House Justice: DeMarco 5, page 26
Yuri called a lawyer in D.C. The man had assisted him in the past with an immigration problem and he had contacts in the Justice Department. He asked the lawyer to check out Pamela Walker but he really didn’t expect that he would learn anything more than what Walker had told him.
He had a late lunch with Heather as he had promised but tuned out her childish chatter and focused instead on the Walker woman. If she was who she claimed she was—a disgruntled employee who needed cash—could he use her to keep him informed of the FBI’s progress? Maybe. But could he trust her? Of course not. It also occurred to him that she could be some sort of undercover agent, but if she was an undercover, what she had done didn’t make sense. She had not tried to insert herself in any way into his organization to get evidence against him, nor had she done anything to get him to admit that he was doing anything incriminating. And she had taken cash from him. Giving her money didn’t cause him a problem, but it could cause her one. He could always say that she was blackmailing him, and it would be her word against his, but she was the one who would have to explain what she was doing with money taken from a criminal —an alleged criminal. So, if she was an undercover agent, he couldn’t see how their initial meeting could harm him and, if she was legitimate, an association with her could turn out to be useful.
After lunch, Heather, annoyed because he was ignoring her, went to watch television. He didn’t care. It occurred to him that he really didn’t care for Heather’s company at all, other than in bed, and Pamela Walker had reminded him of the pleasure of being with a woman who was not only beautiful but intelligent.
He made a gin and tonic, took it out to the pool, and sat and looked out at the bay. He loved the view: the blue water, the magnificent navy ships sailing by, the grandeur of the Coronado Bridge. And the weather today was perfect, as it almost always was. And the house he had taken from Martin Taylor was the type of house he would have designed for himself, and it, too, was perfect. He was, in fact, living a dream—and he had destroyed it. He was going to lose it all. He was going to have to leave this perfect place, his perfect life.
Uncle Lev had discussed with him on more than one occasion the qualities of leadership. A leader had to be decisive. He had to take care of his people yet be willing to sacrifice those same people for the overall good of the organization. He had to be merciless when needed but could never become addicted to the perverse pleasures of cruelty. And one other thing: a leader had to be objective. That was one of the most important qualities of leadership: the ability to look at a situation the way it really was, and not the way one wished it was. And Yuri knew, objectively, that he had made a huge mistake and was now going pay for it.
When they had arrived in San Diego eight years ago, they did the things that he and Uncle Lev had always done. They forced their way into a few small businesses and stripped them of their assets and profits. One of those businesses was an auto body shop and that became their hub for moving stolen cars and auto parts. They established themselves in prostitution and pornography, and set up routes for moving commodities through Mexico. They discovered that moving people was especially lucrative. They did some business in drugs, but not a large amount, because even though drugs were hugely profitable, there was too much competition and the competition was always lethal. Nothing they did was done on a grand scale and they managed to maintain a low profile that rarely attracted the attention of law enforcement, and all their endeavors generated enough profit to satisfy his uncle, though hardly enough to satisfy Yuri.
But then along came Andy Bollinger, Marty Taylor’s perverted CEO.
He never would have gotten involved in Taylor’s company had it not been for Bollinger. Taylor & Taylor dealt with technologies that he didn’t understand and, from a financial standpoint, was enormously complicated. The company also had a board of directors that oversaw the operation and he had no idea how to control such an entity. But when Yuri taped Bollinger having sex with that Mexican kid—it was standard practice to tape all clients who procured their sex services—and then when he discovered who Bollinger was ... well, it was gift from God.
At first he simply blackmailed Bollinger. The man was enormously wealthy and he took half a million from him in a six-month period. Then the idea occurred to him that he could use Bollinger to steal money from Taylor’s company. It was a brilliant idea, and even his conservative Uncle Lev agreed.
T&T Systems became this enormous cash cow, a cow of such magnitude the earth trembled when it walked. Yuri learned that the company was in bad financial shape but he figured it would be years before it went under—and until it did Bollinger would continue to move money from the company’s coffers into Yuri’s wallet.
When Marty Taylor discovered what Bollinger was doing, at first Yuri had been inclined to kill Taylor. But then he discovered that Taylor was a cowardly weakling, so he began to take money from Marty-boy as well. And it was all going marvelously until he made the mistake of trying to sell missile technology to the Iranians.
Yuri had known a Russian army officer when he lived in Russia, and the officer had occasionally provided weapons for Yuri and Uncle Lev to sell on the black market. When the officer retired from the Red Army, he moved to Iran and became a military consultant to the Iranians. Yuri had a drink with the man one day when he was visiting LA, and together they hatched the idea of selling T&T’s technology to the Iranians. Had they been successful, the profits would have been staggering—but they weren’t successful. Although he could not have realistically anticipated that an American spy would attend Diller’s meeting in Tehran, he had to admit, in retrospect, that it had been foolhardy to deal with one of America’s biggest enemies. It had, in fact, been incredibly stupid.
Now, because of what he had done, and because the whole situation had been exacerbated by the death of that spy, he had placed himself directly in the crosshairs of federal law enforcement. And he wasn’t in those crosshairs because he was a thief—the American government could somewhat tolerate a thief, but what it could not tolerate was a thief who helped an Islamic country ruled by a madman.
He had killed the cash cow. It wasn’t dead yet, but it soon would be.
Pamela Walker, whether she was an imposter or not, was correct: the FBI would eventually get him. The things he and Bollinger had done were just too complicated; there were too many people involved and there were bound to be incriminating records that the FBI would find. If he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in jail, he was going to have to kill Taylor and Bollinger—the only two people who could testify directly against him—and then he was going to have to leave the country.
And then there was Uncle Lev to consider. He had met Lev when he was a teenager, when he’d been a homeless boy who survived by robbing tourists. The old man took him under his wing, trained him, and later made him his second in command when he saw Yuri was more intelligent than the other brutes in his organization. At the time, Yuri had been enormously grateful to his adopted uncle but after a few years he realized Lev was a man who thought small and always would.
They left Russia because Lev had crossed criminals who were more powerful than him. He thought it would be easier in America but he soon found out that American criminals, particularly the ones in New York, were just as ruthless and well organized as the ones in his home-land. Yuri agreed that the move to San Diego had been necessary and prudent, but once they arrived the old man simply did what he had always done. He did nothing big, nothing to grow the organization, nothing to increase their profits. He and Uncle Lev made money but they didn’t make all that much—they were no richer than so-called upper-middle-class Americans—and the people who worked for them couldn’t even be categorized as middle-class.
When he first came up with the idea of forcing Bollinger to siphon off money from Taylor’s company, Lev had been reluctant. It was too complicated, he had said, too different from what they had always done. But finally Lev relented and the money began to flow— buckets of money, more money than Lev had ever seen in his long life. And as the leader of their organization he took the lion’s share of the profits even though Yuri was the one doing the work. After a year, Lev essentially retired, moving into a seaside villa near Puerto Vallarta. Yet, in spite of Yuri’s success, he continued to carp at Yuri, warning him to be careful, not to move too quickly, not to become overly ambitious. So as Lev took the money with one hand, his other hand wagged a gnarled finger at Yuri telling him not to overreach.
Well, it looked like the old man was going to have the satisfaction of saying I told you so. Because of this thing with Diller they were going to lose it all. He would still be able to strip Taylor of a lot of money before he had to flee, but very soon he would have to run and when he did he would have to abandon everything in San Diego —the car-theft ring, the porn, the drugs, the illegal alien import business—because if he stayed he would end up in jail.
And he would have to leave Uncle Lev. If Lev were a rational man, he would understand that Yuri had made him enough money to be secure for the rest of his life—but the old man wasn’t rational when it came to money. He talked constantly of “rainy days,” unable to admit to himself that at his age the number of days, rainy or not, were limited. Nor was he rational when it came to failure, and Yuri had definitely failed. The worst problem, though, was Lev’s paranoia: he would be worried that if Yuri was caught he would be, too.
So being objective, Yuri knew that he had to abandon everything, including his uncle, but before he ran he might do as Walker had suggested regarding Rulon Tully. If he did it right, one lightning strike against Tully could net enormous gains.
There was one other thing that appealed to him about Pamela Walker’s idea regarding Tully: Tully was at the root of all his problems. It was Tully’s fault that Diller’s trip to Iran was publicly exposed and the spy was killed. Killing Tully would be, emotionally, very satisfying. He might even do it himself.
“Ivan!”
Ivan, good dog that he was, lumbered out to the pool.
“Tell Heather to go home. Then call Mikhail and tell him to come here immediately.”
Chapter 38
Angela had been gone for almost four hours and DeMarco was worried.
He knew it hadn’t taken her that long to make her pitch to Yuri, and since she wouldn’t let him go with her, he didn’t even know where Yuri lived. He needed to go out and find her. He had just made up his mind to call Neil and have Neil get Yuri’s address when Angela phoned and said she was back in her room.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded as soon as he saw her. He sounded like an anxious father whose teenage daughter had stayed out past her curfew.
She ignored him as she took the blonde wig off her head and tossed it onto the bed.
“Well?” he asked. “Where were you? I was worried.”
“After I saw Yuri, I had to get together with some guys we have out here watching folks. Then I had to call Langley.”
She walked over to the mirror and began to brush out her hair. She seemed to be moving very slowly, as if she could barely lift her arms.
“So how’d it go with Yuri?”
She kept brushing for a moment, then lowered the hairbrush and turned to look at him. Her eyes were oddly bright.
“It went just the way LaFountaine wanted it to go. I suggested to Yuri that he might want to commit a home invasion on Rulon Tully and kill him in the process. I also planted the idea that he might want to kill Marty Taylor, as Taylor might testify against him in the future. For my suggestions, Yuri gave me twelve grand and invited me to sleep with him. I passed on the sex, but the money is in that Nordstrom bag over there by my purse.”
“And you’re okay with all this?”
She didn’t respond.
“How do you think you’re going to feel when Yuri shoots his way into Tully’s house and ends up killing some cook or a maid or whoever else might get in the way?”
She threw the hairbrush down hard on the makeup table; she had probably wanted to throw it at him. “How the hell do you think I’ll feel?” she said. “But how will you feel if Tully gets away with what he did? It was his fault Mahata was killed, and you know he killed Acosta. And you also know we’ll never get him if we play by the rules.”
“So if some innocent schmuck gets whacked, we’ll just write that off as collateral damage?”
She started to spit out some hot-tempered retort, but then didn’t. She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them she said softly, “I want to be part of something that matters, Joe. This is my chance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about terrorism. This country is in a war with religious fanatics and it’s never going to end, and one of these days, if we don’t stop them, they’re going to do something that will make 9/11 look like a car crash. I want to be one of the people who keeps that from happening.”
“Then tell LaFountaine to transfer you into some division that deals with that stuff.”
“That’s not the way it works. I told you, when I was a cop I was a glorified meter maid. I was the one they dressed up in a miniskirt when the mayor wanted to get his name in the paper for being all hard-nosed on prostitution. And it’s pretty much the same way at the CIA. I’m still being treated like a meter maid while all the real decisions are being made by a bunch of bureaucratic dinosaurs that have been at Langley for years. Well, this is my chance. I told LaFountaine I’d do what he wanted when it came to Mahata but only if he gave me a bigger role in the agency, one directly involved with terrorism.”
“So you’re doing this for a promotion?” he responded, unable to keep the disdain from his voice.
“No! Goddamnit, I just told you... oh, never mind. And I don’t need this holier-than-thou shit from you. If you don’t have the stomach for this, just walk away. No one’s stopping you.”
She was right. He could walk away—but he wasn’t going to.
“I’m gonna go get a drink,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
“The drink will have to wait,” Angela said. “We need to talk about—”
“Then we can talk in the bar,” he said and left the room.
DeMarco took a seat at the bar and ordered a Stoli martini—the only Russian thing he approved of at the moment. As he sat there, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror behind the bar: Mr. Holier Than Thou.
No one was holy in this thing, including him. Especially him. While Angela was actively executing LaFountaine’s plan, he was passively standing by and watching it all happen. If he didn’t like what LaFountaine was doing, the right action to take, instead of carping at Angela, would be to blow the whistle. Call somebody—the press or the Bureau—and tell them what was going on. But if he did that, what would happen next?
The answer to that question was that he would definitely lose his job and Angela might lose hers. If she wasn’t fired outright any chance for advancement would be over. Nothing would happen to Mahoney and LaFountaine, of course. Those guys were too slick to have anything stick to them. They’d deny they ever gave an order to do anything to Rudman or Tully, and Angela would be accused of being a rogue agent who’d been acting on her own. Yuri and Marty Taylor might eventually be convicted for whatever Yuri was doing with Taylor’s company, and Rudman might lose his seat in the House, but certainly nothing would happen to Rulon Tully—a man who had killed at least one person and who was, more than anyone else, responsible for Mahata’s death.
Yeah, blowing the whistle was the holy thing to do—but the outcome was all wrong. Yet not blowing it meant that innocent people could get hurt. Maybe there was some way he could stop Yuri before anyone was killed, but he had no idea if he’d get that opportunity. All he knew for sure was that he wasn’t walking away. He wasn’t going to leave Angela on her own, not when a man like Yuri Markelov might be coming after her.
An annoyed Angela joined him in the bar ten minutes later.
“Let’s get a table,” she said, and he dutifully followed her to one.
She looked at his martini and he thought for a moment that she might order one, too, but then she ordered her usual Diet Coke. He would have thought that after the stress of meeting with Yuri, and considering it was after five p.m., she might relax her standards a bit. But no.
“Look,” DeMarco said, “I’m sorry I—”
“Never mind that,” she interrupted. “Tomorrow, we need to meet with Marty Taylor and—”
Her cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID screen and smiled, and when she said hello her tone of voice was different, like she was really glad—desperately glad—to hear from whoever had called. But then after a moment the smile disappeared and she said, “I see,” and he watched her lips compress in irritation.
“Why don’t you come out here, instead,” she said. “I think I’m going to have some free time this weekend. We’ll drive up the coast, see the sights. It’ll be fun.”
See the sights?
She listened for a moment then said, “Yeah, right. Who the hell do you think you’re kidding, Brad?” Then she snapped the cell phone closed. She sat there for a minute staring down at the tabletop, then looked up and waved at the nearest barmaid.
“Gimme one of those,” she said, pointing at DeMarco’s martini.
“Is there a problem?” DeMarco asked.
She didn’t answer him, and when her drink arrived she drained half of it in a single swallow.
“My jackass husband is having an affair. He was just calling to tell me that he’s flying to Key West for a conference. What he’s really doing is taking a little holiday with the bitch he’s currently screwing, probably some twenty-four-year-old resident who thinks he’s God.”
She drank the rest of her martini and ordered another one.
“You might want to slow down on those,” DeMarco said, gesturing at the empty glass. “They have a tendency to sneak up on you.”
