Last Man Standing (31 page)

“If Jesus saw this guy coming at him, he’d scream for a cop.”

“Apparently Westbrook only works with the best,” commented Bates.

“How did Macy fit in with all the brothers? He looks like a white supremacist.”

“Nope. Apparently just doesn’t like hair. We don’t know much about him before he came to D.C. Though we could never prove
it, he was believed to be a foot soldier for a couple kingpins who got sent to federal Shangri-La in Joliet. After that he
came to D.C. and joined Westbrook. He has a well-deserved rep on the street for loyalty and extreme violence. A real crazy-ass,
but professional in his own way.”

“Just as any good criminal should be.”

“His first big act of malice was putting a meat cleaver in his grandma’s head because, he claimed, she was shortchanging him
at dinnertime.”

“How come he’s walking around free after a murder rap like that?”

“He was only eleven, so he did time at a juvie detention center. Since then, the only crime the guy’s committed is three speeding
tickets.”

“Nice guy. Mind if I keep these photos?”

“Help yourself. But if you run into Macy in a dark alley or a well-lit street, my advice to you would be to run.”

“I’m HRT, Perce. I eat guys like him for breakfast.”

“Right. Keep telling yourself that.”

“If Cove’s really as good as you say, then he didn’t just walk into an ambush. Something else is going on.”

“Maybe, but everybody makes mistakes.”

“Did you confirm that Cove didn’t know when we were coming?”

“I did. Cove was not told the date of the hit.”

“How come he didn’t know?”

“They didn’t want any leaks, and he wasn’t going to be there anyway, so he didn’t qualify as a need-to-know.”

“That’s great, you didn’t trust your own undercover. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have gotten the information from another
source. Like WFO?”

“Or like HRT?” Bates shot back.

“And the potential witnesses being there, was that intel from Cove?” Bates nodded. “You know, Perce, it would have been nice
to know all this up front.”

“Need-to-know, Web. And you didn’t need to know that to do your job.”

“How the hell can you say that when you don’t have a damn clue how I do my job?”

“You’re getting close to that line again, my friend. Don’t push it!”

“Does anybody give a damn that six men were killed in the process?”

“In the grand scheme of things, Web, no. Only people like you and me care.”

“So, anything else I
don’t
need to know?”

From his large stack of documents Bates pulled out a very thick expandable file, slid out one of the manila folders and opened
it. “Why didn’t you tell me Harry Sullivan was your old man?”

Web immediately rose and poured himself another cup of coffee. He didn’t really need the extra caffeine, but it gave him time
to think of a response or a lie. When he sat back down Bates was still looking over the file. When he glanced at Web, it was
clear Bates wanted an answer to that question before he would give up the material.

“I never really thought of him as my father. We parted company when I was barely six. To me, he’s just a guy.” After a moment,
he asked, “When did you find out he was my father?”

Bates ran his finger down one of the pages. “Not until I pulled your entire background-check file. Frankly, looking at this
arrest and conviction record, I’m surprised he had time to get your mother pregnant. Lotta stuff in here,” he added enticingly.

Web wanted to snatch the file out of Bates’s hands and run from the room. However, he just sat there, staring at the upside-down
pages, waiting. The bustle of the room had receded for him now. It was just him, Bates and, on those pages, his father.

“So why are you suddenly so interested in, as you say, ‘just a guy’?” asked Bates.

“I guess you get to a certain age, things like that start to matter.”

Bates put the folder back and slid the entire file across to Web. “Happy reading.”

T
he first thing Web noticed when he got back to the motel was that there was a fresh oil patch in the parking space he had
been using. Nothing unusual, really, for another guest could have used that spot, though it was directly in front of Web’s
unit. Before he unlocked the door, he checked out the doorknob while pretending to fumble for his room key. Unfortunately,
even Web could not tell if the lock had been picked or not. It hadn’t been forced, but somebody who knew what he was doing
could pop the simple lock in the time it took to sneeze and leave not a trace.

Web opened the door, his other hand on the butt of his gun. It took him about ten seconds to discover that no one was in the
tiny room. Nothing was out of place, and even the box he had taken from his mother’s attic was there, each piece of paper
exactly where he had left it. However, Web had five different types of tiny booby traps set up throughout his room and three
of them had been tripped. Over the years, Web had developed this system whenever he was on the road. Well, whoever had searched
his room was good but not perfect. That was comforting, like knowing the four-hundred-pound brute you were about to rumble
with had a glass chin and occasionally wet his bed.

Ironic, that while he’d been meeting with Bates, someone had searched his room. Web had never been naive about life, because
he had seen the worst of it, as both a child and an adult. Yet the one thing he had always thought he could count on was the
Bureau and all the people who gave it life beyond the technical forms and guns. For the first time in his career, that faith
had been shaken.

He packed his few belongings and was on the road within five minutes. He went to a restaurant near Old Town Alexandria, parked
where he could see his car through the restaurant’s window, ate his lunch and made his way through Harry Sullivan’s life.

Bates had not been joking. Web’s old man had been a guest of some of the finest correctional facilities the country had to
offer, most of them in the South, where Web knew they grew some exceptionally fine human cages. His father’s offenses were
myriad yet had a common theme: They were typically low-level financial crimes, business scams, embezzlement and fraud. From
some of the old court transcripts and arrest records in the file, Web could see his old man’s main weapon had been a smooth
tongue and more chutzpah than any one human being should be toting around.

There were various photos of his father in the file, from the front, right and left sides, with the little line of prisoner
identification numbers running underneath. Web had seen many mug shots of arrested people, and they all looked remarkably
the same: stricken, terrified, ready to slice wrist or blow out temple. Yet in all his mug shots Harry Sullivan was smiling.
The bastard was grinning, like he had put one over on the cops, even though he was the one busted. But his father had not
aged well. He was no longer the handsome man he had been in the photos in the attic box. The last series of shots showed a
very old man, though he was still smiling, albeit with fewer teeth. Web had no reason to care about him, yet it was difficult
for him to witness the man’s decline in all its impersonal Kodak glory.

As Web read some of the trial testimony of his father, he couldn’t help but laugh in places. One slick operator emerged from
the lines of dialogue as the cagey con battled with prosecutors determined to put him away.

“Mr. Sullivan,” asked one D.A., “is it not true that on the night in question you were—”

“Begging your pardon, lad, but what night would that be again? Me memory’s not what it was.”

Web could almost see the lawyer rolling his eyes as he answered, “The twenty-sixth of June, sir.”

“Ah, that’s right. Go on, now, lad, you’re doing fine. I’m sure ye mum’s proud of yer.”

In the transcript the court reporter had typed parenthetically, “Laughter in courtroom.”

“Mr. Sullivan, I am
not
your lad,” replied the lawyer.

“Well, forgive me, son, for I’m not quite experienced in such matters, and I surely meant nothing by it. Truth is, I don’t
know what to be calling you. Though in the ride over from the jail to this fine courthouse I heard others call you names I
wouldn’t be saying to me dearest enemy in the world. Words that woulda made me poor God-fearing mum roll over in her good
Catholic grave. Attacking your honesty and integrity, and what man can be standing for mucha that?”

“I could care less what criminals say about me, sir.”

“Begging your pardon, son, but the worst of it be coming from the guards.”

“Laughter again,” the stenographer had typed. Huge thunders of laughter, Web concluded, judging from the regiment of exclamation
points tacked on the end.

“Can we continue, Mr. Sullivan?” said the lawyer.

“Ah, now, you be calling me Harry. It’s been me name since me Irish arse came into this world.”

“Mr. Sullivan!” This came from the judge, Web read, and in those two words he seemed to sense a long laugh, though Web was
probably wrong. But the judge’s last name
was
O’Malley, and perhaps he and Harry Sullivan shared a hatred of the English, if nothing else.

“I certainly won’t be calling you Harry,” said the lawyer, and Web could almost see the righteous indignation on the man’s
features for having to carry on such a conversation with a common criminal and getting the worst of it.

“Well, now, lad, I know it’s your job to put me old, withered self into a cold, dark cell where men treat other men with no
dignity atall. And all over a wee misunderstanding that might amount to nothing more than bad judgment, or perhaps a pint
or two more than I should have had. But even so, you call me Harry, for though you’ve got to see this terrible deed through,
there’s no reason we can’t be friends.”

As Web finished the file on that particular chapter in his father’s life, he had to note, with some satisfaction, that the
jury had acquitted Harry Sullivan on all counts.

The last crime his father had been sent to prison for had gotten him twenty years, by far his longest sentence. So far he
had punched fourteen years of the time in a prison in South Carolina that Web knew to be a sweat-hole one short step from
hell, and he had six more years to go unless he got paroled or, more likely, died behind bars.

Web took the final bite of his pastrami and the last swallow of his Dominion Ale. There was one more file to check. It did
not take long to read and left Web stunned and even more confused.

The Bureau was good; they left no stone unturned. When they checked somebody’s background out, damn it, man, you were checked
out. If you were applying to work at the Bureau in any capacity, they talked to everybody you had any contact with in your
entire life. Your first-grade schoolteacher, your paper route manager, even the pretty girl you had taken to the prom and
subsequently slept with. And they had no doubt also spoken with her father, to whom you had to explain your miserable conduct
afterward when the secret got out, even though it was his innocent little girl who had ripped off your pants and brought the
extra-lubricated condoms. Your Boy Scout troop leader, your in-laws, the bank manager who had turned down your first car loan,
the woman who cut your hair—nothing, absolutely nothing was sacred when the FBI was on the case. And damn if they hadn’t managed
to track down old Harry Sullivan.

He had been newly ensconced in his little South Carolina retirement cell, and he had given the background-checking agents
his two cents on Web London, his son. “My son.” It was a phrase Harry Sullivan had used thirty-four times during the meeting
because Web took the time to count them.

Harry Sullivan gave “my son” the best damn recommendation anyone could give another person, though he had only known “my son”
for the first six years of his life. But according to Harry Sullivan, a proper Irishman could tell if “my son” had what it
took from nearly the day the diapers came off. And his son had what it took to be the finest FBI agent there ever was or ever
would be and they could quote him on that. And if they wanted him to come up to Washington to tell the powers-that-be that
very thing, he gladly would, though it would be with leg and arm shackles he’d be trooping in, yet his heart would still be
bursting with pride. There was nothing on earth that was too good for “my son.”

Web continued reading and his head dropped lower and lower as he did so, and then finally it almost hit the table with Harry
Sullivan’s last written statement: “And would the good agents, the fine agents,” he’d begun, mind telling “my son” that his
father has thought about him every day over all these years, never once letting him out of his heart, and though it was not
likely that they would ever hook up again, that Harry Sullivan wanted “my son” to know that he loved him and wanted the best
for him? And to not think too badly of the old man for how things had turned out? Would the good agents mind telling “my son”
that, for he’d be much in their debt if they did. And he would be proud to buy them each a pint or two if the opportunity
ever arose, though the prospects did not look at all promising for that, given his current living arrangements, though one
just never knew.

Well, they never had told Web anything. Web had never seen this report until right this minute. Damn the Bureau! Was there
never any room to bend the rules? Did everything have to be lockstep, their way or the highway? And yet Web could have discovered
this information years before if he had really wanted to. He just hadn’t wanted to.

The next thought that hit Web made his features turn grim. If the Bureau had sent Claire Daniels Web’s file, was she already
privy to some or all of this information regarding Harry Sullivan? If so, why hadn’t she bothered to tell him that?

Web packed the file up, paid his bill and walked back to the Vic. He drove to one of the Bureau’s motor pools, switched vehicles
and drove a late-model Grand Marquis out another gate not visible from the street he had come in on. The Bureau wasn’t exactly
rolling in available Bucars, but the Grand had come in for a ten-thousand-miler, and Web had persuaded the supervisor that
he deserved a nicer set of wheels than the twenty-year vet uptown at HQ the car was assigned to. If anyone had a problem with
that, Web had added, go talk to Buck Winters, he’s my best friend.