To Free a Spy (9 page)

Maria buried her face in her hands. Frank Gallardi hadn’t killed Karly, but what if Big Lenny had found something that made it
look
like he did? A dead man couldn’t defend himself and she didn’t believe for a second that Lenny was trying to clear Frank. If Karly was murdered, the killer had to be the man Maria saw at Karly’s door on the day she disappeared—the pompous bigwig Maria had warned her about.
Jag,
Karly called him, but Maria knew his real name. And if he didn’t do it, well, he’d have to take care of himself now. But she wasn’t about to let Big Lenny drag Frank Gallardi’s name through the sewer. When she looked up she was sobbing, but calm. “I will talk to you.”

* * *

Alicia Fraser knew it was going to be another unusual call. It had been a zoo around her office all week. The girl who usually took the boss’s calls was on vacation and Alicia was covering for her as well as trying to corral her own out of control cubicle. Alicia was reprimanded for mishandling calls once before and uncertain what to do with this one. She put the caller on Hold and pressed the intercom.

“Sir, I have a man on the line who insists you will want to speak with him. His name is, is…Magliacci.”

“Don’t you know how to handle my calls?” he demanded. “I don’t know any damn Magliacci. How’d he get through?”

“Sir, it sounds like he convinced the central operator you’d want to know about some person named Karly. Karly Amarson, I think he said.”

* * *

He closed his eyes briefly in reflection, then told Alicia to put the caller on Hold and walked over to the window. He suddenly realized how hot it was in his office and loosened his necktie. Millions of unwelcome memories flashed across his brain in the two minutes that passed before he went back to the phone.

“Put him through.”

He flipped on the voice recorder and picked up the flashing line. “Mr. Magliacci?”

The caller cleared his throat and said, “I’ll get right to the point. I have some things that may have belonged to Karly Amarson. I was hoping you could help me identify them.”

“Amarson?”

“Karly Amarson. You knew her, didn’t you? And
Jag
?”

There was a pause, then, “Come to my office tomorrow at ten.”

* * *

Magliacci was surprised how easy it was the next day. The guards checking his I.D. at the security points called him
Mr. Magliacci
, and if he was self-conscious about his old car, no one else seemed to pay it any attention. The young man who escorted him inside the building called someone to announce his arrival and showed him to a room where he was to wait for another escort to take him to his host. He declined the offer for coffee and flipped through the pages of a
Time
to keep his mind off his anxiety.

He wondered if he had made a mistake by agreeing to meet here. He could have named the place. Any place. After all, he
was
in control, or would have been elsewhere. He thought casinos had pretty good security but this place put them to shame. Maybe he should’ve handled it another way—sent a note demanding what he wanted without identifying himself. But he had taken steps to protect himself and now he had no choice but to trust in them.

A woman in her twenties showed Magliacci into a large office and he was standing at the window when his host walked in a few minutes later. He shook Magliacci’s hand and spoke with a sunny smile. “Leonard, I’m glad you’re here. It’s great to see you. Sit anywhere you like. They offer you something to drink? Pastries?”

Magliacci glanced around the room as if to see whether anyone could overhear him, although he knew that what he was going to say would never be heard by anyone outside this room even if it was taped. He took a long breath.

“Let’s just do our business. You do know Karly Amarson?”

“Heard of her, yes. Disappeared, didn’t she, few years back?”

“Yeah, but now they dug up some things that belonged to her at a building site in Atlantic City. DNA shows it’s her blood on them. Maybe you saw it in the newspaper.”

“Had no idea!”

“Yeah. Few weeks ago.”

The man looked silently at Magliacci for a moment, then said, “Is this what you wanted to tell me?”

“Well, it’s related. See, Frank Gallardi was my uncle. I went over to his office after the funeral. I found some things that might have belonged to Karly in his vault. Also found your name.”

The host tried a laugh. “My name shows up in a lot of places.”

Magliacci glanced at his own hands and was surprised they were holding steady. “Exactly my point. Unfortunately, things have this way of getting in the newspapers when big names like yours are involved. Inadvertently, you know. And I’m sure you don’t want that to happen.”

“So where did you find it? My name.”

“The vault, indirectly.”

The man hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, Leonard. Could you get to the point.” It wasn’t a question.

Magliacci leaned forward. “Okay, I…I’ve got some financial problems. That’s why I’m here.”

The man studied him.

Magliacci went on. “I can make sure none of the information I found ever gets to the press, FBI, that sort of thing.”

The man looked at Magliacci for several seconds, then said, “Look, Leonard, I hardly knew Karly Amarson, certainly have nothing to hide. But if you need some money…well, Frank and I, we go way back, and you’re his nephew. How big are your money problems?”

“The price is five million dollars.”

The man’s face went pale. The seconds seemed to Magliacci like an hour before he responded. “Mr. Magliacci, I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Well, let’s talk about that.” Magliacci described what he had found in the vault: The Tiffany ring with initials inscribed; the bloody knife; the black dress; and the phone pad bearing the Golden Touch logo and the
Washington Post
phone number. Then he talked about the time frame for the murder: Karly Amarson had to have been murdered somewhere between the day the ring was bought at Tiffany’s and the date the new area code for Atlantic City went into effect, a date Magliacci got from the phone company, because it was logical to assume that was when the hotel would have replaced the old note pads with fresh ones that showed the new area code. That was a 146-day window.

Those facts alone didn’t prove anything on this man Magliacci knew to be JAG but Magliacci was sure it would convince him of the kind of detail he was up against.

The man seemed to be in thought for a minute, then stood up as a clear indication the meeting was over. “Mr. Magliacci, there’s nothing there that concerns me. I have another appointment now, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll call someone to escort—”

Magliacci knew if the conversation ended there his remaining life would be very short. He remained seated and leaned forward.

“Maria Sanchez. Know her?”

“It makes no difference, but no, I don’t.”

“She knows you. Knew Karly too. Executive housekeeper at the Golden Touch. Very loyal to Frank. I’m finding out Karly talked to Maria about everything. You know how women are bad to talk like that.”

“And how does this Maria fit in?” The man was gripping the back of the chair he was holding so hard that his knuckles turned white.

“The ring. At first, you see, I was lookin’ for someone with the initials J-A-G, but when Maria told me Karly’s nickname for you was Jag, well, it sorta cleared that up.”

Magliacci watched the man’s eyes narrow as he looked at the floor, then back at Magliacci.

“Nobody ever called me that in my entire life.”

Magliacci nodded. “Karly confided in Maria at times, and Maria warned her to stay away from you. Then Maria saw you entering Karly’s apartment on the very day she disappeared. Said Karly was, like, draped all over you.”

Jag shook his head. “If she knew anything about Karly’s death she would have taken it to the police a long time ago. How did you dream up this frame, Magliacci?”

“Yeah! I wondered the same thing, I mean, why
didn’t
she go to the police then? So I asked her. And you know what? She had the perfect answer, given the kind of person she is. Maria was worried about Frank’s reputation. She thought you were a friend of Frank’s and knew it would look bad for him if you were associated with a murder there in his hotel. But then when Frank was murdered, she looked me up. Couldn’t hold it any longer. I’m the only person she trusts now that Frank’s gone. I’ve got her under control for now, no FBI or anything, but of course if she ever starts to think you might have been involved in Frank Gallardi’s death too—”

Jag slammed the chair he was leaning on into the coffee table, causing a surface crack in the glass top. He looked like he was about to move on Magliacci when Magliacci thrust a sheet of paper before his face.

“Better read this first. It’s Maria’s statement.”

Magliacci gave him a minute to digest the photocopy of the hand-written letter he had dictated to Maria Sanchez and said, “I can make all of this go away for you and keep Maria quiet. That’s what you’re buying.”

The man uprighted the chair and sat back down. Nothing was left of his eyes but twin dark beads. He was hoarse and breathed rapidly. “Leonard, you seem like a bright man but you’ve made a mistake here. A very big mistake. First, in thinking I have that kind of money, but most of all for taking me on. Take a look at where you are, this room you’re sitting in, who you’re talking to, all the security you saw out there, the resources I control. If I had anything to do with Karly Amarson’s death or was worried about you or this toilet scrubber Maria, has it not occurred to you that I could wrap all this up nice and quiet? You would not walk out of here if I was the man you say I am. You sane enough to understand that?”

Magliacci nodded. “That worried me some. So I planned for it.”

Jag sneered. “Not something you can plan for. That sort of thing is over when it happens.”

“Now you’re insulting me. You’re too wise to not assume I have planned for every contingency. Everything is in a safe-deposit box at the bank. That may seem like an old Edward G. Robinson movie trick to you but everything’s in there. Sanchez’s affidavit. The knife. Karly’s black dress, and the blood stains on it. Maybe all of the blood’s hers, maybe some of it came from the person who killed her. I don’t know, but the cops can figure all that out. With DNA and all. Anything happens to me or Sanchez, the police get a letter from my attorney directing them to the safe deposit box. When I get the money, the letter goes away and you get the keys to the box.”

With that, Magliacci lifted himself off the sofa. “Look, I know it can take some time to raise five million, so don’t worry about that. I can keep everything like it is for a few days. I’ll be in touch.”

After winding up their
Joplan discussion Cross and Warfield took two steps at a time up the wide stairs to the executive level where they stopped and shook hands, wordlessly looking at each other, cementing the charge given to and accepted by Warfield. If he’d ever before signed on for a mission filled with greater potential for widespread disaster, social upheaval and political consequence he could not think of it.

Warfield emerged from the White House compound and drove across the Potomac River into Virginia then south to the Alexandria Detention Center—no more than a twenty-minute trip. A deputy sheriff checked his I.D. at the visitor kiosk and Warfield parked in the shadow of the seven-story jail.

The four-hundred inmate capacity lockup was a county facility but the ADC housed federal prisoners awaiting trial in the Eastern District of Virginia under a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service. The ADC had hosted some interesting inmates. The FBI spy Robert Hanssen and CIA turncoat Rick Ames were held there for a while. A few Al-Qaeda types had landed there—Zacarias Moussaoui, the American John Walker Lindh and others accused of being part of the Osama bin Laden network were guests in the famous jail for a time. The detention center’s upscale architecture and the manicured gardens that graced the grounds did little to offset the chilling effect of the razor wire, concrete barriers and shotgun-toting deputies at the guard station.

Warfield parked under an oak and spent a few minutes reading the FBI file before going inside. A deputy keyed-in the information Warfield gave him. “I’ll get the lieutenant. Hold one.”

Warfield puttered around the vintage motorcycles in the lobby and looked at the black-and-white photographs of a simpler police department of half a century earlier. Before he left Cross, the president had called Paula and instructed her to make the necessary arrangements. The jail would require approval from someone in the justice department, and even though the request came from Cross the filtration down to jail level would take some time. Justice wasn’t going to turn its catch over to an outsider without some ado— especially not if the request went to a United States attorney who recognized Warfield’s name.

Warfield was checking his watch again as a young officer came into the lobby rolling his eyes. He apologized for the delay.

“Cameron Warfield, right? I’m Aubrey Holden, a lieutenant in the Security Division here. Been on the phone with that bunch for most of an hour. First there was clearance and then they called back and said no deal. Now it’s on again. Photo I.D. Let’s get you in before there’s another change.”

Warfield signed a form that listed twenty-seven visitor regulations. Holden told him he was on Joplan’s approved list and there would be no delay next time.

Warfield thought about the man he was about to see. The limited methods and procedures the FBI could get away with were not going to do the trick with someone stonewalling, as Joplan was doing. The FBI knew Joplan was dirty but he and his lawyer knew the FBI hadn’t yet accumulated enough hard evidence to hold him. The prospect of his being freed seven days hence worked on Warfield.

Three armed deputies stood near the door to the private interview room Warfield had requested, and the security camera above the door recorded anyone entering or leaving. When Warfield started in, Lieutenant Holden stopped him. “Sir, if you don’t mind a personal comment—it’s about my brother. He went through Lone Elm few years back. Tom Holden. Navy sent him there after he completed SEAL training. He has great respect for you and Lone Elm.”