The Enemy Inside (48 page)

When I look down his hand is still moving. I step over him to try and pry the gun from his hand.

“Leave it!”

When I look up she has another arrow in the bow. This one is pointed at me. There’s a large black duffel bag at her feet.

“I don’t know who you are,” I say. “I don’t particularly care. But you saved my life. And I thank you.” But I don’t pick up the gun.

“I could say the same of you,” she says. “What was it you threw at him?”

“A broken leg from the chair.”

“Under the circumstances I really don’t want to have to do this. But you saw me kill him. You’re a witness. That is something I cannot afford to leave behind. I’m sorry,” and she starts to flex the bow.

This is my first hint that she is not some Good Samaritan who simply happened by. “Hold on!”

But she doesn’t. She has the bow fully extended, bringing it down on me. “Before I do, I need to know what your connection is. How do you know this man?”

“I don’t. Give me a minute and I’ll tell you what I know.” My mind is racing, my heart pounding. I am exhausted, the adrenaline drained from my body. If I’m going to survive the next two minutes I am going to have to give her some reason.

She looks down at the dying form on the floor. His hand has stopped moving, but it’s still holding the pistol, now in a death grip.

“First of all, you didn’t commit a crime,” I tell her. Thinking like a lawyer. I do what comes naturally, appeal to reason. Something in her demeanor tells me she is not going to be susceptible to emotion. Otherwise I’d be crying.

“In this state, defense of other, like self-defense, absolves all criminal intent in a homicide. So there’s no need to worry about what I saw. You have an absolute defense. He was going to kill me and you prevented it. I will testify to that in any court.”

She backs off a few steps as she relaxes the tension on the bow. Still, she doesn’t seem convinced.

I take a deep breath, though the arrow is still pointed at me.

She’s smiling.

“What’s so funny?”

“The irony of it. The concept of legal absolution and getting paid for the deed at the same time.”

“I didn’t need to hear that. I’m not sure I did. And if I did, I already forgot it. If anyone ever needed killing, you’re looking at him right there. If it were up to me I’d give you a medal.”

I spend the next several minutes bringing her current on how I got involved, along with an abbreviated version of the events of the last two months. I skirt the edges on some of the facts, the details concerning Betz and some of the names of the people involved.

By the time I’m done, the arrow is at least pointed down, somewhere near my knees. I take this as a sign that maybe I’ll live. But I’m still not sure.

“That’s all fine,” she says. “But if you’re still around, what are you going to tell the authorities?”

Lady of few words, she arrives at the pivotal question. It is upon this that I will live or die. “Leave that to me. I’m not going to tell them about you.”

“Then who killed him?”

“Who knows? He was a bad man. I’m sure he had his share of enemies.”

“He had at least one that I know of.”

“All I know is, I came out to get a signature on a document from someone who wasn’t here, found the door open and a dead body inside. I don’t even know who he is. Never saw the man before. And that’s the truth. The man I met the last time I was here, the one who said he was Mr. Becket, was someone else. Seems you can’t trust anybody anymore.

“The white lies I am prepared to tell the cops really don’t matter, at least they don’t to me, not under these circumstances. You may have been hired to come here to commit a criminal homicide, but that’s not what you did. There was an intervening force, his attempt on my life. That absolves you of the act. If you hadn’t shown up at the door I would be dead. We have a bond on this.”

I suspect that some wily prosecutor probably could work up a case against her of conspiracy to commit, but I really don’t care. And I keep the thought to myself. No sense giving her something to worry about.

She considers it for a few moments. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“What would I have to gain by telling the cops?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Nothing. I don’t even know your name. I don’t want to know.”

Slowly she lowers the bow, unstrings the arrow with my name on it, and drops them both into the bag at her feet. She leans over the body and starts to unscrew the tip of the arrow that is protruding from his back.

“What are you doing?”

“I never leave anything behind.”

“Forget I asked.”

She kicks the body over and from the front she pulls the arrow out. She snaps the shaft in half and drops all of the parts, including the tip, in a plastic bag, then deposits this in the duffel as well. “Do you want me to take the gun from his hand?” she says.

“Leave it. It might be better that way. Someone killed him, but at least he put up a fight.”

She picks up her bag and turns to go out the way she came.

“Why don’t we use the front door,” I tell her.

“I have to get my stuff,” she says. She walks around the broken chair to the side of the partner’s desk and grabs the handle on the large metal rolling case, the one I noticed when I first came in.

“That belongs to you?”

“Yeah, it’s mine. He stole it from me and used it twice.” She starts to roll it away when something catches her eye. She stops, looks down, and runs her finger along the side of the case. “Damn it!” she says.

“What’s wrong?” My heart skips a beat.

“He put a hole in it. A small fortune in cutting-edge auto-electronics, and that ungodly sack of shit goes and shoots it!” She starts cursing in some language I don’t understand, hands in the air, stamping her feet.

I don’t know where she’s from. I don’t want to know. But if pressed to the wall, I’d have to say she has a Latin temper.

“After all of this.” She leans over and examines the bullet hole. It is dead center in the middle of the box. “And he turns it into junk.”

“What’s in the box?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” She gives me a look to kill.

“Let’s pretend I never asked.”

As we head for the front door I have visions of
Casablanca,
Bogart and Rains on a fog-shrouded runway. “Round up the usual suspects, Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

EPILOGUE

I
f I had to guess, I would say that whatever was in the large metal box that the lady archer rolled out of Becket’s office that afternoon had something to do with the two fatal auto accidents. It was her use of the words “auto-electronics” to describe what was inside, and the fact that she said he had stolen it and used it twice. This and the research I had done leads me to conclude that whatever was in that box, it was used to kill Serna, Ben, and her boyfriend.

The panicked expression on the girl’s face, the woman I knew as Ben, and the frantic and futile efforts of her boyfriend to control their car on its way to a fiery hell are engraved in my mind.

The woman with the arrows disappeared like a wisp in the wind two minutes after we left the house. I waited a respectful period for her to get out of the area. This gave me time to clean up before I called the cops. In the bathroom I washed my face and got rid of the blood. I didn’t use any towels. I used toilet tissues and flushed so there would be no trace of blood in the drain.

I grabbed my suit coat from the floor in the study to cover my soiled shirt, buttoned it up, straightened my tie, ran a comb through my hair, and called the cops. I told them the same story I’d given to her. The one where I came to the house with documents to be signed and found the dead body.

The Eagle is dead, but so is Rubin Betz. Fifty-seven days after I walked out of the house in Del Mar, the one I thought was owned by a man named Rufus Becket, who appears not to have existed, Betz finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. When he died, I felt as if I had lost a friend. For all of the mystery surrounding the whistleblower in the end, his motives for much of what he had done were simple and to the point. He was protecting his daughter, and to this I can relate. Call it the fraternity of fatherhood.

In the meantime the world has exploded. Whoever had the documents, wherever they were, they began to surface after Betz died, just as he said they would. Within little more than a week the details of political corruption saturated the media of the world. Heads began to roll.

In less than forty-five days, indictments were announced. Maya Grimes was charged, along with eight other members of Congress. And these were just the openers. Other names began to surface. It is likely that indictments will continue for at least another year, perhaps longer.

Many have proclaimed their innocence and vowed to fight, insisting that in the end they will be vindicated. Much of this is disintegrating under their feet even as they and their lawyers dodge the microphones and cameras. New details of foreign money and what it bought seem to surface each day. For some of them, the drip of information is becoming death by a thousand cuts.

As for Grimes, she and her attorneys are already huddled with federal prosecutors hunting for a deal. Rumor is she has offered to pay more than a billion dollars in fines on her offshore holdings, along with a promise to resign from the Senate. This for some short-term sentence, a rap on the knuckles.

She would be wise to move quickly before the Senate Ethics Committee and the entire chamber expel her. The rats are not only leaving the ship but are eating their own on the way. The media is asking serious questions as to the source of some of the money and what was sold, talk of possible capital punishment for acts of treason in which lives may have been lost.

It seems that perhaps what was once called the press, a fourth estate of dogged pursuers, is not in fact dead. It was merely paralyzed by partisan fervor. The news outlets finally found their bearings, remembered first principles, and followed the money. Maybe there is hope after all.

As for Betz and his estate, there was never any question that the government owed him the money, the massive whistleblower award. That they ever tried to link it to his continued silence is now being denied at the highest levels within the Justice Department. It wouldn’t have mattered, for in the end they were forced to swallow a survivor’s clause that I slipped into the settlement agreement that freed Betz. Under no circumstances may the government reclaim the money that has now flowed to his daughter within terms of the agreement.

We had one final conversation just before he died. Rubin realized the only way any of us would have peace was to allow the information to go public. Once all the tainted members were exposed and whoever owned them was out of business, the danger would evaporate. What they say about sunlight is true. It is often the best disinfectant.

As for the gardener, the man I first thought was Rufus Becket, it turned out that he became my lodestone. Police detained him at the house and questioned him. With his employer dead on the floor, the gardener led them to a storehouse of documents, including transcripts of telephone conversations. Several of these documents established beyond any question why Olinda Serna was murdered and who did it. Alex Ives is free. The duce, an ancient term of California legal art dating from the time that drunk driving was charged under Vehicle Code Section 502, the case that Harry and I inherited as a favor to my daughter, Sarah, is over. But its legacy lives on.

Harry and I have disclaimed any of the mounting and additional fees now being netted from the politicians who have been caught, and who are now showering the Treasury with cash in bids to stay free. For us, this latter money is tainted. The fact that we counseled Betz in his ultimate decision to allow his hidden bank documents to be exposed, the act that caused the money to pile up, meant that we had a conflict. To take the additional funds would have lined our own pockets and might have muddied the water regarding his daughter’s ability to receive her share of the added portion. A guardian has been appointed and other lawyers are now on the scene to assure that this happens.

Harry and I face an uncertain future. The thirty-five million dollars, the original fees awarded us by Betz for my work at Supermax, is now in process of being paid. This is like the serendipity of winning a lottery. The fact that it flowed from a dog of a case that neither of us wanted to take speaks to the mystery and caprice of wealth—the imponderable puzzle of who gets it and why.

How this will affect our lives in the future is anyone’s guess.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people provided encouragement and support in the writing of this book, including family and friends.

Most of all, I wish to thank my assistant, Marianne Dargitz, who, for more than two decades, has provided not only her energy and unflagging support but also encouragement, which has guided me through difficult periods. Without her constant efforts and attention to detail, none of this would have been possible.

Among others, I wish to thank my publisher, William Morrow, and all the people at HarperCollins without whose unstinting care and love of the written word and book publishing as we know it, none of this would have happened. Most of all, I thank my editor, David Highfill, whose friendship over many years has been a constant source of encouragement and pleasure. I thank his editorial assistant, Chloe Moffett, and associate editor, Jessica Williams, who over the course of this work fielded my phone calls and handled many technical aspects during the transition from paper to digital editing.

I thank my agent, Esther Newberg of International Creative Management, and my New York lawyers, Mike Rudell and Eric Brown of Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo, for their constant attention and guidance to the business aspects of my publishing career.

For their caring interest, love, and constant encouragement I thank Al and Laura Parmisano, who have always been there for me during good times and bad. Last but not least, for her constant and unconditional love, I thank my daughter, Megan Martini, who makes all things possible for me.