The Black List (4 page)

They walked down the dim passage, its once white walls mostly gray from the waist level down. He listened at each apartment, hearing the ambient noises of general living, TV, laughing, talking, arguing, all coming from behind various doors. There were two, however, that seemed to be quiet, whether because no one was home or because someone was hiding within and the residents were covering for him, Griffin couldn’t tell. At the end of the hall was the stairwell, and he signaled Tex over, then pointed to it, saying loudly, “He must have gone upstairs. Let’s check.”

He and Tex entered the stairwell, Griffin indicating that Tex should continue, and he pressed himself against the wall while Tex stomped his way to the top. About twenty seconds into it, Griffin heard the slight creak of a door opening. He waited, waited, then popped out just as Dorian emerged. Dorian jumped back in but couldn’t push the door shut in time as Griffin darted forward, grabbed it. He shoved his foot between it and the frame and Tex rushed over, put his shoulder to the door. They almost landed on top of Dorian as he let go, dropped to the worn, stained carpet, putting his hands over his face.

“Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! I didn’t tell anyone.”

Griffin scanned the room, saw about fifteen men, women, and children, a few in African dress, some cowering on a threadbare sofa of indeterminate color, others on the floor, their dark eyes staring in fright at the two of them. The only things moving, in fact, were the huge cockroaches scurrying behind a large American flag draped across one wall and the wooden African carvings on the other wall. Not a weapon in sight.

“Told anyone what?” Griffin asked, returning his attention to Dorian.

“Anything. I swear!”

“Jesus,” Tex said. “Can’t we move this outside? Smells like a broken sewer line in here.”

Griffin reached down, grabbed Dorian’s arm and dragged him to his feet. “Let’s go.”

A woman on the couch clasped her hands together, her black eyes pleading. She would have stood, but the man next to her held her back. “Don’t hurt him.”

Griffin looked at her, then at Dorian. “We’re not going to hurt him. We just want to talk.”

Her hands covered her mouth, and if anything she looked even more frightened.

Keeping a firm grip on Dorian, he backed from the room, Tex covering them, then following. Tex pulled the door shut and they marched Dorian toward the front, not stopping until they were outside the building.

“Mind telling us who you’re running from?” Griffin asked, placing him so his back was against the brick facade.

Dorian looked from Griffin to Tex. “This isn’t the best neighborhood in the world. Lot of bad people out there.”

Tex took a business card from his wallet. “We’re investigative reporters from the
Washington Recorder
,” he said, handing the card to Dorian. “And since we’re not in the business of killing news sources, you’re going to have to trust us.”

He stared at the card, looking even paler. “Who sent you?”

“Trip.”

“But . . .
why
?”

“Something about clearing up an embezzlement case.”

“Embezzlement . . . ?
That’s
what this is about?” Dorian took a deep breath, and almost collapsed against the bricks. “Oh my God. I thought—”

Griffin exchanged glances with Tex before saying, “Thought what?”

“Nothing. Just that I’ve known Trip for a lot of years. He’s—He’s screwed up before, made accounting mistakes, and I think he’s grasping at anything that will get him out of the hole he’s dug.”

“What sort of accounting mistakes?”

“Look. I haven’t seen him in maybe two years, so if he actually stole over a million bucks, I doubt he’d call me to confess.”

“A million?” Griffin asked. “We were told this was some small-time thing.”

“This
is
about that money from San Francisco’s showing of
From Sticks to Bricks,
right?”

“
Sticks to Bricks
?”

“The documentary fund-raiser. They’re having one here in D.C. on New Year’s eve. At twenty-five hundred bucks a pop and over five hundred tickets sold, that’s, well, a lot.”

Enough to get someone killed, Griffin thought.

5

“What do you mean
someone tried to kill Carillo?” Ron Nicholas McNiel III, Griffin’s boss, asked from the doorway, his overcoat draped over one arm. Apparently he was on his way out. Griffin was at his desk, Tex seated in one of the mismatched chairs, his boots propped up on the other.

“Mistaken identity,” Tex said, then gave him the rundown on what happened. “They thought he was Trip.”

“The guy you told me was shacking up with Carillo’s wife?”

“The same.”

“If,” Griffin said, “we believe this Dorian we just ran down, Trip made off with a lot of money, which would piss off some powerful people. It would explain why someone placed a hit on him.”

“How much money?”

“Maybe a million or more.”

“When I agreed to let you two go out on this, I was under the impression it was a small-time embezzlement case. If I recall your words, Tex, it was ‘in and out.’ As in it
wouldn’t
take up much time.”

“It didn’t,” Tex replied. “Couldn’t have been in that dump longer than, what? Five minutes?”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re going to qualify that with: And yet . . . ?”

“Because,” Griffin said, “we think Dorian was lying. That guy was afraid of something, and I don’t think it was about Trip being a suspect. There is way more to this than some simple embezzlement case.”

McNiel eyed the clock on Griffin’s wall. “While I appreciate that we owe Carillo, this sounds like something he needs to step away from, and you need to be done with.”

“It’s his wife,” Tex said.

“Soon to be ex, if I’m not mistaken,” McNiel clarified as he put on his coat. “And it’s not her, it’s her boyfriend, or did I misinterpret? Carillo’s walking a thin line if he’s involving himself with this.”

“He’s not really,” Tex said. “He just wants a little extra intel. And it is Carillo. We can’t just leave him hanging.”

“You have to throw this at me when I’m on my way out the door to a Senate intelligence meeting?”

“You’d rather we didn’t tell you?”

“Sometimes, yes,” McNiel said, digging his keys from his pocket. “Do me a favor. Wrap it up so that Carillo can turn it over to the locals and you can get back to what the government is really paying you to do.” McNiel started out the door but stopped, looked back at them. “Pearson’s going to be at that meeting,” he said, referring to the head of the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence squad. “Please tell me Carillo called the police about the woman he shot in his wife’s house?”

“Sure he did,” Tex said. “Home invasion.”

“And they bought it?”

“No reason not to at this point.”

“Some days I love my job. This isn’t one of them.” McNiel gave an exasperated sigh. “I’m serious. Wrap it up and get out.”

McNiel slid into
the room as the meeting was called to order. Senator Dorothea Burgess eyed him, saying, “So nice of you to join us, Director McNiel.”

“Apologies. Conflict in schedules.”

“More important than something that’s been on your calendar for three months?”

“The vice president thought so.”

That shut her up, and he looked for a seat. There were two vacant. One next to CIA’s Ian Thorndike, and the other next to Pearson from the FBI. He chose Pearson, since Thorndike still had issues about Griffin and Tex leaving the CIA to join ATLAS.

There wasn’t enough coffee to get past the first hour’s budget reports, and Pearson elbowed him twice when he nearly dozed off during Thorndike’s dissertation on why his budget needed to be increased when everyone else was being asked to make cuts.

“There’s such a thing as overdoing it,” McNiel said under his breath.

To which Senator Burgess asked, “Did you have something you wished to share, Mr. McNiel?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Because if there is, I’m sure Mr. Thorndike wouldn’t mind turning over the floor?”

“Actually,” Thorndike said, “I would mind. I’d like to discuss the way money is allocated in the refugee resettlement program. Over ten billion dollars that could—”

“I believe,” Burgess said, “the figure is closer to
one
billion. Not ten. That’s quite a difference.”

“Unless,” Thorndike said, “you include what’s coming from the welfare budgets.”

“We’re not. You’re talking about a completely different budget, one in which we have no oversight.”

“Feel free to point that out to the taxpayers, who aren’t differentiating which pocket they’re paying it from.”

“Did you have a point, Mr. Thorndike?”

“Yes. If you’re going to continue dumping that kind of money into the program, some of it needs to be diverted into
who
you’re letting into the country—especially considering the mass emigration from East Africa and the lack of resources and funding to ensure that those coming in are who they say they are.”

The senator’s expression turned icy. “Heaven forbid we allow nonwhites into the country?”

It was Pearson who answered. “No, Madam Senator. Terrorists, unfortunately, come in all colors. If you would take the time to read the FBI and CIA’s joint analysis of the areas we feel are the weak links in—”

“So everyone from East Africa is a terrorist now?”

Pearson took a deep breath. “Of course not. But it only takes one.”

McNiel had to appreciate the man’s position and the effort it took for him to maintain his temper.

Senator Burgess, however, appeared unmoved. “When you get evidence that any of these terrorists are getting past the gatekeepers that the UN
and
the U.S. have put in place,
do
let me know. Until then, I’m more interested in how to address our real concerns, going over the reports from each of your departments on where you’re going to make the cuts necessary without compromising the integrity of your programs.”

“More cuts?” McNiel said.

“Mr. McNiel? You have something you’d like to address before the committee?”

He wanted to address a lot, but Pearson gave a slight shake of his head, warning him to back down. That meant one thing. Pearson needed the meeting to end and fast, so he responded with, “No, ma’am.”

“Thank you, then. For the record, I believe the proper screening measures are in place, and unless you can show me otherwise, we’ll move on.”

“Remind me why
we’re kissing her ass?” McNiel asked as he and Pearson walked out of the building. The question was rhetorical. They were kissing her ass in hopes she wouldn’t recommend slashing their budgets all to hell. Burgess, like every other senator out there, was swayed by the lobbyists. In Burgess’s case, since she happened to be heading the refugee committees, her lobbyists were paid by the so-called charities, who wanted to keep the refugee resettlement system exactly as it was, security flaws and all, because it worked for them.

Pearson shook his head. “Don’t get me started . . .”

“So why was it you stopped me from taking her on head-to-head?”

“Because I got a call from MI6 about five minutes before the meeting started that one of their agents in Somalia has verified intel that Yusuf’s
definitely
heading for Mexico.”

Yusuf, a Somalian terrorist, had recently escaped from a prison in Mogadishu, and according to intel reports was considered a threat to the United States. “Where?”

“We’re not sure. I was hoping that maybe Griffin’s trip to Mexico was successful. Better to stop him before he crosses the border.”

“The lead didn’t pan out. But we’ve sent another team down. Too big an area, unfortunately . . . Thorndike knows?”

“Yeah.”

“Some reason he didn’t bring that up to her royal highness and the rest of her court?”

“One. CIA is working a delicate undercover op. After the recent debacle in the Mideast involving the loss of most of their assets, they’re not about to lay any cards on the table.”

And no wonder, McNiel thought. Thorndike, Pearson, and he could shout national security until they were blue in the face, and Burgess and every other politician would still be racing to the first TV camera they saw. “What’s the other reason?”

“We heard the way Yusuf’s arranging to get into the country is the golden passport.”

“The refugee resettlement program?” There were mile-wide holes in the program that put out a welcome mat for any terrorist with half a brain to circumvent the system. And that, of course, meant the last thing they wanted to do was alert the one senator whose darling it was. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust Burgess, more that they had serious doubts she’d be cooperative when it came to the cold hard facts that put her and that program in a bad light. “I take it that has something to do with Thorndike’s op?”

“Not quite sure,” Pearson said. When they reached the street, he hailed a taxi, then said, “All I can say is, if the intel is true, we need to get on it fast.”

He was right, McNiel thought. If any man had an agenda, it was Yusuf. And they definitely didn’t want him in this country.

6

The creaking hulk of
a truck rumbled across the rutted Mexican road, kicking up gravel and dust, the early morning air slightly chilly. Yusuf heard one of the drivers say that they were a few nights from the American border. He was glad to hear it, as it had been a long and arduous trip from that hellhole of a refugee camp in Dadaab. Unlike the others on this truck with him, migrants who hoped to cross illegally under cover of night or be smuggled over the border hidden in cargo, Yusuf actually possessed an American passport, showing he was a twenty-three-year-old from Burundi, not Somalia. He’d need to find a place to wash the streaks of sweat and dust from his skin and don a set of clean clothes, then walk across once he got there.

If stopped, he’d show his passport, and if questioned, answer in perfect English. He hadn’t yet shared that he even knew the language. There had been no need, and wouldn’t be until he reached the border. He did not, however, know any Spanish, and had managed this far not understanding a word of the language by pretending to be deaf. If someone spoke, he pointed to his ears. They nodded in understanding, then pantomimed in exaggerated movements and spoke louder, gladly helping him past any obstacles, getting him food, water, whatever it was he needed.