Viking Bay (18 page)

26
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Kay needed to call the cops but didn't have her phone with her. She walked to the mouth of the alley—she was limping again; she'd hurt her leg when she'd stomped on the damn guy's foot—and looked up and down Connecticut. The block was all apartment buildings, but not the type to have doormen sitting in the lobby. Naturally, there wasn't a pay phone in sight.

Two guys stepped out of one of the buildings and began walking toward her. They were holding hands. She walked toward them, and when she was about twenty yards away, she said, “I need you to call the cops.”

They stopped, and she kept walking toward them. “I need you to call the cops,” she repeated. “A guy just tried to rape me and I shot him.”

One of the men looked down and saw she was holding the .32 in her hand; she'd actually forgotten she was holding it. He took a step backward and half raised his hands in a surrender gesture.

“No, no,” Kay said. “I'm not going to hurt you. Now, please. Call the cops. I'm going to wait for them back by the body.”

The D.C. Metro Police showed up in less than five minutes—about the expected response time when they get a call saying a woman's walking around with a gun in her hand and had just admitted that she'd killed someone. When they arrived, Kay was standing at the mouth of the alley, and she raised both hands to show she was unarmed. The two cops—one white, one black, both young—exited their patrol car holding guns.

“Where's your weapon?” one of them said, pointing his gun at her chest.

Kay pointed down at her feet. “Right there.”

“Step away from it. Now,” the cop said.

“Okay, guys, but I'm the victim here. So settle down.”

—

KAY HAD THOUGHT
it would be pretty straightforward: She'd show them the bruise on her face where the rapist had hit her, the ski mask lying next to his head, the knife lying on the ground next to his hand, and they'd say, “Thank you, ma'am, for ridding the city of this menace.” She should have known better.

From the cops' perspective it wasn't all that clear-cut. How did they know she hadn't planted the knife? For that matter, how did they know she hadn't attacked the man and he drew a knife to defend himself? And what was she doing jogging at night, packing a sneaky little .32 in an ankle holster? And how was it that she was able to overcome a man bigger than her, who she claimed had her in a choke hold? It was also pretty amazing how she'd been able to put two bullets into his chest in a circle the size of a fifty-cent piece while scared and scuttling along on her butt, trying to back away from the guy.

They read her the Miranda statement and took her to the station.

At the station they put her into an interrogation room, made her wait for an hour, and then a detective came in and asked her all the questions she'd already been asked. The one thing that stumped her was when the detective asked if she'd ever seen the man before. She said, “I'm not sure. He looked familiar, but I can't place him. Who is he?”

Instead of answering her question, the cop said, “Okay, let's take this one more time from the top. You claim you were jogging down Connecticut and . . .”

It was the
you claim
that did it. “All right. I've had enough of this
bullshit. I'm ex-DEA, I know my rights, and I want to make a phone call right now. So you either let me make a call or you get your dumb ass out of here and get a public defender in here.”

—

THERE WERE TWO PEOPLE
she could call: Barb Reynolds and Anna Mercer. She assumed Callahan was still out of the country. She figured that Barb had done her enough favors lately and didn't deserve to get dragged into this mess.

“This is Hamilton,” she said when Mercer answered her phone, “and this call is probably being monitored. I'm down at the police station on Indiana Avenue. I just killed a man who tried to rape me, and the cops are being assholes about the whole thing and treating me like a suspect.”

“My God,” Mercer said. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I'm fine, but can you get someone down here to spring me from this place?”

Twenty minutes later, Sylvia Sorenson opened the door to the interrogation room. She was wearing a black raincoat over jeans and a dark blue T-shirt that looked two sizes too large. Judging by her tousled hair, Mercer must have roused Sylvia from her bed and she'd probably been sleeping in the T-shirt. “You're free to go,” she said to Kay.

As they walked down the hall, the detective who'd questioned Kay came up to her and said, “I apologize, ma'am, for—”

“Hey!” Sylvia snapped. “Don't talk to my client, and you just remember what I told you.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the detective said.

“What did you do to get me sprung?” Kay asked as she and Sylvia were leaving the building.

Sylvia smiled—this small, cruel slice of a smile—and when she did, Kay thought she looked a bit feral and she remembered Mercer's comment about Sylvia the wolverine.

“I had a little discussion with that cop regarding the law,” Sylvia said. “I also pointed out to him that fucking around with a decorated ex–DEA agent currently employed by a former member of the National Security Council was not a good career move.”

Kay wished she'd seen that: Sylvia dressing down the detective.

“Do you need a ride home?” Sylvia asked.

—

KAY LOOKED IN
the bathroom mirror. Her face had a reddish lump near her right cheekbone where the guy had hit her, and it would probably turn purple tomorrow. She also had a headache, and her leg was throbbing. What she was really worried about was that the punch in the face might have affected the concussion she'd had. She'd go see the doctor tomorrow. She didn't want to end up like some punch-drunk NFL lineman from repeated blows to the head.

She was really getting tired of being injured.

She called Anna Mercer again. “I'm back home. Thanks for siccing Sylvia on the cops.”

“Yeah, Sylvia can be pretty formidable when she sets her mind to it.”

“I'd like to get the name of the guy who attacked me. He looked familiar.”

“What are you saying? You think this was more than a random attack?”

“I don't know. He just looked familiar, and I'd like to know his name.”

“I'll have Sylvia get his name tomorrow,” Mercer said. “I'm just glad you're okay.”

—

WHEN JESSICA GOT HOME
from the Dave Matthews concert and saw Kate holding an ice pack to her face, she shrieked, “Oh my God! What happened to you now?”

“Aw, I did something stupid. I went for a jog and I guess my leg wasn't quite ready for it, and I stumbled and landed on my face. Does it look that bad?”

“It looks like somebody punched you. You look like a battered wife.”

That was too close to the mark, and Kay wondered if she should tell her daughter the truth, that somebody had tried to rape her. Maybe she should; maybe it was a mistake to hide what had happened from her. But Kay didn't want to scare her again. Jessica's reaction to Kay's lie that she'd been in a car accident had been bad enough, and she didn't want the girl dwelling on how vulnerable people were and how capricious life could be. On the other hand, not telling her could be a disservice to her. Jessica knew, at least intellectually, that rape was a possibility, but she probably didn't really think that it could happen to her or anyone close to her. Shielding her daughter from the harsh realities of life might be worse in the long run than giving her another scare. The other thing Kay realized was that what she'd done could become public knowledge. The police didn't typically release the names of rape victims to the media, but since a man had been killed, it was hard to predict what information might become public. She could just see some cop knocking on the door and saying to Jessica, “Hi, I'm here to talk to your mom about the rapist she killed the other night.”

She started to say
Okay, I'm not telling you the truth, here's what really happened,
and then another thought occurred to her. It still bothered her that the man she'd killed had looked familiar, and she wondered if what had happened tonight might have some connection to the Callahan Group or Afghanistan. Tomorrow she'd get the guy's name and also see if the cops had any intention of pursuing the issue. And if the attack on her had any connection to Callahan, then she really couldn't talk to Jessica about it. She'd decide tomorrow.

27
|
Alpha was furious. If Bravo had been in the room, Alpha would have killed him.

Alpha called one of the prepaid cell phones they used to communicate.

“You stupid son of a bitch! I told you to just watch her. Why did you try to kill her?”

He didn't answer. He was probably trying to figure out how Alpha knew that he'd sent someone to kill Hamilton. Before he could say anything, Alpha said, “Well, Hamilton killed the guy you sent, genius.”

“Aw, shit,” he said.

“
Aw, shit
? That's all you have to say? The only good news is the cops don't know who he is yet. Fortunately, he didn't have any ID on him. But in a couple of hours they'll run his prints, and since I'm guessing he's ex-military, his prints will be on file. I need his name, and I need it before Callahan learns who he is. It still might be possible to recover from the dumbass thing you've done.”

“How?”

“Never mind
how
. What's his name?”

“Eric Nelson. He was one of the men I used in Afghanistan. He was Charlie.”

“Text me his DOB and SS number.” Then Alpha couldn't help it. “Why in the hell did you do it? Goddamnit, tell me why.”

“Because she saw me in the house right after I planted the bomb and then . . .”

“She didn't see you actually plant the bomb, and you gave her a reason for why you were in the house.”

“But then she goes and looks at my finances and finds out the same thing you did—that I'm broke. So now she has a motive. Then she gets the DEA involved. What if she has the DEA start monitoring my banking transactions and the first time I remove money from that account your boy set up, they find the five million. If that happens—”

“You're getting paranoid. I'm telling you they'll never find the money that Finley hid for you. Finley's a genius. You just follow the procedures he put in place to—”

“Yeah, so you say. But maybe they got a couple geniuses working for the DEA, and with Hamilton pushing them . . . I figured if Nelson raped her before he killed her, nobody would connect us to her death or to what happened in Afghanistan. I mean, you have about ten rapes a day in that goddamn city.”

“Listen to me,” Alpha said. “I don't have any more time to talk right now, but I swear to God, you arrogant prick, if you do one more thing without clearing it with me first, I'll kill you.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” he said, and hung up.

Now Alpha had to really scramble and hope that Finley could do what was necessary. Alpha called him—he was awake, of course, because the freak slept only about three hours a night—and told him what he needed to do before daylight: He had to move a quarter million dollars into an offshore bank and make it look like the money came from Pakistan.

“The money has to be traceable,” Alpha said, “but it can't be too easy to trace. Do you understand, Finley? I want Callahan to have to dig hard to find the money. If it's too easy, he'll get suspicious.”

28
|
Callahan was back, and he summoned Kay to his office. Judging by the way he looked, he'd taken the red-eye from wherever he'd been. But then, he always looked like that. Seeing the bruise on Kay's face, he asked, “What did the doctor say?”

Kay figured that Sylvia or Anna had told him what had happened to her. “He said to take a couple ibuprofen when my head hurts. I'm okay. Am I going to have a problem with the cops about the guy I killed?”

“No. They've been told to drop the whole thing and call it self-defense.”

“Who told them?”

“People with enough weight to crush careers. When I found out who attacked you, I had to nip things in the bud. As far as the cops are concerned, you're just a fair-haired girl with powerful connections and a scary lawyer, but they don't have any real reason to think you murdered the guy.”

“So who was he?”

“We'll get to that later. Right now, I want to know what the hell you've been up to. And don't lie to me. I know you've been digging into the whole Afghanistan fiasco.”

“That's why I came here today, to tell you what I've been doing and what I found out.”

Callahan made a so-get-on-with-it gesture.

“The biggest thing I learned,” Kay said, “is that the fifty million that was supposedly sent to Sahid Khan's bank never made it into his account. The money disappeared. Somebody stole it.”

Kay waited for Callahan to say:
Oh, my God!
How did you discover this?
But he didn't. Instead he said, “I already know that, Hamilton. Didn't it ever occur to you that I would look into the money? What the hell do you think I've been doing since the last time I talked to you?”

Before Kay could answer, Callahan said, “I was told before I hired you that you would disobey orders if you thought you were right—and that you
always
think you're right—and that you lied to your bosses at the DEA and federal judges and anybody else you thought didn't need to know the truth. It looks like I should have listened to the people who told me those things.” Pointing a thick finger at her face, he said, “I gave you a direct order not to screw around with what happened in Afghanistan.”

“I didn't think you were going to do anything,” Kay said.

“How the
hell
could you possibly think that?” Callahan shouted. “An operation I was in charge of blew up in my face.”

“All I knew was that you didn't take me seriously when I told you Dolan might have been involved.”

“I took you seriously, goddamnit! I just didn't agree with you.”

Callahan's face was beet red; she hoped he didn't have a stroke.

“Do you want me to tell you what else I learned,” Kay said, “or do you just want to keep gnawing on my ass?”

Callahan almost smiled. “Yeah. Tell me what else you learned.”

“I learned that Dolan isn't as rich everyone thinks he is.”

“I found that out, too,” Callahan said. “But I still don't believe he was involved in Ara's death.”

“I also learned that C&S Logistics is barely making it and Sterling, in particular, is up to his neck in debt. He really needed that security contract in Afghanistan, but since the contract wasn't a sure thing, maybe he decided the smart thing to do was steal fifty million and retire.”

Callahan nodded as if he'd come to the same conclusion. “Did you look at my finances, too?” he asked.

“Yeah. You're practically broke, but you've always been practically broke.”

“Who else did you check out?”

“Mercer, Sorenson, Cannon, and everybody that Sterling and Cannon took with them to Afghanistan.”

“Did you check out Harris?”

“No. Who's Harris?”

“A guy who worked with Eli.”

“I didn't know about him.”

“That's right, you didn't. You see, Hamilton, you're not as smart as you think you are. And who did the financial checks for you? You're not smart enough to have done those, either.”

He was just going to keep punching her in the face with how smart she
wasn't
. “Barb Reynolds,” she said.

“Aw, goddamnit,” Callahan muttered. “And I suppose you told Barb everything.”

“I had to. I needed her help, and I couldn't trust anybody working for the Group. Including you.”

Callahan laughed. “So why are you trusting me now?

She almost said:
Because I don't have a choice.
Instead she said, “Because Barb convinced me I should. And there's something else. Barb said there was something called a trip wire on the accounts of the people she investigated. This means that someone was able to see that the DEA was investigating and was able to trace the investigation back to the DEA. I need to know if you're the one who put the trip wires in place.”

“No,” Callahan said. “I learned the same thing you did. I used a couple of guys over at . . . Never mind who I used. Anyway, they told me the same thing, that somebody wanted to know if they were being investigated and by who, but whoever set the trip wires was able to hide his identity.”

“I still think it could be Dolan.”

“Well, I don't,” Callahan said.

“Hiding money is what he does for a living.”

“Dolan doesn't have the computer skills to snatch money out of thin air on its way to a Swiss bank.”

“It was
his
computer,” Kay countered. “He put a program on it so he could steal the money, and if he didn't do it personally, then he got somebody to help him.”

“Not necessarily,” Callahan said. “People I talked to told me it's possible that an exceptional hacker could have gotten past the security systems on Dolan's machine and downloaded a program he wouldn't have known about.”

“You gotta look harder at Dolan,” Kay said.

“Goddamnit, quit saying that! That's another thing I was told about you: You get tunnel vision when you think you're right. And there's something else you don't know, Miss Smarty Pants.”

Kay couldn't help but smile. Her mother used to call her Miss Smarty Pants when she was little. After she got knocked up at age fifteen, her mother didn't call her that anymore. “What else don't I know?” Kay asked.

“The guy you killed last night worked for Cannon and Sterling. His name is Nelson, and he was with you in Afghanistan.”

“I thought I recognized him,” Kay said. “When we were in Afghanistan, all the security guys had beards and were wearing hats and turbans and shit to blend in with the locals, and I never really got a good look at any of them. Did you ask Cannon or Sterling about him?”

“Yeah. Sterling said he had no idea what Nelson was doing in D.C. or why he attacked you. He said Nelson quit after he got back from Afghanistan, said that he'd had enough of traveling to shitholes and getting shot at. He was ex-army, two tours in Iraq, and had worked for Sterling for three years, but there wasn't anything special about him.
What I'm saying is, he was bright enough to work for Sterling but not bright enough to plan what happened in Afghanistan.

“The other thing Sterling said—and Nelson's military file confirmed this—is that Nelson got in trouble in Iraq for sexually harassing a female soldier. But if you read between the lines, Nelson might have actually raped the woman. Sterling said that maybe when Nelson saw you in Afghanistan, he got fixated on you. Sexually. And that's why he attacked you.”

“I wouldn't trust Sterling,” Kay said.

“I don't trust him. I'm just telling you what he said.”

“Did Nelson know how to build a bomb?” she asked.

“Yeah. All Cannon and Sterling people have demolitions training. Plus, Nelson had firsthand experience with IEDs in Iraq.”

“So maybe he was the one who built the bombs.”

“Yeah, maybe, but there's something else. I had a guy take another look at Nelson's finances this morning. He had two hundred and fifty thousand in an offshore account, and we were able to trace the money back to a mosque in Pakistan that's financed the Taliban in the past.”

“What?” Kay said. “Are you saying you think this really was a Taliban operation? That the Taliban paid Nelson to kill Ara, and they're the ones who stole the money? I mean, I can't believe . . .”

“No, I don't think that,” Callahan said. “What I think is that somebody else thinks I'm as stupid as you seem to think I am.”

“I don't think you're—”

“It was hard to find the money in Nelson's account—maybe that's why Barb's people didn't find it—and it was really hard to trace it back to the mosque. But it wasn't
that
hard. What I'm saying is, everything else associated with this op computer-wise was done by a genius. We can't figure out who set the trip wires on everybody's bank accounts. We can't figure out how the fifty million disappeared. But in the case of tracing Nelson's money, this genius hacker-programmer freak made
things easy enough that some guy who's
almost
as smart as him could trace the money.”

Callahan lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nose, making Kay think of a weary, white-faced dragon. “I think somebody set this up so that if I started poking around, I'd find Nelson's Taliban connection. But I don't believe the Taliban had anything to do with this. In other words, I actually agree with you, Hamilton. Ara Khan and her father would never have told anyone about that meeting. This was an inside job.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“
We?
We're a
we
now?”

“What are we going to do?” Kay repeated.