Cape Disappointment (27 page)

“You're not telling me they got a doctor to—”

“In this world you can get anybody to do anything. And how about Sheffield going down in that plane? Don't you think critics of the administration might not pull back just a little bit now, even if they're not sure Sheffield was assassinated? Even if they only think it somewhere in the deepest recesses of their brains? Think the naysayers in D.C. aren't already muted? Or maybe it's only slowed their reaction time. That might be enough. A lot of politics involves slowing down the opposition's reaction time.”

“If even half of what you're saying is true, the media would be all over this.”

“You obviously haven't been taking notes. These days a handful of corporations own the media. It's the same machine that's doing all this. Look at the controlled demolitions on 9/11. What does the mainstream media have to say about them? They say you're crazy if you think they were demolitions. Look at the polls in Europe and Canada. Those people all agree they were demolitions. Are all those people nuts, or maybe our machine doesn't have the same control over their media that it does over our own? All you have to do is watch the videos to see it, a massive case of the emperor having no clothes. Of course those buildings were brought down by insiders. And what about building number seven? Towers one and two supposedly went down because they were thumped by airplanes— which is, in itself, ridiculous— but number seven wasn't hit by anything. It went flat anyway. Do you know it wasn't even mentioned in the official commission report? A forty-seven-story building falls to the ground in its own footprint for no visible reason, and not a word in the official report? FEMA's report said it went down because of internal fires. In the history of the earth, no tall steel building has ever collapsed from fire, or a combination of fire and other damage. It's never happened before, so there are no experts who can explain how it happened three times in one day. But apparently you're a fruit loop if you're suspicious.”

“You're way off topic. Talk to me about Sheffield.”

“God, you're a hard man. This
is
about Sheffield. Ten years ago I was thinking about getting out of the business. I had a friend named Connelly. Connelly wanted out, too. Only he thought he might talk to a reporter beforehand, spout off about a few of the stunts we'd pulled.

Mind you, we had all signed confidentiality agreements, so what he was planning was a breach of etiquette.

“He's in a small village in Mexico where he's supposed to meet a reporter from
The Washington Post.
On his way to the meeting, he gets into a minor fender bender with a Mexican military vehicle. Almost no damage to his car, but the military vehicle has him blocked in. He says he's all right, but he's hustled off to a nearby clinic to be treated for what bystanders said were minor injuries. He fails to show up for the meeting with the reporter. He fails to show up back at his hotel room. He fails to call home. A week later when she still hasn't heard from him, his wife sends his best friend down to Cuernevaca to find out what happened. The best friend is me. I find him in a small clinic. He's strapped into a wheelchair with bandages wrapped around his head. He doesn't recognize me. He's got an IQ of sixty. All he does is eat, sleep, play with his own poop, and make halfhearted attempts to grab the nurses. We got him back to the States, where a doctor told his wife he'd had a large piece of his brain removed and replaced with a Neuti-cle.”

“A Neuticle?”

“It's a fake testicle they put into a dog's nut sack after they neuter him.”

“Jesus.”

“That's what I said. He died four years later. I think somebody on the staff of the nursing home where they'd parked him suffocated him, maybe at his own request. His wife didn't want me to pursue it, so I let it go. By the way, I was at the funeral. Kathy had a lot of friends.”

“I didn't see you.”

“You didn't see anybody. You looked like you got hit with a wrecking ball. She meant a lot to me. I hope you know that.”

“I know it.”

“I couldn't …” He was beginning to choke up, and I was afraid if he choked up I would, too, and pretty soon we'd all be weeping like a bunch of kids standing over a dead dog. I didn't like the way Bert was controlling the conversation, and I didn't like the fact that some of what he was saying made more sense to me than it should have.

One of my knees was wet where it had touched the ground, but virtually all of Bert's clothing was damp and soiled from rolling on the wet
earth. I'd hit him with everything I had, but he'd bounced back each time like a blow-up clown. In that respect he was a lot like his brother, the ex-bull rider: able to take punishment without a quibble, fearless, and nearly bulletproof. Having a Neanderthal of a father who beat you weekly could do that. “Bert? Tell me what's really going on here.”

“Okay. The plane goes down at what … three? Four p.m.?”

“Three thirty-seven.”

“Okay. Right.” He seemed taken aback by my command of the details. “Then a car full of FBI agents arrives in Ilwaco at four-thirty and begins their investigation, having driven from Seattle.”

“It takes three hours to drive from Seattle.”

“Right. Were they going someplace else and got detoured to the plane crash site? Or did they have advance notice that a plane with a senator on board was going down? Why don't you see if they can answer that? There's also a guy named Timmy Hoagland.”

“We met him this morning.”

“Nice guy, right?”

“He seemed squared away.”

“He worked for the Agency. I knew him about fifteen years ago, and back then even people inside the Agency were afraid of him. Dollars to doughnuts he's cut human throats more times than you've missed your Sunday paper. He was a wheeler-dealer with connections that went higher than most of us in the Agency aspired to. He's also the one who was in charge of the Wellstone crash investigation. The Carnahan investigation. TWA flight eight hundred. He's the go-to guy for cover-ups.”

“You can't know those were all cover-ups.”

“No, you're right. But on the basis of a whole hell of a lot of insider information, I can sure suspect it. You want to know about the crash? I can tell you this. There was an inside man. He may not have known what was going to happen and he may still have no inkling he was part of it, but he knows he's a traitor to the cause. He knows that. Sometimes it's cash, women, a better position. You play into people's dreams. Or you blackmail them. In our unit, we found greed worked better than guilt.”

“Are you saying we're looking for somebody in the Sheffield campaign who was feeding information to the enemy?”

“Find them and you find a buried cord that's going to lead you directly into the heart of darkness. Just keep pulling on the cord.”

“So you'd—”

“Me?
If this was me, I wouldn't stop running until I was in Greenland, or Tahiti, someplace where they wouldn't find me and cut my throat. If we're even halfway close to the truth, just standing here talking about it makes our lives worth about a nickel. Come inside. I want to show you something.”

Bert set me up in front of his computer, hooked it up to the Internet, and found a website he apparently knew well. There were multiple videos on the website, each showing a different building collapse. The first two were controlled demolitions, one in Las Vegas and one in Seattle. Then he played the videos of the three buildings that went down in New York City in 2001. I'd seen them before, but we played them again.

“Bet you never heard how all the tenants were locked out of the towers the weekend before it happened?” said Bert. “It wasn't something they slapped on the front page
of The New York Times,
but it's true. People who tried to go in to work were told the buildings had electrical problems and the towers would be closed all weekend. Seems like a weekend might be long enough to set up a bunch of demolition charges, doesn't it?”

“You realize, I'm going to check this out?”

“I'd be disappointed if you didn't.”

IT WAS AN HOUR
before Snake was able to drag me away from the computer, Bert sitting at my shoulder kibitzing, Snake complaining all the while that he was hungry. As we left, Bert apologized for taking potshots at me earlier, and once again told me how terrible he felt about Kathy's demise. That was what he called it: Kathy's demise. There was something uncertain and choked in his voice when he spoke about Kathy, something elusive about the way he locked onto my look as if he were trying to sell me a used car. I didn't know whether he was exhibiting complicity in her death or merely the kind of longing that diehard fans felt over something like Elvis's death. I didn't know him well enough to read his signals, and Snake wasn't any help, having spent the past half hour thumbing through a stack of Bert's magazines.

I hadn't gotten the answers I wanted from Bert, but he'd managed to intrigue me with his theory that whatever happened to Sheffield's plane, if it
had
been a covert op, was related to all this other mumbo-jumbo he was having me look up on the Web. As we walked back across the dewy landscape to the car, it occurred to me that I had come here with only a vague idea of how I needed to proceed but was leaving with two plans of attack. On the one hand, if Bert was right, I could enlist Kalpesh's help in looking for a possible stool pigeon in the Sheffield campaign and trace the line of complicity to the killers if they existed. As unlikely as it seemed, at least it was a plan, albeit one given
to me by a petty criminal with a record of thievery, urinating in public, gun hoarding, and paranoia. On the other hand, maybe Bert wasn't the nutcase he seemed and was purposely leading me around in circles to throw me off track. After all, he was the one with the uncanny prescience and the nefarious connections. As things now stood, determining Bert Slezak's real role in all of this seemed like the most promising plan of attack.

“We get into an accident with all that smut in the car,” I said to Elmer as he deposited two bags of magazines at his feet, “I'm going to be pissed.”

“Then you better drive careful, pilgrim.”

“Why don't you leave the eighth-grade research materials here?”

“You're doing
your
research. I'm doing mine.”

“I just don't want anybody to—”

“ ‘Recently Widowed PI's Car Full of Porn,'” Snake said. “That's not a bad headline. If we get into an accident, I'll be sure to tell everybody it was yours.”

“Thanks. But I don't belong to CMA.”

“What's that?”

“Chronic Masturbators Anonymous.”

“Is that a real group?”

Once we were rolling down the highway, Snake said, “If your suspicions are right and you get close to the people who did it, you're going to end up holding a wolf by the ears.”

“You don't have to stick around.”

“Sure I do. They're fumigating my place.”

We stopped at a greasy spoon, part of an international chain, where Snake flirted with the apparently pregnant teenage attendant after ordering what appeared to be one of nearly everything on the menu. “I hope you don't think I'm paying for all that,” I said.

“You
should
pay. There's nothing to eat at your house. I've been starving since I got there.”

“I don't remember inviting you.”

“I don't remember being turned away.”

“I fed you breakfast.”

“Eggs from anorexic chickens.”

“Tomorrow morning I'll tie a bag of oats around your neck.”

I sulked in a corner nursing a milk shake and a bag of salty fries. Even that meager repast made my stomach hurt. As Snake started to spoon up his second dessert, I gazed out the window. It took almost ten minutes before I realized I was inspecting passing cars for Kathy. It was beginning to seem as if I was going to spend the rest of my life looking for her. It would have been so much simpler for me if they'd pulled her body out of the Pacific.

I snapped out of my reveries and used my cellphone to contact Deborah Driscoll. “Thomas? It's good to hear your voice. Are you ready to come back to work?” She was as chipper and high-energy as ever, in stark contrast, I noted, to the dismal moron I'd become.

“Not just yet. I would like to come in and touch base, though. You folks going to be around this afternoon?”

“I don't think so. James and I and a few others are on our way to Tacoma. Everybody else is off doing something. Why don't you come in tomorrow? We do miss you, Thomas.”

“Tomorrow it is.”

“I'm in by seven.”

“Right.”

Next, I called Kalpesh Gupta. I hated talking to him, but he was the one Sheffield worker still alive whose number I had.

“Thomas, my man. It was good to see you last night. You should drop in more often. We could have dinner.”

“Sounds great.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“I have plans.”

“How about the night after?”

“Listen, Kalpesh. I was wondering if I could come over and maybe clear out Kathy's desk?”

“Her desk has been cleaned out. We gave everything to her secretary.”

I hadn't been taking calls from Beulah, but it didn't much matter, because the bid to empty Kathy's desk had been a bluff. I could no more have sorted through her personal effects than I could have performed an autopsy on my mother. “Could I come over anyway?”