The Clause (19 page)

THE ART OF WAR INSTRUCTS US TO DEPEND NOT ON THE PROBABILITY OF THE ENEMY’S NOT COMING, BUT ON OUR OWN PREPAREDNESS TO RECEIVE HIM; NOT ON THE POSSIBILITY OF HIS NOT ATTACKING, BUT RATHER THAT WE HAVE MADE OUR POSITION UNASSAILABLE.

—
Sun Tzu
, The Art of War

Forty-six

The hot tamale was
under the back seat of the Toyota and set for a twenty-second delay. The handicap spot was near the elevators and a straight shot to the garage exit. The grenade’s pin was pulled most of the way out. When Spikic released the hand brake, it would pull fishing line threaded under the carpet that would pull the pin the rest of the way out, starting the timer.

Half the Britany-Swindol take was in the gas tank. When the car went up in flames, the gas tank and fuel would actually protect the gems from being incinerated. It would take awhile before the tank blew, and when it did it would burn at a much lower temperature than the Mark 77 fuel in the grenade, and probably the force of the explosion would force the tank away from the car body. I was counting on the gems being blown out onto the pavement and recoverable.

I was also counting on two bodies being almost completely immolated in the car fire. One male, one female. One me, one Trudy. I had no doubt they might have some way of figuring out the two bodies were not us, eventually, after some pretty serious lab work on what little remained of the bodies. At first, though, they would have to believe it was us, what with the gems and the story Roberto and I fed them through the jukebox.

I had to make sure this all went down the way it was supposed to, so I had to be onsite but out of sight. Across from the Excelsior was a five-story brick apartment building. Slipping the locks on the building’s foyer was about as easy as it gets, and at the top of the stairwell the door to the roof was unlocked. I was in position on the roof by eleven thirty, and the car was in the handicap space in the Excelsior garage across the street.

My timing was good. The FBI started to show up at quarter to midnight. A large van with tinted windows and a phony magnetic sign for restaurant supply rolled gently to the curb opposite the Excelsior’s driveway. Nobody got out.

Then a fake cable TV truck arrived and parked just north of the driveway at a hydrant.

The black and Hispanic agents I saw at the Plaza strolled arm and arm and sat on a bench at a bus stop. They checked their watches. After ten minutes they stood and strolled into the lobby of the Excelsior and did not come out.

A sedan with tinted windows showed up and parked just south of the driveway at the bus stop.

They had the place pretty well bottled up from all angles by twelve thirty. I’m sure they were hoping to catch us arriving at the lower level.

Was it possible not to smoke a jillion cigarettes waiting for this show to start? This was the culminating moment. My success and my escape depended on them believing at least for a while that I was dead, or at least that someone else had the gems and that most of them were destroyed in the fire.

I smoked and chewed Wrigley’s, careful to avoid the two sticks at the end.

“Hey.”

I turned.

“Hello.”

“Your wife not let you smoke inside either?” My new friend was also in a tracksuit, but he was fat with long black hair and yellow slippers on his feet. “Haven’t seen you up here before.”

“I’m visiting.”

“What floor?” He flashed a huge flame from a lighter at a cigarette.

“First.”

“Then how come you came all the way up? You coulda stepped out onto the stoop to smoke.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke.

I pointed at a wedge of Manhattan between the Excelsior’s towers. “The view.”

“Not from around here. If you were, you’d get used to that. Where you from?”

Second time in the same day I had to run into people that ran off at the mouth. I wanted to be left alone with my nervous tension and daydreams about the Bahamas.

“Clifton.”

“Oh yeah? I know people from Clifton. You know Peter Dremmer?”

I glanced at the street and saw Tito walking fast toward the Excelsior lobby.

“No, never heard of him.”

“What school you go to?”

“Fairleigh Dickinson.”

Tito went into the lobby.

“No, I mean high school.”

“Clifton High.”

“I knew a guy once who went there. What year?”

A yellow cab—the kind they have in Manhattan—pulled up to the curb across the street.

“Um, eighty-nine.”

“I went to high school in Weehawken. What are you looking at?”

“Me? Just people. I like to watch people.”

Wrapped in a white fur coat, Idi and a runt in a leather trench coat headed from the cab toward the lobby. Spikic was practically dragging her, and I could hear her whining.

My companion pointed at Idi and Spikic. “Heh, look at those two! Just the type that live at the Excelsior.”

“Is it fancy over there?”

“Fancy but no class. Lotta foreigners, Russians, that sort of thing, and they throw their money around.” He flicked an ash over the edge of the building. “I’m Fabio.”

I shook his hand, and it was moist. “I’m Ralph.”

“Ralph? Like Ralph Kramden?”

I shook out another smoke.

“Here.” Fabio pointed his flame thrower my direction and almost burned off my eyebrows while lighting my cigarette. “So who is it on the first floor? What apartment?”

“Huh?” I was riveted on the garage exit. What was Tito doing there? Sure, he lived there, but he should have had sense to be elsewhere, and with an alibi.

“Who are you visiting, Ralph?”

Three gunshots sounded from across the street, from the garage.

Fabio leaned on the building parapet. “What was that?”

Three more shots.

“I don’t know, Fabio. Were those gunshots?”

That idiot: Tito.

Two men in FBI jackets emerged from the sedan and jogged toward the garage entrance.

“Lookit, Ralph. It’s like on TV. The FBI!”

Fuzzy dice swaying in the window, the Toyota lurched from the garage, narrowly missing the two agents. It was hard to make Tito out behind the wheel as street light twisted through the car, but his silver pistol flashed, clasped to the steering wheel. Idi was easy to make out in the white fur coat in the passenger side—she was screaming hysterically. He cut the wheel hard and drove across the sidewalk, sideswiping a tree.

The cable TV van zipped forward and blocked Tito’s path, so he pulled a squealing U-turn that took him up on the sidewalk directly below me.

I leaned back. I didn’t want my eyebrows singed a second time that night.

The fake restaurant supply truck made a U-turn at the same time as Tito and slammed the Toyota’s front fender and wheel. The ball joint collapsed and the wheel splayed out sideways. The Toyota came to a stop in the middle of Boulevard East.

Agents from the cable truck were already jogging across the pavement toward the Toyota, guns drawn.

The black and Hispanic agents raced from the Excelsior lobby.

Doors to the fake restaurant truck opened.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi
…

It looked like a camera flash went off in the back seat of the Toyota, then a blob of light grew like a balloon and burst into a white hot gas. Fire that hot doesn’t look like fire. It almost looks like a plume of glowing, roaring milk.

“Holy bejesus!” Fabio shouted, turning away from the searing white light.

I ducked my head, momentarily blinded. “Dammit, Tito.”

“Holy
fucking
bejesus!” Fabio shouted again.

Agents reeled away from the Toyota shielding their eyes. The safety glass vaporized; the tires burst and melted into crackling puddles. The hissing chassis thudded to the pavement and the shriveled driver’s door swung open. Tito was a glowing white cinder behind the skeleton of the steering wheel.

I had to give Tito credit. His idea wasn’t really a bad one even if it was crazed. Kill Spikic and take the two hundred grand and don’t follow the instructions, just take the car and run. The cops would likely think I did it. He had no idea the car was rigged with a hot tamale. I guessed the result was the same, more or less, as long as Spikic was dead. Tito’s empty revolver should have taken care of that. First three shots probably dropped him, the next three shots used to finish him off, probably shots at the head.

The bad part of the plan was taking Idi with him. When will men learn that you can’t force a woman to love you?

For my purposes, I was glad he had done that. One man and one woman. Me and Trudy.

Fabio had his phone out. “I’m calling 911!”

The black van managed to back away from the Toyota’s volcanic roar, the paint on its hood smoking from the heat. Local cops arrived lights flashing and barricaded the street in either direction. Fire engines wailed in the distance.

As the chassis buckled, the trunk popped open and gas from the tank leaked onto the pavement, bursting into flames on its way to the gutters. Local police ran forward with fire extinguishers to put out the flaming fuel. People don’t realize that it takes a lot to make a gas tank explode. You can’t just fire a bullet into it and make it go off. The fuel itself needs air to burn, so even a flaming leak from the tank will only ignite what leaks out, not the rest of the tank. Fumes in the tank above the fuel have to ignite to blow out the tank, and that takes a lot of heat, but preferably a spark. I’ve seen car fires on the side of the highway blacken cars whole and the gas tank never goes off, probably because the brunt of the heat produced by the fire rises. The heat from this Mark 77 fire might be different, and the agents and police seemed to realize this and back away from the fireball. Fire engines roared to the scene, positioning themselves at the hydrants.

“Well, Fabio, I’d better get downstairs and make sure people aren’t near the windows. If the gas tank goes off …”

POOM!
A mushroom cloud of yellow and orange fire rose from the Toyota’s trunk.

Fabio’s eyes were wide. “Wow!”

I slid past him and into the stairwell.

Downstairs on the sidewalk there was a crowd. They’d spilled out of the apartments to watch the fire. In their shadow I walked north and around the bend. Ambulances blooping their sirens raced past me. I walked down the cliff to River Road to the Port Imperial Ferry terminal. Taxis were always waiting there for ferry passengers, and they stood outside their vehicles looking up at the dimming glow of the Toyota atop the cliff. Flashing red lights from all the emergency vehicles spun on the Excelsior like it was a disco. The incendiary would run out of fuel soon enough unless it caught the asphalt road surface on fire. The fire department’s hoses would likely prevent that.

I had a cab stop at an all-night liquor store on the way to the Days Inn in Edgewater. I arranged a wakeup call for five and a cab to the airport for six. Old Crow bottle on the nightstand, I sipped bourbon in front of the TV and watched an old Western. Henry Fonda was a gunslinger trying to retire, but there was some punk pestering him to shoot it out one last time with a hundred men for some reason. I couldn’t figure out if it was a comedy or not, and didn’t make it to the end.

I didn’t dream.

Forty-seven

VORTEX 5 SATELLITE

LOCATION: OLD EBBITT GRILL, 675 15TH STREET NW

DEPUTY DIR. EOCTF SUPERVISOR PALMER (SP)

DEFENSE INTEL. AGENCY DIR. LEE (DL)

DATE: TUESDAY AUGUST 10, 2010

TIME: 1721 EDT

SP: I hope I’m not single-handedly ruining your marriage, Bill. Making you go out for a drink every night after work …

DL: I could get used to this, Tom!

BARTENDER: Gentlemen?

SP: A sidecar for me.

DL: Ketel One martini, up, dry, dirty, twist.

SP: So have we gotten any spookier, or am I just paranoid?

DL: Like a haunted house. Your man Spikic? His real name is Major Zoran Radmatic, the “Butcher of Pov,” massacred a couple thousand defenseless Bosniaks in 1995. CIA had pictures. Nobody ever saw them.

SP: How is Spikic’s alias not in the Y3 SPT database? We should have been informed. 381 receives our departmental briefings, they know what we’re working on.

DL: Why do you think?

BARTENDER: Gentlemen.

SP: Thanks.

DL: Perfect, thanks.

SP: Take it out of here. I’m not sure what to think, Bill. Except maybe the worst.

DL: Word is that the CIA sanctioned the Pov massacres and many others. They even encouraged Radmatic to destroy that village and mow down all the people. Women, old people, children …

SP: Not personally, not verbally …

DL: Verbally.

SP: Why would they do such a thing?

DL: Bosniaks were Islamists. Not all of them from Bosnia.

SP: Mujahideen?

DL: There was a battalion: El Mujahid. Bad guys were in it, al-Qaeda, to include some of the 1993 World Trade plotters, so the thinking went.

SP: But to kill a whole village …

DL: People seem to forget that even before 9/11, and particularly after 1993, al-Qaeda has been on the radar as a serious threat. They wanted as many of them dead as possible. And by “them” I mean not only the Mujahid but their future: their families, the families of those who would support them.

SP: Bartender? Another? Bill, I think I’m going to need a lot more than two drinks to choke this down.

DL: Tom, you have to admit, for the CIA, the genocidal Serbs were a blessing. No U.S. boots on the ground, and people like Radmatic and General Mladic to do the dirty work of wiping out a generation of terrorists. Not as noble as what we did in Afghanistan against the Russians, perhaps, but a means to an end. And the feeling was that the Bosniaks had been warned not to invite the Mujahid to come fight. They knew they were a liability but fought with them anyway. Their mistake.

SP: So now all these years later we have Radmatic posing as Spikic running a global gem-theft syndicate. We’re about to grab him. So 381 sends in a man to stop us? What do they care?

DL: I heard what happened last night.

SP: You mean about Spikic? Yes, he’s dead. Shot three times in the chest, three in the face.

DL: Imagine if you grabbed Radmatic. Imagine you were set to prosecute him. Do you think he wouldn’t try to use what he knows about the CIA’s complicity in Bosnian atrocities to save his skin?

SP: So if you’re 381, why not just assassinate Radmatic?

DL: My guess is they couldn’t find him, or that they were waiting for you to find him for them. When you had pulled him in close, they sent a man in to flush him out into the open. How much were the gems worth?

SP: One hundred fifty million.

DL: One hundred and fifty million is good rat bait. I’m sure they’d just as soon do the same with General Mladic except the Serb military has him tucked away. You can be sure that if he’s ever turned over alive it won’t be until he’s so old and feeble his mind is gone.

SP: Why didn’t Milosevic spill the beans? Surely he knew.

DL: You’ll note he happened to die while on trial. Perhaps he intended to. People that have the capacity to seriously compromise the CIA have a way of dying at convenient junctures.

SP: So this means that Gill Underwood is a CIA handyman?

DL: Is that your jewel thief? Yes, he was probably a contractor. Maybe the Cubans were running him for the CIA, as a buffer. The CIA has gotten a lot better at keeping their distance, about maintaining plausible deniability. I’ve heard that with handymen they don’t even explicitly tell them what they’re supposed to do. They’re just supposed to figure it out. In this case I’m sure the target was obvious enough.

SP: But this man Underwood was a career Navy intel officer, injured in action. And then a career jewel thief. What kind of handyman is that?

DL: Fits the profile. CIA often recruits disaffected troops, even at hospitals where they are recovering from PTSD, many lost souls looking for some sort of direction, any direction. Think about it: if you’re the CIA, you don’t have to pay this Underwood character, you just have to let him steal. There’s no money changing hands; you’re not even telling him exactly what to do. You just put him in the situation and have him take care of it. No money trail, no communication trail. More often than not they switch out their identities with dead men, so they’re ghosts. In this case, you have someone who is skilled at breaking and entering and stealing. Better him than someone with a Langley building pass. If he gets caught by the local flatfoots, so what? If he starts in about a connection to the CIA, who’s going to believe a common thief?

SP: Only thing is … the only thing I don’t get is that Underwood’s woman got shot when he stole the gems. Underwood has been making a lot of noise like she’s still alive, but we think she may be dead and that he’s using her to make us and the Kurac mis-anticipate his motives. But what bugs me is that she was shot by one of the Kurac five hundred feet away. That’s a hell of a shot for a goon. Maybe she wasn’t shot? Maybe Underwood wanted us to think she was? Or maybe Underwood shot her?

DL: [laughter] That’s hard to say. You can be sure there’s some trickery attached to it. Or, just as likely, it was a function of The Clause. You know The Clause?

SP: Not in this context.

DL: Supposedly, there’s an unwritten rule in the CIA, and it’s called The Clause. It all has to do with protecting the mission, of covering the CIA’s trail of witnesses and mistakes, of closing the door and turning out the lights. No matter the cost.

SP: Cost. In money?

DL: [laughter] That, too, I suppose, but I was referring to human lives. The fine print in The Clause is that
everybody
is expendable.

SP: And what about us?

DL: Hm?

SP: You and me. What does 381 do about us? Are we expendable?

DL: I’m sure they think this all went completely over your head, Tom. They’re used to thinking the Bureau is comprised of lesser beings.

SP: If they record all calls, then they know I called you.

DL: A subsystem would have to flag a call like that, and why should such a call be flagged?

SP: If they were looking to see if I’d reach out to another source, they might.

DL: Now you’re making me want another drink. But I won’t, because I’m going to resist your paranoia. You should know by now what happens to snoops, to complainers, to might-be whistle blowers within the intelligence community.

SP: They get promoted, or reassigned.

DL: Precisely. They don’t pry out the bent nails in the FBI; they hammer them flat and move on. On that note, I’m driving back to Reston, safe in the knowledge that at the very worst I might be reassigned to Huntsville, Alabama.

SP: Thanks for the history lesson, Bill.

DL: You’re not going to follow up on this, are you? Let it go, Tom. There’s nothing you can do, especially now that the deed is done.

SP: I don’t like being the inferior being.

DL: Perhaps you’ll find some solace knowing that in the end, we’re all—even the CIA—inferior beings to the NSA.

SP: [laughter] Good night, Bill.

DL: Safe home.

SP: You too.