Dead on Arrival

Same with that poor waitress. Or he could have Patsy snatched and tortured and make her give up the NSA guy who made the picture.’

‘But Patsy will say you made the picture,’ DeMarco said.

‘But Lincoln doesn’t know that,’ Emma said. ‘Lincoln knows only what Patsy told Pugh. So Lincoln will think — assuming he can even get to Hall — that the best thing that will happen is she’ll give up the name of the NSA guy that made the picture, which he now knows for sure is fake. But then what? Does Lincoln go after the NSA guy? Does he try to kidnap and torture him and get him to hand over all the files he used to make the fake picture? No, it’s just too much. It’s just too hard.

‘Plus Lincoln thinks Patsy’s just a blackmailing cop, not someone trying to put him in jail. He’ll think that once she hears Pugh was tortured and killed, she’ll be too scared to come after him again.’

Emma kicked at the parking lot asphalt with the toe of her boot and chewed her lower lip for a moment. ‘Lincoln’s not going to do a damn thing at this point,’ she said. ‘With Pugh dead, there’s no solid connection between him and the attacks. And Lincoln now knows the picture’s a fake. Certainly an expert could either prove that or make a good enough case to put doubt in the mind of a jury. So, Lincoln’s just going to wait and see what happens next. I would if I was him.’ Emma paused, her brain spinning, looking for a way to recover from their failure, then she just shook her head in disgust and said, ‘Shit!’

‘Maybe we can use Hall for bait,’ Stan said. ‘You know, get her to spook Lincoln somehow and when he takes a shot at her … Well, I swear, Emma, we won’t-’

Before DeMarco could object, Emma said, ‘No. I’m not putting her and her family at risk. Or at any more risk than they already are.’

DeMarco looked over at Stan. ‘Are you sure you got a good look at that woman, the shooter? I mean, she was wearing a hat and sunglasses, and you saw her for only a few seconds.’

Stan stared at DeMarco. As Stan was wearing sunglasses, DeMarco couldn’t see his eyes, but he didn’t have to see Stan’s eyes to know that Stan was pissed.

‘I said I saw her,’ Stan said to DeMarco. ‘When she stepped out of the car, she looked straight at me. You would have noticed if you hadn’t been worried about bugs crawling up your leg. Then, when she turned to go into the office, I saw her in profile.’ Stan paused before he said, ‘If I saw that broad again, I’d recognize her.’

‘Okay,’ DeMarco said. ‘Then I think we have maybe one chance — and it’s a long shot — to tie Lincoln to this woman.’

‘What’s that?’ Emma said.

‘Well, Lincoln had to talk to this woman. Maybe he contacted her by phone or by e-mail or through a middleman, but he’s been under continuous surveillance by the FBI ever since Pugh was arrested.’

‘Ah,’ Emma said.

69

As he and the boy traveled about the country — it was truly a beautiful land, so rich and so green — they spoke often of martyrdom.

Where he had been before — places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Indonesia — it was easy to find martyrs. Men and women, boys and girls, husband and wives, fathers and mothers — there were many willing to give their lives for their faith. But here in this country, even among the devout, it was difficult to find people who were truly committed. The men in Baltimore, they had said they were willing to die, but he could tell they hadn’t been. They were willing to murder but not to die.

But the boy, he believed.

They had discussed many times what the Koran said about those who died in the service of God, and the boy could quote the words flawlessly, the words that promised that a martyr would be married to fair females with ‘wide, lovely eyes.’ The boy always blushed when he said that, which made him laugh.

It was a shame that the boy would still be a virgin when he died.

But they spoke of more than what the Koran said about martyrdom. This was an intelligent child, and they discussed the strategic value of martyrs, how they were the most powerful weapon they had in their battle against the infidel. It was in these conversations that the boy became the most animated. He grasped completely the terror that the martyrs caused, particularly in this country.

He was sure it would be written later that an impressionable teenager had been brainwashed by an evil man. And he wondered himself at times if the boy was willing to die simply because he was depressed by what had happened to his father and the realization that whatever dreams he once had would never be fulfilled. But he didn’t think so. He was convinced that this boy believed. He had the true faith.

He talked also of his own death. He said that he too would die a martyr and he would most likely die in this country, far away from his wife and sons. He said he was looking forward to that day — he could hardly wait for that day — but he had been commanded by Sheikh Osama to postpone paradise until all his tasks were done.

‘You’re the lucky one,’ he told the boy.

70

Catching Jubal Pugh’s killer turned out to be fairly simple.

The hard part was trying to explain to the FBI and the marshals in the Witness Protection Program what Emma, DeMarco, and four retired Special Forces guys had been doing in Montana in the first place. Once they got past the point of the FBI screaming at them to come clean, and Emma screaming back that watching Pugh wasn’t a federal crime, they finally got around to talking about the person who had killed him.

Stan hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d gotten a good look at Pugh’s killer. They sat him down with an artist, and in a couple of hours the artist produced a sketch that Stan said was spot-on. They showed the sketch to DeMarco, and he said, Yep, that’s her, but the fact was that DeMarco had gotten a much better look at the woman’s ass than her face. If they had asked him to describe her ass to the sketch artist, he was willing to bet he could have done just as good a job as Stan did with the face.

The FBI then showed the sketch to all the agents who had been keeping Oliver Lincoln under surveillance the last four months, and two of the agents said the woman in the sketch owned a Cuban restaur ant in Miami, and ten days before Pugh was killed Lincoln had visited the restaurant and had a long talk with the owner over a glass of brandy.

The owner of the restaurant was Bianca Teresa Elena Castro, no relation to Fidel. Ms Castro had entered the United States on a raft made out of two-by-fours, canvas, and tires when she was fifteen years old. Her mother was a hooker, and good old Mom had put young Bianca out on a street corner when she was thirteen; Bianca told immigration officials that she had been forced to have sex with all the men on the raft in order to be allowed to go with them. After spending two years in a camp near Little Rock, Arkansas, the girl was released into the custody of a woman who claimed to be a cousin but who actually ran a brothel near Jacksonville, Florida. Between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Bianca was arrested twice for prostitution but never did jail time. After that she dropped off the face of the earth insofar as official records were concerned, until she was twenty-six, when she applied for a business license to open her restaurant. The Bureau examined Bianca’s finances and concluded that she lived well within her means, all of her income apparently coming from the proceeds of her restaurant.

Then the FBI did the sort of the thing that it is very good at. Agents started looking at surveillance tapes of people going into the Miami International Airport in the ten days prior to Jubal Pugh’s death. After looking at a lot of tape and talking to a lot of people, they could prove that Bianca had entered the airport six days before Jubal Pugh died and purchased tickets under the name Maria Hernandez. Bianca — Maria — had then taken a plane to Spokane, Washington. Thirty agents descended on Spokane, showed Bianca’s picture to car rental agencies, and found a kid at an off-terminal lot who remembered Bianca because ‘she was one fine-lookin’ piece.’

Records showed that Bianca used the Maria Hernandez ID to rent a car. Mileage logs for the rental car