Dead on Arrival

10

Mahoney was pissed.

That morning in The Washington Post there had been an article saying that he’d been visited by Hassan Zarif, brother of the terrorist Reza Zarif. And the reporter had, of course, discovered that Mahoney and Reza’s father had been boyhood friends in Boston. The guy had even found a high school yearbook picture of Mahoney and Ali Zarif dressed in baseball uniforms, Mahoney’s thick arm around Ali’s thin neck.

‘How’d the press even know he was here?’ Mahoney said to DeMarco. ‘I didn’t have him down on the damn list as comin’ to see me.’

DeMarco was fairly sure he knew the answer to that question: McGuire, the U.S. Capitol cop. When DeMarco had threatened McGuire with an outdoor cold-weather posting for hassling Hassan Zarif, he’d made the mistake of saying that Hassan was expected by the speaker. So McGuire, probably recognizing the Zarif name, decided to exercise a little anonymous payback and informed the Post that Mahoney had been paid a visit by a man with the same last name as a terrorist. And the Post took it from there.

‘Geez, I can’t imagine,’ DeMarco said.

‘The bastards — TV guys too — they’ve been calling all morning,’ Mahoney said, ‘asking what Hassie was doing here.’

‘What’d you tell them?’

‘The truth, sort of.’

That was Mahoney: a man who told the truth — sort of.

‘I told them,’ Mahoney said, ‘that I had known Reza when he was a kid and had known his dad all my life. I said Hassan had stopped by because he was here in town for somethin’, I didn’t know what, but since he was here and he knew I’d want to know how his dad was doin’ after his heart attack, he stopped by to tell me. I also told them that Hassan and his family had gotten a pretty good grilling from the cops, this maybe being understandable, but that we had to watch out we didn’t ruin their lives because of what his brother did.’

‘But you didn’t tell them Hassan thought the FBI’s story had a bunch of holes in it and he wanted you to get him some answers.’

‘No. Hell, no!’

Mahoney brooded for a moment over the political liability of having his picture in the paper with the father of a dead terrorist.

‘So what’d you find out?’ he said to DeMarco.

DeMarco told him.

‘You think it means anything, this yahoo’s fingerprint on the bullet box?’

DeMarco shrugged. ‘If I was placing a bet, I’d put my money on the Bureau’s explanation. Reza probably bought the gun from this Cray character like they think, and when the FBI finds Cray he’ll admit it.’

‘So you think Reza just woke up one day and decided to kill his family and crash a plane into the White House?’

‘I guess,’ DeMarco said. ‘There wasn’t anything I learned from Homeland Security that would make me think different.’

‘Well, I don’t buy it,’ Mahoney said, his big stubborn chin jutting outward. ‘I’ve been thinkin’ about this a whole lot since his brother was here, and I think Hassan’s right. There has to be something more goin’ on than what the Bureau thinks. In fact, I’m sure there is.’

But DeMarco knew that Mahoney wasn’t so sure that he’d say what he’d just said to the press — or the Bureau.

‘So what do you want me to do?’ DeMarco said. ‘I’m going on vacation next week.’

‘For now, just keep your ear to the ground. Stay in touch with Homeland Security and make sure the FBI’s really looking for this Cray guy.’

DeMarco didn’t have the authority to make the FBI do anything, so all he did was nod his head. He wasn’t worried about the FBI diligently searching for Donny Cray; he knew that with a case of this magnitude they probably had a couple hundred agents out looking for the man. No, he wasn’t worried about any lack of effort on the Bureau’s part. What he was worried about was that he wouldn’t be able to take the vacation he had scheduled three months ago.

It was difficult for DeMarco to plan vacations, and not because Mahoney always had something urgent for him to do. It was because Mahoney didn’t care whether DeMarco had made plans or not. DeMarco would ask for permission to take time off, he’d tell Mahoney the days he intended to be gone, and Mahoney would almost always nod his big head in agreement. But Mahoney never bothered to write down the dates when DeMarco would be absent, because from his perspective the dates were unimportant. Then, after having given his permission, after DeMarco had purchased airline tickets and booked hotels and made promises to friends and lovers, Mahoney would force him to cancel his vacation, believing sincerely that whatever problem John Mahoney had far outweighed any problems that he might cause his subordinate.

DeMarco bought travel insurance every time he made reservations.

This year DeMarco was planning to spend a week in Key West, sitting in the sun, drinking rum, and ogling women in small bikinis. Now his trip might be in jeopardy. On the other hand, Mahoney had not specifically instructed him to cancel his vacation. He’d just said for DeMarco to keep his ear to the ground, an activity DeMarco figured he could do by phone from a Florida beach, unless otherwise directed.

To change the subject, he asked Mahoney, ‘How’s Broderick’s bill looking?’

Mahoney shook his head in disgust. ‘It’s still in committee, but with this thing that Reza did, there’s a good chance it’ll make it to the floor for a vote. I’m gettin’ a lot of mail saying that Broderick’s got the right idea, and I’ll betcha everybody on that Senate committee is too.’

On occasion, when Mahoney would talk to high school kids, he’d ask them if they knew how laws were made. The education system being what it is, the answer was usually no, and Mahoney would give the high schoolers the kindergarten version of the lawmaking process.

A bill could be initiated in either body of Congress, the House or the Senate, or in both bodies simultan eously. Suppose a senator — say, William Broderick — decided that the nation needed a new law. He would draft his proposal in the form of a bill, and the bill would go to the appropriate standing committee in the Senate. Here the bill would be reviewed and discussed and modified and then, if approved by the committee, it would go to the floor of the Senate to be voted upon. If the bill passed by simple majority in the Senate, it would then go to the House, and if the House voted to approve the bill, it would go to the president for his signature, and the bill would become law, unless the president vetoed it, which he rarely did.

That was the kiddy-class version of how a bill became a law.

The actual process was much more complicated. It involved backslapping and backstabbing, compromises and trades. Think tanks would crank out position papers, twisting facts as needed to support or undercut the legislation, depending on who was paying their fee. Lobbyists would take lawmakers on golfing trips and ply them with booze and broads and bucks. Party leaders would bend back arms, making it clear that the partisan way was the only way, and special-interest groups would dance around their bonfires and flood the legislature with threatening mail. The politicians would take all these factors into account, add to the mix the proximity of the next election, listen to a reading of the bones cast by various blind pollsters, and, most important of all, decide how a yea or nay vote could affect their chances of being reelected — and then the politicians would vote.

Laws are a lot like hot dogs: You don’t really want to know how they’re made.

‘What are you going to do if it’s approved in the Senate?’ DeMarco asked.

‘It’ll never happen,’ Mahoney said.

The speaker was almost always right when he made predictions about how Congress would behave, but he hadn’t factored Youseff Ibrahim Khalid into his thinking.