CHAPTER EIGHT
“A Favor”
Sunday night.
Yee chose the restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton, The Brigadoon, for its anonymity. The intel meeting had gone well although she could feel the disdain rolling off Brubaker and MacCauley like cold off a glacier. The military mindset always wanted a military solution. Which was why terrorism existed--to deny the military solution.
Brubaker had lost his only son in the Gulf War, which conferred on him a certain moral dimension. He had also been black ops. He was not one of those men who jumped from desk to desk until they reached the top. MacCauley saw Red Chinese under his bed. Panny was a good soldier and had no dog in this fight. Lubitch was in over his head.
Yee had issued a memorandum last winter containing disinformation that eventually turned up on Wikileaks. Somewhere in the complicated cortex where NSA, FBI, CIA, and Homeland met there was a leak. Yee had taken it upon herself to track it down. The next couple of days would be interesting.
She was seated in the back in a corner banquette sipping Merlot when she saw the maitre’ d escorting Stella Darling her way. An overweight tourist seated with his wife and two fidgety kids could not prevent his eyes from tracking Darling across the floor.
Tall and shapely in a gray Ralph Lauren skirted suit that complemented her figure and cover girl all American perfection, she wore her honey blond hair in a pageboy and carried an old-fashioned Gladstone by its strap over one shoulder. Darling never carried a purse. It was all in the Gladstone, including, Yee had heard, a .38 revolver. A gift from her daddy.
Yee rose to her full five one to greet the criminal defense attorney. “Thank you for coming, Stella.”
Darling took her hand warmly. “Of course.”
They both slid onto the red leather bench. A pale young man in black vest and white shirt appeared to take their drink orders. Yee ordered another Merlot. Darling ordered a Grey Goose vodka straight up with a twist. Darling’s dark and puffy eyes were the only indication of the strain she was under. Darling pulled out a contact lens lubricant and dumped an ounce in each eye.
“These contacts.”
“Don’t wear them, dear. Eyeglasses look good on you.”
Darling chuckled ruefully. “I know. Sam always insisted I wear contacts. ‘Girls who wear glasses don’t often get passes,’ he told me. It’s an old habit. I’ve been thinking of having my eyes lasered, but too many people tell me horror stories.”
The waiter came with their drinks and discreetly withdrew. It was eight-thirty in the evening, the earliest Darling could get away after spending all day shepherding her client through the psychological evaluation procedure. It didn’t help that Lester Durant was kept chained and shackled.
Yee held up her glass. “To Sam.”
“To Sam.” They clinked. Yee sipped. Darling drained half the glass.
She set it down and fixed her slightly bloodshot blue eyes on the NSA honcho. “How can I help?”
“We’d like you to bring Otto White in.”
Darling blinked several times. “For what?”
“To head up a team to find and neutralize whatever it is that killed the Senator, and has killed at least twelve others of whom we know. I’m talking about spontaneous human combustion.”
Darling lowered her voice although nobody was around and they were speaking directly to one another. “There have been others?”
“This is top secret, Stella.”
Darling flashed a nervous grin. “Why Otto?”
“He was a smoke jumper in college. He was a volunteer fire fighter for the Poudre Canyon district before he joined the Army where he was a military policeman and became a certified arson investigator. He has extensive counter-espionage experience but most importantly he has something we call the X-factor, the ability to do the totally unexpected and get results.”
Darling smiled ruefully. “That’s for sure. We were at St. Exupery one night and there’s a foreign couple eating a table away. They looked Middle Eastern. Waiter brings their meal, Otto gets up, goes over, grabs the white linen tablecloth and yanks it out from under the dishes. Of course, not being a magician everything on the table went with it. Then he turns to the freaked out couple and says, ‘I’m so sorry. I thought I could pull it off.’
“I had to pay for their meal and the broken dishes. ‘What the hell?!’ I said to him as soon as we got out of there. Tells me the man was an Al Qaeda agent and they were listening in on us.”
Yee’s small black eyes sparkled. “I never heard that.”
“I had to pay the staff a couple hundred to shut them up.”
“You don’t happen to know the name of the unfortunate diners he interrupted?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Did he ever regard you with suspicion?”
Stella looked surprised. “Me? Never. That’s one thing about Otto. ‘An elephant’s faithful one hundred per cent.’ An old-fashioned Boy Scout. It killed me to break it off with him, but what could I do? He was hallucinating ninja out of the woodwork. Every time we met he dumped my purse upside down on the table.”
Yee glanced at the Gladstone. “That thing?”
“Sam gave it to me. I call it my purse.”
“This incident at St. Xupe. Was this before he was hospitalized?”
“Right before.”
“You never visited him. Why was that?”
A crease marred Stella’s forehead as she realized NSA would have access to the hospital’s visitors logs. A tingle of paranoia zipped down her spine. Were they tracking her?
“I was afraid it was me who was causing him to act crazy. Otto never does anything halfway. When he fell in love with me it was more Othello than Love’s Labors Lost. I wanted him to get over me. I still do. I have no idea what would happen if I suddenly showed up out of nowhere. And believe me, it is nowhere. It might throw him into an emotional tailspin.”
Yee trained her lasers on Stella. “It’s the President who’s asking. Will you go get him? Ask him to come in?”
Stella inhaled deeply and let it out. It had been over two years. “Of course.”
Yee blinked revealing nothing. She smiled. “I knew we could count on you. When’s the memorial service?”
“It’s not a service, it’s a wake, and don’t come if you don’t like drunk Irishmen. It’s Saturday at two at Chiklis, upstairs in the private dining room.”
Yee signaled the waiter, caught his eye, and made a little writing motion with her hand in her palm. She turned back to Stella. “I’ll bring a bottle of Irish Mist.”
***