Justifiable Homicide: A Political Thriller (Robert Paige Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  As they approached the entrance to the garage, they saw a young girl walking a small Chihuahua on a leash. She appeared to be about 12 years old, with pigtails, and wearing clothes that looked like hand-me-downs. All of a sudden, the dog stopped, squatted and made a brown deposit on the sidewalk just ahead of them. After finishing its business, the girl and the dog continued walking.

  The Boss saw what happened and became enraged. “Hey! You! Get back here and pick that up! Didn’t your parents teach you anything?” He increased his pace and started walking toward her quickly.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I didn’t bring any paper with me. I can’t pick it up.”

  The Boss’s yelling and aggressive movements caused the dog to become defensive, thinking its master was being attacked. It started yapping at the Boss. The girl had to hold the leash tight to prevent it from taking a bite out of his ankle. He stepped forward and kicked it in the side, hard, causing it to yelp and fly a few feet into the air. The girl screamed and ran to comfort her dog, which was cowering and limping on its right side, its brown eyes sadly looking up at the Boss.

  “If you can’t clean up after your dog, you shouldn’t have one.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I’ll bring paper next time.”

  Wellington remained silent as he saw what happened. He knew better than to confront the Boss when he was angry, which was often.

  Wellington had some apprehension about the plan. Now he also had to worry about the possible problems Tomás might cause if he refused to obey a direct order. Although Wellington agreed with the general idea – to get rid of traitors – they would be turning up the heat by adding multiple targets to the list. At some point, the local police and FBI would start to see a pattern and would devote extra resources to finding out who the serial killers were. Their contacts within the police department and FBI might be able to give them some information and alert them when they were getting too close, but it was a risky business. He started to get nervous about the Boss’s plan to ratchet up their mission.

  55

  “Sarah, may I help you with something?” Paige and Sveta were having dinner at the Wellington’s home on the edge of the Everglades. It was more or less in the country. The air smelled fresh and the birds chirped, but the area had been getting built up in recent years. In a few years, it would probably be in the middle of a suburb. It took Wellington less than an hour to get to downtown Miami, even during rush hour.

  “Oh, no thanks, Sveta. Everything’s under control. On second thought, maybe you can make the salad.” She pointed to the left. “The ingredients are all on the table over there.”

  Sarah, John’s wife, was medium-height with brown eyes and dark blonde hair that came partially out of a bottle. A few pounds overweight. Her body morphed from firm to soft over the last decade, like many suburban housewives in the late stage of their child-bearing years.

  She had taken a liking to Sveta since Paige started seeing her a few years ago. They got together every few months. Sarah didn’t know that John met with Paige on a more regular basis. She thought of Paige as just a nice accounting professor and John as just one of Paige’s former students who worked for the Commerce Department.

  Sveta walked over to the table and picked up the freshly rinsed arugula and romaine. “How did you and John meet?”

  “We met while we were undergraduates at the University of Florida. John was a political science major. I studied French.”

  Paige overheard the conversation and decided to chime in. “So, Sarah, do you keep up with your French?” Paige fancied himself a bit of an amateur linguist. He picked up some French, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish over the years, enough to hold a conversation, and was curious to know how other people learn languages.

  “Not really. I read some things on the internet in French once in a while and I subscribe to some electronic newsletters, but that’s about it. With the kids and work, I really don’t have much time to read. I haven’t read a French novel in years.”

  “That’s too bad. It’s nice to maintain skills in a second language, especially French. It’s the language of diplomacy.”

  “Yeah, about two centuries ago,” Wellington chimed in, chuckling. He liked to make jokes about the French and he liked hearing them.

  Wellington continued. “Other than the literature, I don’t know what about the French is worth studying. They’re a bunch of socialists. Their economy and culture are falling apart. It’s not even a good place to visit anymore.”

  Paige didn’t exactly disagree, but he did manage to find a few positive things to say about the French. “That’s not quite true, John. The history and architecture are quite interesting, and the food, too. And I almost forgot, they did save our ass during the American Revolution.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that. If it weren’t for the French, we would be speaking English today. And if it weren’t for us, they’d be speaking German.” Wellington smirked at his comment about speaking English. He thought it was clever.

  Sveta was curious about Wellington’s statement. Her eyebrows furrowed as she asked, “John, why do you say that it’s not a good place to visit anymore? I was in Paris when I was in transit to America and I thought it was a nice place.”

  “It’s swarming with Muslims. They’re trying to cram their views down the throats of the French people. They want the French judicial system to adopt Sharia law. They block traffic on Fridays by praying in the streets. It’s illegal, but they defy the police to do anything about it. They insult French women who wear short skirts or who don’t wear a scarf, and call them whores. The police are spineless. They’re too afraid to do anything.

  “They’ve reached a critical mass, especially in the big cities. They’re starting to take over. And their birth rate’s higher than the local population. Between popping out Muslim babies and liberal immigration, it won’t be long before they control France.”

  Paige added, “You have a point, John. It’s tough to have the kind of secular society the French people want if they allow a group of outsiders to call the shots.”

  “The problem is, they’re not outsiders any more. They become French citizens, although their loyalty is to Mecca or to their religion. They speak French, but they prefer the language of their home country. They refuse to obey French law if it conflicts with Sharia law. The French nation as we know it is dying.”

  Sarah got depressed listening to their conversation. “OK, guys. Dinner’s ready. Come to the dining room.”

  Wellington and Paige walked into the dining room. Sarah and Sveta put the food on the table. Jack and Alicia sat at their assigned places, waiting to start. Jack, their 12-year-old son, was into baseball. He played in a league. Wellington volunteered to be one of the coaches and tried to get to as many of the games as he could. He couldn’t be the head coach because his job prevented him from being at some of the games, but he did what he could.

  Alicia, their 6-year-old daughter, had brown hair and brown eyes like her mother, and pasty white skin, like her parents. She took dance lessons. Sarah drove her to and from lessons.

  Wellington led the brief prayer. Paige was an agnostic. He abandoned Catholicism years ago and never replaced it, but whenever anyone started a meal with a prayer, he kept his mouth shut and went along with it out of respect for their beliefs. He always managed to say amen at the end if called for.

  When Sveta first came to America, she thought it was a strange practice to speak to God before meals, or at any other time. Atheism was the official religion of Russia during the communist era and the government suppressed talk about religion. She grew up with no religion, although she wasn’t quite an atheist. She wondered what the truth was when it came to religion but didn’t make an effort to read up on it. All she knew was that being a Christian in America was good and being anything else was bad. She wondered why people who called themselves Christian sometimes disagreed on which version of Christianity was the best one. She had read that, a few hundred years
ago, people used to kill each other over that question.

  “Jack, take off your cap. We’re eating.” Jack liked to wear his baseball cap everywhere, even in the house. Wellington tried to break him of the habit, at least at the dinner table. He removed it and hung it up on his chair post.

  “Jack’s team won yesterday, 26 to 21. It was a real pitching duel.”

  “Yeah, it must have been.” The score reminded Paige of his days of playing sandlot baseball. It was easier to get a hit than to strike someone out. If anyone got out it was because they hit a fly ball that someone caught. There weren’t many strikeouts in sandlot ball. They usually didn’t even bother to keep score. They just played for the fun of it.

  Sarah chimed in. “John’s been coaching the team whenever he can. He goes to most of the games.”

  “Yeah, they’ve won two games so far this season.”

  “How many games have they played?”

  “About seven, I think. We try not to emphasize the win-loss ratio because it might damage their self-esteem.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard about that.”

  “Yeah, we also give everyone on every team a trophy at the end of the season.”

  “Really, why do you do that? Doesn’t that destroy the value of a trophy?”

  “The people who make the rules don’t think so. They think that giving out a bunch of trophies boosts their self-esteem. I might also add that each member of the team that has the most wins gets a second trophy, which is larger than the other trophies.”

  Paige smiled. “Well, I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t want them to turn into a bunch of egalitarians.”

  Wellington chuckled. He understood where Paige was coming from. He thought the same way himself. It reminded him of something he read on the internet.

  “Did you know that some high schools in California nominate everyone in the graduating class to be valedictorian?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. Why do they do that?”

  “It’s partially a self-esteem issue and partially to help their graduating seniors get into college. If it’s on their transcript that they were valedictorian, the principal thinks it will boost their chances of getting admitted somewhere and getting a scholarship.”

  “Isn’t that a sham? Even fraudulent?”

  “Yeah, I suppose it is. But I read that most college admissions committees know which California high schools do that, so they disregard it when they make their decisions about who to admit or give scholarships to.”

  “Doesn’t that discriminate against the best students, the ones who could have actually been the valedictorian?”

  “Sure, but the people who make the rules in the California high schools don’t think that’s important. It’s more important to help all students than to recognize the achievement of the best students.”

  Paige smirked. “I don’t think Ayn Rand would approve.”

  Wellington smiled. “I hear you.” He was somewhat familiar with Ayn Rand and her philosophy. He had read Atlas Shrugged in a college literature class and had read portions of her Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Rothbard’s Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature in a political science class. He wasn’t a big fan of egalitarianism, in spite of the indoctrination he received from his professors as an undergraduate.

  He also rejected most of the corporate social responsibility gibberish his management professors tried to cram down his throat as part of his MBA program. He believed that, as a private club, a corporation’s main duty was to its club members – shareholders - and that corporations should try to maximize profits any way they could, as long as they didn’t break any laws or resort to lying, cheating or stealing. That’s the position Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, took, and he agreed with it.

  “Jack, what did you learn in school this week?” Sveta was curious to learn what students were being taught in American schools. When she was Jack’s age in Moscow, she was learning math, science and Marxism for kiddies. Paige once told her, half jokingly, that American kids learned the same things, except without the math and science.

  “I learned that Florida’s going to be covered with water in 50 years because of global warming and that smoke stacks kill people. I want to move but daddy doesn’t want to.”

  Sveta was shocked. She didn’t expect to hear that. She didn’t know what his reply would be but she didn’t expect that.

  John chimed in, “Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff they’re teaching in school these days. The teachers are telling them the government has to do something to prevent us from killing the planet. We’re thinking of sending him to a private school, but doing that would be expensive.”

  Paige suggested, “Maybe the Florida legislature will get around to passing a voucher law that will let you decide where to send Jack and Alicia.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. The teachers’ union’s against it. They don’t want to have the government break up their little public school monopoly. They’re in favor of choice when it comes to abortion but not when it comes to educating your own kids. They think they know what’s best.”

  “That’s just a little hypocritical, don’t you think?”

  “Sure, but they never let logic get in the way of pushing their agenda. I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

  “Maybe you could move to France.” They both laughed.

  After dinner, Wellington and Paige started to walk out to the patio in the back yard while Sarah and Sveta cleared the table, picking up some of the food and dishes and depositing them in the kitchen along the way.

  Sarah saw them picking up a few plates. “Don’t do that. I’ll take care of it.”

  Since they already had some dishes in their hands, and since they were going in the direction of the kitchen anyway, they decided to continue walking toward the kitchen. Although Sarah appreciated the thought, she preferred to be in charge of the kitchen, including the before and after details. She was a bit of a control freak when it came to food and the kitchen. John never put the stuff where she would have put it, which required her to search for the leftover food before putting it back in the fridge.

  After they were on the patio and out of earshot, Wellington turned toward Paige. “Do you have anything to report on Steinman and his merry little band of commie bastards? The Boss likes to keep informed.”

  Paige smiled. They both knew they weren’t communists, just a bunch of well-meaning social democrats and socialists, although Wellington wasn’t nearly as sympathetic toward them as Paige. Whereas Paige regarded them as misguided, Wellington saw them as enemies of the state.

  “Maybe I should talk directly to the Boss. After all, it’s on a need to know basis, and I don’t know if you’re authorized to have this kind of information. What’s his phone number? Maybe we can invite him for a beer.”

  “Nice try, Bob.” Wellington saw right through Paige’s ploy, which was more of a joke than a suggestion. Paige knew that Wellington would never set up a face-to-face meeting with the Boss.

  “What’s his name, again? I forgot.”

  Wellington just smiled. Paige continued.

  “What color hair does he have? Does he even have hair? How tall is he?”

  “He’s just tall enough that his feet reach the ground. And yes, he has hair, but I’m not going to tell you the color. I’m not going to tell you the color of his eyes, either, although I can tell you that he has two of them.”

  “Well, that’s a start. At least you’re not stonewalling me.”

  “I try to be helpful when I can.”

  “Does he ever wear high heels on weekends?”

  “No. You’re getting him confused with J. Edgar Hoover.”

  Paige knew he wasn’t going to get any information out of Wellington, but he did wonder who the Boss was and how active he was in this project. Failure to know the Boss’s identity might cause problems for him later and he knew it. He just hoped that failure to know wouldn’
t prove to be fatal.

  56

  Paige picked up his phone. “Hi, Bob? Saul here. I’m going to have a little get-together tomorrow evening. Can you make it?”

  “Sure. What time?”

  “How about 7?”

  “That will be fine. Your place, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s not Friday but I might have some meat anyway, probably sandwiches.”

  “Fine. See you then.” Paige hung up and immediately called Wellington.

  “John? Hi. It’s Bob.”

  “Hi. Do you have some news for me?” Wellington stood by the window of his Commerce Department office, giving instructions to his assistant. She sensed it was a personal call and left the room.

  “Yes. I just got off the phone with Steinman. He’s going to have his next meeting tomorrow night.”

  “You know what to do. Let us know what he’s up to and get the names of the people who attend. Use that pen I gave you.”

  A few months ago, Wellington gave Paige a pen that took photos and could record up to three hours of conversation.

  “OK. Will do.” Paige didn’t feel comfortable spying on his new friend, yet he continued to commit overt acts that would put Steinman one step closer to extinction, like telling the CIA about the meeting. He didn’t like what he was doing, but he kept doing it anyway. He was in too deep to back out now.

  After they hung up, Wellington placed a call to his Boss to inform him of the meeting.

  Steinman also called Rachel to invite her to the meeting. He hoped to get another look at her … assets. She immediately called Turetsky to give him the information.

  “Sergei, it’s Rachel. I just got off the phone with Saul Steinman. He has invited me to his next meeting. It’s tomorrow night.” She was squeezing a pen in her other hand. She was tense, but it was a good kind of tense, one borne of excitement.

  “That’s great news. Try to determine who the mole is. Get as much information on him as you can, where he works, where he lives, anything else that would be useful.”