Quentin drove across the Rock Creek Bridge into the city proper, trailed by the two tail cars, the Crown Vic and Steve’s machine, a nondescript dark-colored late-model sedan. There was plenty of traffic and Steve was a skilled shadower, so he had no trouble keeping tabs on his quarry and the unknown second party who’d interjected himself into the scene. Steve didn’t even have to stick too close to Quentin; all he had to do was keep his sights on the Crown Vic that was following the Cadillac.
The three cars threaded a maze of streets named for the letters of the alphabet and the states of the union. Steve used all of the shadower’s tricks, sometimes fading back, other times passing both vehicles and letting them overtake him, occasionally pulling over to the curb and switching off his lights for a few beats to make it look like he’d reached his destination, then falling in behind a van or truck and using it as cover to switch on his lights and resume the pursuit.
Several times, he caught a glimpse of the Crown Vic’s driver and lone occupant, a big guy with close-cropped dark hair and a mustache. Only a glimpse, though; he didn’t want the other guy to get too good a look at him and realize that the tailer was being tailed. Steve had an advantage in that he’d followed Quentin for several nights previously and had a pretty good idea where he was going; the sequence of stops might vary, but the ultimate destination remained the same.
Like an iron filing drawn by a magnet, the Cadillac traced a course away from the blocks of federal office buildings and well-lit monuments, arrowing toward the raunchier side of town, a vice district in all but name.
Of course, that was all a matter of perspective, Steve sourly reflected; to the taxpayer, the whole governmental apparatus could be considered a vice district, the difference being that unlike the politicians, the screwing the hookers gave you was a lot more straightforward and honest.
The shadow man who was tailing Quentin injected a new variable into the equation, one that Steve didn’t like so well. He’d already gotten a feel for Quentin’s habits and rhythms, and had pretty well worked out how and when he was going to carry out the sanction. The newcomer was a complicating factor, and that never boded well for an operation. For one thing, it indicated that a third party was involved.
Steve was operating solo on this assignment, but he was part of a larger apparatus; the same could be true of the stranger.
Durwood Quentin III was a person of interest to any number of outside interests, official and otherwise. He had a blueblood pedigree. His people were Old Money; he’d attended the right prep schools, graduated from an Ivy League college and postgrad business school, and been slotted into a fast-track position in a prestigious Wall Street brokerage house. He’d married a former debutante, the heiress to a considerable fortune herself, and fathered a couple of kids on her. He belonged to the right clubs, played a good game of tennis and a fair game of golf.
He’d had all the advantages, but inevitably, his true nature had asserted itself and brought him to his present delicate condition. He was a plunger and long-shot bettor with other people’s money, namely his clients’ financial accounts. He had the temperment of a degenerate gambler, always doubling up and redoubling on ever riskier speculations, finally descending to outright fraud and chicanery.
He’d posted spectacular profits at first, at least on paper, but came a day when he couldn’t make a margin call, and the entire towering pyramid of options and hedges and credit-default certificates and junk bonds had all come tumbling down like a house of cards.
His family were big-money contributors to the current administration in the White House; their clout had kept him from being prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock fraud. By then, his marriage was already long defunct; his compulsive womanizing had seen to that.
The Quentin name and family conections still counted for something, Durwood using them to land himself a post as CEO of Brinker Defense Systems, a Washington-based defense contractor. There was no such person named Brinker associated with the company, as it turned out; the name was an inside joke cooked up by its founders, alluding to the fact that they skated on the brink of solvency and legality.
Quentin made a perfect front man, exploiting his contacts with a clique of civilian political appointees in the Pentagon’s procurement department to land Brinker some nice fat contracts. Brinker’s products proved to be of the same quality as the bad paper Quentin had been pushing at the brokerage house: defective, when not actually nonexistent.
The sweet ride had hit a speed bump when Brinker landed a deal to supply weapons to Iraqi and Afghani police forces that were being trained and equipped by the U.S. Army. The company couldn’t just stiff the Army; they had to deliver something. Operating through some accommodating defense ministers in a tiny Balkan state who served as front men for the transaction, they bought a quantity of arms and ammunition from the People’s Republic of China. The matériel, surplus equipment left over from the Korean War, was transshipped to Afghanistan and Iraq. So haphazard and slipshod was the operation, that much of the delivery was still packaged in cases bearing the PRC’s original labeling and Red Star insignia. The pistols and rifles were too rusty and antiquated to ever actually hit a target; that is, assuming that the cartridges could even be made to fire.
Brinker might have gotten away with it at that, considering that their high-level civilian friends and co-confederates in the Pentagon were equally minded to sweep the mess under the rug and make it go away.
They hadn’t reckoned on the tenacity and single-minded devotion to duty of one Colonel Millard Sterling. Sterling was career Army and posted to the same procurement department in the Pentagon that had brokered the Brinker arms deal. He might have looked more like an accountant than a warrior, but in his way he was a strike trooper straight down the line.
The contract had been granted despite his opposition, thanks to the influence wielded by political appointees, and he was determined to expose the whole rotten mess. He couldn’t be bluffed, bought, or scared. Pressure came down from above, giving him the time-honored bureaucratic screw job, relegating him to the Pentagon’s version of Siberia and career limbo. Sterling stubbornly kept at it, building a file of relevant documents and affadavits, collecting a damning paper trail that led straight back to the malefactors. He kept going through channels, filing reports, bombarding the higher-ups with the naked facts. Worse, some officials were starting to take him seriously.
That’s when Colonel Millard Sterling was found dead in the garage of his modest home in a Virginia suburb, his head virtually blown off by a blast from a shotgun clutched in his hands.
Suicide, his detractors said. It proved he’d been delusional from the start, causing him to construct a paranoid fantasy about alleged irregularities in the Brinker arms deal and, ultimately, take his own life. His grieving family swore he’d never owned a shotgun, but that was sloughed off as the understandable blindness of relatives unable to come to grips with the fact of their loved one’s self-destruction.
The Brinker affair seemed to have died stillborn, only to be revived some months later when a long-term congressman and high-level member of the House Armed Services Committee involved with military procurement was arrested by the FBI in connection with an unrelated bribery investigation.
Under intensive grilling and with the threat of a lengthy prison term, the representative spilled his guts, unloading his inside account of a massive criminal conspiracy between defense contractors, legislators, and federal officials to defraud the United States government.
Among those implicated were members of the Brinker board of directors. The company went bust and some of its officers went to jail, but not Quentin Durwood III. Having learned his lessons since his brokerage house days, he’d been careful not to leave his tracks on the dirty dealings that had gone down during his tenure as Brinker’s CEO. His accomplices who’d been nabbed pointed the finger at him, but the uncorroborated testimony of convicted felons was inadmissable as