Ultimate Betrayal (13 page)

The late spring heat and humidity enveloped O’Neil when he stepped out of the terminal at Reagan National Airport. His dress shirt went limp by the time he reached the taxi queue. He felt as though he’d walked into a steam bath. And the taxi he was assigned had no air conditioning. The taxi driver was a Nigerian who spoke quite elegant British English, referred to O’Neil as “My good man,” and used the word “bloody” to describe everything about Washington D.C.—“bloody weather,” “bloody politicians,” “bloody traffic . . . .” By the time the driver dropped him off at his hotel, across the street from the Watergate Complex, O’Neil was in a nasty mood.

After he checked into the hotel and found his room, O’Neil called Sam Collins.

“Hey, Sam,” O’Neil said. “I’m here in D.C. Can you meet me?”

“You really flew all the way from Chicago? And didn’t know for sure I would actually see you?”

“Dead Marines, Sam! Murdered Marines! All I want from you is an hour of your time.”

“All right. Meet me at McNally’s Tavern on 9
th
Street in two hours.”

“I’ll be there.”

O’Neil got to McNally’s Tavern at 6:30 p.m., fifteen minutes before Collins was due to arrive, and after he ordered a beer, looked around the bar. The place had the appearance of a blue-collar bar converted to a yuppie club. It was half-filled with men and women in business suits. The bar, fronted by stools and a gleaming brass foot rail, extended from the front window all the way to the back wall. There was a narrow circulation area between the bar and tables along the wall opposite the bar. A man and a woman occupied a table close to O’Neil’s. He caught snatches of their conversation—something about a two hundred million dollar IPO for a social media company. O’Neil sighed. He’d never cracked the sixty-five thousand dollar salary level. He quickly pushed the envy out of his mind. If he had to do it all over again, he’d still be a cop.

He considered his approach to Collins. The man could make his search for information easy. But if he refused to cooperate, getting information from the Pentagon would be tortuous and time-consuming, at best. And maybe impossible.

A fortyish man with buzz cut blond hair, dressed in a Marine khaki summer uniform, walked up to the table. “Detective O’Neil?” he asked.

O’Neil nodded his head, stood up, stuck out his hand. He read the nametag pinned over the Marine’s left blouse pocket: COLLINS. “Nice to finally meet you, Sam. Please call me Dennis.”

Collins grunted something and took O’Neil’s hand.

O’Neil could tell from the Marine’s frown he wasn’t happy about this meeting. He pointed at the chair on the opposite side of the table. “Please sit down, Sam. I appreciate you meeting me.”

Collins dropped into the chair and looked around the bar, as though he was reconnoitering the place for enemies. O’Neil quickly looked him over. Collins looked lean and hard, with that square-jawed look seen in Corps recruitment posters.

“How’d you know to pick me out in this place?” O’Neil asked.

Collins smiled. “Look around.”

Dennis laughed when he realized he was the only man over forty in the place, and the only one, besides Collins, with a Marine buzz cut.

They ordered two draft beers from a harried waitress and then Collins said, “So, tell me what you need.”

“I told you before that three Marines who served in my unit in Afghanistan have been murdered in the last few weeks. Assassination style. Gunshots to the head. The murders have to be connected. There’s only one thing I can find that all three men had in common, besides being dead and serving in the same Marine unit. After each of them was wounded, he was transferred from the Marine unit to something called the Special Logistical Support Detachment.”

O’Neil paused when the waitress returned with their beers. “Then I heard on TV this morning that the President just nominated a former Army colonel named Rolf Bishop to a top spot at the CIA.”

Collins’s eyes snapped wide open.

O’Neil leaned forward across the table and lowered his voice. “In Bishop’s Senate confirmation committee hearing, it came out that he was the commander of this Special Logistical Support Detachment.”

“Let me get this straight,” Collins said. “You really do think the murders of three former Marines are connected in some way. You think the murders may be tied to this SLSD unit. And you think the new CIA Deputy Director may be tied to this—”

“No! No!” O’Neil interrupted. He leaned even closer to Collins. “I didn’t suggest Bishop had anything to do with the murders. I just know he commanded the dead men’s unit.”

“I hope to God Bishop isn’t involved. In this town, that guy’s got more juice than Ocean Spray.”

“I hear you, Sam.”

“Okay, so what do you want?”

“I want to know the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every person who served with the Special Logistical Support Detachment.”

“Jeez, what if there are hundreds of them?”

“God, I hope not,” O’Neil said.

Collins sighed. “Okay, I’ll do my best. Where can I reach you?”

O’Neil gave Collins his cell number and then picked up the tab for the beers. They walked from the bar together. O’Neil turned down Collins’s offer of a ride back to his hotel.

“I need the exercise.”

After Collins pulled out of the parking lot, O’Neil walked toward his hotel. It was now dark but it was unseasonably warm—a good evening for a walk. While he waited for the traffic light to turn green at the first corner, he noticed the headline on the front page of a newspaper in a newspaper box. It read, “Bishop Confirmed to CIA Post.”

Rolf Bishop relaxed in the plush back seat of his CIA limousine. It was after 11 p.m. and had been a very long day. But he was full of the feeling that life was good. The U.S. Senate had confirmed him in his new CIA post. The President had then introduced him to the White House press corps and to the nation at a press conference in the Rose Garden. Afterward, Bishop had been driven out to Langley where he presided over a CIA staff meeting of his senior department heads. A dinner in his honor at the White House had capped everything off. The dinner was really nothing but an excuse to raise a million dollars or so for the party, but he still relished the attention and deference paid to him. This was heady stuff for a poor kid from Iowa, and he ate up every bit of it.

Bishop thought about the David Hood matter and felt a slight tremor of doubt that eroded his euphoria. He hadn’t heard from Montrose Toney. He thought the guy had probably run off. He’d have to track him down and eliminate him.

The first order he’d issued as Deputy Director of the CIA was for an intelligence trace to be put on any inquiries about the Special Logistical Support Detachment or Operation Harvest that hit the computer files of any government agency or department. Even though he assumed once Hood was taken care of, there would be no one left alive who would ever be interested in tying him to the SLSD, he wanted to know if that question asked by the senator in the confirmation hearing had put any reporters on the trail of the SLSD and Operation Harvest. Even if the subject of drugs never came up, he realized the activities of the unit could prove embarrassing, considering the tremendous fraud perpetrated by Operation Harvest on Congress and the American people. He realized he was acting paranoid, but he believed in taking every precaution. Although the Pentagon had buried Operation Harvest so deep it would probably never be unearthed, all it would take was one asshole reporter having a drink with some pissed off Pentagon clerk with a long memory.

He rested his head against the leather headrest and closed his eyes. That bastard Toney! He’d fix his ass for good. In the meantime, he hoped his backup plan would work.

APRIL 20

CHAPTER 20

Gunnery Sergeant Sam Collins’s throat was dry and his stomach ached. He rang Dennis O’Neil’s cellphone from a pay phone a few minutes before noon. He nervously looked through the phone booth’s windows.

“Hello,” O’Neil answered.

“Meet me in an hour where we had a couple of beers yesterday.”

When Collins showed up at McNally’s Tavern, a half-hour late, O’Neil noticed the Marine was jittery. His hands shook and he frequently looked over O’Neil’s shoulder at the tavern door. O’Neil ordered shots of Jack Daniels for both of them.

“What’s up, Sam?” O’Neil asked. “You act like you just robbed a bank.”

“I wish it was that simple,” Collins replied in a nervous, subdued voice. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his blouse pocket, placed it on the table in front of him, and covered it with his hand. “You have no idea what you’ve stuck your nose into.” He took a sip of the whiskey, then looked at his glass and downed the whole thing.

O’Neil signaled the waitress for another round of drinks. “Listen, Sam, why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Collins breathed deeply and slowly let the air out of his lungs. “Okay. I got into work a little early today so I could dig up the information you wanted. I logged into Big Bertha—that’s our mainframe system—and I queried the computer to cross-reference all personnel who ever had anything to do with the Special Logistical Support Detachment. I got a readout that said, ‘NEED TO KNOW BASIS ONLY - ACCESS RESTRICTED. TOP SECRET.’ I’ve got a Top Secret/Crypto clearance, so it was no big deal to access the data file. But it’s against the law for me to tell you what I learned.”

“Jeez, Sam, what the hell! I—”

Collins pumped a hand at O’Neil. “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this. I think someone is fucking with the system. I’m going to tell what I learned, but you never heard it from me.”

“Okay. I got it. But what did you mean when you said, ‘. . . someone’s fucking with the system’?”

“The SLSD file was unclassified until yesterday. It got classified at someone’s request. I don’t know why or by whom.”

O’Neil squinted at Collins. “I’m totally confused, Sam.”

“Okay, here’s the deal. I got into the program and it spilled out the names of every Defense Department analyst who planned or worked on the creation of the unit, every officer and enlisted man ever assigned to it, and every individual who ever touched it in any way. I concentrated on the names of those who’d been assigned to the unit in Afghanistan in its eighteen-month existence. A total of fifteen men. The unit managed a mission called Operation Harvest. The files didn’t go into any detail about what that was.

“So, I had a list of fifteen names, some of which I immediately recognized.” Collins uncovered the piece of paper and unfolded it. He read from the paper. “Bishop, the new CIA Deputy Director, was the commander of the SLSD, and we know he’s still alive. Then there’s your three dead Marines: Carbajal, Perkins, and Laniewski. I pulled up the files on the other eleven names, and this is where things got weird.”

The waitress brought another round and Collins snatched up his glass and downed half its contents.

“Oh, before I forget, I learned your three dead Marines were the only Marines assigned to SLSD. The other men came from the other combat services. One of them—an Army captain named Andrew King—died in Afghanistan. Another man—Roland Wilson—died in a car accident a few years ago. Emile Jackson—died from cancer in 2011. And an Army Master Sergeant, Robert Campbell, was murdered while on leave in New York City in 2004. Can you imagine? The guy spends a career in the Army without getting a scratch on him; then he visits the Big Apple and gets killed. Go figure.

“Anyway, I eliminated Bishop, the three Marines, and the four men I just mentioned. That left seven names. All of them got out of the service either immediately or shortly after they left Afghanistan. I figured the addresses on file were probably worthless. Then I got a brain flash and checked Veterans Administration records. You know, maybe some of these men got VA loans, or took courses under the GI Bill, or accessed the VA medical system. In any case, I thought I might find more current addresses there.” Collins paused. “You may want to down that drink before I continue.”

“I’m okay,” O’Neil said.

Collins shrugged and finished his own drink. “So, I inputted a name in the VA database—guy named Jeffrey Schmitt. The most recent entry in his file—just two weeks ago—was a request for Veterans Burial Benefits. I typed in the next name—Lawrence Goldstein—and I got the same damned thing. Request for burial benefits a week ago. I thought that was a little strange. I mean, what are the odds? Then I input Robert Zimmerman’s name. Nothing. The same with a guy named David Hood. After that, I entered Ralph Connors, Ernest Butler, and Clay Elmer’s names. All three had burial benefits requests on record. You gotta figure that’s a high ratio of former servicemen from one unit dying so young, in their twenties and thirties. But get this! Connors, Butler, and Elmer also died within the last few weeks. That’s eight men from the SLSD, including your three Marines, who died over the past thirty days. And they didn’t just die. All of them were murdered. Nine of the fifteen men assigned to the SLSC, including Robert Campbell who was killed in 2004, have been murdered.”

“That leaves Bishop, Zimmerman, and Hood still alive,” O’Neil said.

Collins stared at O’Neil. “The look on your face would be comical under most any other circumstances. You look as shocked as I am.”

“Is that it?”

“Oh, no. I gotta tell you, Dennis, I was sweating bullets, freaked out. But I was hooked; so I tried something else. I had two names unaccounted for on my list—Zimmerman and Hood. I called the telephone numbers from their files. The number for Zimmerman was still good; a lady answered. Julie Zimmerman, Robert Zimmerman’s mother. She cried when I asked to speak to her son. You want to guess what she tells me?”

O’Neil shook his head. “Don’t tell me. Her son was killed in the last few weeks.”

“You got it! Somebody put a bullet in his head. Zimmerman didn’t show up in VA records because his mother had yet to claim burial benefits. That’s nine guys murdered in less than thirty days. I can’t believe any of this, but it’s true and it scares the shit out of me. I tried the same thing with the telephone number in the Hood file, but I got a recording with no name mentioned. I’ve got no idea if the number’s any good or if it’s been reassigned to someone else. Hood got VA benefits to go to school, but the number in the VA database wasn’t any good either.”