Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“And this time,” Parkhall concluded, “no rough stuff. I don’t care how you do it but make sure it looks like natural causes. That’s the only way you get paid.”

Justin Smith stifled a yawn as he stepped out of the Woodley Park-National Zoo station of Washington’s Metrorail subway system. It had been a long, nerve-racking day, the sort that let him feel all the weight of his forty-one years spent in the grinding competition of the newspaper business. He wasn’t exaggerating it to Steve Pace; he was tired and ready to retire, preferably to a place where he would never have to deal with subway schedules and taxicabs again.

He grimaced when he recalled the cost of taking cabs to and from Dulles Airport earlier in the day—nearly a hundred dollars round-trip, including tips, and the journey yielded virtually no new data on the ConPac crash.

Smith and his wife Margaret had lived in the Woodley Park area since moving to Washington from New York City nineteen years earlier. They owned no car when they lived in New York. There was no need, and no place to park, anyway. They owned a two-bedroom condominium on the Upper East Side. He took the subway to his job at the Times each day. She did her shopping in the grocery store half a block from their condo building. Dry-cleaning pickup was available in an anteroom off the lobby. There were a dozen good restaurants within a two-block radius. Subways and cabs were readily available for evenings out farther from home.

When they moved to Washington and sold their condo, they bought a neo-Georgian brick townhouse built on 28th Street in 1921. They also bought one car, which Margaret Smith drove. Justin Smith used the nearby Connecticut Avenue bus line to get to and from work each day until the subway went by their neighborhood and cut twenty-five minutes off the trip to the Times’ downtown office.

Over the years, they’d refurbished their home to totally modern standards. The improvements and the proximity of the house to the Metrorail Red Line, coupled with the wildly volatile real estate market in the nation’s capital over the previous two decades, guaranteed the Smiths would clear more than $300,000 when he retired and sold the property, more than enough to buy the home of their dreams wherever they chose to go. Although Smith could easily have paid for a second car for commuting, his house had no garage, and street parking in the neighborhood was so oversubscribed it took a miracle to find one space, let alone two.

It was getting dark when Smith turned west off Connecticut Avenue onto Woodley. The mass of Wardman Tower, the residential wing of the sprawling Washington Sheraton Hotel, loomed to his left. This was a wonderfully rolling landscape, well above the altitude of the working part of the city. The air was fresher and cooler than downtown, and people moved about the streets with energy. Occasionally, Smith doubted he would leave when retirement time came. Perhaps, he thought, he and Margaret could stay in their 28th Street home, and he could enjoy the neighborhood with the shops and restaurants he would like to know more intimately.

Smith was about to dart across Woodley and turn north onto 28th when he felt a hand on his arm. Even in this low-crime area, Smith tensed as he turned to look at the person on his right. The man was huge, tall and powerfully muscled, but he was smiling.

“Mr. Smith, sorry to startle you, but your friends at the NTSB sent me,” the man said.

That sounded plausible, since the man knew the reporter by name and mentioned the agency that was preoccupying Smith’s time. Still, this was a highly unusual contact.

“Who specifically sent you?” he asked.

“Mr. Parkhall,” the man said. “Don’t be alarmed. We can talk over here, privately.”

He gestured to a darkened, brushy area about twenty feet off the sidewalk.

Smith shook his head. “I don’t walk into bushes with people I don’t know. Not under any circumstances,” he said. “We can talk right here.”

“As you wish,” the man said. He glanced around, appearing to Smith to be checking for passersby who might overhear their conversation. And, in fact, Sylvester Bonaro was looking for potential witnesses, albeit not for the reason Smith surmised.

More quickly than Smith could possibly have ducked it, Bonaro’s right fist snapped up and caught the reporter square on the chin, a sure knockout blow. No one on the street saw it. Bonaro blocked it from view with his massive body.

Quickly, with his left arm, he caught the sagging reporter, who was teetering on the edge of consciousness, and guided him into the darkness of the high bushes Smith had not wanted to approach. When they disappeared from street view, Bonaro let Smith’s body slip to the ground. They were joined by another.

“Give me the kit,” Bonaro whispered to his partner.

Wade Stock pulled a small black box from his jacket pocket and handed it over. By this time, Bonaro had Smith’s right arm out of the sport coat and was unbuttoning the right shirt cuff. He took the box from Stock and set it on the ground beside Smith’s lolling head. Then he shoved Smith’s shirtsleeve above the elbow.

“Give me some light here,” Bonaro hissed.

Stock held a small, battery-powered flashlight close to Smith’s arm and turned on the soft light. Bonaro took a rubber strap from the black box and lashed it tightly around the reporter’s arm, about four inches above the elbow.

He went back into the box and came out with a syringe and a small vial. In the dim light, he inserted the needle into the vial and withdrew fifty units of insulin. He put the vial back in the black box, gripped Smith’s arm tightly at the elbow, and injected the insulin into a protruding vein.

He let the arm drop into the grass and untied the rubber strap. He put the syringe and the strap back into the box, which he snapped shut and returned to Stock. Then he pulled down Smith’s sleeve and rebuttoned the cuff.

“Help me with the jacket,” he told Stock.

The two wrestled Smith back into his sport coat, laid him back in the grass and waited. Within minutes, Smith went into a seizure, violent and brief. When his body relaxed, he was dead.

“Leave him right here,” Bonaro said. “Make sure we aren’t leaving anything behind and check the grass.”

By the light of the small flash, the two ruffled the grass where their shoes and knees had made impressions and backed away from the bushes. Stock hurried off down Woodley Avenue, disappearing among the happy strollers along Connecticut Avenue. Bonaro crossed Woodley and headed up 28th Street to the spot where he’d parked the blue Ford van with the damaged right side.

The irony was cruel. In a neighborhood where a shortage of street parking limited Justin and Margaret Smith to one car, Bonaro found a spot directly in front of their home.

Margaret Smith reported to District of Columbia police shortly after midnight that her husband was missing. She became frantic after calling the Times bureau about 10:30 and talking to a late-working reporter who said her husband left about 7:30, give or take fifteen minutes.

It was too early for the police to express great concern. Many men were late getting home for many reasons. They would not count Justin Smith among the missing at least until the next morning. A detective took Margaret Smith’s statement over the telephone, assured her that her husband probably would show up shortly, and ended the conversation.

Justin Smith was found at 5:17 the next morning when a jogger running through the Washington Sheraton grounds spotted his body in the bushes along Woodley Avenue. The runner thought he’d found a drunk sleeping it off and didn’t stop to take a closer look. When he jogged by the hotel doorman, he shouted that a man was passed out up in the bushes and probably needed help.