Dead on Arrival (14 page)

With the two kids who had tried to blow up the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, the Bureau knew for a fact that an al-Qaeda operative was involved. In the case of Mustafa Ahmed and Youseff Khalid they were convinced of similar organized terrorist involvement but as yet had no concrete evidence to support their theory. But when one took into account all the factors involved – the literature in Mustafa’s house, his bitterness toward the judicial system, the sophisticated bomb vest, the depression caused by his financial problems – the FBI believed it had a pretty good case that Mustafa, with the help of some radical group, had the motive and means to blow up the Capitol.

But the
real
problem with all of this, DeMarco told Emma, was not Mustafa but the guy who had killed Mustafa.

His name was Rollie.

* * *

‘Rollie?’ Emma said.

‘Right,’ DeMarco said. ‘His full name is Roland, but he looks like a Rollie and everybody calls him Rollie.’

Roland Patterson was a short overweight guy with bad feet who always looked puzzled. He was a security guard who screened people entering the Capitol and made sure they walked through the metal detector. And if the detector alarmed, Rollie would tell them to take the change out of their pockets. That was Rollie’s job.

‘I’ve never talked to the guy,’ DeMarco told Emma, ‘but I see him in the morning, about half the time when I go to my office. And right away you get a sense of him. The other guards will be sitting there bullshitting, and they’ll be giving Rollie a hard time. He’s just that kind of guy, the kind other guys are always teasing about something. And he always has this confused look on his face.’

What DeMarco meant was that if one of the other guards said, ‘Hey, Rollie, go get us some coffee,’ Rollie’s brow would furl and he’d get an expression on his face as if he were being asked to make a number of extremely complex decisions. Where should he go for the coffee? What size cups should he get? Should he pay for the coffee or ask the other guys to pay? DeMarco had no evidence that Rollie was in any way stupid. He was just a guy who mulled things over slowly and took his time answering.

The other thing about Rollie was that he almost always worked near one of the Capitol’s entrances, at a job where he could sit for long periods. Supposedly, Rollie had a partial disability, some problem with his feet that prevented him from walking the perimeter.

‘The day Rollie killed Mustafa Ahmed, he did two things completely out of character,’ DeMarco told Emma. ‘First, he decided to take a walk when he went on his break. Normally, when it was time for Rollie’s break, he’d go into this little room the guards used and have a snack and read the paper. But that day – and it was colder than hell outside – he decided to stretch his legs and walk around the building, and he just
happened
to stop and bullshit with the two guys guarding the West Terrace barrier. The second thing he did that was unusual was that he made a decision and he made it quickly.’

This was what really bothered DeMarco: Rollie, a guy who couldn’t seem to decide what kind of doughnut to buy, assessed the situation with Mustafa in about five seconds and then pulled out his gun and killed him.

‘I mean, that’s what I don’t get,’ DeMarco said. ‘The other two guards, they’re scared shitless trying to figure out what to do. Here’s this crazy guy walking toward them with enough explosives on him to blow the dome off the building, they’ve never been in a situation like this before in their lives, and they’re probably thinking that if they shoot Mustafa they’ll hit the C-Four and blow themselves to kingdom come. But not Rollie. Friggin’ Rollie takes out his gun and blows the guy away.’

There was one other thing about Rollie, DeMarco explained to Emma. While everybody agreed that Rollie was a malingering slug, they also agreed he could shoot a pistol. When the guards had to pass their shooting quals, Rollie had no trouble at all. He was overweight, flatfooted, and not the least bit athletic, but he was a natural when it came to using a pistol.

‘Hmm,’ Emma said. ‘Anything else?’

‘Well, no, but when you look at the whole package, you’ve got a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense: an apparently apolitical cabdriver who suddenly decides to become a suicide bomber, and the guy who takes him out is the last person you’d expect to do it. It’s just a puzzle.’

‘And maybe a conspiracy,’ Emma said, smiling slightly.

He sat watching the television set, amazed at what had almost happened.

A man had just tried to walk into the U.S. Capitol with an explosive device strapped to his body. They had pictures of the man – somehow, some way, in this country there was
always
someone with a camera or a cell phone nearby – and the pictures showed the man standing, his arms outstretched, and then the bullets striking his chest. Why didn’t the bomb explode? he wondered.

But it was still amazing. Counting the man who had tried to crash his plane into the White House, there had been three attacks by Muslim Americans in a period of less than a month, and the last two had been only a week apart. The country was in an absolute frenzy. This man Broderick and his bill, his law – whatever they called it – it appeared he was going to succeed.

And if he did, the hatred would grow.

Maybe that was why the attacks had happened so close together: because Sheikh Osama wanted this law passed. But that could also explain the failures. Whoever was helping the American martyrs had rushed their planning or had not trained their recruits well or had not checked their equipment as thoroughly as they should have. But still, two attacks in seven days? That was phenomenal. They had never acted this quickly in the past.

He was embarrassed. He knew he had to move slowly and cautiously; unlike his brethren here in America,
his
identity was definitely known to the authorities. Still, it had been over three months since Baltimore. He needed to move more rapidly, particularly if his success could influence this law they kept talking about.

He and the boy had been to the refinery five times now, three times during the day, twice at night, and they still had one or more trips to make before they would be ready. The first visit had been the most dangerous. He had stopped the El Camino on a road that was not heavily traveled, and from which he could see the refinery, and then he had jacked up the vehicle to make it appear that he was changing a flat tire. But if a policeman had driven by, and if he had seen two Arabs, and if he’d realized the significance of the refinery, they could have been arrested on the spot. That did not happen, though; God protected them.

During the first visit, he and the boy studied the refinery for three hours. He took photographs with a digital camera with a long-range lens and used binoculars to study the markings on the various tanks and pipes. The refinery was
filled
with tanks and pipes; it was a forest of tanks and pipes. But the boy was very bright and he had no trouble at all memo rizing the markings that were significant and tracing the routing of the pipes that were important.

The next two daylight visits, he’d dropped the boy off and told him to find the best spots to place the explosives, places not too close together, places where the charges would not be visible to someone passing by, places where he could hide when he attached the bombs. He told the boy it was particularly important that certain valves be destroyed so the valves couldn’t be shut to stop the chemical from escaping.

He purchased bright-colored clothes for the boy, the type of clothes that teenagers his age wore: a sweatshirt that had the logo of a local sports team, baggy jeans, silly-looking tennis shoes. He made the boy turn the bill of the baseball cap around so it was pointed backwards, and when the boy did he couldn’t help but laugh. Even the boy laughed, something that rarely happened.

And he told the boy, ‘Don’t sneak. Don’t act like you’re skulking about. Act like a boy. Throw rocks, kick cans, run a stick along the fence. You’re just a boy walking about, going wherever boys go.’ On the last visit they’d been lucky enough to find a dog wandering near the refinery, and he tied his belt around the dog’s neck to serve as a leash, and the boy had pretended to walk the dog as he looked for places to hide the bombs.

‘So you wanna know about Jubal Pugh,’ Patsy Hall said.

Hall was a mid-level supervisor at the DEA, and according to Barry King she was the DEA’s expert on Pugh. She was in her early forties and had smile lines bracketing intelligent brown eyes, a trim build, and short-cut, no-fuss dark hair. She was wearing a charcoal-gray pantsuit, a white blouse, and a big gun in a holster on her hip. She was short enough – and the gun was big enough – that the handgrip on the gun was halfway up her rib cage.

Two minutes with Hall, and you knew you were dealing with someone who was bright, tough, stubborn, and confident. DeMarco bet that none of the men who worked for her had any doubt that she was the boss, and most of them, the ones with any brains, knew she deserved to be the boss.

‘Jubal Pugh,’ Patsy said, ‘likes to—’

‘Jubal,’ DeMarco said. ‘That name just cracks me up.’

‘His full name in Jubal
Early
Pugh, Jubal Early having been a Confederate Army general who – Aw, never mind. At any rate, Jubal likes to wear an old slouch hat and he shaves about once a week. In the summer, he wears bib overalls, no shirt, no shoes, and he talks so slow you wonder if he’s ever gonna finish a sentence. Your first impression would be that he’s the brother of the guy who played the banjo in
Deliverance
. And you’d be totally wrong.

‘Pugh sells meth; he’s one of the top five dealers in Virginia. His territory also includes parts of West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. I know he’s killed people and burned their houses and intimidated witnesses to stay king of his little hill. I know all this, and I haven’t even been able to arrest the bastard, much less convict him. And I’ve been after him for more than five years.’

Hall gave a little tug on her holster to readjust the pistol grip digging into her ribs.

‘Jubal didn’t go to school beyond the tenth grade, and he started out with a 1956 Airstream trailer and ten acres he inherited from his daddy. Today he owns
four hundred
acres. He’s got apple orchards and gas stations and a muffler shop, and he makes cider for sale. He uses these businesses to launder his drug money. He’s not that smart, but he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know. He’s got a good accountant, who makes sure he stays out of trouble with the IRS, and another guy who manages his legitimate businesses. And even though he’s no Rhodes scholar, he hires people that are competent and then he micromanages the shit out of them so they don’t screw up.’

‘Isn’t he some kind of white supremacist too?’ DeMarco said.

Hall laughed. ‘Yeah, Jubal’s the head of a group called America First. And you know why he heads up this group? For money, pure and simple. His militia or club or whatever the hell it is never meets, but it has about three hundred dues-paying members. Jubal hired a kid from Shenandoah University to build him a Web site, and every month the kid writes a bunch of garbage about how blacks and Hispanics and whoever are taking over America, and every month a bunch of idiots send money, just small donations, but it adds up. The Web site cost Jubal only two hundred bucks to design and he makes a few thousand dollars a year off the loonies who support groups like his.’

‘So why can’t you nail him?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Do you know anything about meth?’ Patsy Hall said.

‘No.’

‘Well, let me to tell you,’ she said.

* * *

Methamphetamine is highly addictive, and the effects of the drug on the human body are devastating. Longtime users will appear twenty years older than their actual age, will have lost their teeth, and have open sores on their faces. And the drug doesn’t simply affect the users. In communities where meth addiction is widespread, crime – theft and murder – tends to skyrocket.

Depending on purity and availability, a pound of meth can cost as little as six thousand dollars or as much as twenty thousand dollars, and the thing that makes meth particularly troublesome to law enforcement is that anyone can make it. Poppy flowers and coca plants and complex equipment are not required. To make meth – or
cook it
, as they say – most of the ingredients and equipment needed, things like rubbing alcohol and drain cleaner and lye and lithium batteries, can be found at your neighborhood hardware store.

The key ingredient in methamphetamine is either ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, chemicals found in over-the-counter cold medicines like Sudafed and Actifed and a dozen other brands used to unstop your stuffy nose. Meth cookers used to be able to walk into drugstores, buy all the Sudafed on the shelf, and then go home and cook up a few batches of speed for themselves and their friends.

But times had changed. Laws were now in place in an increasing number of states limiting the amount of ephedrine-based drugs that an individual can buy at one time. And consumers of these cold remedies are required to show the pharmacist a driver’s license, and the pharmacist is required to record the name and address of the buyer. Then the pharmacies provide the narcotics cops with these names and addresses, and the narcos start watching those folk who seem to have a chronic case of the sniffles and live in shacks out in the woods.

So in the last few years, because of the difficulty of purchasing ephedrine in the States, Mexican cartels had become the primary manufacturer and distributor of meth because they were able to purchase ephedrine in large quantities – large being
tons
– directly from the nine foreign chemical companies who make the stuff. According to Patsy Hall, what Pugh had managed to do was get a Mexican connection to provide his ephedrine – a connection small-time local dealers didn’t have – and then Pugh either sold the ephedrine directly to cookers or cooked the meth himself for distribution.

‘What’s all this have to do with your not being able to nail Pugh?’ DeMarco asked.

‘Right now,’ Patsy Hall said, ‘meth is a big problem on the West Coast and a growing issue in the Midwest. Because of the proximity to Mexico, places like California and Arizona are up to their necks in the shit. But here on the East Coast, the big drugs are still heroin and crack cocaine, and the DEA’s budget and manpower are primarily focused on the big cities where most of the dealers and users live. What all that means is I can’t get the priority I need to nail an SOB like Jubal Pugh who deals meth and lives out in the sticks.’

Hall tugged on her gun again; DeMarco guessed she did that a hundred times a day.

‘Someplace on Pugh’s property is a meth lab,’ Hall said. ‘And every day a bunch of cars and trucks and tankers go onto his property. They deliver fertilizer or insecticide or they drop off people who pick apples or prune his damn trees or clear the brush on his land. And because he has four hundred goddamn acres, there’s a dozen ways to get on and off his property, and meth and ephedrine are not bulky items – we’re not talking bales of marijuana here – so the shit’s easy to hide.

‘The bottom line is, I can’t get the warrants I need to search Jubal’s place and all the vehicles that are constantly going on and off his property because I don’t have the two dozen additional agents I need to follow all these vehicles. And when it comes to distribution, like most drug kingpins Jubal is personally three or four steps removed from the actual deals. People he trusts make the dope and give the dope to distributors, the distributors give it to dealers, and the dealers sell it to the junkies. So when the cops actually catch some tweaker with meth in his jeans, they can’t get that person to testify against Jubal because the tweaker’s never met him. Or they catch a dealer and he gives up his supplier, and we get the supplier
but
, because he wasn’t arrested for murder, the damn judge lets the guy out on bail and the next thing you know the guy has vanished into thin air or turns up dead or develops total amnesia because Jubal has most likely told him he’s gonna die if he talks.’

‘Sheesh,’ DeMarco said, but Patsy Hall wasn’t through with her rant.

‘The other way we usually get guys like him,’ Hall said, ‘is we plant someone in his organization, an undercover cop or some lowlife we’ve caught who’ll work for us to keep from going to jail. But Jubal’s too smart to let that happen. Normally he only hires people he knows personally, but if he hires an outsider he does a background check on the guy on par with what the government does to issue a Top Secret security clearance.

‘So,’ she said, ‘I know the guy is importing ephedrine, I know he has a meth lab someplace on his property, and I know he’s doing all sorts of bad things – and I can’t get him. But I’m
gonna
get him,’ Hall said. ‘I swear to God I will.’

DeMarco also asked her about Donny Cray. She knew Cray was dead but she didn’t know Cray’s thumbprint had been found in Reza Zarif’s house.

‘You’re kidding!’ she said to DeMarco.

‘No,’ he said, and told her the FBI’s theory that Cray had most likely sold Reza the gun he used to kill his wife and kids.

‘That’s possible,’ Hall said. ‘I mean, that’s the kind of thing Donny used to do before he started working for Jubal, but I’m still surprised. Pugh keeps his people on a short leash. He wouldn’t like Donny having some kind of sideline enterprise that could land him into trouble with ATF.’

‘Yeah, that’s the same thing Barry King told me,’ DeMarco said. ‘But now let me ask you something that’s gonna sound kinda strange. Do you think Pugh would be the type to get involved in these Muslim terrorist attacks that have been taking place lately?’

‘What in the hell are you talking about?’ Hall said.

DeMarco was somewhat reluctant to let Hall know what he was thinking. She was a law enforcement fed and would obviously be more inclined to accept the Bureau’s version of events than his, but he decided he had to tell her. And he liked her and she seemed like someone he could trust. So he told her his suspicions about Rollie and the Capitol bomber and how some things about the attacks just didn’t add up, but in particular how he couldn’t accept that Reza Zarif had killed his family.

He concluded by saying, ‘What I’m asking is this: Do you think Pugh is the type that would threaten to kill Reza Zarif’s children to make Zarif crash his plane into the White House?’

DeMarco realized how ridiculous that sounded the minute the words left his mouth.

‘Not for political reasons,’ Hall said. ‘Jubal couldn’t care less about politics. For money he might do something like that – he’d do anything for money – but what you’re saying … Well, I just can’t imagine Pugh getting involved in something so high profile. He’d know that the FBI and Homeland Security and God knows how many other federal agencies would be coming after him. I mean,
I
may not be able to get the priority to nab him, but those guys sure as hell could. No, for Jubal to get mixed up in this terrorist stuff, the payoff would have to be
huge
.’

‘Yeah, but who would pay him?’ DeMarco said.

‘Hey, it’s your theory not mine,’ Hall said.

DeMarco was silent for a moment before he said, ‘There’s one other thing. The bomb the cabdriver had – it didn’t explode. The Bureau said a wire came loose, but it’s hard to believe with as much bomb-making experience as al-Qaeda has that they’d screw up like that. But maybe someone like Pugh would make that kind of mistake.’

Hall shook her head. ‘I think you’re totally off base thinking Pugh’s involved in any terrorist stuff. I mean, he’s fire-bombed other meth dealers’ labs, I know that for a fact, but I just can’t see him making a bomb out of C-Four with a dead man’s switch. No. That’s just way too high tech for Jubal. He’s a bottle-of-gas-and-a-rag kinda guy.’