Dead on Arrival (35 page)

Stan stared at DeMarco. As Stan was wearing sunglasses, DeMarco couldn’t see his eyes, but he didn’t have to see Stan’s eyes to know that Stan was pissed.

‘I said I
saw
her,’ Stan said to DeMarco. ‘When she stepped out of the car, she looked straight at me. You would have noticed if you hadn’t been worried about bugs crawling up your leg. Then, when she turned to go into the office, I saw her in profile.’ Stan paused before he said, ‘If I saw that broad again, I’d recognize her.’

‘Okay,’ DeMarco said. ‘Then I think we have maybe one chance – and it’s a long shot – to tie Lincoln to this woman.’

‘What’s that?’ Emma said.

‘Well, Lincoln had to talk to this woman. Maybe he contacted her by phone or by e-mail or through a middleman, but he’s been under continuous surveillance by the FBI ever since Pugh was arrested.’

‘Ah,’ Emma said.

As he and the boy traveled about the country – it was truly a beautiful land, so rich and so green – they spoke often of martyrdom.

Where he had been before – places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Indonesia – it was easy to find martyrs. Men and women, boys and girls, husband and wives, fathers and mothers – there were many willing to give their lives for their faith. But here in this country, even among the devout, it was difficult to find people who were truly committed. The men in Baltimore, they had said they were willing to die, but he could tell they hadn’t been. They were willing to
murder
but not to die.

But the boy, he
believed
.

They had discussed many times what the Koran said about those who died in the service of God, and the boy could quote the words flawlessly, the words that promised that a martyr would be married to fair females with ‘wide, lovely eyes.’ The boy always blushed when he said that, which made him laugh.

It was a shame that the boy would still be a virgin when he died.

But they spoke of more than what the Koran said about martyrdom. This was an intelligent child, and they discussed the strategic value of martyrs, how they were the most powerful weapon they had in their battle against the infidel. It was in these conversations that the boy became the most animated. He grasped completely the
terror
that the martyrs caused, particularly in this country.

He was sure it would be written later that an impressionable teenager had been brainwashed by an evil man. And he wondered himself at times if the boy was willing to die simply because he was depressed by what had happened to his father and the realization that whatever dreams he once had would never be fulfilled. But he didn’t think so. He was convinced that this boy believed. He had the
true
faith.

He talked also of his own death. He said that he too would die a martyr and he would most likely die in this country, far away from his wife and sons. He said he was looking forward to that day – he could hardly wait for that day – but he had been commanded by Sheikh Osama to postpone paradise until all his tasks were done.

‘You’re the lucky one,’ he told the boy.

Catching Jubal Pugh’s killer turned out to be fairly simple.

The hard part was trying to explain to the FBI and the marshals in the Witness Protection Program what Emma, DeMarco, and four retired Special Forces guys had been doing in Montana in the first place. Once they got past the point of the FBI screaming at them to come clean, and Emma screaming back that watching Pugh wasn’t a federal crime, they finally got around to talking about the person who had killed him.

Stan hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d gotten a good look at Pugh’s killer. They sat him down with an artist, and in a couple of hours the artist produced a sketch that Stan said was spot-on. They showed the sketch to DeMarco, and he said, Yep, that’s her, but the fact was that DeMarco had gotten a much better look at the woman’s ass than her face. If they had asked him to describe her
ass
to the sketch artist, he was willing to bet he could have done just as good a job as Stan did with the face.

The FBI then showed the sketch to all the agents who had been keeping Oliver Lincoln under surveillance the last four months, and two of the agents said the woman in the sketch owned a Cuban restaur ant in Miami, and ten days before Pugh was killed Lincoln had visited the restaurant and had a long talk with the owner over a glass of brandy.

The owner of the restaurant was Bianca Teresa Elena Castro, no relation to Fidel. Ms Castro had entered the United States on a raft made out of two-by-fours, canvas, and tires when she was fifteen years old. Her mother was a hooker, and good old Mom had put young Bianca out on a street corner when she was thirteen; Bianca told immigration officials that she had been forced to have sex with all the men on the raft in order to be allowed to go with them. After spending two years in a camp near Little Rock, Arkansas, the girl was released into the custody of a woman who claimed to be a cousin but who actually ran a brothel near Jacksonville, Florida. Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Bianca was arrested twice for prostitution but never did jail time. After that she dropped off the face of the earth insofar as official records were concerned, until she was twenty-six, when she applied for a business license to open her restaurant. The Bureau examined Bianca’s finances and concluded that she lived well within her means, all of her income apparently coming from the proceeds of her restaurant.

Then the FBI did the sort of the thing that it is very good at. Agents started looking at surveillance tapes of people going into the Miami International Airport in the ten days prior to Jubal Pugh’s death. After looking at a lot of tape and talking to a lot of people, they could prove that Bianca had entered the airport six days before Jubal Pugh died and purchased tickets under the name Maria Hernandez. Bianca – Maria – had then taken a plane to Spokane, Washington. Thirty agents descended on Spokane, showed Bianca’s picture to car rental agencies, and found a kid at an off-terminal lot who remembered Bianca because ‘she was one fine-lookin’ piece.’

Records showed that Bianca used the Maria Hernandez ID to rent a car. Mileage logs for the rental car showed the distance she traveled was consistent with a round-trip from Spokane to Victor, but this was not conclusive. Next the FBI looked at motels in and near Victor to see if Maria Hernandez had rented a room. No joy. So the FBI platoon started questioning motel clerks and maids and found one young clerk who recognized Bianca’s picture. He said the woman paid cash when she checked in and used the name Elena Mendoza. She never showed him an ID or used a credit card, but the clerk was positive that the picture of Bianca Castro was Elena Mendoza. He remembered her because ‘she was hot!’ – young men out west being fairly consistent in both their appreciation and their description of members of the opposite sex.

Gotcha! the boys from the Bureau said. They had two eyewitnesses who saw Bianca in a deputy sheriff’s uniform enter the junkyard office at the time Jubal Pugh was killed. They had statements from those witnesses that no one had entered the office after her or before the bodies were discovered. And they had proof she’d traveled to Victor and had stayed there. Yep, they had more than enough to arrest and convict Bianca Castro for the murder of Jubal Pugh, and they hadn’t even started gathering whatever evidence they might find when they searched her house.

The first FBI agent who interrogated Bianca didn’t realize it, but he said one thing that was pivotal in getting Bianca to give up Oliver Lincoln. Actually, he didn’t really interrogate her – he made a speech. In his speech, he laid out all the evidence against her and told her she was going to get the death penalty for killing Jubal Pugh and the Indian who owned the scrap yard. He added, ‘I’d suggest you hire a very good lawyer.’

Bianca concluded that there was no way she was going to waste her money on a lawyer. She knew the FBI had her cold for killing Pugh, but they couldn’t get her for killing Rollie Patterson. Most important, they had no evidence at all that she had planted the fire bomb under the bed of Senator William Broderick’s mistress. She wished she hadn’t popped the guy who owned the scrap yard, but when it came to Jubal … hell, he was a drug dealer who had been involved with the fake terrorist attacks and the deaths of at least eight people. No one cared about him. And she was
so
glad she had just knocked out the cop in Montana instead of killing her as she’d originally planned.

So she told the FBI she was willing to deal. No more than twenty years in prison, she said, and she had to be eligible for parole in ten. Twenty years was plenty of time for killing Jubal and one junkyard Indian. But in addition – and this she said was a deal breaker – the government had to agree not to touch her assets and allow her time to move her money into long-term investments before she went to prison. If they didn’t agree to that they could threaten to throw her in jail forever, and she still wouldn’t tell them a thing.

The Cuban was forty-two years old. If she served twenty years, she’d be sixty-two when she got out of prison, younger than that if she could get paroled. Her mother was still going strong at sixty-seven and her grandmother had been ninety-two when she died. Bianca came from a line of long-living whores, and her greatest fear had always been being old and poor. So she’d take the twenty years, provided she got to keep her money.

The FBI agreed to Bianca’s terms – and she gave them Oliver Lincoln.

Nick Fine – Senator Nicholas Fine – beat them all to the punch.

Fine found out that Oliver Lincoln was going to be arrested long before the FBI placed the handcuffs on his wrists; he found out as soon as Bianca Castro gave him up. And as soon as he did, he called a press conference.

Fine looked very good standing behind the lectern, dressed in a gray suit, tall and lean, devilishly handsome with his arched brows and his perfectly shaped goatee. The cameras loved him – as did more than a few female reporters.

Fine told the assembled news hawks that he had just come to a ‘very disturbing realization.’ He said that after he was appointed to fill William Broderick’s seat in the U.S. Senate, he eventually got around to looking at how much money was available in Broderick’s war chest. Well, Fine said, he was shocked – absolutely shocked – to discover that Broderick had vectored approximately eight million dollars to an account in the Cayman Islands. The fact that the money had been sent to an offshore account – well, that just smelled of ‘monkey business,’ he said.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Fine said to the reporters, ‘just two days ago I discovered that the account in the Caymans belonged to a man named Oliver Lincoln.’

A reporter’s hand shot up. ‘How were you able to find out that the account belonged to this man? I thought that’s why people put their money into offshore accounts, so nobody could figure out who the money belonged to.’

Fine chuckled. ‘A United States senator is not without influence, sir. I simply called up the president of the bank and told him that I very much wanted to know the name of the owner of the account. I don’t remember my exact language, but I may have hinted that it would be a grave mistake for the bank to, ah, annoy me.’ (The bank president later admitted that he did indeed tell the senator the name of the account holder, believing it was, in this very, very special case, in the bank’s interest to ignore its normal disclosure policies.)

‘Anyway,’ Fine said, ‘the name
Oliver Lincoln
tickled something in my memory. I remembered when Senator Broderick attended one of his first Senate Intelligence Committee meetings he asked me who Lincoln was, and I said I didn’t know. And I didn’t. As aide first to Senator Wingate and then to Senator Broderick, I didn’t attend all Intelligence meetings, because some of those meetings were limited to the principals, depending on the classification level of the subject matter. After that, I remember Senator Broderick asking me to provide him with the minutes from past Intelligence Committee meetings, some going back as far as ten years. I didn’t question why he wanted to see them. He was, after all, my boss.

‘I was just trying to decide what to do with the information I’d obtained when I was informed, this very morning, that the FBI had arrested Oliver Lincoln as the mastermind behind the terrorist attacks. I also found out that Lincoln has a history of carrying out complex operations, sometimes to help criminal cartels, and other times, unfortunately, to aid the American government, in particular the CIA. And that’s why Senator Broderick had wanted to look at past meeting minutes, so that he could research Lincoln’s past.’

The reporters started to buzz like angry bees around a ruptured hive. A dozen voices called out, which Fine ignored.

‘I believe—’ he said. Then he paused and repeated himself to increase the drama. ‘I believe – and I’ve told this to the FBI, and I say this with great regret – that William Broderick, in order to pass his bill, a bill as you all know I never personally approved of, paid this man Lincoln to orchestrate these terrorist attacks so American Muslims would get the blame.’

Whoa! the reporters cried. Why the hell would Broderick do that?

Fine said it was fairly obvious: Broderick was determined to make a name for himself in politics. He figured the best way to do it was to get his bill passed, and the best way to do
that
was by creating an atmosphere of fear and xenophobia caused by a series of terrorist attacks supposedly perpetrated by Muslim Americans.

But then why was Broderick killed? a reporter asked.

Fine shook his head. ‘My answer to that question, sir, is that I do not know.’ It was possible, Fine said, that a disgruntled Muslim had indeed killed Broderick just like the note found in his car had said. That would be ironic but also fitting. But it was also possible, Fine said, that there had been some sort of falling out among thieves, that Oliver Lincoln had killed Broderick for some reason. ‘I just don’t know why Senator Broderick was assassinated,’ Fine concluded. ‘That’s a mystery the good men and women at the FBI will have to unravel.’

‘One last question, Senator. Why on earth would Broderick have left records showing money going from him to this account in the Caymans?’

Fine hesitated. ‘Well,’ he said, and paused again as though struggling for words. ‘I hate to say this, but Bill Broderick was not the smartest guy I ever met.’