The President's Killers (3 page)

EIGHT

When the call from Lott came, Denny was watching the Mets’ game on TV with Gus Wuslich, who lived in the apartment across the hall from his.

Gus had drained the bottle of beer Denny had given him. “You don’t happen to have any vodka, do you?”

“Nope,” Denny lied. “All out.”

“Gin?”

“Nope. Just beer.”

He was reluctant to offer Gus even a beer, but he looked so pathetic Denny felt sorry for him. His lower lip was swollen and purple. There was an ugly knot next to one eye, and he was sporting a bandage above the eyebrow. He looked as though he’d been in a car wreck.

When he came home the previous night, he was soused, and his wife Helen was waiting for him. He was a small, wiry man in his sixties, and she was huge. She outweighed him by at least a hundred-fifty pounds. The drinking always made her furious and him defiant.

This time the angry shouts and the sounds of scuffling and furniture banging in their apartment were more alarming than usual. Hearing Gus’ whimpers through the thin walls, Denny was afraid Helen was actually going to kill him. He stepped into the hallway and pounded on their door. “Knock if off or I’ll call the cops!

Despite their brawls, he liked the Wuslichs. When Gus wasn’t drunk and they weren’t trying to maim each other, they were pleasant folks who treated him as if he were a son. When he was away, Gus took in his mail and fed the cat. And, of course, if there was any beer in the refrigerator, he helped himself. But Denny didn’t mind. He’d had plenty of experience with alcoholics, and kept the hard stuff in a locked cabinet.

When Helen left that afternoon for her job as a waitress, Denny had invited Gus to his place to watch the ball game, mainly to try to keep him out of trouble. But baseball was too slow for Gus. He didn’t care whether the Mets won or lost. By the third inning, he was ignoring the TV and railing against the indignities he suffered driving a cab four nights a week. He loved to complain about the way the cops harassed cabbies.

When the phone rang, Denny was grateful for the opportunity to break away from Gus. He recognized Jerry Lott’s voice immediately.

“Are you free these days?”

“I put in my last day at O’Brien’s two days ago.”

“Well, how about a little celebration?”

“Sounds good.”

“How about four tomorrow? At my place.”

When Denny arrived at the small parking lot in front of the old train station, Lott was waiting for him in a dark SUV.

“Where you based, the City?”

“We’ve got an office in the Midtown area. How’d you like to go to Chicago for a couple days?”

“Sure.”

“We’re tracking a scumbag by the name of Ahmed Nidal. An Egyptian. Deals in arms, under the table. We got a tip he’s meeting some people at the Atwood Hotel on Monday. We need you to go out there and hang around the hotel for a couple days, see what you see.”

“Fine.”

“We want to know who this guy’s involved with. We need descriptions of anybody you see him with. In the hotel lobby, in the dining room, in the god-damned elevators, wherever. We want to know what these people look like, what they’re wearing, what kind of accents they’ve got — that kind of stuff.”

“Okay.”

“We’ve been keeping tabs on Nidal, but we need a fresh face. Someone he’s never seen before. That’s why we have contract people like you.”

“How am I going to know him?”

“That would help, wouldn’t it?”

Lott dug into a pocket and handed him a color web printout of a newspaper photo. Nidal was a handsome, balding man, with light skin and fuzzy gray hair on either side of his round face.

“So what kinds of things does this guy do?”

“He’s from Cairo. Runs a couple of businesses — fronts — in London. He’s part of a network that buys little goodies like aircraft parts, military computer parts, and high-tech night-vision goggles, and sells them at a nice little profit to shit holes like Iran and North Korea. He’s worth a lot of money.”

“I’ll bet.”

“We can send someone along to baby-sit you if you want.”

“I can handle it.”

“Good.” Lott gave him a little lecture on security, reminding him that computers, smart phones, iPads, and other modern electronic gadgets were just as vulnerable as the old land-line phone in his apartment.

“Anything you do electronically can be hacked,” Lott said.

“I’ll watch it.”

“These are smart guys we’re talking about. They’re high-tech, and they’ve got money. Meaning they can get their hands on the same kinds of equipment the Government buys to monitor stuff on phones and the web. So we need you to be smart. Use pay phones. Use cash or one of those pre-paid cards. No credit cards.”

He opened the glove compartment and removed two stacks of fifty-dollar bills held together with rubber bands. “Here’s some cash to cover your expenses over the next couple weeks. Keep track of everything you spend. We’ll need a record.”

“Sure.”

“This’ll be a great way to get your feet wet, kid. A piece of cake.”

At the first red light after he left Lott, Denny counted the fifty-dollar bills. There were twenty in each stack.

NINE

His first challenge was getting into Chicago alive.

The cabby was a wacko in a grimy Hawaiian shirt. From the airport all the way into the Loop, he swerved his banged-up Thunderbird in and out of traffic at eighty miles an hour, yelling obscenities at every driver he passed.

“Hey, buddy,” Denny shouted, “calm down. I need to get there in one piece.”

It was the first time he’d ever been in Chicago, and he was impressed with how clean and well-kept the place looked. The Atwood Hotel was a nine-story brick building on a tree-lined street only three blocks from Lake Michigan.

When the cabbie dropped him off, Denny went into the lobby and registered as Clay Willis. After splashing some water in his face in his room and changing shirts, he went back downstairs to explore the building.

The Atwood was connected by a tunnel to a nearly identical hotel across the street named the Francis. He checked out the public areas in both buildings, bought a candy bar at the newsstand in the tunnel, and returned to the Atwood’s lobby. It was small but elegant. Subdued lighting, glistening black-and-white marble floors, plush dark carpets. There were potted ferns everywhere, and on the coffee tables were short-stemmed red tulips and imported bonbons.

He parked himself on a sofa next to the wall, where he could see the main entrance, the lobby, and the registration desk, and took another look at the web picture of Ahmed Nidal. The caption identified him as “a wealthy, 62-year-old investor of murky background.”

From behind the newspaper Denny watched the hotel guests and white-gloved bellhops amble in and out of the lobby. Most of the guests were elderly couples or middle-aged men in expensive business suits.

After sitting there for almost two hours, he Googled “Nidal” again on his laptop. There was nothing new, only the half-dozen articles and pictures he’d read earlier. While he was at it, he tried a few more searches for “SIG,” “Jerry Lott” and “McQueen.” He had tried to check them out when he accepted Lott’s job offer, but Lott was right. SIG was highly classified, and he found nothing that could possibly be their Special Intelligence Group. His efforts to find material on Lott and McQueen were just as unsuccessful.

To stretch his legs, he strolled through the tunnel to the Francis and peeked into its lobby and bar. On his way back to the Atwood he noticed a pay phone in the tunnel. He used the phone book to look up the Atwood’s number, inserted some coins, and punched the number. One of the desk clerks answered.

“Do you have a Mr. Ahmed Nidal registered?”

“Would you spell that, please?”

He spelled both names.

“I don’t have him listed.”

“Any reservation for him?”

It took a moment. “I don’t show a reservation for him either.”

Denny wasn’t surprised. Maybe he was using a phony name, too.

At dinner, he dawdled over salmon braised in red wine and studied the faces in the hotel’s crowded dining room. Most of the men were in their fifties and sixties, but none of them bore any resemblance to the man in the web photo. After finishing his chocolate mousse, Denny went out to the hotel’s tiny bar and sat sipping beer and watching the hotel guests come and go until midnight.

During the next two days he haunted the lobbies and bars and dining rooms of both hotels. There was no one who resembled Ahmed Nidal. Every now and then he called the Atwood desk. The response was always the same. No one with that name had registered.

“Nothing?” Lott asked. “No sign of him?”

“No.”

Lott shook his head and stared up at the car’s rearview mirror as he changed lanes. “We’ve been trying to get the goods on that son-of-a-bitch Nidal for months.”

They were riding up and down the quiet residential streets of South Orange, a pretty, affluent suburb near Millburn. Huge maple trees lined both sides of the streets.

Lott had picked him up as he walked along Wyoming Avenue, a wide, shady street not far from his apartment. It was one of the rendezvous procedures they had worked out.

“Okay,” Lott said. “To hell with Nidal. There’ll be other opportunities to nail that bastard. I got something else we need you to do.”

He said SIG was concerned about two gun-owner groups, one in New Jersey and one in Michigan. In Michigan, they’d used threats to try to intimidate a Congressman who wanted to impose a new federal tax on the sale of all firearms and ammunition.

“They’re dangerous.” Lott said. “We’ve got an informant in Flint, a pretty reliable source. He says a couple of hotheads from the group here were out in Michigan a few weeks ago. They seem to be working together. You know Jack Stewart?”

The name was only vaguely familiar.

“He’s a New Jersey Congressman,” Lott said. “Has an office over in Livingston. They’ve been picketing the place because Stewart is pushing for a ban on the use of lead bullets for hunting.”

The group called itself the New Jersey League of Gun Owners. It was small but getting more militant, apparently frustrated because nobody was paying any attention to it.

“We don’t really want to get involved in this crap,” Lott said. “It’s the kind of thing the FBI does. But we need a little information. Then we’ll turn it over to them. So we want to get you inside this outfit. Infiltrate them, so we can find out just how serious these assholes are.”

It sounded like an opportunity to redeem himself.

“Great.”

TEN

The outraged letter-to-the-editor was Lott’s idea.

“Use strong words,” he said. “Make it sound like you’re really pissed.”

Denny had never paid much attention to the gun-control issues that had been hotly debated for as long as he could remember.He loved the outdoors and had hunted deer and small game all his life. As long as he was free to do that, he was happy.

So he spent several hours online studying the issues. Then he went to work on the letter, arguing that gun-control fanatics were trying to demonize anyone who wants to protect their Constitutional right to own a gun. The gun violence that upsets them, he said, is fostered by the glorification of violence on television and in video games and movies. That’s where reforms are really needed.

Many of the worst outbursts of gun violence in this country have occurred, he argued, in places with the most stringent gun-control laws. And it’s clear they don’t prevent mass shootings.

When he finished the letter, he went over what he had written, ratcheting up the rhetoric with insulting references to bleeding-heart judges, head-in-the-clouds college professors, and boneheads whose obsession with civil liberties had made it impossible to get lunatics off our streets and into mental institutions.

He typed two copies of the letter on a battered old typewriter he’d picked up at a second-hand store and signed each letter with the name Clay Willis. He mailed one to the
Newark Star-Ledger
and the other to the
Livingston News-Record.

Four days later, the big Newark daily ran three paragraphs. On the following Wednesday the small suburban weekly printed the entire letter.

When Denny arrived at Congressman Stewart’s storefront office in Livingston, eight men and three women, all decked out in camouflage vests and hunting caps, were parading back and forth in front of it with placards denouncing him. Two other men were leaning against a pickup truck.

Denny parked his car across the street from them and went over to the pair beside the pickup. “What’s happening?”

They told him about Stewart’s efforts to prevent hunters from using lead bullets.

“He’s a flaming fag,” the taller one said.

“And we’re paying his goddamn salary,” the other one added.

One of the women, a plump blonde, gave Denny a big smile. “We’re fed up with people trying to take away our Constitutional rights,” she yelled.

“So am I,” Denny responded. He showed the two men a clipping of his letter in the Livingston paper.

The taller man nodded approvingly as he read it. “Hey, this is great! You wrote this?”

The other one was equally enthused. “Way to go, man!”

They showed the clipping to the others. They loved it, too.

The blonde thrust her placard into Denny’s hands. “Come on, honey,” she said. “Join us. We need all the help we can get.”

The field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Newark shocked Denny.

It was hidden away on an upper floor of a tall office building in downtown Newark. The reception area looked like a misplaced post office, its walls decorated with color photos of the President.

The room was divided by a thick glass wall. Two black women stood at a counter behind it, talking to visitors through a two-way microphone.

Ten minutes after Denny asked to speak to an agent, a balding man with a bushy red mustache emerged from behind a locked side door. His name was Morris. He led Denny into a small, bare room.

“What can we do for you?” he asked.

Morris had never heard of the New Jersey League of Gun Owners.

“They’re kooks,” Denny said. “They’re convinced the politicians want to take away their guns. One of these days they’re going to start planting bombs and shooting people.”

“What do they call themselves?”

Denny repeated the name.

Morris wrote it down. “You a member?”

“I know a couple of people in the group, that’s all. They’re trying to get me to join. But I think they’re dangerous. I think someone ought to keep an eye on them.”

“And your name again?”

“Clay Willis.”

Lott had fixed him up with a driver’s license with his photo and the phony name and address. He told Denny not to mention SIG because there was bad blood between the two agencies. The FBI regarded SIG as an intruder and rival. For years, it had lobbied to try to persuade Congress to eliminate SIG.

SIG had already gone through channels in Washington to alert the FBI to the gun-owner groups, Lott said, but there was no evidence the Bureau was taking any action.

Morris got to his feet.

“I understand you folks use informants,” Denny said. “I’d be willing to do that, if there’s any money in it.”

The agent was noncommittal. “Sometimes we pay. It depends. I’ll pass the information on. If there’s any interest, someone will be in touch.”

Lott was outraged. “They don’t give a shit?”

“No, no,” Denny said, “That’s not what I’m saying. Morris said he’d pass the information on. He didn’t seem to feel it was a big deal, that’s all.”

They were sitting in Lott’s car, a white Chevy this time, in front of the train station.

“You know something?” Lott said. “The FBI is the biggest bullshit bureaucracy in America. They’re always claiming they’ve got a full plate. They’ve got so god-damned many people they’re running around in circles. We try to help them out and this is what we get.”

“Why not wait and see if they contact me?

”Bullshit!”

“Maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression. Morris wasn’t giving me a flat-out no.”

“Screw’em,” Lott said. “If they don’t want to get off their asses, there’s plenty of other law enforcement around. We’ll light a fire under these bastards and see if we can get somebody’s attention.”