Dead on Arrival (13 page)

DeMarco turned down an offer from the redhead – to make him a good home-cooked dinner – even when she winked and said that dessert would be something special. Two hours later was ringing the doorbell of a large expensive home in McLean, Virginia. The home belonged to a lady named Emma.

The door was answered by a young woman in her thirties. The young woman was tall and willowy and blond and lovely. Her name was Christine and she played a cello in the National Symphony. Christine was Emma’s lover.

DeMarco had known Emma for a decade, but Christine had only been with her the last three years. During those three years, DeMarco discovered that he and Christine had absolutely nothing in common. He thought classical music was a cure for insomnia and she thought people who liked football were direct descendants of Attila the Hun. So their conversations, most times they met, usually went like this:

DeMarco: ‘Hey, how you doin’?’

Christine: ‘Fine. How are you?’

DeMarco: ‘Good. Is Emma here?’

Christine: ‘She’s in the kitchen.’

But this day their discourse was slightly different. When Christine answered the door, DeMacro could see she was holding something in her hands. He studied the thing. He knew it was technically a dog, some micro-breed with long hair and bulging wet brown eyes and legs the diameter of a pencil. DeMarco also noticed the critter was trembling even though it was cupped in Christine’s graceful hands. Maybe the cold air coming through the door was causing the tremors, but DeMarco suspected the animal shivered whenever a door opened. Each time it was exposed to the outside world anything bigger than a hummingbird could swoop down and carry it off in its talons.

Oh, boy, DeMarco thought. He knew Emma liked dogs, but real dogs, practical dogs – dogs like German shepherds and Doberman pinschers and bloodhounds. She would not like something that looked like a furry hand puppet. And Emma was a neat freak. She wouldn’t appreciate canine hair on her upholstery or tiny dog turds on her manicured lawn. DeMarco was guessing that the prissy mutt in Christine’s hands was a source of high tension in her and Emma’s shared domain.

‘Ah, see you got a dog,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yes,’ Christine said, clutching the animal to her small bosom, looking defensive, looking ready for a fight.

‘What’s its name?’

Christine blinked once and said, ‘I named him Joe. I always wanted a little Joe of my own to boss around.’

He was pretty sure she was pulling his chain, but not completely. ‘You’re kidding,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ she said.

Christine not only played the cello at the professional level, she had a master’s in mathematics, music and math seeming to go together. She could be a bit of a ditz at times but she probably had an IQ that was in a category of its own. In a verbal sparring match, DeMarco figured he was likely to get a bloody nose.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s … he’s really cute. Is Emma here?’

‘She’s in the kitchen,’ Christine said, and walked away, stroking the dog and cooing to calm its nearly shattered nerves.

DeMarco strolled into the kitchen. Emma was sitting at the table reading the business section of
The Washington Post
. DeMarco knew Emma had money, and he suspected this might have something to do with the fact that she read stock reports instead of box scores.

Like Christine, Emma was tall and slim. She had features that DeMarco always thought of as regal, a profile you’d expect to see on an old coin from some ancient land ruled by queens. She had a perfect straight nose, a broad forehead, and intelligent light-blue eyes the color of faded denim. Her hair was cut short, flawlessly styled, a blondish shade with a little gray streaked in. She was at least ten years older than DeMarco, maybe fifteen, but in much better condition. She played racquetball and ran in marathons but not just to stay in shape. Emma liked to beat the competition.

DeMarco poured himself a cup of coffee. He loved Emma’s coffee, and he should – it cost about forty bucks a pound. He sat down across from her but she continued to read, pretending he wasn’t there.

‘Hey,’ DeMarco said. ‘Just met your new dog.’

‘Don’t start,’ Emma muttered.

DeMarco grinned. ‘What’s its name, by the way?’

‘What do you want?’ she said, still looking down at the paper.

‘You wanna hear a conspiracy theory?’ he said.

‘You bet,’ she said, and now she looked at him and smiled. ‘I love conspiracy theories. They’re almost always wrong, but I like to hear them anyway.’

‘You don’t believe in conspiracies?
You
, of all people?’

Emma was, without a doubt, the most enigmatic person DeMarco had ever encountered. She refused to discuss her past, and although DeMarco had known her for more than ten years, he knew almost as little about her today as he did when he first met her. She was gay but she had a daughter, yet he didn’t know if her daughter was adopted or her natural offspring. He knew she was wealthy but had no idea of the source of her wealth, whether it was inherited or earned. He knew she had worked for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, but he didn’t know if she’d been civilian or military, or if she’d been a spy or a handler of spies or someone who analyzed the intelligence provided by spies. Naturally, everything she had done for the agency was classified Top Secret, but even if it hadn’t been she wouldn’t have told him anyway.

She also claimed to be fully retired from the agency, but he suspected that this wasn’t totally true because there were times when she was gone for extended periods and couldn’t be reached and never returned looking relaxed and tanned like a person who had enjoyed a restful vacation. She knew people in virtually every segment of the government, had particularly close ties with people in intelligence and law enforcement, and knew folk with a wide range of illicit skills – skills such as wiretapping and forgery and safecracking. And these people she knew always seemed to respond instantly when she asked anything of them, but why they responded – out of past loyalty or because she had some particular authority – he didn’t know. But there was one thing he did know: She believed in conspiracies, because she had almost certainly engineered a number of them herself.

DeMarco had met Emma by saving her life. He had just dropped off a friend at Reagan National Airport and was about to leave the terminal when this complete stranger – this elegant middle-aged woman – jumped into his car and told him to drive to the Pentagon. When he’d asked why, she pointed over her shoulder at two men running toward his car and told him the two were armed and were going to kill her – and would probably kill DeMarco as well if he didn’t step on the gas. Having no choice he drove, and when the men gave chase and started shooting at them, Emma got on her cell phone, talked to someone at the Pentagon, and five minutes later choppers and SWAT vans intercepted them. And that was his introduction to Emma – just a guy parked in the wrong place at the wrong time who saved her life by giving her a lift.

After that day, she told him if he ever needed a favor to just ask, and he occasionally did, particularly when things got complicated or he needed access to the resources at her disposal. She treated him most times like an aggravated big sister, and why she helped him was not always clear. Sometimes she helped him because she decided that whatever he was doing was sufficiently important to warrant it. At other times, however, he suspected she helped simply because she was bored with retirement – or semiretirement, whichever the case might be.

‘It’s been my experience,’ Emma said, ‘that whether or not something’s a conspiracy is a matter of perspective. If a bunch of guys are doing something we like, we call it a good organized effort. It’s only a conspiracy when we don’t like it.’

‘Huh?’

‘Say the city council of Dirt Water USA wants to tear down kindly Grandma Jones’s house to make a convenient highway exit to the local mall. Now that’s a conspiracy to all those who side with Grandma, but for all those citizens who want easy access to the mall – which by the way will improve sales and thereby increase tax revenues for the good city of Dirt Water – it’s just a city council doing its job by exercising its right of eminent domain.’

‘Fine, Emma. Conspiracies are in the eye of the beholder. But I’m not talking about grandma and a freeway exit.’

‘So what are you talking about?’

‘I think,’ DeMarco said, ‘there’s a chance that Reza Zarif tried to crash a plane into the White House because somebody told him that they were going to kill his wife and kids if he didn’t. But then the … the bad guys, they killed his family anyway.’

Emma could do two things that DeMarco had always wanted to be able to do. She could arch a single eyebrow and she could whistle through her teeth to call a cab. She now arched an eyebrow, the left one.

‘And what makes you think that Mr Zarif didn’t do exactly what the papers – and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – said?’

DeMarco explained. He said the FBI’s theory was that Reza had just snapped because of all the pressure he’d been under lately and then decided to commit an irrational act of terrorism that would bring attention to the plight of Muslims worldwide. The problem with that theory was neither Mahoney nor anyone else who knew Reza well could accept that he would do something like that. But what they
really
couldn’t accept was that he would kill his wife and two young children.

‘So I asked myself,’ DeMarco said, ‘what if someone held a gun to the heads of Reza’s kids and told him to fly the plane? I think if Reza thought that might save his children, he’d do it. He was an experienced pilot and he knew he was going to get blown out of the sky, just like he was. What I’m saying is, I think the man would have been willing to commit suicide if he thought it might keep his family alive, especially if he knew he wasn’t going to kill anybody else, much less the president.’

‘But what makes you think anybody held a gun to his kids’ heads?’ Emma said.

‘Two things, and I’ve already told you the first: my gut feeling that he wouldn’t have done what he did if he wasn’t forced.’

‘Well, that’s weak,’ Emma said.

‘The second thing is the fingerprint on the bullet box.’

DeMarco explained how Donny Cray’s fingerprint had been discovered on the box of bullets used to kill Reza Zarif’s family and the FBI’s conclusion as to why the single fingerprint was there.

‘So,’ DeMarco said, ‘one explanation for that fingerprint is that this yokel Cray sold Reza a gun just like the FBI thinks. But another explanation is maybe Cray was in Reza’s house.’

‘But what motive would Cray have?’ Emma said.

‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said.

‘And this other guy, the one who hijacked the shuttle. Did someone force him too?’

‘I don’t know,’ DeMarco said again. He was getting tired of saying that.

He told her how questioning Youseff Khalid’s wife had been a little tough since she didn’t speak English, but he said he didn’t see any evidence that the woman had been abused in any way and she denied – he thought – that she’d been used to coerce her husband to hijack the shuttle.

‘Well, shit, Joe,’ Emma said, clearly unimpressed with DeMarco’s logic.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he admitted. ‘But what
really
makes me think there might be an honest-to-God conspiracy going on is not Reza Zarif or Youseff Khalid but the cabdriver who tried to walk into the Capitol with blocks of C-Four strapped to his chest.’

Mustafa Ahmed came from Pakistan thirty years ago, and twenty years ago he became an American citizen. According to newspaper reports, he wasn’t known to have been involved in any political organizations, and he rarely attended his mosque. His only outside interest appeared to be soccer. He had bought an expensive cable package primarily so he could watch international games, and three times in his life he had taken vacations to attend World Cup matches. He had never married but he did have a large extended family, three siblings and a passel of nieces and nephews whom he reportedly spoiled rotten.

Following his attempt to detonate a bomb inside the Capitol, the FBI searched Mustafa’s house and found a folder filled with literature – pamphlets and books and articles taken off the Internet – that were sympathetic to radical Muslim causes. All Mustafa’s friends and family, people who had been in his house, said they had never seen such reading material in the place before and they had never heard Mustafa side with al-Qaeda politics. They all said the same thing. The only thing the man cared about was soccer, and he didn’t have a political bone in his scrawny body.

Folks did admit that Mustafa was a very emotional man, one of those little mouse-that-roared guys who took offense easily and was always ranting and raving about something. And a month before he attempted to blow up the Capitol he lost a case in traffic court that he was felt was due to religious bias. His car had been broadsided by a white man, and the white man claimed Mustafa had run a red light. Mustafa swore the light was green, but the white judge sided with the other man, and a bailiff had to drag Mustafa out of the courtroom as he screamed curses at the judge, calling him a fool and a bigot.

Mustafa’s friends admitted that he’d been outraged by what had happened but refused to agree that losing a case in court would have provoked him into doing what he did. The FBI discovered, however, that the court’s decision had a profound impact on Mustafa’s life. Mustafa’s cab company was a loosely affiliated group of gypsy drivers, men who owned their own cabs, and the cabs were insured by the drivers, not the company. For whatever reason, Mustafa had missed a payment on his auto insurance and he didn’t have the money to pay for the damage to his cab or the white man’s car. So Mustafa hadn’t just lost a case in court. He hadn’t worked in a month, he had lost his means of earning a living, and he was being hammered on by collection agencies to pay his bills.

As with Youseff Khalid, the man who hijacked the New York–D.C. shuttle, the FBI suspected that Mustafa had been helped by somebody. Somebody had given Youseff the plastic gun he had snuck onboard the plane, and somebody had provided the C-4 and constructed the bomb that Mustafa had strapped to his chest. The only reason the bomb didn’t explode, the FBI explained, was that one of the wires connecting the dead man’s switch to the detonator had somehow torn loose, maybe when Mustafa put on the raincoat he had worn over the bricks of C-4. But
somebody
had made the bomb, and it probably wasn’t Mustafa.