“Don’t get me wrong,” she added. “He was damned good on the air. He could think fast and, for someone his age, he really had a knack for politics. But it was the accident that helped him the most.”
“What accident?” This came out of nowhere.
“The crash. The car crash that killed Buck Roberts, the drive time, you know, the afternoon host. Elliott was doing weekends. Roberts was heading home one night and he ran off the road into a ravine. Killed. Just like that. Elliott got called to cover the next day. It was just before an L.A. outfit bought the station. They were putting together a regional block of stations. A month after Elliott took over for Buck, he was on seven stations. That’s what I call lucky.”
“Damned lucky, Mrs. Stuart.”
“Now what?” Roarke asked Shannon Davis.
“We wait.”
“I hate waiting. I’m not good at it. Besides, what do we wait for? For Cooper to say, ‘Here I am!’ That’s not going to happen.”
Davis put his feet up on the table in a conference room in the White House basement — their war room. They knew who the enemy was, but aside from the story leaked to The Times, they didn’t have a clue what to do next.
“Start with the assumption that he saw the report. He could go into deep hiding, which would be the smartest and easiest thing. Does he do that, or does he come after us?”
“Not us. Me,” Roarke corrected. “He knows me by sight now and I’m sure he’s realized I’m after him.” Roarke craned his neck, moving his head from shoulder to shoulder. He felt tense and frustrated. He finally sat down next to his friend. “That means he’s more likely to go on the offensive.”
Neither man added to the conversation for two solid minutes. Roarke finally broke the silence. “Another assumption: Cooper’s got more than enough money to live his life out. He also has the ability to pass himself off as just about anybody.”
“So that and his shoe size are supposed to deliver him to us?”
“No, it won’t. As far as we’ve seen, this guy doesn’t do a thing without surveillance and preparation. There’s a better-than-fair chance that he’s the most skilled assassin that’s emerged in a long time. And if he’s not the most skilled, he’s at least the most careful.”
“Which leaves us at square one.”
They sat quietly for another few minutes, sharing only deep, frustrating sighs.
Davis tried another approach. “We do know his assignments came from a man named Haddad. What if we announce we’ve caught him, that he’s talking to us. That might snarf him out.”
Roarke didn’t like the idea.
“Okay then, we pull in Cooper’s parents. Hold them on conspiracy charges. Hell, they might even be involved and…”
Another no from Roarke. “Unless we catch the right man, with the proper proof, the press will fry us. Remember, it’s been a year since he killed Jennifer Lodge and six months since he shot Teddy Lodge. The story’s already off everyone’s scope. We bring in the wrong man and the FBI takes the fall. Probably the president, too.”
“So I guess that’s it,” Davis said getting to his feet. He reached for his dark blue suit jacket, which was draped over the back of his chair. Roarke had nothing to add that would keep the conversation going.
“Write if you get work,” Davis said. Roarke saluted with two fingers.
That was it. They were in the middle of a chess match, not knowing whether the other guy even wanted to play. To make matters worse, the opponent was winning.
The impact of being on one Houston radio station was far greater than the seven New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada stations. That’s where Elliott Strong went next. O’Connell spoke to Linda Dale Lockhart, the retired media critic of The Houston Chronicle. She was quite familiar with O’Connell’s writing, which made it easier for him.
“Yup, he was in this market about eighteen months, maybe closer to two years,” the critic remembered. “He stirred up all sorts of shit. I think he really found his voice here — a pretty angry one at that. As I recall, he never had guests — not that he had to. When they threw out the Fairness Doctrine, stations had no reason to broadcast balanced shows. So a lot stopped trying. But as I understand it, there was a loophole, anyway. Call-in shows weren’t really governed by the Fairness Doctrine.”
“No?” This was different from what O’Connell had generally heard and what most critics understood.
“Well, presumably by inviting a cross-section of the community to express their opinions, the scope of the opinion broadened — at least on paper. Of course, things were tame back then anyway. Who knew where it was all going? It was all pretty local. Now? Seems whoever’s the loudest gets the most attention. And for a while in this market, Strong was the loudest of them all.”
“How so?”
“Well, remember, he was preaching to the converted. That’s what talk-show hosts generally do. But he must have slipped something in Houston’s Kool Aid, because his ratings took off here.”
O’Connell asked the next question with some notion of what he might hear.
“Would you describe him as lucky?”
“Funny you mention it. Now that I think of it, yes.”
“How so?”
“Well, let’s see, he was on the number-two talker in town. The number-one was a powerhouse station with a bona fide Houston legend. Race was his name, Bill Race. Well, he had a heart attack. 44.”
“He died?”
“Yup. Deader than a doornail. And Strong moved right in on his audience.”
O’Connell kept the critic engaged for a few more minutes, but he had learned enough.
“What about other prints from Haddad’s condo?” Mulligan asked Bessolo.
“Some illegals on the cleaning staff. And one that matched a California driver’s license.
“You have a name with that?”
“Ali Razak.”
“Razak.” He spelled it. “No police record. We’re checking with the IRS on anything they may have. I have a picture of him from California. I’ll forward it up to you. A big guy.”
“Big, like bodyguard big?”
“Try Godzilla.”
Chapter 62
The GAO report was more of an indictment than a study. The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accounting Office, charged that the Pentagon couldn’t reconcile where all its Category I weapons were. Translating the GAO paper into people-speak, the military simply did not know how many Stinger missiles — believed to have been shipped to the Middle East during the Gulf War and through the subsequent war in Iraq — were missing. Inventory records of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) differed from GAO’s physical count, not by dozens or even hundreds, but by thousands of missiles.
Since 1970, several hundred thousand MANPADS were manufactured and issued to American military. Thousands were sold internationally through the Foreign Military Sales Program. Problems in record keeping, storage, theft, and black market trade revealed that the armed services could not account for the actual number of missiles that had been in their stores. The reason? Lax reporting on serial numbers of MANPADS produced, fired, destroyed, sold, or transferred.
To put it another way, there are better records on who owns America’s laptop computers than who’s holding Stinger missiles capable of downing an aircraft.
And what of personal arms? In Vietnam alone, some 90,000 semiautomatic pistols were abandoned by American combatants during the troop evacuation. Add to that 791,000 M-16A1 rifles, 857,600 other non-classed rifles, and thousands of other weapons, including 550 tanks, the total of arms left behind reached an estimated 1,882,238.