Steve Martini - The Enemy Inside

“Bastards!” says Harry. “If they’re gonna kill me, they at least owe me a spot on the Supreme Court.”

“We’ll talk about that later. For the moment it looks like I’ll be going to Colorado.”

“You know they’re not gonna let you talk to Betz unless they’re listening in. That’s a given,” says Harry. “In that place the closest you’re going to get to him is a window of solid acrylic eight inches thick, talking on a wall-mounted mic with the world listening in. The man may as well be a fish in an aquarium.”

“Probably. But it’s the only chance we’re going to get.”

“How do you know he’ll even talk to you?”

“I don’t. Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Proffit said something about negotiations. He said he didn’t know the details, but that Grimes first referred to the matter as an appeal, then said no, it was a negotiation.”

“So maybe they’ve made him some kind of an offer?”

“Or getting ready to. If you think about it, it makes sense. They hit Betz hard, too hard. Alex said Graves called him the whistleblower. Betz was trying to cooperate with prosecutors, and, in fact, he did. He turned over information on taxpayers with offshore accounts from his old employer, the Swiss bank he worked for. But they were small fry. Then suddenly he becomes a little too helpful. Betz tries to put a cherry on it by telling them he had information on powerful political figures with offshore accounts.”

“The PEPs. What Korff told us,” says Harry.

“My guess is prosecutors were probably pretty excited about this at first. But then remember what Alex said? Betz, through his lawyer, the one that died flying his plane, made a proffer. They would have asked for some kind of a solid offer from the government, a short stretch in one of the federal country clubs or maybe straight probation. Who knows? But in order to get it, they had to make the proffer and show their hand.”

“And when whoever was supervising at Justice saw the scope of the thing, they probably had to pick him up and dust him off,” says Harry. “How do you go to your boss and tell him you want to indict half of Congress?”

“That’s when they started loading up the charges in order to keep Betz quiet, lock him away as long as possible. But one of them, either Betz or the lawyer, and I’m guessing Betz because he’s the only one still alive, took a look and realized that this was a problem.”

“Because of the scope,” says Harry.

“Exactly. If it went public with this many officials the political consequences alone could be catastrophic, to say nothing of the economy. Government goes down, markets tumble. Then think about what Korff told us. If investigators started looking at where this money came from, chances are some of it may track back to foreign governments. That goes public, it’s pretty hard to sweep it under the carpet. The implications get serious in a hurry, depending on what was sold.”

“And if European Union officials get drawn in, it grows like a cancer,” says Harry.

“So the deal with Betz was off, at least for the moment. Somewhere along the way he took out an insurance policy. Buried something somewhere. If anything happened to him it gets sent to a million sites on the Internet, every news outlet they can think of. So now the government is invested in making sure nothing happens to him. He’s OK for the moment. The reason he is where he is. It’s the only place they can keep him safe and at the same time keep him from talking.”

“They could try to defuse it,” says Harry. “Prosecute some of them. Put the fear of God in the rest, force them to resign or face the consequences.”

I shake my head. “If the government tries to cherry-pick the worst offenders, the defense lawyers will eat them alive. They’ll be demanding to see all the documents, unredacted, and asking questions about why Senator Smith was prosecuted when Senator Jones got a pass. They’d be arguing that the entire prosecution was nothing but politics at play. Worse than going after them all. Once the prosecution starts down that path they won’t be able to control the mess any longer.”

“Then why would the government offer a deal now, assuming they are?”

“Maybe they have no choice. They know they’ve overreached. If you check the charges and look at the guidelines you’re probably going to find out they’ve overcharged the case for sentencing purposes. And how do they justify holding him at Florence if at some point he decides to appeal, gets tired of sitting in a hole by himself. The writing’s on the wall. He’s like a grenade rattling around, waiting to go off. If he steps out and gets killed, whatever he has tucked away gets published and broadcast. So they want closure. Some deal.”

“What could they possibly offer him by way of a deal that would protect him?” says Harry. “Witness protection?”

“They may offer it. But in this case I’m afraid it would be an illusion. The problem is, no one can be sure who’s involved. For witness protection to work, you have to be able to trust the government. A mole buried in the Justice Department or some other agency and they’d have Betz’s location and his new identity before you could sneeze. He wouldn’t last a week.”

“Then what’s the answer?”

“I’m not sure there is one.”

“Then why would you go to Florence to talk to the man?”

“Because I don’t think we have a choice any longer.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wouldn’t want you to stay up nights worrying, but. . I’m afraid you and I are in the same fix Betz is, only we don’t have a prison cell to hide in.”

“You mean what you said before? Being in their thoughts and prayers?”

“You know they got pictures of the two of us shimmying out of that hotel, tripping over Korff’s body. And Ben at the motel, me with Graves. We may not have all the answers, but we know too much to be allowed to live. Don’t you think it’s strange we made it out of Lucerne?”

“We were lucky,” says Harry.

“No. I don’t think so. I think they could have killed us probably half a dozen times. But they didn’t want to. You said it, remember? The question is why? And we know the answer to that as well. Kiss of death,” I tell him.

“They were following us.”

I nod. “Right to Ben, to Graves, Korff, and they tried to get Alex twice, but they missed if the voice mail from Herman means anything. The kid must lead a charmed life.”

“It’s what I told you,” says Harry. “You said no.”

“Changed my mind this afternoon.”

“Why?”

“Proffit’s phone call. Why would Grimes want me to talk to Betz? I mean, knowing what we know. She has to know he has information. Graves called him the Holy Grail. Now we know why. Everybody else with any information is dead.”

“Because we led them right to their front door,” says Harry.

“The problem they’re having with Betz is they know where he is, but they can’t get at him.”

“So what do they want you to do?”

“They want me to get him out.”

“So they can kill him.”

“No, so that they can kill all of us. You, me, Herman, if they can find him, and Alex. You see, once we deliver Betz we will have completed our mission. I can’t imagine what other chores they might have for us.”

“So who’s doing all the killing?” he says.

“If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be downtown spilling my guts, everything I knew, to the D.A. But Graves gave me a clue. At the time I dismissed it. I don’t mean to say he named the perpetrator, but he identified the motive. The bad thing is it’s institutional, built into the system, dangerous,” I tell him.