“You’re saying they pressured the victim to tell something, it went too far and they killed him?”
“Maybe, but I have a feeling al-Muwalid was a rival for the same information. I’ve gone over my notes and talked to my partner and I think we had him wrong. He was hiring muscle around town and we assumed that he wanted to protect himself. What if he was hiring them to look for Emmylou? The oil guy he met, Zubrom, actually told us he was looking for someone, and I ignored it because I was only thinking about dangerto Muwalid, not that he might be a danger to someone else. I mean,he was the one who got whacked. So the odds are that whoever killed Muwalid sent Dodo Cortez to find whatever it was Emmylou might have told her therapist.”
“I thought this Dideroff woman killed Muwalid.”
“That’s the official position.”
“But you no longer believe it.”
“I’m not sure what I believe, Major. It all depends on who Emmylou D. really is. People think she knows something, but does she know she knows it? Is she a player playing cagey? Or is she a victim?”
“What does she say in that confession she’s writing?”
“Not much. A lot of childhood memories and religion. We’re awaiting the later installments.”
Oliphant swiveled for a moment and sipped thoughtfully from his own FBI mug. “It doesn’t work.”
“I know,” Paz admitted. “The hole in it is that if they thought Emmylou knew something, why didn’t they just snatch her up and put the irons to her? Why all this rigmarole with framing her for Muwalid and going after the confession? Well, one possibility is she doesn’t know what she knows. She’s already been tortured once. Maybe that was their first shot at trying to get it.”
“Tortured?”
“Yeah, the docs say she’s got recent dislocations in both shoulders and whipping scars on her back and soles of her feet. Burns too. So maybe they think that in a situation she feels is safe, with a therapist who’s got no interest in any secrets, she’ll let something slip.”
“It’s plausible,” said Oliphant. “Barely. So…next move?”
Paz had prepared for this question, of course, and he answered fluently, although with more confidence than he actually felt. Since the early passages of this affair he had caught glimpses of a brewing chaos, weirdness, conspiracy in high places, international crap, the stench of Africa again. It was important to have a tale to cling to, as children do, and now he spun it out.
“Basic fact: Emmylou Dideroff, if she acted at all didn’t act alone…”
“Because of the missing cell phone.”
“Right. There’s no cell phone. Next fact: my partner talked to the late Dodo’s associates. About a week before the murder Dodo got a phone call that excited him. Apparently Dodo has not had an organizational home since the Hoffmann gang went down, but now he’s talking about steady work. He was seen a couple of times by two different people getting into and out of a silver Lexus with a big Anglo guy at the wheel, always at night. According to the regulars at the lounge he hung out in, Dodo’s talking big, he’s got more money to spend.”
“You’re starting to like him for the hit on the Arab.”
“And Jack Wilson, who drives a silver Lexus. Look, Wilson knew that Emmylou was in the vicinity of a particular machine shop at a particular time, because he sent her there. There’s a phone booth across the street from this machine shop. We know that Muwalid got a cell phone call in Zubrom’s office and he took off like a bullet after it. Maybe the call said something like we have your information, go to such and such phone booth and wait. That second call both shows him to Emmylou and sets up a meet in his hotel room. He goes there, followed by Emmylou. Emmylou parks the car and begins her search for Muwalid’s room. But Cortez already knows the room. He picks up the connecting rod from Emmylou’s truck, goes to Muwalid’s room, kills him, dumps him over, and leaves. Emmylou arrives and is waiting like a patsy when we walk in.”
“Or Emmylou and Wilson are in it together. Maybe she fingered Muwalid for Dodo.”
“Then why wouldn’t she take off?” Paz asked. “Why was she waiting there praying, or whatever?”
“A deeper game? She wanted to be locked up in a nuthouse for some reason?”
“That’s pretty deep. Although, given that it’s Emmylou, we can’t rule it out.”
“Get more facts,” said Oliphant.
“Fine. The main fact I need is, do you know anything about the guy who owns her houseboat, David Packer, the man of mystery?”
“Why would you think that?” A little glaring here, which Paz ignored.
“Because you were with the feds and the feds are involved in this in some way, unless you think it’s a coincidence that the guy who rented Emmylou her domicile has got the State Department covering up for him when a cop calls for information. I got the sense that there are calls whizzing back and forth between that phone there on your desk and Washington, D.C., and there’s a bunch of you watching me to see what I’ll turn up, like a bunch of kids watching an ant on a sidewalk, maybe poke it with a stick once in a while. Because if that’s the case then, with all due respect, sir, fuck it.”
They played eye games then for what seemed like a long while to Paz. He had been thinking about this aspect of the case, the week off duty had given him plenty of time to think, and about what Oliphant had said the last time they’d discussed it, and how unsatisfactory it had been even then. He had called David Packer a dozen times during that week and got his answering machine and left a message, but had not been called back. No big deal, it was not a crime to leave town, but still….
“Not whizzing,” said Oliphant, “I wouldn’t say whizzing. But I’ve gotten some calls. And made a few. And the fact is that you’re going to have to let me be the judge of what I can and can’t tell you, and the reason for that is that people I respect are feeding me information that they’ve got no legal right to release to me, they’re putting their jobs and pensions on the line.”
Oliphant leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands across his midsection, which to Paz looked about as soft as a steel-belted radial. “Let’s talk a little more about the intersection between national security and the work of the FBI. We’re interested in bad guys in that area just like we are in O.C., mail fraud, computer crime, and so on, and obviously the best way to penetrate the bad guys is to turn a bad guy. That’s how we got the Klan and the mob. Not so easy with terrorists, because the kind of terrorists we’re mainly interested in nowadays are pretty impenetrable by your average FBI-type person. So we look on the periphery. Terror cells need services like any other organized body. They need false IDs, they need money moved, they need transport and weapons and ammo. And there are, naturally, all-American scumbags who will supply this stuff for a price.”
“So you penetrate the scumbags.”
“We do. But you can see the problem. In order for your penetratee to work effectively, he has to continue with his scumbaggery, for which he now has effective immunity, because he’s been doubled. He keeps selling, let’s say, fake IDs, and even though he lets us know what he’s doing, we are still not going to pick up all the evildoers he’s selling to, because these guys are not dumb, they can figure out that if everybody who bought bad paper from old Charlie got busted, there must be something funny going on with old Charlie. And there you have the great conundrum: you’re licensing guys to commit criminal acts, in the hope that you can prevent even greater criminal acts. It’s inherently corrupting. Inherently.”
“So what do you do?”
“Well, it depends on whether you believe in our system,” said Oliphant. “If you believe that justice under law is essentially weak, then you’ll bend the law until it breaks. You’ll have killers and rapists and every kind of human garbage on the payroll of the United States. And you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. If you believe that justice under law is inherently strong, then you won’t license criminals. You might use them or squeeze them but you won’t fucking protect their criminal acts. And the result of this is that you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. Will you have more victims? Unclear. I tend to doubt it. You can stop ninety-nine percent of terror attempts just by taking your thumb out of your ass, like we could’ve stopped nine-eleven if we hadn’t been having turf wars and snoozing in our deck chairs. The rest of it is like lightning strikes or traffic fatalities, it’s part of life in any open society, get used to it, not that the attorney general is ever going to get up on the TV and say that. But if you play it straight, at least you won’t have blowback, you won’t have impunity, you won’t have the corruption of law enforcement.”