Sunday morning, Mahoney sat in front of the television in his condo in an old bathrobe, drinking coffee laced with bourbon. He was watching Kevin Collier, the director of the FBI, do his best to scare the shit out of the American public.
Collier had always reminded Mahoney of a Boston terrier he’d once owned: pudgy, bulging eyes, a pushed-in snout – and the misconception that it was a mastiff instead of a creature whose head was barely a foot off the ground. Collier was telling Tim Russert that the Bureau believed there were several al-Qaeda operatives in the United States and that those operatives were identifying disgruntled Muslim Americans and trying to convince them to commit terrorist acts.
Collier assured the television audience, though, that as tough as his job might be, he and all his agents were doing everything they could to track these culprits down. He said his job would sure be a lot easier if the borders weren’t so long and porous, but he was confident that General Banks of Homeland Security was doing the best he could, implying, of course, that if the customs agents who worked for Banks had done their job in the first place, none of these foreign terrorists would be in the country. When Russert asked Collier if he thought that Senator Broderick’s bill would make his job easier, Collier said that indeed it would.
Then Russert said, ‘As you know, Mr Director, Senator Broderick’s bill is currently in committee in the House. My sources have said that the House does not appear to be moving as expeditiously as it could to bring the bill to a floor vote. What’s your opinion on that?’
When Director Collier cleverly answered Russert’s question by saying that he was just a cop and it was the speaker’s job to pass the laws, Mahoney wanted to reach into the television set and strangle the bug-eyed bastard.
But Russert’s sources were right. Mahoney was doing everything he could to keep the bill in committee as long as possible without making it obvious that he was the one directing the slowdown. He had assigned the bill to a committee chaired by James Brice, a Massachusetts congressman so firmly under his thumb that the man was practically flat. Mahoney’s direction to Brice was to nitpick the shit out of the bill, question the placement of every comma and period, and then call in eighty-five experts to provide their opinions. A normal bill, Mahoney could have kept in committee indefinitely, but there was too much media focus on this one. Brice would do what he was told, but Mahoney also knew he could delay things for only so long.
The next day Mahoney arrived at the Capitol with the temperament of a scalded bear and called DeMarco up to his office to beat him up. DeMarco naturally thought this unreasonable. The FBI probably had five or six thousand agents looking into the terrorist attacks, maybe more. They had the manpower, the authority, the expertise, and all the right equipment. The Department of Homeland Security was assisting the FBI, and the NSA was probably bugging every cell phone call in America. The CIA was involved too, trying to find terrorist connections to the attacks overseas; knowing the CIA, they were most likely skulking around inside the United States as well. So if all those agencies and all their agents hadn’t turned up any evidence of a conspiracy, how in the hell was DeMarco supposed to?
Mahoney’s response to this well-reasoned argument was that all those federal agencies were firmly convinced that al-Qaeda was behind the recent attacks. The only guy that wasn’t convinced was John Mahoney, but he wasn’t about to stick his thick political neck out and say this to anyone who might actually be able to do something. He preferred to beat on Joe DeMarco, which he did by listing all the things that DeMarco had failed to do. He hadn’t been able to show that Donny Cray had done anything more than sell Reza Zarif a gun, he hadn’t found any concrete evidence that the men who had attacked their own country had been forced to do so, and he had absolutely no proof that the late Rollie Patterson was anything other than the hero that Mahoney had personally claimed him to be when he had pinned the medal on Rollie’s chest.
‘So, goddammit, what are you going to do next?’ Mahoney asked.
‘Well,’ DeMarco said, ‘I was hoping that maybe you could get them to do an autopsy on Rollie, see if maybe they can find something to show that he died from other than natural causes.’
Mahoney mulled that request over for a minute.
‘Yeah,’ he finally said. ‘I can do that. I’ll call the guy who runs the Capitol cops and tell him, Rollie bein’ one of our own and having just whacked this terrorist, that they need to cut him up to make sure some al-Qaeda loony didn’t shove a hypo into one of Rollie’s veins. He’ll keep my name out of it.’
‘There’s one other thing,’ DeMarco said.
‘What’s that?’ Mahoney asked.
‘I also want an autopsy performed on Donny Cray. I want to make sure his neck really snapped in a car accident.’
‘What do I look like, the governor of Virginia?’ Mahoney yelled. ‘An autopsy on Rollie’s one thing, but gettin’ one done on Cray is way out of my jurisdiction.’
Nothing
was out of Mahoney’s jurisdiction. He just didn’t want to do anything related to the attacks that might garner more media attention. He was getting enough bad ink for just knowing Reza Zarif and then dragging his feet on Broderick’s bill.
‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re right. They oughta take a closer look at how that guy died. So you go figure out some way to make it happen.’
DeMarco didn’t bother to argue with Mahoney; he knew from past experience that arguing didn’t help. The speaker was motivated, above all else, by self-interest. The other reason he didn’t argue was that he thought it possible his new friend at the DEA, Patsy Hall, might have the clout to do what he wanted done.
But before he saw Patsy there was something else he needed to do.
He needed to get some help.
DeMarco was sitting behind his desk, just about to pick up the phone to call Emma, when the phone rang. It’s spooky when that happens.
‘This is Mrs Drake from Senator Broderick’s office. The senator would like to see you at eleven
A.M
.’
Oh, boy.
Broderick’s office was located in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. DeMarco entered the senator’s suite and identified himself to the receptionist/executive assistant nearest the door, a young lady with strawberry-blond hair and an accent that made him think of magnolia blossoms and mint juleps and Daisy Duke. He may have been hopelessly in love with an Italian adulteress from Queens, he may have been smitten most recently by a cute schoolmarm from Iowa, but there was something about blondes with southern accents that always gave his libido a jolt. The young lady picked up the phone on her desk, punched a button, and said that a Mr DeMarco was there. Five minutes later he followed two well-oiled hips down the hallway to an office.
The man in the office was not Senator Broderick. He was a tall slim black man in his early forties. He had a longish nose, short hair, and a goatee. His eyebrows were slightly arched and, combined with the goatee, this made him look like a handsome, dark, brooding devil.
The man didn’t rise from his seat or shake DeMarco’s hand. He pointed to a chair in front of his desk and said, ‘Sit down, DeMarco. I’m Nick Fine, Senator Broderick’s chief of staff.’
‘I thought the senator wanted to see me,’ DeMarco said.
‘Fortunately for you, the senator doesn’t know who you are, and I think it would be in your best interest if the situation were to remain that way.’
Now
this
pissed DeMarco off: getting jerked over to the Dirksen Building by a guy who had used his boss’s name to get him there. Most folks come a-runnin’ when a senator says he wants to see them, DeMarco being no exception, but he might have ignored the call from Broderick’s office if he’d known he’d been summoned by someone on Broderick’s staff.
Before DeMarco could say anything, Fine opened a folder on his desk. ‘Your personnel file is amazingly … terse. It says you’re a lawyer, a GS-Thirteen, and have a House position called Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs. The file doesn’t identify your supervisor, and your job description is a single paragraph of absolute gibberish, which makes it impossible to tell what you do. So maybe you could clarify that for me, Mr DeMarco. Exactly what does the Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs do?’
DeMarco’s title, the one in flaking gold paint on his office door, had been Mahoney’s invention and it
was
completely meaningless. In order for DeMarco to get paid by the federal government he needed to be a civil servant. But as Mahoney didn’t want it known that DeMarco worked for him, he made up an imaginary function that had nothing to do with the Speaker of the House, devised an incomprehensible title to suit the function, and then forced his will upon some minor bureaucrat who was responsible for establishing legitimate positions in the legislative branch of government. The consequence was that DeMarco received a paycheck every two weeks, but, as Nick Fine had discovered, nobody could tell exactly what he did or for whom he worked.
In response to Fine’s perfectly logical question, DeMarco said, ‘I do exactly what my title says. I liaise for congressional affairs.’
DeMarco didn’t think he’d ever used the word
liaise
in a sentence before.
Fine stared at DeMarco for a minute, stroking his goatee. ‘Don’t try being cute with me, DeMarco.’
DeMarco didn’t say anything. He just stared back at Fine, all the time thinking he might be in a shitload of trouble here.
‘I’ve heard,’ Fine said, ‘that you’ve been asking questions about the terrorist attacks that have occurred in the last few weeks. What authority do you have for asking these questions?’
There was an old saying that Mahoney had introduced him to:
Tell the truth as often as you can. That
way it’s easier to keep track of all the lies you tell
. In keeping with this adage, DeMarco said, ‘I’m basically an odd-jobs guy. If a member of the House wants something checked out, something he doesn’t want to assign to his staff for whatever reason, and in particular something dealing with other government agencies, he may call me. In this case, a member asked me to find out a little more about the attacks.’
‘Which member?’ Fine said.
‘I can’t tell you that. I’ll let the congressman – or congress
woman
– know that you’re interested, and if he or she wants to tell you, he or she can.’
Fine shook his head. ‘What you just told me is pure bullshit. If a member of Congress wanted to know something about the attacks, he would have called the FBI directly. The second thing is, there’s virtually nothing that Congress does that doesn’t deal with other government entities, so I find it difficult to believe they need someone like you to do their staff work for them.’
Since the half-truth didn’t work, DeMarco decided to ask his own question. ‘Why do you care who I’m talking to?’ he said.
Fine smiled as if amused that someone of DeMarco’s rank would be so impudent. ‘Senator Broderick, as I’m sure you know, is spearheading America’s war against radical Muslims. He’s the only person in this government who’s actually trying to do something other than
lament
the situation. And because the senator’s bill is so significant, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of healthy debate over the issue. But it appears to me, based on the sort of questions you’ve been asking, that what you’re trying to do is muddy the waters. It appears that you’re attempting to develop scenarios related to these attacks that don’t fit the evidence. I think your goal may be to mislead the American people regarding what really happened.’
Mislead the American people?
DeMarco didn’t have the power to mislead anybody. And who the hell had Fine been talking to? How did he know what sort of questions DeMarco had been asking?
‘Look,’ DeMarco started to say, but Fine didn’t let him finish.
‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Fine said. ‘Getting a bill passed, any bill, is difficult. My job is helping Senator Broderick get this particular bill passed, and I don’t like someone like you – someone with no authority, someone unconnected to any elected position – making my job harder.’
‘You’re way off base here,’ DeMarco said. And sticking to his previous lie – a liar has to be consistent – DeMarco said, ‘Some congressman was just curious about a few things. I’m not trying to screw up the entire legislative process, and I’m sure as hell not trying to mislead anyone. I’m just—’
‘
Some congressman
, you say. It just occurred to me that the speaker has close ties with one of the terrorists’ families. Are you investigating these incidents because the speaker asked you to? We know Mahoney doesn’t support the bill.’
This was dangerous ground.
‘The speaker hasn’t asked me to do anything,’ DeMarco said. ‘I doubt if he even knows who I am.’
DeMarco got to his feet.
‘We’re not through yet,’ Fine said.
‘Yeah, we are,’ DeMarco said.
‘DeMarco, I don’t know what your game is, but you
will
stop doing whatever you’re doing. I’m not going to allow you to become an impediment to something as serious as this legislation. And if you don’t tell me who you’re working for, I’m going to talk to the Bureau and suggest that
you
become someone they need to take a hard look at. You may actually be committing a crime by interfering in a federal investigation. I may also have a quiet word with a man I know at the IRS and suggest your tax returns be audited. I noticed you have a home in Georgetown, and I’m trying to understand how you can afford it. I’m sure my friend at the IRS will be curious as well. And I’m definitely going to talk to OPM and suggest that they review your federal position and determine exactly what you do that warrants your current salary. That’s just for starters. There are probably a dozen other things I can do to make your life miserable if you don’t crawl back under the rock you came from.’
DeMarco had encountered a lot of staffers like Fine, guys who liked to throw their boss’s weight around, but this guy was taking things to a whole new level. He was also a total asshole.