House Justice: DeMarco 5, page 10
The florist entered a home that smelled of whatever dinner was being prepared in the kitchen, and the smells made his stomach growl, reminding him that he needed to eat. Tâm didn’t offer him tea or invite him to sit, which surprised him. The man had always been courteous in the past, almost courtly.
Tâm wordlessly handed him an envelope. Inside were two passports, two driver’s licenses, two social security cards, and two AAA cards. The documents looked perfect but the florist had no idea if they would pass inspection, particularly the passports. He took out his wallet and paid for the identities but didn’t return the wallet to his pocket.
“Did you get DeMarco’s address?” he asked.
Tâm looked at him for a long time with his bottomless black eyes and the florist wondered if there was something wrong. Finally, Tâm passed him an index card with DeMarco’s address and home phone number.
Tâm spoke for the first time. “I also learned he works for Congress.”
“Congress? What does he do there? How did you find this out?”
“I don’t know what he does. And how I found out isn’t something you need to know.”
Still shocked by what he had just heard, the florist asked, “And Crosby, did you learn anything about him?”
“Yes. I learned he works for the CIA. Don’t come here or call me again. Ever.”
It was after seven when the florist reached DeMarco’s house in Georgetown, and he didn’t see any lights on inside the house. He called DeMarco’s home phone and no one answered. It was likely DeMarco was still in New York and might not be returning to Washington for some time. He would wait a few hours—until after midnight— and if DeMarco hadn’t returned by then, he would pay a visit to Derek Crosby.
Sandra Whitmore snatched the cell phone out of LaTisha’s hand as soon as LaTisha showed it to her.
She punched in DeMarco’s number and almost cried with relief when he answered. “DeMarco, you asshole, I want the name of the guy in that photo.”
“Not yet, Sandy. All I can tell you is that he doesn’t work for the CIA.”
“I already know that! That snooty bitch who showed me his picture told me. But I need his name.”
“I need to verify something before I give it to you.”
“Goddamnit, DeMarco, don’t you dare play games with me!”
“Just give me until tomorrow morning. You can stand it a few more hours.”
“No, I can’t!” Whitmore screamed.
“Well, you’re gonna have to,” DeMarco said and hung up.
“You son of a bitch!” Whitmore said. She pulled back her arm to throw the phone at the wall but LaTisha said, “Hey, don’t break that phone.”
Whitmore returned the cell phone to LaTisha, flopped down on her bunk, and put her forearm over her eyes. She was so damn tired, tired of everything: the failed marriages, the countless affairs that had never amounted to anything, her lousy job, never getting a break. When she’d been young—back when she had a waist and tits that stuck straight out—things had been good. She had used her looks to her advantage and hadn’t felt bad about that at all. But she’d lost her looks years ago. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been laid. But now she had a chance, not for sex, but for a life—if that damn DeMarco didn’t screw things up for her.
The story was golden: Marty Taylor, the CIA, and a dead spy. And the fact that she’d been tossed in jail made it even better because now she was part of the story. There was definitely a book in this, and maybe a job with some other paper, some place where she could start over, like Washington or LA. But what she couldn’t do was come out of this looking like a moron, which right now she did. She obviously needed to know the name of the guy who had fed her the story and why he had done it, particularly now that she knew he wasn’t CIA.
That damn DeMarco. If he didn’t tell her what she wanted to know by tomorrow she was going to make good on her threat. She was going to call People magazine and tell them about John Mahoney and one drunken night at the U.S. Capitol. If they thought John Edwards cheating on his wife was a big deal, or that governor with the Argentinean mistress, wait until they heard about the Speaker of the House screwing reporters—especially this reporter. It wouldn’t hurt her reputation—hell, it would probably help her reputation—but it would sure as hell hurt Mahoney.
Mahoney hadn’t been the Speaker then, but somehow he’d gotten the keys to the Speaker’s office and one night, after they’d polished off a bottle of bourbon, they went out onto the Speaker’s balcony, which overlooked the National Mall. It was two in the morning but the balcony was lit up by floodlights and every once in a while a security guard would walk by on the terrace below them. If the guard had looked up at the right moment he would have seen her bare ass up on the balcony rail, her flaming red hair hanging down to the small of her back, and her legs wrapped around John Mahoney’s big ears. She still got a little tingle in her groin thinking about that night but that wouldn’t stop her from telling the whole world what the philandering bastard had done.
DeMarco closed his cell phone and looked across the table at his date.
Colleen Moran was in her late thirties, blonde, attractive, and very fit. She had a personal trainer. She was a partner in a firm that specialized in corporate tax law—or, to be accurate, in corporate tax evasion. She made more in a month than DeMarco made in a year. She’d been divorced twice and had an eleven-year-old son, but the boy lived with his father. DeMarco suspected that there were mama crocodiles more maternal than Colleen Moran.
She would call DeMarco periodically and invite him to dinner; he rarely called her, although he was always happy to see her. She was bright and witty, she gossiped about important people—excluding her clients—and she was good in bed. He was convinced, however, that for her sex was akin to exercise, something she felt the need to do periodically to maintain her mental and physical well-being, but she wasn’t emotionally invested in the act. He never knew, nor did he care, if he was the first man she called when her libido tickled, or if he was further down on the list.
“Sorry about that,” he said to her, “but I had to take that call.”
“That’s okay,” she said, “as long as no one calls later and interrupts us doing something important.”
DeMarco smiled, turned off his cell phone, and refilled her wineglass.
Chapter 18
At the time DeMarco was eating dinner in Washington, it was five p.m. in San Diego and Marty Taylor was sitting on the deck of his sailboat trying to hack into a bank’s computer.
He had spent most of the day on the boat. He had wasted the morning cleaning things that didn’t need to be cleaned and shining things that didn’t need to be shined, and then spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to get the money he needed to escape from Yuri.
He had decided the best thing for him to do was simply disappear. If he stayed where he was, Yuri was going to bleed him dry and he’d most likely be implicated in Yuri’s crimes. And although Yuri had said he’d kill Marty’s family, he’d only do that if Marty did something to put Yuri in jail. But if Marty just walked away from everything—from the company, his family, and the cops— Yuri would have no reason to go after his family. And to make sure of this, he would send Yuri a note before he left telling him that if anything happened to the people he loved, he’d come back and do whatever was necessary to put Yuri behind bars.
But what he couldn’t do—what he wouldn’t do—was flee empty-handed.
He couldn’t sell his stock because Yuri—via that pedophile Bollinger —would know if he tried and, as a major shareholder in the company, there were SEC controls that prevented him from simply calling up a broker and cashing out. And he didn’t have much cash left in his bank accounts—just a few hundred thousand—because Yuri kept asking for “loans.” But he had a lot of stuff: a yacht worth a couple of million; the sailboat, which was worth half a million; three houses (Yuri was currently living in one of them); five or six high-priced cars (two of which were now in Yuri’s possession); some absurdly expensive pieces of art; and a ranch in Arizona that he’d never seen. He even had a racehorse. The horse, even though it had won only a couple of races, had turned out to be a pretty good investment because when they put the animal out to stud Marty had made more money selling the horse’s semen than he ever made when the animal was racing.
If he waited too long to escape, Yuri would eventually take away everything he owned. In fact, he was surprised Yuri hadn’t already begun to liquidate his assets. He assumed the only reason he hadn’t was because Yuri was still making a ton of money off the company, but at some point, he’d go after the rest of Marty’s things. The good news was that while Yuri knew about some of his possessions, there were others Marty was pretty sure he didn’t know about, like the horse and the land in Arizona. He figured if he sold everything he owned, he could get twenty to thirty million without even haggling over prices; the houses alone would bring in ten or twelve million, even in the current market.
But he had to find a way to do it that Yuri wouldn’t see. He couldn’t have a real estate agent show up at the house that Yuri was currently occupying and start showing it to potential buyers. He knew a guy, though, a broker, and he was pretty sure the guy could sell his stuff in some under-the-radar way.
But say he sold everything and got the money. Then what? He couldn’t just get on a plane and fly to Tahiti. Yuri might track him down, and when he found him, he’d make him suffer like God’s worst enemy. So he needed a new identity—a passport, a driver’s license, and credit cards made out in some other name—but he had no idea who to contact to get those things. And even a false ID might not be enough. He had a pretty famous face so he’d have to see a plastic surgeon. He knew one in Rio, one that a couple of his ex-girlfriends had used—but he really didn’t want to do that. He liked the way he looked; women loved the way he looked.
After he spent a couple hours thinking about all that depressing shit, it felt like his head was just gonna explode—and that’s when he took out the tequila and his laptop and tried to hack into a Wells Fargo computer. He wasn’t planning to steal anything; hacking was just something he did to relax, to have a little fun—to make him feel like he did in the old days before Yuri had taken over his life.
And at that moment, as if the devil had been eavesdropping on his thoughts, he felt the sailboat move as someone climbed on board. He turned his head and saw Yuri walking toward him.
Yuri, as usual, was beautifully dressed: designer sunglasses, a lightweight linen suit, a silk T-shirt, and Italian loafers sans socks. Marty had no idea how much of his money Yuri spent on clothes. He reminded Marty, particularly when he wore sunglasses, of that actor Viggo Mortensen. Or maybe Yuri reminded him of Viggo only because Viggo had once played a Russian mobster in a movie.
Yuri ignored him. He walked over to the rail of the sailboat, lit a cigarette, and admired the harbor view for a moment. Finally, he turned and said, “I want you to call Diller. Use a public phone, not your cell phone. Tell him to meet you at the ranger station at the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park tonight at nine.”
“Why do you want me to meet with Diller?” Taylor asked.
“I don’t want you to meet him,” Yuri said, and crushed his cigarette out on the deck Marty had just buffed.
Conrad Diller looked at his watch again. It was nine thirty. Where the hell was Taylor? He was half an hour late, but then Marty was a flake and had never been known for being punctual. Diller decided he’d wait ten more minutes and then he’d leave.
He wasn’t surprised Marty had wanted to meet him late at night and in an out-of-the-way place. The old lawyer, Porter Henry, had told them to avoid contact with each other prior to the trial so they couldn’t be accused of collaborating on a story. He was guessing the reason Marty wanted to see him was that Marty was going to try to convince him to hang tough and not hand him over to the federal prosecutor for a get-out-of-jail deal. Well, good luck with that. He’d tell him the same thing he’d told the lawyer: he wasn’t doing time for Marty Taylor.
What a debacle the Iranian thing had been. He’d been called to Marty’s office one day, and with Marty was the CEO, Bollinger, and a guy he’d never met who was introduced only as John, a consultant who specialized in foreign business opportunities. Bollinger had told him that they wanted him to take a vacation to the Middle East and, for the most part, it would be a vacation. He could visit Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, and anyplace else in the region he wanted, and the company would pay for the trip. His last stop would be Tehran.
“Tehran?” he had said, having not a clue where this discussion was going.
“Yes,” Bollinger had said. “We want you to explore the possibility of, uh, interfacing our control systems with the Shahab-3.”
The Shahab-3 missile had been developed by the Iranians, most likely with some outside help, but everybody knew it was a piece of shit. Kids flinging stones with slingshots had a better chance hitting what they were aiming at.
Naturally, the first question he had asked was, “Isn’t that illegal?”— knowing damn good and well it was.
To which Bollinger had responded, “If we actually sold them the technology, it would be. Today, that is. But we’re not talking about an immediate sale. You see, things with Iran are starting to change a bit, not quickly, but gradually. Some folks I know back in Washington have said that maybe, some time in the future, we might actually be able to work with the Iranians. You know, if they back off on building nukes, we might be able to help them with conventional weapons designed only for defense of their homeland.”
Diller knew this was all bullshit. He suspected that the company was in so much financial trouble they were actually thinking about making an under-the-table deal with Iran. But he’d been smart enough not to say anything; he had just sat there waiting for Bollinger to tell him why he, Conrad Diller, should put his young ass on the line in this way. But Bollinger wasn’t through with his spiel.
“All we want you to do,” Bollinger had said, “is sit down and talk with them. Talk to them about how we could improve the performance of the Shahab, and”—Bollinger meant tell ’em how T&T’s technology would allow them to put one of their missiles right in the Israeli prime minister’s back pocket, if that’s what they wanted to do— “and get an idea of how much they’d be willing to pay. If they’re interested, we’ll work out the details later. You know, how to upgrade their systems, tech support, any issues we might have with U.S. export laws, stuff like that.”
“I see,” Dilller had said, still waiting to hear the magic words. And then they came.
“We were thinking,” Bollinger had said, “that if you do this and you’re successful, a bonus of two hundred thousand might be appropriate.”
He had sat there for almost thirty seconds, until the silence in the room became strained, and he had noticed that John—the guy hadn’t said a word during the meeting—was starting to look a little perturbed. Well, fuck John.
“I’m thinking half a million might be more realistic,” he’d finally said, already envisioning himself sitting on the deck of a condo on Lake Tahoe that he and his wife had seen last year.
Then something odd had happened. Bollinger, instead of looking over at Marty Taylor to see if he wanted to meet his price, looked over at John, and John nodded his approval. His immediate thought had been, Who the hell is this guy? So he asked.
John explained, in an accent that sounded Eastern European, that his job was to put Diller in touch with the right people when he arrived in Tehran. And meet the right people he did—and then that article appeared in the Daily News and ten days later he was arrested. It had never occurred to anyone that a damn CIA agent would attend the meeting.
After he was arrested, Taylor upped his “bonus,” saying he’d give him five million if he didn’t implicate the company in his Iranian vacation. Well, he had decided that five million wasn’t enough. After he met a third time with Porter Henry, he concluded the old lawyer was right: the government was going to have a tough time convicting him based on the word of a dead spy. So if the case went to trial he might win, but if he saw things weren’t going his way, then he’d give the government Marty Taylor and Andy Bollinger—and that John guy, although he suspected John wasn’t the man’s real name.
The way he looked at it, he was currently making two hundred grand a year and if he worked twenty more years, and if the market performed the way it normally did, five million was about what he would have made during that period. But who said he was going to stay at the two hundred grand per year level? With his brains, he could eventually be the chief executive of some big company and in a twenty-year period could make tens of millions, maybe hundreds. Now, of course, with the Iran case hanging over his head, he wasn’t going to be the chief of anything. So he figured, considering his lifetime earning potential, that five million wasn’t anywhere near enough. He was thinking twenty million was a more reasonable number. Yeah, he was glad Marty Taylor had wanted a meeting—but he wished the guy would hurry up. It was getting cold, and it was sort of creepy in this place, too.
It was pitch black in the woods surrounding the ranger station and there were no streetlights around the gravel parking lot. The only light was a porch light near the ranger station door, and he had parked fifty yards away from the door. There was another car in the lot, which surprised him, considering the hour. When he had first arrived, he had thought it might be Marty’s car, although it wasn’t the sort of flashy thing that Taylor usually drove. Then he took a closer look at the parked car and noticed the driver’s-side window was broken and some wires were hanging down near the steering column. It looked like the car might have been stolen and abandoned at the ranger station. Whatever.
