Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

“There’s, uh, uh, there’s a Barnes amp; Noble with a coffee shop on M Street in Georgetown. How about there?” he asked, sounding tentative.

“Forty-five minutes. I’ll be there,” I said before he could back out on me.

Until this moment, I’d been stupid beyond words. I’d been playing in other people’s sandboxes, and I was the only guy too blind to recognize I was out of my depth. Everybody had warned me: my client, Mary, Alexi. My libido was too puffed up to hear them. I’d nearly gotten myself killed, and Katrina also.

Somebody was making a point of showing me my own limitations.

Jimmy was not an impressive-looking guy. Soft brown skin, average height, average build, average face, all of which added up to pretty honest advertising, since on Jimmy’s best day, he was just an average guy.

He was sipping from a big Starbucks coffee as he noodled through the history section when Katrina and I walked up behind him.

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Hi, Jimmy. This is my co-counsel, Katrina Mazorski.”

He spun around, nodded, and his face looked alarmed. He immediately whispered, “What’s this about three killings this morning? Tell me about that?”

“Between eight and ten this morning, somebody tried to arrange two murders. I was attacked by two thugs in the parking lot of my apartment, and some ersatz homeless guy tried to whack Katrina with a butcher knife while she was walking to her car.”

He studied my face to see if I was kidding and came to the obvious conclusion I wasn’t. “This isn’t my bailiwick, Sean. I’m a financial guy. I do money-laundering and bank fraud, not murder, or espionage.”

“Yeah, but I know you, so I trust you.”

“Any reason you don’t trust the rest of the Bureau?” he asked, appropriately suspicious.

“Working on my client’s defense, I’ve discovered there is probably a mole somewhere in our government. Somewhere very high up, a mole with extraordinary resources. I’m not saying Morrison wasn’t a traitor-I don’t know about that. I’m saying there’s another mole, and that’s why somebody tried to kill us.”

Jimmy was nodding his head. “And this mole is working for the Russians?”

“Right.”

“The attempt on your lives? What happened?”

“Mine was set up like a robbery that went wrong. Only the killers screwed up and gave themselves away, so I, uh, well, I killed them. The guy who tried to take out Katrina, he didn’t expect me to show up.”

“And you killed him, too?”

“I had to. He was swinging a butcher knife.”

He nodded, as suddenly six men and women came running at us from other nearby stacks. Before Katrina or I could do a thing, Jimmy was holding a pistol in his hand, and Katrina and I were getting our hands cuffed behind our backs, our rights read, our dignity trashed.

I was swearing at Jimmy, who was obviously wearing a wire, and he held up a hand. “Drummond, take it easy. I’m a federal agent. When you said you killed three guys this morning, I had to tell my boss. You gave me no choice.”

It obviously wasn’t supposed to work this way. In the movies, you see guys in desperate positions like mine, they call some old buddy and the old buddy cherishes the sacred bonds, protects their confidentiality, and takes care of everything. Either those movies are horsecrap or I’d overestimated my popularity.

Katrina and I responded like lawyers naturally do, keeping our mouths shut, although I’d already crossed the Rubicon, because Jimmy had me admitting on tape to killing three guys, and all hell was going to break loose.

Katrina and I were next led outside to two shiny Crown Victorias waiting beside the curb, as a crowd of gawkers and gapers gathered to watch a real-life arrest go down. This was a fresh and incredibly unwelcome experience for me, parading in front of folks like a common felon. Katrina was guided into the back of one car, and I was shoved into the other one.

On the ride to the garage under the FBI building, I contemplated the charges they could throw at me: conspiracy, manslaughter, fleeing a crime, hiding evidence. And those were merely the charges I could think of. The FBI and Justice Department have all those highly imaginative guys with Ivy League degrees who are geniuses at thinking up charges. No doubt they could do better than me.

We parked in an underground garage and then took the elevator to an upper-floor interrogation room. Jimmy hung around while a new guy entered the room. He had that weaselly look of the professional interrogator: long, skinny face, deadpan, droopy eyes, and a mouth with no wrinkles around the edges, like he never smiled or frowned or had orgasms. He walked hunched over, with his chin protruding out and a big, beaklike nose that poked suspiciously through the air.

He sat in front of me and said, “I’m Special Agent Michaels. Do I need to read you your rights?” Belafonte, the traitorous prick, leaned against the wall. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why Belafonte remained in the room. I’d made my confession to him, and his presence was to remind me I’d already spilled the big beans, so let’s not niggle over the gravy.

I shook my head. “Already done.”

He leaned toward me like this was some kind of melodramatic moment. “We have you on tape admitting you killed a man in Washington and two men in your apartment parking lot earlier this morning.”

“All that’s true,” I admitted, since it seemed damned silly to deny what I’d already admitted.

He leaned back and stroked his chin. “However, we have a bit of problem here.”

Technically, we didn’t have a bit of problem. I did, and not a bit of a problem, a mountain of a problem. I said, “I know.”

He continued in a perfectly dry tone. “The problem, Drummond, is nobody reported any deaths. Unless you want to count a lady who got shoved off the subway platform at the Fourteenth Street station this morning. Only the D.C. police caught the guy who did that. Or would you like to confess to that killing, too?”

“What are you talking about?”

“What I just told you, Drummond. No dead guys showed up near your apartment building. And no dead guys showed up near Miss Mazorski’s apartment, either. So what the hell’s going on here?”

“That’s impossible. This morning, at my apartment, the police came. I was interviewed by a detective. He took my statement.”

He was nodding, like, Yeah, sure, tell me more, convince me.

I said, “I’m not jerking you around. I walked out to my car and two guys approached me with a knife and gun. It was meant to look like a robbery, only it wasn’t. It was a hit.”

He was still nodding, only now he was biting his cheek. “And what happened to the bodies?” he asked, scratching the side of his nose, like, Gee, no shit, throw in a few Nazi spies and quit boring me?

“A meat wagon got them. It was an Arlington County Hospital ambulance. I watched them load the bodies.”

“What time?”

“Shortly before eight.”

He nodded at Belafonte, who nodded back and left.

“And tell me about that second attack,” he ordered.

“It happened right around the corner from Miss Mazorski’s apartment. Around nine-thirty… maybe ten. She was walking to her car and a guy who was made up to look homeless went after her with a butcher knife.”

“And you stopped him?”

“Only barely. Actually, she nailed him with some pepper spray and that blinded him.”

“And you what? You shot him?”

“No. I stabbed him.”

He was doing that head-nodding routine and scratching that big goddamn nose again, and I wanted to reach across the table and jackslap him. He was trying to be grating, and even though I knew that, and knew I should rise above his provocation, I was emotionally entangled.