The Inside Ring

The faded gilt lettering on the frosted glass of DeMarco’s office door read COUNSEL PRO TEM FOR LIAISON AFFAIRS, J. DEMARCO. The title was Mahoney’s invention and completely meaningless. DeMarco entered his office, took off his jacket, loosened his tie, and checked the thermostat to make sure it was set on low. Adjusting the thermostat was something he did from force of habit, for his psychological well-being; he knew from experience that twisting the little knurled knob had absolutely no effect on the temperature in the room. He could call his neighbors, the janitors, to complain but knew he would rank low on their priority list. Who was he kidding? A guy with an office in the subbasement didn’t make the list.

In his office squatted an ancient wooden desk from the Carter era and two mismatched chairs, one behind his desk and one in front of it for his rare visitor. A metal file cabinet stood against one wall, the cabinet empty except for phone books and an emergency bottle of Hennessy. DeMarco didn’t believe in keeping written, subpoenable records. On his desk was an imitation Tiffany lamp – a redundant appliance as strips of harsh, fluorescent lights provided all the illumination needed – and on the black-and-white tile floor was a small Oriental rug, the predominant colors being maroon and green. On the wall opposite his desk were two Degas prints of dancing ballerinas. His ex-wife had given him the faux-Tiffany lamp, the rug, and the ballerinas – a futile effort on her part to ‘warm the place up.’ Only an arsonist, DeMarco had concluded long ago, could give his office any warmth.

DeMarco took to the chair behind his desk. He put his feet up, laced his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. What to do about Billy Ray? He doubted the agent was guilty of anything. It was just as Emma had said: Mahoney was playing a long shot and using DeMarco’s career for chips. He was hoping DeMarco would get lucky and find out Billy Mattis was dirty, in which case Donnelly’s failure to properly investigate the warning letter could be used to nail his slippery hide to the wall. DeMarco didn’t know why the Speaker disliked Patrick Donnelly but it was obvious he did. The bear wanted to gobble him up.

So since the bear wanted his snack, DeMarco was stuck. He couldn’t disobey a direct order from Mahoney yet he could do nothing that would come to the attention of the Secret Service or the FBI. If they discovered he was mucking about in their business they’d stomp him to death with their wing-tipped shoes – and when the stomping began the Speaker would pretend he’d never heard the name Joe DeMarco. So he would investigate Billy Ray as ordered, but carefully. Invisibly. Discreetly. And investigating Billy meant making a gigantic leap of logic: he had to assume Mattis was guilty. To think otherwise left him nothing to do.

DeMarco’s investigation began with the warning note. He took the index card Banks had given him and reread the words. The signature was interesting: ‘An agent in the wrong place.’ It sounded as if the author was being coerced or had knowledge he didn’t wish to have. It was a … reluctant signature. So if the note was legitimate and if the Secret Service was somehow involved in the assassination attempt, maybe Billy Mattis was the one who sent the note. He knew the assassination was going to take place, didn’t want any part of it, but could do nothing to stop it.

A second possibility was that the note referred to Mattis and he had intentionally dropped his sunglasses to give the shooter a clear shot at the President. A third and more likely possibility was that the note was a prank and Mattis was innocent. Possibilities and could bes and ifs. He was skipping down a yellow brick road of nonsense in a political land of Oz.

Banks had also given DeMarco a copy of Mattis’s personnel file, so he put aside the index card to shine the bright light of his intellect on that thin document. He would learn all there was to know about his quarry; he would study the jackal’s past.

According to the file, the jackal was as American as grits and moonshine. He was born in Uptonville, Georgia, wherever the hell that was, and had lived there until he enlisted in the army at age eighteen. He spent fourteen uneventful months in South Korea and after the service joined the Army Reserve and spent a couple of years at a community college. Following college, the Secret Service hired him and he’d been with the agency for six years.

There were two noteworthy incidents in Billy Ray’s file. Billy’s Army Reserve unit had been activated for eight months in the get-Saddam war and he had performed some unspecified act of heroism worthy of a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. The second incident had occurred two years earlier and closer to home.

While Billy was standing on a street corner in Gary, Indiana, waiting for the President’s motorcade to pass, a bank robber decided the President’s visit would provide perfect cover for a robbery. It never occurred to the robber, who had the IQ of a rabbit, that the President’s route was saturated with both uniformed and undercover cops. As the robber exited the bank, alarms sounded. A nearby cop turned toward the noise, drew his weapon, and the robber shot at the cop. The crowd scattered, screaming civilians running in every direction like chickens from a hawk, and at that moment the President’s limousine turned the corner. Billy, the closest agent to the robber, was afraid to fire his weapon for fear he would hit the civilians, yet at the same time he had to make sure the robber didn’t shoot bullets in the President’s direction. Billy charged the robber. His body armor deflected the robber’s first shot; he caught the second with his left bicep before he tackled the robber and disarmed him.

Billy Mattis may not have been the brightest guy on the block but he was a brave man. He had been scarred twice in the service of his country. He was a Secret Service agent and a decorated veteran. He had willingly put himself in harm’s way at Chattooga River. Could there possibly be an individual less likely to attempt to kill a president?

One thing DeMarco did notice while reviewing Mattis’s personnel file was that until two and a half months ago Mattis had never had any of the glamour jobs. He was often a perimeter guard at the White House or Camp David, and frequently one of the anonymous agents standing on the street whenever the President graced Middle America with his presence, but he had never been a personal bodyguard to the President or the President’s family. DeMarco couldn’t tell from the file if Billy had been assigned to the praetorian guard on May 15th because of his previous heroism or if he just had enough seniority in the Service to automatically get the detail. He needed someone with the inside skinny on the Secret Service to tell him more about Billy’s promotion. The fact that he’d recently been assigned to the President’s security detail struck DeMarco as intriguing – well, intriguing if you liked conspiracy theories.

DeMarco put Billy’s file and the index card in the top drawer of his desk and locked the drawer. Leaving his office, he walked down the hall to the maintenance shop. He knocked, waited patiently until he heard a deep voice say ‘Yo,’ and opened the door. Three black men dressed in dark-blue coveralls were seated at a table playing pinochle. A fourth man, also black, also wearing coveralls, was working on an air-conditioning unit on the shop bench. When the cardplayers saw DeMarco he was greeted by the now expected chorus: ‘It’s the I-talian stallion.’ ‘The wop who don’t stop.’ ‘The guinea wit da skinny.’

‘Jesus,’ DeMarco said, ‘do we have to go through this every damn time?’

‘Yeah,’ the man at the workbench said. ‘We have to go through this every damn time because they’re idiots and because you look like Sonny fuckin’ Corleone.’ Then the man wiped his right hand on the leg of his coveralls, walked over, and shook hands with DeMarco.

‘How’s your boy, Curtis?’ DeMarco asked. Curtis Jackson’s oldest son played catcher for the Mets’ triple-A team. Last week he had blocked the plate when a first baseman the size of New Jersey slid into home. He didn’t drop the ball but he was out cold for two innings.

‘He’s okay. Got a head like his mother. He’ll be back playin’ next week.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Hey, Dee-Mar-ko,’ one of the cardplayers said. ‘You noticed you the only white guy in the building got an office in the basement?’

‘He ain’t white,’ cardplayer number two said, ‘he’s I-talian. He darker than you, Clark, he got a tan.’

‘You oughta join a union, DeMarco,’ cardplayer one said. ‘That way you get seniority, you get an upstairs office.’

‘Hell, no,’ DeMarco said. ‘If I joined a union, I’d have to wear them ugly coveralls and get my name sewn on the pocket.’

‘DeMarco, you fool,’ cardplayer two said, ‘you never sews your own name on your pocket.’

‘Yeah,’ said cardplayer three, ‘I got your name on my shirts, DeMarco, and one of these days they gonna fire your lazy ass.’

As the cardplayers whooped and high-fived each other, DeMarco said to Curtis, ‘Why aren’t those guys working?’

‘Not that it’s any of your business but their shift doesn’t start for an hour. They come early to play cards and get away from their wives. You need something, Joe?’

‘Yeah. Can I borrow your TV and VCR?’

‘Sure,’ Curtis said, ‘but bring ’em back before tomorrow afternoon. The Skins got an exhibition game.’

This prompted a fifteen-minute discussion between DeMarco, a die-hard Redskins fan, and the cardplayers. The cardplayers, unhampered by sentiment or geographic loyalty, ran down the coach, the defensive line, the offensive line, and a fullback who they said ran like a fat girl. They were unanimous, however, in their support of the cheerleaders.

Back in his own office, DeMarco popped a borrowed copy of the assassination tape into the VCR. He tapped the play button on the remote then sat back, finger poised to pause the tape. He was ready to assess the hinkiness of Billy Ray Mattis.

The television commentators and their hired experts had, for the last four days, endlessly discussed the fact that Mattis had dropped his sunglasses before the first shot. And they had all reached the same conclusion: Mattis’s fumble was a clear sign that God was a Democrat. Had Mattis not dropped his sunglasses, Montgomery would not have bumped into Mattis’s ass, and, in turn, Montgomery would not have bumped into the President – in which case the first bullet would have blown the President’s head apart. The lads and lasses at the FBI didn’t disagree with this interpretation of events, yet neither they nor the journalists had seen the warning note.

As DeMarco watched the tape this time he thought that Mattis was maybe more nervous than the other agents. And as the President’s group approached the helicopter, right before the first shot, Mattis seemed to scrunch his head down into his Windbreaker, like a turtle trying to make its head disappear. Yet, DeMarco noticed, Mattis moved quickly and without hesitation to protect the President and he had fired his weapon before any of the other agents.

There was nothing conclusive about the film yet DeMarco now understood what Banks meant. Mattis did look different than the other agents but it was difficult to articulate how and there was nothing you could point to with any certainty. More important, DeMarco knew that by now the FBI had positively Zaprudered the video: they had taken it apart pixel by pixel, blown up every frame, and built 3-D computer simulations. If the FBI and its legions of white-coated techies had found nothing suspicious on the tape there was no way that DeMarco’s naked eyeball would find a smoking gun. After watching the video five times, DeMarco gave up; the tape either showed a very alert agent acting as he’d been trained or a very nervous agent with foreknowledge of a shooting that was about to occur.

DeMarco looked at his watch. It was four p.m. The sun was over the yardarm – at least in the mid-Atlantic it was – and that was close enough for DeMarco. He called Alice.

8

The Monocle was a historic drinking establishment on the senate side of the Capitol, a block from Union Station. The walls were covered with photographs of smiling, glassy-eyed politicians. Mahoney’s own picture was displayed prominently near the entrance, a thick arm around the neck of a rival who looked decidedly uncomfortable.

DeMarco liked the place. The kitchen served an adequate meal, the bar an excellent martini, and from his favorite stool he could watch the young ladies who worked on the Hill fast-walk by in their tight skirts as they hustled to catch the Metro at Union Station.

Mr William, the Monocle’s afternoon bartender, brought DeMarco his martini, the expression on his face as solemn as if he were bearing the Eucharistic wine. Mr William was in his sixties, black, skinny, and six foot six. He had inherited from his forebears the dignified, mournful face of an undertaker – a face which belied a filthy, adolescent mind.

‘You watch the Birds against Seattle last night, Joe?’ Mr William asked.

‘We have discussed this before, sir,’ DeMarco said, ‘and you know my feelings on this subject. I will watch the Orioles only when the Senators return to Washington.’

In 1971 the Washington Senators left D.C. and moved to Texas to become the Texas Rangers, and all good D.C. baseball fans mourned the team’s departure as if their sainted mothers had expired. For years Washingtonians had lobbied to return a major league team to the capital but the owner of the Baltimore Orioles blocked every effort, rightfully concluding that a team in D.C. would take butts out of the seats at Camden Yards. It appeared that Washington might finally prevail in the coming year, but only by giving major financial concessions to the Orioles’ owner, a man DeMarco had come to loathe with a passion that could only be understood by other baseball fanatics.

‘Then you didn’t see Rodriguez’s triple play followed by Rodriguez’s inside-the-park home run?’ Mr William said.

Shit. Either a triple play or an inside-the-park home run was as rare as dinosaur droppings. And he’d missed ’em both. Fuckin’ Orioles. Their owner was an avaricious spoiler, their front office cheaper than Scrooge’s offspring, and their pitchers not fit to play at the high-school level – but they had Alonzo Rodriguez, currently the best player in either league. But DeMarco would not lift his embargo. Ever.

‘Screw Rodriguez and his triple play,’ DeMarco said, trying to act as if he meant it.

‘You’re a stubborn man, Joe.’

He was. DeMarco sipped from his martini, nodded his gratitude to the martini’s creator, and said, ‘Excellent, Mr William. May I use your phone please?’

‘You don’t have a cell phone, like all the other yahoos who come in here?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t want to use up my minutes. Come on, gimme the phone. It’s not like you pay the bill.’

DeMarco dialed. ‘It’s Joe,’ he said when Emma answered.

‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,’ Emma said.

‘You sound cheery, Emma.’

‘I’m healthy, wealthy, and wise – and unlike you, I have an active sex life. Why shouldn’t I be cheery? So what do you want? I’m doing my nails.’

‘I’d like to borrow one of your associates for surveillance duty.’

‘The Mattis thing?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Goin’ whole hog, are you?’

‘What’s an investigation without surveillance, Em? I’ll have your man tail Billy for a day or two then I’ll report back to Banks that he’s as pure as the fallen snow.’

‘The fallen snow is black from pollutants, Joe. Anyway, what will you be doing while my guy’s tailing Billy?’

DeMarco told her.

‘I think Mike’s free,’ she said. ‘I’ll have him call you.’

‘Is this the same Mike you loaned me in February?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. He’s an okay guy. By the way, Emma, what’s his background?’ DeMarco rolled his eyes when he asked the question, knowing he was wasting his breath – but as Mr William had observed, he was a stubborn man.

‘Oh, the usual,’ Emma said. ‘Navy SEAL, licensed to kill, that sort of thing.’ Emma hung up.

The truth was Mike could be licensed to kill. DeMarco had discovered in the years he had known her that Emma had access to a wide variety of talented people: ex-cops, ex-soldiers, and, he suspected, ex-criminals. She knew wiretap experts, document forgers, and computer hackers. They were all competent and for reasons he was sure he would never know, completely loyal to Emma.

DeMarco had met Emma by giving her a ride. He had just dropped off a friend at Reagan National. He was parked ahead of the cab lane, checking traffic on his left, ready to pull out, when his passenger door opened and a woman entered his car. She was attractive, middle aged, and dressed in an elegant white pantsuit that was rumpled from travel. She was also out of breath, and it didn’t look as if she’d slept for a while. The only thing she was carrying was a purse.

DeMarco said, ‘Hey, what—’

‘In about ten seconds,’ the woman said, ‘two men are going to come out of the terminal. They’re armed and they’re going to try to kill me. They’ll probably kill you too since you’re with me. Now drive. Please.’

The woman was desperate, DeMarco could tell, but not panicking.

‘Hey, look—’ DeMarco said.

‘You now have less than five seconds. I work for the government and I’m not lying.’

DeMarco almost said ‘I’ve heard that line before’ but he didn’t. He was starting to get scared. He looked intently at the woman. She could be someone running from the cops or a mule hauling drugs. But he didn’t think so. She didn’t have a particularly kind face but it seemed to be one you could trust.

DeMarco glanced into his rearview mirror at that moment and saw two dark-complexioned men run out of the terminal. They looked frantically up and down the sidewalk in front of the terminal, and then one of them pointed at DeMarco’s car.

‘Shit,’ he said, and he stepped on the gas and pulled into the arriving airport traffic. ‘Why didn’t you just take a damn cab?’ he said to the woman.

‘Did you see the line at the cabstand?’ she answered. She looked behind her. ‘Damnit, they had a car waiting.’

DeMarco checked his rearview mirror. The two men were getting into a black Mercedes sedan.

‘What’s going—’

‘Just get me to the Pentagon,’ the woman said. ‘And if a cop tries to pull you over, don’t stop.’

‘Wait a—’

‘You’ll get the cop killed. Now drive. Fast.’

The woman checked the traffic behind them. The Mercedes was gaining on them. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse.

‘It’s me,’ she said into the phone. ‘I just got in from Cairo. I’ve got the sample but they were waiting for me at baggage claim. That wasn’t supposed to happen, you moron!’ She was silent for a moment. ‘No, I don’t have a gun. How the hell was I supposed to get a gun on the plane? Look … Shut up. Listen to me. I’m with a civilian. We’re in a 19 …’ She looked over at DeMarco.

‘Ninety-four,’ he said.

‘A 1994 Volvo, maroon in color. We’re just leaving National and headed for the GW Parkway. You’ll be able to tell it’s us because we’ll be going a hundred miles an hour with a Mercedes on our tail. Now scramble someone. Fast!’ She closed the cell phone.

‘What’s your name?’ she said to DeMarco.

‘Joe,’ he said.

‘Well, Joe, you need to put the pedal to the metal. A wreck is the least of your problems at this point.’

The Mercedes was directly behind them now but it wasn’t trying to pass or cut them off.

The woman glanced back at the other car. ‘They’re going to wait until you’re on the parkway, then I’m guessing one of those guys is going to pull out an automatic weapon and shred your tires.’

‘Jesus!’ DeMarco said. ‘Why don’t you just throw whatever the fuck they want outta the window?’

The woman laughed, apparently not realizing that DeMarco hadn’t been joking.

DeMarco reached the George Washington Parkway with the Mercedes fifty yards behind him. He was soon going ninety miles an hour and was thankful that traffic was light. He looked in his rearview mirror and saw one of the guys in the Mercedes stick half his body out the passenger-side window. Then he saw flashes of orange light erupt from the end of the man’s arm – he didn’t hear any shots being fired – then he saw sparks, about a dozen of them, fly up from the asphalt next to the Volvo.

‘Son of a bitch!’ DeMarco screamed. He jammed his foot down on the gas pedal, but it didn’t move. The Volvo couldn’t go any faster.

Then it was over.

A helicopter, a big black one, was suddenly above the Mercedes shining a spotlight down on it and DeMarco could see a guy hanging out of the helicopter holding a rifle. Where the helicopter came from, DeMarco didn’t know. The Mercedes slowed down slightly, apparently looking for an exit or a turnaround. DeMarco didn’t slow down; he kept the gas pedal jammed to the floor. A minute later he saw red-and-blue lights from five or six cars flashing in his rearview mirror and the Mercedes was surrounded.

‘You can pull over now,’ the woman said.

DeMarco kept going.

‘It’s okay,’ the woman said. ‘Calm down. Pull over.’

DeMarco did and when the car stopped he put his head on the steering wheel for a moment and closed his eyes. Without raising his head he said, ‘Would you mind telling me—’

‘Sorry, Joe, but I can’t.’

The damn woman would never let him finish a sentence.

A white van with government plates pulled up behind DeMarco’s Volvo. The woman got out but before she closed the door she said, ‘By the way, I’m Emma. And thank you.’ Then she got back into the van and took off.

The next morning DeMarco was sitting in his office, flipping through the paper to see if last night’s incident had made the news. It hadn’t. A moment later there was a knock on his door, which surprised him as people rarely visited his office. He opened the door. It was Emma.

‘How did you …’

DeMarco had started to say ‘How did you find me,’ then realized that would have been a very silly question.

‘I just wanted to thank you properly for what you did last night,’ Emma said. She entered DeMarco’s office without being asked, raised an eyebrow at the decor, then handed DeMarco an envelope. ‘Two seats for the Wizards for tomorrow night, right behind the players’ bench. I’ve heard you’re a sports fan.’

‘Jeez, thanks,’ DeMarco said. The tickets must have cost about five hundred bucks. ‘I appreciate the tickets but I’d still like to know what happened last night.’

‘I’m sorry, Joe, I can’t tell you. But as they say in the funnies, you have the thanks of a grateful nation. And, Joe, here’s my phone number.’ She handed DeMarco a card that had nothing on it but a phone number with a 703 area code.

‘If you ever need help – with anything – give me a call,’ Emma said.

‘Well,’ DeMarco said, thinking about his current assignment from Mahoney, ‘you wouldn’t by any chance know a guy who can crack a safe, would you?’

That had been the beginning of a long, often bizarre, relationship which DeMarco had never regretted.

DeMarco did know one small thing about Emma. He had asked the Speaker to run a background check on her shortly after he met her. DeMarco was guessing she was CIA, something Mahoney should be able to confirm easily. Or so DeMarco had thought.

When the Speaker got back to DeMarco, he was as flustered as DeMarco had ever seen him.

‘She’s ex-DIA,’ Mahoney said.

The Defense Intelligence Agency was formed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Some said it was the organization the CIA wanted to be when it grew up. Not only was it so competent that it rarely made the papers but it was involved in military operations so sensitive and so vital that even ranking politicians feared to challenge them.

‘When I asked about her, my buddy said he’d get back to me. Next thing I know I got two guys in my office so fuckin’ scary I almost soiled my britches. They wanted to know how I knew her name and why I was askin’. Me. The Speaker. Anyway, after I do a song-and-dance routine like goddamn Fred and Ginger, they finally tell me she’s ex-DIA – and I think the ex part might even be bullshit.’