House Justice (24 page)

“Now do you get it, DeMarco? So, yeah, you’re right, this is about revenge—but I don’t want to hear any more street gang bullshit from you. We send our people into places you can’t even imagine, to keep nuts with suitcase nukes from blowing up that building where you work. And our agents know if they’re caught, they’ll suffer the same fate as Mahata and there won’t be any due process involved. So every agent we have needs to know that if they’re killed, we’re going to get the people who killed them. We
owe
them that. And if you don’t understand that, it’s because you’ve never had your ass on the line, not the way our people put their asses on the line.”

She waited for DeMarco to say something but he didn’t have anything to say because she was right: he had never risked his life the way Mahata had and he probably never would.

“We gotta go,” she said. “We need to meet a guy.”

As they entered the McDonald’s at Sixth and Independence, Angela looked around but didn’t see whoever she was looking for and took a seat. DeMarco ordered a Big Mac, a large bag of fries, and Diet Cokes for him and Angela. When he had asked if she wanted anything to eat, her nose had crinkled up as if eating McDonald’s greasy fare would be like dining on something plucked from a Dumpster.

Five minutes later, Angela pointed toward the doorway with her chin and said, “There he is.”

“Him?” DeMarco said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

The man who had just walked through the door of Mickey D’s had to be over seventy. He was maybe five foot six—if you allowed for the curvature in his spine—and had wispy gray hair and a body that seemed to be wasting away from something like TB. He took little short, shuffling steps, and DeMarco figured it was going to take him an hour to cross the thirty feet from the door to the table where he and Angela were seated.

While DeMarco was taking a physical inventory of the man they had come to meet, Angela said, “That guy could follow you across a desert in broad daylight and you wouldn’t see him.”

“Maybe so,” DeMarco said, “but I’ll bet if I started running, he’d have a hard time keeping up.”

The man finally reached their table. Angela introduced him as Morrie, no last name. He was one of the two private detectives the CIA had hired to follow Ray Rudman, although DeMarco was pretty sure that Morrie didn’t know he was working for the CIA.

“So, Morrie,” Angela said, “what’d you get?”

“Nothing, sweetheart, but it’s only been two days. The guy just acts like your basic politician, spends most of the day in his office at the Rayburn Building or over at the Capitol. After work the first night, he attended some function, the second night he worked until six, went to a restaurant, ate like a pig, then went straight home to that condo of his on Capitol Hill. We went into the condo yesterday but—”

“You broke into Rudman’s house?” DeMarco said.

Morrie looked over at DeMarco, his expression making it clear that he didn’t appreciate being interrupted, then slowly swiveled his turtle head back to Angela. “But we didn’t find anything. No kiddy porn or anything like that under his bed. No weird sex toys. No evidence he’s stepping out on the missus with either girls or boys. The only vice this guy has is food. You shoulda seen the stuff in his refrigerator.”

DeMarco had about six fries remaining in his paper french fry bag, and when Morrie finished talking he reached across the table and, without asking DeMarco, pulled the bag toward himself. DeMarco gave him a what-the-hell-are-you-doing look but Morrie ignored him.

“Does he have a safe inside his condo, someplace secure for hiding things?” Angela asked.

“Where’s the ketchup?” Morrie said.

DeMarco wordlessly handed him a ketchup packet and Morrie ripped it open with his false teeth and squeezed the entire packet over DeMarco’s fries.

“Morrie, does he have a safe?”

“Nope,” Morrie said. “If he had one, I would have told you what’s in it.”

Maybe DeMarco had underestimated Morrie’s talents.

Morrie took the six french fries remaining in the bag into his hand, the ketchup staining his fingers red, and shoved them all into his mouth at once. He chewed maybe twice then swallowed and DeMarco watched his throat swell momentarily like a snake swallowing a frog.

“Well, stick with him for a couple more days,” Angela said. “Call me immediately if you get something.”

“Hey, if that’s what you want, sweetheart,” Morrie said, and then he rose to his feet and shuffled toward the door.

“He ate my french fries,” DeMarco said.

“Let’s get out of here,” Angela said.

They left the McDonald’s and walked down to the National Mall. Angela said she needed some air and some exercise so they took a stroll
like a pair tourists—tourists who were trying to figure out a way to coerce a confession out of a United States congressman.

“We’re getting nowhere,” Angela said, after a while. “We need to do something.”

DeMarco didn’t say anything. He couldn’t get the image of Mahata’s face out of his head. And her face was the only part of her that could be seen in the video; who knew what her interrogators had done to the rest of her body. And then there was the horror of being raped, probably several times by several men. He figured her captors had probably gotten everything they needed to know from her in the first few hours; after that they weren’t questioning her—they were torturing her. They were punishing her for having duped the Iranian government for so many years.

“Are you sure Mahata doesn’t have any relatives who are still alive?” DeMarco asked.

“We’re as sure as we can be,” Angela said. “Although she was a U.S. citizen when she joined the Company, she was born in Iran and so were the people who adopted her. So before she was given a security clearance, we investigated her background as thoroughly as we’ve ever investigated any employee, including multiple polygraph tests. The bottom line is we believe what she told us: that her biological parents and all the rest of her family were killed when she was four. There were no records we could get to in Iran to confirm this but we talked to a guy over there who knew her father and he told us the same thing.”

“Does anyone else know that her whole family’s dead? I mean other than the CIA?”

“I’m sure some people must know. Friends she had in school, friends of her adopted parents. But it’s not public knowledge. And when she was killed, we didn’t give the media any information about her family. That’s agency policy. Why are you asking all these questions?”

DeMarco didn’t answer for a minute, not at all sure if he wanted to do what he was about to propose. “We think Ray Rudman told Rulon Tully about Diller,” he said, “but we can’t prove it, and you
said you needed a confession. And it doesn’t look like your pal Morrie is going to be able to get anything you can use to squeeze a confession out of the man.”

“Yeah, but what do Mahata’s relatives have to do with that?”

“What if someone close to Mahata wanted to avenge her death and that person held a gun to Ray Rudman’s head and asked him if he had leaked the information to Tully.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what if someone held a gun to Rudman’s head?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious.”

She stopped walking and looked at him. “Are you saying you’d be willing to do that?”

“Yeah,” DeMarco said.

DeMarco’s close association with John Mahoney had made him particularly cynical when it came to the goodness of politicians. And it seemed like about once a month there was a story in the papers about some legislator getting caught taking bribes. The most recent case was a congressman nabbed by the FBI with ninety grand inside his fridge, the money being payment for political services rendered. He didn’t think all politicians traded their votes directly for cash but he did believe that the environment in which they worked was morally corrosive. In 2005, the
Washington Post
had reported that there were more than thirty-four thousand registered lobbyists in Washington, which meant that there were approximately sixty lobbyists for every member of the House and Senate. And corporations paid for this army of manipulators—and paid them extremely well—because experience had shown that they were very effective when it came to bending the hearts and minds of our elected officials. But what Rudman had done had gone far beyond the typical sins that politicians committed to remain in power. DeMarco had seen Mahata’s face—and he was now willing to do whatever it took to get the man out of office.

“But I need to be someone who has a plausible motive,” DeMarco said. “And the only people I can think of with such a motive would
be a relative or the CIA. And I’m guessing you wouldn’t want me posing as a CIA agent.”

“You got that right.”

Angela pondered DeMarco’s proposal for one long block as they continued down the mall in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial. As they were looking into the sculpture garden in front of the Hirsh-horn Museum, at a statue by Rodin called
Crouching Woman
, she said, “Okay. I’ll check with LaFountaine, but I don’t think he’ll object.”

“You don’t want to do that,” DeMarco said.

“Why not?”

“Because your boss—if he’s anything like my boss—will not want to be put in the position of knowing what we’re about to do.”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

“But you need to call Morrie and tell him and his partner to take the night off. I don’t want them following Rudman to a meeting with me. And you need to call Rudman to set up the meeting. If he thinks he’s meeting a woman, I think he’ll be more likely to come.”

“Okay.”

“There’s still a problem. I’ve never met Rudman, but because my office is in the Capitol he might recognize me.”

“That’s not a problem,” Angela said.

They drove to a small house in College Park, Maryland, that belonged to a lady named Marge, a middle-aged woman with unruly gray hair, a good-natured face, and wide hips. She sat DeMarco down in front of a big mirror, hauled out a steamer trunk filled with cosmetics, and went to work.

While she was spreading goop on his face, she told him that she had worked in LA as a makeup gal for a film company but had to come back to Maryland to take care of her mother. She had been in town only a couple of months when she was approached by a man—
a man who never said what organization he represented—and after that she had a job altering the appearance of federal agents who wanted to talk to various violent lunatics without being recognized. She said the work wasn’t as challenging as turning men into aliens from another planet but it helped pay the bills.

It took her just an hour to change DeMarco into the Incredible Iranian Hulk.

His skin was a shade darker than normal, his nose was a bit longer and a bit wider at the base, his jaw thrust out a few millimeters farther, and the cleft in his chin had disappeared. The changes weren’t significant but he was pretty sure his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. The other thing about the makeup job, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on why, was that he looked extraordinarily brutal and he was a pretty hard-looking guy to begin with.

“Wow,” he said.

“That’s great, Marge,” Angela said. “All he needs now are brown eyes.”

“I’ve never worn contacts,” DeMarco said.

“Yeah,” Angela continued, as if DeMarco wasn’t in the room, “give him brown eyes, and then I think we’re done here.”

“But do I look Iranian?” DeMarco asked.

“Iranians are technically Indo-Europeans, and their skin color varies from white to dark brown. They’re Persians, not Arabs. She only made your skin darker to make you less recognizable—and because most Americans think Iranians are Arabs.”

“I wonder if I should use an Iranian accent.”

“Mahata didn’t have an accent. Anyway, do you know how to do an Iranian accent?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess that answers your question.”

The woman who called had a very seductive voice.

She said that she represented Mr. Tully and they needed to meet that night. She wouldn’t say
why
they had to meet, however, just
that it was per Mr. Tully’s orders and it was related to recent events surrounding the late Sandra Whitmore. Rudman didn’t agree immediately; Tully was his most powerful supporter but he didn’t work for the man and, goddamnit, he resented Tully thinking that he’d just drop whatever he was doing. But then, being a politician and a pragmatic man, he decided he couldn’t risk angering Tully, so he swallowed his pride and agreed to meet her.

Rudman sat at his desk a few minutes more, stewing, then called the lobbyist he had planned to dine with that evening—which made him even more annoyed at Rulon Tully. The lobbyist had made reservations at the best French restaurant in the District, a place where wine and dinner for two would cost at least four hundred dollars— and the lobbyist would have picked up the tab.

All he could do at this point was hope that the woman looked as sexy as she had sounded on the phone.

She had told him to meet her at a tavern near Middleburg, which was an hour’s drive from D.C. She said the tavern would be closed but the door would be unlocked. He hadn’t wanted to drive that far but he didn’t complain. He wasn’t a well-known public figure but it was probably still prudent to meet someplace outside the District where there was less chance that somebody might recognize him.

The tavern was located at an unlit crossroad. There were no other businesses nearby, and the closest house he had passed was two miles away. He never would have found the place without the GPS navigator in his car. And now he understood why the woman had said the place would be closed even though it was only eight p.m.: it had plywood over the windows, graffiti on the concrete walls, and looked as if it had gone out of business months ago. He didn’t get out of his car immediately; he felt uncomfortable meeting in an abandoned building in such an isolated spot. His instincts told him to drive away, but
then he’d have to face Rulon Tully’s ire, which could be considerable— and possibly career-ending.