Blood Trust (6 page)

“But—”

“Henry is family. He’s got power and influence, which is what she needs right now.” Jenkins caught Jack’s eye. “You can see this is the best course for Ms. Carson.” He cast a glance at the departing cops and ME. “In any event, you’re needed here. If you’re taking over the case, you need to examine the crime scene as well as interview Detectives Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee before they can get together and cook up a story.” Seeing Jack’s gaze wandering to Alli, he added, “Besides, you heard what O’Banion said: ‘We won’t be forgetting this.’ I need you to ride herd on him, make sure he doesn’t make good on that threat.” He smiled. “That’s what you folks do best, isn’t it, deflect threats. So do it.”

*   *   *

D
ENNIS
P
AULL
passed through the six layers of security to reach the West Wing, then was vetted one more time, though in a totally different way, by Alix, the president’s press secretary. Paull liked her far more than he did the president. Arlen Crawford, a big, rangy, sun-scarred Texan, had been Edward’s vice president, a marriage of political convenience that had pleased neither man. Each was strong where the other was weak, but their political ideas, and, worse, ideals, had worked at cross-purposes.

“Morning, Dennis,” Alix said cheerfully, “I see we’re all up early today.”

“Duty calls.”

She nodded. “So I heard.”

They began to walk together toward the Oval Office.

“How are things with your daughter and grandson?”

“Claire and Aaron are settling down nicely, thanks.”

“It was fun meeting them.”

“Aaron hasn’t stopped talking about you.” He laughed. “I don’t know what you did to impress him—”

“I let him wear Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Rider hat.”

Paull nodded. “That would do it, all right.”

They were now nearing the door to the Oval Office and Alix stopped, her face suddenly grave. “Dennis, you know I’m a loyal person. I work for the Old Man, but…”

He paused, waiting and suddenly on edge.

“I just … well, I just wanted to say watch your back.”

Before he could formulate an answer, she had stepped forward, planted a kiss on his cheek, and was heading back down the red-carpeted hallway. He turned. It was deathly still. Even the faint whisper of air from the hidden vents seemed ominous.

Nestling Alix’s nugget of intel in the forefront of his mind, he rapped sharply on the thick double doors, turned the knob, and entered.

Dawn had come, seeping through the thick-curtained windows. The president was alone, which surprised Paull. He was sitting on one of the matching sofas that faced each other in the area in front of his desk. On the low glass-topped table was a chased silver tray and an antique silver service from which Crawford was pouring himself a cup of coffee. Significantly, beside the tray lay a black dossier with the yellow
EYES ONLY
stripe across its cover.

“Dennis, come on in.” He gestured. “Good of you to join me.”

In his soft, West Texas accent he made it seem as if Paull had had a choice.

“Help yourself,” the president said, stirring in a tablespoonful of sugar. “The tarts and hot cross buns are just out of the oven.”

Seating himself across from the president, Paull poured a cup of coffee and took a hot cross bun on a small china plate. Fully concentrated on Crawford, he neither drank nor ate. Crawford had proved himself the kind of man who takes to the presidency the way a chef takes to the cutting board. In the space of the ten months since he had ascended to the highest office, he had quietly but methodically dismantled all of his predecessor’s initiatives, replacing them with others that conformed to his conservative agenda.

“Sorry to get you out of bed at this hour.”

“I was already up,” Paull said. “Your call caught me at Walter Reed.”

“You’re not ill, are you, Dennis?”

“No, sir. Lyn Carson died.”

“Ah.” The president put down his cup and stared up at the ceiling, as if watching out for Lyn in heaven. “Sad business, Dennis. My condolences. I know how close you were with the family.”

Paull couldn’t help but ponder the question of a double meaning. When he was with Crawford he was always aware that he had been one of Edward Carson’s closest friends and advisors, even though in his first meeting with Crawford after he’d been sworn in as president, he said to Paull, “I just want you to know, Dennis, that I value loyalty above all other traits.”

Leaning forward, Crawford refilled his cup. As he sat back, he gestured at the dossier. “We have one helluva problem.”

Paull took the file onto his lap and opened it. On top of a significant pile of papers was a black-and-white photo, a head shot of a man who Paull judged to be somewhere between forty and forty-five. It was impossible to see the face clearly or even to make out particular features, other than a full beard. It could be anyone.

“Who the hell is this?” he said.

“It’s not so much who,” the president said, “as what.” He cleared his throat, watching as Paull began to leaf through the intel that lay below the image. “His name, as you can see, is Arian Xhafa.” He pronounced the last word “Shafa.”

“He’s Albanian,” Paull said. “Why should we care about him?”

“That’s what I thought,” Crawford said. “Read on.”

Paull did, rustling pages as he scanned them. Xhafa was the kingpin of the Albanian Mafia, of which there were at least twenty competing clans. That is, before Xhafa’s rise to power. Like Mao or Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogun of feudal Japan, Xhafa had vision—more than that he had the muscle to cajole, bully, extort, murder, and maim his way to the top of the heap by uniting all the clans.

“He calls his men freedom fighters,” the president said, “and I suppose in some respects they are—fighting for Albanian freedom in Macedonia. But their true business is smuggling, though by the evidence in your hands, they’re not averse to a bit of murder-for-hire. There.” He pointed. “Read the particulars on that page.”

Paull ran his finger down the sheet. Three hundred Macedonian soldiers slaughtered in Bitola, almost the same number in a pitched battle on the outskirts of Resen. The text was punctuated by highly graphic photos of mass graves, gaping pits filled with bodies, exposed to the photographer’s lens like raw wounds. Firefights in the mountain villages around Struga, resulting in ruins, cindered, smoking as if just leveled. Scattered around were charred bodies, warped and curled, barely recognizable as being human. The next page held more horrors, a series of photos showing the victims of assassinations, both inside Macedonia and in more far-flung places, such as Greece, southern Italy, even Turkey and Russia, that Xhafa or his people were suspected of carrying out. These areas were so remote, the countries involved of so little interest to Americans, that the atrocities barely made any of the papers and certainly were not rating fodder for CNN or FOX, let alone the three legacy networks.

“This fucker’s a real live monster,” the president said with obvious distaste. “No one’s going to give a crap how we take him out, guaranteed.”

But that would be far from easy. Xhafa’s base was the impregnable city of Tetovo, in western Macedonia—coordinates 42° 0' 38" North, 20° 58' 17" East—an area as wild and lawless as Afghanistan or western Pakistan. Xhafa, clever fellow that he was, had played on the theme of Albanian freedom, making the rational case that freedom for Albanians was unattainable unless they were united in their efforts against the Macedonian government.

However, in the three years since he had come to power, the main thrust of his activities had been to increase the efficiency of the clans’ smuggling operations. This included expanding the white slave trade, exporting Eastern European girls from ten to eighteen from their native countries to Italy, England, and the United States. Most often, these girls were sold to Xhafa’s representatives by their own parents, desperate and poor beyond measure, who could see no monetary upside to female offspring.

Paull, pausing in his reading, glanced up. “Surely this is a job for Interpol, not Homeland Security.”

“The Pentagon disagrees. They believe Xhafa to be extremely dangerous and so do I. Listen, after the last decade of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Yemen, America’s image abroad is in desperate need of rehabilitation. Edward was on the right track with the arms deal he signed with Russia just before his death. And I’m fully aware of President Yukin’s attempts at double-dealing. Without you and Jack McClure, the deal would never have gotten done.”

He looked around the room, as if suddenly self-conscious or overwhelmed by his surroundings. “In tonight’s TV address I’m making human rights one of the ribs of my agenda. We can’t have young girls—hell, girls of any age—being shipped into the United States and sold into prostitution rings. The traffic in human beings is enormous. Every six minutes another girl is sold or snatched off the streets. The trade is epidemic; it has become a worldwide scandal. Think how the image of the United States will profit when we bring Xhafa to justice.”

“Have the DoD send in a team of Special Forces—”

The president sighed. “Look at page ten.”

Paull pulled it out. It was an “Eyes Only” field SITREP from General Braedenton, the head of DoD, to the president himself. In brief, a Special Forces SKOPES unit of six highly trained black ops agents had been dispatched to Macedonia two weeks ago with orders to take out Arian Xhafa with all due speed. DoD monitoring lost contact with the unit thirty-one hours into the mission.

“The SKOPES unit never returned and was never heard from again,” Crawford said.

“How in the hell did Xhafa manage that?”

The president looked like he’d just seen a dog run over by a car. “That’s one of the mysteries. This man is not like other crime lords; there’s something different about him.”

“He’s smarter?”

“Among other things,” the president nodded, “such as sophisticated weaponry to take out an entire SKOPES unit.”

“Sophisticated weaponry takes big bucks.”

The president’s expression became even more pained. “Simply put, we aren’t authorized to send military into Albania. Besides which, the military can’t cut it in that region—the mountainous terrain works against them. No, this is strictly black ops. A small guerrilla unit is what’s needed. And don’t talk to me about Interpol. Those monkeys can’t find their own assholes.”

“Nevertheless, with all due respect, sir—”

“Loyalty, Dennis.” Crawford’s voice was soft but with a backbone of steel. “I want you to find Xhafa and shut him down … permanently.”

Paull sighed in resignation. “All right. I’ll get a task force to work up a plan ASAP.”

“That’s just what you
won’t
do.” The president set down his cup. “I want you to handle this job personally.”

Paull felt as if he were a whiplash victim of a car crash. “Sir, I don’t understand. A secretary of HS doesn’t—”

“It seems to me, Dennis—and I say this as a compliment, though I fear you’ll take it otherwise—that secretary of HS was never the best use of your talents.” He turned and took a thick Eyes Only dossier off his desk. “For ten years, during your assignments in the field, you never once failed to complete a mission. Plus, you never lost a man.”

“Once,” Paull said. “I lost a man once.”

“No.” The president paged through the dossier until he reached the page he was looking for. Running his forefinger down the page, dense with typescript, he said, “The agent, Russell Evans, was wounded by friendly fire. You carried him on your back for twenty-five miles until you crossed over from hostile territory.”

“By then he was dead.”

“Through no fault of your own, Dennis.” The president closed the dossier with a decisive slap. “You received a medal for that mission.”

Paull, chilled to his marrow, sat very still. He was hyperaware of his heartbeat and his breath, as if he were a scientific observer monitoring this unreal scene. “What is this,” he said in a voice he did not fully recognize, “a sacking?”

“What makes you say that?”

“A demotion, then.”

“Dennis, as I feared, you’ve completely misinterpreted what I’ve just said.”

“Do you want me to step down as secretary of HS?”

“Yes.”

“Then I haven’t misinterpreted anything.”

Crawford hitched himself to the edge of the sofa. “Listen to me, Dennis. I know you don’t trust me. I know your loyalty was to Edward, and since we never saw eye to eye on most matters…” He allowed his voice to trail off, as if he was thinking ahead three or four steps. Or, anyway, that was Paull’s interpretation of the small silence.

Then the president’s eyes reengaged with Paull’s. “I value you, Dennis, perhaps—and I know this will be difficult for you to believe—perhaps more than Edward did. This job he put you in—it’s not … You’re not a politician. Your expertise is in the field—it always has been. That’s where you shine; that’s where you’ll be of the most use to me—and your country.”

“So the decision has been made.”

Crawford looked at Paull for a moment. “Dennis, answer me this: Have you been happy the last year or so? Happy in your job, I mean.”