House Justice: DeMarco 5, page 11
“Mr. Diller,” a cheerful voice called out, and he almost crapped his pants.
He spun around, the adrenaline surging through him, making his entire body tingle, and he saw a man—and the son of a bitch was huge. The guy looked like he could have been an offensive tackle for the Chargers but somehow, despite his size, he’d managed to get within three feet of him without making a sound.
“You are Mr. Diller, correct?” the man asked, moving even closer to him.
He had read somewhere that adrenaline was a hormone that preceded a “fight or flight” decision—and every instinct he had was screaming at him that this was a flight situation. He needed to get away from this monster.
“Uh, yeah. Did Marty Taylor send you?” Diller asked, but he was looking over at his car, wondering if he could get back inside it before the man could react. The problem with that bright idea was the big bastard was standing too close to him, and before he’d be able to open, close, and lock the car door, the man would certainly get him. No, his best bet would be to forget about getting back into his car and just run like hell. He was sure he could beat a guy this size in a flat-out foot race.
“Not exactly,” the man said.
Fuck this, Diller thought, and he pivoted on his right foot to run, but when he did, the guy’s hand shot out like a steam-driven piston and grabbed him by the throat. He tried to break the man’s grip but he couldn’t, even using both of his hands, and when he tried to kick him the man just squeezed harder and shook him like a doll.
Then the guy put his other hand around Diller’s throat and really began to squeeze.
Chapter 19
At midnight, the florist finally gave up on DeMarco returning home that night and drove to Derek Crosby’s house in Fairfax. The lights were off in Crosby’s home and hopefully this meant that Crosby was in bed and asleep and not out of town.
He put on a black ski mask, exited his car, and took the silenced .22 out of the trunk. There was a small patio at the back of Crosby’s house and the house could be entered from the patio through a sliding glass door. Using the butt of the .22 he broke the glass in the door, reached inside, and unlatched it. No alarm. He waited a moment to see if the sound of the glass breaking had awakened anyone. It apparently had not.
He didn’t know if Crosby had a wife or children. If he did, that would complicate things but, since he was armed, the situation was manageable. Using a penlight, he walked quickly through the small house, through the kitchen, the living room, and a bedroom that had been converted to an office. The fact that the bedroom was used as an office was good; this made it seem unlikely that Crosby had children living with him. At the back of the house was a closed door that he assumed was Crosby’s bedroom.
He opened the bedroom door, immediately switched on the overhead light, and was relieved to see a man lying in bed alone. The man woke up when the lights went on, and when he saw the florist standing in the doorway, he shrieked. Then, without considering the possibility that the florist might shoot him, he reached for his glasses on the nightstand and put them on. The lenses of the glasses were incredibly thick and they magnified the man’s eyes, eyes which grew in size when he was able to see that the florist was masked and holding a gun.
“Are you Derek Crosby?”
“Yes. But what...”
“Get out of bed. We need to talk.”
“Take off your pajamas,” the florist said. This was an old interrogator’s ploy: a naked subject always felt more vulnerable.
“What?” Crosby said.
“Take off your clothes. If I have to tell you again I’ll pistol-whip you.”
Crosby was bald and short. His arms and legs were thin and his chest was hairless and narrow. Nude, he was almost child-like.
“Remove your glasses.”
As blind as Crosby appeared to be, making him remove his glasses would increase his sense of helplessness. He didn’t resist as the florist took him by the arm, walked him to the kitchen, and duct-taped him to a chair.
“You met with a reporter named Sandra Whitmore in New York. What did you tell the reporter?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Crosby said. “I’ve never met with any reporter and I haven’t been to New York in five years. I swear. I’m telling the truth.”
The florist simply repeated the question, and again Crosby denied meeting with Whitmore.
“Okay,” the florist said. He checked a few of the drawers in the kitchen, finally finding what he wanted in the cabinet under the sink: a box containing white, plastic garbage bags. He took one of the bags, placed it over Crosby’s head, and sealed the bag tightly around Crosby’s neck with duct tape. He watched as the plastic sucked up against Crosby’s mouth and nose, and then looked on dispassionately when Crosby began to thrash in the chair as the oxygen inside the bag was depleted. He had done this sort of thing before; he removed the bag just seconds before Crosby passed out.
“What did you tell the reporter?” the florist asked for the third time.
Crosby, now crying, snot running from his nose, swore again that he had never met with Whitmore. The little man’s chest was heaving so much the florist was concerned he might have a heart attack— but that was a risk he was willing to take. He placed the bag over Crosby’s head again.
As he was sealing the bag, Crosby screamed, “Stop! I’m telling you the truth.”
“No,” the florist said. “You’re lying. I know you registered at the Hyatt in Manhattan; you charged the room to your credit card. I know you were there.”
“The credit card!” Crosby yelled. “That’s not my credit card! I called Visa and told them.”
The florist removed the bag from Crosby’s head. “What are you talking about?”
Crosby said that someone had taken out a credit card in his name and charged a trip to New York. The florist shook his head in disbelief.
“Look in my desk! Please. There’s a file marked Visa. Look at it. You’ll see I’m not lying.”
The florist hesitated, then went to Crosby’s den and found the file. Included with a copy of an e-mail that Crosby had sent to Visa was a signed statement from one of Crosby’s coworkers who was willing to swear Crosby had been at Langley the two days he had supposedly been in New York.
The florist went back into the kitchen and stood there looking down at Derek Crosby.
“Did you find the file?” Crosby asked. The florist didn’t answer.
Derek Crosby was not physically strong nor was he brave. But even brave men become terrified when men in ski masks wake them in the middle of the night, strip them naked, and torture them. It was still possible Crosby was lying about meeting Whitmore, and the Visa file was part of an elaborate cover-up, but he didn’t think so. He could spend another hour suffocating Crosby repeatedly with the plastic bag and then he would be certain, but he was already convinced that Crosby was telling the truth.
He placed a strip of duct tape across Crosby’s mouth. “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.
He walked into Crosby’s unlit living room and sat down in the dark to think. It had been a mistake coming to see Crosby. He should have waited until after he had questioned DeMarco. Impatience had always been his biggest weakness. Now, if he didn’t kill Crosby, Crosby would report that someone had tortured him and asked questions about Sandra Whitmore. And he would not only tell the police, he would tell his employer, the CIA. Crosby hadn’t seen his face but he would be able to say that the man who tortured him spoke with an accent. Crosby might even be able to identify from his accent that he was Iranian.
He should kill Crosby—that was the logical thing to do—but he couldn’t. Crosby had not been one of those responsible for Mahata’s death.
To delay Crosby from calling the police, he found the man’s cell phone and removed the battery, then ripped the wires out of the phones in Crosby’s house. He made sure the man was still taped securely to the chair and the tape over his mouth wasn’t restricting his breathing, and left the house. Crosby would eventually free himself and by then the florist would be long gone—but the hunt for him would begin.
Chapter 20
DeMarco had set his watch alarm for five a.m., and he cursed Mahoney when the alarm sounded. He slipped from Colleen Moran’s bed, dressed, left a note on the kitchen table saying that he’d had a wonderful time, and tiptoed from the house. He was going to have to hustle to make his flight to Myrtle Beach on time. Fortunately, his house was only a couple of miles away.
When he reached his place, he rushed in and grabbed the bag he’d packed the night before. He checked his watch. If he did it quickly, he’d have time to shower and wash the smell of sex from his skin. He stripped off his shirt as he hustled toward the bathroom.
When the prisoners were taken to breakfast in the morning, LaTisha nodded to a certain guard and the guard nodded back, and LaTisha walked into the kitchen as she had the night before and called her contact at Langley again. She didn’t know how many people were working this op, but considering that everything they were doing was illegal—spying on Whitmore, monitoring calls without warrants— she sure as hell hoped it was a small number. Her contact was an agent she’d never met named Tom Foley, and although she’d only talked to him twice, he didn’t exactly fill her with confidence.
“This is Clark,” she said. “Did you intercept the call last night?”
“Yeah,” Foley said. “She called a lawyer who works for Congress, some guy named DeMarco. He visited her the day before yesterday, and we were still doing background checks on him when she called last night. We don’t know why he visited her and we couldn’t make much sense out of the call. Whitmore said something about a woman showing her a picture of some guy, and DeMarco said the guy was not CIA, but he wouldn’t give Whitmore the man’s name. So we’re not sure what the hell to make of it all.”
Foley sounded like he was out of breath, like he was running while he was talking.
“Could DeMarco be Whitmore’s source?” Clark asked.
“Maybe, but we don’t think so.”
“Well, shit,” Clark said.
“And there’s something else,” Foley said, and he told her what had happened to Derek Crosby.
“Someone tortured him?” Clark said. “Why in the hell would—”
“Look, I don’t have time to talk right now. I have to brief LaFountaine.”
“Fine. But, Foley, we gotta wrap this up. If I have to spend any more time with that aggravating, chain-smoking bitch, I’m gonna kill her.”
Tom Foley was limping down the hall toward LaFountaine’s office as fast as he could, being careful his cane didn’t slip on a floor that looked as if it had been recently waxed. He’d been using the cane for almost thirty years, and walking with it had become second nature to him—but he still wished they wouldn’t wax these fucking floors so often.
When he first became a gimp, it had bothered him a lot. He was twenty-four at the time, and although he wasn’t movie-star handsome, he’d been an athletic guy with a good body. He figured he’d never get laid again walking around with a third leg, but soon found out he was wrong about that. Women loved going to bed with a spy injured in the line of duty; the only thing that would have been better than a cane was a black eye patch.
The bullet that crippled him not only got him laid more than he deserved, it was also the best thing that ever happened to his career. An agent who had been out in the field trading bullets with the bad guys was given a lot of slack and he was, at least early on, advanced over people smarter than him because of his injury. And, of course, so they didn’t forget, he constantly reminded folks of how he’d been crippled—or how he had supposedly been crippled.
It happened in Cairo. It had been his first overseas assignment, and being a newbie he was never given anything important to do. He was the one they sent out for food when the secretary wasn’t there and the three months he spent in Egypt had been incredibly boring. Then, one night, his boss asked him to drive him to a meeting because the agent who was supposed to drive was having a recurring bout of malaria. The only reason Foley was picked was because he had just completed a course in Farsi. The guys they were meeting were two young Iranian dissidents who, for whatever reason, opposed the ayatollah. The Iranians spoke English but the boss wanted Foley along in case they started jabbering to each other in their own language. He was surprised when the boss told him to check out a weapon from the ordnance locker.
The meeting took place a couple of years after the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had been overthrown. The Ayatollah Khomeini was in charge of Iran at the time and was rabidly anti-American— which was rather understandable as the Americans, and the CIA in particular, had done everything they could to keep the shah in power and were now doing everything they could to get the ayatollah out of power. The purpose of the meeting was to give the dissidents a briefcase full of money and instructions on how the money should be spent to cause the ayatollah as much grief as possible. At that point the CIA didn’t have any expectation of unseating Khomeini but they still wanted a few folks stirring the pot.
The meeting was held in a house in Cairo the agency leased, and somehow it got compromised. A couple of heavyweights from Iranian intelligence had followed the dissidents to Cairo and they burst into the house and, without saying a word, started shooting people. One of the dissidents was killed immediately and Foley was shot in the right knee. After he was hit, he didn’t do anything but scream and scramble behind a couch so he was out of the line of fire, and he had no idea what happened after that. When all the shooting stopped—there must have been a dozen shots fired in that room in about eight seconds—the shooters were dead and Foley’s boss was on the floor, his gun in his hand, blood pouring out of his chest and stomach. Miraculously, the other dissident, who was also holding a gun, didn’t have a scratch.
Foley told the unhurt Iranian to take the briefcase and get the hell out of there, then dragged himself over to a phone, called the duty officer at the embassy, and told him to send an ambulance and a clean-up crew—and to hurry because both he and the boss were badly wounded. His boss died while they were waiting for the medics to arrive.
Because of his injuries they didn’t debrief him immediately. After he got out of surgery and while he was still groggy from the drugs he’d been given for pain, they asked him what had happened. He told the truth—with one small variation: he said that he and the boss had shot the bad guys. He shouldn’t have lied but he didn’t want to admit that he had been hiding behind a couch while his boss was getting killed. It occurred to him later that what he had done had been incredibly dumb because if they had checked his weapon they would have seen it hadn’t been fired, but that never happened. No autopsies were performed and the Iranian bodies and the weapons were all disposed of—and Tom Foley the hero was born.
After he was discharged from the hospital in Germany, they sent him back to Langley, and when he walked into the office with his new cane— the same one he still used today—folks stood up and clapped for him, and for the rest of his career he milked his injury for all it was worth. The other thing that happened was that he was promoted into the Middle East section at Langley and tasked with analyzing intelligence data on Iran. Although he had rudimentary knowledge of Farsi and had spent three months in the country, he suspected the main reason he got the assignment was because he had supposedly killed two Iranians. Be that as it may, after thirty years he was an armchair expert on Iran and one of the few people in the Company who had known about Mahata Javadi’s assignment, which unfortunately now placed him in a position where he didn’t want to be: talking to Jake LaFountaine about what they were doing to catch the people who had killed her.
“We still don’t know who Whitmore’s source is,” Foley said, and LaFountaine clenched his big jaw so tightly that Foley was surprised he didn’t crack a molar. “But last night a CIA analyst named Derek Crosby who works the Cuba desk was tortured by somebody who thought he had met with Whitmore in New York.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” LaFountaine said.
Foley, in all his years at Langley, had never briefed a sitting director one-on-one. He was just too low on the totem pole to do that. Normally, the DCI talked only to Foley’s boss, but Foley’s boss was in the hospital having his prostate removed, and consequently he had to talk to the guy directly, which he didn’t like doing at all. Jake LaFountaine just scared the shit out of him—particularly after what had happened to Carson.
Foley explained how a man in a ski mask had broken into Crosby’s house and asked Crosby about meeting Whitmore in New York. He also told LaFountaine how somebody had gotten a credit card in Crosby’s name and used the card to stay at a hotel in New York about a week before Whitmore’s story broke.
“Somebody impersonated Crosby,” Foley said, “and it’s possible that whoever it was, was Whitmore’s source. And that’s not all. There’s a guy named DeMarco involved in this thing. He visited Whitmore in jail the other day, and—”
“So who is he?”
“He’s a lawyer who works for Congress.”
“For Congress?”
“Yeah. And after he visited Whitmore, some woman visited Whit-more and showed her a picture of somebody. Whitmore told Clark—”
“Who the hell’s Clark?” LaFountaine asked.
Foley felt a bead of sweat roll down his neck and into his collar. “The agent we put in Whitmore’s cell.”
“Oh, that’s right. Go on.”
“Well, Whitmore told Clark DeMarco had information that could get her out of jail, and after that we intercepted a call from Whitmore to DeMarco. Whitmore demanded the name of the guy in a picture she’d been shown, but DeMarco wouldn’t give it to her.”
As Foley talked, LaFountaine looked like he was about to explode— and Foley could understand why. He was doing a horrible job of briefing the man, tossing out all these different names, making things sound even more confusing than they really were. He just wanted this meeting to end.
