House Justice (30 page)

He next typed
Tully
“
Conrad Diller
” into the search engine but Mr. Google spit nothing back. Since he knew from the newspapers that Conrad Diller worked for Martin Taylor, he tried “
Martin Taylor
” “
Rulon Tully
”—and hit the jackpot. There was article after article about Martin Taylor having had an affair with Rulon Tully’s wife, after which Tully divorced his wife. Tully definitely had a motive for wanting to hurt Taylor. But was the Xavier Quinn who was Tully’s chief of security the man that had contracted Jimmy Franco to kill Dale Acosta? He couldn’t be sure, but logic told him he was. This supposition was reinforced as he spent more time looking at other stories about Mr. Rulon Tully. From the articles, he learned that Tully
was a ruthless individual who would do anything to get his way— the sort of man who wouldn’t care if exposing Conrad Diller would put a CIA spy in danger.

The florist needed to talk to Rulon Tully and the Xavier Quinn who worked for him.

After the meeting with LaFountaine, Angela had driven DeMarco back to the Sheraton in Crystal City. She was preoccupied during the drive, most likely thinking about how to accomplish the mission her boss had given her. DeMarco, on the other hand, spent no time at all thinking about how to execute LaFountaine’s orders. What he was thinking about instead was that everyone involved in this thing—LaFountaine, Angela, and even Mahoney—was willing to do anything to avenge the death of this spy. And maybe that was the right thing to do, but neither LaFountaine nor Mahoney was taking the risks and breaking the laws. He and Angela were the ones at the pointy end of the spear and DeMarco knew if he was caught doing something illegal, Mahoney wasn’t going to step forward and say DeMarco had been acting on his behalf. He wondered if Angela knew that her boss was the same kind of guy. He also knew screwing around with the Russian mob was a good way to get killed.

When they reached the hotel, Angela dropped him off at the entrance, said that she had phone calls to make and a meeting to go to, and told him to keep his cell phone on so she could reach him. She concluded with, “And pack your things. I have a feeling we’ll be leaving for California tomorrow.”

“To do what?” he asked.

She didn’t answer him. She just drove away. If she wasn’t so good looking, he would have found her extremely annoying.

But instead of packing as directed, he went to the Capitol and told Mahoney what LaFountaine had in mind regarding Rulon Tully and some Russian gangsters. Mahoney listened without any apparent reaction.

“This thing is getting out of hand,” DeMarco said. “We ought to leak the recording I made of Rudman confessing and let the cops and the media take it from there.”

Mahoney just sat there, staring off into the space above DeMarco’s head. DeMarco guessed that he was most likely trying to figure out whether anything LaFountaine was doing could come back and bite him. He finished the bourbon remaining in his glass, rose from his chair, and said, “I gotta go vote on something.”

At eleven o’clock the next morning, Angela called DeMarco and told him to meet her in the hotel bar and to bring his suitcase with him. She’d already checked them out of the hotel. They were catching a flight to San Diego in three hours but they had to talk to someone first.

DeMarco found her at a table in the bar, staring down at the traffic on the Jeff Davis Highway. When he ordered a beer, she gave him a look that seemed to say,
Isn’t it a bit early for that
? He ignored the look. She, as usual, was drinking a Diet Coke; so far that was the only thing he’d seen her drink, other than water.

They didn’t speak to each other.

DeMarco was pissed. He had no idea what she’d been up to or what she was planning, and he was getting damn tired of being dragged along in her wake. He was about to tell her this when she waved to a man who had just entered the bar, a stocky guy in his fifties carrying a briefcase and walking with a cane.

The man sat down at their table and Angela introduced him as Tom Foley. Before she could introduce DeMarco to Foley, Foley smirked
and said, “And I assume this is the magnificent Mr. DeMarco, our friend from Congress.”

DeMarco decided right then that he didn’t like the guy.

“So did you get what I needed?” Angela asked.

“In a way,” Foley said. “Unfortunately I couldn’t find anybody suitable for DeMarco to play, not in the time we had, so you’re going to have to do this yourself, Angie.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?” DeMarco said.

Foley winked at him and said, “You’ll see.”

DeMarco didn’t like winkers. He definitely didn’t like Foley.

To Angela, Foley said, “I found a gal over at Justice. She’s perfect.”

He opened his briefcase and took out a manila envelope. From the envelope, he pulled a Virginia state driver’s license. The photo on the license showed a woman in her midthirties with long blonde hair. She had a thin face, close-set eyes, and pinched features, and seemed as if she might be perpetually annoyed. But since it was a DMV photo, the woman probably
had
been annoyed.

DeMarco wondered what Foley was doing with the woman’s driver’s license and then concluded that it was probably a duplicate of the woman’s license. The CIA employed a bunch of sneaky shits.

“Her name’s Pamela Walker,” Foley said.

Angela was still looking at Pamela’s picture. “Yeah, she’ll do,” Angela said. “What’s her story?”

“She’s a lawyer,” Foley said, “and she had an affair with her boss. The guy dumped her about the same time a job that would have been a promotion for her opened up. She applied for the job, didn’t get it, and went bananas. She filed an EEO complaint, claiming that she didn’t get the job because
she
dumped her boss, who’s married by the way. She also filed a sexual harassment complaint against the guy. She became, in other words, a gigantic pain in the butt for Justice but then, while all her complaints were going through the system, she fucked up a case they’d been working on for five years. Apparently, she’s not just a bitch but an incompetent bitch, so Justice is now trying to fire her. Pamela, naturally, is suing Justice, saying that Justice
is retaliating for all the complaints she’s filed, and her lawyer is trying to take a great big bite out of Justice’s ass.”

“You’re right,” Angela said. “She’s perfect.”

Perfect for what
?

“All the background on her complaints and one small newspaper article on the whole mess are in the envelope,” Foley said. “As an added bonus, the newspaper article has a bad photo of her.”

“Can you get her out of Washington for a while?”

“We think so. There’s a lady in Miami. She used to be one of us but now she runs a law firm down there. She’s gonna call Pamela, go all Gloria Steinem on her, and tell her how she’s read what the male-dominated establishment at Justice is trying to do to her. She’ll invite Walker down for a job interview, become her new best friend, and, as long as we’re footing the bill, she’ll keep Walker in Miami as long as she can.”

“As long as she can may not be long enough,” Angela said.

Foley shrugged. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

DeMarco didn’t know what they were talking about but he was willing to bet that that particular phrase—
we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it
—was fairly common to CIA planning.

After Foley gave Angela the package on Pamela Walker, he loosened his tie and ordered a Manhattan. DeMarco could tell that Angela was anxious to leave for the airport, but since they still had two and half hours before their flight left, and as the airport was only a five-minute cab ride from Crystal City, she decided to sit with Foley for a while.

Foley and Angela exchanged some office gossip, the usual water-cooler rumors about who was getting transferred, who was retiring, and who was getting divorced. Because DeMarco didn’t know any of the people they were talking about, he began to get very bored.

Foley ordered a second Manhattan, oblivious to the look Angela gave him. Angela, she of the Diet Coke, didn’t approve of people drinking on duty, let alone so early in the day. She had told DeMarco this when
they first met, and he had informed her that he worked for Congress and drinking on duty was a job requirement.

Foley then began bitching about the new house his wife had made him buy, a four-thousand-square-foot monster in Springfield. He said his mortgage payments had doubled and so had his commute time. “There was absolutely nothing wrong with the place we had in Falls Church,” he said. “And this new place, the size of it, my heating bill’s tripled and it costs twice as much to water the damn lawn.”

DeMarco looked at his watch and said, “Angela, I think we’d better get going.” They had plenty of time but he was really tired of Foley.

“Yeah,” Angela said. As she reached for her purse, she said, “And thanks, Tom. You did a good job on this.”

Turning serious, Foley said, “You get these guys, Angie. Mahata was good people. She was the best.” Then he shook his head and added, “LaFountaine should never have cut it so close.”

“What?” Angela asked.

“I said…”

DeMarco had always thought that it was just an expression, a guy turning as “white as a sheet,” but Foley actually did. His ruddy complexion, made even more ruddy by two drinks, blanched as the blood drained from his face.

“I didn’t say that, Angie. Do you understand? I didn’t say anything and you didn’t hear anything. You gotta promise me. Please. I don’t wanna lose this job. I’m too damn old to start over.”

Foley suddenly got up, grabbed his briefcase and his cane, and limped away as fast as he could. He was moving so fast that at one point his cane slipped and he almost fell.

“What the hell was that all about?” DeMarco wondered out loud.

Angela was still watching Foley as he turned a corner and disappeared from view.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I have to find out. Call the airport and get us on a later flight, sometime after five. I need to talk to someone.”

His condo was in a six-story building on Connecticut Avenue in the District, one of those stately places with elaborate cornices built after the Second World War. She imagined it was absurdly expensive and it surprised her that he lived there. He had spent almost his entire career working outside the country and she would have guessed that the time he had spent in the condo could be measured in months, not years. But he had never married and he had the money, so she assumed that when he was home for those brief periods he wanted a haven, and this place would certainly be one.

She flirted her way past the doorman, took the elevator up to his floor, and rang the bell. She didn’t know if he was home. She could have called before she came, to verify he was there, but she hadn’t wanted to give him the opportunity to tell her not to come. She exhaled in relief when he opened the door.

He didn’t look like a legend. He was a tall, thin man with sparse gray hair. Reading glasses were perched on the end of a long, bony nose. He was wearing moccasin slippers, khaki pants, and a Cornell University sweatshirt that was so wash faded she wondered if he had actually purchased it when he was in college. He was holding a book in one hand and she was willing to bet that the book was about history or politics—or some politician’s autobiography, which he would have said belonged in the genre of historical fiction.

He had a fading bruise on his right cheek and his left eye was slightly blackened. The injuries had been inflicted by Jake LaFountaine.

“Angela,” he said. “I swear, you get more beautiful every day.”

Bill Carson had a soft Southern accent that Angela loved. He’d been raised on a place in Kentucky where they bred derby winners; his family didn’t own the thoroughbreds, they just trained them. And though he must have been surprised to see her, he didn’t look or sound it. It was almost impossible to surprise Bill Carson.

Carson was the real thing—he was the one you read about in spy novels, except the job was a lot less glamorous and lot more dangerous than the novelists imagined. He’d been out in the field since the hot days of the Cold War. He’d been in Russia and South America and Afghanistan, and almost every other place on the planet the CIA felt the need to go. He’d been wounded in the line of duty and almost killed more than once. For the last five years he had been the primary controller for a string of agents in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He’d been Mahata’s control.

Angela didn’t know what had happened with Mahata—but she did know that Bill Carson, after thirty years of service, should have been given a medal by the president and the accolades of everyone at Langley —and not sent out the door with a beating by LaFountaine.

Carson led her to his den and the room was just what she would have expected of a lifelong bachelor. There was a small fireplace with a marble hearth, dark leather chairs, and stained-glass lamps—and shelves and shelves of books. On the fireplace mantel was a model of a three-masted frigate—a replica of the USS
Constitution
—and she suspected he’d constructed the model himself. Carson had the patience and mania for detail required for that sort of hobby—these also being character traits needed for a controller of spies.

“Would you like a cognac?” he asked her.

“Thank you,” she said, although she knew she wouldn’t drink it.

When he had opened the door, all she had seen were the fading bruises. Now she noticed how haggard his face looked and that he had lost weight since the last time she’d seen him. On his chin was a
day’s worth of unshaven gray stubble, which was unusual for a man as fastidious as him. And he looked bone tired, as if he hadn’t slept in days, as if he’d spent his nights lying open-eyed in his bed, staring into the maw of hell. If it had been anyone other than him—anyone less strong than him—she would have wondered if what had happened to Mahata had made him suicidal.