The Enemy Inside (6 page)

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“He can’t run,” says Herman. “Can’t hide. Bail conditions see to that.”

“Yeah. It’s all pretty convenient, isn’t it?” I tell him.

Herman arches an eyebrow. “So what do we do? Where do we go from here?” He flips open his little notebook ready to jot down whatever little tidbits I can give him.

“Two unknowns,” I tell him. “First the mystery girl. We have only a partial name and a description. Asian, very good looking, long dark hair about the middle of her back, about five foot five or five six. First name or nickname, Ben. She has a tattoo on the inside of her left thigh, red and blue, probably a dragon or the tail of a dragon.”

Herman is still scribbling on the notepad.

“I would start with the local tattoo parlors.”

“Hell, there must be seven thousand of them,” says Herman, “and that’s only on one block downtown.”

“Got your work cut out,” I tell him. “Harry and I need to go to work on Alex, to loosen his tongue regarding this hot news tip he’s got involving Serna. Makes sense that if that’s the only connection between the two of them, and if the accident was staged to trap them both, that the story he was working on is probably the reason.”

“OK, tell me this,” says Harry. He finally looks up from the report. “Says here there is no evidence of mechanical malfunction in the steering or brake systems of either car. And catch this, no evidence of any malfunction or tampering with the accelerator, cruise control, or other speed maintenance systems in either vehicle.”

“They can tell all that from the burned-out remains?” says Herman.

“Steel doesn’t burn,” says Harry. “So, if he was unconscious, on roofies, unable to coordinate his arms or his legs and there was no alteration to the steering, the accelerator, or the cruise control, how did they do eighty miles an hour and steer one car into another in the space of a small intersection? And don’t tell me they did it remotely because if they did, there would be evidence of hardware left behind no matter how small it was. The cops would have found it.” Harry looks at me across the table, tapping the page of the accident report with his finger.

It is a good question, and one for which I have no answer.

SIX

T
he phone on her desk buzzed. Maya Grimes reached for the receiver.

“Senator, you have a call. The man refuses to identify himself but says you know him.”

She thought for a moment. “OK, put him through. And hold my other calls and appointments.” She put the receiver down and a few seconds later it buzzed again. Grimes picked it up. “Hello.”

“Sorry to bother you at your office.”

“I told you never to call me here. You’re not calling from a cell phone, are you?”

“I’m at a pay phone. It was unavoidable. We’ve got a problem. We have to talk.”

“Not here,” said Grimes. She glanced at her watch and thought for a moment. “The bench on the north side by the reflecting pool. You know the one.”

“Where we met last time?”

“Give me fifteen minutes.” Grimes hung up the phone.

Early spring, and the Mall outside the Capitol was already bustling with early tourists and busloads of children on school field trips. Senator Maya Grimes walked quickly, trying to melt into the crowd, as unobtrusive as possible. Still, her face was recognizable to some of the passersby who stared at her and others who stole second glances as she clicked along quickly in her high heels down the path.

Usually, if she had a private meeting, she would do it at some offbeat restaurant in the suburbs, take a car from the congressional fleet with darkened windows and a driver to deliver her to the door. But she wanted no record of this meeting popping up in the computer in the motor pool.

Grimes had been twenty-two years in the US Senate, chairperson of the Committee on Banking, vice chair of Senate Finance, and a senior member of several subcommittees on financial affairs. She came from California, where the cost of an election to the Senate was approaching thirty million dollars. This, coupled with her political gravitas around the Capitol, gave her more hours on television than most seasoned pilots have in the cockpit. Hers was one of those faces that people tended to recognize. She lost count of the number of times some idiot had stopped her on the street wondering what film it was they had seen her in. Usually she didn’t mind, but today she had a terminal case of bad temper. She nearly ran down a couple of third graders who aimlessly bolted into her path in a misguided game of tag.

A grandmother and seasoned politician, Grimes could usually turn on the charm for kids. Today she gave them a look from the Wicked Witch and kept moving quickly toward a small clump of trees along the north side of the reflecting pool. The walkway curved a little to the right. As she made the turn she saw him sitting there alone on the bench.

Grimes slowed down and looked around to make sure no one was watching, there were no idle picture-takers with their backs to the pool glancing at the bench and the bushes behind it. Of course they could be a mile away with powerful optics listening through an electronic bug the size of an aspirin glued to a man’s chest.

She walked slowly toward the bench, passed him by, and stopped. She stood there for a couple of seconds with her back to him, a few feet away. There was no one in earshot. “What do you want?”

“You want to walk and talk?” he asked.

“No!”

“Suit yourself. I’m just trying to help. You wanted to be kept informed. That’s what I’m doing.”

“So what is it?”

“She’s dead.”

“I know that!” It had been in the early-morning paper, identification of the woman killed in a car crash in Southern California. The
Washington Post
had played it up, page three with a two-column headline. Serna was a local political player, a lobbyist who was in and out of the Capitol on a regular basis. She had friends, lots of them, most of them women. Some of them were powerful. Grimes was no doubt at or near the top of that food chain.

“But there is still a problem,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Loose ends,” he said. “It wasn’t done cleanly—”

“I don’t want to know the details!” She cut him off quickly through clenched teeth. “I don’t know what happened and I don’t want to know. I am not part of it!”

“Of course not.” He smiled, looking at her from behind. For a woman in her early sixties, she still had a pretty good body. There were times when he wondered what she might be like in the sack; whether all that intensity would translate into sexual energy once you got her there. “Why don’t you come over and sit down.” He gently patted the slatted wood on the bench next to him.

He was lean, about six feet, gray-haired, tan complexion, blue eyes with just enough wrinkles in the forehead and the bags above his cheeks to look distinguished. It was a face that had seen some wear. His three-piece pinstriped navy suit might just as well have been a uniform around the government buildings and monuments in Washington. So ubiquitous were his looks that he was nearly invisible. This was well practiced and honed over the long course of his career. He had lived in many countries and could disappear like a ghost in almost any of them. He carried a walking cane, though he seldom used it. This was insurance against a trick knee that at times could go out on him without notice, the result of an injury sustained in his youth. The cane sported the sharp-beaked head of an eagle cast in silver. It was the work of a Mexican silversmith. The bird’s slitted eyes, tarnished a little from wear, mimicked its owner’s. Ever vigilant, they peered out at the world in cold judgment.

“Loosen up. Relax. You seem troubled.” He studied her body language, tense, wary. “There is no one here but the two of us.”

“How can I be sure?” she said.

“If we wanted to expose you, you would already be sitting in a federal penitentiary. Oh, one of the country clubs, to be sure,” he said. “They would never subject you to, what is it they call it, the general population.” He smiled, though with her back to him she couldn’t see it. “There’s supposed to be a very nice one, I think they call it Pleasanton, out in your neck of the woods in California. I am told it is not a bad place. At least it’s close to your family.”

Whenever he met up with her he always stoked the coals, feeding the fires of anxiety that burned within. Keeping her on edge was part of the practiced technique, honed over generations by its practitioners.

Still, his words today made the women’s correctional facility at Pleasanton sound almost idyllic. There were nights when she lay awake, unable to sleep, wishing that they would pull this cord, put her out of her misery. At least the worrying would be over. That was the worst part, wondering if and when the world would cave in on her. They would remind her first of how far she had to fall, and in the next breath tell her she had nothing to worry about. She often thought this must be how they lived in the old Soviet Union, constantly in fear, wondering when they might come for you.

“Please. Sit down. You will worry yourself into an early grave,” he said. “In time you will learn to trust us.”

“That’ll be the day,” she told him.

“Believe me, we have absolutely no interest in doing you any harm whatsoever. Why would we? Think about it. We are invested in you, long term,” he told her. “We are like partners in a business enterprise. Simple as that.”

“If that’s true, I’ll be happy to sell you my interest cheap,” she said.

“Sounds like you’d like to retire?”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“Sorry, but it’s not that easy,” said the man.

Dealing with the devil never is, she thought.

“We gave money to your last campaign. A lot of it. I’ll bet you didn’t even know that.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

“The donations were not in our own name, of course. The media, to say nothing of the federal election commission, would have made a big stink over that. But it was support nonetheless. Come, sit down.”

“Save the pleasantries. Can we keep this short? What is it you want? I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Make time.” he said. “After all, I’m not one of your fawning constituents looking for a photographed handshake to put on my mantel.”

She took a deep breath, released some of the muscles in her back, dropped her shoulder, and slowly turned around to face him.

“That’s better. I came here to warn you.”

“Warn me about what?”

“It’s possible that the press, some of the media types, might be contacting you now that Serna is no longer with us,” he said.

This caused a spike in the adrenaline already running through Grimes’s body. He saw the startled look in her eyes.

“Why would they be calling me?”

“The two of you ran in the same circles. She plied the Capitol, came in contact with you regularly. It’s only natural.”

“She came in contact with a lot of people,” said Grimes.

“Yes, but she managed money for two of your campaigns before she registered as a lobbyist.”

“I thought you said that’d been taken care of? That the records were purged.”

“We thought they were,” he said. “Seems we were mistaken. Some old tapes containing FEC reports on campaign funding apparently got out. There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing illegal about any of it. She just shows up as the campaign finance chair on two of your early reports, that’s all. That’s it.”

Grimes put a finger to her lips, as if to seal them as she thought and looked away from him off into the distance. Those records placed them in the same universe, the circle of hell that led Serna to Maya Grimes’s life of sin. If she found it, so could others.

“It’s not important,” he told her.

“That means they know we had financial dealings,” said Grimes. “If they start poking around and somebody finds out we had a falling-out, they’ll want to know why. One thing leads to another.”

“Relax! We’re confident they don’t know anything.”

“Where did these tapes go?” she asked.

“Purchased by some Internet news group.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. “It happened more than a year ago. I’m sure it’s nothing. For all we know, they have probably thrown them out by now.”

“You’re telling me everything, right?”

He raised two fingers. “Honest injun,” he said.

“I’m not sure I believe you,” said Grimes.

He looked at her, arching an eyebrow as if to say, “What else is new?”

“I’m just trying to give you a heads-up. I’m not saying they will call. Just that they might, ask you a few questions.”

“And what do I say if they do?”

“Don’t deny it, the fact that she worked on your early campaigns, that’s all. Just tell them that you and Serna were friends way back in the early part of your career. Ancient history,” he told her. “She helped you run a couple of your campaigns and that’s it. But don’t bring it up unless they do. If they are doing an obituary on her, it’s only natural that they might contact you. I didn’t want you to panic if they should mention the campaign stuff. That’s all.”

“Still, I don’t understand why they would call me,” she said. “There are plenty of others who were closer to her. It’s not like we were friends. What if they know we had a fight?”

“They won’t.”

“What if they know about Ginger and Spice?”

“They don’t. Trust me, how could they know?”

“You found out.” Grimes almost spit the words at him.

“Yes, but we had the means.”

“So did Serna.”

“That was your fault,” he said. “You were careless. Now stop worrying. They know absolutely nothing. Of that we are certain.”

“How can you be sure?”

“If they contact you, just give them a few happy remembrances, how much she’ll be missed, what a great person she was, and hang up. That’s all you have to do. It shouldn’t be difficult. Just a little white lie. Think of it as campaigning,” he said.

“You said there was still a problem. Some loose ends. Plural,” said Grimes.

“Yes, well, leave that to me. Forget I mentioned it.” He didn’t want to load her up with too many worries at one time. There was no purpose in telling her they had failed to bag Alex Ives, or that Ives and his boss were the ones digging for dirt, and that she might be hiding in the hole where they were shoveling.