Conspiracy (40 page)

“Sir?”

“I'm going to be out in California myself the day after tomorrow. Senator McSweeney and I will be sharing a podium. I'd like to have something specific to tell him when he asks who's trying to kill him.”

“Understood.”

 

AS SOON AS
he was out of the jetway, Jimmy Fingers increased his pace, striding quickly in the direction of the exit. Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport had never seemed so immense. Fortunately, he'd only taken a carry-on, so there was no need to wait with the others in the luggage-receiving areas. Jimmy Fingers joined the queue at the taxi stand; it moved briskly, and he soon found himself in a cab.

“The Strip,” said Jimmy. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the secondhand laptop he'd brought along.

“Which hotel?”

“I'm not going to a hotel,” said Jimmy Fingers, turning the laptop on.

“Hoo-kay,” said the driver.

What Jimmy Fingers wanted to do was find a wireless network where he could connect and send the e-mail—from the cab, if possible. But the radio waves didn't seem to want to cooperate, and the driver seemed nosey besides, checking his mirror every few minutes to see what was going on.

“You know where there's a Starbucks?” Jimmy Fingers said finally.

“Starbucks. Coffee?”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“Expensive place for coffee. I know a place—”

“Starbucks is where I want to go.”

“Hoo-kay.”

JIMMY FINGERS ORDERED
a tall decaf, then went and sat outside in the small fenced-in area at the side of the Starbucks at Centennial and I-95. He connected to the Internet and, with cars whizzing back and forth, sent what he knew would be the last e-mail of the campaign, this one threatening Congressman Mark Dalton of Florida, whose status as a veteran had not helped him break into double digits in any of the primaries so far, and whose campaign was all but finished.

After he signed off, Jimmy Fingers walked to the back of the store, toward a row of Dumpsters. He was just about to throw the laptop into the nearest one when a soft moan caught him off guard. Two teenagers were making out in the scrubby bushes nearby.

Cursing silently to himself, Jimmy Fingers immediately whirled around and began walking in the opposite direction. His heart double pumped, and his hands became clammy. A bus was just pulling up; Jimmy Fingers got on it. He realized it was a mistake but felt trapped; when the bus driver told him he needed exact change, Jimmy Fingers blinked at him for a second before recovering and reaching into his pocket for the right coins.

By the time he gathered himself, the bus was moving. Jimmy Fingers realized he now had a bigger problem than getting rid of the laptop in his briefcase—he had no idea where the hell he was.

Jimmy Fingers stayed on until he came to the Cannery Hotel. Still feeling disoriented, he went inside and found a bar—the Pin-Ups Lounge. He ordered himself a beer, and drank it greedily. When he was done, he simply got up, leaving the briefcase with the computer.

He was about halfway to the door when a woman in her late sixties called after him, telling him he had forgotten his bag.

I'm never going to get rid of the damn thing, Jimmy Fingers thought to himself, pretending relief as he thanked her and tucked the briefcase under his arm.

He made his way to the men's room, where he flushed his face with cold water. It was the heat that was getting to him,
he told himself, not the pressure. There was no pressure—he was within a few months of achieving everything he'd ever dreamed of achieving. McSweeney would be President; Jimmy Fingers would take a job as special assistant to the President, and hold a post in the party as well.

Scores would be settled, friends rewarded.

And they would achieve a great deal. Jimmy Fingers had been a believer in democracy and the little man when he started out, and as cynical as he had become, deep down he still believed that an elected official could do some good. If the right people were guiding him.

Jimmy Fingers caught sight of his face in the mirror. He looked a lot paler, and a lot older, than he had thought.

As he reached for the paper towels, he realized the solution to his laptop problem stood right before him.

With a quick shove, the laptop fell from the briefcase into the wastebasket. Jimmy Fingers rolled out a fistful of paper and threw it on top. He washed and dried his hands again, adding still more paper to make sure the laptop couldn't be easily seen. Hands dry, he went to find out how to get a cab to pick him up.

 

“IT'S ONLY IN
the last ten years that this has become practical. The exact methods we use weren't even around then, I don't think,” said the FBI specialist as she scraped the inside of Jason Cedar house's mouth. “You'd be amazed at what the scientists can do.”

“I am amazed,” said Ambassador Jackson. He guessed that the technician had been in middle school a decade before.

“Mummm, too,” said Jason.

“Hold on, sweetie,” said the FBI technician. “Almost done with you. Have to be very careful about contamination with these tests.”

She slipped the probe—it looked like a Q-tip that retracted into a pen case—into a small plastic container, screwing it closed. She'd taken a dozen samples.

“All done. That wasn't so bad, was it?”

“Uhhh-uh,” said Jason.

“What we're going to do with this is a Short Tandem Repeats test. STR. It's a kind of PCR protocol, where the DNA replicates itself. Of course, we may have to fall back on the mitochondrial test. We'll do a whole series. Not likely to get an error—unless there was contamination.”

“Yeah, but, uh, this is going to prove my uncle is the one that's buried in Arlington National Cemetery, right?” said Cedar house. “Because my mom would want to be sure. She's a little concerned since you called,” he added, turning to Jackson.

“It should be able to confirm it,” said Jackson.

“Every family has a certain amount of DNA that they share,” said the FBI expert. “And they inherit it. Now let's say Robert Tolong was your father rather than your uncle. Then the odds that a match was a coincidence would be one in a quintillion, assuming we were using STR. In this case, the odds will be a little less, but they're still way up there.”

“Quintillion is one with eighteen zeroes,” said Jackson, who had heard the entire lecture on the way over.

“It will take us roughly six hours to pull the results together,” added the technician. “The actual DNA cycling is three hours; that's where the time is, because you need enough strands to do the actual test.”

“Cool. Can I have dinner now?” asked Cedar house.

 

CHIEF BALL HAD
a cover story all ready, but the clerk at the car rental counter didn't even bother looking at the name as Amanda Rauci's credit card cleared the scan. He was too busy selling the optional insurance.

“I guess I'll take it,” said Ball as soon as the man glanced at the card. “The insurance.”

“Can't be too careful,” said the clerk happily. He slapped the card through the reader and handed it back to Ball without checking the name.

In the old days, the days when he was back from Vietnam, Ball would have immediately driven down to the worst ghetto in the city and sold the car for cash and, with luck, a new ID. He'd quickly acquire a whole set of phony identification—license, credit cards, Social Security number, anything and everything he needed.

But he was too old for that, and not “hip” to the local scene. He didn't know where the chop shops were, and certainly wouldn't have known who to trust. He didn't even know if you could make money doing that anymore.

Looking tough when you were sixty wasn't nearly as easy as when you were twenty. If he looked like anything now, it was probably a cop: an old, has-been cop.

He'd fallen down a rat hole. Plunged down.

He'd never felt like this, not even in Vietnam.

He thought of Amanda Rauci, and his hands started to tremble.

Just drive, he told himself. Just drive.

 

RUBENS WAITED UNTIL
he had reached his office to call the President. Even so, it was only just 6:00
A.M.
The switchboard operator gave him Mark Kimbel, the most junior aide to the chief of staff.

“Mr. Rubens, what can we do for you?”

“I have important information for the President,” said Rubens.

“Important enough to wake him up?”

“No,” said Rubens. “But he should call at his earliest convenience.”

President Marcke called Rubens back an hour later.

“What's going on, Billy?”

“The man who was identified as Sergeant Tolong and buried at Arlington National Cemetery is not Sergeant Tolong,” said Rubens.

“Is it Ball?”

“We're working on that,” said Rubens. The FBI had been unable to obtain DNA samples to match relatives; tracking them down, obtaining and testing samples, and most of all doing it with the legal paperwork necessary to be used in court would take some time.

“Assuming you're right, linking this Chief Ball and Tolong won't actually prove that McSweeney was involved in the theft of the money, will it?” asked Marcke.

“No, sir. As I said, there may in fact be no link.”

“Which would mean he would get away with it, wouldn't it?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think the senator's reaction would be if someone told him what you know now? In other words,” explained the President, “if you said that the attempt on his life may have had something to do with the theft of money in Vietnam, and that we think he's being pursued by one of the men.”

“I don't know.”

“As we saw with the Vietnam information, word will leak at some point,” explained the President. “Let's see if it will give us some advantage. Don't mention that we suspect he may have ended up with the loot, or is otherwise involved.”

 

THE CUSTOMS AGENT
came up to Tommy Karr's belt.

“Could you and Mr. Dean come with me, Mr. Karr?” she asked.

“Now how do you know I'm Tommy Karr?” said Karr, suppressing a laugh.

“I was told to look for the biggest man on the plane.”

“Got you there,” said Dean, shouldering his carry-on bag.

The diminutive customs agent led them around the side of the row of customs stations, through a door, and into a hallway that was part of a secure area at Los Angeles International Airport. Another customs agent met them and asked to see their passports.

“Gee, I don't know if I have mine,” said Karr, before handing over his brown diplomatic passport.

“Plane ride put you in a goofy mood?” asked Dean as they were led down the hall.

“No—twenty-something hours of Abbott and Costello did. I have the ‘Who's on First' routine memorized. Want to hear it?”

Dean declined.

They were shown into a conference room used by the customs agents for briefings and updates. When the agents left, Dean asked the Art Room what was going on.

“We think Tolong's death was staged,” said Sandy Chafetz, who'd taken over as their runner while Rockman got some rest. She explained that DNA evidence had proven that the remains that were brought back weren't Tolong's.

“Our working theory is that McSweeney, Gordon, and Ball were involved in taking the money during Vietnam,” said Chafetz. “And for some reason they had a falling-out. The FBI and the local police are reinvestigating Gordon's death; it's very possible he was pushed rather than jumped from that window.”

“So you think Ball was the one who tried to kill McSweeney?”

“We're not sure,” said Chafetz. “It looks from his credit cards that he was there. But we can't find him now to verify that. There may be another player—it's possible someone killed him, or he's just hiding out. Everyone's looking for him—FBI, Secret Service, and us. Tommy, they want you to join the press corps covering McSweeney. Stay undercover and see if you spot Ball or pick up anything else suspicious. We've uploaded photos and other information for you, along with credentials.”

“I always wanted to be a reporter,” said Karr.

“What am I doing?” Dean asked.

“Mr. Rubens wants to talk to you about your assignment himself.”

 

AMANDA RAUCI'S CREDIT
card had been used the day before to rent a car in Buffalo, NewYork; the information was flagged and passed along to the Desk Three analysts as soon as it reached the credit card company from the processing firm, roughly eight hours after the transaction itself. The information led the analysts to request the tapes from video surveillance cameras at the two train stations that served Buffalo, Exchange Street and Depew. Neither station was very large, nor did many trains stop there. But Amanda Rauci had not been spotted.