Off the Grid, page 25
“No. Of course, don’t do that. How much money do you want?”
Koa feigned irritation. “Don’t insult me. I want to return these pictures to you in person.”
“Where?”
“Right here in Hilo.”
“In Hilo?” The voice showed relief.
“Yes, right here in Hilo and soon, before I change my mind.” Koa sank the hook deeper. “You wouldn’t want me to change my mind, would you?”
“Where would I meet you?”
“Call me at this number tomorrow, and I’ll tell you where to meet.”
“Why not tell me now?”
“Because we’ll meet alone and in the place of my choosing.”
Koa had conditioned Nihoa for the next act of the drama he and Zeke had planned. Nihoa might be suspicious, but he’d have to show up. He couldn’t afford to let Sapada’s papers become public. Koa ended the call. He wanted to go back to the listening post, but he knew the officers would call him if they heard anything. Waiting was agony.
* * *
Koa’s cell went off at three a.m. and he hurried to the listening post. Nihoa had called Rachael Ortega at home. The two had spoken for forty-five minutes about the Sapada documents, the police investigation, and the Indonesians. They’d speculated about who’d found the documents and his motivation for wanting to return them. The man praised Rachael’s loyalty and renewed his promise of a great reward for her in the near future. The call ended with an exchange of intimate endearments.
Koa used many analogies to describe what he did for a living—he peeled away the layers of onions—turned over rocks—peered through a glass darkly—but lifting the veil was one of his favorites. The intercepted call lifted the veil around Rachael Ortega. Raul Oshoa hadn’t enticed her to Hawai‘i with a big signing bonus. She wasn’t in it for the money. She had somehow met a powerful man and been seduced by the promise of a bright political future. With glowing stars in her eyes, she’d sold her soul.
Koa called Zeke, and they met in the prosecutor’s office. Together they replayed the conversation.
“Okay,” said Koa, “now for the last act.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Koa’s prepaid cell phone rang. “Where do we meet?” Nihoa asked.
“Come to the back of the abandoned bank building on the corner of Kalakaua and Kamehameha. The back door will be open. Come alone. Up the back stairs at midnight.” Koa hung up.
Zeke had worried that Koa might be recognized. He was well known to Nihoa. They weighed that risk against a greater threat—their inability to predict how Nihoa would react. Koa, who knew the case inside and out, was best prepared to deal with any unexpected actions on Nihoa’s part.
To improve their odds, Koa turned to a local theater makeup artist, who padded Koa’s shoulders and stomach, streaked his hair with gray, built up his cheeks, and added a false nose, three days’ growth of beard, heavy black eyebrows, and owlish wire-rim glasses. When she applied a large black mole near his nose, he protested that she’d gone too far.
“Go with it. The eye always focuses on an obvious blemish and overlooks most everything else.”
He knew she was right. When she finished working, he’d dressed in a loud, oversized aloha shirt and size 44 jeans. He appeared to have gained sixty pounds. Even Nālani wouldn’t have recognized him. Then while he waited for the appointed hour, he practiced altering his voice, dropping it down the register and adding a twang.
Because he’d heard the two DIA spooks, Christopher and Nelson, reporting to Nihoa on one of the wiretap lines, Koa wasn’t surprised when they drove Nihoa into downtown Hilo and parked up the street from the rendezvous location. Koa had concealed cops on every corner for two blocks in all directions, and one of them reported Nihoa’s arrival.
Nihoa approached the abandoned bank building by himself and looked around to be sure he wasn’t under observation. He entered the building and stood in silence for more than a minute before heading toward the wooden staircase.
Four police officers surrounded the parked car where the two DIA spooks sat waiting. Christopher started to yell out a warning before Sergeant Basa rammed the barrel of his pistol into the side of the agent’s neck. The warning died on Christopher’s lips. The two agents protested, threatening arrest, jail, and disgrace, but their warnings went unheeded as the police handcuffed them, placed them in patrol cars, and bundled them off to the county jail.
The kepala, unaware of the arrests taking place a block away, reached the top of the stairs in the old bank. Light pouring through an open door guided him into the room where Koa in disguise sat behind a small desk.
Photographs of the lieutenant colonel in uniform as well as several of the more pornographic pictures lay spread across the desk. A NATO document prominently stamped TOP SECRET partially covered one of the photographs.
“Sit down,” Koa instructed. He spoke in a deep voice, pointing to the chair stationed about six feet in front of the desk.
“I don’t have much time,” Nihoa said.
“Don’t patronize me,” Koa snapped. “You have as much time as it takes to get these pictures back, and you know it.”
Nihoa sat down. “Are we alone?”
They were alone if you didn’t count the microphones connected to the concealed recording system, the two policemen in the room next door, and Zeke behind another connecting door. “Do you see anybody else here?” Koa asked. His cold voice echoed in the small room.
“Then we should be able to wrap this up very quickly.” Nihoa spoke in an unnaturally loud voice, almost as if firing off commands. Koa grasped the significance of the signal. Nihoa was wearing a transmitter and had just signaled the two agents to come upstairs to help him reclaim the photographs.
“Tell me about the woman.” Koa held up the picture of her riding the lieutenant colonel.
The man frowned. “That fuckin’ Yugoslav whore, Dejana, suckered me. She worked in a German sex club where I used to go to relax, you know, to get a little on the side when my wife was having our kid.” The man paused before adding, “Dejana was hot, and there was nothing, I mean nothing, she wouldn’t do.” The man’s frown morphed into a leer. “After the first few times, we started going to her place, a tiny little squat with this big fuckin’ bed. I never guessed the bitch was a damn Chinese spy.”
Koa kept his face impassive. “When did you find out she worked for the Chinese?” Koa reversed the picture to display the Chinese lettering.
“Worst day of my life. Dejana was so blisterin’ hot takin’ me up to her apartment, kissing me, and rubbing my crotch. Then she opens the door, and three chinks grab me. They’d been watchin’ me screw her for weeks. Musta had six hidden cameras in that squat. They were gonna send the pictures to my wife, my boss, the counterintelligence guys, maybe even my mother. I didn’t have a choice.”
“That’s when you sent Sapada into the embassy?”
The man glanced toward the door before turning back to face Koa. “I wasn’t gonna let those chink assholes own me.”
“But Sapada doubled-crossed you?”
“Rotten cocksucker.”
“How’d Sapada come to be in Hawai‘i? You help set him up?”
“Nah. Son of a bitch had it in for me. Told me he’d watch every fuckin’ thing I did. Not sure how he pulled it off, except I heard he knew some old-time buddy of Oshoa’s.”
“Twenty thousand a month. That’s a lot of money.”
“Yeah, but he wanted more. A month ago, he upped the ante. The greedy prick.” Nihoa shifted nervously. He turned to look back at the door.
Koa decided to twist the screws. “Expecting someone?”
“Nah, but it’s warm in here. Are you gonna give me the pictures? I’ll pay you.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Okay, okay.” Nihoa shifted. Beads of sweat appeared across his forehead.
Koa understood. The man’s backup, his insurance, hadn’t come through. He was getting frantic. Koa could see it in his body language. The man’s right hand slid down to his outside jacket pocket and closed around the butt of a gun.
“Drop the gun,” Koa ordered.
As Nihoa turned in response, he found himself staring down the barrel of Koa’s Glock. “Nice and easy. Drop the gun to the floor.” Nihoa let go of the gun, and it clattered on the boards. “Kick it over here.” Nihoa obeyed. Koa laid his own gun on the table within easy reach. “Now we can finish our conversation, and I can give you your pictures. Okay?”
“Okay,” the man responded softly.
“Now tell me, a month ago when Sapada asked for more, how much did he want?” Koa was enjoying himself.
“Double … he wanted double.”
Good, Koa thought. He thinks I’m ultimately going to ask for money and he’s haggling. “From 20K a month to 40K?”
“Yeah, and that wasn’t gonna be the end of it. He’d want more. He was always gonna want more, more, more. He was gonna suck me dry.”
“That’s when you decided on extreme measures?”
“Hey, hey, what is this?” Alarm sounded in Nihoa’s voice.
“Settle down.” Koa kept his deep voice soft and friendly. “I know what happened to Sapada, and I don’t want to suffer the same fate.”
“Just give me the pictures.” The man spoke rapidly, his nervousness getting the better of him. “I’ll give you whatever you want, and that’ll be the end of it. Sapada was different. He kept upping the ante, the greedy bastard. I had to put an end to it.”
“How did you get Rachael to do it?”
The question was asked so casually, his target forgot who he was talking to. “Stupid fuckin’ cunt. She made a mess of it with those two assholes from Indonesia. They were supposed to get the pictures from Sapada, not kill him and his girlfriend. But Sapada wouldn’t cooperate, and the Indonesians got sloppy and killed him.”
“How did you hook Rachael into it?”
“She was a naïve cunt. You give ’em a little sex, a little money, promises of a fancy job. They’re yours. It’s easy.” Koa realized, to his disgust, Nihoa was bragging.
“You met her in Washington, didn’t you, when she worked on the hill for the House Armed Services Committee?”
“Yeah, she was a sucker for the uniform.”
Koa stood up, making a gesture like a party host. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
Nihoa began to panic. “Hey, hey. You said we were alone. What’s going on?”
One of the side doors opened, and Rachael Ortega entered the room. The woman looked haggard, and her handcuffs rattled as she advanced, glaring at Nihoa. “So your stupid fuckin’ cunt made a mess of it,” Rachael shrieked, “because she followed your directions! And you would be elected governor.”
The man whirled back toward Koa, pointing an accusing finger. Then he jerked around again as Zeke Brown stepped through the other side door, followed by two uniformed policemen. “Nāinoa Nihoa, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to murder Ernesto Sapada and Lan Zwang.”
Koa felt satisfaction, relief, and sadness as the cops handcuffed Nihoa and led him away. He and Zeke had nailed the bastard, successfully ending another major case. He’d ended the threat to Nālani and saved his job. He grinned at the prospect of telling the chief. But mostly, he found the story painful. Nihoa had embarrassed his country, wrecked Sapada’s career, driven the hero into exile, and ultimately killed him. All to cover up his screwing a whore.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“WE ARRESTED NĀINOA Nihoa and Rachael Ortega for conspiracy to commit murder. And we got the two DIA agents for obstruction of justice,” Koa announced as he walked into the chief’s office at seven a.m. the following morning. The smile on his face hid Koa’s still simmering anger at the way the chief had treated him.
“You did what?” The color drained from the chief’s face.
“Your buddy Nihoa masterminded the Campbell murders. He’s in jail as we speak. I hate to tell you, but he isn’t running for governor anymore.”
Koa would have paid a fortune for a photo of the stunned look on the chief’s face. “Jesus Christ, you’d better have an airtight case.”
“The evidence will put him away for life, if the feds don’t hang him for treason.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Calm down, Chief. Let me tell you what we’ve got.” Koa outlined the nature of the complex sting operation and the evidence. The chief sat in cowed silence. When Koa finally finished, summarizing his tape-recorded exchange with Nihoa in the abandoned bank building, the room remained silent for long beats.
Finally, the chief spoke. “How—how did you know?”
Koa almost responded, “Good detective work,” but kept the resentment out of his voice. “It all fell into place when I saw the Chinese markings on the back of those photographs. The classified documents and Sapada’s tape only reinforced the damage the traitorous son of a bitch did to his country.”
The chief was starting to recover. Nihoa might be out of the picture, but the chief was around to stay. “Are you sorry you saved the SOB’s life?”
“Hell no, Chief. He’d have died a martyr,” Koa pointed out. “This way, every American will see Nihoa for the cockroach he really was.”
“And the DIA boys, when did you figure out their game?”
“No disrespect, but I knew they were squirrely from the beginning. After we agreed to return the CIA file, CIA Deputy Director Blaines tipped us that the DIA agents were freelancing for the DIA deputy director, who served in NATO headquarters during the Kosovo war. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was working with Nihoa to cover his own ass.”
“And Ortega?” the chief asked.
“We knew Oshoa or one of his people had to be an accomplice, but we weren’t sure who till we heard Nihoa and Ortega talking on a wiretap. Once we had the wiretap, we flipped her. It wasn’t hard. She started out tough but crumbled like stale bread. She admitted forging Jorge Chavez’s name to the temporary work permit applications, monitoring the listening devices in my home and office, and passing information to the DIA agents and the Indonesians. And you should’ve seen her face after Nihoa called her a stupid cunt. She’d have killed him if she hadn’t been handcuffed.”
“What was her motive?” the chief asked.
“Nihoa played her. It started back when they were both in D.C. Nihoa sweet-talked her into bed, and she thought they were in love. Fed him info about personnel decisions, budgets, and military appropriations from the Armed Services Committee while he was in the Pentagon and after he was assigned to Kosovo.”
“How’d she get out here?” the chief interjected.
“When Nihoa got out of the service in June ’99, and became deputy undersecretary of defense, it was only a two-year deal. He planned to move back to Hawai‘i, run for state representative, and parlay that job into a run for governor. Then Sapada started blackmailing him. Nihoa was in D.C. and didn’t want to pass the money himself, so he recruited Ortega with promises of marriage, a job in his administration when he became governor, and the glamour of living in Hawai‘i. Nihoa knew Oshoa, the anticommunist and Republican moneyman, from his time in D.C., and leaned on Oshoa to give Rachael a job.”
The chief shook his head. “She doesn’t sound all that bright.”
“Love, ambition, and greed warped her judgment. That’s for sure.”
“She puts Oshoa in the clear?”
“Yeah, Chief. Oshoa was straight with us. One of Oshoa’s old anticommunist buddies was Sapada’s mentor at the Army War College. The guy put in a good word for Sapada, and Oshoa sold him a life estate on an unused parcel of land. That, his friendship with Nihoa, and undeserved trust in Ortega were Oshoa’s only failings.”
“Strange.”
Koa nodded. He’d seen the look on the chief’s face many times before: gratitude that his chief detective was so good at what he did. “I guess I owe you an apology,” the chief acknowledged.
Koa wanted to laugh. The chief had fired him. But for Zeke’s intervention, he’d have stayed fired, Basa and Piki would have quit, and Nihoa would have been elected governor. The chief’s apology felt like a joke.
“You owe the entire department an apology. The whole force knows you laid off people because you were campaigning for Nihoa and angling for the homeland security job in his administration. And the troops are royally pissed about it.”
The chief appeared incredulous. “The whole department?”
“Yes, the whole department. The troops have been talking about nothing else for the last week.”
“Jesus,” he said, and Koa could tell he was scheming for a way out. “I take it you have recommendations for me?”
“You need to make an announcement canceling the layoffs. And a personal apology to Smithy and some of the others you targeted would go a long way toward restoring morale.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“I think it’s what you have to do, if you want to continue to be an effective leader of the force.”
“I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do I?”
“No, not much.” Then Koa added, “Oh, and here’s the good news. The county prosecutor is holding a news conference at ten o’clock this morning to announce the arrests. He wants you to join him.”
EPILOGUE
THE NEWS THAT Hawai‘i County police had arrested Nāinoa Nihoa and Rachael Ortega for conspiracy to murder Ernesto Sapada and Lan Zwang caused turmoil. Nihoa’s supporters marched on the Hilo police station demanding his release. But the political repercussions in Hawai‘i were nothing compared to the superstorm that struck Washington after Koa played the Sapada tape for CIA Deputy Director Clancy Blaines.
A week later, the U.S. attorney in Washington indicted Nihoa for espionage and treason. In the Senate, the Armed Services, Intelligence, and Judiciary Committees announced hearings into the scandal, to be followed by House of Representatives committees on the Armed Services, Government Operations, and Foreign Relations. The military, the DIA, and the CIA all retreated to their defensive corners. The deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency resigned, followed by two Air Force generals and three top CIA officials.
