Dead on Arrival

39

The Cuban didn’t know where the subject was going.

She’d arrived at Reagan National two hours earlier, where she’d been met by a man named Jorge driving a Honda SUV with tinted windows. She didn’t know Jorge. She’d asked a man she knew — someone she trusted about as much as she trusted anyone — to supply a driver who knew the city and would follow orders.

Except for the fact that he talked too much, Jorge was acceptable. He was ugly and he was big, six-three or six-four. He had a shaved head and a stupid-looking little strip of beard beneath his lower lip. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt — the sleeves pushed up to show off the tattoos on his forearms — baggy jeans, worn so low you could see the upper half of his plaid boxer shorts, and big unlaced Timberland boots that were a hideous yellow color. Around his neck were four gold-plated chains and on his left wrist was a fake Rolex.

He had a brain the size of a cashew.

The good news was that he did what he was told without arguing and she liked his size. One disadvantage of being a five-foot-six-inch woman who weighed one hundred and thirty pounds was that she wasn’t physically intimidating. Usually that was good but sometimes, particularly if you needed to control several people, it helped to have someone like Jorge around.

After he’d picked her up at the airport she told Jorge she wanted to see the subject’s house, and just as they arrived at the address in Georgetown, a car pulled out of the garage. She looked at the driver and compared his face to the picture in her hand, one taken from a DMV file. It was him: DeMarco. She told Jorge to follow the car. The man stopped at a restaurant on Capitol Hill, had breakfast and read the paper, then forty minutes later got onto I-95, heading north. When he passed through Baltimore, the Cuban began to wonder just how far he planned to travel. Not too far, she hoped.

Then she had an idea, one that was easy to execute. Lincoln had said that he wanted this man either killed or severely injured in some manner where it would not be obvious that he had been singled out as the target. There were a lot of big trucks on the road, eighteen-wheelers, and today the highway was relatively clear so the trucks were traveling fast. She and Jorge were two cars behind DeMarco, and DeMarco was in the outside lane behind a big rig, a moving van. She told Jorge what she wanted him to do. She wanted him to pass the van and then cut right in front of it, so the truck driver would have to slam on his brakes. She was hoping the tractor-trailer would jackknife and that DeMarco would be caught up in the accident. It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was easy to do, and if she was lucky she’d be back in Miami tonight.

Jorge, it turned out, was a better driver than she would have guessed and he executed the move perfectly. He cut in front of the truck so closely that she was afraid that they were going to get rear-ended, but the trucker reacted instinctively and, just as she’d expected, he slammed down hard on his brakes. She watched in awe as the trailer began to move side-ways and swatted a car in the inside lane that had been trying to pass the moving van. She saw the car go into the grassy median that separated the north and southbound lanes, and watched it flip over twice. And then the trailer tipped over, and a second later so did the cab. The cab and the trailer were now both on their sides skidding down the highway, throwing up sparks. The only problem was she couldn’t see DeMarco’s car and couldn’t tell if he’d been caught up in the accident or not.

* * *

DeMarco was flipping through a stack of CDs he had balanced on his thigh. He was trying to find one by Norah Jones that he knew was in the stack. He loved Norah Jones. He wished she’d marry him. Not only was she beautiful, but since she’d won about a hundred Grammys, she’d be able to support him in the style to which he’d like to become accustomed.

And then he saw the brake lights flash on the big rig in front of him.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed and slammed down on the brake pedal, CDs flying all over the car. He was sure he going to rear-end the trailer — the bumper of which would go right through his windshield and turn his face to bloody pulp — when the trailer began to swing over into the left lane of the freeway, hitting a car that was just passing the truck. DeMarco didn’t see what happened to the other car because his car was now fishtailing, and he was struggling to control it, afraid he was going to roll over, but somehow, no thanks to any skill on his part, all four tires stayed on the ground. As he was fighting to bring his car to a stop, it barely registered in his mind that the eighteen-wheeler was now moving down the road on its side.

DeMarco’s car finally stopped skidding and came to a complete stop. His car was now perpendicular to the highway, the front tires on the paved part of the road, the rear tires on the gravel at the side of the road. Once his car had stopped, he immediately spun his head to the left, his eyes big as saucers, terrified that somebody was now going to plow into the side of his car. Luckily, the car that had been behind DeMarco when the accident started had been a safe distance back — not tailgating the way DeMarco had been.

DeMarco sat there for a minute with his eyes closed, his head on the steering wheel, breathing heavily. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t hit the truck or rolled his car or been smashed into from behind. Traffic was already starting to back up on the freeway, and four or five people had left their cars and were now running toward the wrecked vehicles to see if the occupants needed help. DeMarco’s hands shook as he undid his seat belt, then he slowly opened his door and walked unsteadily over to the truck that had overturned. He looked in through the front windshield of the cab and could see the driver was still in his seat, lying on his side. The driver was okay, not obviously injured, but madder than hell because he couldn’t get free of his seat belt or upright himself. Another man was talking to the driver, saying that he’d already called 911. DeMarco found out shortly that the man in the car that had been sideswiped by the trailer hadn’t been so lucky. He was dead.

Four hours after the accident, DeMarco pulled into a visitor’s parking space near the front entrance of Dobbler Security Systems, Inc. He had called Dobbler’s office earlier to say he’d been held up by an accident, and Dobbler’s secretary had become completely flustered, as if nobody, for any reason, was ever late for an appointment with her boss. When he walked into Dobbler’s office, the secretary — a skinny woman in her fifties with butterfly-frame glasses affixed to a chain around her ropy neck — informed him that, since he was late, Mr Dobbler had moved on to other things and DeMarco would have to wait. As she said this, she nervously twisted a Kleenex in her hands and little flecks of paper crumbled into her lap. DeMarco had the impression that the secretary was perpetually cowering, as if people screamed at her about two dozen times a day, and he could just imagine Dobbler calling out from his office for a cup of coffee and this poor woman’s ass going straight up, two feet off her chair.

He was finally ushered into Dobbler’s office an hour later. Three of the four walls in the room were devoted to certificates and plaques and photos obviously intended to impress Dobbler’s visitors with his deep charitable commitment to the City of Brotherly Love. There were testimonies from every fraternal do-gooder organization in Philadelphia; pictures of him posing with Little League teams he sponsored; a newspaper shot of him dishing out Thanksgiving turkey to a line of men who all looked like winos.

Dobbler in the flesh, however, didn’t strike DeMarco as a man with a large strain of human kindness running through him. He was a big florid-faced guy in his fifties, and DeMarco knew the minute he met him that his complexion would go instantaneously from red to purple whenever anything upset him. He had short-cut dark hair, a meat-eater’s jaw, and somewhat protruding dark eyes, as if his elevated blood pressure was slowly forcing his eyeballs out of his head. He was six-three, over two hundred and fifty pounds — the type who would crowd you in an argument and try to intimidate you with his bulk. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a cheap-looking blue tie with red stripes. DeMarco would have bet fifty bucks that Dobbler was wearing white socks and his shoes were plain black lace-ups, but he never got a chance to find out because the man never came out from behind his desk.

To get the appointment with Dobbler, DeMarco had almost told the truth. He said he worked for Congress and was doing a little legwork for a congressional committee that was interested in — and approved of — the type of work that Dobbler’s company did. The nonexistent committee had tasked DeMarco to interview Dobbler, obtain a few facts, and report back. DeMarco began by saying that he just wanted to hear a bit about Dobbler’s background, and after that he hardly had to say another word. It was clear that there was nothing Ken Dobbler preferred more than discussing his own achievements.

His beginnings were predictably Lincoln-like: born in a rustic backwater, surviving on table scraps, never wearing a thing that wasn’t a hand-me-down. He had a passel of underachieving siblings, a saint for a mother, and a worthless bum for a father. The military saved him, he said. He enlisted right after high school, his brilliance was soon recognized, and he was sent off to college on Uncle’s dime and turned into an officer and a gentleman. He had spent some time in military intelligence, he said, coyly refusing to tell DeMarco exactly what he did.

After twenty years in the army, he retired and launched his own company. The company started off by providing rent-a-cops for businesses in Philly, and he soon squeezed out the local competition and expanded into other cities. Next he ventured into building security systems and opened branch offices up and down the eastern seaboard. He began doing employee background checks for private companies and state and federal agencies five years ago.

‘I have a bunch of retired guys working for me,’ he said to DeMarco. ‘FBI, people from OPM, ex-military, ex-cops. There’s nobody that can do background checks on people better or faster than my guys. I’ve got the right computer systems, the right contacts, and the know-how.’

‘I’ve heard,’ DeMarco said, ‘that you’re a strong supporter of Senator Broderick’s proposed legislation, the so-called Muslim Registry Act.’

‘You’re damn right I am,’ Dobbler said, his eyeballs swelling. ‘Broderick’s the only guy in Washington who doesn’t have his head up his ass about those people.’

‘I’ve also heard that maybe one of the reasons you’re supporting Broderick is if his bill passes, your company might get the contract doing the background checks on the Muslims.’

DeMarco got to see that he was right about Dobbler’s face changing color. A flush started at the base of the man’s neck and spread up his face toward his hairline like an out-of-control brush fire. ‘Are you implying that I’m doing something improper?’ he said.

‘Oh, no, sir,’ DeMarco said. He then gave Dobbler his best impression of a D. C. insider’s smirk, added a conspiratorial wink, and said, ‘We all know that’s the way things work in Washington. One hand washes the other. We approve.’

‘Well, I’m not washing any damn thing,’ Dobbler said. ‘I’m just supporting a politician I believe in.’

‘Yes, sir, I understand,’ DeMarco said. To change the subject, he asked, ‘How many employees do you have?’

DeMarco left half an hour later without having come to any useful conclusion regarding Ken Dobbler. The guy was a pompous, self-satisfied, arrogant bully, but that didn’t mean he was coercing innocent Muslims into committing acts of terrorism to help pass Broderick’s bill.

He checked his watch. It was almost 5 p.m.: quitting time. He found the closest bar to Dobbler’s company. He was hoping a few Dobbler employees might stop in for drinks and that he might get some information from people who were less impressed with Dobbler than he was with himself.

The Cuban was patient — like a hunter in a deer blind — but being trapped in a car with Jorge for almost eight hours was beginning to grate on her. Earlier in the day he had tried several times to start up a conversation, the dimwit probably thinking he might be able to charm her into having sex with him. She’d seen tree stumps that were more appealing than Jorge, but even if he’d looked like Antonio Banderas he still wouldn’t have scored. Sex was simply not a priority for her. She finally told him to shut up, he was being paid to drive, not talk. So for the past four hours she’d sat in the car with him as he sulked, her only relief being when she sent him for food and coffee.

She’d been disappointed that DeMarco hadn’t been injured in the accident on the highway, but not really surprised. It had been an opportunity and she’d taken it, but it wasn’t an opportunity she had direct control over. Other opportunities would come along. They always did.

If all she’d been asked to do was kill the man, it would have been simple. She could have killed him from three hundred yards away with a rifle or from three feet away with a silenced pistol, just as she had done with Lincoln’s researcher Jeremy Potter. She’d also been trained by one of the best in the business in the use of explosives, and she could have blown DeMarco into tiny pieces when he started his car or opened his door or answered his phone.

She’d killed politicians surrounded by bodyguards and crime lords so paranoid they rarely left their fortified homes. Killing a man who had no training or protection, and had no inkling that he was a target, would normally be no more difficult than swatting a fly. But to kill him in the way that she’d been contracted to do — without making it obvious that he was the intended victim — well that wasn’t so easy, particularly in this country.

Like right now, he was sitting in a bar. If this had been Israel, she could have tossed a bomb into the bar and killed DeMarco along with a dozen others. The act would have been blamed on Hamas, and everyone would have thought that DeMarco, the poor schmuck, had just picked the wrong time and place to have a drink. But that wouldn’t work here, not in Philadelphia.

So she’d wait until the right opportunity presented itself. It always did.

It didn’t take DeMarco long to strike up a conversation with a Dobbler employee. He recognized the people in the bar who worked for Dobbler because they all had company ID badges on lanyards around their necks. When one man wearing a Dobbler badge started talking to the bartender about the Redskins’ chances of beating the Eagles on Sunday, he surprised DeMarco by saying that the Redskins were going to kick the Eagles’ green-clad butts. This surprised DeMarco for two reasons: the Skins’ chances of beating the Eagles were practically nil the way Washington was currently performing, and most folks in Philly were rabid Eagles fans. In fact, the word rabid didn’t come close to describing their fanaticism. For a man to stand in a Philadelphia bar and admit out loud that he wanted to see the Eagles lose was tantamount to a death wish.

But it gave DeMarco the opening he needed. He told the man that he was from D.C. and ‘Go Skins,’ and a bond was formed. They became two cowboys surrounded by heathens, standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be scalped, as they wished for the downfall of Philadelphia’s favorite team. Before too long, DeMarco got around to asking about Dobbler. DeMarco told the guy — his name was Chuck — that he’d had an appointment with Dobbler and that Dobbler had blown him off after he’d driven all the way from the capital. Chuck’s response to this complaint was that he wasn’t surprised because Dobbler was a prick. Yep, Chuck was his guy.

Chuck confirmed what DeMarco already suspected: Dobbler was ruthless, mean-spirited, tight-fisted, and cared more about his company than the people in it. Dobbler, Chuck said, would fire you if you looked cross-eyed at him. Chuck did mention one interesting thing. When Dobbler started up his company, there were four other security firms he was competing against. Three of these outfits went out of business because the buildings they were supposed to be protecting began to experience an unusually high number of successful break-ins. Dobbler went to the people who owned the buildings and said if they wanted to stop having their offices robbed and trashed, maybe they should hire somebody who knew what he was doing, so the companies did. The rumor was that Dobbler had hired the thugs who did the break-ins, but that was never proven.

When DeMarco asked Chuck if Broderick’s bill was going to be good for business, Chuck said, ‘Beat’s the shit out of me. I’m on the security systems side. But,’ he added, ‘I like what Broderick’s saying.’