Authors: Tod Goldberg
“No,” Sam said. “Federal agent.”
“Oh, I don’t think anyone like that is here,” Windbreaker said. “We’ve been working the scene here for the last couple of hours and it’s just been fire and police.”
“Dammit,” Sam said.
This was perfect. He made an exaggerated motion of slamming his car into PARK, even letting it roll a couple of inches in NEUTRAL first, so that the car made a noticeable lurch. He thought about jumping out of the open car window, but decided that might be a touch over the top for the situation and he also wasn’t entirely sure he could get through the window in light of the three-beer lunch he’d had. He fished around in his center console, found the perfect sunglasses among the half dozen pairs he kept there—mirrored aviators—and put them on before he opened his car door and bounded out onto the pavement like he was leading a charge up an enemy beach. Patton could have used mirrored aviators. “All right, all right,” Sam said. “Then I need some answers and I need them fast. Which one of you candy asses was first on the scene?”
Windbreaker took a noticeable step back into the crowd. A born leader knows to let someone else take the fall. It’s what made Nixon so good for so long. And really helped Dick Cheney out. Surrounding yourself with idiots also helped.
“That would be me,” one of the nebulous short-sleeve men said.
“What’s your name, son?” Sam said. The man looked to be about Sam’s age, but Sam always thought calling people “son” immediately gave the air of imperial authority and opened the door for spankings if need be.
“Peter,” he said.
Sam took a pen out of his pocket and wrote the name PETER on the back of his hand. Every man Sam had ever met who was willing to take notes on his flesh was a man who meant business. “Peter what?”
“Handel,” he said. “Like the composer.” Peter had a mop of gray-flecked brown hair and a goatee that was about twenty years too late for his face. Sam thought he sort of looked like Ringo Starr if Ringo Starr had thrown it all away for an exciting career in the insurance field. Sam did admire a guy who had an interesting enough—or, depending upon how one looked at it, boring enough—name that he needed to tell you someone else who had it. Sam wrote HANDEL on his palm.
“Well, Peter Handel, I’m Chuck Finley and I’m like nothing you’ve ever seen,” Sam said. “Give me the stats.”
“Uh,” Peter said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I know what you’re looking for.”
“Peter Handel, let me
compose
something for you, okay, son? This is the tenth bombing I’ve seen like this in the last month. Des Moines. Five dead. Cupertino. Three dead. Lake Charles. No human deaths, just two very crispy Dobermans. You seeing where this is headed, son?”
“I’m sorry,” Peter said again, “but where did you say you were from?”
Used to be people in the insurance business respected authority but now that they
were
the authority half the time, well, they were getting a bit on the cocky side. Sam preferred the old world where you could go to whatever doctor you wanted, any repair shop you wanted, and they’d both take a bullet out of your backside without a question. Now, it was all guys like Peter Handel. Mr. Question Man. Sam gave an exasperated sigh that was meant to convey all of that to Windbreaker, since clearly he was a man who would agree with Sam since not just anybody can wear a Windbreaker without irony.
Problem was, Sam couldn’t find Windbreaker. In fact, in the short time they’d been speaking, most of the sewing circle of insurance men had stepped away. They were like stealth bombers. Sam would have to deal with Peter Handel-like-the-composer.
“Where am I from?” Sam said. “I’m from a little town in Virginia called Langley. You heard of it? Or do I need to spell it out for you? Would it help if I called in a black helicopter?”
“Uh, no, no, sir,” Peter said. “I’m sorry. I just—you understand, protocol is that we don’t provide confidential information to third parties, and as I wasn’t sure who you were, I . . . well, you understand, right? Sir?”
Sam took out his pen again. “What’s your Social Security number, Handel?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your Social. Give it to me right now.” Peter rattled off nine numbers that Sam made a big show of carving into his palm. “Good. Good. Well. I’ll check you out. If you’ve got no priors, haven’t visited Pakistan in the last month, I’m sure everything will be fine. In the meantime, I need all of the information you’ve gathered here today if you value living in a free society. You value that, don’t you, Peter?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Peter said. There was a fine sheen of sweat covering the poor guy’s face and for a moment Sam felt sorry for him. He was just doing his job and, actually, doing it according to rule. Well, Sam thought, at least now he’d have a story to tell about the time he worked with the CIA. “I need to get my clipboard from my car. Is that all right?”
“Which car?” Sam asked.
“The gray Taurus,” Peter said. He pointed down the street where there were maybe five gray Tauruses parked.
“Okay,” Sam said, “but make it fast. Every minute you take is another minute we’re closer to a terrorist action, you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” he said and scampered off.
Sam walked over to the parking lot where Sugar’s car still smoldered. It was unlikely that Sugar’s name was associated in any way with the car, since Sam had a hard time imagining Sugar either going to a dealership to purchase the car or executing the actual act of mailing off a check each month for the payments. And there was no way Sugar was mentally capable of keeping up with his registration and insurance. He was sure the car had those things in the glove box and he was just as sure they were forgeries.
A young detective stood next to the car and wrote notes down on his notepad. Sam couldn’t figure out what it was about young detectives that made him edgy, particularly since they were both fighting the same war, at least metaphorically speaking. Sure, maybe Sam blew things up in the middle of the city periodically, and, sure, maybe he’d done some work over the course of the last couple years that straddled the line between legal and illegal, but it was all for the greater good. Anyway, it was probably that this batch of new detectives dressed like they were in a commercial for self-tanners and polo shirts.
“Help you with something?” the detective said.
“Finley,” Sam said and extended his hand toward the detective, who in turn just stared at it.
“You a reporter? If so, we’ve got no comment, okay?”
“Not a reporter, son,” Sam said. “I’m in from Langley.” He let that sink in for a moment but when the detective didn’t seem to show any recognition, he added, quietly, because these CIA guys tended to be all monosyllabic and quiet, “Langley, Virginia. Where the CIA lives? Maybe you’re familiar with it?”
The detective straightened up a bit but still didn’t seem to be a hundred percent invested in believing Sam.
“You got some ID?”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “The Department of Homeland Security just hands out badges that say TERRORIST LIQUIDATION OFFICER on them. Listen, son, I’ve got about five minutes of time here and either you’re going to help your country or you’re going to hurt it. Which is it going to be?”
The detective looked over his shoulder at the smoldering building. “This terror-related?”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine. This car stolen?”
“Yes, sir,” the detective said.
“And the office, it was the notary?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That makes fifteen,” Sam said.
“Fifteen what?”
“Classified,” Sam said. He took out his pen again and this time wrote “15” on his forearm. “This place owned by Henry Grayson?”
“That’s right,” the detective said.
“Find him?”
“No, not yet.”
“Good. Good. How many men you got on him?”
“None as yet. We’ve been calling his known numbers and getting disconnects. The insurance guys say he’s behind on payments, which they’re thrilled about.”
“Fucking carrion,” Sam said. “Pardon my Greek.” He stepped around the detective and looked into Sugar’s car. There wasn’t anything inside it now that could ever be tied to anyone—it was just ash and melted leather inside a metal frame. “Stolen, right?”
“VIN is for a Chevy van stolen in Orlando three months ago,” he said.
“Same guy, then,” Sam said. The insurance agent had made his way back and was waiting patiently a few yards away. He had a fancy clipboard, one of those that was encased in metal and had a flip top. Impressive. “Here’s what I need from you, Detective, and I don’t have time to wait around for an official report, you understand? For America?”
“I do,” he said. He stood up a little straighter. No matter the situation, in Sam’s experience at least, you ask cops to do something for America and they have an atavistic response that requires them to be completely honest and to improve their posture by at least twenty-five percent “What’d they use to blow up the building? C-4?”
“Shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Don’t know the make yet. But looks like maybe an M90.”
Shoulder-mounted rocket. Jesus. “Expected,” Sam said. “Same with the car?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right,” Sam said. “What’s your name, Detective?”
“James Kochel.”
“You ever think about working in something that is actually challenging?”
“Yes, sir, I have.”
“Good,” Sam said. “We’ll be in touch.” He stepped away and then did a quick pivot, added a touch of military flair to his persona (while, he noted, tweaking something in his calf) and addressed the detective again. “This Grayson fellow. You got anything on him with organized crime?”
The detective licked his lips in a way that reminded Sam of the guys he played high school football with but who, clearly, were never going to be as important later in life as they were then. Guys like that always licked their lips before something exciting. It freaked Sam out in high school and it freaked him out now. “Fact is,” the detective said, “I probably shouldn’t even be saying anything, but we’re all on the same team, right?”
“America’s team,” Sam said. “Like the Dallas Cowboys. Just one big interdepartmental huddle, Jimmy.”
The detective liked that. He leaned in toward Sam and then lowered his voice. “A year ago we had this place under surveillance. Thought he was running a high-stakes book out of it. Never got him on anything, but he had shady guys coming in and out at all hours.”
“Any Al-Qaeda?” Local cops loved to feel like they were just inches away from finding Bin Laden sitting inside the local Dairy Queen.
“No, no. Local talent.”
Sam looked at his hand and then licked his lips, too. Let him know they both had the same tic, make him think he’d fit in over in Langley. Though his godforsaken Dockers never would. “The name Big Lumpy mean anything to you?”
“It does.”
“The word ‘Hamas’ mean anything to you?”
“It does.”
“Good. Keep away from Big Lumpy for the near future—you got it?”
“I wouldn’t have guessed that,” Kochel said.
“Sleeper cells all over the place.”
“But didn’t he go to MIT?”
MIT? Sam tried not to show any surprise. He couldn’t imagine anyone presently called Big Lumpy ever attending MIT, but clearly Kochel knew something he didn’t.
“You tell me, hotshot,” Sam said. The beauty of ignorance mixed with authority (real or imagined, in this case), Sam believed, was that people tended to feel like they needed to impress you with their own importance. It’s what makes criminals think they can talk their way out of jail or convince a jury of their innocence on the power of personality alone. In the wrong hands, well, it’s clinical narcissism. In the right hands, it’s essentially been American foreign policy since Vietnam.
“When ATF was out here last year, that’s what they told me, anyway,” he said. “That’s how he got the nickname Big Lumpy, because he’s actually very skinny, right? But his brain, it’s big and lumpy, right? I heard he had an MRI when he was in college or something and it just stuck. But that could all be myth, right?”
Big Lumpy was the nickname of his
brain
? Oh, Sam thought, this is just getting more and more weird.
“That’s right,” Sam said. “Now, how many guys you think are in Hamas who have a degree from MIT and who can get hold of the kind of money he has access to? Starting to make sense?”
“Wow,” Kochel said. “Wow. Yeah. Wow.”
The problem with local cops wasn’t that they were ineffective, because Sam was sure they must be pretty good at solving something, though certainly they’d never put the pieces together on any of the cases he and Michael had worked on, which made them perhaps blind and deaf, particularly since half the time they helped someone, Sam ended up blowing up half a city block. No, Sam thought, the problem with local cops everywhere was the same: They wished they were doing something more exciting. So all anyone really had to do to get them to spill what meager information they might have was to, well, ask them. Cops were the very worst confidential sources on the planet.
“Keep that information on the down low now, okay? It’s national security level. You’ll notice I confirmed nothing. And I was never here, got it?”
“Yes, sir.” Sam could tell Kochel had something eating away at his conscience. His voice had gone all timid. These guys always thought guys like Sam—or, well, guys like who Sam was pretending to be—had all the answers. “Can I ask you a shop question?” Kochel asked.
“Sure, hotshot, but make it quick.”
“Maybe you don’t know this, but I have to ask . . .”
Sam waved the detective off in midsentence. “It was Oswald. He acted alone. The guy on the grassy knoll was one of our guys.”
Before Detective Kochel could respond, Sam thanked him and then made his way back to Peter Handel and his metal clipboard. No sense prolonging the experience or answering anything about Area 51. “What do you have?” Sam asked Handel once he reached him.
“Bare bones? Guy hasn’t made his last payment, so on the record, this isn’t on us to pay out on the hazard insurance or fire or anything. Now, off the record, he’s been a client for ten years, so maybe he sues and says, Okay, I’ve made enough payments that if I’m forty-five days late, you’re not going to honor my account? Take it to mediation, we’d probably settle, but we’d make him sweat it. It would be a bad beat, but we’d take it.”