The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 20

  She realized that over the past two days, she had returned to her earlier worldview, the one she held before Brock swept her off her feet two years earlier: All men are bastards.

  34

  The Thursday sun rose in a quiet fury, its light reflected off a high layer of clouds that painted the sky a gorgeous crimson. It was amazing to be alive, Sam thought as she cruised along with the eastbound traffic on I-70.

  She had rested for a few hours at a Dayton flop house, again paying cash and using her Jennifer Garman identification, then rose several hours before dawn to get a head start on the drive back to DC.

  She had elected not to buy a return airline ticket simply because she thought Ekman might have circulated a watch order through the TSA network. She was pretty sure he didn’t know about her Jennifer Garman alias, but that wouldn’t help her get past the facial recognition software in use at almost all airports in the US. She wasn’t sure whether Dayton had one, but Reagan International certainly did.

  So she guzzled coffee and rolled down the window to help her stay awake on the long drive east, and her mind gnawed on the confusing events of the past five days, searching for possible connections.

  Dibiaso wasn’t an Executive Strategies guy, and neither was Brock. That was good, she thought, but it left her back at square one trying to figure out what Brock and Dibiaso were involved in.

  Also, Fatso Minton’s company may have been paid by a Venezuelan company – Fatso wasn’t sure – but if that were the case, it was more than likely nothing more than a shill corporation used to launder CIA money. It didn’t seem logical for Executive Strategies to become involved with a real-life Venezuelan concern on the side. The profit couldn’t possibly be large enough to justify jeopardizing a long and very lucrative relationship with the Agency and its satellite organizations. Fatso was keenly aware of where his bread was buttered.

  So that left another mystery: why the hell did Executive Strategies pay John Abrams and Everett Cooper, who, if Ekman and Jarvis were to be believed, were dancing to a Venezuelan tune?

  But were Ekman and Jarvis to be believed?

  They were both careerists, which meant they were reeds in the wind. That wasn’t necessarily bad, as long as the wind blew from the right direction. But Sam still had no idea what pressures they were responding to at the moment, and what was fueling their suspicion of her and Brock. Obviously, it was somehow connected to Dibiaso, but all of her efforts to figure out the Dibiaso connection had so far produced bupkis.

  Then an idea struck. Really, it was a realization of her own weakness. When Ekman had shown her the cell phone location data that proved Brock and Dibiaso had spent time together, she had let her emotions cloud her investigative judgment. She was instantly overcome by the horror of Brock having lied to her, and she failed to ask the obvious question: where the hell were Brock and Dibiaso going together?

  Time for another chat with her deputy. She turned on one of her new burners and dialed his office. It was still early, but she had no desire to anger Sara, Dan’s tired and long-suffering wife, so she didn’t dare call Gable at home. To her surprise, he answered his office phone. “Are you hiding at work?” she asked.

  “Is it that obvious?” He chuckled.

  “Good luck with that time bomb. Anyway, I’m a jackass, and I thought of a question I should have asked four days ago. Where did Brock and Dibiaso meet each other those times when they were together?”

  “Holy shit, Sam, I thought you knew that already. The first thing I did when you sent me the data was to plot it on a map. I’d have sent it over right away, but I thought it was old news for you.”

  Sam cursed under her breath. That’s what I get for acting like a lovesick chick.

  “Hit me,” she said.

  “Both times, they met at the Pentagon and drove south together. Brock’s line ends in Arlington a couple of blocks away from your house, while Dibiaso’s line goes all the way to the park-n-ride at the end of the HOV lanes.”

  “Down in Triangle?” It was a town built around a daily traffic jam. Brock used to joke that the whole town would declare bankruptcy if Virginia ever added another southbound lane, because people wouldn’t have to pull out of the bumper-to-bumper traffic to go to the bathroom or get food.

  “Yeah. It’s a dump. Anyway, whatever they were doing, they only did it during those car rides together, at least as far as I can tell.”

  Sam’s mind churned. She realized that she had seen only two episodes of Brock’s and Dibiaso’s locations overlapping. She had assumed that they were representative episodes, chosen by Ekman to illustrate a larger pattern of Brock and Dibiaso doing business of some sort, but she realized that might not be the case at all. What if the two times that Ekman had showed to her were the only times?

  Two episodes were surely enough to demonstrate a connection, but it was worth knowing how deep the rabbit hole might have gone.

  She asked Dan to assemble a location map for Brock and Dibiaso’s phones over a three-month period. Dan raised the issue of not having a warrant, but Sam pointed out that Brock was in the military, which meant that he did not enjoy the same constitutional protections as ordinary citizens. Strange, and a bit sad, but true.

  And Dibiaso probably wasn’t a US citizen, which made him fair game – at least with some degree of plausible deniability.

  Dan wasn’t a stranger to legally ambiguous territory, but that didn’t make him excited about skirting the line. He voiced his displeasure, and Sam promised an extra smiley face on his year-end report card. Dan reluctantly agreed, and Sam thanked him with due fervency.

  Something else was important, she realized as she tossed the phone into the passenger seat. If Dibiaso were indeed Venezuelan, what was he doing at the US Pentagon? While the Pentagon was a famously overpopulated place, Sam was fairly certain its Venezuelan constituency was approximately zero.

  Venezuela was on several State Department tourism alert lists because of its officially unfriendly position vis-a-vis Uncle Sugar, and Sam felt certain that any spare Pentagon office space was reserved for America’s Inner Circle – the UK, Canada, and maybe Australia. There might be a few others, but the list surely didn’t contain openly truculent governments.

  So what gives? Sam checked her watch. If the traffic gods smiled on her, she’d arrive back in DC before the mass Pentagon exodus at the end of the day. Maybe she would be able to find out for herself what Dibiaso was up to.

  It felt good to finally be moving forward, although she was still angry at herself for ignoring such an obvious question days before. How much closer to figuring out this mess would she have been if she hadn’t let her emotions get the better of her?

  Flashing lights caught her eye, and she looked in her rear-view mirror. A state trooper was on her bumper. She looked down at the speedometer, and realized that her impatience and frustration had manifested in a lead foot.

  Balls.

  Her first instinct was to run like hell, but her little rental car was no Porsche. And she realized that she wasn’t anywhere near the Metro DC jurisdiction – she was in Pennsylvania, to be precise – which significantly lowered the odds that this particular patrolman was interested in anything more than meeting his monthly ticket revenue quotas.

  Sam sighed heavily and pulled over.

  Gotta quit making rookie mistakes, she thought. One of these days, my luck is going to run out.

  35

  El Jerga waited in an upscale coffee shop, the kind with six-dollar lattes and four-dollar percolator swill, and watched the suits come and go.

  It was a strange town, he thought. Nobody smiled at anyone else. Even in the toughest parts of Caracas, there was some basic human courtesy passed between random strangers. But not here, in the Mecca of Democracy, with its towering monuments to the common man, built by history’s greatest oligarchs and religious kooks.

  How can they be anything but crooked? It wasn’t that the system was corrupted. The problem was that the system was corrup
tion itself. And it was administered by an army of anonymous bureaucrats, with only their egregiously inflated sense of self-importance held in common with each other.

  And nothing held in common with the governed. How dare the gringos wag their fingers at us, he thought.

  The exchange went nothing like the movies. El Jerga rested the appropriate book face-up on his table for two, and a stranger in a three-piece suit sat down without warning in the opposite chair. “Finally cooling off,” the stranger said.

  “About time,” El Jerga croaked. His voice sounded like gravel in a clothes dryer, and the well-dressed stranger immediately looked to El Jerga’s grievously scarred throat. El Jerga had long ago stopped viewing such reactions as impolite. It was human nature, and he had grown used to the common reaction to the sound of his voice, as well as the pained facial expressions that inevitably followed.

  Regardless of its horrific sound, El Jerga’s voice had delivered the appropriate identification code, and the man in the suit crossed one leg over the other, slouched in the coffee shop chair, and nonchalantly tossed a folded newspaper onto the table. “I know you’re following the stock market,” he said, “so I saved the business section for you.”

  El Jerga nodded and smiled in thanks, in lieu of attracting more attention with his wrecked voice box.

  He waited the appropriate amount of time, then retreated to a restroom stall to check the delivery. He unfolded the business section to find a clear plastic bag with a few grams of chalky white powder. He put a little on his tongue. Satisfied, he re-wrapped the substance in the newspaper and left the coffee shop.

  El Jerga waited in an idling minivan in a curbside parking spot outside the Department of Agriculture, surveying the stream of pedestrians exiting the Department of Homeland Security’s national headquarters building across the street. It was a stone’s throw from Congress and the Washington Monument, the world’s largest obelisk.

  Lunchtime was a horrible time to find a particular individual in Washington, DC, but it was otherwise a terrific time to do what El Jerga needed to do. He divided his attention between watching the doorway of the building across the street and cooking the bag of heroin, by holding a lighter beneath a large spoonful of the white powder.

  It didn’t take long for the powder to liquefy, and El Jerga placed a needle in the center of the liquid and withdrew the syringe plunger. The liquid filled most of the syringe. He wasn’t a user himself, but he figured it would have been enough heroin for a house full of addicts. And more than enough for his purposes.

  He replaced the cap on the needle, tucked it into his pocket, and resumed his surveillance of DHS’ front door.

  His quarry appeared right on time. El Jerga’s source had provided detailed information about the Thursday lunch attended by everyone in his target’s office. They didn’t always go to the same restaurant, but they always ate together, and they usually left a half hour before noon to beat the lunchtime rush.

  El Jerga exited the minivan, patted his pocket for reassurance, and joined the rush of self-absorbed, unsmiling pedestrians crossing the street with the light. The timing worked serendipitously well, and El Jerga found himself just a dozen paces behind his target.

  The gaggle rounded the corner onto a street full of restaurants, and El Jerga had to find creative ways to avoid detection as the group of office workers paused to view the menus. It was interesting to watch a group of people come to a decision, El Jerga thought with professional detachment. It happened in stops and starts, and it was much more about social dynamics than about the substance of the decision at hand, he thought.

  Indian food eventually won out, and the dozen Homeland workers took over a corner of Najeeb’s Finest in L’Enfant Plaza. El Jerga pulled his ball cap low over his face and took a seat at a table for two near the hallway leading to the restrooms.

  He ordered food, monitored the table of Homeland employees, and did his best to control the growing impatience he felt. He didn’t have long before the syringe cooled and the drug condensed, making it impossible to inject.

  The waiter had just brought a basketful of naan bread when motion in the vicinity of the pack of bureaucrats caught El Jerga’s eye. A tired-looking man in his mid-thirties stood up. He had dark circles under his eyes, and he seemed rumpled and too thin for his clothes.

  El Jerga cross-referenced the photo on his phone to remove all doubt. He’s the one.

  The man walked past El Jerga’s table and down the hall toward the men’s room. El Jerga followed.

  The door was locked, and his quarry waited patiently, so El Jerga did the same, smiling at the tired-looking man when their eyes met. They heard a toilet flush, and soon the door opened.

  “It’s a two-holer,” the tall, thin man said to El Jerga. “I just need the urinal, so no need to wait.”

  El Jerga croaked his thanks and followed the thin government employee into the restroom, locking the door behind him.

  As his target stood before the urinal and unzipped his fly, El Jerga reached into his jacket pocket and removed a handkerchief from a sealed Ziploc bag. The unmistakable stench of chloroform assaulted his nose.

  In a flash, El Jerga approached from behind and pressed the handkerchief tightly over his target’s mouth and nose. The man was too taken aback to struggle at first, but soon began to thrash. El Jerga dragged him to the center of the small bathroom to prevent him from kicking the walls and alerting passersby.

  The exertion rapidly depleted his target’s oxygen supply, and he gasped for breath, ingesting a lungful of chloroform fumes. Several seconds later, his skinny body went completely limp in El Jerga’s arms.

  El Jerga hefted his target into the toilet stall, set him on the toilet, and propped his torso upright against the toilet paper dispenser while he unbuttoned the man’s sleeve. He pushed the sleeve up above the elbow and wrapped a phlebotomist’s band around the too-skinny arm.

  It took several seconds for a suitable vein to expose itself, and it took two attempts with the syringe before El Jerga was rewarded with a surge of blood as he withdrew the plunger ever so slightly. He watched his victim’s blood mix with the drug, and wondered how many times the skinny addict had performed the same ritual on himself.

  Never again, hombre, he thought to himself as he slowly pressed the plunger toward the needle, forcing the deadly dose of heroin into Jeff Jensen’s veins. He felt his victim’s body shudder, and watched cyanosis spread from the man’s lips to the rest of his face.

  Less than a minute later, El Jerga witnessed the last breath of Homeland CSI Jensen.

  He wiped the syringe free of his own fingerprints, and used Jensen’s lifeless hand to create the appropriate evidence of a self-inflicted overdose, then exited the restroom and returned to his lunch.

  As his curry arrived, El Jerga sent a text message: addiction kills.

  El Grande’s reply was swift: nice work…stay ready…more to come.

  El Jerga smiled. He thought that with his fat cigars and his skinny Russian prostitutes, El Grande was far more poseur than bona fide heavy, and his ostentatious pistolero-and-freedom-fighter affectation would likely lead to a painful demise. But El Jerga hoped it wouldn’t happen any time soon, because he thoroughly enjoyed all the business El Grande brought him.

  It took a surprisingly long time for anyone to discover the late Jeff Jensen’s corpse. When it finally happened, El Jerga left cash on the table for his lunch and took his place among the open-mouthed gawkers.

  36

  But for a $200 traffic ticket and a brief slowdown due to road construction in Eastern Pennsylvania, Sam’s car trip from Dayton to DC was uneventful. She skirted around the southeastern edge of the city via the Beltway, jumped onto I-395 northbound, and took Exit 8C for Army Navy Drive and the Pentagon.

  She turned left and headed toward the vast Pentagon parking lot, but was greeted by a slovenly and surly rent-a-cop who informed her that she lacked the appropriate sticker to gain entrance. Apparently, nobody but t
he three-stars were allowed to park next to The Building, as it was affectionately known, so Sam set about trying to find a place to park her rental car.

  Half an hour later, with the sun threatening to duck behind the Crystal City office buildings, Sam settled for leaving her car in an underground lot beneath the Doubletree Hotel.

  She ventured across Army Navy Drive on foot, dodging speeding cars as they rounded the blind curve with a crowded city’s reckless abandon. This section of road must have been what Brock meant when he talked about “playing Frogger” on the way to the Pentagon, she thought. The old-school car-dodging video game predated her popular culture awareness, but Brock had brought her up to speed on the joke.

  She walked briskly beneath the 395 overpass, past the same surly traffic cop, and toward the Metro entrance of the Pentagon. It was easily a two-mile walk. She finally arrived at the entrance, only to discover a lengthy line of people waiting to pass through a security screening station. It looked just like an airport security setup, complete with metal detectors and seven underemployed guards milling about.

  She took her place at the end of the line and surveyed the long, serpentine procession of humanity. Sam only had an hour before the place turned into a ghost town. The daily Pentagon exodus was famously fast, much like the way large factories disgorged their employees during the Industrial Revolution, and she didn’t have time to waste.

  She held her DHS badge above her head, called out, “Pardon me, folks,” and made her way to the front of the line, as if her official business were naturally more important than their official business. Her advance garnered a few angry looks, but people mostly just got out of her way.

  As she arrived at the front of the line, she made a curious observation: The headquarters of the most powerful military in human history is guarded by. . . rent-a-cops?

  She shook her head at the absurdity, emptied her pockets, passed through the metal detector, and emerged seconds later in front of the vast bank of escalators leading up into what was once the world’s largest office building.