House Justice: DeMarco 5, page 16
She got a phone book from the palooka behind the bar and called reporters she knew at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and the New York stringers for the Washington Post and the LA Times. She told them where she was and to be here in half an hour if they wanted the story. She said if anyone brought a camera she’d call the whole thing off. After she had called all the other papers, she called the Daily News. No way was she giving the News an exclusive. The News was not her ally. For that matter, the News might not even be her employer at this point.
She was on her fourth drink when all the reporters assembled around her table and she was feeling about as mellow as she ever felt.
“Yeah,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “I’m out of jail. I gave up my source.”
The reporters smirked, which was just what she’d expected. Then she told them what had happened: how a man posing as a CIA agent had been her source and that the guy was now dead.
“Whoa!” they all said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Somebody, maybe somebody inside the government, engineered this whole thing. They fed me the story—which, by the way, was accurate—but as soon as I figured out who my source really was...”
“But how’d you figure out that Acosta was the guy?” the New York Times reporter asked.
Now it was her turn to smirk. “Just because I was in jail didn’t mean I stopped working the story. Anyway, whoever was behind this— maybe somebody in Congress, maybe somebody at the CIA—popped Acosta because they knew I was on to him. So, since my source lied to me about his identity, I gave him up to the judge.”
“But why would—” the Journal reporter started to ask.
“That’s all, boys. I’m still on this story so that’s all you’re getting. But I just wanted to make sure you heard it directly from me, that I may have been tricked by Acosta but he would have tricked any one of you, too.”
“I don’t know about that,” the reporter from the Washington Post said, a smug smart-ass who parted his long hair in the middle like a girl.
All the reporters left soon after that except her colleague from the Daily News. He stuck around to say, “You’re in the shits, big time, Sandy. I hope you know that. No matter how you try to spin this, Acosta snookered you. But as bad as that is, there’s no way you should have talked to the other papers before you talked to us.” The reporter shook his head, pretending he felt badly for her. “I just hope you have another job lined up.”
Whitmore smiled. “I’m not sure I need to have another job lined up, Bobby. I’m thinkin’ book deal here. And before you got here, I called a producer at Good Morning America, and they’re gonna have me on tomorrow.”
She sat back in the booth and started in on the scotch the guy from the LA Times had bought for her, the only one decent enough to spring for a drink. She felt so good right now that she didn’t feel like ever leaving the bar. Yeah, she was going to stay right where she was in this nice, soft booth until they had to pour her into a cab. And while she was sitting, she’d think about how she was going to handle all the interviews coming up—and how she was going to spend the money she was going to make. She almost forgot that the Daily News reporter was still there.
“Bobby,” she said, “I don’t know how things are gonna end up, but you got a dead spy, a dead guy who was pretending to be a spy, and a valiant reporter—namely, moi—who was maybe set up by the fucking CIA. Oh, yeah, Bobby, I’m thinkin’ major book deal. Movie rights, too.”
“Who’s gonna play you in the movie, Sandy. Miss Piggy?”
“Oh, screw you, Bobby. Now quit being a prick and buy me a drink.”
Chapter 26
The florist awoke feeling refreshed but more frustrated than ever. All he had learned in Myrtle Beach was that DeMarco had been planning to visit a man named Acosta but Acosta was killed before DeMarco could talk to him. And he didn’t understand why Benny Mark had been hired by a pawnshop owner in LA named Jimmy Franco to kill Acosta. He needed to relocate DeMarco to find out what was going on, and the best chance for doing so was in D.C.
Before going to the airport, he stopped at a drugstore and bought materials for mailing a package, then drove to a post office and mailed the gun he had taken from Benny Mark to general delivery in Los Angeles. If he had to go to LA to talk to Franco he was sure he would need a weapon and he didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to buy one in California. He also disposed of the Mossberg shotgun. He tossed it into a Dumpster, but before he did he disassembled it and smashed the barrel on the ground a few times to render it useless. He didn’t want some kid finding the weapon and shooting himself.
At the airport, he purchased a ticket for Washington and had just passed through security when he looked up at one of the television monitors in the terminal. A female newscaster was saying Sandra Whitmore had been released from prison and that she had given up her source—a man named Dale Acosta who had impersonated a CIA agent named Derek Crosby. Acosta, the newscaster added with a wideeyed look, had been found dead in his home yesterday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The woman then began to rehash the entire Whitmore saga but the florist was no longer listening. He just stood there, thinking, as the other passengers in the terminal swirled by him. He at last understood the connection between Acosta and Crosby—Acosta had impersonated the little man that he had tortured. He headed back to the ticket counter to exchange his D.C. ticket for one to New York.
Sandra Whitmore’s time had come.
Mahoney had arranged to meet LaFountaine at an IHOP in Clarendon. They picked the restaurant because it wasn’t a place where they were likely to encounter other politicians or spies—and because Mahoney felt like having a waffle for breakfast. Waffles were a treat.
LaFountaine was already there when Mahoney arrived. Mahoney ordered coffee; he wanted to add a shot of bourbon from his flask but decided he’d wait until LaFountaine left before doing that. As soon as the waitress walked away from their table, LaFountaine said, “So, what was this guy, DeMarco, doing talking to Whitmore?”
“No, no,” Mahoney said. “Let’s start with you telling me why you ever told us about Diller visiting Iran in the first place. If it was so important to keep that information secret, why did you say anything at all?”
“I told you because I have a legal obligation to keep Congress informed.”
“Jake, it’s too early for bullshit. Give me a straight answer or I’m walking.”
LaFountaine stared at Mahoney for a moment, then finally said, “I told you because of Jean Negroni.”
Jean Negroni was the secretary of Homeland Security, but Mahoney didn’t understand what she had to do with Diller’s trip to Iran. LaFountaine explained.
“It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that Homeland pays attention to folks who fly out of places like Iran and end up in America. And when an American citizen visits Iran, that also makes Home-land wonder why. At any rate, Negroni’s guys knew Diller had flown to both Damascus and Tehran and I found out that she was thinking about picking him up and questioning him, and I didn’t want her doing that.”
“Why not?” Mahoney asked.
To delay answering, LaFountaine sipped his coffee, then dabbed his lips with a napkin. He lowered his voice and said, “Do you know what Marty Taylor’s company makes?”
“Yeah, something to do with missiles.”
“Right. He manufactures control systems for missiles and a bunch of other military hardware. And, well, we had an idea.”
“We who?”
“My guys. The CIA. We wondered if there was a way we could modify Taylor’s equipment without the Iranians knowing about it and then if they ever tried to shoot one of their missiles in the wrong direction, maybe we could control the missile.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Mahoney said.
“No. It was a good idea. We weren’t sure it could be done—the Iranians aren’t fools—but I wanted to explore the idea. And if we could have found a way to make it work, we would have used Diller to sell the modified hardware to the Iranians. So that’s why I didn’t want Diller arrested right away and why I didn’t want Negroni’s people tipping him off that we knew he’d been in Tehran. But then Diller’s trip was front-page news before we could even start to study the concept.”
Hmm, Mahoney thought. That would have been pretty slick if LaFountaine had been able to do what he’d just said. He could just see the Iranians firing some rocket and a technician sitting in a spy ship parked in the Persian Gulf turning a joystick and making the rocket land right in the grand ayatollah’s hot tub. But LaFountaine still hadn’t told him what he wanted to know.
“You didn’t answer my question, Jake. Why did you tell the committee about Diller?”
“Negroni insisted. She told me she wouldn’t pick Diller up and interfere with my plan but only if I told the president and the intelligence committee the reason why. She wanted to make sure the president understood that if it had been up to her, she would have arrested Diller immediately but she held off because I asked her to. She also didn’t like being the only person outside the CIA knowing what we were planning about the Iranian missiles because if something went wrong somebody might blame her in some way. In other words, she wanted her ass covered.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t really tell us what you had in mind. You didn’t say anything about giving the Iranians some tricked-out control system.”
LaFountaine shrugged. “I told the president everything and I told you guys as much as you needed to know. And I didn’t lie to you when I said that arresting Diller would affect an ongoing operation. But I didn’t see the point of letting people like Glenda Petty piss all over my idea until we had completed the research.”
There you go, Mahoney thought, that was the Jake LaFountaine he’d always known and loved. Then he had another thought, “Well, hell,” he said. “For all you know, Negroni was the original source of the leak. Maybe one of her people paid Acosta to talk to that reporter.”
“It wasn’t Negroni. She wouldn’t do that and you know it. It was one of your guys, John, and that brings us back to the question of why DeMarco was visiting Sandra Whitmore.”
Mahoney lied, of course. “I sent him to see her because of you. At your press conference you basically accused Congress of divulging national security information, so I wanted to see if there was any truth to that. Then one thing just led to another.”
LaFountaine’s dark eyes flashed and it looked like he was going to lose his temper, but he didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he said, very softly, “Let me tell you about Mahata. I went to Georgetown University one day and gave a speech to an auditorium full of kids. We were having a hard time recruiting the right kind of people, and I figured I needed to get out there and tell folks that we were the good guys and not the evil fuckups the press always makes us sound like. Anyway, I gave the standard spiel about the CIA’s role in the war on terror and, as usual, there were a couple of hecklers in the audience. The speech ended with the campus cops dragging one kid out by his hair and me getting pissed and telling those brats they were nothing but a bunch of dilettantes.”
Mahoney smiled. He could see LaFountaine losing his temper with the college kids. He would have done the same thing.
“After the speech, I was walking back to my car and this girl comes up to me. She was beautiful. She had eyes so big you could fall into them and disappear. I thought she had followed me out to give me a ration of shit, but the first thing she said was that she was born in Iran, that the Iranian government had killed her entire family, and she spoke four languages. And she wanted to work for the CIA.
“I brought her into the agency, John. Me. Personally. She was only twenty years old at the time, twenty-two when she finished her training and we inserted her into Iran. She was an incredible woman. Brave, smart, resourceful.” LaFountaine hesitated a beat, then added, “I loved that girl.”
Mahoney nodded his head but he was thinking that LaFountaine was being literal when he said he had loved Mahata. He didn’t know if LaFountaine had had an affair with her—maybe he did, maybe he didn’t—but he definitely felt about her in a way that went beyond a boss caring for one of his employees.
“So I want whoever killed her,” LaFountaine said. “I want them all. Somebody paid Acosta to impersonate one of my people and give the story to Whitmore. But now Acosta’s dead and the only lead we have to follow is that half-ass description of the killer that DeMarco gave the Myrtle Beach cops. And you may not have heard this yet, but Conrad Diller is missing. They found his car at LAX but nobody can find him.”
“He skipped the country?”
“Maybe, but he never entered the airport; if he had, one of the security cameras would have picked him up and none of them did. The FBI’s got two dozen agents trying to find him, but one possibility is that Diller’s dead, and without his testimony we won’t be able to get Marty Taylor.
“I don’t know where this is going next, but there’s one thing I do know: I’m not going to sit around and wait for the FBI or the Department of Justice or the goddamn sheriffs in Myrtle Beach to do something. I’m going after these people myself.”
“Okay,” Mahoney said. “So what do you want from me?”
“I know one of your guys leaked what I told you at that briefing, and I think it was Ray Rudman. Rudman’s biggest backer is Rulon Tully and Tully benefits if something bad happens to Marty Taylor. And I know something else. Tully got a call from the Rayburn Building an hour after that committee meeting ended.”
“From Rudman’s office?”
“No. From Diane Frazer’s office.”
Frazer was a congresswoman from Utah.
“Frazer? She wasn’t at the meeting.”
“No, but her office is two doors down the hall from Rudman’s, and we found out from Frazer’s secretary that Rudman popped in unannounced to visit Frazer after the meeting. The secretary had an errand to run, so she didn’t see Rudman leave Frazer’s office, but the call to Tully was made from Frazer’s conference room. We think Rudman used the phone in the conference room after he talked to Frazer, and he used it because he didn’t want the call traced back to his office.”
“Did you have warrants to look at these phone records,” Mahoney asked.
“What do you think?” LaFountaine said. “But even if I could prove Rudman called Tully, I can’t prove that they talked about Diller’s meeting in Iran. Rudman will just...”
“Well, at least it’s good to know you’re not bugging every phone on Capitol Hill.”
LaFountaine ignored the jibe. “Rudman will just say that Tully is a big supporter and they talked about some bill going through the House. But I know Rudman talked to Tully about Diller.”
“Let’s say you’re right,” Mahoney said. “So what?”
“Tell me the truth, John. Do you want Rudman in Congress? Do you want a guy in your House who will pass classified dope to a constituent just to keep his seat?”
“No.”
“Then help me get him. Him and everybody else involved in this.”
“But how can I help?”
“You got this guy DeMarco, and—”
“DeMarco’s not my guy. He doesn’t work for me, at least not directly. He’s just sort of an odd-jobs guy the members use sometimes.”
“Fine,” LaFountaine said. “But I got a feeling he’ll do what you tell him, and I want you to tell him to help.”
“Why do you need him?”
“I don’t need him—I mean, I could live without him if I had to— but I want to minimize the number of people involved in this thing. And DeMarco’s already in it.”
“You mean you want to limit the number of CIA agents involved because you know if one of them gets caught, you’ll have a major problem.”
LaFountaine shrugged.
Mahoney didn’t say anything for a moment, but he was thinking, Never try to bullshit a bullshitter—and he knew LaFountaine was bullshitting him. He was lying about why he wanted DeMarco and Mahoney knew why he was lying.
“Okay,” Mahoney said. “You can have DeMarco but only on one condition: I don’t want it getting out that Rudman leaked the story. I want to find some other reason for getting him out of the House.”
“So you know Rudman did it.”
“I know it but, just like you, I can’t prove it. But what I don’t need is another congressional scandal. Our approval rating is already a negative number, so I don’t need the whole world knowing a guy in my own party can’t keep a secret.”
“Okay, I’ll agree to that condition.”
That was too easy, Mahoney thought.
“You have a plan of some kind?” Mahoney asked.
“Not really. Since there’s no way to prove Rudman talked to Tully about Diller, Rudman’s not going to jail for that unless he confesses. But maybe we can put him in jail for something else he’s done. Or maybe we can prove Tully was behind Acosta’s murder. Or maybe we can get Rudman and Tully to turn on each other for something not related to Mahata. I don’t know—and that’s why I want DeMarco. We’ve done a little research on him and we know he’s a tricky bastard. Maybe he can help us come up with something.”
LaFountaine left a few minutes later and Mahoney took out his flask, added a shot of bourbon to his coffee, and ordered a waffle from the waitress. And because the waitress was a good-looking gal in her forties, he spent a little time flirting with her.
While he was waiting for his breakfast, he sipped his laced coffee and tried to figure out exactly how many lies LaFountaine had told him.
He didn’t mind lending DeMarco to LaFountaine because he really did want Rudman out of Congress. But he knew that LaFountaine had lied to him about the reason why he wanted DeMarco. LaFountaine didn’t want DeMarco because he wanted to minimize the number of CIA agents involved, nor did he want DeMarco because DeMarco was a devious guy that could help him. LaFountaine employed several thousand devious people, and most of them were smarter than DeMarco. No, LaFountaine wanted DeMarco for a completely different reason: LaFountaine wanted a fall guy—a scapegoat to pin things on if something went wrong—and he wanted a fall guy who didn’t work for the CIA. But even though he realized what LaFountaine was doing, Mahoney had decided to let DeMarco get involved for one simple reason: he wanted DeMarco inside the CIA’s tent so he could keep Mahoney informed about what LaFountaine was doing. DeMarco was his spy—and Mahoney was going to use him to spy on the spies.
