Dead on Arrival by Mike Lawson Page B

the poor picture they had of him in which he wore a beard. They would detain him until the FBI examined him, and the FBI would confirm his identity.
    So now he traveled on buses with cleaning women, taking seven hours to make a journey that should have taken an hour and a half. But that was all right. He had a lifetime in which to complete his mission.

10
     
    Mahoney was pissed.
    That morning in The Washington Post there had been an article saying that he’d been visited by Hassan Zarif, brother of the terrorist Reza Zarif. And the reporter had, of course, discovered that Mahoney and Reza’s father had been boyhood friends in Boston. The guy had even found a high school yearbook picture of Mahoney and Ali Zarif dressed in baseball uniforms, Mahoney’s thick arm around Ali’s thin neck.
    ‘How’d the press even know he was here?’ Mahoney said to DeMarco. ‘I didn’t have him down on the damn list as comin’ to see me .’
    DeMarco was fairly sure he knew the answer to that question: McGuire, the U.S. Capitol cop. When DeMarco had threatened McGuire with an outdoor cold-weather posting for hassling Hassan Zarif, he’d made the mistake of saying that Hassan was expected by the speaker. So McGuire, probably recognizing the Zarif name, decided to exercise a little anonymous payback and informed the Post that Mahoney had been paid a visit by a man with the same last name as a terrorist. And the Post took it from there.
    ‘Geez, I can’t imagine,’ DeMarco said.
    ‘The bastards – TV guys too – they’ve been calling all morning,’ Mahoney said, ‘asking what Hassie was doing here.’
    ‘What’d you tell them?’
    ‘The truth, sort of.’
    That was Mahoney: a man who told the truth – sort of.
    ‘I told them,’ Mahoney said, ‘that I had known Reza when he was a kid and had known his dad all my life. I said Hassan had stopped by because he was here in town for somethin’, I didn’t know what, but since he was here and he knew I’d want to know how his dad was doin’ after his heart attack, he stopped by to tell me. I also told them that Hassan and his family had gotten a pretty good grilling from the cops, this maybe being understandable, but that we had to watch out we didn’t ruin their lives because of what his brother did.’
    ‘But you didn’t tell them Hassan thought the FBI’s story had a bunch of holes in it and he wanted you to get him some answers.’
    ‘No. Hell , no!’
    Mahoney brooded for a moment over the political liability of having his picture in the paper with the father of a dead terrorist.
    ‘So what’d you find out?’ he said to DeMarco.
    DeMarco told him.
    ‘You think it means anything, this yahoo’s fingerprint on the bullet box?’
    DeMarco shrugged. ‘If I was placing a bet, I’d put my money on the Bureau’s explanation. Reza probably bought the gun from this Cray character like they think, and when the FBI finds Cray he’ll admit it.’
    ‘So you think Reza just woke up one day and decided to kill his family and crash a plane into the White House?’
    ‘I guess,’ DeMarco said. ‘There wasn’t anything I learned from Homeland Security that would make me think different.’
    ‘Well, I don’t buy it,’ Mahoney said, his big stubborn chin jutting outward. ‘I’ve been thinkin’ about this a whole lot since his brother was here, and I think Hassan’s right. There has to be something more goin’ on than what the Bureau thinks. In fact, I’m sure there is.’
    But DeMarco knew that Mahoney wasn’t so sure that he’d say what he’d just said to the press – or the Bureau.
    ‘So what do you want me to do?’ DeMarco said. ‘I’m going on vacation next week.’
    ‘For now, just keep your ear to the ground. Stay in touch with Homeland Security and make sure the FBI’s really looking for this Cray guy.’
    DeMarco didn’t have the authority to make the FBI do anything, so all he did was nod his head. He wasn’t worried about the FBI diligently