In the Company of Liars

NINE DAYS EARLIER
FRIDAY, MARCH 5

Jane McCoy opens the file on her desk:

Zulfikar Ali Haroon was born in a small village outside of Quetta, in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, in 1978. His father, Ghulam Zia Haroon, was a shoemaker. His mother, Jamila Khan Haroon, was an English professor at Baluchistan University.

In March of 1985, an aerial bomb destroyed a wing of Baluchistan University. Among the casualties were Professor Jamila Haroon and her four-year-old daughter, Benazir. The blast was widely accredited to the Soviets, as one of many attacks against Pakistan since that country became the focal point for resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Less than two months after the deaths of his wife and daughter, Ghulam Haroon was recruited. Ghulam joined theHizb-i-Islami, the most fundamentalist of the Afghan resistance groups that formed the Central Alliance, and the group that received the bulk of CIA arms supplied to themujahedin.

Ghulam Haroon was dispatched to Peshawar to assist in the flow of arms to themujahedin. From the moment that he arrived in Peshawar, he introduced and registered his son as Ramadaran Ali Haroon, changing his first name from Zulfikar. Ghulam Haroon purported to work as a carpet merchant, but his principal work consisted in training and supplying freedom fighters on behalf ofHizb-i-Islami.

“Jane, Mr. Benjamin’s here,” Harrick says. “In the conference room.”

They take a stroll down the hall.

“Hello, Mr. Benjamin,” she says when she enters the conference room. “Mr. Salters.”

Walter Benjamin is the director of governmental affairs, Midwest region, for Flanagan-Maxx Pharmaceuticals. Gerald Salters is his lawyer, an aging veteran of the criminal courts.

“Appreciate you coming back down,” she says. “You came in through the underground entrance?”

“Of course,” says Gerry Salters.

“Okay. Good.” McCoy opens a file folder. Her notes from their last meeting were typed by an office assistant. A wonder, that the typist could comprehend her lousy penmanship. “First, I’d like to go back over what we originally talked about. Then I’d like to cover something new.”

“If you have a specific question, my client can certainly answer it,” says Salters. “But I don’t see why we need to cover old ground.”

“Call it a favor,” she requests. You always learn at least one new thing when someone tells a story a second time. Which is precisely why defense attorneys don’t like to let their clients have more than one conversation with law-enforcement types.

“That’s fine,” Benjamin says to his lawyer. The Flanagan-Maxx executive is painfully thin, but not in a way that she would attribute to exercise. He doesn’t look fit. He looks ill, actually. But you don’t see a lot of happy, healthy faces sitting across from you in this job. Not two years ago, she recalls putting the squeeze on an executive who was borrowing a little here, a little there from some corporate accounts, when suddenly he vomited all over the conference-room table. She ended up with no information from him that day except what he had eaten for breakfast.

Benjamin starts his narrative-hiring Sam Dillon to pass the Divalpro legislation, paying MAAHC to hire Mat, and the sudden switch of three votes in the Senate that allowed it to pass.

“How did Mat Pagone prevail on Senators Strauss, Almundo, and Blake to change their minds? Agent McCoy, I have no personal knowledge of that. You think I have time to micro-manage like that? I’ve got seven state legislatures I’m dealing with, I’ve got seven sets of statutory and regulatory compliance issues to deal with. I don’t have time to ask those questions.”

“Understood,” she says, because she believes him.

“But then Sam calls me one day, January of this year. Couple months ago. About two months after veto session. He says he has some concerns about what may have transpired in the Senate. He tells me, he’s hearing whispers in the corridors of the capital. He says he heard Senator Blake talking about a trip to Sanibel Island, and he knows Mat took the same trip at the same time. So now, Sam says, he’s thinking about those three new votes for our bill. Strauss. Almundo. Blake. He tells me, flat-out, what that concern is.” Walter Benjamin shrugs. “We didn’t know what to do. Neither of us. We’re not sure. We don’t have the power to subpoena or immunize people. We canask, but how exactly do you do that? Approach a sitting senator who just voted for your bill and accuse him of being on the take? We have to have a continuing relationship with these people. That’s political suicide.

“We asked Mat, did he bribe those senators? He said no. Were we totally convinced? Maybe not. But I didn’t know. Sam didn’t know. What more, in God’s name, are we supposed to do? We have nothing but suspicions.”

“Okay, Mr. Benjamin,” McCoy prods. “Keep going.”

“So Mat comes to Sam, late January of this year. He’s panicked. He says federal agents want to talk to him. He says they’ve seized his bank records. They’re looking at money withdrawals Mat made over several months. It looks bad. It smells. Sam says to Mat, come clean. Tell me what happened. And that’s when Mat drops it on Sam.”

McCoy nods. This is her favorite part, or least favorite, depending on the perspective.

“Mat denies the whole thing, right? But he says it to Sam hypothetically. Mat says to Sam, ‘If I were to have done something wrong, the same could be said of you.’ He says to Sam, ‘If money were handed to Senator Strauss, it wasn’t handed to him by me. It would have been handed to him by you, Sam. So we’re in this together.’ ”

Benjamin sighs. “See, Strauss apparently had lunch at the Maritime Club with Sam and Mat, last-I guess it was October.”

“Right.”

“And that was after they played racquetball at the club. Sam and Strauss. But before that, apparently, Mat saw Sam and handed him a bag. A gym bag. He told Sam it was Strauss’s clothes from another time they had played-sweats, in a gym bag that Strauss had left in a locker. Turns out, I guess, that gym bag had some money in it, too. Sam swears he never looked. I’m sure if he had, he would have found some dirty clothes in there. But somewhere in there was, I assume, about a hundred one-hundred-dollar bills. About ten thousand dollars.”

“So Sam unknowingly handed the money to Strauss,” McCoy says. “In the locker room before racquetball, before all three of them had lunch.”

“Exactly,” Benjamin says. “And Sam’s no dummy. He gets it. Mat Pagone’s telling him, if he has any inclination to squeal, Sam will go down with him.

“So Sam meets with me and tells me all about this. We don’t know what to do. So he calls you guys, the FBI. You know he called you. He wanted you to subpoena him before the grand jury.”

“Understood,” McCoy says. “But let’s back up. Back to what happened after Sam confronted Mat, and Mat threatened Sam.”

Walter Benjamin frowns. McCoy, after hearing all this, wants to focus on conversations between Benjamin and Sam Dillon.

“You’re not a target, Mr. Benjamin. You know that. Sam came to see you, you said. Start with that.”

“Okay.” The executive sighs. “Sam comes to my office and tells me that his worst suspicions have been, more or less, confirmed. Mat Pagone all but admitted to bribing these senators and threatened Sam if he cooperated with the feds. Sam swore to me that he didn’t know what was in that bag that he handed to Strauss. And I believed him. I’ll go to my grave believing that. Sam’s a trusting sort of guy. Yeah, he’s political, but-Mat hands him a gym bag and says, ‘Strauss left this in the locker room, last time we played,’ Sam’s going to believe Mat. He’s not going to assume there’s bribe money in there.”

“I believe you, Mr. Benjamin. I do. Sam Dillon was a good guy. What happened next? Next thing you remember, after meeting with Sam?”

McCoy sees Owen Harrick, in her peripheral vision, his pen poised. McCoy asked for Benjamin to repeat the entire story for cover; this is the only part she needs to hear again.

“The next thing I remember?” Benjamin looks at his lawyer. “Like, going home or whatever?”

“Like,” she elaborates, “did you speak with anyone about this conversation?”

“Not in any detail, no.”

“At all,” she insists.

“At-” Benjamin’s focus strays to the ceiling. “Well, right. I think I told you this before. The scientist who came to my office. We were going to have lunch together. This was right after Sam left my office.”

“Okay. What was his name again?” she asks, another attempt at cover.

“Doctor Neil Lomas,” Benjamin says.

“Right. That’s right. Okay. Tell me about that again.”

“Well, he could probably see the look on my face. He told me I looked upset. We were supposed to have lunch in the cafeteria-we did that once a week. I said I needed some fresh air. We went across the street to this Italian place. Neil-Neil and I-Doctor Neil Lomas,” he explains. “He’s one of our top researchers. Works in pediatric drugs.”

Oh, yes. McCoy knows all about Doctor Neil Lomas, one of the chief pediatric researchers for Flanagan-Maxx Pharmaceuticals.

“We’ve been pretty close, recently. Neil’s wife left him, just like that, about a year ago.”

Fourteen months ago, to be exact.

“And he’d gotten into some problems. He’d been-well, I don’t know if I-Neil came pretty unwound when his wife left. It was out of the blue. He was a train wreck. So-he’d been having some problems.”

Some problems.McCoy would react, visibly, under other circumstances. Yes, Doctor Neil Lomas has been having some problems. Cocaine for starters, a habit that set him back about twenty thousand dollars over the last year. McCoy doesn’t know if this was the result, or cause, of his wife’s rather hasty departure. Now he gambles, too, and he’s not very good at it. Self-destructive habits, both of them, and McCoy has always wondered whether addictive gamblers, deep inside,want to lose. Lomas has a second mortgage on his house and tough alimony payments to boot. Yeah, a few problems. He was into a bookie for over fifteen thousand before his debt was purchased by someone with another agenda, and he’s not off the cocaine yet.

A drug-addicted, distraught gambler. The perfect scientist to compromise. Buy his debt, supply him cocaine, whisper whatever bullshit into his ear that he needs to hear, and he’s yours.

Benjamin, given his audience, doesn’t want to mention Lomas’s narcotics use or gambling problems, and McCoy won’t force the issue. She won’t tell Benjamin that she knows the identity of the person who purchased Lomas’s gambling debts from the bookie Jimmy, that she knows that this is the same person who is supplying Lomas with cocaine on a daily basis, after work. McCoy wants, in fact, to give the impression that she is entirely unconcerned with Doctor Neil Lomas. But that may be difficult.

“So there was a history of confiding in each other,” Benjamin explains. “But I swear to you, I didn’t go into detail. I just told Neil there were some problems. That there was some possibility that someone had been doing something they shouldn’t, and that there would be a federal investigation.”

“And how did Doctor Lomas respond to that?”

“He was concerned. Like a friend should be.”

“Be specific, please, Mr. Benjamin. Word-for-word, if you could.”

“Word-for-okay. Well, he asked me questions. He wanted to know whatkind of investigation. He wanted to know what department was being investigated. He asked me who was interested. He wanted to know who had initiated this investigation. He wanted details.”

“Word-for-word, Mr. Benjamin.”

Benjamin closes his eyes a moment. “God. Okay. I said there might be a problem with something. I said someone outside our company had raised a very disturbing concern. He wanted to know who had raised the concern, he wanted to know what kind of concern. Well, he could pretty much figure out thewho part.”

“He could?”

“Well, he had seen Sam walk out of my office. In fact, out of common courtesy, I had introduced them.”

Jesus.McCoy’s stomach reels. This is new information, a seemingly innocuous detail from Walter Benjamin’s perspective. Benjamin had given Doctor Lomas a name, a name that Doctor Lomas had passed on.

“So,” McCoy says, with all the casualness she can muster, “Doctor Lomas knew that it wasSam Dillon who had some disturbing information.”

“Yeah. I mean, the name ‘Sam Dillon’ meant nothing to him. I just said, Sam had raised some questions.”

“And what did Doctor Lomas ask about that?”

“Well, he wanted to knowwhat questions. I said I didn’t know.”

“You lied?”

“Yes. I said I didn’t know, because if I told Neil Idid know, he’d keep pressing me. You have to understand Neil. You have to understand our relationship. I’ve been his confidant. The guy he talks to. He needs someone like that. So he would expect the same from me. He would expect me to be open with him. So I lied.”

“Tell me, Mr. Benjamin, exactly what you said.”

Walter Benjamin pauses. “I said, ‘I don’t know the details. All I know is that Sam told me something illegal was taking place, and he was going to report it to the U.S. attorney, and he wanted me to know in advance because the feds might be paying us a visit soon.’ ”

McCoy looks at her partner.

“And I told Neil, that was all I knew. I said I didn’t know any details. Sam had just paid me a courtesy call, I told him, so I wouldn’t have my pants down when the FBI showed up.”

“And this was Tuesday, February third?”

“Umm-right. Yeah. I remember that day mostly because it was the last time Sam and I spoke. It was, what, less than a week before he was mur-”

Benjamin’s face goes cold. The room is silent. McCoy tries to avoid his stare but she can’t; her eyes involuntarily move to the Flanagan-Maxx executive, staring at her, his mouth open.

“Oh my God,” he mumbles.

“Hold up.” McCoy waves her hand furiously. “Hold up. I’m only asking about Doctor Lomas because I need to know who you spoke to. That’s it, Mr. Benjamin. Don’t connect him with Sam Dillon’s death. Really. There’s no connection there.”

There is such a thing as protesting too much, and McCoy wants to dance that fine line. This is what she feared when she brought up the topic, but it was too important not to address. She cannot let Walter Benjamin blame himself for this. She cannot ask him to bear that kind of a burden.

She will bear it herself. The death of Sam Dillon was her fault.

“Who have you spoken to in the company since this investigation began?” she asks.

Walter Benjamin’s face is flushed. He is still grappling with the thought he has just had.

“Did I get Sam ki-” His throat closes. He places a hand on his chest, as if struggling for breath. “Did I-”

“No, you most certainly did not. Really, Mr. Benjamin. This had nothing to do with you. Now, could you answer my question?”

“Who-have I spoken to at the company? Well, our CEO. Our chief counsel. That’s it.”

“Doctor Lomas?”

“No. I haven’t spoken to Neil. Should I-what do you want me to do?”

“Don’t go out of your way to initiate conversation. What I would like for you to say is, ‘There’s something going on in my department. I’ve been instructed not to discuss it.’ Just something like that. To anyone who asks, not just Doctor Lomas. I’m sure Mr. Salters here has already given you that advice.”

“Okay.” He nods. “Okay.”

“You’ve been put on a paid leave, correct?”

“Yes, I have.”

“You’ll be back soon, Mr. Benjamin. No one thinks you had anything to do with the bribing of those senators, and we’ll make that clear when the investigation is over.”

Benjamin brings a trembling hand to his face. “That’s-very nice to hear.”

“But you will comply with what I’ve asked?”

At this point, Walter Benjamin looks like he just completed a marathon. He would probably agree to stand on his head if she asked. “I will repeat what you said. ‘It has something to do with my department. I’ve been instructed not to discuss it.’ I’m not talking to anyone, Agent McCoy. Believe me.”

“Thank you, sir. Thanks, Mr. Salters. I think that’s all I have for you.”

Benjamin and his attorney stand up, the former with some difficulty. He looks at McCoy as she gathers her things.

“Neil?” he asks.

“Doctor Lomas has nothing to do with this,” she assures him. “Forget about Neil.”

She hopes that he will take her advice. She has thought enough about Doctor Neil Lomas for every man, woman, and child in this city.

Harrick shows them out, then returns a moment later. McCoy has not left her spot at the table. He places a hand on her shoulder.

“He’s been a good boy,” Harrick says. He’s referring to the wiretap of Walter Benjamin’s phone. They are taking no chances.

“Walter Benjamin is a decent enough guy caught up in something ugly.” McCoy tries to get out of her chair but stops. She is weary, emotionally and physically exhausted, and this thing has hardly begun.

“I didn’t mean to put that bug in his ear,” she says. “Now he thinks that what he told Doctor Lomas might have gotten Sam Dillon killed.”

“You had no choice, Jane. We had to be thorough.”

“You see the look on his face?” She shakes her head. “On the mere suggestion that he might be responsible for what happened to Dillon? I’ve never seen anyone so tortured.”

Harrick takes the seat next to her. “I have,” he says. “I’ve seen it on your face every single day for the last month.”