House Justice (29 page)

“Why not?”

“DeMarco, Rulon Tully isn’t a guy that has an attorney—he’s a guy that has his own
law firm
. With his money, we’ll both be in our graves before Tully sees the inside of a jail cell.”

“So what are we…”

Angela’s cell phone rang. She answered it, listened for about five seconds, said “Yes, sir,” and hung up.

“That was LaFountaine. He wants to see us.”

“Are we going to Langley?”

DeMarco had never been to the CIA’s headquarters; a tour would be cool. He particularly wanted to see the inscription he’d always heard about, the one at the entrance to the main building that said: And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

But killjoy Angela burst his bubble. “DeMarco,” she said, “do you think Mr. LaFountaine wants it on the record that you visited him at his office? You keep forgetting. This is like that old
Mission Impossible
show: if we get caught, the agency will disavow any knowledge of our actions. So, no, we’re not going to Langley. We’re meeting him at a marina near the Pentagon on a boat that belongs to an old friend of his, a former vice president of the United States.”

The yacht LaFountaine had borrowed for the meeting was one of those magnificent old wooden boats built in the forties or fifties; it was all gleaming hardwood and shiny brass rails and fittings. DeMarco imagined it had huge Rolls-Royce engines, a wet bar stocked with
expensive cognac, and a master bedroom fit for a king. He would have gladly moved out of his Georgetown home to live on the yacht, and the fact that he didn’t know how to operate any boat bigger than a canoe wouldn’t be a drawback. He’d buy one of those white yachting caps with scrambled egg on the brim, sit on the bow, drink martinis, and watch the sunset—and if the boat never left the pier that’d be fine with him.

Angela must have been having similar thoughts because as soon as she saw it, she said, “Oh, man, will you look at this boat.” But then she added, “Can you imagine what it must cost to maintain this thing?”

Women—always able to ruin a perfectly decent fantasy with some completely unnecessary, practical observation.

When DeMarco and Angela stepped on board the yacht, a deep voice called out from below, “I’m down in the galley.”

DeMarco had seen LaFountaine only on television, and the impression he had always had was that LaFountaine was an arrogant prick, but a really smart prick and not a guy you’d want to cross. He had the same impression when he met him in person.

LaFountaine was dressed in a dark suit—no yachting cap for him— and sitting on one side of a built-in dining table, so DeMarco and Angela sat on the other side, next to each other. After they were seated, LaFountaine asked, “Well?”

Angela gave a succinct report of their activities. DeMarco could see she was nervous, like a fourth grader reading a book report to the class, and it irritated him that LaFountaine could make her feel that way.

When she finished, LaFountaine said, “So we’ve got two dead people, Whitmore and Acosta, and we don’t know who killed them. And Diller, the one guy that can testify against Marty Taylor, is missing and may be dead. Ray Rudman is still a United States congressman and he’s now being protected by the Capitol police, and Rulon Tully is apparently ignoring the recording we sent him. And now the FBI tells us some Russian gangsters may be behind Diller’s trip to
Iran, but the FBI has no proof, and the way they work it’s going to take them months to do anything about Taylor. Is that about right?”

“Yes, sir,” Angela replied.

“You got anything to add, DeMarco?”

“No,” DeMarco said. He didn’t bother to add “sir.” He didn’t work for the guy.

DeMarco expected LaFountaine to blow up at them at this point and tell them what a lousy job they were doing—that’s what Mahoney would have done—but he didn’t. He just sat there spinning his wedding ring on his finger and staring at the space between their heads.

“Actually,” he said, “this isn’t going too badly. Two of the people responsible for Mahata’s death are dead, and now I know for sure that Rudman was the leak. I’ll figure out some way to deal with that bastard later. But I want Tully.”

“Sir, I’m not sure how we can get him,” Angela said. “What I’m saying is, I doubt we’re going to be able to find any evidence that he had anything to do with leaking the information to Sandra Whitmore or killing Dale Acosta, so there’s no way we’ll be able to convict him of a crime.”

LaFountaine sat there brooding in silence for a moment, thinking about what Angela had just told him, and DeMarco could almost see the wheels spinning inside the man’s big Machiavellian brain.

“Do you think this Russian gangster is really behind Diller’s trip to Iran?” LaFountaine asked.

Angela shrugged. “I don’t know, but it makes a lot more sense that he’d do this than Marty Taylor.”

“And there’s something you don’t know,” LaFountaine said. “When Mahata told us about Diller meeting the Iranians, she said one of the people who attended the meeting was an ex–Russian army officer. She had never seen the Russian before and he didn’t say anything during the meeting but he came with Diller. Or, to be accurate, she said that he came into the meeting room at the same time as Diller.”

“Do you think this Russian army officer might have known Yuri Markelov before he came to the United States?”

LaFountaine shrugged, and DeMarco wondered what it would be like to have a job that dealt with so much ambiguity.

LaFountaine got up and poured a cup of coffee, then just stood for a long time next to the galley stove. Finally, he said, “I want you to give Tully to the Russians.” Then he sat back down and told them what he meant.

DeMarco spoke for the second time during the meeting. “People could get killed if we do that.”

LaFountaine looked at DeMarco and said, very softly, “I don’t care.”

“Yeah, well, I do,” DeMarco responded. “And I don’t work for you.”

LaFountaine smiled. “No, but you work for John Mahoney, and right now Mahoney and I have an agreement. I’ve agreed not to tell the media that a man who belongs to his party shot off his mouth and got my agent killed. But if you don’t do what I want, I no longer have any reason to honor my deal with your boss, and I think you know how he’d feel about that.”

LaFountaine rose from the table. “Angela, turn off the coffeepot and lock up the boat when you leave. There’s a padlock on the deck near the hatch.”

DeMarco and Angela just sat there, not speaking, as they listened to LaFountaine’s slow, heavy footsteps on the deck above them as he departed.

DeMarco moved to the other side of the table, to where LaFountaine had been sitting, so he could face Angela. “You don’t think he’s going too far?” he said.

She didn’t respond. She was a loyal company gal, and whatever she might really be feeling, she wasn’t going to disagree with her boss to an outsider. But she surprised him.

“He feels guilty,” she said. “If he hadn’t said anything to that committee about Diller, Mahata would still be alive and he knows it.”

“So what? Just because he feels guilty doesn’t mean he gets to play high executioner.”

Angela turned away and gazed out the porthole, irritated by either DeMarco or the box that LaFountaine had put her in. She was probably wishing she was on a cruise ship instead of sitting on a boat in the Potomac, being used as LaFountaine’s pawn. Or maybe not.

She rose to her feet and said, “You can do what you want, DeMarco, but I’ve got a job to do.”

“We may have a problem,” Quinn said.

Rulon Tully made no attempt to hide his irritation; he was in a good mood and he could tell Xavier Quinn was about to ruin it.

Tully had spent the morning dealing with various corporate problems by yelling at his overpriced executives via video conferences. He loved video conferences. He set them up so he could see the executives but they couldn’t see him. And when he screamed at them, he knew they felt like they were talking to an invisible, angry god—a god who would rain down fire and brimstone upon them if they didn’t keep him happy. But now here was stone-faced Quinn, and the feeling of satisfaction he had gotten from ranting at his executives was already beginning to fade.

“What sort of problem?” Tully asked.

“I’m not sure,” Quinn replied.

“Well, goddamnit, then why…”

“Jimmy Franco is missing.”

“Who’s Franco?” Rulon asked.

“Franco hired the man who killed Dale Acosta.”

“Why the hell did you tell me that?” Tully muttered.

“Because you asked,” Quinn said. “Anyway, Franco is missing.”

“How is his being missing connected to me?”

“It appears that someone has followed the trail from Whitmore to Acosta to Franco. And the next step on that trail is me—then you.”

“But you don’t know for sure that Franco’s disappearance is connected to us.”

“No.”

“Will Franco talk?” Tully asked.

“Not to the police,” Quinn said. “But it may not be the police who talk to him. It could be the CIA. You suspected that they were the ones who coerced Rudman to confess and sent you that recording. So, maybe, although I don’t know how, they connected Franco to Acosta’s murder. And if the CIA has Franco, they’ll make him talk.”

“Do you think the CIA would actually kidnap and torture an American citizen?”

“They’ve done it before.”

The liberal media had accused the CIA of detaining terrorist suspects, some of them American citizens, and shipping them off to prisons in foreign countries for interrogations. Tully had always thought the stories were most likely fabrications but Quinn had a military background and had worked in some rather unorthodox jobs, so it was possible that he knew what he was talking about.

“And there are two new players in all this,” Quinn said.

“Who?”

“One is a man named Joseph DeMarco. He’s a lawyer and he visited Whitmore in prison, and right after he did, Whitmore gave up Acosta as her source. And then the day Acosta died, DeMarco was in Myrtle Beach and he was involved in a shoot-out with Acosta’s killer and an unidentified man.”

“A shoot-out? Goddamnit, what in the hell are you talking about?”

Quinn explained that the day Acosta was killed, DeMarco was the one who found Acosta’s body. And when he left Acosta’s place to call the police, the man Jimmy Franco had contracted to kill Acosta tried to kill DeMarco, but then another man intervened and drove off Acosta’s killer. But neither DeMarco nor the Myrtle Beach police knew who either of the shooters were.

“You got all this from the Myrtle Beach police?” Tully asked.

“Yes, and from an administrator at the prison where Whitmore was being held.”

“Have you talked to the killer Franco hired?”

“I don’t know who he is. That’s the way these things work. I hire Franco and he hires the killer, but the killer doesn’t know me and I don’t know him. It’s safer for everybody that way.”

Tully didn’t like anything he was hearing. He particularly didn’t like the fact that Quinn was giving him supposition instead of facts. He couldn’t make decisions based on Quinn’s guesses.

“What do you suggest, Xavier? I hope the purpose of this meeting isn’t just to give me things to worry about.”

“I would suggest, sir, that until I can sort this all out you stay here on the estate where I can protect you best.”

The florist sat back and rubbed his tired eyes. After six hours of research, he had finally found what he needed.

Because he didn’t think it would be safe to stay in LA after killing Franco, he had driven to Fresno and then spent the day sitting in front of a library computer trying to locate Xavier Quinn. When he had interrogated Franco, he didn’t ask how Quinn and Franco knew each other. He didn’t have time for that. He had wanted only two things: Quinn’s name and his location. But Franco said he didn’t know Quinn’s address, he hadn’t seen the man in years, and Quinn had contacted him by phone and he couldn’t remember the phone number.

Fortunately, Xavier was not a common name. A “people search” site on the Internet identified only seven Xavier Quinns in the United States. Two of these Xavier Quinns were almost eighty and one was in his early twenties, so he crossed them off his list. The fourth Quinn lived in Alaska, and he arbitrarily crossed that one off his list as well. Alaska was just too … too far out of the mainstream, too remote.

That left three Quinns: one in Boston, one in New York, and one in California. Only the Quinn in New York had a listed phone number, so he called the number and a woman answered.

“St. James rectory,” she said, “may I help you?”

“Uh, yes,” the florist said, “may I speak to Xavier Quinn.”

“I’m sorry, but Father Quinn is saying Mass right now. May I take a message?”

A priest. He crossed that Quinn off his list, although religious clerics of any kind—be they Christian, Jew, or Muslim—were never people he trusted.

He then plugged the name Xavier Quinn and various word combinations into Google—“
Xavier Quinn” Boston; “Xavier Quinn” CA; “Xavier Quinn” MA
—and patiently begin looking at the results. He discovered that the Xavier Quinn in Boston was Xavier Quinn, CPA, and was a partner in an accounting firm. An accountant? Could an accountant be involved in all this? Possibly, if there was some sort of money motive related to exposing Conrad Diller’s trip to Iran. He found nothing on the Xavier Quinn who resided in California until he came across a newspaper photo of a Xavier Quinn getting into a limousine with a man named Rulon Tully. Quinn was identified as Tully’s chief of security.

The florist had heard of Rulon Tully but didn’t know much about him. All he knew was that the man was a billionaire. The photo he had found was connected to a story about Tully visiting a manufacturing plant in Ohio and the factory workers almost rioting when they heard Tully planned to shut down the plant. Quinn’s name was mentioned in the article because he had Tasered one of the workers when the worker attacked Tully.