Murder at the Watergate (31 page)

“How did they know we’d be there?” Mac growled.

“That’s for later,” LaHoya said. “Please, pack your bags and come with us. You’ll be safe overnight. We have you on the first flight out in the morning from León to Mexico City, then to Washington.”

“I can’t leave. Something’s being delivered to me here.”

LaHoya looked at the clown. “I’ll check the desk,” he said. “Stay there until it arrives.” To Smith: “It has to do with your meeting?”

“Yes, damn it!”

“Good job, Mr. Smith,” LaHoya said, leaving.

The men stood outside the suite as Mac and Annabel packed.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, jamming clothes into her suitcase and fighting back tears.

There was a knock on the door. Mac went to it.

“Whatever you were expecting already arrived,” LaHoya said. “Delivered by an old man with a patch over one eye.”

“Good. Give it to me.”

“Someone else picked it up.”

“Who?”

The night manager says it was a young gringo, maybe thirty-five, good-looking, wearing a tux.”

“Chris Hedras,” Mac said. “Where did he go?”

LaHoya shrugged.

“Probably back to Elfie’s house,” Annabel said.

“We’ve got to find that package,” Mac said to LaHoya. “If we don’t, this has all been for nothing.”

LaHoya and the clown conferred. “Okay,” LaHoya said. “Mrs. Dorrance’s house?”

“Right,” Mac said.

“Finish packing,” said LaHoya.

“When we come back. Can some of your people look for the taxi with Hedras?”

“He could be anywhere.”

“Start with the airport. Come on. There’s no time to lose.”

Elfie Dorrance’s party was still going strong when they arrived. She greeted Mac at the front door, looked wide-eyed at the men surrounding him, then asked, “What in the world is going on? We heard gunfire from town. What happened to you, Mac? Your tux is dirty. The knees.”

“Where’s Chris?”

“That, too. He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Mexico City. He came running in here and said he had to leave for Washington immediately. I was shocked. It was so rude. My guests were appalled at his behavior.”

“How is he getting to Mexico City?” Mac asked, noticing for the first time that Elfie’s guests, drinks in hand, puzzled expressions on their faces, had gathered behind her.

“A taxi. He arrived by one, told the driver to wait a few minutes, ran to his room, came down a minute later with his suitcase and was gone.”

“I need to use your phone,” Mac said.

“Would you and your friends like drinks?” Elfie asked.

Mac ignored the question, went inside, and found a
phone on a table in the foyer. He turned to Elfie, who’d followed him. “Get me a long-distance operator, Elfie. I need to put a call through to Washington.”

It took a few minutes until the call was answered at the White House.

“The vice president’s office,” a young man said.

“This is Mackensie Smith. I’m a friend of the vice president and on his campaign staff. I’m calling from Mexico. It’s an emergency. I must speak with the vice president immediately.”

Chris Hedras urged the driver to go faster as they approached the suburbs of Mexico City. It was still dark; the sun would not rise for another three hours.

He twisted his neck repeatedly against a dull ache that had set in soon after leaving San Miguel de Allende. It was accompanied by a blinding headache and sour stomach. He glanced down, reminding himself he was still dressed in formal wear.

They entered the city, blessedly free at that hour of its usual traffic clots. Hedras leaned over the seat back: “The train station.”

After depositing the envelope he’d carried with him from San Miguel in a public locker with a combination lock—“Six-one-five, six-one-five,” he repeated until confident he would remember it—he returned to the taxi and gave the driver further instructions.

“Go that way. Turn around,
idiota
! Up there. That road.”

They progressed to a higher elevation, the air through
the open window cooler now. Eventually, after a number of false turns while Hedras tried to find his destination, they came to a stop in front of a home surrounded by a pastel masonry wall. Hedras was asked by the driver if he wanted him to wait.

“No. Here.” He handed him a wad of pesos and told him in Spanish to get lost.

He went to the wooden gate and pressed the buzzer numerous times until a voice asked through an intercom, “Who is it?”

“Chris Hedras.”

The man muttered a curse. Chris repeatedly punched the buzzer again.

“Un momento.”

Hedras waited until the heavy wooden gate was unlocked from inside and pulled open by a short, heavy man dressed in a gray sweatsuit. A holster containing a handgun was strung about his waist.

Chris pushed by him and fairly ran to the front door, which was open, and stepped inside. A light came on at the end of a long hallway. Oswaldo Flores, dressed in pajamas, silk robe, and leather slippers, stepped from a room, hands in the robe’s pockets, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“I’m sorry to barge in at this hour,” Hedras said, breathless. “But I had to come. It’s urgent.”

“It is fortunate my family is away,” Flores said, closing the distance between them. “If you had woken them, you would not be welcome.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad they’re not home, too.” He glanced back at the man who’d opened the gate and who now stood a few feet away. “Where can we talk, Oswaldo?”

Flores silently led them into his home office and closed the door. He sat behind a large desk, handcrafted, and gestured to a green leather chair. A brass desk lamp cast the only light in the room.

“You look as though you’ve come from a party, Chris. Fun, I hope. Now, what brings you here unannounced at this ungodly hour?”

“They killed Carlos Unzaga.”

Flores’s face reflected no overt reaction to the news.

“He was meeting with the American, Mackensie Smith. He told Smith what he knew about things—about certain situations here.”

“How do you know what they spoke of?”

“Because I was told what the meeting was about. I was the one who tipped the authorities they’d be meeting. Unzaga had a package of evidence prepared to give Smith, but I got to it first. Unzaga had an old aide deliver it. He trusts me, handed it over when I told him I’d see that Smith got it.”

“Where is it?”

“Safe. But you can have it if I get what I want.”

“Get what you want? And what would that be?”

“A lot more than I’ve been getting, Oswaldo. I need big money in case things go bad for me back in Washington. I don’t know if Smith realizes it was me who ended up with the package, but that’s always a possibility. I’m not worried about Joe Aprile. I’m his fair-haired boy. But I want a cushion.”

“How much of a cushion, Chris? How much have you been paid so far? A million dollars? A little more?”

“Less than that.”

“I see.”

“I’ve earned every goddamn cent of it. Every penny. Now I’ve really put myself out on a limb. It was one thing to feed you information about the Initiative, and to help launder big money into the Scott-Aprile campaigns. Running off with evidence that could sink you and your whole game is another. I’ve taken a big risk for you, Oswaldo. I deserve a lot. Tonight.”

Flores lighted another cigarette and offered Hedras one from a custom-made inlaid wooden box on the desk. Although Hedras hadn’t smoked since he was a teenager, he readily accepted it, and the light from Flores. “You have any coke?” he asked.

Flores answered by going to a wall safe, dialing in its combination, and removing a clear plastic bag containing white powder. He then took a piece of heavy glass from his desk, along with a straw, and placed everything in front of his visitor.

Chris immediately opened the bag and poured a thin line of the cocaine on the glass. He placed the straw slightly above it and inhaled, first in one nostril, then the other. Flores watched dispassionately from behind his desk.

When Hedras was finished, he looked up and found himself staring into the business end of a loaded forty-five Flores had taken from another desk drawer.

“Hey, easy, Oswaldo. What’s that for?”

“There is the matter of my daughter to discuss.”

“Laura?” Hedras held up both hands, forced a laugh. “Man, I had nothing to do with that. Jose Chapas at the trade alliance set that up. Believe me. All I did was tip him to what she had come up with—which, I might add, was plenty on you and Televisa. But her dying … No, sir,
that wasn’t me. I’ve never killed anybody. Talk to those guys at the trade alliance.”

Flores lowered the forty-five and gently placed it on the desk. “You say this evidence Unzaga delivered is safe. It would be even safer here. Where is it?”

“You give me the money, I tell you where it is.”

“I’m sure I don’t have in the house as much as you want.”

“Bull!” Chris stood. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. I never have. So I let the trade alliance and others know when certain things were going down. Garza. Ramon Kelly. Unzaga. All I did was pass along information. And I’m not here to make trouble for you.” He laughed. “Hey, I’m here to keep you out of trouble. That evidence Unzaga delivered could sink a lot of people. Two million.”

Flores smiled. “Two million dollars, just like that, Chris?”

“Yeah.”

“I can give you half of that now, the other half in a few days.”

Hedras was light-headed, his nerves on edge, thoughts flying through his mind and leaving just as fast.

“Yeah, okay. A half. What, two, three days for the rest?”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“Oh, I also need your private jet to get me out of Mexico. Maybe they’re looking for me at the airport. Get me to El Paso or San Antonio. I’ll fly home from there.”

Flores picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Oswaldo Flores,” he said. “I need the plane in an hour. The
passenger is named Mr. Hedras. Chris Hedras. You’ll fly him to El Paso, or wherever he wishes to go.”

He hung up. “Satisfied?”

“Yeah. That’s good. I appreciate it.
Muchas gracias
.”

Flores returned the cocaine and apparatus for its use to the safe, returning to the desk holding two fat envelopes. He slid them to Hedras. “There should be a million in U.S. dollars there, give or take a little bit. But we won’t quibble over a few dollars, will we, Chris? You’ve done very good work for us and it is sincerely appreciated.”

Flores stood, smiled, and came around the desk, placing his hand on Chris’s shoulder. “The plane will be waiting. Jasper will drive you to the airport in my car. Have a safe journey home.”

Hedras stood and offered his hand. After Flores had shaken it, Hedras said, “Look, don’t take this wrong, Oswaldo, but you aren’t going to pull anything on me, are you? I mean, I know what Jasper’s all about. He’s a goon. What I’m saying is—”

“Chris, you are becoming very paranoid. It’s the cocaine. It does that to people. I suggest you consider no longer using it. Jasper will take you to the airport, you will have the comfort of my private jet, and you will return home. Now, where is the envelope with the evidence?”

“The train station in the city. Locker number eleven. The combination is six-one-five. Six-one-five. Want me to write it down?”

“Not necessary. I don’t wish you to take this wrong, either, Chris, but when I send someone to open that locker, the envelope will be there.”

“Of course it will. You know you can trust me.”

Mac and Annabel arrived back in Washington at three the next afternoon and went directly to their apartment, where they showered and changed into fresh clothes. The car that had brought them to the Watergate from the airport had moved to the parking area serving the hotel’s lower entrance. It was joined by another vehicle, a plain four-door black sedan carrying Richard de LaHoya, who’d debriefed the Smiths during the flight from Mexico City, and two CIA agents assigned to that agency’s Latin American division.

One of two Secret Service agents dispatched by the vice president’s office to meet Mac and Annabel at the airport had accompanied them upstairs and waited in the living room. The other agent stayed with the limo driver.

“We’re ready,” Mac said, emerging from the bedroom.

They rode the elevator to the underground parking garage and set off at a quick pace to the hotel.

“Why was the limo moved to the hotel?” Mac asked.

“Procedure,” the Secret Service agent said.

They entered the limo, and the two vehicles turned onto Virginia Avenue. Minutes later they pulled up at a seldom-used entrance to the old Executive Building at Seventeenth and Pennsylvania, in which the vice president’s office was located. Former president Harry Truman had said of the mammoth, nineteenth-century, French-inspired building that consumes ten acres of floor space, “I don’t want it torn down. I think it’s the greatest monstrosity in America.”

But its architectural shortcomings weren’t on anyone’s mind as they piled out of the cars and, after confirmation by phone that they were expected in Vice President Aprile’s office, were escorted by two guards inside the building, across the vast main hall, and to the VP’s suite of offices. They were ushered into one of the building’s 566 rooms, a large, square chamber dominated by a huge teak conference table surrounded by twenty padded armchairs. The two men already there stood and introduced themselves. Mac and Annabel knew one of them, Lawrence Mayles, Washington’s police commissioner. The other was MPD’s Chief of Detectives Peter LaRocca. They’d no sooner taken seats when Joseph Aprile entered and took the chair left vacant for him at the head of the table. Fatigue was engraved on his face.

“I have a sense of what’s happened, thanks to your phone call from Mexico, Mac. And I’ve been briefed on other aspects. Where do we stand?”

LaHoya spoke:“Mr. Vice President, as you know, your campaign manager, Chris Hedras, has allegedly been involved in a pattern of betrayal of you and others. We don’t know the specifics of his actions, why he did it, who he was paid by, or the extent to which he participated in
those actions. But evidence to be delivered to Mr. Smith by the Mexican guerrilla leader Carlos Unzaga was intercepted by Hedras. We know he went to Mexico City in the middle of the night, but have no information as to his current whereabouts. As far as we can ascertain, he didn’t take a flight from either Mexico City or León.”