Cold Frame (6 page)

“Okay, I want to hear you say it: McGavin—did you arrange for him to be killed?”

“Of
course
not,” he said. “But, like I said, I am going to take advantage of his sudden death to do some good work for Jesus. In my view, what we have here are some American bureaucrats who've joined forces with the enemy by trying to undo the DMX. Oh, I don't mean literally joined the enemy, but I'm nothing if not a net-results man. These guys are helping some shaky old barnacles in the Senate, who've lost their nerve, to take away the only surviving U.S. government entity with the power to strike our worst enemies and: Kill. Them. Dead.”

“You really believe this, don't you,” she said, softly. “That if someone starts to have doubts about the DMX and the Kill List, it would be convenient if they just—died? Is that what I hear you saying?”

“You
never
heard me say that, Ellen Whiting,” he said. “But it's good to know you understand where I'm coming from. And just to amplify: I'd find a way to take down the entire committee if I thought that would preserve the Kill List. This town is nothing if not chock full of bureaucrats. I'm sure I could refill the DMX in about an hour.”

She blinked. Then he saw understanding wash over her face: what was it he'd called her? My dear coconspirator? “What if I just go warn the other two?” she asked.

“I'll make sure your bosses in the Bureau know that you were there when McGavin suffered his unfortunate—accident.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it.

“Hey?” he said. “Let's indulge in a little armed d
é
tente, why don't we? This is Washington. Let's make a deal. You agree to keep your mouth shut about my—um, sentiments. You forget I ever asked you to sweet-talk McGavin. You revert to simply being the Bureau's rep on DMX. If you hear about any sort of serious investigation into McGavin's sudden demise, you keep me informed. I, in turn, will keep my mouth shut about
your
role.”

She sat back in her chair.

“All right,” she said, suddenly calm. “A mutual lock, then.”

“Exactly,” he said, relieved. “The best kind. Now: I need to get back to my office. I believe we're done here, aren't we?”

*   *   *

When she had gone, Mandeville picked up the secure phone at the head of the table and called a number at FBI headquarters. He punched in four digits when the menu robot started up.

“Audiovisual support services,” a man's voice answered. “Kyle Strang.”

“Call me back on a secure line.”

“We may have a problem,” Mandeville said once Strang called back and the sync tones subsided. “Whiting's developed cold feet. Thinks I may have had something to do with the McGavin thing.”

“Perish the thought,” Strang said.

“Yes, really,” Mandeville said. “I denied everything of course, but now she's very suspicious. I've talked her out of doing anything. Told her to go back to simply doing her day job on the DMX.”

“Then there's no problem,” Strang said.

“You're probably right, now that I think about it,” Mandeville said. “Plus, there is a bright side. At some point, we might need a patsy.”

There was a long moment of silence on the phone. “You mean if somebody
outside
of DMX starts looking into the, um, coincidences?” Strang said.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Like?”

“Some office in Metro PD called ILB.”

“Lemme pull the string on that,” Strang said. “I'll get back to you.”

An hour later Strang called back. “Metro PD sent McGavin's body to MedStar, who sent it along to OCME,” he reported. “My sources tell me that OCME pathologists are holding both the cause
and
the manner of death open.”

“Why do we care?”

“Cause of death should be damned near impossible to determine, but manner of death might turn out to be more important.”

“I'm confused.”

“Manner of death: natural, accidental, physiological incident, suicide, or homicide.”

“Oh,” Mandeville said. He thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Who's involved at MPD?”

“Like you said, Metro PD has an office called the ILB—they're—”

“Yes, Whiting told me. So?”

“One of their detectives has taken an interest.”

“Again, why should we care? As I understand it, in the great scheme of things, ILB is nobody-minus.”

“OCME's pushing for disposition instructions. This ILB detective told them to wait. Apparently he's on the hunt for the mysterious girlfriend who disappeared right after McGavin checked out.”

“Does he have her name?”

“Apparently he does.”

“Ah,” Mandeville said. “That we do
not
need.”

“Want to calibrate him?”

“Gently,” Mandeville said. “Find a way to let him know that he's playing above his pay grade. If he's any sort of cop at all he'll get the message, but do keep it subtle. For now.”

“I know some people who can do subtle,” Strang said. “I think.”

“Get me his name and where he lives,” Mandeville said, and then hung up.

He sat back to think, as the Washington workweek began to dissolve into intractable traffic outside the EEOB. He could hear office doors down the cavernous marble-floored hallways closing and the sounds of staffers trying not to break into an unseemly trot down the halls in search of the weekend.

A Metro cop. A nobody. On the scale of important things in Washington, the Metro Police Department was somewhere down in the weeds. The distance between the National Security Council and the MPD was measured in light-years.

And yet: a presidency had been brought down by some drone leaving a door wedged open with a piece of paper, which had been discovered by—wait for it: a building security rent-a-cop at the Watergate. For want of a nail …

Strang would have someone lean gently, for a start, anyway, on the cop. The cop would go tell his boss, the one in the office who could both read and write, and he would tell the cop: watchit. But: was that enough?

He knew he hadn't convinced Ellen Whiting of anything. She suspected that he'd done something to McGavin, or, at the very least, lit that fuse, which was why he'd wrapped a lock on her: you bought the flowers, you were there when he died, not me. It hadn't been subtle, and she'd caught on immediately. So: for the moment, anyway, Ellen Whiting had been neutralized. She was an up-and-comer in the Bureau, where even the whiff of any kind of screwup or, worse, scandal, would see her career go up in flames.

His phone rang, and Strang gave him the information on the Metro cop.

He hung up, thought some more, and then made a decision. He picked up the phone and dialed a twelve-digit number. There were a series of clicks, and then silence, followed by a voice-mail beep.

“Beacon twenty-three,” he said. “Tonight.” Then he pressed the pound key and hung up.

 

FOUR

Av had to penetrate Amex's version of menu hell through six iterations before he snared a human in card security, who told him to bring them a warrant. Av told the man that he wasn't looking for a data dump, just a phone number for McGavin's next of kin, now that he was unexpectedly deceased. That was news to the security guy, who said there was a hefty balance on the account. The security guy's supervisor came on, took ILB's office number, called him back, and then gave him McGavin's home phone number.

A stuffy-sounding man answered the McGavins' residence phone. Av identified himself as a Metro police detective and asked to speak to Mrs. McGavin. The man told him that Mrs. McGavin was not taking any phone calls due to the recent death of her husband. Av then asked for an appointment with Mrs. McGavin. Not likely, the man responded with an aristocratic sniff. Her attorney, possibly? Who is her attorney? You said you're a detective, the man said, and then hung up.

Everyone's a wiseass today, he thought. He was about to call back, but then realized that he no longer had to make a notification because, apparently, the widow already knew. But: they still needed an autopsy authorization. Okay, if the family wouldn't talk to him, then he'd get a court order. Use that John Doe business.

He paused.
How
had the widow already known? The hospital was calling the case a John Doe. OCME, currently holding the remains, was calling him a John Doe. So who the hell had informed the newly minted widow? His office? And who'd called
them
? Not the OCME, not MedStar, and not ILB—so: the girlfriend? Had to be, didn't it?

Okay, he decided; tee up this Ellen Whiting, then. He looked at his watch—almost four-thirty on a Friday. That meant Monday for the mysterious lady luncheon partner. Right now, let's get a court-ordered autopsy rolling. Four-thirty. Well, he'd give it a try, but on a Friday afternoon it was very likely that their honors would have bailed at two for the golf course.

Friday. Thank God. Monday would be good enough. It wasn't like he was going to bring McGavin back to life, and, besides, he wasn't even supposed to be trying to solve this one.

*   *   *

Carl Mandeville paused to look for traffic coming around the Lincoln Monument. Even at midnight there was still some traffic; this was Washington, after all. He crossed the narrow lane into the trees and sidewalks flanking the reflecting pool, a custom-made Burger walking stick tapping the concrete discreetly as he walked toward the distant Capitol building. More than most, he was aware of the security patrols in the precincts of the White House. Carl Mandeville did not sleep very much, if at all. He walked the Mall just about every night unless the weather was really bad. The night security people all knew who he was, the great big guy from the White House who haunted the Mall and the monuments at midnight, walking boldly forward as if on an urgent mission of state, with that fancy walking stick, which contained a seventeen-inch Damascus steel blade, gripped firmly in his right hand. He wore his usual dark suit, a lightweight overcoat if the temperature demanded it, and a dark gray fedora which added four inches to his already imposing height. Secret Service agents sitting in darkened vehicles would whisper into their lapel mikes: Mandeville, at the Lincoln, headed east.

When he'd first started making his nightly excursions onto the Mall, there'd been night owls all over the area, couples getting some air after a big dinner at one of the downtown eateries, workaholics getting some badly needed exercise, street thieves, panhandlers, and muggers over from Anacostia, hoping to get lucky, tottering drunks trying to find their cars, furtive gays, and a few homeless people. Not anymore. After nine-eleven, this part of Washington around the White House, a teeming tourist mecca by day, had become an armed camp after dark. He knew about the gun emplacements on top of many of the federal buildings, and the real reason why the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument had been closed for so long after the earthquake. If he had stopped suddenly, got down on one knee, and aimed his walking stick at the White House, seven snipers would have dropped him in two seconds. Brave new world, he thought, as he reached the World War II Memorial, so small considering the global holocaust it was supposed to memorialize. And they were all missing the point.

The threat's not here, boys, he wanted to shout to the caffeine-jagged agents trying to stay awake in their parked cars. The real threat's offshore, where an Iranian tramp steamer would one day lay to fifty miles off Maryland, open a cargo hatch, and fire a ballistic missile into the atmosphere above Illinois and fry every tendril of the electrical system the whole country depended on. The threat's on the Mexican border, where depraved Muslim fireheads carrying a vial of Ebola-virus-infected blood in a hornet spray can would come over one night amid the flood of “homeless refugees” and take a Graypup to a football game in Dallas. It was all well and good for the TSA goons to pat down granny at the airport and dump the baby out of its airplane car seat, but the Big Deal, when it came, would come from
outside
the country, directed by seventh-century barbarians who'd finally realized that the modern world had consigned them to the dustbin of history.

In other words, the Candidates.

He sighed in frustration as he tramped across the Mall itself. The DMX was the only entity in the byzantine world of federal counterterrorism that was aiming at those shadowy maniacs who set the martyrs in motion, aided and abetted by oil money and Saudi princelings who were playing both sides just to be safe. One good thing about all those agencies involved: they cast a wide net, and the process, however unwieldy, had surfaced some real bad guys out there on the edges of the Empire. And the Muslims knew it. He could never prove it, but he'd become convinced that the legislators who were now out to undo DMX had been bought off by the same people who were determined to destroy America, that blazing glass house on the hill, whose entire nervous system ran on something so delicate as the Internet and the galactic array of electronics that made it all possible.

He reached the base of the Washington Monument and, like every tourist before him, looked up at the spotlighted obelisk. He repressed an urge to wave at the watchers up there, both human and robotic, and then looked around for Evangelino. There he was, sitting on a park bench about fifty yards away, staring at nothing.

Evangelino Francini was so named by a very misguided mother of Sicilian heritage who had hoped to invoke the protection of her family's patron saint by imposing this outrageous name on her second son when he was born in Brooklyn. Once in school, where names began to matter, he'd tried to call himself just Gino, but the word got out and he had become, out of necessity and the annoyance of daily fistfights when someone called him Evangeline, one of the toughest kids in school. From there he'd graduated to being a hanger-on with the neighborhood mob, and from there to a made man in his early twenties in the Fortunato family business. Fifteen years into his career as a mobster, he'd been given the assignment of supervising the takedown of a Brinks armored van. The operation had gone like clockwork, thanks to two drivers who'd been paid off handsomely to decamp, right to the point where Gino, standing in the back of the truck in wide-eyed amazement over a pile of cash beyond his wildest dreams, had gunned down his two accomplices and then driven the van to an abandoned warehouse in Queens sometimes used by the mob to store corpses. Leaving his erstwhile associates in the van, he'd coolly taken the subway back down to Brooklyn, loaded up his Ford Econoline van with a few personal possessions, gone back to the warehouse, loaded up the cash, set fire to the warehouse, and left for Florida that very night.