Glenda Petty
hated
the CIA. She was convinced—paranoid, liberal, whack job that she was—that the CIA was running some kind of shadow government and, given half a chance, would engineer a coup to overthrow the elected president. She had bullied her way onto the House Intelligence Committee and she twisted LaFountaine’s nuts every chance she got.
Now any normal person would have thought that if LaFountaine had wanted to hide Diller’s visit to Iran from Congress, he never would have said anything about Diller to the committee. But Glenda wasn’t a normal person. She’d think LaFountaine had told them about Diller for some underhanded reason and, just as the
Daily News
had implied, that LaFountaine hadn’t wanted Diller arrested immediately because doing so would interfere with some devious CIA scheme.
Mahoney had to admit even he was suspicious when LaFountaine told them about Diller, so he could imagine Glenda had been ten times as suspicious. So, to get to the truth, Crazy Glenda, who could be as crafty and underhanded as anyone Mahoney had ever met, could have hired Acosta to leak the information to Sandra Whitmore to force the truth out into the open.
Yeah, Mahoney thought, that was a possible scenario, but as crazy as Crazy Glenda was, that scenario just didn’t feel right to him. The main reason it didn’t feel right was because he couldn’t figure out how Glenda would know Dale Acosta.
Which brought him to Congressman Raymond Rudman.
Ray Rudman’s biggest financial backer was a man named Rulon Tully, an avaricious egomaniac who was richer than God and who also had a personal beef with Marty Taylor. Taylor—a handsome son of a bitch who could have any woman on the planet—had the opportunity to screw Tully’s wife and the horny bastard took it. After Tully found out about the screwing—via a headline in a tabloid rag— he divorced his wife and the divorce cost him a staggering amount of money, but the worst thing was that Tully was publicly humiliated when the media wrote about the affair.
So leaking a story that would damage Taylor’s company and possibly land Marty Taylor in a cell would certainly make Rulon Tully do cartwheels of sheer joy—and Congressman Ray Rudman would have known this. Furthermore, as he had told DeMarco, eight or ten years ago Acosta and a lobbyist had gotten in trouble for lying to a grand jury. What Mahoney hadn’t told DeMarco was that the lobbyist was the primary one used by Rulon Tully.
Yeah, Mahoney liked that explanation a lot better than Crazy Glenda leaking the story. And if Rudman leaked it to Tully, Tully, from everything Mahoney had heard,
was
the kind of person who would hire someone to impersonate a CIA agent.
But what could Mahoney do to confirm his suspicions? He could play hardball: he could call the U.S. Capitol Police and have them start looking at phone records and e-mails and see if they could find
anything linking Glenda or Ray to Whitmore and Acosta. And with his clout, he could probably get the cops to do what he wanted without opening an official investigation and getting a bunch of warrants and crap like that. The problem with going that route was the word was bound to get out that he was investigating his colleagues—which could cause him, Ray, and Glenda a whole bunch of problems if they were innocent—or, for that matter, if they were guilty.
Naw, he better not do that, or at least not yet. For now, he’d just call them into his office, look ’em in the eye, question them, and see how they reacted—even though he already knew how they’d react. Glenda would go berserk. She’d rant and scream and threaten to rip his balls off, which she just might be capable of doing. And if she had leaked the story, she would lie. Ray Rudman wouldn’t go postal like Glenda. He would act shocked, hurt, and bewildered—and, of course, he’d lie, too.
That was the problem when working with politicians. They all lied.
Mahoney asked Glenda Petty to come to his office, making sure it sounded like a request and not an order. No point getting her back up prematurely.
When he asked her, as diplomatically as he possibly could, if she was the one who had leaked the story, she responded just as he had expected: her bony ass shot up from the chair in which she was sitting; her thin, shrewish features contorted into something even more shrewish; and she splattered spit all over his desk as she screamed at him.
Ray Rudman showed more control.
Rudman was about sixty, a genial guy who always seemed eager to please. When Mahoney first met him, Rudman already weighed more than two hundred pounds—not a good weight for a man only five foot seven—but after three terms in the House, the congressman had added at least another seventy pounds to his short frame. He looked like a bowling ball with feet.
“John,” Rudman said, shaking his head in dismay, “I don’t know how you could even think that I would do something like that. I’m… I’m hurt. And I’m offended.”
“I know how close you are to Rulon Tully, Ray. And I know Tully would be very happy to learn something that could hurt Marty Taylor. And I can understand, Tully being a big supporter of yours, how …”
“Mr. Speaker, there is no way I would ever do anything to compromise national security,” Rudman said, now doing his best to bristle with the anger he claimed to be feeling.
“Well, I know you wouldn’t
intentionally
,” Mahoney said, still trying to give Rudman a way out, “but…”
Rudman didn’t bite. He rose—doing his best to look simultaneously dignified, offended, and picked upon—and said, “I’m late for an appointment, Mr. Speaker. After this, I’m not sure that we’ll be able to work together the way we have in the past, and I’m very sorry about that.”
After Rudman left his office, Mahoney poured another stiff shot of bourbon and walked over to the picture of Tip O’Neill that hung on one wall. In the photo, Tip was shaking the hand of an impossibly young John Mahoney. In the years to come, as Mahoney’s hair grew white and his belly expanded, many would comment on his resemblance to Tip, although Mahoney always considered himself much better-looking.
“Rudman did it, Tip,” Mahoney said to the photo. “I know the son of a bitch did it.”
It was early evening when the florist knocked on the door of the forger’s house. The man who answered was a short Asian in his sixties who wore owlish-looking glasses, a faded Washington Wizards T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops on his feet. His name was Nguyêñ Va’n Tâm, or at least that was the name he had invented for himself. Like the florist, Tâm’s real name was a distant memory.
Tâm had been Viet Cong during the American war in Vietnam. The florist had no idea what lies he had told or who he had bribed to immigrate to the United States but he now owned a restaurant, a dry cleaners, and a limousine service, all of which were staffed by his large Vietnamese clan. Providing fake IDs was something he did rarely these days, and usually only to assist other Vietnamese immigrants and a few old clients. Because he didn’t have the technical knowledge to manufacture modern identity documents, he had turned that enterprise over to a niece who attended George Washington University, and the florist had never met the woman.
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.
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.