McKean S04 The Re-Election Plot (3 page)

“No you won’t, lady,” the man hissed. “You see, I’m quite prepared to put a bullet into each of yuz and run out the back door. So chill out, you hear me?”

She nodded, cowed by a fierce look in his beady blue eyes.

“Who are you?” Ali asked tremulously.

“Nobody,” the man retorted. Then he cracked a grin and looked at Yamani wickedly. “I know who you are, though. Heard your voice on a certain video tape.” He laughed a rough, smoker’s laugh that ended in a thick cough. Then he glanced from one to another of us with a calculating gaze. “This is great,” he chuckled. “I’m tracking one guy and I get three. I gotta thank you, ma’am, for getting ‘em all together.’

Fatima’s dark eyes widened with renewed horror.

Half drawing the gun from under his lapel he muttered, “Now, I got some questions, but not here.” Tossing a nod toward the emergency exit behind us, he commanded, “Out there.”

We rose and filed out the door followed by our abductor. “Turn here,” he ordered. “Go down to the end of the pier.”

Pier 56 has a wide plank roadway around the perimeter of the building on which stevedores with jitneys once unloaded cargo. Now it serves pedestrians by day and trucks collecting the restaurant’s garbage by night. We walked toward the end of the pier until, just beyond two large green dumpsters, he commanded, “Stop here.”

We instinctually backed against the wall of the pier building when he drew out his pistol. It had a silencer on it. “First question!” he snapped. “Where do yuz want it? The head or the heart?”

The Yamanis clung to one another and cowered against the wall but McKean took another tack: he stalled for time with a question. “If I may,” he said, “I’d like to clarify one thing. On whose behalf are you doing this?”

“You mean, who’s my boss?”

“Exactly,” McKean replied. “You don’t strike me as the Arab terrorist type.”

“Damn right,” the man growled. “I hate terrorists as bad as the next guy.”

“Then, why do this?”

“Ya don’t see, do ya, mister smart guy? I ain’t workin’ for no terrorists. I’m workin’ for some guys that threw the last election. They’re the ones what had enough money to finish that tape and release it when they did. It was all about getting certain incumbent friends of certain rich people re-elected. Get it now? And me, I’m just the guy who’s gotta go around and clean up the evidence.”

“You shot Omar Azziz,” Yamani exclaimed.

“That’s right,” the man crowed. “That punk showed up in my neck of the woods with the video. Nobody knew exactly where he came from until just lately.”

“Y-you beat it out of him?” Yamani stammered.

“Hell no. Some congressman sent the FBI after him.”

“That must be Congressman Feebus,” McKean suggested.

“That’s right,” the man acknowledged. “Anyway, my boss don’t like a congressman and the FBI getting involved, so he said I should take Omar out. That way nobody’s the wiser about where the tape came from.”

“Who is this boss?” I asked.

“Enough talkin’,” the man snapped. “I got work to finish.”

There was a cold moment of silence, broken only by the deep honk of a ship’s horn as a Bainbridge Island Ferry neared Coleman Terminal two piers south of us.

“Second question,” the man grinned as the horn echoed among the skyscrapers above us. “Where would yuz like to be found? In this here dumpster or floatin’ in the water? I can fix it either way.”

We looked at each other in dumb silence as he raised the pistol.

Suddenly, McKean challenged, “I believe there is enough evidence for the authorities to find you, if you do this.”

The man hesitated, scowling. “Nobody’s got nuttin’ on me.”

McKean retorted with assurance, “There’s a security camera on the fireboat station next door. I’m sure it recorded you coming into Ivar’s.”

“You’re bluffin’,” the man growled, but his dark eyebrows tented up with a hint of doubt. “I didn’t see no camera.”

“I assure you,” McKean asserted, “the camera is there.”

“You’re startin’ to piss me off,” the man muttered, holding the gun up under McKean’s chin. “You die first.”

The realization struck me that this would be my last chance to act. I lunged at the man’s gun arm and caught his wrist in both hands, sweeping the gun away from McKean’s Adam’s apple as it discharged with a loud puff, sending a bullet high over the peaked roof of the pier.

Snarling like an animal, the man clamped his other hand on mine and grappled for control of the gun’s aim point. Another stray shot splintered the decking of the pier and sent the others diving for cover while I fought on alone. The man must have had hand-to-hand combat training as good as mine because he kept me off balance and struggling to hang onto his gun hand. The others shouted encouragement but my grip began to loosen, so I made a quick decision. Noticing a roped-off gate where gangways once joined ships to the pier, I drove against the man’s body with all my weight and pushed him to the brink of the opening in the handrail. We hit the rope cordon and toppled over it together, plummeting thirty feet to the waters of Puget Sound.

The surface felt like brick pavement when we hit. It knocked the wind out of me and loosened my grip on the gun. We plunged down into the dark green depths and I came up gasping for air and flailing at the icy water, heavy with wet clothes and sinking more than swimming. I managed to thrash my way to one of the log pilings under the pier and I clung to it, trying to shinny up its slimy, barnacle-coated surface and gagging on the stink of creosote and the kelpy taste of Puget Sound water in my mouth. Big rollers from the ferry’s bow rose and fell around me, nearly tearing me loose from the piling.

McKean called from above, “Watch out Fin, he’s behind you!” The silencer puffed again and a slug splintered the piling over my head. I craned my neck around and saw the man clinging to the next piling about fifteen feet away. He glared at me through waterlogged eyes, gasping and trying to level the gun at me as another cold wave washed around him.

Eventually, a roller big enough to completely submerge us came in and its cold water frothed over my face and up my nose, but I somehow managed to hang on. When the wave subsided I coughed and sputtered and looked around for my adversary but he was gone.

After a few minutes the water calmed and I caught my breath enough to risk swimming toward shore. I struggled and thrashed to the Alaskan Way bulkhead and climbed out onto the green slippery basalt blocks stacked against the base of the seawall. There I sat with my teeth chattering in the night chill while McKean shouted encouragement. Eventually an orange Coast Guard Rescue zodiac came along and fetched me off the rocks. By then I was delirious with hypothermia and gibbering like a roadside bomb survivor. I raved at my rescuers about guns and incoming fire and every dead body I’d ever seen until the chill sank into me so deeply that I passed out.

* * * * *

I woke up in an emergency-ward room at Seattle Public Health Hospital with McKean at my bedside.

“What happened to the man with the gun?” I asked.

“They’re dragging the bottom for his body.”

“How do you stay so cool under pressure, Peyton? I mean, that guy had a gun pointed right at you and you talked him into a tizzy.”

“Simple logic, Fin. Stay cool or die.”

“That’s more than I could’ve done. Where are the Yamanis?”

McKean shrugged. “I was so busy following your predicament and phoning for help that I neglected to watch them. When I did look around, they were gone.”

“So, where’s this story going from here?”

McKean opened his field coat and pulled his cell phone from a breast pocket. “I turned on the recorder for the Yamani meeting. Everything’s in an audio file, including that goon’s self-incrimination. I wonder if Vince Nagumo can make sense of it?”

* * * * *

I was released from the hospital the next morning and went to McKean’s office. Vince Nagumo was there, proudly explaining, “Our acoustics people ran a comparative voiceprint analysis of your audio recording of Yamani speaking Arabic at Ivar’s versus the voice on the bin Laden election video. It’s a convincing match, so his story about creating it checks out.”

“Hence,” McKean concluded, “the election video was indeed a fake issued just at the right time to influence the voters.”

“There’s more,” Nagumo said. “We fished the gunman’s body out of the Sound. According to his ID his name is Matt Ebersold. Found a piece of paper in his pocket with an interesting name and phone number on it: Fred Altmeier. Turns out to be a mucky-muck with a certain political party. Ran the re-election campaign for Texas Congressman Jeb Walker.”

“Jeb Walker!” McKean exclaimed. “He’s one of the most influential political figures in Washington DC.”

“Sure is,” Nagumo agreed. “Comes from a district in Texas where Halladay Corporation is headquartered. You know, the maker of Predator drone and cruise missile engines and guidance systems.”

“Aha,” McKean crooned with new light in his eyes. “A company standing to benefit greatly from continued hostilities in the Mideast.”

“Thought you’d be interested in that,” Nagumo replied. “And this Altmeier fellow’s got more interesting history. Used to be an oil company lobbyist, then joined the re-election committee as a public relations man, producing video materials and attack commercials against Walker’s political opponents. Lately he’s been more obscure. Retired to a fabulous estate in the Maryland countryside right after the ‘04 election. Plays a lot of golf nowadays, drawing on a big offshore bank account. Our D.C. office sent some people around to see him for an interview. No arrest yet.’

“Can they charge him with anything?”

“They’ll squeeze him first and see if he lets on anything useful before they arrest him. Meanwhile, we’ve got Ebersold’s comments on your audio recording, Peyton, which clearly imply that someone is guilty of election tampering, although who’s responsible is not nailed down just yet.”

“Any sign of the Yamanis?”

“Yeah. A Washington State Patrol Officer in Blaine spotted them at a gas station near the Canadian border. Having seen our all-points bulletin on Yamani two days ago, he arrested them. They’re in our custody now and they’re talking to us pretty openly. Yamani’s willing to testify in return for immunity and a witness protection deal that’s already been okayed by headquarters. But the big catch is going to be Fred Altmeier. Looks like, thanks to you guys, we’ve flushed out a rat that threw the 2004 election in favor of the incumbents, from the President on down.”

“I also interviewed Congressman Feebus. He’s not implicated in any wrongdoing. Sometimes you can tell right away. He just played the role of a passive conduit, sending Yamani’s tape to the Congressional Elections Oversight Committee, the FBI and the CIA.”

McKean tugged at his chin. “No telling who might have a copy now.”

“Exactly,” Nagumo agreed. “And that’s too bad, in a way. We’d like to round up everybody who participated the election scheme, but we’ll probably never trace the route to the bad guys though so many agencies. At least we know Altmeier was in the loop. He’s going to see a lot of the FBI until we identify the responsible parties.”

After Nagumo left us I said, “Peyton, I’m amazed how much hell I go through every time I get near you. It’s like Iraq all over again. How could writing a story about molecular modeling lead to all this?”

“The connection is quite logical,” McKean asserted.

“It is?”

“It’s the ability to portray the un-seeable. Molecules can never actually be seen, because they’re smaller than the visual system trying to see them, namely, the human eye. So every time a protein is modeled it is in a certain sense a fake.”

McKean held up a long finger. “Exactly the same is true for the bin Laden video. Consider that bin Laden lived his last years in hiding, using only one trusted courier to get messages out. His seclusion made him all but un-seeable. Cowering in his hideout, he became an almost non-existent entity, except through the dark magic of computer modeling. Kyle Smith had the misfortune to tread the common ground between molecular modeling and terrorist modeling. He saw and understood too much for his own good. Watch the 2004 election video with your illusions stripped away and you’ll see what Smith saw: the footage is smooth but simplistic. Nothing moves on bin Laden except his mouth and his finger-waving hand. Heaven knows, Hollywood does much more sophisticated animations with talking babies, pigs and dogs. Modern computer graphic programs like Smith’s are double-edged swords, forces for good or evil. Whether used to animate molecules or terrorists, they are merely complex machines that do the bidding of fallible human beings.”

“From Hollywood to Jihad,” I reflected. “What a monstrous concept.”

“Worse,” McKean elaborated. “From Hollywood, to Jihad, to American elections; a diabolical duping of the voters of the most powerful nation on earth in the interest of perpetuating political careers, a war, and the manufacture and sale of war machines, all done with computer graphics.”

The phone rang and McKean put it on speaker. Vince Nagumo was back at his office. “Bad news from D.C.,” he said. “Altmeier’s dead.”

“Not such bad news,” I responded. “He was an evil one.”

“True,” Nagumo agreed, “but now we’ve got no leads to trace other people’s involvement.”

“How did he die?” McKean asked.

“Gunshot to the temple, at home in his study. Looks like suicide, because he realized the jig was up for him. The pistol lay on the floor at his side.”

“So that’s where it ends,” I sighed. “We’ll never know if he was working for a higher-up.”

Peyton added, “We’ll never know if it was suicide, either.”

“Good point,” Nagumo affirmed. “Anyone above him would want things covered up and the best guarantee would be to murder Altmeier. But I doubt we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I’m already getting pressure to stop this investigation and leave it on Altmeier’s head.”

“Pressure from whom?” I asked. “I’ll bet it’s from Altmeier’s boss.”

“No, it’s from FBI headquarters in D.C. But I can’t be sure who’s the originator of the pressure.”