Dead on Arrival (24 page)

The Cuban watched the subject as he left the house in McLean. It was a beautiful place but she wondered how much the owner spent to maintain it. She thought it was foolish to own a home that size.

Before coming to the house, DeMarco had had breakfast in the same restaurant on Capitol Hill where he had eaten the morning he had driven to Philadelphia. He sat at the same table he’d used the previous time, and based on the way the waitresses greeted him, he was clearly a regular customer. This could be useful.

When DeMarco had been in Philadelphia, the Cuban had ruled out the idea of bombing the bar he was in, but a restaurant on Capitol Hill was a different matter. The country was in a complete uproar because of what these Muslims were doing, and … well, it was like the politicians said. It was only a matter of
when
, not
if
. No one would be surprised if a bomb exploded in a restaurant visited by congressmen and their staffs. Yes, if a better idea didn’t occur to her, she might enter the restaurant while DeMarco was eating and attach a bomb to a nearby table.

There were two good things about the idea. First, DeMarco would be the apparently random victim of a terrorist attack and there would be no reason to think he had been singled out. Second, she’d have plenty of time to get away. What she didn’t like was that she’d have to enter the restaurant and somebody might remember her. On second thought, why should she go into the restaurant at all? She’d make this fool, Jorge, plant the bomb for her. Yes, that would work. But planting the bomb wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that every cop in the country would be looking for her if she exploded a bomb on Capitol Hill, particularly because of what had happened in the last few weeks. So it was a viable option, but not ideal.

Her second option was to make DeMarco a victim during a robbery. Last night, after he’d returned from Philadelphia, he’d stopped at a small grocery store near Georgetown and bought a couple of things. Like most men, he didn’t shop in bulk; he just bought whatever he needed on the spur of the moment, probably not even paying attention to the sales. So there was a good chance he might pop into the same store again this evening to buy something for dinner, and if he did, she’d walk in, a ski mask covering her face, clean out the cash register, and then execute the clerk and all the customers. She noted that in the grocery store where he shopped the windows were covered with advertisements, and a store like that wouldn’t normally have more than two or three customers at any one time. She liked this idea better than bombing the restaurant. A robbery was a fairly mundane sort of crime, even if two or three people were killed; it happened all the time. The downside of this plan was that the store was on a fairly busy street.

There was always a downside when killing people.

She was mulling all this over as Jorge followed DeMarco’s car. Where was he going now? She hoped he stopped at a convenience store, a 7-Eleven, someplace like that. She wanted to get back home. She hated being away from the restaurant for very long; she just knew her employees were stealing her blind when she wasn’t there.

The subject drove over the Key Bridge, got onto the Whitehurst Freeway, and exited onto K Street. He drove to where 8th Street NW intersected K Street and started to make right-hand turns. He appeared to be looking for a place to park. He finally found one; then she and Jorge trailed slowly behind him in Jorge’s car until he entered a building on the corner of I and 8th Street NW. There were flags over the building’s entrance, and chiseled in stone above the entrance were the words
DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION
. Lincoln had not told her why he wanted this DeMarco person killed, but she found it odd that Lincoln would be involved in drugs. Drugs were so … she didn’t know what, but drugs just didn’t seem like something a dilettante like Lincoln would be involved in. But for whatever reason, DeMarco was visiting the DEA and now she had a third way to kill him, one that she liked and one that she could execute immediately.

She could see DeMarco inside the lobby of the building going through a metal detector. There were two guards that she could see and a number of people were in the lobby, waiting for elevators or exiting the building. DeMarco cleared security and then waited for an elevator himself. After he had entered the elevator, she sat watching the lobby a bit longer and was pleased when a group of four people came out together. It was almost lunchtime. That was good too.

‘Do you have a gun?’ she said to Jorge.

‘Chur,’ he said, and flipped open the glove compartment and pulled out a chrome-plated automatic with an eight-inch barrel, the weapon as gaudy as the chains around his neck.

‘How many bullets does the magazine hold?’

‘Twelve,’ Jorge said. ‘Why? Wazzup?’

She ignored him and checked the D.C. street map that she’d bought. The damn map had cost six dollars in a drugstore; even if Lincoln was paying for it, it was outrageous that they should charge so much. She found the location of the DEA building and then saw what she was looking for: a metro station. Even better, it was located only two blocks from where they were parked.

‘Jorge, how would you like to earn twenty-five thousand dollars?’ she said.

She’d almost said fifty thousand but decided that twenty-five sounded more realistic, a large number, certainly more money than Jorge had ever seen at one time, but not so big he’d think she was lying to him.

She
was
lying, of course. She didn’t plan to pay him a cent.

DeMarco’s talk with Patsy Hall had gone just the way he’d expected. She’d
loved
his idea. It was complex and was going to be difficult to execute, and she wasn’t at all certain it would work – but she loved it.

He now waited with another couple on the fifth floor for the elevator to arrive. On the way down to the lobby, two other guys entered the elevator on the fourth floor. DeMarco checked his watch. It was ten after twelve and he guessed all the narcs were heading off to lunch, which made him realize that he was hungry too. He had a sudden craving for a pastrami sandwich, one on that swirly kinda bread that was brown and white. Maybe he’d have a side of potato salad and a big pickle too. On second thought, he’d skip the potato salad and have a beer instead. He figured the beer and the potato salad probably had about the same number of calories, so that was a fair trade-off; the fact that the beer had little nutritional value was irrelevant.

He was trying to remember if there was a deli nearby but couldn’t recall one. Standing next to him was the couple who had entered the elevator with him. They were both white and in their early forties, and he guessed they were DEA agents. The man anyway, he looked like an agent, an athletic, cocky-looking guy. He reminded DeMarco of Michael Keaton when he’d played a cop in that Tarantino movie
Jackie Brown
. The woman, she just looked tough, not bad looking but tough. If she was an agent, he’d bet she had a great big gun like Patsy Hall and she’d kick you in the nuts if you gave her any crap. Or, of course, the couple could just be a pair of DEA pencil pushers, but he didn’t think so.

He turned and asked the man if there was a deli nearby. The guy said he didn’t know of one, at which point the woman jumped in and said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Mark, there’s one right across the street. You walked by it to get here.’ They must be married, DeMarco thought.

It was good manners that saved DeMarco’s life. He was following the couple when they left the elevator, but as he and the couple approached the exit, a FedEx carrier was entering the building and everybody did a little dance to get out of his way, and DeMarco ended up being the first one to reach the door. He started to walk through but then the habits his mother had drummed into his head from an early age took over. He pulled the door open and stepped back as he’d been trained by his mom to allow the woman who was behind him to pass through the door first – and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Suddenly glass was breaking all around him, and the woman slammed back into him, and at the same time DeMarco felt a stinging sensation along his left side. An instant later there was a sharper pain in his right leg, up high, on the inside of his thigh. He either collapsed to the floor or the force of the woman’s body being thrown backward pushed him to the ground. He was now on his back and the woman was lying on top of him; it registered in his mind that the woman’s left cheek was missing but all he was thinking about was getting out of the doorway. As another bullet struck the woman’s torso, DeMarco tried to push her off of him, to crawl out from under her, and that’s when the woman’s husband fell onto both DeMarco and the woman. He was now pinned down by the weight of two bodies. He could hear people screaming and more glass breaking and bullets ricocheting off the lobby walls. And he could hear – or maybe feel – bullets slamming into the bodies of the couple lying on top of him.

The Cuban was confident that the incident would be reported just as she intended. A couple of gangstas had driven up to the DEA building and shot up the place. Why they did what they did was anybody’s guess. Revenge over some recent bust? Retaliation for the killing of a gang member? Who knows why these crazy drugged-up kids do what they do.

She and Jorge had been parked in a loading zone right across the street from the entrance to the building. It was a fairly narrow street and the distance to the door was less than twenty yards. She got into the backseat and on her command Jorge was to power down the windows and start shooting at the security guards that they could see inside the lobby. She told him she didn’t care if he hit anybody; he was just to shoot as many bullets as he could as fast as he could.

Jorge, the idiot, didn’t even ask how they planned to get away.

What the Cuban had wanted was for DeMarco to come out the door with other people, and he did. She saw a man and a woman approaching the doorway and DeMarco behind the couple, and two other people, both men, behind DeMarco. Perfect. But then a damn FedEx guy, a chunky black
hijo
de
puta
, bounced up the steps, a box on his shoulder, and went into the building, momentarily blocking her view of DeMarco. Shit, she thought at first, but it turned out perfect: DeMarco was the first one to reach the door. He put his hand on the door, pulled it open, but then, goddammit, just as she was squeezing the trigger, he stepped back and allowed a woman to go through the door before him.

The Cuban hit the woman but she also hit DeMarco. She was
sure
she hit him. She was positive. And even if she didn’t hit him with her first shot, the type of bullets she was using would pass right through the woman unless they struck bone. She saw the woman fall and she saw DeMarco go down under her and then she saw a man standing behind DeMarco fall. She fired five more shots into the pile of bodies and then screamed at Jorge to drive.

She directed him to drive one block and turn right at the next corner. He never even questioned her orders. He was high from the adrenaline rush of what they’d just done. As he drove he said, ‘Oh, man, that was cool, just fuckin’
cool
! Did you see those windows
blow
?’

‘Stop at the next corner,’ she said. She could see the big red M for the Gallery Place metro station.

‘What?’ Jorge said.

‘Stop the car!’ she screamed

And he did – and she shot him in the back of the head.

She exited the car and closed the door and walked quickly but calmly toward the metro station. With the tinted windows in the Honda, no one could see Jorge’s body slumped over the steering wheel. As she descended the escalator to the subway platform, she heard the cars behind Jorge start to honk.

Emma had known Doug Chamberlain for twenty years. He’d been a Green Beret, and then he’d trained special ops guys before he retired from the army. He now worked for Prescott Security, the mercenary outfit that Edith Baxter had hired.

‘Why are you involved with these people, Doug?’ Emma said.

Chamberlain looked away, embarrassed. ‘Because of Maggie,’ he said. Maggie was his wife. ‘I got drunk one night, three years ago, and drove the car off the road. Naturally, I didn’t get a scratch. Maggie broke her jaw. The insurance paid for the first surgery, but the docs screwed something up. She was in pain for a year. And it affected her mentally too; she was so depressed I was afraid she was gonna kill herself. Anyway, the HMO wouldn’t pay for another surgery so I paid out of pocket to have her taken care of. She’s had two operations now and might have to have a third. I’ve got two mortgages on the house and I’ve wiped out our savings.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that Doug. But Prescott?’

Chamberlain shrugged. ‘They offered the most money. And all I do is train the people they hire.’

There was nothing to be gained by pointing out that the people he trained provided protection for dictators who butchered their own people. So instead, Emma said, ‘Did you find out why Edith Baxter hired Prescott?’

‘Yeah. You remember the deck-of-cards thing in Iraq? Saddam and the other fifty-one bad guys we were trying to capture over there? Well, Edith had her own deck made up, fifty-two radical Muslims. She’s offering a hundred thousand a head for the capture of these guys.’

‘Their capture or their deaths?’ Emma said.

‘The contract says capture, but well … you know. The thing is, Prescott’s just screwing her. Governments – ours, the Europeans, even the Saudis – have been after some of these guys for years. Prescott’s chance of catching them is practically nil, but he’s billing Baxter for the hours he’s spending looking for them.’

‘Is Prescott helping Edith do anything here in the States?’

‘In the States?’ Chamberlain said.

‘Yes, anything to do with Muslims here in the U.S.?’

‘Not that I know of. I can try to find out if you’d like.’

‘Well, if you could, I’d appreciate—’

Emma’s cell phone rang at that moment. The caller ID screen said it was Howard University Hospital calling.