Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

“Got your work cut out,” I tell him. “Harry and I need to go to work on Alex, to loosen his tongue regarding this hot news tip he’s got involving Serna. Makes sense that if that’s the only connection between the two of them, and if the accident was staged to trap them both, that the story he was working on is probably the reason.”

“OK, tell me this,” says Harry. He finally looks up from the report. “Says here there is no evidence of mechanical malfunction in the steering or brake systems of either car. And catch this, no evidence of any malfunction or tampering with the accelerator, cruise control, or other speed maintenance systems in either vehicle.”

“They can tell all that from the burned-out remains?” says Herman.

“Steel doesn’t burn,” says Harry. “So, if he was unconscious, on roofies, unable to coordinate his arms or his legs and there was no alteration to the steering, the accelerator, or the cruise control, how did they do eighty miles an hour and steer one car into another in the space of a small intersection? And don’t tell me they did it remotely because if they did, there would be evidence of hardware left behind no matter how small it was. The cops would have found it.” Harry looks at me across the table, tapping the page of the accident report with his finger.

It is a good question, and one for which I have no answer.

The phone on her desk buzzed. Maya Grimes reached for the receiver.

“Senator, you have a call. The man refuses to identify himself but says you know him.”

She thought for a moment. “OK, put him through. And hold my other calls and appointments.” She put the receiver down and a few seconds later it buzzed again. Grimes picked it up. “Hello.”

“Sorry to bother you at your office.”

“I told you never to call me here. You’re not calling from a cell phone, are you?”

“I’m at a pay phone. It was unavoidable. We’ve got a problem. We have to talk.”

“Not here,” said Grimes. She glanced at her watch and thought for a moment. “The bench on the north side by the reflecting pool. You know the one.”

“Where we met last time?”

“Give me fifteen minutes.” Grimes hung up the phone.

Early spring, and the Mall outside the Capitol was already bustling with early tourists and busloads of children on school field trips. Senator Maya Grimes walked quickly, trying to melt into the crowd, as unobtrusive as possible. Still, her face was recognizable to some of the passersby who stared at her and others who stole second glances as she clicked along quickly in her high heels down the path.

Usually, if she had a private meeting, she would do it at some offbeat restaurant in the suburbs, take a car from the congressional fleet with darkened windows and a driver to deliver her to the door. But she wanted no record of this meeting popping up in the computer in the motor pool.

Grimes had been twenty-two years in the US Senate, chairperson of the Committee on Banking, vice chair of Senate Finance, and a senior member of several subcommittees on financial affairs. She came from California, where the cost of an election to the Senate was approaching thirty million dollars. This, coupled with her political gravitas around the Capitol, gave her more hours on television than most seasoned pilots have in the cockpit. Hers was one of those faces that people tended to recognize. She lost count of the number of times some idiot had stopped her on the street wondering what film it was they had seen her in. Usually she didn’t mind, but today she had a terminal case of bad temper. She nearly ran down a couple of third graders who aimlessly bolted into her path in a misguided game of tag.

A grandmother and seasoned politician, Grimes could usually turn on the charm for kids. Today she gave them a look from the Wicked Witch and kept moving quickly toward a small clump of trees along the north side of the reflecting pool. The walkway curved a little to the right. As she made the turn she saw him sitting there alone on the bench.

Grimes slowed down and looked around to make sure no one was watching, there were no idle picture-takers with their backs to the pool glancing at the bench and the bushes behind it. Of course they could be a mile away with powerful optics listening through an electronic bug the size of an aspirin glued to a man’s chest.

She walked slowly toward the bench, passed him by, and stopped. She stood there for a couple of seconds with her back to him, a few feet away. There was no one in earshot. “What do you want?”

“You want to walk and talk?” he asked.

“No!”

“Suit yourself. I’m just trying to help. You wanted to be kept informed. That’s what I’m doing.”

“So what is it?”

“She’s dead.”

“I know that!” It had been in the early-morning paper, identification of the woman killed in a car crash in Southern California. The Washington Post had played it up, page three with a two-column headline. Serna was a local political player, a lobbyist who was in and out of the Capitol on a regular basis. She had friends, lots of them, most of them women. Some of them were powerful. Grimes was no doubt at or near the top of that food chain.

“But there is still a problem,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Loose ends,” he said. “It wasn’t done cleanly-”

“I don’t want to know the details!” She cut him off quickly through clenched teeth. “I don’t know what happened and I don’t want to know. I am not part of it!”

“Of course not.” He smiled, looking at her from behind. For a woman in her early sixties, she still had a pretty good body. There were times when he wondered what she might be like in the sack; whether all that intensity would translate into sexual energy once you got her there. “Why don’t you come over and sit down.” He gently patted the slatted wood on the bench next to him.

He was lean, about six feet, gray-haired, tan complexion, blue eyes with just enough wrinkles in the forehead and the bags above his cheeks to look distinguished. It was a face that had seen some wear. His three-piece pinstriped navy suit might just as well have been a uniform around the government buildings and monuments in Washington. So ubiquitous were his looks that he was nearly invisible. This was well practiced and honed over the long course of his career. He had lived in many countries and could disappear like a ghost in almost any of them. He carried a walking cane, though he seldom used it. This was insurance against a trick knee that at times could go out on him without notice, the result of an injury sustained in his youth. The cane sported the sharp-beaked head of an eagle cast in silver. It was the work of a Mexican silversmith. The bird’s slitted eyes, tarnished a little from wear, mimicked its owner’s. Ever vigilant, they peered out at the world in cold judgment.

“Loosen up. Relax. You seem troubled.” He studied her body language, tense, wary. “There is no one here but the two of us.”

“How can I be sure?” she said.

“If we wanted to expose you, you would already be sitting in a federal penitentiary. Oh, one of the country clubs, to be sure,” he said. “They would never subject you to, what is it they call it, the general population.” He smiled, though with her back to him she couldn’t see it. “There’s supposed to be a very nice one, I think they call it Pleasanton, out in your neck of the woods in California. I am told it is not a bad place. At least it’s close to your family.”

Whenever he met up with her he always stoked the coals, feeding the fires of anxiety that burned within. Keeping her on edge was part of the practiced technique, honed over generations by its practitioners.