Dead on Arrival (31 page)

‘So why didn’t your men kill Mustafa’s niece?’ Clark asked Pugh. ‘They killed Zarif’s family and Khalid’s mistress.’

‘’Cause Jones said not to. He said not to hurt her at all.’

Clark figured that by
not
killing Anisa Aziz there was no way anyone could claim that Mustafa had been coerced to commit an act of terrorism, provided Anisa was too afraid to talk, which she had been. And in the case of Khalid’s mistress, no one even connected her death to Khalid.

‘What pissed ol’ Randy off,’ Pugh said, ‘was havin’ a juicy little college girl like her all tied up naked and not bein’ able to poke her one.’ Pugh laughed and added, ‘He did tell me he got a little stinky-finger, though.’

Clark hit Jubal Pugh in the nose with the palm of his right hand. He didn’t know if he broke Jubal’s nose or not. He did know that he didn’t care.

Myron Clark finished his initial interrogation of Jubal Pugh, Pugh answering the remaining questions with cotton balls shoved into his nostrils. Clark would question the man several more times in the days to come, asking the same questions over and over again to make sure Pugh’s story didn’t change, but right now he was briefing a senior agent named Merrill Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons was the Bureau’s current point man on the terrorist attacks, the last point man having been fired because he’d failed – with five thousand agents at his disposal – to figure out that it was Pugh and not al-Qaeda who was behind the attacks.

‘And you think Pugh’s telling the truth about the Capitol Hill cop?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said. ‘Pugh’s guys had nothing to do with his death or with paying him to shoot the cabdriver.’

‘And the air marshal?’

‘Same thing. Jones arranged that on his own.’

‘And this guy Jack?’ Fitzsimmons said.

‘Pugh doesn’t know who he is, just someone Jones assigned to make sure Pugh’s guys followed orders. He’s obviously somebody with a lot more discipline than Pugh’s people.’

‘And the senator, who the hell killed him? Congress is goin’ nuts over that. We’ve got so goddamn many agents looking for Broderick’s killer, we’re hardly doing anything else.’

‘Pugh says he doesn’t know who killed Broderick and I believe him. Maybe it was this guy Jack or somebody else. I mean, Jones sounds like some kinda organizational genius. Killing Broderick,
if
he killed Broderick, could have been a separate operation.’

‘Christ!’ Fitzsimmons said. He looked for a minute as if he was going to take out all his frustration on Myron Clark, but he didn’t.

‘Well, sit Pugh down with an artist,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘and let’s see if we can get a lead on Jack.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said, although he’d already arranged for that.

‘And we’ll talk later, Agent Clark, about you losing control with the prisoner.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Clark said again.

Mahoney had requested that the FBI brief two of his associates, Emma and DeMarco. Mahoney didn’t tell the Bureau why they should brief these two civilians, nor did he explain their relationship to him, but at the present time nobody in Washington was refusing Mahoney anything. And Special Agent Merrill Fitzsimmons, the man assigned to brief them, acted unusually humble. At some point the Bureau would go back to being the arrogant, insular organization it had always been, but for the moment the egg stains on the agency’s face were still all too evident.

Fitzsimmons was a tall lean man in his fifties with gray hair. He was soft-spoken, cool, and collected and had been with the Bureau almost thirty years. DeMarco could tell that Agent Fitzsimmons was a fellow who was normally quite pleased with himself.

Fitzsimmons told them everything they’d learned from Jubal Pugh and then said, ‘As you know, Pugh met with a man who called himself Mr Jones in a waffle house in Winchester, and Pugh’s boy, Randy, took a picture of the guy. Here’s the photo.’ Fitzsimmons pushed a button on a laptop sitting on the table in front of him, and a picture flashed onto a screen at the other end of the table. The picture showed a man with long black hair and a full black beard, wearing sunglasses and a Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball cap. The only feature that could be clearly distinguished on the man’s face was his nose, and in the picture the man was sitting against a plain white wall.

‘We gave that photo to the wizards,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘They stuck it in a computer and removed the hat and the sunglasses and the beard, and here’s what they came up with.’ Fitzsimmons tapped his laptop again and now, next to the bearded man in the baseball cap, was a photo of a handsome beardless man with short dark hair and full sensuous lips. The man’s arrogance was apparent even in a picture.

‘That’s the man who met with Pugh,’ Fitzsimmons said.

‘So who is he?’ DeMarco said.

‘His name is Oliver Lincoln,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘and I’ll tell you more about him in a minute. But those photos, both of them, are useless in terms of evidence. Pugh’s not in the first photo, the one where Lincoln’s disguised, so all we have is Pugh’s word that he met with Lincoln, and Pugh’s word isn’t worth its weight in shit. Plus the photo was taken with Lincoln up against an unadorned wall so we can’t even use it to prove Lincoln was in the restaurant. As for the second photo, the one that shows Lincoln minus the beard. … Well, it was made by manipulating pixels, so it’s not going to stand up in court either.’

‘Can’t that guy Randy corroborate Pugh’s story?’ DeMarco said.

‘He could, but Randy’s not cooperating. At all. He literally hasn’t spoken a word since we arrested him. He reminds me of McVeigh.’

‘What about Harlan Rhodes, the guy my cousin shot?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Rhodes is in a coma, and the docs are saying he’s not going to come out of it.’

‘Shit,’ DeMarco said.

‘But don’t worry. The minute we saw that reconstruction,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘we knew Lincoln was the guy who managed Pugh. We knew this because half a dozen agencies in this town have either hired Lincoln or encountered him when he was working for other people. And he is
exactly
the kind of guy who could have engineered these fake terrorist attacks.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ DeMarco said.

‘Lincoln’s a fixer,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘He’s worked for some of the biggest mining, oil, and pharmaceutical corporations in this country – although none of those companies will ever admit they hired him.
And
he’s worked for the U.S. government, the military, and the CIA, on more than one occasion – and they won’t admit they hired him either.’

‘What’s he fix?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Whatever you want,’ Fitzsimmons said.

Then Fitzsimmons explained. Say you were a major U.S. oil company and wanted to drill a couple of wells in Chile, but the Chilean government wasn’t cooperating. In comes Oliver Lincoln. Within a few months, the atmosphere in Chile has changed dramatically toward U.S. oil. To achieve this turnabout, some people were bribed or blackmailed or forced out of office. Some even died, usually in tragic accidents.

‘He’s very good,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘He’s a master at planning and organizing complex operations. He goes into a place and figures out where the pressure needs to be applied, who needs to be greased, and who needs to be removed. And he rarely does anything himself. He develops the plan, hires people to do what needs to be done, and directs the people he hires. Just like he did with Pugh. And he’s one of those people who’s completely at home, even in West Africa or South America or the new Russia. He’s been doing what he does for over twenty years, and the array of contacts he has in governments – both ours and foreign ones – and among criminals is enormous. ‘But here at home,’ Fitzsimmons said, ‘Oliver’s a pillar of the community. Gives to charities, supports the arts, all that bullshit. He has a beautiful home in Key West, he drives beautiful cars, and he sleeps with beautiful women. He collects wine and rare brandies and antiques. He lives large and well, and his only motive for doing what he does is money.

‘So,’ Fitzsimmons said, sitting back in his chair, ‘now it’s just a matter of tying Pugh to Lincoln and then tying Lincoln to whoever paid him. And we will.’

‘You might want to see if there’s any connection between Lincoln and a man named Kenneth Dobbler or a woman named Edith Baxter,’ Emma said.

‘
The
Edith Baxter?’ Fitzsimmons said.

‘Yes,’ Emma said, then she explained.

‘How’d you people find out that Dobbler and Baxter were contributing to Broderick?’

‘That’s not important,’ Emma said. ‘Just check them out and you’ll find the same thing we did.’

Fitzsimmons studied Emma and DeMarco for a minute, seeing them in a new light – and not necessarily liking it. But, because they were the speaker’s friends, he restrained from lecturing them on the inadvisability of civilians meddling in criminal matters.

‘At any rate,’ Emma said, ‘one of the things we learned about Dobbler was that he was in military intelligence. I pulled his file …’

‘You
pulled his file?’ Fitzsimmons said.

‘… and found out that he spent a lot of time in South America, fighting the so-called war on drugs. So there’s a possibility that he may have known – or used – Oliver Lincoln when he was in the military. And Edith Baxter, as you well know, ran multi national companies located in political hot spots all over the world, and she may have known Lincoln as well. I never thought Edith was the type to employ someone like him – and I still don’t – but then I never thought she’d support Broderick’s politics either.’

‘Well, we’ll check them out,’ Fitzsimmons said, making a neat notation on the legal pad on his desk.

‘The other possibility is that Broderick himself hired Lincoln,’ Emma said. ‘Broderick was an ambitious man, and everything Pugh did advanced his agenda.’

‘But then why was Broderick killed?’ Fitzsimmons said.

‘I don’t know,’ Emma said.

‘Well, right now we don’t have anything to show that Lincoln or Pugh had anything to do with Broderick’s death,’ Fitzsimmons said. ‘When that bomb went off, all Pugh’s guys were down on Pugh’s farm, getting arrested by the DEA. And Lincoln, as I just stated, never kills anyone personally and we have nothing at this point to tie him directly to Broderick. But if Pugh’s telling the truth, there’s somebody else helping Lincoln kill people, like that Capitol cop. It could be this guy Jack who directed Pugh’s men or it could be someone else. Lincoln knows lots of killers. Or maybe – and we’re afraid to say this out loud right now – but maybe some Muslim really did kill Broderick just like that note in his car said.’

Fitzsimmons gave them a small smile that was meant to reassure. ‘So that’s where we are right now,’ he said. ‘We’re after Oliver Lincoln. We have a lot of leads to follow, and we’re gonna get him.’

And DeMarco believed him. FBI agents are dedicated and competent and well trained, and there are a lot of them. And behind those agents is an enormous support network: a legion of computer geeks and wiretappers and accountants and crafty lawyers. They have laboratories filled with high-tech gizmos and psychologists who understand the workings of the criminal mind, and they have millions of dollars at their disposal. There was nothing Emma and DeMarco could do that the FBI couldn’t do bigger, better, and faster.

Yep, the big dogs were on the hunt. The FBI would get Oliver Lincoln and whoever had paid him.

He couldn’t just sit in Cleveland doing nothing while this cursed strike continued. And he had to get the boy away from the influence of his mother.

He decided he would take the boy with him and look at the young man in Santa Fe that he had read about, the one who had been driven from the Air Force Academy because of his faith. And they would look at other targets. There was a nuclear facility in Illinois he wanted to see, a chemical plant in Colorado that sounded intriguing, and a refinery in western Texas that was particularly attractive.

He told the boy to tell his mother that his company – the company he supposedly worked for – had decided that because he was so smart, they were sending him to a special school in – oh, Chicago. Tell her you might be gone for as long as six months, he said, and be sure to tell her that you will continue to send her what money you earn. The boy did as he was told, and his poor heartbroken mother accepted the story, but he could tell that afterward the boy was upset. When he asked what was troubling him, he said, ‘My mother was very proud of me when I told her I was being sent to a special school.’

He nodded his head. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I love my mother too.’

The ex-cadet in Santa Fe turned out not to be suitable. He was still working at the movie theater selling popcorn, and he could sense the young man’s bitterness, but when he tried to talk to him, to tell him he had heard about what had happened at the military academy, he could see that he was instantly suspicious. He was just too
American
. He may have been angry about what had happened to him, but he could tell in just one short conversation that the one in Santa Fe was likely to report him to the police. The Americans may not have been willing to let him fly their warplanes but he was still, for whatever reason, loyal to them. He just couldn’t understand it; didn’t he realize he would never be accepted?

So he and the boy from Cleveland moved on. They visited the other places he wanted to see. The nuclear facility was out of the question. The guards there acted like guards, and it would be difficult to damage the reactor in such a way that a catastrophe could be guaranteed. The refinery in Texas, however, which also used hydrofluoric acid, looked like a … what was that expression he’d heard? Yes, a walk in the park. The security at the Texas plant was even worse than at the refinery in Ohio, and the hydrofluoric acid tanks were within fifty yards of the fence line.

He made the boy call home every few days and tell his mother how well his training was going, and every time, for a few hours afterward, the boy would be depressed.

And every day he looked on the Internet to check on the status of the strike.

It couldn’t last forever.