The Echo of the Whip Page 19

  Charlie’s eyes narrowed. “You might have to buy me dinner for that.”

  “Or we could discuss the subject hypothetically, if you’d feel more comfortable.”

  “What’s going on here, Carina?”

  Charlie took a look around the diner, as if someone might be closing in on him.

  Only the waitress was, back with his order in a flash. She moved Carina’s plate back to her side of the table, but got the message it was meant to send. Not a quitter, though, she still beamed at Charlie.

  As soon as she left, Carina said, “A friend who’s still in uniform asked for my help. If I give you a little bit of the situation, can I trust you to keep it to yourself?”

  “I’m gay, but I’m not a gossip,” Charlie said.

  “Good to know. A certain person highly placed in the government is being threatened with death. This is someone who has certainly been threatened before, but this one is being regarded more gravely than most. The word is, it could be somebody connected with our own intelligence community who might actually make an attempt.”

  “JFK and the CIA all over again?” Charlie asked.

  Carina spread her hands. “I’m just an intermediary, but the person who contacted me about this isn’t a conspiracy nut.”

  She took a piece of bacon from Charlie’s plate.

  He said, “The only way I could see something like this happening is if somebody from the fringe is being used.”

  “Someone who’s not a serious threat?” Carina asked.

  “Didn’t say that. Look, did you ever wonder what happens to all the guys who try to join special forces units but don’t make it?”

  “They go back to their old outfits, do their old jobs?”

  “Some do, but a lot separate from the services altogether.”

  “Disappointment will do that,” she said, knowing military misfortune all too well.

  “Yeah, well, some big thinker at the Pentagon thought it was a waste of manpower, at least when it came to the guys who missed out making special forces by a whisker. All that training and a lot of skills and talents walking out the door, it seemed unproductive.”

  “When you say a whisker, how close are we talking?” Carina said.

  “Close enough to make a man bitter. I heard a story about this one guy. He did everything right, aced the training, passed all the tests, qualified down to the smallest detail.”

  “But?”

  “But he whistled while he worked. At least when he wasn’t supposed to keep quiet. Other guys would be grunting and wheezing from busting a gut; this dude would be whistling a merry tune. They thought he was a mite unbalanced, but not in a militarily useful way. So they washed him out.”

  “Did he take it hard?” Carina asked.

  “That’s the thing. The powers that be saw to it that someone met him as soon as he cleared the post gate. Offered him an interesting job at a salary the chairman of the joint chiefs doesn’t get.”

  “Who makes that kind of offer?” Within a heartbeat, Carina answered her own question. “A private security firm with a very fat government contract?”

  Charlie didn’t say a word, barely nodded.

  From her own intelligence background, Carina was able to draw other conclusions. “This whistling guy was far from the only one to get that kind of job offer. If the special forces people are the super-elite, the guys who just missed are the near super-elite. Damn, the guy who thought up this program was earning his salary. You get high quality personnel and if one of them screws up you’ve got political deniability and probably no grieving widow to go on TV.”

  “See that,” Charlie said. “Not only are you still beautiful, you’re as smart as ever.”

  “Yeah, thanks. But I haven’t figured it all out yet, have I?”

  “Take another sip of your milkshake. Maybe something will come to you.”

  Carina did, and the rush of cold sugar and chocolate did stimulate her.

  She smiled and told Charlie. “You didn’t just pull this whistler guy out of your hat for no reason. If his only flaw was an overdeveloped love of music, he must have been about the best of the guys who didn’t make the cut. So what was his name?”

  “Don’t think I ever heard it,” Charlie said, “but I do recall he was one of your kind of people.”

  Retired Colonel Carina Linberg made the connection. “Air Force.”

  Palisades Park — Santa Monica, California

  Directly opposite the bench where McGill, Mindy Crozier and John Tall Wolf sat was a sign that said visitors to the park used it at their own risk: The bluffs were subject to collapse. The drop-off to Pacific Coast Highway was steep, measuring close to a hundred feet. Portions of the park that city officials thought were in imminent danger of crumbling were blocked off by metal fencing.

  SAC Elspeth Kendry saw the warning sign and immediately wanted McGill to do his run somewhere else. Mother Nature, she’d told McGill, wouldn’t back down from committing a hostile act just because you pointed an Uzi at her. You couldn’t intimidate the old girl or even reason with her.

  McGill laughed and replied, “Elspeth, there probably isn’t a square foot of this state where a fissure couldn’t open directly beneath you.”

  “Good point,” she replied. “Maybe you should get out while you can.”

  “Says the woman who grew up in war-torn Beirut,” McGill replied.

  “Really?” Mindy asked.

  “And shot it out with desperate characters elsewhere in the Middle East.”

  “Really?” Tall Wolf asked.

  Elspeth gave McGill a dirty look worthy of Celsus Crogher, but made no further objections. She didn’t want McGill to give away her entire résumé. She took up a position behind the bench to protect his back, while turning hers on him.

  If the bluff in front of him gave way, too freaking bad.

  Maybe she’d have time to run for it.

  McGill, Tall Wolf and Mindy, meanwhile, took their chances and enjoyed the ocean view.

  “So you think I’m the one?” Mindy asked McGill.

  “Which one?” he said.

  “Whoever it was that slipped the door code to the thief. So he could get in, right?”

  Tall Wolf turned his head in her direction when he asked, “What makes you think somebody did that?”

  “Somebody had to do it. He didn’t guess the combination.”

  “Was that something you learned about in school, how inside jobs get done?” McGill asked, getting Mindy to look back at him.

  He hadn’t planned to triangulate the questioning with Tall Wolf, but he could see the advantage of playing things that way. It didn’t always have to be good cop-bad cop. You could have both interrogators act friendly. As long as it wasn’t obvious you were acting or you weren’t dealing with a sociopath, building a sense of camaraderie could open people up even better than intimidation.

  Mindy said, “There was some classroom discussion about it, but we learned a lot more about how bad guys really work when we went out for drinks with the visiting cops some of our profs brought in as guest speakers.”

  “Sure,” Tall Wolf said. “People can speak more freely in informal settings.”

  Mindy laughed. “You mean like right here.” She looked back at McGill. “Or at my mom’s house, where you wanted to talk to me yesterday.”

  “Yes” he said, “either here or there is good,”

  “Right. But in either case, even if you think it was me, it wasn’t.”

  McGill said, “I didn’t think that. Did you, John?”

  She looked back at Tall Wolf.

  He held a thumb and an index finger a half-inch apart. “Maybe just a little. But I don’t have any kids and Mr. McGill has two daughters.”

  “You guys are such BS-ers,” she told Tall Wolf with a grin. “But I kind of like it that you think I’m maybe just a little bit of a bad girl.”

  McGill said, “It’s our imperfections that make us interesting, but I think you’re way to
o smart to blow up your whole life by helping someone steal embryos.”

  “Right,” Mindy said. She turned to see if Tall Wolf agreed.

  He nodded.

  Satisfied on that point, she asked McGill, “You know who I think did it?”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Hansen, that’s who.”

  “The woman who owns the clinic,” McGill said.

  He and Tall Wolf leaned forward to look at each other.

  Mindy asked them, “You know why I was terminated.”

  “I didn’t know that you were,” McGill said.

  “Yeah, I was. Because I snooped where I shouldn’t have.”

  “Where?” Tall Wolf asked.

  “Well, one of the things that got drilled into us both in the classroom and afterward was if there’s trouble between a married couple, you always look at the spouse first.”

  Both McGill and Tall Wolf nodded.

  “So I checked the clinic’s records and found out most of the embryos taken from Ms. Gersten were created with a man named Edmond Whelan. He was Gersten’s husband at the time the embryos were made, but the records showed they got divorced, and the embryos were flagged as requiring a court order to release them.”

  McGill, who came by his paternity the old-fashioned way, asked, “Does that order apply equally to Ms. Gersten and Mr. Whelan?”

  “It does for the ones they created together. There are no holds for Ms. Gersten on the embryos she made with other partners. Not that the records showed.”

  “Okay,” McGill said, “go on.”

  “So, looking at the husband first, I thought he might be the one responsible for the theft, but how would he know the door code? What I did was look at the video file of the interview he and Ms. Gersten did with Dr. Hansen when they first came to the clinic.”

  “I can understand talking with the doctor about the process,” Tall Wolf said, “but why is there a need to make a record of the occasion?”

  “Self-interest,” Mindy said. “The doctor explains the risks. An individual embryo might not survive being frozen and thawed. Also, there’s the possibility of a catastrophic power failure. You know, like after an earthquake. All the embryos in the whole place might be ruined if something bad happened and the power went out. The doctor wants people to know there are risks. With the recordings, they can’t say they weren’t told.”

  McGill said, “That’s sensible.”

  “Right. Well, video can show other things, too. Like the looks people exchange, whether they’re positive or negative. The looks Mr. Whelan and Dr. Hansen exchanged … well, I was surprised Ms. Kersten didn’t notice and object.”

  McGill gave a dry laugh. “The guy was coming on to Dr. Hansen while he and his wife were planning their future family?”

  “He didn’t say anything wrong,” Mindy said, “but when a guy looks at a woman’s boobs more than her eyes, I get suspicious about what he’s thinking.”

  “Did the video show anything more than impolite staring?” Tall Wolf asked.

  “Might have. I don’t know because that’s when Dr. Hansen came in and asked what I was doing. When I told her, she fired me. But I did see something else.”

  “What?” McGill asked her.

  “A week or so before the robbery, I was out with a guy who was trying to impress me. He took me to dinner at the kind of restaurant young people who aren’t rich don’t dine at too often. I saw Dr. Hansen there with a man. She’s not married so I didn’t think anything of it. I’m pretty sure she never even saw me. But you know who that man was?”

  McGill and Tall Wolf answered together, “Edmond Whelan.”

  “Right. The guy who liked to look at her boobs.”

  The White House — Washington, DC

  Every political operator in the nation’s capital knew that if you had bad news that had to come out and you wanted it to do the least political damage, you engaged in what was called the Friday Night News Dump. That was, you put the word out as late as possible on the last working day of the week. You made sure it was released too late to be on the national news that night, and probably too late to be included in the Sunday morning political week-in-review shows.

  If you leaked a juicy story on a Thursday morning, though, it would have two nights on the national news and probably be the headline story on the Sunday morning shows.

  White House Chief of Staff Galia Mindel knew all that almost from the time she took her first step. She had her office TV tuned to WWN. Didi DiMarco came on with a “special bulletin.” The graphic below her face screamed: BREAKING NEWS.

  Galia smiled to herself.

  Looking serious and straight into the camera, Didi said, “We have news this morning that an arrest warrant for Senator Randall Pennyman, the Democratic junior senator from Georgia, has been issued by a federal court in Atlanta. The senator has been charged with several counts of fraud. Currently, the number of counts is fourteen, but a Department of Justice source says that number is likely to go higher.

  “Specifically, the senator and several other people, including both members of the clergy and lay people, are accused of having bilked the congregants of churches throughout the country out of many millions of dollars by setting up fake charities that were supposedly intended to help the victims of natural disasters in the United States and abroad.

  “Federal law demands that charities with tax-exempt status must support educational, religious or charitable activities, and must specify that no part of their assets shall benefit any of their directors, officers or agents. The purported charities with which Senator Pennyman and the other unnamed individuals are involved have been converting more than 90% of the donations they received to personal use.

  “Initial inquiries have shown that Senator Pennyman has off-shore bank accounts with assets totaling over $10 million dollars. Authorities suspect there are still more accounts belonging to the senator which have yet to be discovered. A source told this reporter, ‘We think Pennyman has enough cash stashed away that he couldn’t explain it honestly even if he had a winning lotto ticket.’

  “Police and federal officers in Washington, DC and the senator’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia have reported that they went to the senator’s homes and did not find him in either city. Calls to his cell phone have gone unanswered, and authorities say it must either be turned off or was disabled because they are unable to locate it. The public is being asked to call 911 if they see the senator but not to approach him personally.

  “The same source whose comment I shared a moment ago also said, “Senator Pennyman has no criminal record, but a man in his position cannot be counted on to act rationally.”

  Galia clicked off the television and smiled.

  Her spies had told her Pennyman had started his scam while he was still in college. He thought he’d never get caught. Even if there were suspicions, he was sure no one would be able to prove his misdeeds. Until he made the mistake of challenging Galia two days ago, saw the look in her eyes and decided it was time to run.

  The SOB should have taken it as a sign and folded his con-game when Galia had destroyed his opponent for his Senate seat. What had Pennyman thought? That he was too smart not to get caught. Hell, nobody was that smart, including her.

  That was why she had her letter of resignation already written and signed.

  All it needed now was to be dated.

  The Speaker’s Office — United States Capitol

  Speaker of the House Peter Profitt clicked off the TV in his office in the West Front of the Capitol. Sitting with him was House Whip Carter Coleman. Each man bided his thoughts in silence for a moment and then Coleman looked at his boss with a questioning look.

  Profitt sighed and shook his head. “Taking down Randall Pennyman was more than a shot across our bow, you realize that, don’t you, Carter?”

  The man who counted conservative votes in the House gave a reluctant nod. “Yeah, I guess I do. It might look like the Democrats just lost one of their senators
, but we lost a vote for convicting Patti Grant.”

  “Has to be Galia Mindel’s doing,” Profitt said. “That woman knows more of Washington’s dirty secrets than J. Edgar Hoover ever did.”

  A chill ran through Coleman, and Profitt knew just what he was thinking.

  “You’re right, Carter. We better worry about what other sins she knows.”

  The Whip said, “And when she’s going to use them. She didn’t pick up on this scandal of Pennyman’s yesterday. She had to know about it for some time. She had to be patient about digging out all the details she could, and then she saved it for just the right time. When it would do the president the most good.”

  The Speaker said, “Do you think …”

  “What?”

  “Well, you know how we’ve been scheming and working to make sure we can control all the levers of power around here on a more or less permanent basis.”

  “Yeah, well, all that started to slip when we lost two seats on the Supreme Court one night at the same dinner table.”

  “That was unfortunate, the loss of the judicial branch’s pinnacle — as well as two good men, of course.”

  “Yeah, them, too.”

  The Speaker said, “What I was thinking, though, is while we’ve been working on a plan to take over the federal government, maybe the other side has a plan to wreck it if we do. Because I would bet my children’s inheritance it won’t be long before the White House chief of staff engineers the destruction of one of our senators.”

  “In addition to those thieving fools on the Senate Armed Services Committee, you mean.”

  “Yes, in addition to them. But if Ms. Mindel singles out another senator, one of ours, with news of some horrendous scandal, who do you think would dare vote for the president’s conviction?”

  Coleman produced a joyless laugh. “Hell, she might be acquitted by acclamation.”

  “Or damn near,” Profitt said, “and how will that make all of us fine ladies and gentlemen in the House look, after we voted to impeach the president?”

  “Christ, we’ll be peddling magazine subscriptions door to door.”