The President's Henchman (17 page)

Kira said, “But if everyone she worked with knew …”

“Right. Nobody has to point a finger directly. The weight of their collective testimony is enough. How could Colonel Linberg be ignorant of what was common knowledge?”

“You’re still skeptical, though.”

“There’s a very old expression in the armed forces,” Welborn told her. “It’s called closing ranks. Today, I could hear footsteps falling into line all over the parade ground.”

Kira gave him the keys to her Jeep.

Major Seymour wasn’t skulking outside Kira Fahey’s building. Maybe he felt he’d seen enough, Welborn thought. He could report to General Altman that Lieutenant Yates had driven with the vice president’s niece from a bar in Annapolis to her dwelling in Washington for … well, most likely, for purposes unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

Not that they could get him for anything illegal. Like adultery. Neither he nor Kira was married. Nor had they engaged in intercourse. Though it might embarrass Ms. Fahey to admit that a man had visited her lair and left her with nothing more than a peck on the brow.

He’d have to ask Colonel Linberg if there was anything in the UCMJ against forehead kissing. Given her duty of copying all the rules and regs, she ought to know. Then he’d ask her why she wanted to resign.

He was very eager to talk to Carina Linberg about that. And he wanted to watch her carefully as she answered. He’d have done so already if Major Seymour hadn’t gotten in the way. Now, he’d have to check out the major, too. Investigate a superior officer who was the personal aide to the Air Force Chief of Staff.

He didn’t remember his mother telling him there’d be days like this.

But Galia Mindel had, more or less. Warned him that there’d be people out to screw with him. People who undoubtedly had agendas of their own to advance.

Colonel Linberg had told him her workday ended at 1700 hours. Which meant he’d have to visit her at home. Kira’s home computer had access to the colonel’s address. She had even printed a map for him so he could find his way.

Made him feel, somewhat uneasily, as if he’d picked up an unofficial partner.

He drove out New York Avenue. The rain had stopped, and traffic was light. He rolled past the National Arboretum and soon came to Route 50 East. It’d take him right back to Annapolis if he wanted. But he was only going to Landover, where Colonel Linberg had a condo, and the Washington Redskins played football at FedEx stadium.

He never got to Landover. Because his fighter pilot’s eyes saw a navy blue Dodge Viper parked in the lot of a Courtyard Inn just off the highway, two miles short of the colonel’s dwelling. He wondered what the chances were it could it be just a coincidence, somebody else’s sports car.

No chance at all after Welborn pulled into the lot and saw the license plate.

He looked at the motel, trying to guess which room Cowan was in.

“So what’s the story, Captain?” Welborn asked himself. “Your deal with the brass gives you continuing immunity? You can keep shacking up with the colonel, and she’s the only one who has to pay the consequences?”

Welborn parked Kira Fahey’s Cherokee in a space directly across the lot from the Viper. He slid down in his seat and adjusted the rearview mirror so he’d be able to see if anyone got in either side of the sports car.

He
hated
the thought that Carina Linberg was in the hotel having sex with Dexter Cowan. Because if she came out of the hotel with him, he’d have to report what he’d seen. Become a witness against her. Damn! Couldn’t they have driven to Baltimore? Parked the damn Viper indoors. He almost wished —

Oh, God.
They’d really done it to him, he thought. The president and her husband. He was about to wish he’d brought Kira Fahey with him. To insulate him against his feelings of jealousy.

Brought on by his
infatuation
for Carina Linberg.

The president and her henchman had foreseen he might make a fool of himself and a disaster of his investigation, and they’d provided him with Kira as an inoculation against a runaway libido. He wondered if Kira knew what her role was in all this. That thought made him smile. It also reassured him that he had some really smart people in his corner.

He was pretty sure he was going to need them.

Chana Lochlan lay sleeping peacefully in her bed. She was nude. Damon Todd stood next to the bed looking down at her. She’d always been lean and firm. Now, with her increased workouts, her muscle definition was starting to show. She’d hit the weights hard for him, and her appearance excited him greatly. But all he did was gently kiss her shampoo-scented hair and pull the top sheet over her shoulders.

“You’re so beautiful, so strong. You’ve always been my inspiration,” he murmured. “I’ve loved you from the start.”

He sat in a chair and watched Chana turn on her side as she slept. Pale light slanted in through the partially open bedroom door. It fell across the right side of her face.

She’d told him about James J. McGill, of course. Going to him for help. Todd blamed himself for that. He’d missed visiting her last year. He’d left her alone for such a long time only once before — and disaster had resulted. She’d gotten married.

But the fact that she’d upped her workout and bought the thong showed that a level deep in her subconscious she still anticipated an annual visit from him. She’d been his first and most successful subject. He’d helped her to become what she had desperately wanted. There shouldn’t have been any degradation of that persona.

After all, that was what he was trying to sell to the CIA: a foolproof technique for alternative personality creation. What was he supposed to say now?
Oops.

Thankfully, he had the opportunity to learn from his mistake and correct it. He was sure that Chana would want it that way, too. They would become partners in a new, exciting round of experimentation. Everyone would be happy.

With the possible exception of James J. McGill. Chana would call him in the morning. She’d told Todd that McGill had the green thong she’d bought to model for him. That gnawed at him. He wanted that thong back. Not one just like it.
That one.

If McGill hadn’t been the president’s husband, Todd would have gone after it. After him. He didn’t like people who intruded on his plans. But McGill had to have Secret Service protection. And his wife was the ultimate master of the CIA. He didn’t want to screw that up.

So okay, if McGill accepted the news, maybe he could forget the thong.

But if McGill didn’t …

CIA Field Officer Daryl Cheveyo watched from the shadows as Damon Todd departed from Chana Lochlan’s town house. He knew who lived there because he’d punched the address into his personal digital assistant. The Company had PDAs like nobody else’s. There was no such thing as an unlisted phone number to them; they never had to address a letter to “occupant.”

He saw Todd turn the corner of the block and disappear. Cheveyo slipped from the shadows and walked the opposite way. What he’d learned that night had chilled him.

Damon Todd had gotten a senior congressional staffer to ride a horse nude on the Mall. He’d gotten a member of congress to sing opera in the House of Representatives. And now … now he’d visited a reporter who had regular access to the White House. Which begged the question: What did Todd have in mind for Chana Lochlan?

Cheveyo got into his car for the drive to Langley, debating with himself whether Todd would actually try to assassinate the president, using a reporter as his tool, if the CIA didn’t hire him.

He wondered if the Company would share his report with the Secret Service.

On most Saturdays, the president slept in. All the way to 6:00 a.m. McGill’s everyday hour to rise. Getting up at the same time, the First Couple swam together in the White House pool. Well, Patti swam. McGill lumbered, stopped for a breath at the end of each length, then pushed off the pool wall, the only time he got the feeling he was moving with any grace.

Patti had worked with him on his stroke, his breathing, and his kicking. Flip turns were out of the question. McGill had made some improvement, but the basic problem was that he never felt relaxed when he knew the water was too deep to touch bottom. His muscles tensed. His heartbeat raced. He became short of breath much sooner than he ever would have running.

He’d told Patti once, “I must’ve been a drowned cat in a previous life.”

When they got out of the pool, McGill joined Patti in doing resistance training. But he used only one station — the chin-up bar. He did one set of as many reps as he could manage without having a stroke. That day he gutted out twenty-four.

Patti looked over from where she was doing leg extensions, and said, “I’m told Lieutenant Yates can do one hundred pull-ups without stopping.”

McGill sneered at her.

He moved on to the second stage of Father McNulty’s Holy Trinity of Physical Fitness. Sit-ups. McGill could do, and did, one hundred of those. After that, came push-ups. Fifty-seven. Father McNulty had devised the regimen of chin-ups, sit-ups, and push-ups because his parish — and McGill’s as a child — had no school gymnasium. Everyone worked out in the lunchroom.

The good father told all his young charges that no matter what cross life gave them to bear, these exercises would give them the muscle to carry it. So break a sweat for Our Lord.

Once a week, on the same day he heard their confessions, Father McNulty also had the children run around the block as many times as they could. Technically, this was a fourth exercise and should have ruined the allusion to the Trinity, but the canny priest had a new name for running: physical penance. No matter how many “Our Fathers” and “Hail Marys” the children of St. Andrew’s school might have to say after their confessions, their souls weren’t cleansed until they finished running.

The one thing Patti had added to McGill’s fitness routine was stretching. It was understandable how Father McNulty had missed that. The Church taught dogma not flexibility.

After showering and changing their clothes, Patti and McGill sat down to breakfast in the residence, and the phone rang. Normally, the president wasn’t to be disturbed during meals. Unless it was something important. Patti put down her seven-grain toast and picked up the phone.

“Yes.” She listened impassively. “No, no, that’s all right.” She handed the phone to McGill. “For you. Sweetie. Tell her she can call anytime.”

McGill told Sweetie she could call anytime, and listened.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

He put the phone down and looked at Patti.

“Chana Lochlan called my office. I’ve been fired.”

Welborn’s eyes fluttered open, and he saw someone staring at him.

Carina Linberg. The
colonel,
he reminded himself. Wearing civvies and leaning over to look in his car.
Kira’s
car. He was still groggy and having trouble orienting himself.

But he thought to check his rearview mirror. Cowan’s Viper was gone.

A rap on the window brought his attention back to the colonel. It was hard to think of her as military in her sleeveless pink top and khaki shorts. She gestured to him to lower his window, and he followed orders.

“Good morning, ma’am.” His voice came out as a croak.

She smiled at him. “They rent rooms here, Lieutenant. You don’t need to sleep in your car.” She noticed the OSU decal on the rear window. “If this is your car.”

“Borrowed it from a friend, ma’am.”

“And just happened to park it in the lot of the hotel where I’m staying.”

Welborn winced at the colonel’s admission that she’d spent the night at the Courtyard Inn.

“You look like you’re in pain, Lieutenant. Tell you what. I owe you a breakfast. I’ll repay you now.” She stepped back from the door.

“Ma’am, I … I …”

“Look like you slept in a car?” She took a keycard out of a pocket and neatly flipped it onto Welborn’s lap. “Room 213. Go take a shower, brush your teeth, whatever. There’s a diner on the other side of the hotel. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

She turned and walked away. Having given him permission to enter her room alone. Where he might peek into anything he wanted. Very interesting. But what really intrigued Welborn were her tanned shoulders and the way her backside moved inside those civilian shorts. He picked up the keycard. She’d said she would wait for him in the diner, but if he didn’t show up, she’d come back to her room and —

“Kira Fahey,” he whispered to himself.

He kept quietly repeating the name as he got out of the car and entered the hotel. Made it a mantra for his self-preservation. Kira, Kira, Kira.

Sweetie was waiting at McGill’s office when he and Deke entered the reception area. She extended a business envelope to him. His name was written on it in Palmer cursive. Chana Lochlan’s name was embossed in the upper left corner.

“Messenger brought it twenty minutes ago.”

McGill told Deke to hold down the fort as he and Sweetie went into his office and closed the door. He took his seat behind his desk and pulled out a letter opener. But before he used it, he held the envelope up to the light. First the ceiling light, then the window.

“What?” Sweetie asked. “You’re thinking letter bomb?”

McGill snorted and slit the envelope open.

“I’m thinking I’ve never been fired before. Don’t know what I’ll find in there.”

He found a check for $20,000.

He handed it to Sweetie and read the accompanying note aloud. “‘Mr. McGill, please accept my apology and the enclosed check for all the trouble I’ve put you through. The pressure of my job must have left me a bit overwrought. Right now, I’m truly not sure how much of that harassing phone call was real and how much was a dream. And, as silly as it might sound, I remember now that I bought that thong. I must have been repressing a buying choice I later found embarrassing. I trust you’ll keep our dealings confidential and consider this a matter that has resolved itself.’”

McGill looked at Sweetie.

“You remember many self-resolving matters when we were cops?”

“Uh-uh,” Sweetie said.

“And the money?”

“Seems to be of the hush variety.”

“Or worse.” McGill told her about Monty Kipp’s wet dream about topless photos, and McGill’s own fear that Kipp and Chana were out to embarrass Patti through him.

“How’s it going to look if I cash that check?” he asked.

“Like something you wouldn’t want to explain on World Wide News.”

McGill turned to his computer and booted it up. He clicked on his word-processing program and started to write a response to Chana Lochlan. He didn’t get far before he stopped and looked at Sweetie.

“My first case and not only am I fired, I violate the ethics of my new profession.”

“Private eyes have ethics?” Sweetie asked. “Like what?”

“Like don’t blab about your client’s case to anyone else.”

He told her about telling Patti the details of Chana’s case.

“So what’re you going to do?” Sweetie asked.

“I’m going to confession. Then I’ll run a couple of miles of penance. After that, I’m flying home to see my kids.”

“But you’re not giving up on your new line of work.”

“I’ve never been a quitter. And you wouldn’t you let me anyway, would you?”

“No.”

Sweetie nodded at the computer.

“So what are you going to tell, Ms. Lochlan?”

“That she must have misunderstood our fee agreement. A check for the overage will be available to her, and her alone, to pick up at this office anytime during regular business hours.”

“You’re not going to let her get away without a heart-to-heart.”

“Right.”

“And if she comes in while you’re away?”

“You don’t have the combination to the office safe.”

“That’s true,” Sweetie said. “We’ll have to change that.”

Welborn’s mantra for self-preservation worked. He didn’t wait for Colonel Linberg to come back to her room and find him in bed. He spotted her in a corner booth in the diner, a cup of coffee in front of her, reading the
Washington Post.
To his surprise, she had a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.

That should have made him think of the age difference between them. Instead it made him think that the glasses would be the first things to come off when … Kira, Kira, Kira, he repeated to himself as he walked over to the booth.

“May I sit down, ma’am?” he asked.

She glanced up. “You’d look rather foolish just standing there.”

Welborn took that as a yes and sat.

“So which of us were you following?” she asked, lowering her newspaper.

“Ma’am?” he said, stalling.

She took her glasses off, and Welborn felt his pulse quicken.

The arrival of the waitress provided a welcome interruption. Welborn forsook a cup of coffee in favor of a glass of ice water. He also asked for a large orange juice and a bran muffin. The colonel ordered French toast with strawberries on the side. The waitress smiled and left.

Carina Linberg said, “I made a phone call while I was waiting for you.”

“Ma’am?”

“I had a friend run the license plate of that car you slept in.”

Welborn stiffened. He hadn’t thought military intelligence would have access to civilian databases. Now he knew better. OJT.

“It belongs to Kira Fahey, Vice President Wyman’s niece.”

“Yes, ma’am, it does.”

“The friend who dug up that information also found photos of Ms. Fahey. He sent me one.” She brought up a photo of a smiling Kira on the screen of her cell phone and showed it to Welborn. “Attractive young lady.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The colonel put her phone away. “And you know her well enough to borrow her car. Unless, of course, you stole it.”

“It was a loan.”

“All perfectly innocent.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So who were you following, Lieutenant? Captain Cowan or me?”

“Neither of you. I was on my way to call on you at home when I saw the captain’s car in the parking lot. I pulled into the hotel lot to check the plates, make sure it was his vehicle, and I decided to wait.”

“To catch us almost in the act.”

Before Welborn could say anything, the waitress returned with their orders. She topped off the colonel’s coffee and said to let her know if they needed anything else.

“I was hoping I wouldn’t, ma’am,” Welborn told the colonel.

She looked at him as she chewed her first bite.

“But then I woke you up this morning.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But I wasn’t with Captain Cowan.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you know what went on at this hotel last night, Lieutenant?”

When he was slow to answer, she told him. “There was a seminar called Command Careers after the Military. It was put on by a civilian head-hunting firm with offices around the country. I attended and so did Captain Cowan. Separately. We saw each other but never exchanged so much as a hello.”

Welborn remained silent.

“You should be able to get a list of the people present. They’ll tell you.”

“Why did you take a room, ma’am, when you live nearby?”

“I’m having my condo painted. So I can sell it faster. Get a better price.”

Welborn asked, “Why are you asking for a RILO, Colonel?”

She put down her fork and sipped her coffee.

“Isn’t it obvious, Lieutenant? Somebody’s out to get me. Somebody I can never beat. That’s who you should be looking for. The person who decided to end my military career. See what his motives are.” She smiled and shook her head. “The funny thing is, now that I know my days in the Air Force are coming to an end, I’m relieved. Happy, even. I’ve served my country for eighteen years, and soon I’ll be a free woman again — unless, of course, they lock me up.”

She took another sip of coffee.

“You didn’t sleep with Captain Cowan last night, ma’am?”

“No. Have you slept with the vice president’s niece?”

Welborn started to answer but Carina Linberg held up a hand.

“I don’t really want to know. I just wanted to make a point. As a civilian, you’d be free to tell me to fuck off. That’s pretty appealing, don’t you think?”