The Hearing Read online

  “You’re the boss. You got a gun down my pants, I’ll do anything you want.”

  Carl relaxed his hug but kept one arm around Aguilera’s waist in what looked like a friendly embrace. The hand holding the gun was still hidden under the polo shirt.

  “Everything’s cool, Rubi. We need to talk for a minute. What we’re going to do, the lady’s gonna drive a car over here and we’re gonna get in the back seat. We’ll sit there and talk for a couple minutes and then you’ll get out and go on your way. No trouble for anyone. You understand that?”

  “You’re the boss, my friend.”

  “Helen, if you could bring the car over, please?”

  Helen went to Carl’s car, and sat for a second behind the wheel. She was shaking. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and for the first time since college, when she had come briefly under the influence of a Pentecostal football player, she prayed. “Dear Lord, make me do the right thing. Don’t let me screw this up.”

  Then, driving slowly through the milling crowd, she pulled the car to the curb next to Carl and Aguilera.

  They climbed into the back seat. To Helen it looked as if Carl’s hand was halfway down the front of Aguilera’s jeans.

  “Just drive ahead a few yards, Helen, get out of the crowds. Maybe over there, away from the streetlights. Yeah, that’s good. Right here. Fine.”

  She stopped the car and turned off the lights and ignition. In the rear-view mirror she could see their faces, pro fessional and businesslike, as if none of this was new to either of them. But from Aguilera, no longer laughing, came a threat completely different from the toughness she saw in Carl. She was frightened to have him behind her.

  Carl said, “Well, Rubi, what a day it’s been, right?”

  Aguilera chuckled, as if he and Carl were old friends and this entire encounter were some kind of prank.

  “Some day, that’s right.”

  Carl’s arm moved.

  Aguilera gave a painful grunt. “What do you want with me? Who are you?”

  “The point, Rubi, is that you’re a DAS agent and you’re running this car bomb and you know when the bomb’s going off. That’s a given, okay? So we don’t need to discuss that. What we—”

  “You’re crazy, my friend. I don’t know what—”

  Aguilera let out a low, sudden howl so charged with pain it made Helen sick.

  “I said, we already know these things, Rubi. They’re not open for discussion, okay? Don’t waste time. I’m a nice guy, calm and considerate, but if I get angry you could get your balls shot away. What I started to say, all I want to know is when the bomb’s going off.”

  Aguilera was quiet, and as the seconds ticked away Helen was terrified that Carl would do what he’d done before, and there’d be another howl of pain.

  Aguilera said, “If I told you, how would you know I was telling the truth?”

  His voice didn’t match the face now, or the menace. Behind the Latin accent, the pretense of mirth abandoned, was the almost soft-spoken tone of a disciplined professional, a man who had never acted on impulse, who could always be counted on to do the reasonable thing.

  “A very good question, Rubi. Been thinking about that myself. My feeling, I think you’re an honest man. I think I can trust you. You’re not some thug, are you Rubi? Not some cheap terrorist? You’re an educated, trained intelligence agent. Isn’t that right, Rubi?”

  Aguilera didn’t speak or move. His eyes were closed.

  “And here’s something else I think, Rubi. I think you’ve been standing in the street there, trying to figure out how to get back to your friends in the Trade Commission. So here’s what we’re going to do. You tell me when the bomb’s going off, and I’ll walk you right past the police line, through the barricades, and take you straight down that street to the Trade Commission and watch you walk inside. You’d like that, right? Tit for tat. You do something for me, I do something for you. How’s that?”

  Aguilera laughed. “You think I’m stupid. You’d take me back there? Get serious, my friend.”

  “Doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. Truth’s the truth. Anyway, I don’t see any choice for you.”

  “You get me in there, take me behind one of the buildings, and do anything you want.”

  “You think I’d hurt you, Rubi, after you told me what I want to know? No chance. I did that, the word’d go out—Don’t talk to Carl, he can’t be trusted.”

  Aguilera was silent, thinking. Suddenly he grinned—his whole face, ear to ear—and he said, “She comes too.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Aguilera laughed, as if this were the funniest thing that’d ever happened to him. Helen was beginning to won der if the laughter was an act or if Aguilera was insane. He said, “She comes.”

  “Oh, now Rubi, I never dreamed you were—”

  Helen heard herself speak. “It’s okay, Carl. I—”

  “Be quiet! Rubi, you don’t trust me.”

  Carl’s arm moved. The howl again. Helen wanted to throw up.

  Carl said, “You don’t trust me?”

  Rubi, hoarse with pain, sweat glistening on his forehead, said, “I believe you. But I want her with us.”

  “You really think I’d get you in past the cops there and hurt you?”

  “You already hurt me.”

  “Kill you?”

  Silence.

  “Well, that is a thought. Why not? You’re trying to kill the judge and his daughter, right? Kill you. Good idea. Yeah. That’s a chance you’ll have to take. What time’s the bomb going off?”

  “She comes.”

  Another cry of pain. Aguilera’s head jerked back against the seat.

  “What time, Rubi?”

  “You’re crazy. You’re gonna kill me. I’ll tell you if she comes.”

  Carl’s arm made a deep thrust forward and down.

  Rubi let out a heavy, almost silent shriek, gasping for air. In a painful whisper, he said, “She comes.”

  “Helen?”

  If Aguilera felt more secure with a witness, then let him have a witness.

  Helen said, “It’s okay. I’ll go. I’d like to go.”

  “Okay, Rubi. She comes. What time’s it going off?”

  “You’re gonna take me back? With her?”

  “Right now. Straight back. With her.”

  “Three A.M.”

  Helen looked at the car clock. It was 10 P.M.

  Carl said, “Three A.M.? Don’t lie to me, Rubi.”

  “Three A.M.”

  “Fine. Thank you. You did the right thing. Helen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drive as close to the barricade as you can get. When a cop stops you, we’ll all get out. Stay close. And Rubi, you so much as wiggle an eyelash and I’ll blow your balls into your socks. Guaranteed. You understand?”

  He nodded, painfully.

  Carl showed his badge to a cop, who moved a wooden barricade and let them through. They got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk toward Blossom. When they reached the corner, turned, and crossed to the next block, they saw the Mercedes. They continued another half block and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the Trade Commission. Light from high-intensity lamps on the corners had at this distance diminished to a gloom not much brighter than moonlight.

  Carl, his gun hand still down the front of Aguilera’s jeans, looked around and said, “Over there. That’s a good place.”

  Aguilera said, “This is the commission, right here. I go in here.”

  Carl gave him a shove and headed for a tree on the Trade Commission lawn, directly across the street from the Mercedes and Blossom.

  Aguilera said, “You said you’d let me go inside.”

  “I didn’t say when.”

  Carl stopped next to the tree.

  “Put your arms around the trunk.”

  “What’re you—”

  Carl gave his arm another thrust downward. Aguilera embraced the tree.

  Carl pulled the h
andcuffs from his jacket pocket and cuffed Aguilera’s wrists around the tree. He wanted to be on the lawn between the Trade Commission and Blossom. If someone decided to cross the street, enter Blossom, and do something to Gus or Samantha, they’d have to get past Carl.

  “You wanna sit down, sit down. Helen, thanks for coming. You can go back now.”

  “I’d like to stay.”

  Her words surprised her. The street was quiet, and even in the dim, long-shadowed light, the Mercedes looked as peaceful as any parked car had ever looked. Nothing she had ever done before had given her such a certain sense that she was exactly where she was supposed to be, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. Despite the nearness of the explosives-laden station wagon, she felt a tranquillity completely new to her.

  Carl said, “In a minute you may change your mind. Rubi—”

  Rubi was trying to slide his arms down the tree trunk and position his legs so he could sit on the grass.

  “Rubi, I’m talking to you.”

  “Yeah. And I’m listening. I’m listening to every word you say.”

  He was smiling again, hiding behind the mirth.

  Carl said, “We’re going to sit here until you tell me the truth about when the bomb’s set for. Then I’ll know when it’s safe to go in and bring out the judge and his daughter. Okay? You wanna keep it a big secret, that’s fine. You’ll get blown up and I’ll go with you. You ready for that? I’m ready.”

  Aguilera let out a roar of laughter. “That’s wonderful! We’ll both get blown up sky high. You’re crazy, my friend. Crazy, crazy, crazy.”

  Carl grinned, and to Helen he looked genuinely amused by Aguilera’s laughter. For several minutes she’d felt the same sense she’d had in the coffee shop of a kinship between Carl and her late husband. They were part of a different world, and listening to Carl and Aguilera now, watching them, experiencing the atmosphere around them, she understood a large area of her husband’s life that had been hidden to her when he was alive. So often she had felt a barrier between them, and she had blamed him for putting it there, for refusing to share his life with her. Now she knew what the barrier had been made of—it was not a barrier, it was a shield, and it had been made of love. She no longer blamed him. She loved him for protecting her from the place Carl and Aguilera were in now. She didn’t want to be in that place, but watching Carl and Aguilera, confronting for the first time the world that had driven, and killed, her husband, she felt held. She couldn’t move.

  Carl said, “You’re the crazy one if you let yourself get blown up. But you’re not crazy. You’re a vicious bastard, but you’re not crazy, and you’re gonna tell me as soon as we need to get outta here. And you’d better give me plenty of time, because the judge and his daughter are going with us. Get them out of the house, I figure about ten, fifteen minutes. Be really safe, say half an hour. So you tell me half an hour before the bomb’s gonna go, and that’ll give us plenty of time to clear out.”

  “I told you, three A.M.”

  “That was before you were hugging the tree. I figure now you’ve got a little more incentive to tell the truth. You don’t wanta be here when it blows.”

  “You don’t either.”

  “I won’t be. Because you’re going to tell me.”

  “I don’t care if I get blown up.”

  “You care, Rubi. You’re not some fifteen-year-old suicide car bomber wants to die for Allah. Not you, Rubi. You’ve got plans for the future—girls to screw, money to steal, people to hurt. Helen, it’s time for you to go.”

  Helen, cross-legged on the grass, couldn’t move. She tried to get up. Something held her to the grass.

  She said, “Not yet, Carl. Please. A few more minutes.”

  Aguilera said, “I can’t see my watch.”

  “You don’t have to see your watch. You just tell me when you think we’d better move. But don’t guess wrong, Rubi. Don’t guess wrong.”

  Now Carl was smiling. Helen wondered if maybe, possibly, he was really prepared to get blown up. Maybe he wasn’t bluffing. Maybe Aguilera wasn’t bluffing.

  And at that moment, Helen thought she saw movement in a second-floor window of the Trade Commission.

  Late Friday night, Rothman was in the White House Situation Room with Dutweiler, two White House attorneys, a White House political polling expert, the DEA administrator and his counterparts from ATF and the FBI, deputy assistants from the State Department, CIA, and the National Security Agency, a deputy attorney general, and an army general from the Pentagon.

  They were listening to reports from the FBI command truck, as well as abstracts of decrypted intercepts of Colombian embassy telephone and cable traffic, when an army colonel leaned over Rothman’s shoulder to whisper that he had a personal telephone call from Carl Falco.

  “In the truck?”

  “Yes, sir, but he said it’s for you personally, doesn’t want anyone else connected.”

  Rothman excused himself, left the room, and took the call in an outside office.

  “What is it, Carl?”

  “I just had another call from Larry Young in London.”

  “And?”

  “He said there was something he thought we might like to know, maybe he should have told us earlier, thinks maybe it wouldn’t be good if certain other people found out first. Samantha killed a man. When she was eight. Guy tried to rape her and she stabbed him with a knife.”

  “She killed a man?”

  “Right. That’s what he said.”

  “And he thought we might like to know?”

  “Considered it a possibility.”

  “Oh, boy. Where?”

  “Milwaukee. I’ll get someone over to the courthouse, see are the records still there.”

  “Thanks, Carl.”

  The records would be there, but they’d better not stay there. The first place investigators would go to confirm a rumor of the killing would be court records.

  Rothman left the White House and spent an hour and a half driving around Washington, thinking. The more he drove, the more certain he became. He was holding a bomb. A very valuable bomb. How to place it, how and when to trigger it?

  In the command truck, the Puerto Rican agent flipped a switch and yelled, “Listen!”

  A Spanish voice boomed from the console speaker and filled the truck.

  Iverson said, “What’s he saying?”

  “He says there’s people on the lawn. He’s talking to someone.”

  Four times during the night they had heard two men talking in the Trade Commission. Mostly they argued about what to watch on TV. One wanted game shows, the other wanted news. Neither said anything about the Mercedes or a bomb.

  More Spanish.

  The agent said, “He says there’s three people on the lawn.”

  Iverson said, “Who the hell’s on the lawn?”

  A phone buzzed on another console. An agent in shirtsleeves grabbed it, listened, yelled at Iverson.

  “Baker post says three subjects have arrived in front of the TC. Two men and a woman.”

  Baker post was a position in a doctor’s office twenty-two floors up in an office building half a mile away, with an uninterrupted view of the Trade Commission and Blossom. Agents there had high-energy telescopic night scopes.

  Carl said, “Put it on the speakers.”

  The agent flipped a switch and the Spanish voices in the Trade Commission were replaced by a southern American accent from Baker post.

  Carl said, “What’ve you got?”

  “Two white males and a white female. Number one male is five-seven, one-eighty, stocky, polo shirt and pants, can’t give you color, everything’s green on this scope. At the moment it looks like he’s cuffed to a tree. Number two male is six feet, one-ninety, T-shirt, pants. Female’s five-six, one-thirty, blouse and pants. They just came walking up the block about three minutes ago and when they got in front of the Trade Commission, number one male walked over to a tree, put his arms around it, and number two
appeared to cuff his hands so he was hugging the tree. Now all three are sitting by the tree. Just sitting there. Talking, I guess.”

  Iverson, straining to keep his voice from showing the anger evident on his face, said, “Where’s Falco?”

  No one answered.

  “Where’s Falco! When was the last time anyone saw Falco?”

  An ATF agent said, “I saw him two hours ago outside the Winnebago.”

  Talking to Baker post on the speaker phone, Iverson said, “You ever meet a DEA agent named Carl Falco? You know what he looks like?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What’re they doing now?”

  “Still sitting there. Looks like a picnic.”

  Iverson nodded his head. “Picnic.”

  Someone said, “Who’s the woman?”

  Iverson said, “Where’s Terry?”

  “Right here.”

  She was standing by the door.

  The Puerto Rican agent, a headset over his ears, said, “Iverson?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re getting a little excited.”

  “Get it up.”

  Baker post was disconnected and the truck filled with Spanish voices.

  Iverson said, “What’re they saying?”

  “They’re arguing about what to do. They know one of the men on the lawn. They call him Rubi—”

  Iverson looked at another agent—the only one wearing a tie—standing behind the translator. The agent nodded. “Aguilera.”

  Iverson said, “They say anything about the woman?”

  “No. Just that there’s a woman. I don’t think they recognize anyone except what’s-his-name, Rubi. They’re really confused. They say there’s a woman and another man, and Rubi’s cuffed to a tree. One of them keeps saying, ‘Shoot him, shoot him.’”

  Iverson said, “Who’re they talking about? Rubi or the other guy?”

  “Can’t tell. The other guy, I think. They were talking about the other guy, who is he, who could he be, and one of them said ‘Shoot him.’ Hang on.” He strained to hear. “The other guy says, ‘Rubi’s in the way. He’s behind Rubi.’”

  Iverson picked up a telephone. “Put Baker post on this.”

  An agent, flipping switches, said, “You got it.”

  “Oster?”