Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

They went to Clyde’s, DeMarco’s favorite bar on M Street, and took a seat, and Emma ordered a Ketel One martini. When the waitress asked what DeMarco wanted, he hesitated. After a night spent drinking with a priest, could his liver stand any more? Yes, he concluded; hair of the dog, he told himself, and duplicated Emma’s order.

Emma sighed. ‘I’ve met Edith Baxter. She’s an incredible woman.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘ Fortune sponsored a most-powerful-women-in-business thing. They held it at the Four Seasons in Palm Springs, and Edith, of course, was the biggest name at the conference. It was a networking orgy, all these powerful women getting together, meeting each other, and hopefully in the future helping one another and the women they were mentoring.’

‘And you went to this conference?’

‘Yeah,’ Emma said. ‘It was the only thing like that I ever attended. The people who arranged the event wanted a few women from government but not just politicians. I was at the end of my career at the DIA, had no pressing assignments, and the secretary of defense made me go. It was kinda funny. They printed up a little brochure for the conference that gave the attendees’ biographies. All mine said was that I worked at the DIA and everything else was classified. Anyway, I met Edith. She’s incredibly intelligent, principled, tough, driven, courageous. For some reason …’

Emma may not have realized it, DeMarco was thinking, but she’d just described herself.

‘… for some reason we took a shine to each other and had dinner alone one night. I really liked her.’

‘From what I’ve read about her,’ DeMarco said, ‘even with what happened to her son, it’s hard to believe she’d be supporting Broderick.’

Emma shook her head. ‘Imagine you’re a mother and your only son — a son you’ve probably neglected his entire life — is horribly disfigured. Then for months and months you watch him suffer as he recovers, knowing he’ll never be the same again. And then he kills himself. Don’t you think it’s possible you might be driven almost out of your mind with guilt and grief and hatred?’

‘I guess, but hatred for whom?’ DeMarco said. ‘Al-Qaeda? All Muslims? Lunatics who bomb trains?’

Emma plucked the lemon twist from her martini and nibbled off a piece. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but let’s say Edith decided to do something to avenge her son. And being Edith Baxter, she thinks big . She thinks she’s going to make life miserable for every Muslim in this country and she’s going to deport every one she can who’s already here and not allow any more to come in. She’s going to do her best to make sure that no other mother experiences what happened to her son. No more towers collapsing, no more planes crashing into the Pentagon, no more subway bombings.

‘And this thing with Broderick, this bill of his, maybe that’s just the first step. Maybe the next step is … hell, I don’t know. Maybe it’s crippling economic sanctions against every Muslim government. Maybe it’s getting the European Union to pass laws similar to what Broderick’s proposing.’

‘That’s a hell of an ambitious plan,’ DeMarco said.

‘Edith made her mark in the world executing ambitious plans.’

‘But Jesus, if you’re right, she was an accomplice to killing a couple of kids.’

‘There’s nothing to show she’s had anything to do with these terrorist attacks,’ Emma said. ‘All she’s done is support Broderick. But Edith lost her kid. Maybe she considers what happened to Reza Zarif’s family the price that has to be paid to get what she wants. Or maybe she …’

‘What?’

‘We’re still missing something here — assuming that anything we’ve learned is connected to anything. If somebody is forcing these people to commit acts of terrorism, there has to be an organizer, somebody who’s doing the detailed planning, arranging for the equipment. And neither Edith Baxter nor — and I’m guessing here — this businessman, Dobbler, has that sort of … of field experience.’

‘Jubal Pugh?’ DeMarco said.

‘No. Pugh’s too much of a bottom feeder. He’s a meth dealer, for Christ’s sake. If someone is orchestrating these attacks, it has to be someone a lot more sophisticated than Jubal Pugh. That doesn’t mean that Pugh isn’t involved, but there has to be someone else.’

DeMarco drained his drink. ‘So what do you wanna do?’ he said.

‘I want to talk to Edith Baxter.’

‘Why? Do you think she’ll tell you she’s behind all this stuff?’

‘I don’t know, but I need to see her.’

‘Okay. You go see Edith and I’ll go see Dobbler. I like money motives.’

The materials he needed hadn’t arrived, and he was furious.

He should have received the C-4 and the radio receivers and the transmitter and the blasting caps two weeks ago. The planning phase was over. The boy was ready. But the material for the devices had not arrived, and he had no idea what was causing the delay or how long he’d have to wait.

The materials were coming from Germany to Mexico, then across the Mexican border into Texas, after which someone would bring them to him in Cleveland by car. He couldn’t simply make a phone call to find out what had happened; they had to assume that all the lines were monitored by the NSA these days. The same with e-mail; they didn’t know the limits of American technology. So they communicated the old-fashioned way, by sending letters written in code and waiting for a response the same way. And the letters didn’t go directly to the recipient; they were mailed and then mailed again before reaching their destination.

If he had been in another part of the world — or had he not been an Arab — he could have picked up the C-4 easily, almost as easily as buying bread from one of the giant American markets — or super -markets, as they called them. Even their grocery stores were monuments to excess and decadence.

So he would wait. He would continue to mold the boy, to make sure his resolve stayed firm, although he wasn’t particularly worried that the boy would change his mind. His only task at this point was to make sure he wasn’t arrested and to plan, as best he could, for the next operation.

There was that other boy in Santa Fe he’d read about. The boy had received an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, which most likely meant that he was very bright. But the Air Force Academy had a large fundamentalist Christian faculty and was located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which had one of the largest evangelical churches in the country. The boy was harassed so relentlessly that he was driven from the academy, and when his father, not a rich man, tried to sue the air force, he and his son were humiliated by the government’s lawyers. The last article he’d read about the boy in Santa Fe said that he was working in a movie theater, serving popcorn, while he tried to save up enough money to attend another college. Would that boy have the same fire in his belly as this boy in Cleveland? He wouldn’t know until he saw him, until he looked into his eyes.

The Cuban didn’t know where the subject was going.

She’d arrived at Reagan National two hours earlier, where she’d been met by a man named Jorge driving a Honda SUV with tinted windows. She didn’t know Jorge. She’d asked a man she knew — someone she trusted about as much as she trusted anyone — to supply a driver who knew the city and would follow orders.

Except for the fact that he talked too much, Jorge was acceptable. He was ugly and he was big, six-three or six-four. He had a shaved head and a stupid-looking little strip of beard beneath his lower lip. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt — the sleeves pushed up to show off the tattoos on his forearms — baggy jeans, worn so low you could see the upper half of his plaid boxer shorts, and big unlaced Timberland boots that were a hideous yellow color. Around his neck were four gold-plated chains and on his left wrist was a fake Rolex.