talkin’ to Jones, Randy snapped off a shot with my Kodak.’
Clark didn’t bother to tell Pugh that the picture wasn’t worth a damn.
‘And later Randy tried to follow the guy,’ Pugh said, ‘but he was too slick for that.’
Clark refrained from commenting on the slickness quotient of Jubal or his boy Randy.
‘So then what?’ Clark said.
‘Well, then he told me what he wanted me to do,’ Jubal said.
Pugh said Jones gave him a broad outline of the plan and said he’d pay Pugh in installments following each successful phase. Pugh said he was impressed with Jones’s thoroughness and negotiated for another half a million.
‘I mean, I knew the shit was just gonna
‘Yeah, sounds like you were a real bargain,’ Clark said. This guy Pugh, with his ferret’s nose and his tiny eyes and his unshaven chin, was just repulsive.
Pugh said that after he agreed to work with Jones, they left the restaurant together. In the restaurant parking lot, Jones gave Pugh a laptop, a schedule specifying when he was to turn the laptop on, and told him to hide the laptop someplace where it wouldn’t be found in the event that some law enforcement agency — like the DEA — obtained a warrant to search his house.
Pugh gave a little sniff. ‘Like I was an idiot or something,’ he said. ‘And then you know what the bastard said to me next?’
Clark just shook his head.
‘He said it was a damn good thing I agreed to do the job, because there was a rifle pointed at me, and if he took off his cap I’d have a third eye in my head. That actually kinda pissed me off.’
Pugh told Clark that after that one meeting, he never saw Jones again and all further communications were by e-mail, either that or through Jones’s man Jack.
‘Jack?’ Clark said. ‘Who the hell’s Jack?’
‘This foreign guy who worked for Jones.’
‘Foreign guy? Where was he from? What country?’
‘I dunno,’ Pugh said. ‘He spoke English but he had an accent, maybe Russian, somethin’ like that. He seemed to think it was funny calling himself Jack. He showed up at my place one day and explained he was just there to make sure things got done right. He was also the guy, by the way, who was gonna shoot me if Jones took his ball cap off at the Waffle Shop. Said he woulda killed me easy, bein’ only three hundred yards away.’
‘Wait a minute!’ Clark said. ‘Goddammit, what in the hell are you talking about?’
Ten minutes later, it all became clear. Jones, not trusting Jubal and his men to follow orders, had sent in someone he could rely on to oversee things. Myron Clark had figured that Jones selected Pugh because Pugh was willing to kill for money, because he had an organization already in place, and if things went wrong a racist like Pugh would be the perfect patsy to blame things on. But Clark had always found it hard to believe that Jones, particularly for an opera tion this complex, would have such confidence in Pugh’s ability. So Jones had assigned a straw boss, a man to manage Pugh. Jones would send Pugh the e-mails and tell Pugh where to send his men, and Jack would be there to make sure they did what they were told to do. But all Pugh could tell him about Jack was that he sounded ‘Russian or something, was white, and kind of a smartass.’ Physically, the description Pugh gave of ‘Jack’ was useless — blond hair, light blue eyes, ‘sorta handsome’ — but Clark left the interrogation immediately to let his boss know that Pugh had had some outside help, a pro, maybe Russian mafia, maybe someone with a military background, but somebody good enough with a rifle to shoot Pugh from three hundred yards away if Jones thought he needed to be shot.
‘So how’d you do it, Jubal?’ Clark asked. ‘How’d you get these people to commit these acts of terrorism?’
Pugh said it was the same in all three cases. They told Reza Zarif, Youseff Khalid, and Mustafa Ahmed that people close to them would be killed if they didn’t do what they were told. Pugh said he had no idea how Jones had identified the Muslims, but it was obvious that Jones had done a lot of research to find people with some sort of grievance that could later be considered a motive for doing what they did. All Pugh knew was that a target would be identified, and detailed instructions for how to capture the target and use his loved ones to coerce him were all provided by Mr Jones and his man Jack.
Pugh said Randy and two other men did all the work. One of those men was the late Donny Cray. The second person was the guy Danny DeMarco had shot, Harlan Rhodes. Danny had not killed Rhodes, and he was currently in a hospital in D.C. being guarded by federal agents.
‘What about this guy Jack?’ Clark asked.
‘He went with ’em, but he didn’t do any of the heavy liftin’. I mean, he never killed anybody or anything. He’d just make sure that Randy and Donny and Harlan knew what to do.’
According to Pugh, the day Reza Zarif tried to crash his plane into the White House, Randy and Donny Cray entered Reza Zarif’s house at 3 A.M. wearing ski masks and they tied up Reza’s family. Then Randy handed Reza a gun and a box of shells and told him to load the gun. When Reza refused, Randy lit a cigarette and said he was going to blind Reza’s son with the cigarette if Reza didn’t do what he was told. Reza loaded the gun. Then Randy explained to Reza what they wanted him to do and said if he didn’t do exactly what he was told, he was going to make Reza watch while they raped his wife and children — including his son. Randy explained to Reza that Harlan Rhodes had a taste for boys, having spent some time in jail.
‘Jesus,’ Clark said. It didn’t take much of an imagi nation to visualize the terror experienced by Reza Zarif’s wife and young kids.
‘Yeah,’ Jubal said. ‘Randy really spooked that Arab guy.’
‘He was an American, you idiot,’ Clark said,
‘Whatever,’ Jubal said. ‘Anyway, Randy told the guy that after they raped his family a couple times each, they were gonna tie ’em all up and pour gasoline on ’em and burn ’em alive.’
But Randy said if Reza Zarif cooperated, and since his family couldn’t identify Randy and Donny, they’d let Reza’s family go. So they gave Reza a choice. He could either allow his family to suffer painfully before they died, or kill himself by flying his plane at the White House. Reza made the only choice he could.
‘After that,’ Pugh said, ‘Randy followed the guy to the airfield and waited until he took off. Then he called Donny, and Donny killed them little ragheads.’
It took a lot of willpower for Myron Clark not to hit Jubal Pugh.
‘What happened to Donny Cray?’ Clark asked. ‘And don’t tell me he died in a car accident.’
Pugh said that when the FBI found Donny’s fingerprint on the bullet box, Mr Jones sent Pugh an e-mail saying Donny had to go and told him how he wanted him to die. Because Jubal could be tied to Cray, Pugh agreed, though he felt bad about it.
‘Donny,’ Pugh said, ‘could be a little ornery at times, but he’d give you the shirt off his back if you were a friend.’
‘So how’d you kill this guy who’d give you the shirt off his back?’
Pugh said he had Harlan Rhodes snap Donny’s neck and then he bashed the head of Donny’s skinny girlfriend against the windshield of Donny’s truck.
‘That Harlan,’ Pugh said, ‘he looks fat, but he’s stronger than a gorilla. Then him and Randy drove Donny’s truck to a good spot, put the bodies in the front seat, and pushed it down a hill.’
‘How did Jones know the FBI had Donny Cray’s fingerprint?’ Clark asked.
‘Beats me,’ Pugh said. Then he smiled, ‘If I had to guess, I’d say that maybe Jones has one of you Hoover boys on the payroll too.’
‘Do you have any facts or any specific infor mation that a member of the FBI was involved with this Mr Jones?’ Clark said.
‘Well, no,’ Jubal said.
‘Then shut the hell up about the Bureau being involved in anything, you ferret-faced shit.’
‘Hey, I’m sor-’
‘Now tell me what you did to get Youseff Khalid to hijack that airplane.’
Two hours later, Myron Clark thought he had the whole story. In the case of Youseff Khalid, and un beknown to the FBI, Khalid had had a mistress, an African American woman named Athena Warner. Pugh’s men waited until
