Political Suicide (37 page)

Hogarth appeared confused.

“Turn around, Mr. Secretary,” Lou said, “and I think you’ll see what my friend, here, is getting at.”

Hogarth spun around. Sarah and Edith, propping a very wobbly Chris Bryzinski between them, stood in front of the Mercedes. Bryzinski’s hands were tied behind his back, and blood had soaked through a makeshift tourniquet wrapped tightly around his meaty leg. He was bearing most of his weight on the other.

Hogarth stared at the detective, then at Sarah. “We had a deal,” he said. “Goddamn it, we had a deal.”

Sarah mocked him with her eyes and spread her hands. “So sue me,” she said.

Hogarth whirled frantically, searching every person for a way out.

“It’s over,” Lou said. “You’ve taken this as far as it can go. It’s over.”

For the first time, Hogarth seemed to realize that he was still holding his gun. From ten feet away, hand shaking, he pointed the weapon at Lou. “Back away,” he said. “Let me out of here.”

“To go where?” Lou asked. “You’ve contracted men to kill innocent civilians, you’ve stolen from our country, sanctioned suicidal missions. Where are you going to run?”

Hogarth backed away, swinging his pistol from one person to the next. “You think I did this for glory? For power?” he shouted, turning as though he were onstage in a theater-in-the-round production. “I did this to win the war against terrorism. I did this to save lives! Our enemies do not fear death. They welcome it. They beg for it, for God’s sake. We’re at a disadvantage to them. Can’t you see it? We need to fight fire with fire. That is our mission here. And we are doing it, too. Mantis is making our country stronger. Damn you, Cooper, we had a deal!”

Hogarth raised his gun and pointed it toward Sarah. Lou and Cap had seen enough. The sparring partners charged shoulder to shoulder and lunged at the man. But at the instant they reached him, Hogarth took a quick, purposeful step back and jammed the gun barrel into his mouth, pulling the trigger in the same motion. The shot was surprisingly muffled, but no less deadly. Bone exploded outward like crimson snowflakes from the back of his skull. His arms went limp, and his knees folded almost balletically.

He crumpled to the ground, just a few feet from his protégé, his overcoat splayed open beneath him like the wings of a giant mantis ready to take flight.

CHAPTER 51

Blinking strobe lights on the wings of the Boeing C-40 Clipper painted the wintry night with a continual flash of color. To Lou, it looked like a last gasp, a final weak breath from a living behemoth that once could fly. A small cluster of grim men stood some distance from where Hogarth and Brody now lay. The MPs had arrived and had radioed for their superiors and for the medics.

The group included everybody connected with Operation Talon. Just before the MPs drove up, Lou had finished giving an impassioned speech and now looked to each man for confirmation.
Will you go along with this plan?

Sarah stood by the Mercedes, along with Edith, Papa Steve, and Cap. Bryzinski was in the backseat. Lou could see the tension on each of their faces. At his request, none of them had heard what he said to the men. Had Lou won them over? Each passing second raised doubts before the answer finally came from the men.

“Whatever it takes!… Mantis, whatever it takes!”

Lou nodded. “Whatever it takes,” he echoed.

As the first wave of help arrived, the circle parted and Lou headed toward the others. He zippered his parka jacket to fight off a sudden burst of cold air.

“We started laying the groundwork for everything that’s going to follow. Listen, if it’s okay with the others, how about you and I take a walk?”

“Sure. Sure thing, Lou.”

Lou placed an arm around Papa Steve’s burly shoulders as he led him away. They walked until they reached a secluded area behind a stack of empty pallets. Their gaunt, haggard faces were eerily lit by the yellowish glow of a floodlight mounted to a large steel hangar.

“Coon will organize the response,” Lou said. “He’s the ranking officer on the scene. He’s going to get some military investigators over here, now that we’ve got our consensus.”

“And what consensus did we reach?” Papa Steve asked.

Something about his expression put a knot in Lou’s chest. “The mission will remain a secret,” Lou said. “Along with other things.”

“By other things, do you mean—?”

“Mantis. As of this moment, Operation Talon doesn’t exist. Neither does Manolo, the cartel, or the Mantis drink, for that matter. It’s all gone. Buried. Coon and the CIA will take care of Manolo. There can be no loose ends here.”

“I think that’s really for the best. You did a hell of a job today, my friend. A hell of a job. Cap, too. He’s an amazing piece of work.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“Thanks for speaking to the men. I watched their faces. I’m glad they took the advice of a civilian. No offense.”

“None taken. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

“What now?” Papa Steve asked.

“Now,” Lou said, “we talk.”

“About?”

“About your friends.”

“My friends?”

“Cap isn’t the only piece of work around here. You’re one of them yourself, and your friends are a testament to that. You have a lot of them. Very useful they are, too.”

“What are you getting at, Lou?”

“From the first time we met, I’ve been impressed that whenever you need help, one of your friends is there. The police officer that gave me a ticket, the guy who lent you a helicopter to meet me at the golf course, your buddy at the restaurant. That’s a terrific credit to the kind of person you are. But one of those friends was even more impressive than the others—the one who knew so much about guns and ballistics.”

“Well, I guess you might say I’m a very lucky guy.”

Lou watched the man closely, marveling at his ability to stay composed. “A couple of days ago,” Lou went on, “I flew out to Minnesota to see Dr. Sherwood, the director of the Pine Grove Clinic. Turns out, he and Elias were fraternity brothers at the University of Virginia. That’s why Elias went to see him. Initially, he was freaked about violating confidentiality, and wouldn’t tell me anything. But later, after he thought about what was at stake for McHugh, he had a slight change of heart and had his assistant call and tell me that Elias was in fact a patient of his. After I got back to D.C., he called me himself with some more information. Elias was dying from chronic myeloid leukemia. It’s a type with what’s called a Philadelphia chromosome—almost impossible to treat successfully. Six months, maybe a little more, with what would have been pretty painful therapy.”

“Go on.”

“Does the name James Styles mean anything to you?”

“Should it?”

“It’s the name Elias is known by at the clinic. Dr. Sherwood communicated with him through a post office box in Bowie, Maryland.”

“You’ve learned an amazing amount in a short time,” Papa Steve said. “No wonder I’m so impressed with you.”

“I don’t think anyone knew Elias was dying—maybe not even Jeannine. No one, that is, except you.”

“Lou, I don’t—”

Lou reached out and gently placed his hands on Papa Steve’s shoulders. “No more games, Steve,” he said without rancor. “I understand what you did, and I understand why.”

For a time there was only silence.

“I was hoping things would just pass,” Papa Steve said finally. “How long have you known?”

“I began having suspicions when you told me you couldn’t tail Brody, because of the Palace Guards. You just seemed too resourceful to be stopped by them. So I began to wonder why you wanted to protect the secret of where he was going. It was Mark Colston. You were protecting your godson. You never meant for me to find that CD, did you?”

“Of course not. The police were supposed to find it. I made it as easy as I could for them. It was the only picture in the whole damn office that was turned around. I did everything but hang an arrow from the ceiling pointing down to it. That buffoon Bryzinski and his cops should have found it, and after they listened to it, marched straight to Brody’s front door.”

“The investigation of a murdered congressman would have been intense, and the pressure on Brody massive—especially with your ballistics friend on the job.”

“Except that Elias didn’t know Jeannine was having an affair with your pal Gary,” Papa Steve said, finishing Lou’s thought. “The moment Bryzinski had a prime suspect, the investigation went south. The police did a half-baked job searching Elias’s office because they already had their man in custody.”

“Then I showed up,” Lou said.

“Enter Lou Welcome.”

“I became the police by proxy—the guy you fed just enough information to keep me on Brody’s trail.”

“That’s it. All I wanted you to do was to get the police away from Gary and back on Brody. And you did a lot more than I bargained for.”

“By that, you mean I followed Brody and found out about the drugs and the Mantis juice.”

“All I wanted you to do was get the murder weapon.”

“Because you didn’t want me to know the truth about Mantis.”

“The motive for Elias’s murder was supposed to be his knowledge of Reddy Creek,” Papa Steve said. “Brody was stealing weapons because of budget cuts, and Elias was on to him. That’s what the prosecutors would have said, anyway, if the police had found the CD, and had done their job by following the trail to its logical endpoint.”

“It’s a weak case if you don’t have the murder weapon, though,” Lou said. “Good thing I got you that ballistics report.”

“Elias came across a battalion supply sergeant who was willing to testify against Brody. He would have provided circumstantial evidence linking Brody and Horgath to armory thefts up and down the East Coast. Still, we needed that weapon. I couldn’t very well have waltzed into a police station and said, ‘Here, I think this is the gun used to kill Elias Colston.’ I needed another way to get the gun into the right person’s hands.”

“It had to have been terrible for you,” Lou said.

“Shooting Elias? Killing my best friend? Yeah, Lou, it was worse than terrible. It was the hardest damn thing I’ve ever had to do. I refused again and again, but Elias wouldn’t let up. He was like a terrier on a rat.” Papa Steve looked away and rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Eventually you caved in.”

“Imagine if Cap asked you to kill him,” Papa Steve said. “And you knew it was the right thing to do. You knew in your gut that it had to go down that way. Brody needed to be stopped.”

“That’s why you transferred to Mantis,” Lou said.

“It was before Elias became ill, of course. He had his suspicions about Mantis and Brody. Mark’s uncharacteristically heroic death, Brody’s Ph.D. thesis, the Reddy Creek incident, and the missing reporter’s blog. But he didn’t have solid proof.”

“You got yourself embedded with Mantis so you could follow Brody. That’s how you found out about the Mantis drug. You knew all along.”

“Mark and the others had died with incredible valor. Elias and I would never do anything to taint that. We had to eliminate Brody without having anyone learn about the chemicals the men were getting every day.”

Lou could not stand back any longer. He put his arms around Papa Steve and made no attempt to stem his own tears. The real hero in the piece was the man there with him. “I’m so fucking proud to know you,” Lou said.

“Once you found that CD, all I wanted was your help getting the gun to the right people. End of story.”

“In the end, nobody was supposed to learn about Mantis,” Lou said.

Papa Steve nodded. “That’s what Elias wanted. That’s what he died for.”

“With Brody gone, Mantis would be gone,” Lou said.

“And so would its secret. We needed to take down Brody without having to expose the world to the truth, without having to leave a black mark on the graves of those heroic young men. They would forever be associated with one of the most horrific examples of human experimentation since the Nazis. That would have been their legacy. For Mark, for the others, I did what had to be done.”

“Whatever it takes,” Lou said. “You picked the day because you knew Brody went to see Manolo each and every Wednesday. You knew he wouldn’t have an alibi that would hold up. He’d say he was at the military parade because he couldn’t very well confess to where he really went.”

“Elias must have said something to Jeannine,” Papa Steve added. “Of course, she wouldn’t have known it was his final good-bye. But I’m sure he spoke from the heart, because even though he didn’t pay as much attention to her as he might have, he loved Jeannine to pieces.”

“It was a kiss,” Lou said, remembering her description. “A very special kiss.”

“Well, whatever he said or did, I’m sure it made her realize the mistake she was making with Gary, so she ended the relationship.”

“And Gary showed up at the Colstons’ place, drunk and despondent. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“He must have got there just after I left,” Papa Steve said.

Silence.

“What happened out there with the men, Lou?” Papa Steve eventually asked. “What are we going to tell the world?”

“Wyatt Brody and Spencer Hogarth were involved in a massive weapons-theft scheme as a way to circumvent congressional budget cuts and keep Mantis fully operational,” Lou said. “Mantis was Hogarth’s baby, Brody’s, too. It made sense they’d do anything to protect it. Elias found out about Reddy Creek, and for that Wyatt Brody killed him on a Wednesday morning. There’s video evidence showing Brody leaving a military parade on the day Colston was murdered.

“As for the murder weapon, I showed you the ballistics report at your request. You know a lot about guns. You suggested to me that the weapon used to kill Elias might be an antique Colt military pistol from Brody’s substantial gun collection. A pistol that just so happens to leave a six left rifling mark. You got the gun—how, I don’t know—and gave it to me. We got it tested and it came back a match. Brody was going to go public because he knew the walls were closing in. Hogarth wouldn’t stand for it, so he killed Brody in front of dozens of witnesses. Once Hogarth realized he had no way out, he decided to take his own life. End of story. That’s what happened here. And everybody from Mantis, Coon included, agrees.”