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Diego’s battered white van was still where he’d left it in the apartment building’s small rear lot. It was late morning on a weekday, and the lot was mostly empty.
He opened the passenger-side door and placed his toolbox on the dusty floormat. Then he popped the glovebox and grabbed the pouch of American Spirit tobacco. He rolled a cigarette, lit it with a throwaway plastic lighter, then puffed out a cloud of smoke and relaxed against the side of his van.
He’d come here to scope out the Senator’s townhouse while the family was out of town. Diego knew it would still be guarded, but certainly with less care than when Robinson and Delilah and the kids were at home. Seeing Benson hadn’t really affected the day’s plan. Diego wasn’t dumb enough to go close to the house and risk get captured on camera.
Diego sighed out some smoke, took another deep drag, then tossed the half-smoked cigarette and stepped on the burning cherry, grinding it into the asphalt as he mulled over what he’d seen on this little recon mission.
The townhome was built of stone, which immediately took away any chance of penetrating the walls with even a high-powered bullet. The windows were bulletproof too, and the front door had been replaced so it opened outward instead of inward. That was classic CIA and Secret Service protocol, which meant that the new front door was probably reinforced steel with just a thin wood veneer to make the place look less like the bunker it was.
Diego started the engine and put the van into gear, pulling slowly out of the parking lot and into traffic, making sure he stayed well below Georgetown’s 30-mph speed limit. He might be invisible to the average man on the sidewalk, but he would be very visible to a cop cruising this posh neighborhood.
Especially if Benson had guessed it was Diego Vargas who’d been on the good shipRivington.
But it would only be a guess, Diego thought as he drove out to Dupont Circle and took the ramp to the nearest highway. Benson hadn’t seen Diego himself, and even Hannah the nanny and her boyfriend would have only gotten a short glimpse. They’d have described Diego as a muscular Hispanic male of medium height with a buzzed head and no facial hair. Diego had plenty of scars, but nothing too identifiable on his face. Perhaps Hannah and her boyfriend had been shown some old photographs of Diego from the CIA archives, but he doubted they could make a confident positive identification.
Still, Benson’s continued involvement made Diego uneasy. He’d had one of his men back in Zeta Nation do some digging on Benson. They’d turned up some rumors that Benson had left the CIA seven years ago and was now running an off-the-books team that appeared to have the blessing of CIA Director Martin Kaiser and even Senator Robinson himself—who was head of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The connections worried Diego, but today’s development gave him some hope.
Because it looked like Benson was ordering his Darkwater men to abandon their posts, pulling them off guard-duty.
At first Diego had wondered if Benson was simply reassigning them to a different spot around the Robinson lot, but there was far too much discussion for a simple reshuffling of the guard. There was also some head-scratching and beard-rubbing and clearly mouthed curses from the Darkwater men. Then Benson had shrugged like it was out of his control, and when the Darkwater men stalked off and got into a black Jeep Liberty parked behind the house, leaving just two members of Robinson’s regular security detail watching the empty lot, Diego felt that flicker of hope, like maybe things were turning his way again.
In fact many things had turned Diego’s way since the cluster-fuck on theRivington. The biggest break had been when Northrup Capital got bought out by some overseas organization based in the Cayman Islands. Turned out the Northrup brothers had a clause in their operating agreement that if both brothers were ever indisposed at the same time, all investor funds would be temporarily frozen to prevent panicked withdrawals and allow time for Northrup Capital to be sold in an orderly fashion.
And although it had been touch-and-go for a few weeks, this mysterious offshore organization swooped in with enough capital to ease the investors’ doubts about whether Northrup had a future. The lock-up period was long enough that even those investors who’d panicked at the news of Kyle and Kenneth’s untimely deaths calmed down and decided to hold tight, to keep their money parked where it was generating obscenely high returns from the money funneled back into it from the American taxpayer via lobbyist-assisted loopholes inserted in Congress-approved aid-packages with a thousand pages of clauses that nobody read, not even the President.
End result was that this new white-knight company from the Caymans had saved the day in a way that seemed almost miraculous, like it was fate stepping in, destiny intervening.
Now Diego hit the open highway and sighed out a breath, letting his face relax as he settled in for the drive to Baltimore. He set the cruise-control to just under the speed limit, then reached for his burner phone and tapped three times on the screen to dial Ernesto, who was Zeta Number 142.
Ernesto was not a great fighter. He was an accountant. Diego had poached him from the Juarez Cartel almost a decade earlier, after a bloody battle that left the Zetas in control of a crucial segment of the Mexico-U.S. border.
“Hola,” came Ernesto’s nervously upbeat voice. “How is your American holiday going?”
Diego grunted. “What news of Northrup Capital?”
Ernesto was silent a moment. Diego heard computer keys being punched on the other end. “There is no more Northrup Capital. The acquisition is complete, and all funds have been absorbed by our new benefactors.”
“Do we have a name?”
“Si.” More keys being punched. “IMC is the name. International Management Corporation. Registered in Grand Cayman.”
“I already know that,” Diego snapped. “I’ve seen the company registration. It is clearly just a shell, with local Cayman agents listed as the officers. I want to know who is really behind that generic company name.”
Ernesto sighed into the phone. “Nothing on that. Nobody has reached out to us directly yet. It is business as usual. Which is a good thing. They are smart enough to not contact us directly for now. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Diego exhaled slowly, glancing at his sideview mirror before changing lanes. It had been business as usual ever since Northrup Capital got taken over by IMC. A relief, of course.
But also a mystery.
After all, certainly the owners of IMC were not blind to what Northrup Capital was really up to. The Zeta Nation was just one of many such investments the Northrup brothers had engineered. There were the Kendos in Western Africa and the Urzis in Eastern Europe and some fringe Islamic group who’d taken over an island near Indonesia or Malaysia.
All those arrangements had been designed the same way by the Northrup brothers: Make sure these “startup countries” positioned themselves as the “lesser of evils” in dangerous parts of the world. Then get “foreign aid” packages slipped into larger bills pushed through Congress by well-paid Washington lobbyists. Issue bonds that pay generous interest using the foreign-aid money. Northrup Capital buys the bonds, thereby getting massive interest payments courtesy of the clueless American taxpayer.
A beautiful scheme, but also a house of cards built upon what Washington lobbyists fondly called “Trojan Horse” bills—large, overly complex bills that contained everything including the kitchen sink and all the fixtures, giving both parties a piece of the pie, thereby guaranteeing it got passed by the House and the Senate, then signed into law by the President—who of course didn’t have time to read 3,452 pages of legal nonsense and simply relied on his advisers to tell him where to sign.
But Senator Robinson had repeatedly called out these Trojan Horse bills, was promising to close these loopholes, reduce the influence of paid lobbyists, clean up Congress and make American democracy transparent and easy to understand. That was part of his platform, and it was resonating with the public.
