps too many times.” He looked hard at Savich. “You, however, I’ve never seen before. You’re not with the local FBI, are you?”

Savich shook his head. “I’m from Washington.”

“What may I do for the three of you?”

Somehow, Eve thought, Savich knew it should be she who answered, and he gave her a small nod. She said, smiling at Siles, who, even in his lifts, was a good three inches shorter than she was, “Cindy told us about Sue, but she forgot to give us a last name. Could you please provide that, sir?”

Savich wouldn’t have seen the flash of horrified recognition in Siles’s eyes if he hadn’t been watching him closely.

Gotcha.

Siles paled a bit, too, if Savich wasn’t mistaken, but for only an instant. Then Siles turned his back on them, got himself together, and said over his shoulder, “Would any of you like a glass of water?”

They all declined.

Milo Siles drank, or pretended to, then sat behind his impressive glass desk framed with a beautiful dark wood that looked like it should be on the endangered list. Black paraphernalia was set precisely on the top of the desk—a computer, a phone, a fancy black desk set that looked like an expensive Christmas present from someone who didn’t know what else to buy for him but didn’t want to cheap out.

Siles waved them to chairs. There were only two. Without hesitation, Eve fetched another chair. She noticed that all the chairs were lower than Siles’s, so he could, quite literally, look down on them. She remembered clearly her father telling her once, “You don’t have to hunt for red buttons to push with short guys. And short guys wearing lifts are the easiest of all.”

Eve glanced at Siles and saw from his look that he seemed to have downgraded her to gofer, a pretty girl with no particular importance, even though she was a deputy marshal. And so she said to him, her voice deferential, “I have to tell you, sir, I admired watching you sparring with the prosecutor. O’Rourke didn’t have a chance against you even though he’s probably a good eight inches taller than you and doesn’t have to sit on a stack of books.”

Bravo,
Savich thought.

Whatever Siles would have said stuck in his throat. He turned red, then yelled, “I do not sit on a pile of books!”

Harry said, his voice lazy, “Come on, now, Deputy Barbieri, no reason to insult him. I’ll bet his dad was short, so what could he expect? It’s not very nice to rub his nose in it. Look at his office. He’s a very successful man. He could probably convince the devil to buy charcoal for a barbecue.”

Siles tented his fingers, regarded each of them in silence, smoothing himself out. “You’re all quite good. But these insults, they’re rather immature, don’t you think? I’m a busy man. What can I do for you?”

“Tell us about Sue,” Savich said.

“I heard about your interview with my clients without my being present,” Siles said. “I don’t care that they told you it was all right, because it’s not. If that happens again, I’ll take it up with the court.”

Savich said, “It seems to me a big part of the court is missing, and another part has been shot. So I’ll repeat what Deputy Barbieri asked you for, a last name. We know Sue is very likely an agent of a foreign government. Attorney-client privilege won’t protect you for long from Homeland Security and the CIA if you’re abetting espionage against the United States.”

Siles said easily, “Isn’t there an old song about Sue? I wonder why Cindy mentioned a girl named Sue?” And he laughed.

Savich said, “Because Sue is involved, a go-between. The Cahills’ handler. She probably hired the Cahills to help her get the classified documents from Mark Lindy’s computer, or maybe the Cahills looked her up when they realized what they had. I’m sure you can tell us how this all worked. You don’t want to be tried for treason, Mr. Siles.”

Milo Siles sat forward, clasped his hands atop the huge black desk pad. “I have never heard either of the Cahills mention a woman named Sue. I don’t know personally who this Sue might be, well, unless she was referring to my wife. There is no question of treason or of selling any of Mark Lindy’s computer data to anyone. The Cahills were being tried for murder, not treason.” He sat back, grinned at them. “My wife, by the way, is a bitch, and I’m taking steps to see she won’t be my wife for much longer. Trust me, I’d hardly be involved in some conspiracy with her.”

His desk phone rang, and Siles picked it up, listened, and said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” He set the phone gently back into the receiver. “Poor Alicia. I’m a busy man, even on Saturday. She was afraid to put through the call. Are we done here?”

“And here I thought we’ve only just started,” Eve said.

Milo Siles looked amused. He studied Eve Barbieri’s very pretty face, her blond hair whipped back into a ponytail, showing off her well-shaped ears that sported small gold studs. Her red leather jacket was open, showing her black turtleneck. “When I first noticed you in the courtroom, Deputy, I thought you were real cute, all bouncy and clean like some of the female TV anchors, all tits and no brains, a girl next door every guy dreams about marrying. But let me be honest here. You’re not in Cindy Cahill’s league. She makes men forget their names from twenty feet away. She’d have no reason to be disturbed by your looks, such as they are. And you’re what, five, six years older than she is?”

She’s got him taking shots at her,
Harry thought
. Good work.

Eve smiled at him. “I guess that’d place me closer to Clive’s age, like I could hook up with him and it wouldn’t look quite so obscene. Is that what you were thinking, sir?”

She watched him quickly rethink his approach. She saw when he’d decided how to deal with her, all in about two seconds. Siles had defended some of the smarmiest, most dangerous people on the planet, drug dealers, extortionists, and murderers. Few people could shake him.

Savich could, maybe, but she? To him she was nothing more than a fly buzzing around him.

Siles said, “Who cares about ages, Deputy? They’re a loving couple. Wouldn’t you say you’re being rather sexist?”

Eve shook her head.
“Not me. You want to know what I think? I think Cindy drives the bus and Clive has been expendable for a while now. I looked at him and wondered how long it would take before she dumps him. Not that she’ll get the chance now. I mean, she’s never getting out of prison unless she talks to us, right?”

“I have a client waiting outside—” He looked down at his Piaget watch. “Do either of you gentlemen have anything to say, because I’m finished talking with Ms. Ponytail here—Deputy Marshal, ah, what did you say your name was?”

Savich said smoothly, “Mr. Siles, why don’t you tell us what you think about Federal Prosecutor Mickey O’Rourke’s disappearance.”

“I don’t know anything about it, Agent Savich. How could I? Mickey has never shared his emotional sensitivities with me. I did hear through the grapevine that he was having an affair with a law clerk last year, though I don’t know if that has anything to do with this. Look. I know people are starting to get alarmed, since Mickey hasn’t showed up anywhere. I’m as concerned as anyone else.” He paused for a minute. “We all noticed he was behaving pretty strangely in the pretrial hearings, like ignoring Judge Hunt’s direct orders to hand over needful documents so I could give my clients the best defense. I chalked all his balking up to the intense cutthroat competition in the federal prosecutor’s office finally getting to him. They have about a hundred federal prosecutors, and they’re always jockeying for position. Did you know the prosecutors themselves keep actual records of their wins, who gets the toughest prison sentences in the least amount of time for the least cost? This is a death penalty case, and Mickey was going to have to convince a jury without using any of that classified information, information I’ll bet he couldn’t even access himself, information he either couldn’t or wouldn’t turn over to me. Can you imagine the stress?