Strike Force Charlie (36 page)

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Authors: Mack Maloney

BOOK: Strike Force Charlie
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Rushton looked at the man for a very long time, then glanced at Li.
“Do you really think I need any more protection than this?” he asked with a wink.
The security man did not smile. But it made no difference. The elevator had arrived by this time. Rushton and Li quickly stepped inside it and were gone.
The bodyguard called down to the lobby to pass the word to his men down there that Rushton was on the move.
But the general never reached the lobby. Instead he and Li got off at the second floor and took the stairs down to the basement. A side door led them out to Pennsylvania Avenue. Li's car was parked nearby.
As soon as he walked out into the waning light, Rushton became distraught. He felt very exposed after so long being surrounded by bodyguards. People on the street who recognized him stopped and pointed at him. He tried to turn around and go back, but Li calmed him down, assuring him this was the right thing to do, that he was finally in good hands. At last, they reached her car.
She let him in, locking the door behind him, then went around to the driver's side and got in herself. She turned the key and the Toyota's engine roared to life.
“Where to now?” he asked her, nearly in tears.
Li just looked at him and smiled. “Do you like haunted houses, General?”
Rushton didn't know what to say. That's when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around to see a fist coming right at him.
“Hi, General,” Ozzi said, delivering a crushing blow to Rushton's nose. “Remember me?”
 
When Rushton woke up again, he really did believe he was in a haunted house.
Through barely slits in his eyes he could see he was in a room that was full of cobwebs and covered with dust, with weird light pouring through dirty cracked windows. Even in his first few seconds of hazy consciousness he could hear the
old house creaking, the wind running through its rafters, the moaning of spirits just one room away.
Then he heard the telltale sound of someone typing.
He finally opened his eyes fully to see the beautiful Asian woman sitting across the room, at a very messy desk that was covered with wires and cables and pieces of doughnuts. His hands and feet were tied with bedsheets. And on the walls all around him different-sized pictures of the same image, one that he'd seen just once before: the crude drawing of the Nellis attack as depicted on the coffee-stained napkin.
He also saw two dark figures staring down at him. One was the man who'd sucker-punched him in the car, knocking him cold until this moment. He was such a little man in stature, Rushton was almost embarrassed that such a blow from him would put him out. Next to him, covered in bandages, was a huge individual who looked like he ate young children for breakfast. And indeed Rushton slowly recognized both of them. They'd been part of the rogue unit he'd rounded up in the Philippines not two months ago.
And that's when he knew for sure that he'd been had … .
Rushton just couldn't believe it. All the planning, all the details attended to, the dreams of power and glory. All gone because, like many aspirants before him, he'd been stupid enough to fall for a story from a beautiful woman.
He reached up and felt blood all over his face, especially on his lips and nose. Then suddenly there was a boot on his stomach.
“You made this job easy for us, General,” the large man was saying now. “We were running all over the city trying to find a way to pop you. Now, we can just do it here, all warm and cozy like … .”
Rushton could barely speak; he had no doubts these two would kill him, right here, in cold blood.
“You people are crazy, you know,” he said suddenly, surprised the words came out of his mouth. “It's people like you that made me do what I did.”
The boot felt heavier on his gut. “Save your breath, General. You're going to need it.”
Meanwhile, Li was pounding nonstop on the computer—Rushton's computer. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.
“Dear God,” she kept saying, over and over. “I just don't believe this … .”
It was all in there, everything Rushton had been up to in the last few months, weakly hidden by security walls that Li broke down routinely now. And it was bombshell information, something that could shake the U.S. government to its foundations.
But the strange thing was, it actually had little to do with Al Qaeda, Stinger missiles, or Greyhound buses.
It had
more
to do with Rushton's secret lunches and the traffic jams in Washington for the past week and why the Army was hiding in alleyways and jets were constantly flying overhead.
She read it all, then she got up and spat in Rushton's face.
“What kind of monster are you?” she hissed at him. “Are you just insane or power-hungry? Or both?”
Rushton was almost too dazed to talk.
“I don't know,” he finally blurted out, as if all the air had suddenly gone out of him. “I just don't know … .”
Ozzi stared at her. He'd never seen her act like this before.
“What is it?” he asked. “We knew he was tied into this thing from the beginning. What else could it be?'
She just pointed to the laptop. “You'll have to read it yourself.”
Ozzi and Hunn sat down at the old desk and did just that.
The story that emerged was indeed chilling. It was the last file—the one simply marked “May 1-7”—that proved to be the real smoking gun. It was the same file they'd found in Palm Tree's PDA surrounded by so many security walls, they couldn't bust into it. But here it was now. Notes, memos, letters, e-mails. All of it, in plain English.
Sure, Rushton had been in cahoots with the terrorists, as well as the French intelligence services. He was the one who'd arranged for the Stinger missiles to get into the hands of Al Qaeda; he was the one who'd cleared the way, with an
assist from the DGSE, for them to be spirited into the United States via the port of LA without a security search. He'd made sure no one was looking for the Greyhound buses by scaring the hell out of the entire country with false reports about WMD bombs soon to explode somewhere in the United States. He was the one who denied that terrorists were roaming around the country, taking shots at airliners, and that a rogue team of special ops people was chasing after them, trying to prevent disaster.
He did all these things—but it wasn't for money or revenge or some other crazy reason. He did them as a diversion.
For a coup d'état …
An overthrow of the American government.
Once again, it was the oldest trick in the book. Get everyone looking in one direction, while you plan something in the other. Cause havoc inside the Beltway and out, then gather together the real power brokers in Washington and basically say to them: See what is happening? The people who attended his secret lunches, the people who smoked fat cigars at the Oak House. Convince them that America had changed way too much since 9/11—or that it hadn't changed enough. Whisper that typical politicians were too weak to deal with a changing world. Portray the President as a misguided intellectual boob. Stir the pot with a few select military commanders who had the same ideas and have them call their troops into the streets for a week, just enough until people in D.C. got used to seeing them—then strike! Tie up every key intersection in the district. Surround the White House and the Capitol with troops. Knock the networks off the air. Then seize power … and change the world.
Would it have worked? No way. Rushton's plan read like a bad movie script. But would America be weakened just by the attempt? In the minds of the people? Of the world? Of the financial markets?
Absolutely … .
“The May 1
7 Plan …
Seven Days in May,”
Ozzi said now after reading it through, putting the pieces together,
connecting the dots. A famous novel about a near coup back in the 1960s. That's why the file was labeled as it was.
“Strictly an amateur,” Hunn said now, putting some fresh ammunition into the team's lone M16 clone. “But dangerous nevertheless … .”
But then Ozzi stepped in.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Putting two into this guy, here, like this, might not be the way to go. It will only make us look like the villains once they catch up to us. And at that point no one will believe any of this is true—no one who wasn't involved in it, that is. Popping him here and dumping his body in a ditch is too good for him and bad for us. Somehow we've got to expose this asshole for what he is … .”
“I agree,” Li said, the blood running ice-cold in her veins by now. “He's got to go. Just like Palm Tree and Ramosa. But it has to be to our advantage.”
Rushton spit back at them. “Look at this,” he said. “A Chink, a commie, and a moron, trying to put the world back together again. It's exactly people like you who are ruining this country. Can you honestly say you think the person in the White House is capable of dealing with things today? Or those idiots in Congress? We're on the same side here, in a way. Power speaks. Power gets respect … .”
They let him talk, but they weren't really listening to him. They were huddled in the corner, trying to think of a way to prevent Rushton from becoming a martyr and thus encouraging others like him.
In the end it was Ozzi who came up with the perfect solution. No, they wouldn't pop Rushton here. They would do it someplace that would at least lead people to suspect that the facade he'd put forward—true—blue, family values type of guy—was not the real Rushton at all. And once that happened, maybe other people with more juice than they had would start looking into the whole thing. And maybe it would get exposed that way.
Ozzi told the others his idea, and they agreed it was worth a shot.
But they would have to work fast.
 
 
It was around 2:00 A.M. the next day when the Baltimore police got the call. There was an “undisclosed disturbance” at a brothel on the south side of town, a place that was once a playground for the rich and famous but had fallen into disrepair lately.
It was the second time in as many weeks the police had been called to the run-down cathouse. A body had been found there on the first call. Shot in the face, he was still lying in the morgue, unclaimed, listed as “John Doe/Filipino.” That case was unsolved of course. No suspects. No motive. Just another skel, found dead in a room full of needles.
The responding unit found pretty much the same thing this night. A dead body. No ID. No motive. Found on the third floor in the same room as the last.
The scene was puzzling even for the seen-it-all cops of South Baltimore. They thought they recognized the dead man's face, but it had already puffed up and was leaking pus. He was stripped of all his clothes, found propped on the filthy bed in the corner of the filthy room. He had a needle still stuck in his arm, his hand still on the plunger.
But he did not look like an ordinary junkie. He was obviously well fed, overweight even, clean, no tracks on his arms, with manicured fingernails, even pedicured feet. They doubted this body would lie unclaimed in the morgue for very long.
No one at the cathouse recalled seeing the man arrive—none of the hired help remembered taking him on. Though this was standard operating procedure in cases of cathouse murders, the cops tended to believe the residents this time. They seemed legitimately shocked that the body was here in the first place.
The cops were also hip enough to know that this was probably a setup, that whoever arranged the scenario had done it to disgrace the victim—a simple homicide not being good enough for him.
The cause of death would eventually be determined as air
being injected into a major artery, causing a bubble to race and then burst in the victim's heart. Painful and not as quick as it might sound. With the dark humor of the police in a tough part of town, they'd almost appreciated the joke. Someone who wasn't really a junkie dying a junkie's death.

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