Dead on Arrival (32 page)

Special Agent Merrill Fitzsimmons had been with the Bureau for twenty-nine years – twenty-nine successful, decorated years. He’d been thinking about working three more years, by which time his youngest would have her master’s. And he figured when he did retire, he’d be leaving at the top of his game and he’d have no problem at all landing a job as a consultant. Yep, with consulting fees and his pension, he’d be able to buy that Bayliner he’d always wanted.

But now he was thinking that maybe he’d pull the plug this fall. Debbie would have to get a loan to finish school – Christ, what the hell did she need a master’s for anyway? – and he would kiss the Bayliner goodbye. The way it was going now, he’d be lucky to get a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart after he left the Bureau.

And it was all because of that fuckin’ Oliver Lincoln.

Folks had initially been delighted when they’d pinned the terrorist attacks on Pugh and Broderick’s bill had failed, but after four and a half months all the delight had disappeared. Now everybody – the president and Congress and every two-bit scribbler who wrote for a paper – wanted the people behind Pugh, and they began to crap all over the director of the FBI.
And
they wanted to know who killed William Broderick. He may not have been a hero anymore, but he had been a U.S. senator. So they dumped on the director and, as the old saying went, the crap flowed downhill – right onto Merrill Fitzsimmons.

Fitzsimmons was
drowning
in crap.

At first he figured it’d be a piece of cake. They knew Oliver Lincoln had met with Pugh. Pugh had even identified the guy’s voice. Fitzsimmons figured, with all the resources at his disposal – they’d given him everything he’d asked for – that in a couple of weeks he’d have Lincoln’s head mounted on his wall.

They had the laptop Lincoln had given Pugh, and the laptop had e-mails in it that supposedly came from Lincoln, and the e-mails told Pugh how to orchestrate the attacks. But they couldn’t trace any of the e-mails back to Lincoln. The e-mails had been sent from public libraries, places where Lincoln didn’t have to open up an account, and nobody at the libraries remembered seeing Lincoln on the days the e-mails had been sent. It was possible that Lincoln had never even been in the libraries; some nerd could have fixed things so it only
looked
like the e-mails came from libraries. At least that’s what the Bureau’s nerds said, those useless geeks, so the laptop turned out to be no help at all.

Lincoln’s man Jack, the guy with the Russian accent who had helped Lincoln, was a dead end too. They showed Pugh thousands of pictures of possible suspects, but no one looked like Jack. Jack, whoever he was, had disappeared and might not even be in the country.

Same way with Lincoln’s bank accounts. Lincoln had paid Pugh a couple million bucks, but there was no money trail from Lincoln to Pugh, nor was there any evidence that Lincoln had received money from someone to pay Pugh.

The waffle house where Lincoln had met with Pugh was another bust. None of the sixteen people who worked there – all of ’em with two-digit IQs – could say that Lincoln had ever been to the restau rant. They knew Pugh had been there because he was a frequent customer, but they couldn’t remember him being there with a bearded guy wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat on the day Pugh said the meeting occurred.

‘The man was wearing a Tampa Bay baseball cap,’ Fitzsimmons said to the waitress who usually served the table where Pugh and Lincoln had sat. ‘You can’t see many of those around here.’

‘Well, to tell you the truth,’ the waitress said, lowering her voice, ‘I always thought baseball was a game for pussies and I never pay it any attention. Now if the man had been wearing a Dolphins hat …’

The only satisfaction that Merrill Fitzsimmons had was tormenting Lincoln, but even that small pleasure had soured. The first time he met Lincoln in the flesh, he had to ring the bell at the gate to be allowed onto Lincoln’s estate and then had to wait to be admitted, like he was a damn Amway salesman instead of a federal agent. And after the big wrought-iron gates had finally swung open, he and three cars full of agents had driven up the quarter-mile driveway to Lincoln’s mansion only to find Lincoln waiting for them, cool as you please, with his lawyer.

Now that had
really
pissed Fitzsimmons off. How in the hell had Lincoln known he’d been tied to Jubal Pugh? And how had he known the FBI was coming to his house that night? Obviously Lincoln had a source someplace in the government – in the Justice Department or Congress or right in the Bureau itself – and this source had given Lincoln so much warning that he had time to call his shyster.

And Lincoln’s shyster was
good
. The man’s name was Lamont Greene. He was very calm, very quiet, very businesslike – and as flexible as a rock. Every step of the way, he made Fitzsimmons jump through every legal hoop he could construct just to slow Fitzsimmons down. And when they questioned Lincoln – on five separate occasions – Greene had been there instructing his client to say nothing more than his name. When they asked Lincoln to take a lie detector test, Greene had laughed out loud, like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

Fitzsimmons’s only satisfaction to date was that his men had torn Lincoln’s mansion apart during their search – they had just
ripped
the place up – and fuck Greene’s threat to sue them for the damage they’d caused. Fitzsimmons worked for the United States goddamn government, and he didn’t care if they doubled the national debt to settle with Lincoln. And, speaking of money, there was one other thing that made Fitzsimmons smile: Lincoln had to be paying Lamont Greene about six hundred bucks an hour. He could only hope the arrogant bastard would have to declare bankruptcy by the time they were done with him.

But after months of trying and thousands of man-hours expended by his agents, Fitzsimmons couldn’t pin one damn thing on Oliver Lincoln. Lincoln had been too careful. He could find no connection between Lincoln and Kenneth Dobbler or Edith Baxter – or anyone else on the planet who might have paid Lincoln. He couldn’t figure out who had killed Senator William Broderick or Rollie Patterson, the U.S. Capitol cop who shot Mustafa Ahmed. He couldn’t even arrest the damn air marshal that had killed Youseff Khalid, even though he knew the marshal had been tipped off that Khalid would be on the plane that day.

Yes, retirement was beginning to look very, very good to Merrill Fitzsimmons.

‘Well, Steve, there she is. Your new home.’

Steve
. Jubal Pugh couldn’t get used to that name. Nor could he get used to the fact that instead of residing on four hundred acres in the Shenandoah Valley he now lived in a trailer park in a place called Victor, Montana. Actually, it wasn’t even
in
Victor but on the outskirts of Victor. All he knew was that he hated Montana, and he hated the trailer he now had for a home.

And he hated this goddamn marshal too. He thought a U.S. marshal would
look
like a marshal, like that actor Sam Elliott: tall and lanky with a handlebar mustache and cowboy boots. The marshal who escorted him to Victor looked like he should be selling life insurance. He had a pudgy build, a half-bald head, and he wore glasses, for Christ’s sake. The only way you’d know he was a marshal was if he showed you his badge.

But until he could get back on his feet – if there was any way to get back on his feet – Jubal was stuck in Victor. And in some ways it was good that he was. He’d testified at Randy’s trial, and the way Randy had looked at him … well, it was a damn good thing they’d moved him here. Randy had about a hundred cousins, and they were all just as mean as Randy. If they ever found out where he was …

‘Well, Steve,’ the marshal said, ‘it’s time to go meet your new boss.’

‘A scrap yard?’ Jubal Pugh said. ‘That’s the best job you could find for me?’

‘Hey, it’s not like you got a lot of skills, unless you consider making meth a skill. And you’re gonna love your new boss,’ the marshal added. ‘He’s this old Indian guy, big as a horse, and I’ve been told he just hates white people.’

On the first day of the lovely month of May, Mahoney woke up with his ass on fire.

Things had been relatively good in the speaker’s domain since Broderick’s bill had been defeated. He had won most of his political battles; laws had been passed, some good and some bad. Ali Zarif had survived his heart attack, and Mahoney had let the photographers take pictures of him and his old friend dining on fish and chips on Boston’s waterfront. But this particular day he rose from his bed, annoyed that after four and a half months the only person who had been incarcerated for the deaths of eight people – including a United States senator – and a flagrant attempt to corrupt the legislative process was one Virginia thug: Randy White.

When he arrived at his office he called the director of the FBI and asked him why he and all his minions hadn’t made any progress arresting Oliver Lincoln and whoever had hired him. After listening to the director’s blubbering excuses, Mahoney called the man a flaming idiot and told him that he was going to suggest to the president that a change in management over at the Hoover Building was overdue. After that he called the attorney general and told him the same thing. It was time the country got a new top lawyer since the one currently in the job didn’t have the skills to catch a cold, much less indict one. He then poured himself a drink and sat there in his big chair scowling at an empty room, trying to decide whom to badger next. And when he couldn’t think of anyone who actually had responsibility for solving crimes and catching criminals, he summoned DeMarco to his office.

At the time the summons was issued, DeMarco was lying in bed with the schoolteacher from Iowa. His friend from Key West had volunteered to take a group of kids to visit the nation’s capital. She had never volunteered to lead one of these field trips in the past because she always suspected that chaperoning twenty twelve-year-olds would be a gigantic pain in the ass. But this year, when spring came, when the sap started to run again and the biological juices began to flow, she had an overwhelming urge to see a broad-shouldered Italian fellow she knew in Washington, and he, in turn, had been delighted to hear that she was coming.

The trip, however, hadn’t turned out as well as they had anticipated for the simple reason that the twelve-year-olds were a full-time job, a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation. During the day they had a nonstop schedule going to all the places the school had promised their parents that they’d take them. At night, once the kids were back at the hotel, it was then Ellie’s job to make sure they did no harm: that they didn’t smoke in their rooms, ingest illegal substances, or destroy hotel property that the school board would have to pay for. And, as some of the little shits were on the onset of puberty, it was also her job to make sure they didn’t try to road-test the reproductive equipment that they’d been told about in the sex-ed class that half their parents had tried to ban from the curriculum. To make things worse, the male teacher who accompanied Ellie to Washington had caught a retching case of stomach flu the day after they arrived, and he spent most of his time either in bed or kneeling in front of a toilet bowl.

So it did not turn out to be the romantic rendezvous that she and DeMarco had envisioned. They never had one dinner alone in a fancy restaurant; they never went dancing cheek-to-cheek. DeMarco did go to Ellie’s hotel room every night. He had to sneak in, of course, and, once together, they had a couple of drinks – Ellie actually needed several to restore her mood – and then they would hop into bed. About half the time their pleasures were interrupted, either by a kid calling to whine about something or by the hotel manager calling to whine about something the kids were doing. And every hour or so, Ellie would have to get out of bed, get dressed, and check to make sure that none of her charges had escaped and that they all were still breathing, if not asleep.

When DeMarco’s cell phone rang he had been lying in bed studying the curve of the schoolteacher’s rump. She was heading back to Iowa that afternoon. He had woken before her and had just been lying there hoping she would wake up soon. But then Mahoney’s secretary called and told him to get his undersexed ass over to Mahoney’s office.

‘You need to do something to get this guy Lincoln,’ Mahoney said, the moment DeMarco took a seat.

DeMarco’s response was predictable. ‘If the FBI can’t get him, how in the hell can I?’

In response to this perfectly legitimate question, Mahoney got a crafty look in his eye. It was a look DeMarco had seen before, a look that said rules applied to other people, that rules were meant to be broken, that there were exceptions to every rule. And that was pretty much what Mahoney said.

‘My guess,’ he said, ‘is that the reason the Bureau can’t get this cluck is they’re playin’ by the rules. That’s the problem with government organizations these days. Nobody’s ever willin’ to go out on a limb, to take a few chances. But you …?’

Mahoney left the sentence unfinished but his meaning was clear. The reason Mahoney employed DeMarco, the reason DeMarco dwelt in a subbasement office instead of being a legitimate member of Mahoney’s staff, was because Mahoney considered DeMarco’s job to be unencumbered by the niceties of ethics and law.

‘Well, shit,’ DeMarco said. ‘What do you expect me to do, plant evidence on the guy or something?’

Now had John Mahoney been a normal employer he would have said,
No, of course not. What sort of
person do you think I am?
But Mahoney wasn’t a normal employer; he wasn’t even a normal human being. Instead what he said was, ‘Now there you go, now that’s usin’ your head.’

‘Mahoney,’ DeMarco said to Emma, ‘wants me to come up with some way to catch Lincoln, and he doesn’t care how I do it.’

Emma, instead of acting surprised, nodded her head. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Something’s got to be done about that guy. He can’t be allowed to get away with this.’

Emma, unlike Mahoney – or, for that matter, Joe DeMarco – had rather high ethical standards. DeMarco, in fact, suspected that there were canonized saints who were less ethical than Emma. But here she was, apparently agreeing with Mahoney that when it came to Oliver Lincoln anything was fair game.

‘Christ, Emma,’ DeMarco said. ‘It’s like I told Mahoney. What can I do, plant false evidence in the guy’s house?’

‘No,’ Emma said. ‘That would be illegal. I have another idea.’