Friends at Homeland Security Read online

  “Will it hurt or help my case if I get a lawyer involved?” he asks.

  I know I have him, “hurt, more likely than not,” I say firmly, although I am not completely sure of my ground.

  “I’ve heard about you, Mr. McGee. You have a pretty decent reputation as a straight shooter. I think I have about run out of options and am willing to talk to the police. I want you to be there when I do. I am about to make some terrible decisions; and I don’t want to make them based on lies, all right?”

  “I’ll go out and give Detectives MacLeese and Redworth a call. My partner here will watch you while I’m gone. Don’t make the slightest attempt to communicate with anyone outside this room. If you do, all plea deals will be off. We have yet to determine if you are low enough in the criminal hierarchy to be worth granting immunity. We clear on that, Whitehead?”

  “Perfectly.”

  I call Mary Margaret and tell her what has transpired. She has been waiting in President Vestor’s office trying to get a grip on how much he knows about what has been going on in his bank and how much he is a dupe. She is not satisfied that she has gotten what she needs yet.

  Her cell phone plays the iconic song Popular from Wicked. The ID shows McGee’s name and number.

  “What do you have, McGee?”

  “Another important link ready to cop a plea. You should come by the conference room and complete our chat with Whitehead. Bring Redworth, too. We will get farther faster if we gang up on this guy. He is in this up to his eyeballs.”

  “For the murder, too?”

  “Probably not directly, but he at least has guilty knowledge with malice aforethought.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  She smiles at President Vestor and tells him that he needs to stay in the bank where she can find him for the rest of the day.

  Chapter Eight

  The two NYPD detectives walk briskly into the conference room to join me. Before she sits down, Mary Margaret hands Whitehead a yellow lined legal pad and a supply of pens. The effect is chilling in its presumptiveness.

  “Now, Mr. Whitehead, Detective Redworth and I are very busy. Don’t waste our time.”

  “What do you want? What do you expect from me?”

  “A full allocution. Nothing left out; nothing shaded or exaggerated.”

  “Hey, wait a minute—I don’t have a good basis for why I should do any kind of confessing. What’s the offer if I do?”

  “We take the death penalty off the plate, for starters.” Whitehead winces and turns pale.

  “That’s all?” he asks.

  “Depends on what you have to tell us.”

  “I could be killed if I mention anyone else who is involved. I would have to have protection or be put in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, at the least.”

  “If you are credible, we can whisk you off to Fort Meade where they are used to protecting important and endangered material witnesses awaiting their opportunity to testify against major targets. It is the ultimate safe house. After that, you might go to a federal penitentiary and be housed in protective custody. Or … you might go into WitSec like you said. Depends.”

  “Before I say or write a thing, I have to know that RICO charges would be taken off the plate, too. I want my family left out of all of this. I don’t really even know what RICO is all about, anyway.”

  Det. Redworth takes over for the moment, “The acronym RICO—I’m sure you know—is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Its main provisions include hefty fines—as much as double the gross profits or proceeds from the criminal gains—and prison sentences of twenty-to-life. You lose any interest and any present or future rights to any property involved in the racketeering enterprise and forfeit any ill-gotten gains that came out of the enterprise, including money or any property or objects of value. You will have to post a satisfactory performance bond. You can’t transfer property to anyone to evade the penalties. Any property given to your wife or family resulting from the imposition of RICO penalties will be forfeited to the federal government. In very brief language—short of the death penalty—getting hung up by RICO is the ultimate bummer.”

  Whitehead seems to be shrinking before the eyes of the police and private detectives who are drilling holes in his eyes with theirs. There is no mercy in any of the four pairs of steely eyes staring into his.

  “I’ll cooperate all the way. Please put in a word about what I asked for. Please don’t make it life in prison. I’m a family man. As soon as I complete writing down everything I know, you have to promise that you will get my family out of harm’s way. They’ll know in a minute. They always know, and they know everything, believe me.”

  “‘They’ being the Sorianos?” I ask for the record.

  “Yes,” he sighs.

  He picks up the first pen and begins to concentrate on the yellow legal pad. Soon he is industriously filling page after page, pausing only to try to be accurate about dates, times, places, and people. What he produces will bring down the Soriano family and a significant number of Russian Mafiosos who are living in the US. He is also signing his own death warrant.

  The detectives return in three hours to check on his progress. The legal pad and three pens are set aside, and the hard-nosed banker’s head is lying on the conference table. He sits sobbing.

  I sit beside him. “A couple of more things, Mr. Whitehead. First, did you kill Decklin Marcus?”

  “Most certainly not!” he exclaims emphatically and convincingly.

  “Did you order his death?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “Not for sure, and I would tell you if I did. I have my suspicions about the boy’s father who had the most to lose if his boy ratted on us. Howard took the money from the Sorianos and the Russians as a lifeline just like I did. Both of us would be ruined if the truth got out. Angus McTavish was involved with the Sorianos just like Marcus and me, but I’m less sure of my suspicions about him for doing anything to harm Decklin than I am of Howard.”

  As soon as MacLeese and Redworth take Whitehead away to the safe house at Fort Meade, Caitlin, Ivory, and I put our heads together about what we should do next. Ivory—ever the up-the-center-charger—votes for a confrontation with Howard Marcus right now. Caitlin is an analyst, and she wants to learn more about Marcus’s involvement with the Sorianos and what role the Russians played—are playing—in all of this. For the moment, we all agree that events have been moving so fast that it is likely that the Sorianos don’t yet know what has come down.

  “Okay,” I say, “this is what I think we should do. Let’s split up. Ivory, you’re in pretty thick with the Marcuses. Why don’t you have a slightly more than casual sit-down with them and see if they might accidentally spill a little. But not too much of Mr. Nice Guy. Before you leave them, you have to confiscate every means of communication to the outside of the house and get them isolated. Caitlin, get some of your old CIs to snoop and give us something that ties the family to either or both of the American or Russian mobs. Find Decklin’s friends—use the NYPD’s help, if you need to—and drag something out of them about a tie to the Russians. I am inclined to think that they are behind the killing; after all, one of their hit men did the deed. I am absolutely convinced that Mazurkiewicz did not act alone.

  “I will get with the NYPD detectives and go to the FBI, the CIA, and Interpol to see if we can convince them to open a formal investigation in Russia. We have got to get hold of Viachaslau Mazurkiewicz, the Byelorussian wet work merc. That’s probably the only way we can dig up anything on the Russian mob that will convince the Russian police to act. It may take a government to government intervention.”

  “A-a, boss, aren’t you forgetting the little impediment that Homeland Security is obviously involved and highly unlikely to help? They may put the kibosh on our whole plan for reasons of their own,” Ivory says.

  “Yeah, I know,” I say, “but I’m just going to blunder ahead and s
ee what happens.”

  “Good plan,” Ivory says. “You seem to have worked out all of the details.”

  I raise my one eyebrow in a withering look. He doesn’t seem to wither.

  My first call is to a friend from my time in the FBI, Darryl Strathmore.

  “To what do I owe this honor, McGee?” he asks. “Oh, I think I can guess. You want something, and it is probably something you shouldn’t have.”

  “I think I should have it,” I say as lightly as I can under the circumstances.

  “It’s your nickel—shoot,” he says.

  I give Darryl better than a nickel’s worth of explanation—more like the two-buck version—of what is happening in our case. He is patient.

  “Tell me more about Homeland’s involvement, McGee,” he asks when I finish.

  “I don’t know more than what I told you. They came on like gangbusters and threatened to shut us down, but we haven’t seen or heard anything more of them since.”

  “Don’t be too sure that they’re out of the picture. Everyone thinks the FBI is hard to deal with. They just haven’t run crosswise with Homeland Security. Keep your guard up,” Darryl says seriously.

  “We are, and we will.”

  “Now, exactly what can I do for you?”

  “We’ve got a lot of useful dirt on the key players at Global Investment Bank—enough to put some of them away for decades. We know who the actual murderer is, even though we probably don’t have enough on him to extradite him or to get him into court yet. More importantly, we are sure that he works for much more important and much more secretive puppet masters; and we want them. What we need is for you to get a joint investigation into Viachaslau Mazurkiewicz with your counterparts in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs and get the police to pick him up and to hand him over to us.”

  “You know that’s a tall order. Russian police have never been all that willing to cooperate with us, even in their own best interests. They are like the rest of the Russian agencies—secretive, dogmatic, arrogant, and very sensitive to slights. I’ll get on it today. It happens to be a slow news day, and I need something interesting to do. But I can’t make any promises.”

  “Your word that you will try is good enough for me, Darryl. Thanks.”

  My second call is blocked. So is my attempt at sending an encrypted e-mail. Our communications are all shut down tight. I know what comes next; so, I send Ivory and Caitlin out to do their work in person.

  I am right. Less than ten minutes after I get them out the door, four large unsmiling men in dark suits, fresh white shirts, power ties, and shiny shoes walk into McGee and Associates Investigations with a search warrant and subpoena duces tecum in hand.

  “I warned you,” the older of the four agents says. “Now keep out of our way. Interfere, and you get an obstruction of justice charge and get to make an extended visit to Homeland Security offices here in New York or Washington, DC, or Elk Wallow, Idaho—whichever suits our fancy.”

  “Nice to see you again, Agent...?” I say with exaggerated politeness.

  “It’s Special Agent Hinckley, and you can skip the sugar. We’re here on the business of national security. You’re here to watch and keep out of the way of the real cops.”

  I show him my “much chastened” face and leave him to his search. Of course, since Hinckley’s last search we have moved all of our sensitive records to our secret office in Vermont, and I am not worried. Having our communications jammed up is most inconvenient, however; and my next task of the day is to get them restored.

  I walk to the outer office and saunter over to stand in the group of office workers to watch our government’s finest security officers do their duty.

  When the agents stop looking at me, I quietly turn aside to a low-level administrative assistant and whisper, “Nancy, here’s a credit card. Go out and buy a box of burner phones and three voice distortion gadgets. Find Ivory and Caitlin and get those purchases to them. Don’t be too obvious about it.”

  Nancy is happy to be a part of the solution. She walks to the ladies room where she spends five minutes then slips out the side door while the four agents and six forensic assistants rifle through our records, throwing papers all over the floor in an effort to create as much chaos as they can.

  I walk up to Hinckley’s side.

  “Not to disturb you during your important government work, Special Agent Hinckley; but if there is something specific you want besides just scattering papers around, why not just ask me; and I can be of assistance. That would shorten your work day, and you nice government people can go out and have fresh doughnuts—or whatever—for the rest of the day and get credit for a full day’s work. How about that?”

  I think he wants to deck me, but he surprises me.

  “Tell you what, McGee. We pretty much know what you have been up to and something of what you’ve found. I’ll take you up on your offer. Box up all your records related to the Decklin Marcus case. Our people will come back tomorrow and pick them all up and include them into our files. Don’t horse with me, McGee. Hold back and we’ll be back with arrest warrants for you, your partners, and everybody who works for you. We’ve lost patience. Maybe this little exercise will convince you to leave the case alone. It is ours and ours alone.”

  “We’ll get right on it,” I say obediently.

  Five minutes later the federal government vacates the premises, and I get the office personnel to work. Two secretaries gather up every paper off the floor and place them in their hopeless disarray into neat new unmarked manila folders. Carter Hinckley, our CPA, and Carolyn Zumbrowski, the chief administrative assistant, catch on quickly and get the troops to work. Two girls head off to buy boxes; Carter’s assistant, Justin Rose, is sent to the attic store room with two of the secretaries who don’t yet have an assignment to fetch down boxes of stored files. They prove to be very diligent workers. By four in the afternoon, they have three dollies which can carry four boxes each, and they each make ten trips. That is one hundred twenty boxes of files that date back as far as fifteen years ago—including old insurance forms, payroll records, business records related to trash collection, janitorial service, and rent, and a few outdated case records. The girls sent to get boxes are equally efficient and creative. They gather their coworkers who mix and mingle file folders and their contents to ensure that no folder is accurately labeled, and no human being could ever rearrange the contents into a coherent record. We are absolutely in compliance with the law as demanded in the warrant and the subpoena duces tecum—“produce any and all records related to the above captioned case [the Decklin Marcus investigation].” Nothing in that document says anything about including boocoup additional material. After all, the subpoena did require delivery of “all records, documents, books, photographs, and electronic data.” We are just trying to be fully compliant and helpful.

  By six that evening, our resourceful—and now giddy—staff members have accumulated another seventy-two boxes—all unlabeled—of papers, some of which contain files labeled as “Decklin Marcus, suspicious death” case and some contain actual papers related to the case but not necessarily in accurately identified file folders. Although it has been a great deal of work, we include a letter absolving Homeland Security of any responsibility for creating an “undue burden or expense” that would entail sanctions on the federal government—just being good citizens. In addition—as required by the subpoena—we have included fifteen USB flash drives of electronic data, some of which relates to the case in question. The flash drives are in a clear baggie and are waiting near the back of the outer office for the officers who will want to remove all of the large boxes before getting to the baggie. There is a term for what we did in the technical language of attorneys: “Scattered tidbits of real mixed with mountains of “b—s—.”

  Since the subpoena duces tecum does not include a command for appearance, I declare the following day to be an office holiday. The boxes are all neatly stacked and waiting for the government
officers to collect. Admittedly the boxes so jam the limited space in the outer office that it could prove to be difficult for the large officers to navigate their way in, but we are confident in their level of ingenuity. We could have made all of this difficult for the federal agents by filing protests and requests for delays; or we could have found small irregularities in the language of the subpoena; but we thought that would not have been right. Therefore, relaxing our vigilance over our rights, we have complied--and with alacrity.

  I, of course, do not hang around while my competent office staff does their work. I find Ivory and Caitlin and our newly purchased burner phones and voice distortion equipment, and we get to work.

  Ivory arranges a meeting with the Marcuses for the same afternoon. Caitlin calls the NYPD detectives and brings them up to date on our recent dealings with Whitehead and our plans to interview the Marcuses again and invites them to join us. I put in a call to Langley to talk to Sybil Norcroft, the DCIA. This time, I use her top secret identifier code and get right through.

  “McGee, this better be good,” she says by way of greeting.

  “And a fine day to you, as well, me fair lassie,”

  “I’m not in the mood for Irish malarkey. What do you need this time?”

  I know she’s very busy; so, I give her the condensed version. She is very interested in the direction the case is taking, but her greatest interest lies in her innate distrust and disdain for Secretary Robert Carter, US Department of Homeland Security. If he is involved and interfering, there just might be something worth her agency’s interest, especially if the Russians are included in the web of secrecy the autocratic Homeland Security department is weaving.

  “And you say that the NYPD detectives are working with your FBI agent friend to get the Russian police involved?”

  “Yes.”

  “We might be able to help. Give me a couple of days, all right? Sounds interesting.”

  As soon as we complete that round of calls, Ivory, Caitlin, and I discard the burner phones we use. One of Ivory’s men has taken a few burners around to the homes of our main staff people, and we do the business of the office via those phones for the next hour.