Hot Start (27 page)

The shadow of impropriety was there but not the smoking gun. And even if Buzz had nailed down a solid connection between Pierce Walton and Emil Sokol, it still got me no closer to finding out what, if anything, either man had to do with the deaths of Roy and Toni Hollister. The murders, however, didn’t matter to Buzz. All he cared about was carrying out his mandate from the White House: to make Walton quit before the story broke and he became a political liability. His connection to Sokol, it was hoped, would torpedo him for good.

“You take one more crack at him,” Buzz said, “and the guy is gonna fold like a Kmart lawn chair. All you gotta do is lay it all out for him. Make him see that the ship’s going down.”

How in Buddha’s name did I ever get involved in all this? I sighed and leaned back against my truck, closing my eyes and relishing the cooling breeze. “You still there, Logan?”

“Regrettably.”

“You owe me, you know.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Buzz. I would’ve completely forgotten otherwise.”

I wouldn’t have forgotten, of course. No way. You never forget your obligations to a battle buddy who saves your life, as Buzz had done mine more than once. Nothing you can ever do from that point forward will balance those books. And so, geared up once more to play the role of bad cop, I paid Pierce Walton another visit. I called first this time, to say I was on my way over. Amy the intern—I recognized her voice—said the congressman wouldn’t be in until after noon. I said I was on my way over, regardless.

“May I tell him what it’s about?”

“Tell him it’s about Praha Aeronautika.”

“I’m sorry. Could you spell that for me, please?”

I did. Amy the intern asked to put me on hold. Less than a minute later, she returned to say the congressman would be expecting me.

Walton’s field office was five minutes from the hospital, but I didn’t drive over right away. I wanted to make him wait. I wanted to make him sweat. The more anxious he became, the more off-balance he would feel, and the more likely he’d be to further incriminate himself. I needed to brush my teeth and check up on my cat anyway. I drove home.

Stan the retired postal worker next door was watering his flowers. Kiddiot was lounging on Stan’s front porch, taking a sunbath.

“He’s over here,” Stan yelled. “Your cat.”

“I can see that.” I whistled for him to come—Kiddiot, not Stan. He ignored me.

“I think he prefers being over here.”

“So it would seem.”

“I’m just saying,” Stan said. “Hey, what was with that gunfire the other night and those cops out in the alley? Did they catch who did it yet?”

“Not yet. I’ll keep you posted.”

The mailbox I shared with Mrs. Schmulowitz was jammed. I hadn’t checked it in days. Inside were the usual grocery store advertisements, carpet-cleaning flyers, charity solicitations, and a few overdue-bill notices. Sorting through the stack, I found a small manila envelope with a Rancho Bonita postmark and no return address. Inside a folded note was an inch-long flash drive. The note was written in a woman’s hand. It read, “Should you need them—M, AKA N.”

Mary, also known as Nina.

I may not be the most tech savvy individual in the free world, but I do know what flash drives are. They’re like miniature filing cabinets. We used them all the time in the intelligence community, long before they became commonplace in the civilian world. I went inside, fired up my laptop, and inserted the drive into a USB port. Up came a list of color photographs.

There were fifty-five in all. Nina was in some of them. Her friend Simona was in others. In some, they were together. In some, there were other young, seductive-looking women, including a short-haired blonde with angel wings tattooed on her flank. I recognized her from the photo my friend Kang had shown me.

All of the women were nude or provocatively dressed. Most were bound and gagged. A few looked to be unconscious. Some bore ugly red marks where they appeared to have been slapped around. One of them had blood trickling from her mouth. How much of it was evidence of criminal assault or the result of consensual, sadomasochistic sex, I couldn’t say. I lack experience in either.

The only common denominator in all of the pictures was Congressman Pierce Walton, who was engaged in various carnal acts with all of the women, sometimes two and three at once.

He was the only one who looked as if he was having a good time. The time of his life.

TWENTY-THREE

W
alton didn’t keep me waiting long. He emerged from his inner office flashing those big teeth, with his hand outstretched, like he was looking for my vote.

“Mr. Logan,” he said, putting on his best face for the benefit of Amy the intern behind the reception desk. “C’mon in.”

His office was a testament to self-aggrandizement. The walls were plastered with dozens of engraved plaques commemorating his contribution to this or service to that. These were interspersed among framed photographic collages of Walton gripping and grinning with various sports stars and Hollywood celebrities. On his desk, along with a shiny brass nameplate and a small, crossed pair of US and California flags, was a foot-long plastic model of an M1 Abrams tank. I hadn’t noticed it the first time I’d been in.

“Make yourself comfortable, please.” Walton took up station behind the desk while I occupied the same chair I’d sat in before.

I nodded toward the tank. “What’s the story with the Abrams?”

“When I was in college,” Walton said, “I was in ROTC, briefly. I always wanted to command a tank, but I fell off my bike and broke my back. The army let me out of my contract. It’s not something I really talk about. Rancho Bonita isn’t the most military-minded district in the country, as I’m sure you know, having served with distinction and honor yourself.”

I didn’t mind so much that he’d done some digging into my background. That was to be expected. It was the gratuitous flattery I couldn’t stomach.

“So,” he said, “now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way, what was so important about Praha Aeronautika you had to talk to me right away?”

“We’ll get to that in a second.” I reached into my pocket and slid the little flash drive across his desk.

“What’s this?”

“Open it up.”

“I really don’t have time today for games, Mr. Logan. I already told you, I’m not leaving office unless the people of this district say so at the polls in November. They elected me to do a job, to help them lead better lives. I intend to continue doing just that.”

“For your own good, Congressman, open up the drive.”

Reluctantly he slipped the device into his computer. I couldn’t see the photos on his screen from where I was sitting, only the back of his monitor, but their effect on him was undeniably powerful. Walton shrank back in his chair, the palm of his left hand covering his mouth.

“Where did you get these?”

“From one of the women you smacked around.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You can cut the crap, Congressman. You insult my intelligence.”

He asked me who else had seen the photos.

“Nobody—yet,” I said. “Do the right thing and nobody ever will. You can keep that flash drive, by the way. I already made copies. Rest assured, they’re in a safe place.”

Walton pushed back from his desk and leaned forward in his chair, head hanging down, forearms planted on his thighs, his hands clasped tightly. I couldn’t tell if he was praying or fixated on the beige carpet at his feet.

“What I could really use is some coffee,” he said, looking up at me after several seconds. “Would you like a cup?”

I’d just handed the man a political death sentence and now he was offering me a beverage. What part of that equation, I wondered, doesn’t compute? I didn’t ponder the question too long.

“Sure.”

“How do you take it?”

“Black.”

“Black it is.”

Walton stood like a man in pain and walked slowly out of his office, subtly shaking his head side-to-side.
He’s going down
, I thought to myself.

I checked my phone for e-mails. There were no new ones. I scrolled through the latest international stories on the BBC and Associated Press news wires. Humanity seemed to be in free fall, even more so than usual. Across the globe, people were blowing each other up in huge numbers for reasons that made no sense. And, if they weren’t, Mother Nature was doing the killing for them.

“Here we are.” Walton returned with two steaming mugs, blue, each bearing the congressional seal. He elbowed the door shut and handed me one.

“Thanks.”

“No, thank you,” he said, standing by the window and looking out. “You’ve been more than fair to me in all of this. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

Coffee is coffee as far as my unrefined palate goes, but even I could tell that this stuff was high end. Strong and full-bodied, it had subtle cocoa flavor and a slight bitter aftertaste that I couldn’t quite place.

“So,” Walton said, “just so we have all the cards on the table, you wanted to talk to me about Praha Aeronautika?”

“That and Emil Sokol.”

He looked at me blankly. “I’m sorry. Who?”

“Your friend, Congressman, the international pimp. The silent Praha partner. The secret contributor who chunked in a hundred large to your campaign the very day you voted to allocate NATO funds for the specific acquisition of Praha training jets.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Walton said. “I won’t deny that I’m familiar with that particular company. Praha makes fine, affordable aircraft—certainly more affordable than what our own defense industry produces these days—but this gentleman, I’m sorry, what did you say his name was again?”

“Emil Sokol. Nina used to work for him. I’m sure you remember Nina. She remembers you, quite well. Look, Congressman, we can chitchat all afternoon. I need an answer and I need it now.”

Walton sat back down behind his desk and rubbed his forehead. “You’re talking about a big decision here,” he said. “I need time to think, weigh my options.”

His words began sounding strangely far off. At first I thought it was my imagination. I blinked to clear my brain, but that did no good. I glanced down at my hands. There was a weird haze around them, and around Walton’s face. I was suddenly feeling the way I used to when I drank.

“Mr. Logan?” Walton walked over and leaned into my rapidly diminishing field of vision. “You don’t look too good. Are you feeling OK? Can you hear me? Mr. Logan? . . . Would you like me to call you an ambulance?”

I could feel my eyes rolling back in my head.

T
HE
DREAM
was always the same: I was on the phone with Savannah. I don’t recall what we talked about specifically, I never did, only that she was still very much alive and that I’d simply forgotten to call her after all this time. There were no words to describe the exuberance I felt, knowing she wasn’t dead. And then her voice grew faint. I begged her to come back to me. I don’t remember why she couldn’t. Like sand on the tide, her words washed clean from my memory the moment I woke up with a start, leaving me only with the crushing, guilt-ridden anguish that she was, in fact, gone, and that nothing I could do would ever bring her back.

My eyes ached. My stomach hurt. My skull felt like it had been squeezed in a vice. As I came to, I comprehended where I was: in an unfinished, dimly lighted basement, or maybe one of those bomb shelters from the fifties, when everyone lived in fear of Russian nukes. I also realized that I was in my skivvies, spread-eagled, with Velcro straps binding my wrists and ankles to the frame of an electronically adjustable hospital bed.

Glancing around, I saw in one corner of the room a wheelchair and a stack of portable oxygen canisters. Against one wall was a freestanding metal locker and, next to it, a metal pole on wheels, the kind you find in a hospital for IV medications and plasma bags. The walls were windowless cinder blocks. Exposed utility pipes hung from wooden floor joists above me. To my right, a flight of wooden stairs led to a closed door edged by daylight shining through the frame. To my left, sitting in a tattered corduroy recliner and engrossed in a paperback copy of
Moby Dick,
was a massive Samoan-looking guy. He was about thirty, decked out in Hawaiian-style board shorts, neon green, and a sleeveless black muscle shirt. His dark hair was slicked back, the sides shorn high and tight, marine-style. The only light in the room petered from a brass floor lamp next to his chair.

Subtly, so as not to attract his attention, I tested the Velcro restraints around my wrists. The left strap was snugged tight. Not so the right. There was the slightest bit of give. That’s what I learned about Velcro when I was with Alpha, where we were always trying to find more effective ways to secure the occasionally high value targets we captured rather than killed outright. Once Velcro fails a little, we found, it fails a lot. Always better to use duct tape or plastic zip ties.

Being bound and spread-eagled isn’t what you’d call comfortable. As I shifted my weight slightly, trying to find a less painful position, the bed creaked. The giant Samoan-looking guy looked up at me from his reading.

“Good. You’re awake.”

I nodded toward his reading material. “You know what
Moby Dick
’s favorite meal was?”

“Tell me.”

“Fish and ships.”

He smiled and set the book aside, but not before carefully marking his place with a folded corner. A well-read bruiser. I liked him immediately.

“You’re not going to tell me where I am, are you?”

“Where you are doesn’t matter right now,” he said. “What matters is that you and I come to an agreement.”

“Lay it on me.”

“You have some photographs. My acquaintance would like them.”

“By acquaintance,” I said, “you mean Congressman Pierce Walton, who spiked my coffee.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” the giant Samoan-looking guy said.

“This isn’t going to end well for you. You know that, right?”

“How so?”

“Me lying here, all tied up? It’s called kidnapping. Walton’s looking at prison time. You are too.”