Conrad Diller didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said it again, “I’m not going to jail for Marty Taylor.”
Porter Henry had no respect for men like Diller. When he was younger, much younger, he had defended thugs—bank robbers, dope addicts, muggers, car thieves. Those men had had no illusions about who they were or what they did, and they all knew that if they were caught they’d go to jail. They
expected
to go to jail.
But not Diller. He was one of those privileged young snots who had had every advantage. He had been raised by wealthy, doting parents, had gone to the right schools, and then had been lucky enough to get a job that paid extremely well. But he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a bigger house, a fancier car; he wanted to be a player. So he decided to do something that he knew was illegal—but when
he
was caught, he didn’t expect to go to the can. No, not him. He expected his golden life would continue as it always had. Diller didn’t just lack courage, he was one of those people who sincerely believed that he was above the herd and shouldn’t be treated like the criminal he was.
Porter Henry picked up the phone on his desk. It had push buttons, of course, but he would have liked it better if it had had an old-fashioned dial. He liked the sound phones used to make when you dialed a number and the phone dial rotated back. Marty Taylor answered his call.
“I’m afraid young Mr. Diller lacks the necessary resolve,” Porter Henry said. “He’ll give you up if the case doesn’t look like it’s going his way.”
“Aw, goddamnit. Why is it that everything I do these days turns to shit?”
Marty Taylor, Porter Henry thought, wasn’t much different from Conrad Diller: he was another young snot who whined like a baby when things didn’t go his way.
“So what do I do now?” Taylor asked.
“I would suggest that you talk to Yuri, Mr. Taylor. He’ll know what to do.”
Mavis looked up just as her boss walked through the door. He was a big man with a heavy gut, a broad back, and hair as white as snow. In spite of the weight he carried, he was still a handsome man, and when he smiled, and when those blue eyes twinkled, he could make her heart sing. But right now he wasn’t smiling. He was moving toward his office like a man on a mission, and she knew what the mission was: he needed a drink. It was almost eleven a.m. and he hadn’t had one all day—unless he had had one with his breakfast, which was possible.
She had worked for him for almost thirty years and she knew him as well as his wife did. Hell, she knew him better than his wife because she was sure that his wife didn’t know half the things he’d done. He was an alcoholic and a womanizer and played outrageous games with the taxpayers’ money, money that he treated as his own. He was lucky other people didn’t know what she knew; if they did, he would probably be serving time in a federal prison.
She shook her head. Her boss: John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives—and God help the country.
He dropped a thick three-ring binder on her desk and said, “Have Perry read all that shit and tell me what it says,” and then continued on toward his office.
He had just been in a meeting with some Treasury people, and she knew the notebook contained proposals for how to deal with a federal budget deficit that had reached an all-time high. She also knew he had sat through the meeting not paying attention to a single thing that had been said. Nothing bored him more than budget discussions. But Perry Wallace, his chief of staff, would stay that day until he had read every word in the binder. Then he would boil all the nonsense down to a single sheet of paper and Mahoney would most likely go along with whatever Perry recommended.
Mahoney was lazy, but he wasn’t stupid. That’s why he had a hardworking genius like Perry Wallace as his chief of staff—and her. She was just as indispensable to him as Perry, and he knew it, too.
He just didn’t know that she loved him and always would.
Mahoney loosened his tie, sat back in his chair, and put his big feet up on his desk. In his thick right paw he held a tumbler of bourbon. He took a sip and sighed. Nothing like the first one of the day. He looked around for the remote and fortunately it was sitting on his desk so he didn’t have to get up and search the room for it. He turned on the television just as Jake LaFountaine was walking up to a podium to address a gaggle of reporters.
Mahoney knew LaFountaine had been director of the CIA an unprecedented eight years and had served under two presidents, one a Democrat, the other a Republican. He was a career spook. He had been in military intelligence when he was in the army, had worked at the NSA, been a deputy director at Langley, and prior to being appointed as director of the CIA had been the national security advisor. He had no known political aspirations and he tended to act like a man with no such aspirations. He had nothing but disdain for the media and this was evident every time he spoke to them—or about them. Even worse, LaFountaine wasn’t the type to measure his words. So for him to be addressing the media instead of letting his PR guy do the job was very unusual, which was why Mahoney had decided
to watch the news conference. He was sure LaFountaine had been given a carefully prepared script, but he also knew that he was likely to ignore it. He was like Mahoney in that respect.
LaFountaine stood for a moment, looking down at the podium, then gave the cameras the full force of his eyes. “As you all know,” he said, “a CIA agent named Mahata Javadi was executed in Iran. The Iranian government has denied any responsibility for her death but I know they shot her, and before she died she was severely beaten, tortured, and most likely raped.”
The journalists let out a collective gasp. The death of the spy had been reported—the way she had died had not.
“Mahata Javadi spent six years in Iran. Six horrible, stressful, perilous years. She was one of the bravest people I ever met, and she provided this country with vital intelligence on the most dangerous government on this planet. Our covert agents know, as I do, that they might pay the ultimate price if they are discovered and were it not for one thing I could accept Mahata’s death. What I cannot accept is that she died because of a story published by an irresponsible journalist named Sandra Whitmore. Had it not been for Ms. Whitmore’s story, Mahata would be alive today.”
“Mr. LaFountaine,” a reporter called out. “Can you tell us…”
“Shut up!” LaFountaine said.
Oh boy, Mahoney thought.
LaFountaine didn’t say anything for a moment. He just stood there, head down, as he tried to regain his composure. Finally, he looked out at the reporters again and said, “The only reason I’m talking to you people today is because Ms. Whitmore claimed the source for her story was a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. I want you to know that every person at the CIA who had even the slightest knowledge of Mahata’s mission or any knowledge of Mr. Diller’s trip to Iran has been questioned, investigated, and polygraphed. No one— I repeat,
no one
—at the CIA was Ms. Whitmore’s source. I will stake my job on that.”
Now that’s pretty gutsy, Mahoney thought.
LaFountaine paused. “But a week before Ms. Whitmore published her story I met with select members of the House and Senate to give them a routine update on intelligence matters.”
“You son of a bitch!” Mahoney said, and he stood up, sloshing bourbon on his pants.
“During this meeting, I informed the committee that the CIA was aware that Diller had met with people in Iran. I told the committee we didn’t want Diller arrested immediately because doing so could jeopardize an ongoing operation. I told them that we’d deal with Mr. Diller—and his boss, Martin Taylor—at some later date. So, contrary to what Ms. Whitmore implied in her story, the CIA was in no way covering up our knowledge of Diller’s activities.”
“Are you saying that someone in Congress was Whitmore’s source?” a reporter asked.
LaFountaine just looked at the reporter for a moment, then walked away from the podium.
“You son of a bitch!” Mahoney screamed again.
The florist locked the door of his small shop in Alexandria, put the
CLOSED
sign in the door, and lowered the Venetian blinds over the front window. He usually left the blinds open, even when the shop was closed. He liked people to be able to walk by and see the flowers— to see his work. He personally thought of the floral arrangements in his window as works of art, not advertising, and he had constructed most of the bouquets and wreaths himself. He had always been good with his hands but he was surprised to discover that the same hard hands that had been trained to maim and kill could fashion nature into beautiful, artistic displays.
He sat down on the high stool behind the sales counter and looked around his shop. He was going to miss it so much. He had never in his life known the tranquillity that he had found in this small, sweet-scented place; it was the only spot on the planet where the ghosts of his past didn’t invade.
The florist had been told more than once that he didn’t look like a man who sold flowers for a living. He was six foot three and had broad shoulders and very strong arms; his chest and forearms were matted with dark hair. And although his only regular exercise was walking the two miles from his home to his shop every day, he had good genes and his stomach was flat and he weighed the same as he had when he was thirty. He was fifty-three now.
He had a hard-looking face: dark, probing eyes, a prominent nose, and thin, cruel lips hidden by an impressive black mustache. He wore his hair cut close to his skull because he didn’t like to fuss with it and because he had always worn it that way. There was a long scar on his left forearm, almost ten inches long, but it had faded to a thin white line that wouldn’t have been noticeable if the color of the scar didn’t contrast so starkly with his dark skin. When anyone asked him the cause of the scar he would laugh and tell them he’d tripped and fallen through a window when he was young. I was a clumsy boy, he’d say. He couldn’t tell the truth: how the bomb fragments had magically flown past him on that horrible night leaving him with only one small reminder of how incredibly lucky he’d always been. As he sat there he thought it might be smart to let his hair grow out and, at some point, he’d have to shave his mustache, something he hated to do because he was vain about it.
He looked around the shop one more time, knowing he would most likely never see it again, and then called out to his assistant who was working in the back room. She was surprised when she saw the
CLOSED
sign on the door.
Marta Silverman was the same age as him. She was a plump, motherly woman, pleasant and reliable, and had been with him for nine years. He told her his brother was terminally ill and he was leaving that night to care for him. He said he might be gone for a long time, possibly several months, and that she should hire someone to help her while he was gone.
Naturally, she said how sorry she was. And naturally she said that she didn’t know he had a brother as she’d never heard him speak of one before. And that was true. He never spoke of his brother because Mohsen had been dead for years.
He told Marta to take the rest of the day off, and after she left he walked back to the potting room. One table had bags of soil and fertilizer stacked on it and, without removing any of the heavy bags from the table, he pushed it to one side. The floor in the potting room was made of rough wooden planks, and using a screwdriver he pried up
two of the planks that had been under the table. He reached down into the hole and pulled out a locked metal box he had hidden there sixteen years ago when he first opened the shop. His hope had always been that the box would remain hidden forever—but God had decided that was not to be.
He took out the pistols first: a Makarov 9 mm and a Colt .22 automatic equipped with a silencer. The weapons had been sealed in plastic bags and small packets of moisture-absorbing desiccant had been placed in the bags. He dry-fired the weapons a couple of times and they appeared to function properly. Later, he would disassemble and clean them thoroughly.
Remaining in the box was a switchblade knife and a pouch that contained two sets of false identification papers: passports, social security cards, and driver’s licenses. The knife he would keep; the identity papers he would destroy. Being almost twenty years old, the documents were expired and he no longer looked like the young man in the pictures. Fortunately, the forger who had made the IDs was still alive and not in prison, and the florist had kept in touch with him. He would call the man today and get him started on manufacturing two new identities.
Lastly, he pulled out a prayer rug from a closet. He had never been a religious man, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had prayed. He placed the rug on the floor, took off his shoes, then knelt and touched his head to the floor.
He asked God to assist him in his mission.
He prayed to God to grant him vengeance.
“Honey, is that the bat phone ringing?” Betty Ann asked, calling out from the kitchen.
“Aw, crap, it sounds like it,” Benny said, and with some effort he struggled out of the recliner’s soft embrace.
They called it the bat phone because it came with a scrambler and was illegally connected to the telephone pole behind the next-door neighbor’s house. Boy, had that been a bitch, hooking up that wire. He could still remember it: three in the morning, Betty Ann holding on to the base of the ladder so it wouldn’t slip, her yammering at him to hurry up, him hissing at her to shut up, then dropping the pliers, almost hitting her head, and her shrieking loud enough to wake the dead. What a fun night that had been.
Benny Mark—not
Marks
—was fifty-six years old, five foot seven, and, depending on which weight-height chart you wanted to believe, he was either fifty or seventy pounds overweight. He had lost most of his hair when he was in his thirties and all he had now was a horseshoe fringe of curly gray that ran around the base of his round skull. But neither his bald head nor his big, sloppy gut bothered Benny. Not much of anything bothered Benny. He was a content man, almost always in a good mood, and this was reflected by his face: the laugh lines radiating from his small blue eyes, his lips perpetually turned up in a pleasant half-smile.