by M. A. Lawson
That was a lie; Kay had no intention of negotiating with anyone.
Shirley stood there for a moment, a frown on her face, trying to digest what she’d just been told. Finally, she came up with a response: “Fuck you,” and slammed the door.
• • •
BROOKES SENT PRESCOTT the recording of Hamilton speaking to Shirley Brown. When Prescott heard it, she closed her eyes. Did Hamilton have to tell Brown the Callahan Group was connected to national security? Jesus Christ! What was wrong with that woman?
• • •
KAY WENT BACK to her car to wait and see what Shirley would do. But Kay didn’t even have to wait ten minutes before a car pulled out of the garage. Kay was surprised to see that the Hells Angels poster girl was driving a Prius. Shirley came out of the driveway fast, the driver’s-side tires running over part of her well-tended lawn and crushing one of the boxwood plants. Shirley was way too drunk to be driving, and Kay hoped she didn’t get pulled over by a cop; the last thing Kay wanted was the cops hauling Shirley away in handcuffs.
Shirley didn’t go more than half a mile before she pulled into a shopping mall on Braddock Road. She drove up to a PNC bank, jumped out of her car, leaving the door open, and ran to the ATM. She fed her card into the machine—and Kay smiled when Shirley began hitting it with her fists.
Kay thought that Shirley would drive back to her place, but instead she drove for half an hour and ended up in Fairfax, stopping in front of a fair-sized house on a corner lot. In addition to the attached two-car garage, most of the large backyard was occupied by a sheet-metal building that had roll-up garage doors.
Shirley walked up to the front door and pounded on it like she was trying to batter it down.
• • •
OTIS WAS SITTING with his family in the living room having what Ginnie thought of as an “intervention,” something she’d picked up from a reality show. Ginnie had found a pack of cigarettes in their twelve-year-old daughter’s backpack and was giving her hell while Otis and the boys just sat there, not sure what they were supposed to do. Every once in a while, Otis would say, “Yeah, that’s right,” to support his wife, but he was really thinking that Ginnie would be in a much better position to lecture their daughter on the evils of tobacco if she herself didn’t smoke. His two sons were just sitting there, trying not to grin, watching their older sister catch hell. Usually they were the targets of Ginnie’s wrath.
Ginnie was in mid–finger wag when someone began pounding on the front door.
“Jesus, who’s that?” Ginnie said.
“I’ll get it,” Otis said. He was afraid that the next words he would hear would be: Open up. It’s the police. He looked through the peephole and sighed. “It’s Shirley. Let me see what she wants.”
Otis opened the door, stepped outside, and closed the door behind him before Shirley could enter the house. “What’s going on, Shirl?” he said.
“I got a big problem,” Shirley said.
“Why? What happened?”
Shirley told him a woman had showed up at her house and wanted to know who Ray had worked with on his last job.
“Was she a cop?”
“No. She said she was worse than a cop, whatever the fuck that means. She said you took a safe from the office of a guy hooked into national security. National security, Otis! Then she told me that if I didn’t give you up, she was going to freeze all our bank accounts and cancel our credit cards.”
Otis noticed she said our, like Ray was still alive.
“I thought she was bullshitting me, so I called Visa, and sure as shit, my card had been canceled. Then I went to the bank and tried to get cash out of the ATM, but the statement said my checking account balance was zero. What am I going to do, Otis? What are you going to do?”
“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t tell her shit. But what are you going to do? I don’t have a job. All I’ve got is the house and the money we’ve put in the bank. And she threatened to have the bank foreclose on the house. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Calm down,” Otis said, “and quit screaming. The whole damn neighborhood can hear you and you’re probably scaring my kids.”
“Fuck you, calm down. I—”
“What’s this woman’s name?”
“She didn’t give me a name.”
“Then what did she look like?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Tall, blond ponytail, pretty.”
Blond ponytail? Otis wondered if it was the same woman who’d killed Quinn.
“Okay,” Otis said. “I’m going to see the guy we did the job for tonight to collect the rest of what he owes us. When I see him, I’ll get some answers about this national security shit. And since Ray’s cut was five hundred grand, you’ll be okay for money until we can sort out all this bank account stuff.”
“But what about my house? What if the bank forecloses like she said?”
“We’ll sort it out, Shirley. Trust me. Now go home. I’ll call you later.”
“Okay, Otis,” she finally said. Then she started blubbering. “God, I miss him. I’ll be sitting there in the house and I’ll catch this motion out of the corner of my eye, like Ray’s still there. I can feel him in the house. I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”
Otis stayed on the porch, watching Shirley until she got in her car and drove away. Just looking at her, you’d never guess how fragile she was. If something ever happened to Otis, Ginnie would grieve and she’d miss him, but she’d be okay in the end. She could survive without him. But Shirley . . . he didn’t know.
He wondered if Shirley had been told the truth—had they messed with national security? You rob a bank, they assign half a dozen agents to track you down; you fuck with national security, the entire government comes after you.
He remembered the aftermath of the Boston Marathon attack and the way they went after those two little Chechen shits: thousands of cops working twenty-four hours a day, going door to door, talking to every person the bombers ever knew, looking at every surveillance camera and seemingly every cell phone photo in Boston. He’d never seen a manhunt like that, and he sure as shit didn’t ever want to be the focus of one.
Otis walked back to the living room and took a seat. If the intervention was having any effect on his daughter, it was hard to tell; she just had this stubborn, You can’t make me do anything look on her face that reminded Otis of Ginnie when she wasn’t going to back down.
“Is everything okay?” Ginnie asked him.
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” he said.
“What did Shirley want?” Ginnie asked.
“I’ll tell you later,” he said, then he pointed his finger at his daughter’s sullen face and said, “And you. You’re gonna knock off the smoking shit. You got it?”
• • •
FROM HER CAR, Kay watched Shirley scream at the guy who came out of the house. He had short dark hair, was tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome in a rough way. He was wearing boots, jeans, and a white T-shirt that showed off hard biceps and a flat stomach.
She could tell by the body language that he was trying to calm Shirley down and wasn’t having much luck. But he must have said something to reassure her, and ten minutes later, Shirley walked unsteadily back to her Prius and drove away. Kay didn’t see any reason to follow her. She needed to know who the guy was. When he went back inside the house, she used her NSA smartphone to do a property search. The house belonged to a guy named Dylan Otis, wife named Virginia.
• • •
BROOKES COULD SEE that Hamilton was stationary in Fairfax, Virginia, and it sounded like she was listening to the radio in her car. He watched on another monitor as Hamilton used her phone to do a property search, and discovered that a house near her location belonged to one Dylan Otis. With a few keystrokes, Brookes learned that Otis had served ti
me for a bungled armored-car robbery when he was seventeen, had no convictions since then, and according to his tax returns, he remodeled cars. He called Prescott immediately.
• • •
KAY TAPPED HER fingers on the steering wheel, thinking, then checked her watch. It was after four. Eagleton should be on duty. She called him.
“I need to know what you’ve got on a guy named Dylan Otis. He lives in Fairfax.”
“I have a job you know,” Eagleton said. “Right now I’m at a double homicide. Two dead bangers. They were selling dope off their designated corner when a couple guys in a car drive by, shoot off about a hundred rounds, blowing out half the windows on the block. Luckily, only the corner boys were killed.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Kay said. “What I’m working on trumps dead dope dealers. Call somebody and have them look up Dylan Otis.”
“Yeah, all right. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Kay wondered how long she should watch Otis’s house. He could stay inside for the rest of the day. She decided to wait until she heard back from Eagleton. Otis could be one of the people who worked with Ray Brown or he could just be a guy who Shirley ran to when she had a problem, a guy with broad shoulders to cry on. But Kay doubted that. And even if Otis was one of the people who stole the safe, Kay didn’t have a plan for what she should do about him.
• • •
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Eagleton called her back.
“Otis did time for an armored-car heist when he was seventeen. And get this. One of the guys who pulled the job with him was his old man. Anyway, his father was killed during the robbery and Otis and two other guys were caught. Otis did five years. He probably would have done more time if he’d been older.
“We don’t have anything on him other than the one conviction. He’s never been arrested here in the District and he’s never been convicted of another crime. But I was curious about him, so I called an FBI guy I know who works banks. He said the Bureau has had Otis on its radar for years. They’re pretty sure he runs a crew that’s pulled a bunch of big-money capers, but they’ve never been able to nail him.”
“Okay, thanks,” Kay said.
“How did you come up with Otis’s name?” Eagleton asked.
“Just stumbled across it,” Kay said.
“Yeah, right. Are you going to tell Mary Platt about him?” Eagleton asked.
“No,” Kay said. Then she added, “At least, not yet. And you’re not going to tell her anything either, Eagleton. You do not want to get in the middle of what’s going on here. This is way above your pay grade. You understand?”
“Yeah, I understand,” Eagleton said.
Kay disconnected from Eagleton. Now what? She was pretty sure that she’d found the guy in charge of the break-in, but—just like the FBI—she didn’t have any hard evidence. She was also pretty sure that Otis was working for somebody. Otis robbed banks and Callahan’s office wasn’t a bank, which meant that somebody had most likely hired him—but she had no idea who that could be. All she knew was that it had to be somebody who cared about the attachment—like the foreign government that the e-mail had been sent to. Otis wasn’t the guy at the top—and she wanted the guy at the top.
• • •
BROOKES CALLED PRESCOTT to tell her about the conversation between Eagleton and Hamilton, and when Prescott didn’t answer, he forwarded the recording to a machine in her office. Brookes wondered where she had gone.
17
DAY 3—5:30 P.M.
Prescott was the first to arrive at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington. The room had a magnificent view of Lincoln’s Memorial, which she ignored. The first thing she did was close the drapes on the extremely remote chance that somebody was pointing a directional microphone at the window, attempting to eavesdrop on the meeting.
Grayson arrived next. Like Prescott, he was in his sixties. He worked at the Pentagon, was privy to intelligence gathered by the DIA, saw the daily briefing reports given to the Joint Chiefs and, most important, controlled large amounts of money given to the DOD. Grayson was tall and lanky, his hair was white and softer than goose down, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses and favored tweed suits. You might mistake him for a college professor—which would be a big mistake. In his youth, Grayson had been a Delta Force soldier who had slit more than a few throats.
The first words out of Grayson’s mouth were, “How’s Callahan doing?”
“He’s still among the living, but just barely. I’m not sure he’s going to make it.”
“Do you have any idea yet who was behind the attack on his office?”
“Let’s wait for Lincoln to get here,” Prescott said, “so I don’t have to tell the story twice.”
Grayson walked over to the minibar, ignored the alcohol, and pulled out a can of ginger ale. “Would you like anything, Olivia?”
“No.” Actually, she felt like having a Scotch but knew she’d be returning to Fort Meade and most likely spending the night there, so she had to keep a clear head.
As they waited for Lincoln, they chatted about some idiotic thing the president had said at a news conference that morning. Neither of them could remember a president they didn’t think was a complete fool.
Lincoln arrived ten minutes later—ten minutes after the stated start time. It was almost unheard of for Lincoln to be tardy.
“I apologize for being late,” he said. “Some idiot ran into another idiot right outside the main gate at Langley.” It was also almost unheard of for Lincoln to apologize.
Lincoln was a big man, six-foot-four, and weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. He had short, gray hair and a big-nosed, craggy face, like it had been chipped out of stone by a myopic sculptor. Not a handsome man, but an impressive and intimidating one.
“Would you like a drink, Lincoln?” Grayson asked.
“No, nothing for me. Well, Olivia, would you care to enlighten us?”
For some reason, Lincoln—to Prescott’s great annoyance—always assumed that he was the one in charge, but the fact was that they were all equals.
As soon as Prescott heard about the attack, she had immediately called Grayson and Lincoln. There was nothing unusual about her talking to these men, considering their relative positions in the intelligence community. She said the same thing to each of them: “I’ll take the lead on the K Street event. I have background you don’t have.” Neither man had asked any questions, but now they wanted to know what had happened.
Prescott quickly told them everything that had transpired since Danzinger called her in London, about the e-mail attachment, and Parker, and what Hamilton was doing.
“Have you identified the spy at Zytek yet?” Grayson asked.
“No, but I’ll find him,” Prescott said. “I have my best man working on that. Then I’ll have the FBI arrest him and find out how much damage he’s done. The spy at Zytek isn’t my biggest concern. The bigger problem is Hamilton.” Prescott shook her head. “If that stubborn bastard Callahan had gotten rid of her after the fiasco in Afghanistan . . .”
“Why on earth did you tell Hamilton anything?” Lincoln said. He’d been brooding the whole time Prescott had been talking.
“I told you why,” Prescott said. “Weren’t you listening? She threatened to give my name to the cops and the media.”
“She was bluffing,” Lincoln said.
“I don’t think Hamilton bluffs,” Prescott said. “The other reason I told her what I did is because we need to know who was behind the attack, and Hamilton is good enough to find whoever it was.”
Lincoln started to object, but Grayson said, “Lincoln, I don’t think we need to worry about Hamilton. All she really knows is that Prescott knew Callahan from his days at the CIA. She has no proof whatsoever that Prescott is working with the Callahan Group.”
Ignoring Grayson, Lincoln said to Prescott,
“Are you sure that she doesn’t know about Grayson or me?”
“Am I sure? No. But as far as I know, Callahan only gave her my name. If Callahan ever regains consciousness, I’ll ask him what else he told her.”
“I’ll say it again,” Grayson said. “I don’t think we need to worry about Hamilton. She can’t talk about the covert missions she did for Callahan because she’d be implicating herself. I also think that young woman is bright enough to know that exposing the Callahan Group could have a disastrous effect on the intelligence agencies, and I don’t think she’d want that to happen.”
“The problem,” Prescott said, “is that we don’t know what she might do in the future. If she’s ever arrested or needs money, maybe she’ll talk. I do not ever want to face the day when she testifies to a congressional committee about the Group and names me as part of the leadership.”
No one said anything for a moment as they envisioned Hamilton telling a roomful of senators about Callahan’s missions, but a Senate investigation would be the least of their problems. They’d be fired, of course, and could even end up in jail.
But it wouldn’t end with them. They had taken funds from their respective agencies—funds earmarked for legitimate operations and programs—and used them to carry out unsanctioned missions. This meant that the organizations they worked for obviously lacked sufficient internal controls, and their bosses would be forced to resign and the president would be crucified by the opposing party. The worst consequence, however, would be that the entire intelligence community would be put under a magnifying glass and Congress would hobble it even more by demanding increased oversight.
Softly, almost as if she were thinking aloud, Prescott said, “We’re vulnerable because of Hamilton. Maybe it would be best if . . . well, if Hamilton was gone.”
“Do you mean kill her?” Grayson said bluntly.
Prescott didn’t answer.
