Deadly Waters (32 page)

LXXXVII

12/19/10 17:08 PST

“What are you upset about this time?” Mondragon asked. “These so-called ‘journalists’ got you worked up? This will blow over in a couple weeks, at the most. They and their readers can’t stay engaged in one matter for more a few days.”

Taylor sprawled across a plush lounge chair while Mondragon dominated the private office by speaking and gesticulating as he rambled about the room. Erin’s habitual pacing had long been unnerving to his old acquaintance. Under the present circumstances Mondragon’s perambulating lectures were utterly disconcerting to the drunken businessman.

“They’re talkative,” said Taylor, rubbernecking to follow Mondragon’s movements. “They follow me everywhere,” he said. He fell momentarily silent when a glass statue of a panther Erin had passed commanded his full attention. “I had someone from
The
Chronicle
call me yesterday. They’re not a tabloid, are they? That means the stories are spreading.”

“The only story they have is this: some people are dead, and you and I might have once known some of them,” said Mondragon, walking the length of the long conference table and touching the top of each chair in turn. “That is everything they have found. Nothing more.”

“There was a fellow...” began Taylor. He stopped because although he did not remember Bob Mathers’ name or yet recall the meeting in the doughnut shop, he knew he once perhaps had said more to Bob than he should have.

“A fellow what?” asked Mondragon, not looking at Taylor as he adjusted the window blinds.

“He was watching me drink...” said Taylor, and again left his sentence hanging.

“You mean that friend of the Indian?” suggested Mondragon. “From Arizona. He’s a stocky fellow. Blond crew cut. Wore a lumberjack’s plaid shirt the last time I saw him.”

“Why, yes,” said Taylor, a light coming on in his head. “You say he was a friend of the Indian?”

“Don’t you remember? I knew he’d come looking for you, too,” said Erin. “The day we met him he was in some sort of law enforcement uniform.”

“In that little town by the dam,” recalled John, in whose mind the images of that nearly forgotten meeting came rushing back. “He spoke to the boy.”

“Yes, we stopped for coffee,” said Mondragon, taking a fountain pen from his pocket and clicking its cap open and shut several times. “The town was Page; it was right by Glen Canyon Dam.”

“He wasn’t a policeman,” said Taylor, sitting upright on the lounge and looking into space as though he had the people in the doughnut shop before his eyes. “He was an officer of some sorts... maybe a sheriff. Or a deputy. They have sheriffs in those little towns.”

“Yes!” erupted Mondragon as the entire picture became clear to him. “He was a deputy sheriff! That’s why I haven’t made any connections to cops in Page. That’s very good, John.” Mondragon sat himself down for three pensive seconds. “It is absurd,” and rose to pace the floor anew, “that out of the thousands of law enforcement officers and federal agents on our trail this, this nobody in Page, Arizona, has been the only one to figure out our scheme. Or part of it. He cannot know everything. The only question remaining: is he very clever or merely clever?”

“Why do you put it that way?” asked John Taylor.

“We don’t know how the authorities may have reacted when he brought them the story,” said Mondragon, working his way down the far side of the conference table, this time double touching the top of every chair. “They may have thought he was a nut. My guess, given his present efforts, is that they did. Now he’s playing another angle. He wants money. I’m sure of it.”

“Only money?”

“That’s the question; what else could there be?” asked Mondragon, perturbed that John Taylor had almost had an original thought. This was a dangerous new trait he thought unsuitable in his old friend.

“Maybe he wants revenge,” said Taylor.

“No,” said Mondragon, and banished the notion from the conversation with a wave of his hand. “Perhaps that was his original intent, back when he somehow stumbled onto... onto this thing of ours. Now he’s run into a brick wall. No one will listen to his story. Yes, the gutter press has. Their attention to his wild tale will only serve to discredit him. Very soon he will be sending us demands for money.”

“He didn’t say anything about money,” said Taylor.

“He talked to you?” asked Mondragon, stopping his progression to hurl the question directly at John.

“Not quite,” said Taylor. “He was pretending to be one of those reporters--whatever they are; they’re not really.” He wanted to stand up when he said the next part. There was a chance, he thought, that Erin would think the note from Mathers was a joke. “He told me, anyway, he wrote this letter and gave it to me,” said Taylor and made himself smile, “saying that you were going to kill me.”

“Did he?” said Mondragon, and also smiled. After a short silence he added: “There’s no reason I would, is there?”

“I sure hope not,” said Taylor, in the moment he met Erin’s gaze becoming as sober as he would have been had he fallen into a frigid lake. His head felt as clear as a cloudless sky. Still, he needed to sit down in Erin’s lounge chair again.

LXXXVIII

12/19/10 19:20 EST

At nearly the same time Mondragon was speaking to Taylor, another meeting was taking place in the basement of the Pentagon between the Secretary of Defense and Ronald Goodman, Margaret Smythe’s former flame and, after his falling out with her, the holder of the menial post of Sub-Assistant Director of Political Relations at the DoD. The two men had happened to meet in a hallway in the spot the younger man chanced to have been waiting for a half an hour for the secretary to walk past.

“I see you’re working late, sir. Have you seen the latest?” asked Goodman when he jumped from the shadows holding forth a certain file for the secretary to examine.

“Do I know you, young man?” asked the Secretary of Defense, for he vaguely recognized Ronald as someone who worked for him but someone he never before had any reason to speak to, and he wondered if this were one of those odd-balls he should order his Secret Service escorts to push aside.

“I’m Ronald Goodman,” the younger man had explained. “Bill Tate’s nephew.”

“Ah,” said the secretary, and stopped walking when he heard the once powerful man’s name. “Your uncle is a fine man, a great member of Congress. How is Bill these days? Still a scratch golfer?”

“My uncle has been dead for fourteen years,” said Ronald, not offended, for his late uncle had lost his last bid for re-election in 1978 and the first lesson young Ron had learned in Washington is that there is nothing more insignificant than a politician out of office.

“Sorry to hear that, son,” said the secretary, and was ready to move on as soon as he had offered that deeply felt condolence.

“I’m your new Sub-Assistant Director of Political Affairs, sir,” said Ron. “Just over

from Margaret Smythe’s office. This came across my desk this morning, and I thought you might want to see it,” in reference to the file. “Seems a former operative of ours, one of the intelligence community, I should say, was killed ten days ago. A Colonel Michael Method.”

He had the secretary’s attention then. The important man, renowned for his patrician features and his silvery mane, had taken two steps in the direction of the elevator. The mention of that forbidden name caused his custom-made Italian shoes to freeze in place. His wanted to ask how Ronald knew about Method. The name beat so heavily upon the secretary’s ears he did not care to repeat it in a hallway where anyone walking by might overhear.

“Do you mind stepping in here a minute, son?” he said, taking Ronald by the arm and leading him into the nearest office. “Ladies,” said the secretary to the three startled computer technicians inside the room, “please leave us in here for, oh, ten minutes? Please, take a break. Tell your boss it was my idea. You work so hard and such late hours, you need a little break now and then. Thank you so much,” as the three women left the room he shut the door behind them.

The Secretary of Defense tapped the end of his chiseled jaw with two fingers before he began his interrogation of Ronald. “What is this about, Mr. Goodman?”

“It started as a fax from the FBI office in Milwaukee,” said Ron, talking fast to get everything said. “Colonel Method shot four men in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the Ninth of this month. He was wounded in the shootout; then the local police cornered him, and he shot himself. There is no known motive for the killings.”

“How did the FBI know who Method was?” asked the Secretary of Defense. “Surely his file is classified.”

“They don’t seem to know much, sir,” said Ron. “They know his name. They know he worked in some sort of intelligence. They know he no longer does. That appears to be it. That’s why they contacted us; they want to know more.”

“This came across your desk?”

“And to the Director of Political Affairs office, and to the Office of Naval Intelligence, and to the Secretary of the Army. Probably to others. I was lucky enough to catch it,” said Ronald,

“Damn,” commented the usually calm secretary. “That is way too many people.”

“I’m afraid there’s worse news, sir,” said Ronald, and took from the file the copy of a story from a Wisconsin newspaper. He had highlighted with a yellow marker the part he wanted the secretary to see.

The Secretary of Defense put on his reading glasses and read aloud, “The fifth man was identified by authorities as Michael Method, a former Army colonel.” He threw the bit of paper on the floor. “What is this!” he demanded. “The FBI has spoken to the media out there? Are they out of their minds?”

“There’s more, sir,” said Ronald.

“More?” asked the secretary, nearly gagging on his tongue. “More than this?”

“Method’s gun has been matched to five other murders in Alabama and Washington state,” said Ronald. “As well as to a sixth murder nearly two years ago in southern Utah. One of the people he killed in Alabama was Kenneth Greeley, a retired Army pilot who worked for a CIA operation in Central America during the Eighties.”

“Did he go nuts?” said the secretary, regaining his calm demeanor. “Method snapped and started shooting people?”

“That is a possibility, sir,” said Ronald. “There is another rumor making the rounds. Have you ever heard of a tabloid called
The
Sensation
?”

“No, I can’t say I have,” lied the secretary, whose wife brought home
The
Sensation
and a dozen other supermarket rags every week, but he was not going to confess that to someone of Goodman’s inferior rank.

“They’ve spun these murders into a wild story that has the dead people involved in some sort of conspiracy involving the southwestern dams,” explained Ronald.

The secretary allowed himself a frail smile. “As long as they’re on the wrong trail,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what they say.”

The Secretary of Defense was known in Washington as a deep thinker. He took the file from Ronald and, with his arms folded across his chest, had a brief session of deep thought in the small basement office. Like most wily political veterans who have survived so many catastrophes, they can look forward to retiring at a proper retirement age, he was not in a moment of crisis wasting deep thoughts on possible solutions, but was pondering on whom he could shift the blame.

“That girl,” he said, “she was in the Terrorist or Anti-Terrorist Task Force of Something Something, she was in charge of the dam investigation.”

“Margaret Smythe,” said Ronald, only too happy to drop her name into the conversation again.

“Yes,” said the secretary, doing some more deep thinking.

Another talent common to old Washington veterans is the ability to spot ambition in young people. The secretary discerned ambition in Ronald. In Margaret Smyth, an

operative he really did not need Ronald to name for him, he knew ambition burned like an overheating nuclear reactor. Were she connected to this Method mess, he thought, this matter might not be as bad as it first appeared.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Ron--may I call you ‘Ron?’” he said.

“Yes, sir!” said Ronald, already seeing himself in a new office with a new, more prestigious title on his desk top.

LXXXIX

12/20/10 02:20 PST

Paparazzi had been on John Taylor’s front yard since Friday morning, talking in loud voices and flashing bright lights into the living room windows. Taylor had hidden inside the entire day. Now in the dark hours of Tuesday morning he could not sleep. He lay on his living room sofa, the lights turned off while he yearned for the intruders to leave. A nearly empty bottle of gin sat on the coffee table, offering Taylor a measure of consolation each time he peeked out the front curtains and saw the lingering crowd. The reporters meanwhile sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups and told each other war stories while they fought to keep warm in the cold night air.

“I was in the castle when Madonna got married to her second husband,” boasted Frankie Paulo, a rising star among the younger tabloid writers. “I had to wear a kilt and make like I was Bonnie Prince Charlie, but I pulled it off. The security guys thought I was the Scottish lord of the next place down the road. Those up the checkered skirt pictures of her husband: they were mine. What was the name of the guy she married that time?”

The other reporters thought the question over and none of them could recall.

“Sonny boy,” said Donald Demming, one of the few stringers present to have any grey hair, “we’ve all got scoops as big as that. I’ve seen everything in my time. Hell, I was doing in depth profiles back when people still didn’t know Rock Hudson was gay. I was the first one to let the public know that Doris Day had nothing to worry about when she did those bedroom scenes with him.”

“Who’s Rock Hudson?” asked a young woman in the group.

“Kid Rock’s father,” a friend beside her explained.

“Why are we here?” Frankie Paulo asked to no one in particular. “This guy’s a nobody. I did a Lexus-Nexus search on him and found nothing.”

“You use computers?” asked Donald Demming. “That’s not real journalism. Real journalism is getting a phone call from one of your secret sources and then going out and pestering somebody till they tell you something.”

“John Taylor, this guy we are here to question,” said Bob Mathers, who was in the swarm of reporters, “is the latest of a long line of Taylors in the import-export business here in San Francisco. He’s an old college friend of Erin Mondragon and is said to be the so-called Russian agent who took part in the terrorist attacks on those dams back in 2009.”

“’Is said to be?’” said Frankie. “Who talks like that? Where are you from?”

“I’m working for
The
Sensation
out of New York,” said Bob, which was almost true. “I’m employed as a private investigator, not as a reporter.”

“’Employed as?’” said Donald Demming, twisting his lips around the phrase. “If you’re gonna hang around with journalists, sonny, you gotta learn how to talk right. You English or something?”

“I live in Arizona,” said Bob.

“You went to college?” asked Frankie.

“Yes, for two years” admitted Bob.

“That explains a lot,” said Donald, and the entire group shook their heads, “Yes.”

Bob glanced down the suburban street in both directions. In that decidedly laid back group of twenty or so he was the one individual on full alert. He knew Mondragon would not sit still for long now that he knew Bob was involved in the case. By Bob’s calculations, he expected that within two days of the confrontation on Market Street, Erin would have learned his nemesis’ identity, and therefore Mathers had telephoned his wife back in Phoenix and told her to take their daughter and go to her parents’ place in Utah and stay there until he called her again.

Becky was furious with him, though she did as he said, and when Mondragon’s men got to the Phoenix apartment on the Twentieth they had found the place empty. Now he fully expected for Mondragon to make an attempt on his life, and Bob doubted he could linger among the tabloid men for much longer, as they were too obvious a group for Mondragon’s people to watch, since he had already been seen with them. As he looked down the street, he half expected to see a couple of the beefy men from Mondragon’s security detail headed in his direction.

“The thing is,” Bob told the reporters, “somebody has to show the Colombians a photograph of Taylor here and of his friend Mondragon. Then show them some pictures of the dead men in Alabama, Washington, and Wisconsin. The Colombians will ID them, and a link between the convicted terrorists and Mondragon’s group will be established.”

“I think I would have to cut some corners to do that,” said Donald Demming, which made the others laugh.

“If you cut any more corners, you’d be grinding the circle down to nothing,” said a

young woman at the back of the crowd.

The group laughed again, and Donald laughed the loudest. “Don’t tell me this is a real story now,” the tabloid veteran said sarcastically, and his younger colleges grunted in agreement.

“Aren’t you real reporters?” asked Bob, knowing full well that was not a question to pose to this group.

“You’d turn this into another O.J. story,” said Frankie. “Once that one got real, after we had done all the grunt work, the boys and girls from the networks, the ones with the hair spray and the satellite feeds, pushed us out of the way and ran with the story every day from six in the morning to eleven at night.”

“We did a bang-up job on O.J,” said Donald, reliving the pain of that old injury. “I was the one to find the store that sold him the knife. The first interview with the clerk was supposed to be mine; everything was set, then NBC steals my exclusive.”

“I knew about Faye Resnick before the Dream Team did,” said a female reporter standing behind Frankie.

“Treat this like it’s real, and Stone Phillips and Barbara Walters will be on this conspiracy business before you can say ‘bloody glove,’” said Frankie, and the others seconded him like an amen corner.

Bob did not stay to catch the rest of their reminiscences. He thought he saw something move in the shadows farther down the street. Long before the others noticed he was missing, Bob had slipped into the darkness.