Capitol Punishment

by Carl Hamlin

  They settled into bed, and Eric reached for the briefcase that rested on the floor just next to his gun. Macie wanted only to sleep, seeking relief from the mild but stubborn headache she had worked through all day.

  When Eric showed Macie a photo of a man named Howard Clemons, Macie felt her heart begin to race. She could only wonder if her expression betrayed her reactions. While she had not taken Eric’s cautions as seriously as he intended, she had always wondered how it would feel to come face to face with one of the subjects from one of the photos shown to her during one of the clandestine bedroom briefings. She now knew that she had, although she was not aware of it at the time. She knew Howard Clemons as her firm’s anti-hunting client, Ben Jarrett.

  Macie had never so struggled to maintain her composure. Her first impulse was to reveal to her husband that she had met Clemons under a different name. Still, she felt giddy with knowledge, and experienced a rush of excitement.

  She listened for another moment, struggling to act bored. She had an initial urge to wait until the next day to reveal her secret to her husband.

  Eric went on to tell Macie that Clemons had been reported to be planning to bomb the dams in the western states to revert the rivers to their natural state. In the course of his planned actions, some major cities would be robbed of electric power. Of course, Clemons wanted humankind to revert to a more primitive state.

  Finishing his explanation of the investigation to Macie, he kissed her, and then turned off the bedside lamp. However, the woman who has so badly sought sleep was now wide-awake, smiling in the dark at how she would present her knowledge of Clemons’ alias to her husband the next morning. She wanted to go back through her file on “Jarrett”, to see what was there that could be helpful to Eric.

  Macie hardly slept at all that night. She could only imagine the look on Eric’s face when she presented him data on the other identity of Clemons. There would be an address that may or may not be of use, a phone number, and a record on her phone’s caller memory of the number he had recently called her from. There were handwriting samples to match against other records for verification, and some notes that made reference to a region of Idaho he had mentioned as a potential wolf refuge. She finally settled into a fitful sleep near morning, but when the alarm went off, she could not wait to get to her office. Eric never woke her when she was still asleep in the morning, so she feigned slumber until she heard the apartment door close behind him.

  Once she was certain Eric had left, she took a rapid shower, dressed quickly and sped to the office. She grabbed a breakfast sandwich from a sidewalk vendor and rushed up to the office before many others were present.

  She hustled into her office that Tuesday morning and pulled the Jarrett file from a cabinet. She hurried to the copy machine near the reception desk, looking around frantically to see that no one was watching. As fast as she could move, she made copies of the few papers and the single sheet of notes in the folder.

  Done with the copying, she turned to go back to her office, then spun around and returned to the copier to make sure she had left nothing behind. Once back in her office, she sat down and took a breath to calm herself, then began scanning the information she had not seen for a month.

  There was an address in Fairfax, Virginia, numbered as if it were a house address rather than an apartment. She picked up her phone and hit the command to show her calls received. The call telling her that the contract would not be accepted had come two weeks earlier, but she was able to scroll back to find it. Finally, a number came onto the small screen that matched the one on the inquiry sheet she had filled out as she met with “Jarrett”.

  Macie placed the copies in the briefcase she often carried home. What a surprise package she would present to Eric that evening. She would explain that she wanted to make sure her memory was correct before getting his hopes up that she had information he could use. It was only a minor lie, for her memory rarely failed to recall a face. She many not always remember to watch out for her surroundings and potential hazards, but she never forgot a name and face.

  The morning wore on slowly. Macie was anxious to get home to see Eric, but her will for time to pass only made the work of the morning more tedious. She had a list of calls to make and several letters to send out. To make it all worse, she had a long quarterly staff meeting awaiting her in the afternoon.

  Just as she was about to head for a diner at street level to grab some lunch, she got a call from the receptionist. The daughter of the senior partner had gone into labor, and he and his wife were heading for Baltimore to be present for the birth of their first grandchild. The meeting was canceled.

  Macie sighed in frustration. The afternoon would creep along even more slowly now. She went down the elevator to the diner and considered the rest of her day while munching on a salad.

  As she ate the salad and sipped on her iced tea, her imagination began to churn. She began to wonder just how much information she could provide to Eric.

  Her mind wandered back to the evening during which she and Eric had lightly sparred over whether she could ever serve as an investigator. A giddy excitement churned up in her chest. She was tempted to follow an impulse. After all, she had already survived a paddling over Eric’s knees.

  She scurried to her car in the underground garage, and turned on her GPS. She punched in the Hanford Avenue address in Fairfax, and saw that she would need forty minutes. As she sat in the line of cars waiting to exit the garage, Macie called the office secretary, and explained that since the meeting had been cancelled, she was taking the afternoon off. No one would suspect anything, for she had been working extra long days, and the practice of taking some compensatory time off was typical behavior in the firm. If Eric tried to contact her, he would call her cell phone, so he would not know that she was not at the office. In any case, she was often out and about during the day.

  Macie finally got into the flow of traffic, and as she made her way onto the highway that the GPS unit said would take her to the correct residential area of Fairfax, her palms began to perspire. She fought conflicting urges, as she argued with herself. She wanted to see the home where Clemons had apparently set up a residence under the name of Jarrett. In her heart, she knew that she should simply give Eric the data she already had in her possession. He would not mind that she had waited a few hours to divulge her contact with the government authorities were seeking.

  As she neared the neighborhood of the residence, she was struck by the fact that this was certainly not one of the more fashionable areas of Fairfax. The homes were small and quite modest, many of which were in a questionable state of care. Some were empty with unmowed lawns, and real estate signs indicated that many were for sale.

  Macie told herself that taking up residence in such a neighborhood made sense for someone wanting to keep a low profile. The environment was such that having men coming and going at odd times of the day would not likely draw much attention. The appearance of the area certainly would not preclude the presence of drug activity.

  Macie scolded herself that only one thing would cry out as being out of place. She was driving the Mercedes, and that would make people think that she was either lost or seeking to score some drugs.

  She turned another corner, and the voice on the GPS informed her that she was 200 feet from her destination. She quickly pulled in tightly behind a pickup truck, placed the car in park and gazed at the home she had sought. The black metal house numbers were clearly displayed against the white top fascia board on the front porch.

  Her breathing became rapid and shallow as she reminded herself that she was looking at a home that could, at the moment, contain one or more domestic terrorists. The man she had met was known to be capable of planning to set bombs, and bring major disruptions to the lives and safety of hundreds of thousands of people.

  The realization hit her that this very dwelling could also be holding a cache of explosives. She wondered if it might also contain guns.

  She told
herself that she had taken this little adventure far enough. She began to reach for the gearshift lever when she saw the door of the house open. There was no mistaking that the silver-haired man who stood in the partially open doorway speaking to someone still inside was the man who had introduced himself to her as Ben Jarrett. Her pulse was racing and her stomach began to churn.

  He was dressed in jeans and a light brown leather jacket. Macie’s breath caught when he seemed to be placing something black and shiny in his inside jacket pocket.

  With her hands trembling, she put the car in reverse and slowly backed away from the rear of the truck. She pulled away, and then slowed as she curved out around a man who was changing a tire on a van she had not initially noticed.

  Inside the van, the F.B.I. agent watching the video feed turned to her more senior colleague, Mike Stafford. “I couldn’t see the plate on that Benz that just pulled away.” She resumed watching the screen that was presenting a view of the front of the house, courtesy of a small camera mounted on the tip of the truck’s dispatching antenna. The vehicle was disguised as a plumbing service van.

  Her companion shrugged. “Replay the video segment and see if we have an image of it to blow up. By the way, send the video to my e-mail. Maybe I can take a look at it later.”

  She went to another laptop computer, replayed the video section showing the car pulling away, and then shook her head. “Damn…….at no point did we have a view of the plates.”

  Macie was a half block away, then slowed and pulled over. She looked ahead to an alley, and decided it likely spanned the rear of the Clemons residence. She turned into the narrow roadway and crept the car along for a half-block until she was behind the house. There was a ramshackle garage with its two windows boarded over. Next to it sat a ten-foot long rental moving trailer. She noticed that a padlock was secured to the latch on the trailer’s door.

  She backed up a few feet to where she could see the license plate on the trailer, but still be largely shielded from any view from the house by a cluster of tall shrubs. Taking a note pad and pen from her briefcase, she wrote down the number and drove slowly away.

  Just as she reached the end of the alley, her phone chimed. She was so tense that she jumped, and her foot pressed down on the accelerator. She slammed on the brakes, coming to a stop just before she was in the street. A car that would have crashed into her sped by.

  Fumbling for her phone, she flipped it open with shaking hands. The screen told her that it was Eric calling her.

  She strained to calm her breathing. “Hi there.”

  “Hey. I have to fly out to Chicago tonight. I’ll be back Saturday morning.”

  Macie struggled with conflicting impulses. She was wanting to tell Eric of her discoveries, while also weighing the desire to try to think of just one more thing to bring to him on a silver platter.

  “Awwww…….I’ll just have to look forward to Saturday, then. Have a good flight, Eric. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She snapped the phone shut and scolded herself for not spilling her guts to Eric. She was nearing the point of no return of using the excuse that she simply wanted to verify her recollections before disclosing to him the data she had on “Jarrett”.

  She told herself that she should call him right back, catch him before he was on the plane and unavailable on the phone. However, her sense of curiosity was getting the best of her. She still wanted to show Eric what she could do.

  She knew what was at stake. She reached back and put her hands on her bottom before she drove away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She drove back around the block to head back to Washington. Inside the van, the F.B.I. agents were busy enlarging a section of a still image from the video. It was an enlargement of the face of the silver-haired man who had stepped onto the front porch and walked to a car parked along the street. Suddenly, the young agent turned to her supervisor.

  “Mike, I think that Benz just went by again. I just saw it out of the corner of my eye. Too bad we were weren’t in record mode.”

  Stafford continued to work with the image enhancement software. “Probably nothing but a buy……lots of meth in this part of town. Maybe I can pass it along to the cops, but it’s too vague for them to take it seriously. Probably a dozen buys every day in the neighborhood. I’ll try to remember to look at it tonight. Don’t forget to e-mail it to me.”

  Mike Stafford returned to his apartment in Bethesda, Maryland after yet another twelve-hour day. It was after midnight, and he poured a glass of scotch over some ice and collapsed into his recliner. It was one of the possessions he had insisted on keeping when his wife had moved out the year before, tired of being alone so much of the time.

  He had just begun to slowly sip the scotch when he decided that he should check his e-mail. He walked wearily to his desk and logged into his F.B.I account. He read a response from his boss granting his request to take the following morning off. Another senior agent was going to be in charge of the Clemons surveillance for the next two days.

  His eyes were tired as he read two e-mails from family members, and then noticed the message with the sign indicating that a video was attached. He opened the message and clicked on the video. He hit the command to play it in slow motion, and waited impatiently as the images crept by. Suddenly, the Mercedes Benz came into the picture, but the lower portion of the car and the license plate were not visible. As the car neared the van, he paused the image and closed in on the driver.

  There was a glare from reflecting sunlight, but he could see that the driver was a woman. He chuckled to himself that she resembled his friend Eric’s wife Macie.

  The next day at the office, Macie spent the day doing what she often did on Fridays, calling current clients to follow-up on their progress and to inquire as to whether the firm’s services were satisfactory to that point. She always liked to do that on a day before they were likely to be engaged in some relaxing endeavors. It was her theory that people were more candid on a day when they were looking forward to some rest and recreation.

  She tried to put the trip to Fairfax out of her mind. Now the decision to tell Eric everything or even withhold what she knew was her choice. She decided that either option risked her ability to sit comfortably for a day or so. However, the dominant thought now rattling around her mind was that Clemons could hurt some people. She had to assume that the government had no idea where he was. She did not want the loss of life or any other form of tragedy weighing on her conscious for the rest of her life. She would occupy herself by working late into the evening. She had two proposals for some mining groups to write up, and she would go ahead and work on them, rather than the following week as she had originally planned.

  At eleven o’clock that evening, Howard Clemons packed a briefcase in the basement of the Fairfax home. The briefcase served as a delivery method for a surprise he was planning for some unfortunate souls who would not see it stuffed behind some random waste receptacle or vendor kiosk near the Washington, D.C. federal building that housed the Department of the Interior.

  It was not a large device. It was just a trial run assembled by a novice. However, it would damage property, perhaps some people. To Clemons, there were no innocent people near the agency that allowed for so much destruction of the environment and the wildlife that were its true owners.

  He would take the case upstairs and grab his suitcase and duffel bag. His two accomplices were already in Arizona scoping out a dam targeted for destruction. He would disappear from Fairfax for a few days after the device would be delivered and set to be activated the following Monday morning. When he felt it was safe, he would return to his “safe house” to plan even more lethal and widespread mischief.

  Clemons rechecked the diagram he had printed off the internet. One connection did not look secure, so he turned on the soldering iron again to insure that there would be no failure due to a primitive wiring glitch. He waited for a minute, and then touched the tip of the hot iron
to the twisted strands of the two thin copper wires. He simultaneously touched the length of solder to the hot metal. The shiny gray solder melted onto the wires, and coated them with a protective layer that should hold the contact in place while the case was being transported and carried around.

  Clemons was in a hurry, and while he flipped the switch on the soldering iron to “Off”, he set it aside in contact with a piece of wadded newspaper left over from the process of padding and securing the device against movement inside the briefcase. There was a block of plastic explosive inside, and he wanted to take no chances. He closed the case, grabbed the handle and rapidly went up the stairs.

  As he finished placing his sparse wardrobe into the suitcase, he was unaware that the wadded newspaper was now flaming and in contact with a cardboard box full of printed diagrams and instructions he had printed out over the past ten months. The flames grew and the wooden folding table upon which Clemons had been working was soon fully engulfed.

  The house was old and the floor beams were dry. The flames that rose and licked at the two by four inch beams ignited them readily. As Clemons finished packing, the entire back up the small dwelling roared into an inferno.

  Out on the street, the F.B.I. was operating inside a different van, this one marked as belonging to a concrete repair service. They watched in amazement as the house they were surveiling was now a scene of smoke and flames leaping from the back.

  Inside, Clemons was coughing and fighting the urge to run outside without any certainty of what awaited him. He grabbed the briefcase, checked to see that the gun was tucked into his waist, and ran out the front door.

  He had not regained his breath or composure when three F.B.I. agents pounced on, handcuffed and disarmed him. The bomb was secured but soon surrounded by its own separate yellow tape as the house was reduced to rubble thirty feet away. Neighboring houses were evacuated until the following morning, but all around the house were at least safe.