House Justice (20 page)

“I will, but—”

“Good-bye, Sandy,” DeMarco said and hung up.

Dead? Acosta was dead? What the hell was going on?

Maybe the guy who had paid Acosta to impersonate a CIA agent had killed him so he wouldn’t talk. Or maybe his murder had nothing to do with the story.

Whitmore took another sip of her scotch.
God
, that tasted good.

She realized then that it didn’t really matter who had killed Acosta or who he had been working for. Once his name came out, there were going to be a million reporters pursuing the story. There was no way she could have this thing to herself anymore. No, her job was no longer the story—her job was making a buck off this whole thing. In fact, the more she thought about it, Acosta getting killed was
great
news. It showed that the conspiracy in which she’d been ensnared was not just complex—it was deadly.

Oh, what a story. A dead spy. A dead source. The CIA. Marty Taylor.

Book deal. No doubt about it.

Halfway through her third drink, she thought that she should hold a press conference right away. By now the media had to know she’d given up her source and had been released from jail, so she needed to talk to her brother reporters soon to make sure they got the story straight. In particular, she needed to make sure the headlines in tomorrow’s papers didn’t imply that she’d caved in.

To get the most exposure, she should call up the TV guys. But she didn’t want to appear on camera the way she looked right now— and particularly after she had had a couple of drinks. No, that wouldn’t be smart. Plus, if she held a televised press conference, she’d have to write up a statement to read and then deal with a bunch of reporters screaming questions at her, and she didn’t feel like doing
that right now. Tomorrow she’d go on some show—
Good Morning America
or the
Today
show, one of them. They’d be dying to have her on and they wouldn’t throw a bunch of hardball questions at her. But she couldn’t wait until tomorrow to tell her side of the story.

Then she thought,
Why not hold a small press conference right in the bar with just a few newspaper guys
? She really should go home and wash her hair before she met with them, but decided to hell with that. She didn’t want to stop drinking and she didn’t want to move, and regarding her appearance … well, she’d just point out to them that this is what you ended up looking like when the government tosses you in jail and tortures you. And she’d definitely been tortured, the way they’d held back her pain medication.

She got a phone book from the palooka behind the bar and called reporters she knew at the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
, and the New York stringers for the
Washington Post
and the
LA Times
. She told them where she was and to be here in half an hour if they wanted the story. She said if anyone brought a camera she’d call the whole thing off. After she had called all the other papers, she called the
Daily News
. No way was she giving the
News
an exclusive. The
News
was not her ally. For that matter, the
News
might not even be her employer at this point.

She was on her fourth drink when all the reporters assembled around her table and she was feeling about as mellow as she ever felt.

“Yeah,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “I’m out of jail. I gave up my source.”

The reporters smirked, which was just what she’d expected. Then she told them what had happened: how a man posing as a CIA agent had been her source and that the guy was now dead.

“Whoa!” they all said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Somebody, maybe somebody inside the government, engineered this whole thing. They fed me the story—which, by the way, was accurate—but as soon as I figured out who my source really was…”

“But how’d you figure out that Acosta was the guy?” the
New York Times
reporter asked.

Now it was her turn to smirk. “Just because I was in jail didn’t mean I stopped working the story. Anyway, whoever was behind this— maybe somebody in Congress, maybe somebody at the CIA—popped Acosta because they knew I was on to him. So, since my source lied to me about his identity, I gave him up to the judge.”

“But why would—” the
Journal
reporter started to ask.

“That’s all, boys. I’m still on this story so that’s all you’re getting. But I just wanted to make sure you heard it directly from me, that I may have been tricked by Acosta but he would have tricked any one of you, too.”

“I don’t know about
that
,” the reporter from the
Washington Post
said, a smug smart-ass who parted his long hair in the middle like a girl.

All the reporters left soon after that except her colleague from the
Daily News
. He stuck around to say, “You’re in the shits, big time, Sandy. I hope you know that. No matter how you try to spin this, Acosta snookered you. But as bad as that is, there’s no way you should have talked to the other papers before you talked to us.” The reporter shook his head, pretending he felt badly for her. “I just hope you have another job lined up.”

Whitmore smiled. “I’m not sure I need to have another job lined up, Bobby. I’m thinkin’ book deal here. And before you got here, I called a producer at
Good Morning America
, and they’re gonna have me on tomorrow.”

She sat back in the booth and started in on the scotch the guy from the
LA Times
had bought for her, the only one decent enough to spring for a drink. She felt so good right now that she didn’t feel like ever leaving the bar. Yeah, she was going to stay right where she was in this nice, soft booth until they had to pour her into a cab. And while she was sitting, she’d think about how she was going to handle all the interviews coming up—and how she was going to spend the
money she was going to make. She almost forgot that the
Daily News
reporter was still there.

“Bobby,” she said, “I don’t know how things are gonna end up, but you got a dead spy, a dead guy who was pretending to be a spy, and a valiant reporter—namely,
moi
—who was maybe set up by the fucking CIA. Oh, yeah, Bobby, I’m thinkin’
major
book deal. Movie rights, too.”

“Who’s gonna play you in the movie, Sandy. Miss Piggy?”

“Oh, screw you, Bobby. Now quit being a prick and buy me a drink.”

The florist awoke feeling refreshed but more frustrated than ever. All he had learned in Myrtle Beach was that DeMarco had been planning to visit a man named Acosta but Acosta was killed before DeMarco could talk to him. And he didn’t understand why Benny Mark had been hired by a pawnshop owner in LA named Jimmy Franco to kill Acosta. He needed to relocate DeMarco to find out what was going on, and the best chance for doing so was in D.C.

Before going to the airport, he stopped at a drugstore and bought materials for mailing a package, then drove to a post office and mailed the gun he had taken from Benny Mark to general delivery in Los Angeles. If he had to go to LA to talk to Franco he was sure he would need a weapon and he didn’t want to go through the hassle of trying to buy one in California. He also disposed of the Mossberg shotgun. He tossed it into a Dumpster, but before he did he disassembled it and smashed the barrel on the ground a few times to render it useless. He didn’t want some kid finding the weapon and shooting himself.

At the airport, he purchased a ticket for Washington and had just passed through security when he looked up at one of the television monitors in the terminal. A female newscaster was saying Sandra Whitmore had been released from prison and that she had given up her source—a man named Dale Acosta who had impersonated a CIA agent named Derek Crosby. Acosta, the newscaster added with a wideeyed
look, had been found dead in his home yesterday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The woman then began to rehash the entire Whitmore saga but the florist was no longer listening. He just stood there, thinking, as the other passengers in the terminal swirled by him. He at last understood the connection between Acosta and Crosby—Acosta had impersonated the little man that he had tortured. He headed back to the ticket counter to exchange his D.C. ticket for one to New York.

Sandra Whitmore’s time had come.

Mahoney had arranged to meet LaFountaine at an IHOP in Clarendon. They picked the restaurant because it wasn’t a place where they were likely to encounter other politicians or spies—and because Mahoney felt like having a waffle for breakfast. Waffles were a treat.

LaFountaine was already there when Mahoney arrived. Mahoney ordered coffee; he wanted to add a shot of bourbon from his flask but decided he’d wait until LaFountaine left before doing that. As soon as the waitress walked away from their table, LaFountaine said, “So, what was this guy, DeMarco, doing talking to Whitmore?”

“No, no,” Mahoney said. “Let’s start with you telling me why you ever told us about Diller visiting Iran in the first place. If it was so important to keep that information secret, why did you say anything at all?”

“I told you because I have a legal obligation to keep Congress informed.”

“Jake, it’s too early for bullshit. Give me a straight answer or I’m walking.”

LaFountaine stared at Mahoney for a moment, then finally said, “I told you because of Jean Negroni.”

Jean Negroni was the secretary of Homeland Security, but Mahoney didn’t understand what she had to do with Diller’s trip to Iran. LaFountaine explained.

“It shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that Homeland pays attention to folks who fly out of places like Iran and end up in America.
And when an American citizen visits Iran, that also makes Home-land wonder why. At any rate, Negroni’s guys knew Diller had flown to both Damascus and Tehran and I found out that she was thinking about picking him up and questioning him, and I didn’t want her doing that.”

“Why not?” Mahoney asked.

To delay answering, LaFountaine sipped his coffee, then dabbed his lips with a napkin. He lowered his voice and said, “Do you know what Marty Taylor’s company makes?”

“Yeah, something to do with missiles.”

“Right. He manufactures control systems for missiles and a bunch of other military hardware. And, well, we had an idea.”

“We who?”

“My guys. The CIA. We wondered if there was a way we could modify Taylor’s equipment without the Iranians knowing about it and then if they ever tried to shoot one of their missiles in the wrong direction, maybe we could control the missile.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Mahoney said.

“No. It was a good idea. We weren’t sure it could be done—the Iranians aren’t fools—but I wanted to explore the idea. And if we could have found a way to make it work, we would have used Diller to sell the modified hardware to the Iranians. So that’s why I didn’t want Diller arrested right away and why I didn’t want Negroni’s people tipping him off that we knew he’d been in Tehran. But then Diller’s trip was front-page news before we could even start to study the concept.”

Hmm, Mahoney thought. That would have been pretty slick if LaFountaine had been able to do what he’d just said. He could just see the Iranians firing some rocket and a technician sitting in a spy ship parked in the Persian Gulf turning a joystick and making the rocket land right in the grand ayatollah’s hot tub. But LaFountaine still hadn’t told him what he wanted to know.

“You didn’t answer my question, Jake. Why did you tell the committee about Diller?”

“Negroni insisted. She told me she wouldn’t pick Diller up and interfere with my plan but only if I told the president and the intelligence committee the reason why. She wanted to make sure the president understood that if it had been up to her, she would have arrested Diller immediately but she held off because I asked her to. She also didn’t like being the only person outside the CIA knowing what we were planning about the Iranian missiles because if something went wrong somebody might blame her in some way. In other words, she wanted her ass covered.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t really tell us what you had in mind. You didn’t say anything about giving the Iranians some tricked-out control system.”

LaFountaine shrugged. “I told the president everything and I told you guys as much as you needed to know. And I didn’t lie to you when I said that arresting Diller would affect an ongoing operation. But I didn’t see the point of letting people like Glenda Petty piss all over my idea until we had completed the research.”

There you go, Mahoney thought, that was the Jake LaFountaine he’d always known and loved. Then he had another thought, “Well, hell,” he said. “For all you know, Negroni was the original source of the leak. Maybe one of her people paid Acosta to talk to that reporter.”

“It wasn’t Negroni. She wouldn’t do that and you know it. It was one of your guys, John, and that brings us back to the question of why DeMarco was visiting Sandra Whitmore.”

Mahoney lied, of course. “I sent him to see her because of you. At your press conference you basically accused Congress of divulging national security information, so I wanted to see if there was any truth to that. Then one thing just led to another.”

LaFountaine’s dark eyes flashed and it looked like he was going to lose his temper, but he didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them he said, very softly, “Let me tell you about Mahata. I went to Georgetown University one day and gave a speech to an auditorium full of kids. We were having a hard time recruiting the right kind of people, and I figured I needed to get out
there and tell folks that we were the good guys and not the evil fuckups the press always makes us sound like. Anyway, I gave the standard spiel about the CIA’s role in the war on terror and, as usual, there were a couple of hecklers in the audience. The speech ended with the campus cops dragging one kid out by his hair and me getting pissed and telling those brats they were nothing but a bunch of dilettantes.”