table outside the bar area where she sipped on a cup of coffee, an unlit cigarette dangling in her free hand.
Milton said, “Mrs. Radnor?”
Startled, the woman looked at him warily. “How do you know my name? Is there a problem?”
“This is very awkward,” Milton began as Dolores looked at him expectantly. “I was in town a few months ago and your daughter gave me the best massage I ever had.”
The woman’s lips began to quiver. “My Cindy was damn good at giving massages. She went to school for it, had a certificate and everything.”
“I know, I know. She was great. And I promised her the next time I was in town I’d look her up. I was just over there and they told me what happened. And they were kind enough to give me your name and where you worked.”
“Why did you want to know that?” she asked, though her look was now more sad than suspicious.
“She was so nice to me that I told Cindy that the next time I was in town I was going to place a bet for her on the craps table.”
Dolores looked at him more closely. “Hey, aren’t you the shooter who burned up Table No. 7? I popped over there on a break because people were all talking about it.”
“I am the very one.” He took out his wallet. “And I wanted to deliver Cindy’s share to you.”
“Sir, you don’t have to do that.”
“A promise is a promise.” Milton handed her twenty one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Oh my God,” Dolores said. She tried to give it back but Milton insisted until she put it away in her pocket.
“You coming over and giving me this money is the only good thing that’s happened to me in a long time.” She suddenly broke down in tears.
Milton handed her some napkins from the holder on the table. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “Thank you,” she said.
“Is there anything I can do to help, Mrs. Radnor?”
“You can just call me Dolores. And you just did something wonderful.”
“Helen over at the spa told me she died in an accident. Was it a car accident?”
The woman’s face hardened. “Accidental overdose, they said. That’s crap. Cindy never took drugs in her life. And I’d know, because I did drugs, in my time. A druggie knows another druggie, and she wasn’t one.”
“So why did they think that’s what killed her?”
“Stuff in her body. And a container of stuff by her bed, and bam, she’s a crackhead. But I know my Cindy. She saw what the stuff did to me. I finally got myself straightened out, got a good job, and now this. Now my baby’s gone.” She started snuffling again.
“Again, I’m very sorry.” Milton left and rejoined Reuben.
Milton said, “Okay, Cindy gives Tony Wallace a.k.a. Robby Thomas a massage. Wallace gets nearly beaten to death by Bagger. And Cindy dies of an accidental drug overdose even though it appears she didn’t use drugs.”
“Can’t be a coincidence,” Reuben said.
“The probabilities are Bagger had her killed. I can do some poking around on the Pompeii Web site. There might be a back door there I can exploit.”
They walked off without noticing the man in the suit who’d been watching Milton talk to Dolores. He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “We might have a big problem. Get hold of Mr. Bagger.”
CHAPTER 34
IT WAS A LATE-STAGE PROBE and penetration mission, which was the only reason Harry Finn was standing in a queue early in the morning after having flown in the night before from visiting his mother. While he listened to the man in the front of the group drone on, Finn’s thoughts kept going back to his frail mother with the resolute spirit. The story she had told him, as she had hundreds of times before, concerned Rayfield Solomon, who was Harry Finn’s father. Solomon had been a man of inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and possessed an unassailable integrity. He had labored on behalf of his country for decades, building a reputation as not only a true patriot but a man who could fix things with his ideas, who could see the answer when no one else could. Then, later in life, he’d fallen in love with Harry Finn’s mother and married her. Finn was born and then things began to change, or, more accurately, implode.
And then his father was dead, by his own hand it was claimed, in a fit of guilt. Yet Finn’s mother knew better.
“It was all lies,” she had told him over and over. “None of it was true. Not about me or him. They killed him for their own reasons.”
Finn knew what these reasons were because his mother had drilled them into him. Rayfield Solomon’s career as a servant of his country had been forgotten, his good name besmirched. It wasn’t the unjust shame that hurt Finn’s mother so much. It was the fact that she had lost the man she loved far sooner than she should have.
“He deserved none of this,” she had told Finn. “And now there must be retribution.”
Finn remembered hearing this story for the first time when he was just seven years old, soon after his father’s death. It had astounded him then, assaulting his still developing sense of justice. Today it still stunned him, how one man could be destroyed so unfairly, so completely.
He broke free from these thoughts and concentrated on the task ahead. In the crowd with him were three other members of his team. Two were college students pulled out of his office for a little adventure in the field. The third was a woman who was nearly as accomplished at her work as him.
With some wrangling and sleight of hand they had garnered tickets for a VIP tour of the almost completed U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. The nearly 600,000-square-foot three-level complex was located beneath the east Capitol grounds. This was because its footprint was larger than the Capitol building and the planners didn’t want it to detract from the historic structure. The visitor center included orientation theaters, gift shops, food services, a great hall, exhibition space, an auditorium and other attributes both functional and ceremonial, including much-needed space for the operations of the House and Senate. Once open, it would host millions of visitors a year from all around the world. And in keeping with Washington’s stellar reputation for efficiency and integrity, the project was only years behind schedule and only several hundred million dollars over budget.
Finn was most intrigued by two elements: first, the connecting tunnel from the visitor center to the Capitol itself, and second, a service tunnel for truck deliveries. The delivery he had in mind was one that no member of Congress ever would have wanted.
Each member of the team carried a buttonhole digital camera and surreptitiously snapped byte after byte of the underground site. Unfinished tunnels and hallways veered off in interesting directions that would come in very handy to Finn and his people later.
Finn asked several questions of the guide, innocent enough on the surface. Yet just as he did with phone freaking, these queries were subtly designed to elicit information that the guide would never have knowingly revealed. On cue, other members of Finn’s team asked tagalong questions that revealed even more. Once all was put together, the unsuspecting tour guide had given them nearly enough information to take down the Capitol and everyone in it.
You’re a terrorist’s best friend and you don’t even know it, Finn thought to himself about the affable guide.
Outside, Finn studied the bronze Statue of Freedom that crowned the dome of the Capitol. It was a nice image, he thought. Yet he didn’t know if the people who worked inside the building deserved such a nice topper to their digs. It seemed to him that concepts like freedom, truth and honor were the last things on people’s minds here.
He and his team strolled through the Capitol’s nearly sixty acres of grounds, compiling still more useful data. They congregated at an empty deli off Independence Avenue to go over their results and form new additions to their planned assault on the Capitol.
“I guess congressmen like to keep safe,” said one of the team. “Because the operation we’re putting together is costing Uncle Sam a bundle.”
“Just another drop in the federal budget,” the
woman said. “We’ve heading back to the office now, Harry. I’ve got some phone freaking to do on the Pentagon assignment.”
“You can go back,” Finn said. “I’ve got something else to do.”
He left them at the deli and headed to the Hart Senate Office Building, the newest and biggest of the three complexes devoted to taking care of America’s one hundred senators and their enormous staffs. It amazed Finn sometimes that a hundred people couldn’t manage to fit their operations inside something less than the over two million square feet the Hart, Russell and Dirksen Senate office buildings collectively provided. After all, this equaled over twenty thousand square feet per senator. And still the politicians were clamoring for ever more expansive digs and more tax dollars with which to build them.
The Hart Senate Building was located at Second and Constitution and was named after Philip Aloysius Hart, a Michigan senator who died in 1976. The deceased Hart, as the inscription above the main entrance to the building said, “Was a man of incorruptible integrity.”
The gent would feel quite alone in the Capitol these days, Finn thought.
He strolled around the interior of the building admiring the ninety-foot-high central atrium and its major feature, a mobile-stabile entitled, Mountains and Clouds, sculpted by the renowned Alexander Calder. The sculptor had come to D.C. in 1976 to make the final adjustments to the piece, which was enormous—the tallest peak in the mountain rose fifty-one feet high—and then had promptly died that same night back in New York. This was a stark testament to the old saying that “Washington can be downright deadly to your health.”