Dead on Arrival (28 page)

Mahoney was at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but it hadn’t been easy to get there.

Since Broderick’s death, security for senior poli ticians had been ratcheted up to a degree not seen since 9/11 or maybe since World War II. Homeland Security’s color-coded threat level was now at red, the only time Mahoney could remember its being above orange since the system had been invented. He guessed that if they could’ve come up with a color more alarming than red, they would have used it.

The president was in the White House but the vice president was somewhere else, not in Washington, and the Secret Service wouldn’t divulge his location. The White House itself looked like it was under siege: armed men stationed every few feet, armored personnel carriers parked in the driveway and outside the gates, guys with sniper rifles and rocket launchers visible on the roof – and those were just the secu rity measures that could be seen.

Cabinet members were under guard too, as if they were actually more important than the figureheads that most of them really were, and senior leadership in the House and Senate were flanked by armed men whenever they left their offices and were driven to meetings in armored cars. Mahoney himself, being third in line for the presidency, was being
smothered
by his security, four guys so big they all looked like they could have played on the line for Notre Dame. And that was the problem. He
felt
smothered, and he needed to get away, to someplace where he could be alone and think.

He had them drive him to a restaurant on Capitol Hill and made two of them wait outside, saying four inside was just too many. Then, once in the restau rant, after he’d had a drink, he rose from the table. The two remaining security guys rose with him but he waved them back to their seats. ‘I’m just goin’ to the head,’ he said, ‘and I can’t pee when I’m being watched.’ This embarrassed them so much that Mahoney was gone before they could move.

But instead of going to the restroom, he ducked into the kitchen, borrowed a ski jacket and stocking cap from one of the cooks, and boogied out the back-door, the cap pulled down low on his forehead. Then, feeling momentarily gleeful, he sprinted down the alley – well, for a guy his age and size it was a sprint – and caught a cab to the memorial. The security guys were gonna be pissed when they caught up with him, but screw ’em; he needed some
space
.

So now he sat on a bench near the memorial, that stark black granite wall that lists the names of the fallen and mostly forgotten. There is no memorial in Washington that is more poignant than that simple wall. Mahoney, bundled in the cook’s stained jacket, the stocking cap on his head, looked like a broken-down old vet who had come on a dismal day to mourn those who had fought beside him.

And Mahoney was mourning, just not for the men on the wall – although he had known several of them. He was mourning Bill Broderick – not because he had liked the man but because Broderick’s death was having a horrible galvanizing effect on the passage of his damn bill.

An ordinary bill Mahoney could have kept in committee indefinitely. He could have bounced it from committee to committee until Congress recessed or until it died a quiet death. But not
this
bill. There was just too much media heat and too many congressmen feeling the heat. Two days ago, it had reported out of the committee, two Democrats voting for it. Mahoney then began to do what he could to delay a floor vote, hoping – though without optimism – that something would happen to give him what he needed to get folks turned around. But then Broderick had to go and get himself killed, burnt to a crisp while screwing his secretary. The idiot.

Now practically every member of the House was screaming for Mahoney to bring Broderick’s bill to the floor for a vote. They didn’t scream directly at Mahoney, of course – they screamed via the press. And the press, at least the conservative press, was starting to make John Mahoney sound as patriotic as Benedict Arnold.

There was something else that irritated Mahoney. Before his death, Broderick had tried and failed to come up with a clever name for his bill, something like the ‘Patriot Act,’ a name that would make it sound as if the bill were really in the country’s best interest. He had tried to get the media to latch on to a couple of different names, such as the Domestic Security Act or the Muslim American Validation Act, but these names were neither particularly euphonic nor sufficiently misleading. And no matter what name Broderick tried to give his proposal, the liberals insisted on calling it the Muslim American Registry Act, a name Broderick had hated because it focused attention on the most controversial aspect of his bill. But now the bill had a name. It was being called the Broderick Act.

Jesus
.

Nor could any advantage be taken of the fact that Broderick had been diddling his receptionist the night he died. A tidbit like that might have been useful if the man was still alive, but to bring it up now would be considered by one and all as a despicable thing to rub into the face of Broderick’s widow. So the press, in a rare act of decency, was pretending to accept the story given by Senator Broderick’s aide Nicholas Fine.

Fine had said that the senator had attended a meeting with some constituents the night of his death – this story matched the lie that Broderick had told his wife – and Fine assumed that the senator had stopped by Ms Talbot’s apartment afterward to give her some urgent task related to the meeting. Maybe, Fine said, Broderick had given her something he wanted typed up that very night or possibly something that he wanted her to get into the mail first thing in the morning.
Yeah, he was giving her something,
all right
, the reporters thought, but they didn’t print what they were thinking.

Then the last straw floated down and landed on the camel’s back, prompting Mahoney to ditch his security so he could be alone. The FBI had discovered a note in Broderick’s car, a note that had apparently been left there by the bomber. The previous night when the cop had opened the car to find out who the car belonged to, he hadn’t seen the note. In fact, the cop had planted a knee right on it when he reached over to open the glove compartment to get Broderick’s registration. But after the FBI arrived and began to examine the scene in an organized manner, the note was discovered. The note was typed and unsigned but appeared to have been written by a Muslim American, one not particularly well educated. There were references to Allah, the Koran, and the worldwide Muslim brother hood, and there was the implication that al-Qaeda had helped the bomber, a statement to the effect that wise men across the sea had aided his efforts but al-Qaeda was not mentioned specifically. In the note Broderick was thoroughly denounced as a godless infidel whose bill was proof that America had declared an unholy crusade against all Muslims.

So even though the FBI could not prove it – even though the FBI said
repeatedly
that they could not prove it – the public was convinced that an American Muslim was responsible for the death of a United States senator, a man whose character had already improved tenfold in the hours since his passing.

Mahoney thought about calling DeMarco but decided not to bother. Unless DeMarco could find something in the next forty-eight hours, the Broderick Act was going to become law.

‘Mr Speaker.’

Mahoney turned his head. Aw, shit. His four secu rity guys were jogging across the grass toward him, the Notre Dame offensive line for sure.

They’d found him fast. These guys were good.

‘They blindfolded me,’ Danny said.

‘Son of a bitch!’ DeMarco said, glaring at his cousin.

‘Hey! It wasn’t my fault. I did what you wanted. I got ’em to show me the lab.’

Patsy Hall said, ‘Yeah, but for all you know, it wasn’t even on Pugh’s property.’ She thought for a minute. ‘Was the lab in a cave?’ Looking at DeMarco she said, ‘There’re a couple small caves on Pugh’s land. I snuck in there one night to check ’em out, but at the time they were empty.’

‘You went onto Pugh’s property by yourself, at
night
, and explored these caves?’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah. I didn’t have a warrant and I wasn’t going to get any of my guys in trouble.’

Wow, DeMarco thought. Patsy Hall was something else.

Danny said, ‘This place I was in, it didn’t look like a cave. It was man-made. But it
was
underground. I could tell because we walked down these stairs to get in and the floor was dirt. But the walls weren’t made of rock, like a cave. They were built out of railroad ties, like they dug the space out and reinforced the walls with the ties so they wouldn’t collapse.’

They were in a conference room in Winchester where the DEA had a small field office. They all sat in silence, Danny worrying about his future, DeMarco annoyed at his cousin, and Patsy Hall thinking about Pugh, her lips set in a stubborn line. Hall got up after a moment and opened a file cabinet and pulled out a topographical map that included Pugh’s land. She spread the map out on the table.

‘How long were you driving around?’ she asked Danny.

‘Half hour, maybe forty-five minutes.’

‘Well, which was it? Half an hour or forty-five minutes?’

‘I don’t know! They took my watch when they made me strip.’

‘Shit. And how fast do you think you were driving?’

‘Wherever we were going, it was pretty rough. I’d say less than fifteen miles an hour most of the time, but a couple of times Randy, that asshole, really opened the thing up. Scared the crap out of me.’ Then he added, ‘I mean, being blindfolded like I was.’

‘But most of the time you were going less than twenty?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

Patsy scratched some numbers on the edge of the map. ‘If it took you forty-five minutes at an average speed of twenty miles an hour, you would have gone fifteen miles. She looked down at the map and said, ‘Shit, if you were traveling in anywhere near a straight line, you’d be off Pugh’s property.’

Danny said, ‘But we weren’t traveling in a straight line. We made a lot of turns. I could feel them.’

‘I know,’ Patsy Hall said, shaking her head, ‘but if you drove that long I can’t establish that you were on his property.’ She stood there a moment, studying the map, tracing a slim forefinger over the heavy black line that outlined Pugh’s land. ‘Could you feel anything or hear anything while you were driving?’

‘Like what?’ Danny said.

‘Like was the vehicle going up and down hills?’

‘Sometimes,’ Danny said, ‘but not big ones.’

‘There’s a train track on this edge of the property,’ she said, tapping the map. ‘Did you hear a train? Or other cars, like you might have been near a road?’

‘No. No noises. It was quiet, like we were deep in the woods.’

‘This is hopeless,’ DeMarco said. ‘Maybe we can set up a delivery right away and get Pugh when he delivers the dope.’

‘That won’t work,’ Hall said. ‘
Jubal
won’t be de livering anything. All we’ll get is some mule who won’t talk.’

‘There was one thing,’ Danny said.

‘Yeah, what was that?’ Hall said, obviously not expecting much.

‘Right before we stopped, maybe five minutes before, we drove over something that went
bumpitty-bump,
bumpitty-bump
.’

‘
Bumpitty-bum
p
?’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, like we were going over logs or one of those whaddaya-call’em – cattle guards. It happened twice, right before we stopped.
Bumpitty-bump, bumpitty-bump
, then a couple minutes later,
bumpitty-bump
,
bumpitty-bump
again. Then, a couple minutes after that, we stopped.’

Hall studied the map. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing. ‘This could be it. There’re two creeks running through his place, small ones, no more than two or three feet wide. If I remember right … Wait a minute.’ She went to the file cabinet again, the one from which she’d taken the map. She pulled out an accordion file folder and came back to the table. From the folder she pulled a stack of eight by ten black-and-white photographs.

‘We did
one
aerial surveillance of Pugh’s farm. I tried to get ’em to park a satellite over his place for a week, but they laughed me off.’ She flipped through the photos, then stopped and studied one.

‘Here. You see that? A little bridge made from logs, and here, about two hundred yards away, is another one. The two bridges are where these two creeks come close to each other and run parallel for a while. So if you’re right about the time it took you to get from the second bridge to the lab, the lab’s probably someplace within a quarter mile of the second bridge.’

‘But which one’s the
second
bridge?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Were you going uphill or downhill when you came to the second bridge?’ Hall asked Danny.

‘Uh … downhill,’ Danny said.

‘Then this is the second bridge,’ Hall said, stabbing a finger at the topographical map. She looked directly at Danny, her eyes bright, and said, ‘You’re going to have to go in there tonight and find that lab.’

‘Bullshit!’ Danny said.

DeMarco put on the night-vision goggles. The trees in the woods were clearly visible, everything a greenish color. He’d never worn night-vision goggles before – or a military camouflage suit, combat boots, and a bulletproof vest either. And he wished he wasn’t wearing any of those things right now.

Hall said she couldn’t search for the lab with them. She and her guys – a bunch of DEA cowboys who
knew
how to shoot and sneak through the woods – couldn’t go onto Pugh’s property without a warrant, and they didn’t have sufficient justification to get one. If Danny had been positive he’d been on Pugh’s property it would have been different, but since he’d been blindfolded and didn’t have a clue as to how far he’d traveled, it was impossible to state with certainty where the lab was. Then toss in the fact that the judge would have to accept the word of a convicted felon regarding its whereabouts, and there was no way Hall was going to get a warrant.

So DeMarco and his cousin were on their own. DeMarco didn’t want to go with Danny to search Pugh’s farm, but he didn’t trust his flake of a cousin; he couldn’t put the unveiling of a national conspiracy in the hands of a mafia fence.

Hall and another agent had driven them to the northern boundary of Pugh’s four hundred acres in a black Jeep Cherokee. To reach that spot it had been necessary to go through two pieces of property not owned by Pugh, and Hall had to cut through two barbed-wire fences on the way. Cutting the fences didn’t seem to bother her a bit, DeMarco noted.

‘You’re sure you know how to use a GPS?’ Hall asked Danny a second time.

‘Yeah, I’m positive. I got my hands on one once …’

This meant, DeMarco suspected, that one of Tony Benedetto’s crews had stolen a crate of the instruments.

‘… and I played with the thing for a couple of days,’ Danny said. ‘I know how to use it.’

‘Okay,’ Hall said, and she showed him and DeMarco the GPS unit she was holding in her hand. ‘Here’s the waypoint for where we are now, and here’s the waypoint for the second bridge. When you get to the bridge, start looking for a trail or a path.

Look for tire tracks made by ATVs, places where the grass has been beaten down. Understand?’

‘Sure,’ Danny said.

Sure, my ass
, DeMarco thought. Like his cousin was Davy Crockett instead of some fuckin’ New York wiseguy who could barely find his way through Central Park.

Hall pulled a pistol in a clip-on holster out of one of the pockets of the black ski jacket she was wearing and handed it to DeMarco. ‘That’s a forty-caliber automatic. There’re eight bullets in the clip. You shoot somebody, even in the arm, it’ll put him down. Have you ever used a gun?’

‘Yeah,’ DeMarco said. And that was the truth. He’d once killed a man with a revolver. The man had shot at him and DeMarco had pulled the trigger of the gun he’d been holding out of sheer fright and amazingly hit the guy. But the total amount of time he’d spent with a pistol in his hands could be measured in minutes, and the number of times he’d fired one at another person was exactly once. He didn’t bother to tell Hall this. He did ask, ‘Is the safety on or off?’

The agent with Hall muttered, ‘Oh, great.’

Hall shot a shut-up look at the agent and said to DeMarco, ‘Give it to me.’ He handed her the weapon, and she did something to it and handed it back. ‘Now the safety’s off and there’s a bullet in the chamber. If you have to take it out of the holster, don’t shoot yourself in the leg.

‘Oh, and one other thing,’ she said. ‘There might be people working in the lab.’

‘What?’ DeMarco and his cousin said at the same time.

‘Pugh’s cookers work at night, but we don’t think they work every night.’

‘You don’t
think
?’ DeMarco said.

‘That’s right. Every couple of weeks Pugh buses in a bunch of people to do things around his place: clear brush, prune trees, whatever. These guys will stay on his property overnight in his barn, sometimes for a couple of nights. What we think is that five or six of the workers are really Pugh’s cookers. They sneak off to the lab in the dark and stay there for a couple of nights and brew his meth, then they leave on the bus with the real workers when they’re done. Anyway, Pugh had a bunch of guys come in a few days ago and they left the day before yesterday, so we’re pretty sure they’re not in the lab now. But be careful.’

Be careful
, DeMarco thought. That was just great fuckin’ advice. But he didn’t say anything.

‘So I guess that’s it,’ Hall said. ‘We’ll wait here for you. If you haven’t found the place by dawn, come back here and we’ll try again tomorrow night. And good luck.’

‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Danny said. ‘Aren’t you gonna give me a gun too? I mean, if there’re guys in that lab—’

‘No way,’ Hall said. ‘I shouldn’t even be giving one to your cousin. The DEA’s not supposed to go around arming civilians, and I’m sure as hell not giving one to a guy that’s still under indictment for murder.’

‘But—’ Danny said.

‘No,’ Hall said, eyes like flint. ‘If you’re in danger, call on the radio and we’ll come in and get you. But I hope we don’t have to do that, because that’ll really screw up our chances of getting Pugh.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Unless he personally kills one of you.’

Yeah, that was
real
funny, DeMarco thought.

They didn’t make bad time. The good thing about the woods on Pugh’s property was that there wasn’t a lot of brush or ground cover. They had to veer around thickets of trees a couple of times, but Danny, who was in the lead, brought them back on course. Maybe he really did know how to use the GPS.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the log bridge. The bridge spanned a creek that was two feet wide and had carved a shallow gully into the landscape. Leading to and away from the bridge was a trail created by vehicle tires.

‘Which way,’ DeMarco whispered.

Danny pointed.

‘How do you know it’s not the other way?’ DeMarco asked.

‘The GPS. The other little bridge, the first one we crossed over when I was blindfolded, is behind us. It’s that way. So we go
this
way.’

DeMarco took off the night-vision goggles and looked around. There was no moon, maybe a dozen stars overhead that weren’t obscured by clouds, and it was so damn dark without the goggles he felt like he was standing inside a closet. He didn’t have any idea how the goggles worked, but he was damn glad they did, because if Pugh had someone standing guard, the guard wouldn’t be able to see them unless he was similarly equipped.

‘Okay,’ he said, putting the magic goggles back on. ‘Let’s go.’

They walked down the trail about seventy-five yards and the trail forked.

‘Aw, shit,’ Danny said. ‘Now what? You wanna split up or stay together?’

If Danny had been right about the time, the lab had to be within a hundred yards of the fork in the road. They had radios so if they split up and if one of them found the lab, he could let the other guy know. Nah, forget that, he thought; he didn’t want Danny doing
anything
by himself.

‘We’ll stay together,’ DeMarco said. ‘We’ll go that way a hundred yards or so and look around for an hour; if we don’t find it, we’ll come back here and go up the other road.’

‘You’re the boss,’ Danny said.

They walked for a couple of minutes. Then DeMarco said, ‘Okay, what are we looking for?’

‘Well, shit, Joe, I don’t know. There’s a door in the ground around here somewhere, I think, and there’s bushes or something coverin’ the door. Probably the best thing to do is just walk around and
sniff
. The place I was in stunk to high heaven.’

DeMarco went left and Danny went right, noses probing the air like a couple of Italian beagles. He searched for any anomaly on the ground, anything that didn’t look natural. There was nothing. He wondered if he should take off the night-vision goggles and use a flashlight, thinking it might be easier to spot something with the flashlight as opposed to the green color he was seeing through the goggles. They were at least half a mile from Pugh’s house and he didn’t think a flashlight beam would be visible from that distance. He was still thinking about using the flashlight when the walkie-talkie on his belt squawked, a burst of static that scared the crap out of him.

‘What?’ he hissed into the radio. Then he remembered and said, ‘Over.’

‘I found something. Over,’ Danny said.

DeMarco looked around. He could see Danny fifty yards away and he jogged over to him.

‘Look,’ Danny said, pointing to the ground.

Cigarette butts, a lot of them, in an area underneath a good-sized oak. Most of the butts were contained in a rough three-foot circle of ground and DeMarco guessed that the guys who worked in the lab came out here to smoke so they wouldn’t blow themselves up. They’d sit under the oak, puff their cigarettes, squash the butts out near the tree, and then go back to work. So the lab had to be fairly close, probably no more than fifty feet away, but DeMarco still couldn’t see anything with the night-vision goggles other than a fluorescent green forest.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna use a flashlight.’

‘You sure?’ Danny said.

‘No,’ DeMarco said, and took off the goggles and turned on the flashlight. He walked around searching the ground with the flashlight for five minutes but still didn’t see anything that looked like a door. Then he noticed something. The cigarette butts made a trail, a little Hansel and Gretel trail. The guys would be almost done smoking their cigarettes and they’d start back toward the lab, and on the way they’d drop their cigarette butts on the ground and grind them out with their feet. They couldn’t just flick the butts away because they might start a forest fire. So DeMarco followed the butt trail, sweeping his flashlight back and forth, and then he saw it: a little ridge of dirt about four feet long, about an inch high, and the ridge was absolutely straight. There aren’t many perfectly straight things out in the woods. He walked over and knelt down next to the little ridge and ran his hand along it.

‘Here it is,’ he said to his cousin.

They rubbed their hands along the line in the dirt, came to another intersecting line, and finally understood what they were dealing with. It was a piece of wood, four feet square. A half sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. On top of the plywood was a shallow layer of dirt and three small shrubs. DeMarco couldn’t figure out how the plants could grow in so little soil until he touched the leaves: they were artificial plants and they were glued to the piece of wood. On two parallel sides of the plywood sheet were small rope handles that had been covered with dirt. All you had to do was pick up the piece of plywood and move it to one side.

Hall had said the meth cookers worked at night. During the day, the door to the lab would be almost invisible, just another square of forest, a small plot of dirt and shrubs. From the air it would be
completely
invisible. The nights when Pugh’s men manufactured the meth, they would simply remove the hatch covering the lab’s entrance; maybe they’d just leave it off to provide ventilation for the space, or maybe a couple of men would put the hatch back in place after the cookers had entered the lab and those guys would stand guard and periodically remove the cover when it was time for the cookers to take a smoke break. When they finished working for the night, they’d put the cover back in place and hide the edges with a layer of dirt. The cover was simple, easy to remove, and, most important, almost impossible to spot unless you were right on top of it. DeMarco would never have found it if it hadn’t been for the cigarette butts.

‘Let’s get this thing out of the way,’ DeMarco said.

‘What if there’s somebody inside the lab?’ Danny said.

‘Then either we would have heard them or they would have heard us, all the damn noise you’re making. Pick it up.’ Danny and DeMarco took hold of the rope handles, raised the door, and saw the steps going down into an underground bunker.

‘Hurry up,’ DeMarco said. ‘Get the pictures.’

Danny hustled down the steps. Using a digital camera, he snapped off half a dozen pictures of the equipment inside the lab, shoved the camera back into one of the leg pockets in his camo pants, and came back up the stairs.

‘Let’s boogie,’ Danny said.

‘We gotta put the cover back or they’ll know somebody’s been here. And if that happens they’ll remove all the drugs and the equipment.’

‘Right,’ Danny said.

Master
fuckin’ criminal, DeMarco thought.

They put the cover back in place and brushed dirt over the edges.

‘
Now
let’s get out of here,’ DeMarco said.

‘You assholes hold it right there,’ a voice said. ‘You move and I’ll put deer slugs into both of you.’

Aw, Christ.

DeMarco watched as a man stepped out of the woods, a tall guy with an enormous gut and a beard. Like DeMarco and his cousin, the guy was wearing night-vision goggles – and he was holding a shotgun. There must have been some sort of alarm system protecting the lab. Maybe the plywood sheet covering the lab’s entrance had been alarmed, but DeMarco didn’t think so. He hadn’t seen any wires or contacts, and it had taken them less than five minutes to take the pictures and put the cover back in place. The man couldn’t have gotten to the lab from Pugh’s place that fast. No, more likely they’d tripped some sort of perimeter alarm, maybe motion detectors or cameras that could see in the dark. Whatever the case, this wasn’t good.

‘Now unzip them jackets real slow and hold ’em open. I wanna see if you’re strapped.’

Shit. The gun Patsy Hall had given him was on his belt, on his right hip, and the guy saw it as soon as DeMarco opened his jacket. Seeing DeMarco’s gun, the man said to Danny, ‘Where’s yours?’

‘Don’t have one,’ Danny said.

‘I pat you down and find one, bud, I’m gonna put a hurt on you.’

Danny didn’t respond.

‘Okay,’ he said to DeMarco, ‘toss the gun into the woods. Use your left hand, just your thumb and one finger. You point it at me and I’ll blow your ass away.’