Dog Tags

CHAPTER 90

I TELL CINDY SPODEK’S ASSISTANT TO INTERRUPT HER MEETING, THAT IT’S URGENT I SPEAK WITH HER. Apparently it isn’t FBI protocol to interrupt important meetings when defense lawyers call, and he resists doing so. So I up it a notch and describe it as a matter of life or death, and he relents.

Fifteen seconds later Cindy is on the phone. “Life or death?” she asks. She doesn’t sound that worried, since she knows I’ll say anything to get what I want.

“Many lives and many deaths,” I say, and relate the situation as quickly as I can, without leaving out anything important.

“Have you spoken to Benson?” she asks.

“I can’t reach him.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Make sure that nothing is happening at that terminal, and maybe find Willie in the process.”

“Andy, I can’t order an FBI terrorist operation on your hunch. That’s not how we operate.”

“Cindy, this is real; I can feel it. If you don’t stop it, we could be looking at a catastrophe. If I’m wrong, we’ll be embarrassed. I’ll take whatever heat I can take. But I know if I spoke to Benson, he’d move on it.”

“Hold on,” she says, and I wait for about three and a half endless minutes before she gets back on the phone. When she does, the stress in her voice is unmistakable. “Andy, I’m on it; I have to go.”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s a tanker due in port in twenty minutes.”

I hang up the phone, then I stare at it and mentally beg for it to ring. Billy and Laurie do the same; we are silent, knowing that there is nothing more we can do, other than wait.

It is five minutes later that Benson calls, and I quickly tell him what has happened, and that I have already spoken to Cindy, who said she was on the move. If he’s annoyed by my intervention in bureau affairs, he certainly doesn’t sound it.

What he sounds is worried.

As he’s about to get off, I say, “I believe the guy behind all this is Colonel William Mickelson; he’s based at the Pentagon.”

“How sure are you?” he asks.

“Eighty percent. But if I’m right, he’s about ready to leave the country.”

Click.

Benson has hung up on me. I hope and believe he did so because he was in a desperate hurry to act on my words. The other possibility is that he hung up for the same reason that people have been hanging up on me my whole life, that they find me an insufferably annoying pain in the ass.

So we wait again.