Finally, he called Yuri. “Is there any way,” he asked, “that you can get this guy to go someplace outside the city? You know, tell him you need to talk to him and he should meet you someplace where there are not a lot of people around?”
Yuri cursed as if Ivan had asked him to dig a ditch with his bare hands but said that what Ivan wanted could be arranged.
“Oh,” Ivan added. “And can I get reimbursed for the money I have to spend on gas? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the price of gas…”
Yuri hung up.
DeMarco took a seat next to Mahoney on the rough-cut wooden bleachers, hoping splinters wouldn’t snag his pants.
“This thing with Sandra Whitmore is getting weird, boss,” he said.
Mahoney ignored him and watched the pitcher throw a thirty-mile-per-hour fastball. The batter, who was about four foot three, smacked it good but right to the shortstop, and the shortstop scooped it up like a midget Derek Jeter and sidearmed the ball to first.
“Good glove,” Mahoney yelled. “Good glove.”
Every once in a while, and DeMarco had no idea why, Mahoney would leave his office, cab over to a ball field in southeast D.C. and, depending on the season, watch the kids play baseball or football. Almost all the kids were black, as were the spectators, and Mahoney would usually be the only white man there. After watching the boys play for a while, he’d head back to the Capitol, rejuvenated by the experience.
One time when DeMarco had met him at the field, Mahoney had been behind home plate wearing a too small chest protector and a mask. DeMarco assumed the regular ump hadn’t shown up, that they had needed a volunteer, and Mahoney had raised his paw. Mahoney was having a blast that day, yelling “Stee-rike” at the top of his lungs and lumbering into the middle of the diamond to make calls at the bases. DeMarco had to sit through four innings and when the game was over Mahoney had an absolute glow in his eyes.
John Mahoney was a hard man to categorize.
“So, what’s going on?” Mahoney finally asked as he continued to watch the game.
“Whitmore was set up by somebody, but I don’t know why.”
“Set up?” Mahoney said. Then he yelled out to the batter, “Good eye, son, good eye. Stay away from those high ones.”
“The guy that leaked the story to her isn’t who he said he was,” DeMarco explained. Then he told Mahoney how Whitmore’s source had used the identity of a real CIA employee. “So, I don’t know if the guy who talked to Whitmore is really CIA or not, but whoever he is, he’s not Derek Crosby.”
Mahoney started to say something—probably to tell DeMarco that he didn’t want to hear about what he
didn’t
know—but just then a kid tried to steal third and the home-plate umpire, the only umpire in the game, called him out. Mahoney, who was closer to third base than the ump, leaped out of his seat and yelled, “He was safe! Safe!” One of the mothers sitting a few feet from Mahoney then called out, “Yeah, Lionel, that boy’s foot hit the bag about an
hour
before he tagged him.”
Lionel turned and glared at Mahoney—and DeMarco didn’t blame him. The poor guy volunteered his time to ump these games and the last thing he needed was some big mouth stirring up the mothers and turning them into a screeching mob. Lionel also knew, whether Mahoney was right or wrong, that if he changed his call they’d yell about every call he made for the rest of the game. He looked directly at Mahoney and said, “Runner at third is out. Batter up.” Then he slammed his mask down over his scowling face and took up his position behind the plate.
“Can you believe that guy?” Mahoney said to the mother on his right.
This was hopeless, DeMarco thought; he’d just have to wait until the game was over.
Twenty minutes later it was, and DeMarco and Mahoney started walking in the direction of the Capitol, looking for a cab. Mahoney’s
security guys would be having heart attacks if they knew where he was.
“Anyway,” DeMarco said, “the guy who leaked the story to Whit-more may or may not be CIA, and right now I don’t have any idea how to find him.”
“Supposedly,” Mahoney said, “there were only two groups of people who knew about Diller attending that meeting in Tehran. Select members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and people at the CIA.”
“And LaFountaine said all his people were polygraphed,” DeMarco added.
“Yeah, I know what he said.”
“What? You don’t believe him?”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe him. I’m saying I don’t trust him.”
DeMarco wasn’t sure what to say next, but before he could say anything Mahoney said, “I know LaFountaine’s up to something but I think he’s telling the truth about his guys not having leaked the story. He said he’d resign if one of them had, and he wouldn’t have said that if he was lying. So he’s probably right; somebody in Congress leaked this thing, and the guy who impersonated Crosby probably isn’t CIA.”
“Do you have any idea who in Congress could have leaked the story?” DeMarco said.
Instead of answering his question, Mahoney asked, “What did you find out about this fake CIA guy?”
“All I’ve got so far is a description. He’s in his early sixties, tall, tanned, good shape, ginger-colored hair.”
“Ginger?” Mahoney said. “What the hell’s
ginger
?”
“You know, kind of a reddish-brown color.”
“Well, shit. No wonder nobody could connect him to Whitmore. They probably didn’t know what ginger was. What a stupid fuckin’ description.”
Sheesh. “And the guy had a lisp,” DeMarco added.
“A lisp?”
“Yeah, you know, when he says…”
“I know what a lisp is,” Mahoney said.
He and DeMarco walked in silence for half a block before Mahoney said, “You know about Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson?”
“Watergate?”
“Yeah. Well, Dick Nixon wasn’t the only guy who employed people like Liddy. Almost every guy who’s been in the White House has had a few people like him, goddamn commando zealots willing to do anything.”
“What’s this got to do with…”
“There was a guy like Liddy who worked for ___.”
And Mahoney told DeMarco the name of the president.
“You’re kidding!” DeMarco said. “I never would have thought…”
“Yeah, I know. Now he goes around building houses for the homeless and wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful. Anyway, he had a young guy that would leak stuff he wanted leaked, and lean on people he wanted leaned on. The guy’s name was Acosta, and I remember him because of the lisp. It’s hard to act tough when you’re lisping, and one time he tried to get tough with me.”
Mahoney laughed at the memory.
“It would be a hell of a coincidence if this Acosta character was the one that talked to Whitmore,” DeMarco said.
“Yeah, but there’s something else that makes me think it could be him,” Mahoney said. “Eight, ten years ago, Acosta was working for a lobbyist, and he and the lobbyist almost landed in jail for lying to a grand jury.”
“What does this have to do with—”
“This particular lobbyist is very close to one of my, uh, friends.”
“You mean one of the congressmen who attended LaFountaine’s briefing?” DeMarco said.
Mahoney didn’t answer.
“Well, which congressman is it?” DeMarco persisted. “I mean, if you know who started this whole thing, you oughta tell me. The name might help me identify Whitmore’s source.”
“Never mind that for now,” Mahoney said. “Just look up Acosta. He could be dead for all I know, but he fits the description. And he’s the kind of guy that would do something like this if the money was right. His first name is Dan or Dave, something like that, and he had kinda reddish hair—what I guess you’d call ginger.”
The target’s name was Dale Acosta.
Benny Mark was sitting in his rented Taurus in the lot where Acosta most likely parked his car. He had been sitting there for two days and his back was killing him.
When he had arrived at his motel in Myrtle Beach, there’d been an envelope waiting for him. Inside the envelope was Acosta’s address, the make and license-plate number for his car, and Acosta’s DMV photo. Benny always insisted on a photo.
One time he’d been hired to take out a snitch named Bob Reynolds. He’d been given Reynolds’s address, which turned out to be an apartment in a housing project in St. Louis. So Benny popped Bob Reynolds —then found out the next day that he’d popped the
wrong
Bob Reynolds. Two Bob Reynoldses had lived in the same damn building. Boy, had he felt like a horse’s patootie on that one—and from then on, he always got a photo.
Acosta lived in a short block of town houses on the sixth fairway of a golf course. The parking lot for the town houses was on the east end of the block and if Benny parked at the front of the lot, close to the fairway, he could see the front porch of Acosta’s place from where he sat. But Acosta’s car wasn’t in the lot and Benny had never seen a light go on in Acosta’s town house the whole time he’d been watching. The guy was obviously out of town or staying with a girlfriend or some damn thing.
He had called Jimmy yesterday and asked him if he had any idea where Acosta might be. Jimmy said he didn’t know; he’d been told that Acosta was retired and he figured the guy would be at home. Well, he’s not, Benny had said, and I’m goin’ outta my mind, sittin’ here
on my ass all day. Do you think maybe you could find out where he is? But Jimmy hadn’t gotten back to him, so Benny was still sitting.
The setup for the hit wasn’t ideal. If the guy had parked in a garage it would have been better, but the lot where he parked was right out in the open and you could see it from the fairway and from the street, and there were cars driving by all the time. If Acosta went to his car at night,
late
at night, that might work, but the lot was pretty well lit.
So Benny came up with a plan.
The first day, he walked around in the rough near the fairway until he found a golf ball. Then, last night, when it was dark and nobody was playing, he walked to the front of Acosta’s town house, which faced the golf course, and threw the golf ball at a window—and the ball bounced off the window. He went back to his car, got the tire iron, and jabbed the window with the pointy end and, fortunately, the window didn’t shatter—which made him wonder what kind of glass it was made of. He then shoved the golf ball he’d found through the hole made by the tire iron. Perfect.
If Acosta ever came home, Benny was gonna put on a hat and sunglasses and knock on his door. He’d say, “Hey, sorry about that ball I put through your window, that fuckin’ slice I got. I just came to settle up with you.” If the guy didn’t let Benny into his house, he’d show him the .32 and force his way in.
Benny always used little .32 caliber automatics when he worked. The gun was the quietest one he could find, and if he wrapped a towel around the barrel or shot through a pillow, you could barely hear it. After the job, he’d toss the gun—the cost of the gun was included in the cost of the job—and buy another one.
Yeah, he loved those little .32s. They were easy to conceal and quieter than a popcorn fart. They weren’t the least bit accurate, of course, but that didn’t matter because Benny couldn’t shoot for shit and he’d never shot anybody from more than three feet away.
He always got a kick out of those professional killers they showed in the movies, those slick, evil-looking guys that used silenced weapons
or could hit somebody with a rifle from three hundred yards or blow up cars with cell-phone bombs. Benny had no idea how to build a bomb and he had never used a rifle in his life. He wasn’t a hunter and had never been in the military. And as for silencers—where the hell did you buy ’em? He didn’t know. And if you bought one, then you had to machine the gun to fit the silencer and he didn’t know how to do that, either. Benny assumed that there were professional killers out there like you saw in the movies but he suspected most of the real ones were guys like him: guys that just walked up behind people and shot ’em in the head.
Benny had never planned on being a professional killer but he’d been in Chicago working for a guy in the rackets there, and one day his boss said he needed somebody whacked. The boss had just been bitching about how this guy was a problem; he hadn’t really been asking Benny to do the hit. But Benny and Betty Ann had been living in a shit hole at the time and they needed the money, so Benny had said that for five grand he’d do the job. The boss had stared at him like he was nuts, not ever thinking a guy who looked like Benny would do something like that. And that’s when Benny said, “He’ll never see me coming.”
The next time it happened, he and the boss were having drinks with the big boss, and the big boss said
he
needed someone taken care of. And Benny’s boss glanced over at Benny and said, “I know a guy who can do the job.” And that’s how Benny the professional killer was born.
Killing people wasn’t, however, a full-time occupation. There just weren’t that many guys who wanted people dead or were willing to pay someone to do the job. So he and Betty Ann saved up their dough and bought a bar in Tacoma, Washington, near the port there. He made maybe sixty grand a year after taxes, which was enough for him and Betty Ann to get by on, but he could always use the extra money. So when Jimmy had a job for him, he’d take it as long as it wasn’t anything too tricky—and this thing with Acosta wasn’t tricky at all.
The United States House of Representatives has its own historian and DeMarco had always thought this position had been created so there would be at least one version of history that put Congress in a positive light—or at least more positive than if the tale was told by someone not on their payroll.
Dr. Donald Finemore worked in Cannon House Office Building. He was a shaggy-haired six footer in his forties who weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. The absence of body fat could have been due to a tapeworm but was more likely explained by the racing bike propped up against one wall. When DeMarco entered his office, Finemore was using a magnifying glass to study a small book that looked as if it might fall apart if he turned a page too fast.