Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  “I’m not here to steal America’s secrets, Ginny.”

  “That’s not what the chairman thinks. He’s convinced you’re a double agent, Sam. Even Michael wasn’t able to convince him otherwise.”

  “Rand? He’s off his rocker.”

  “Why should I believe you’re not?”

  “Because I’m telling you.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  “It’ll have to be—for now.” He watched as she wiped her nose with his bloody handkerchief. “Look—I’m here with one objective. I don’t give a goddamn about any secrets in your safe—except Rand’s. But I want to see what Rand stored here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he stored it here. In your office. Not in his hideaway—he has a big fireproof safe there. Or in the safe in that paneled library of his out in Round Hill. He gave these items to you, Ginny. That tells me he doesn’t want anyone to know about them.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You’re not his lawyer.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No—you’re his chief counsel. O’Neill’s his lawyer. So, why the hell aren’t the folder and the box in a safe in O’Neill’s office?”

  Ginny’s head cocked like a terrier’s. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, neither do I—which is why I’m going to take a look-see.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to.” He walked to the big black steel cabinet, punched a series of numbers into the electronic lock, waited as the bolt linkages whirred, turned the handle, and opened the door. “Voilà.”

  She sat on the couch, dumbfounded. “How the hell …”

  “Trust me, Ginny. Please.”

  He waited to see her reaction. When she didn’t reach for the telephone, Sam pulled the accordion file and the locked safe-deposit box off the top shelf, set them on Vacario’s desk, then closed the safe door and rolled the lock handle closed.

  He opened the accordion file and riffled through it. “Rand’s wife’s papers—her will, other stuff. None of my business.” He closed the file and secured it with its elastic band.

  “Now this …” Sam examined the slim shackle that went through the safe-deposit box’s hasp, flipped the padlock over, pulled his lock picks out, and went to work.

  9:37:30. It was a rudimentary lock, and Sam had it open in less than a minute. He looked over at Ginny. “Before I open the box—do you have any idea what we’ll find?”

  “No. The senator told me he wanted to keep some of his personal effects in a safe place—away from the house. He brought the folder last month—just before Howard showed up. I think he brought the box a couple of days after I got back from Moscow. I didn’t question him further.” She pointed at the accordion file. “And personal effects are exactly what we’ve found so far.”

  Sam flipped the lid and peered inside. “These are interesting personal effects.” He tilted the box in Vacario’s direction so she could see the stacks of hundred-dollar bills bound with rubber bands. “What is this, Rand’s presidential campaign fund?”

  He put the wads on her desk. There were twenty-five of them. He undid one and began counting. There were one hundred bills in all. He resecured the pile of hundreds. “A quarter-mil,” Sam said. “Not bad.” Then he tilted the box further, revealing a brown clasp envelope that sat under a black felt sack secured by a narrow band of red ribbon.

  Sam took the envelope, carefully undid the clasp, and peered inside.

  Vacario asked, “What’s there?”

  “SSCI secrecy agreements for compartmented information.”

  She frowned. “SSCI doesn’t have its own secrecy agreements. If staffers need access to a compartment, CIA takes care of the clearance.”

  “Don’t tell that to a couple of people named Reese and Johnson.” Sam gently edged the sheets out of the envelope and showed her. She reached out for the top one but he quickly drew it back. “Fingerprints, Ginny.”

  “Sorry, Sam.”

  There were regulation orange-striped Top Secret cover sheets stapled atop two-page agreement forms. Each page was signed and initialed, and the bottom of the back page had a thumbprint below the signer’s hand-printed name.

  Sam’s eyes scanned down the page until he found what he was looking for. He hadn’t been far off. “Rand’s compartment is called TALL CAVERN.”

  Vacario frowned. “Come again?”

  “TALL CAVERN.”

  “There is no such compartment, Sam. Not at CIA, not at NSA. Nowhere.”

  He hefted the agreements. “You coulda fooled me.”

  Lips pursed, Vacario found her reading glasses, slipped them on, and looked over Sam’s shoulder. She shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why would this material be anything more than confidential? What we have here is nothing more than a receipt for an unspecified amount of money and an agreement to act on the personal orders of the chairman.”

  “Recognize the names of the individuals who signed the forms?”

  She squinted at the bottom of the page. “No.”

  “They’re U.S. Capitol police officers—one of them headed the security detail after Howard showed up at Rand’s place. Rand sent them to kill me.”

  Her intake of breath was audible. “Impossible.”

  “Then why did Rand make sure to get their fingerprints on what you call nothing more than a receipt? Why did he create a fictitious compartment called TALL CAVERN and make two officers sign secrecy agreements?” Sam’s expression was grim. He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Believe me, Ginny, nothing’s impossible.”

  Sam put the documents back in their envelope. Then he took the sack from the metal box and hefted it in his hand. He inverted the sack in the palm of his gloved hand, revealing perhaps fifty or sixty flawless diamonds in the one-and-a-half-to two-and-a-half-carat range. “I’m not up on diamonds these days, but I’d bet these would be worth a million dollars on the wholesale market—maybe more. And unlike currency, they’re untraceable.”

  “Oh, my God!” Vacario’s eyes went wide.

  “Hold out your hands.” Sam allowed the stones to cascade into Vacario’s palms. She stared at the diamonds, and the two signed security agreements. He said nothing, allowing the eloquence of his silence to make his case.

  Ten, twenty, thirty seconds passed; the only sound was Vacario’s labored breathing. The look on her face told Sam everything he had to know. It revealed her feelings of disbelief, horror, shock—and betrayal. Ginny might have been a Player—even an Alien—but it was impossible to feign that complex a reaction. All of his instincts told him she was on the right side of this fight.

  Finally she gazed up at him. “Take everything back, Sam. Put it all away. I don’t want to look anymore.”

  “Will do.” But first he put the envelope with the agreements on the desk.

  Vacario’s eyes followed his actions, but she said nothing. When he’d finished she let the stones fall back into his hands. He funneled them into the sack, then dropped the sack in the safe-deposit box. He slid the cash back and replaced the envelope with the agreements, too. Then he closed the hasp, threaded the shackle, and snapped the padlock closed. But he didn’t replace the box in the safe when he locked the accordion file behind the heavy steel door.

  “Does Rand have the combination to your safe?”

  “Not that I know.”

  “Then he won’t know we have this.” He tapped the steel box. “Ginny, you’ll have to come with me.”

  She blinked. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to let you out of my sight now. Things are too dicey.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not Faye Dunaway and this isn’t Three Days of the Condor.”

  “Ginny …”

  She pulled herself off the couch “I’m serious, Sam.”

  He walked to the phone and unplugged the wire. “So am I. Four people are dead—and someone has tried to kill me twice in the last ten days. There’s a high-leve
l Russian network in play. But the more I discover about it, the less I seem to know. I need some time.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” She focused on his face. “And your mustache is coming loose.”

  Sam adjusted the device and pressed it firmly onto his upper lip. “Better?”

  She examined his face. “I guess.”

  “Look, Ginny—”

  “No, you look. I’m going to tell you to do the same thing you told me to do just about a month ago. Call the FBI, Sam. Right now. Let the Bureau handle this mess. If you don’t, I’m going to put up a hell of a fuss.”

  Sam didn’t need a fuss. His misapprehensions about Vacario might be allayed, but in point of fact he trusted no one at this point in time except John Forbes. Rand Arthur was up to his eyeballs in something. Ginny might or might not be involved—might not was his instinct, but his instinct had been miserably wrong in the recent past.

  Sam couldn’t afford to screw up now. So he looked at her reassuringly. “The FBI’s already been called in.” The lie came easily. “I can take you to meet the special agent working the case.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “What’s his name?”

  “John Forbes.”

  “Plug the phone in, Sam.”

  He did as she asked.

  “Call the DOJ twenty-four-hour locator.”

  “Do you have the number?”

  In response, she pulled a government phone book out of her credenza, perused it, then wrote seven numbers on a pad.

  Sam dialed the number. “I’m looking for FBI Deputy Assistant Director Forbes’s extension. John Forbes. F-O-R-B-E-S.” He handed her the receiver.

  Sam watched as Ginny wrote a number down. She hung the phone up. “John Forbes is the deputy assistant director of the National Security Division.” Her tone told Sam she was impressed.

  Sam nodded. “He handles special projects. He’s totally trustworthy.”

  The tenseness evaporated from her expression. “I thought you were lying to me.”

  “I want you to meet with Forbes and tell him what we found.”

  “Now?”

  “Forbes is questioning the disposable I just told you about.”

  “Then I agree.” She daubed at her face with Sam’s handkerchief. “Mind if I freshen up a bit first, though? You seem to have smudged my makeup.”

  “Of course not.” Sam paused. “Are you carrying a cell phone, Ginny?”

  “Of course.”

  “I really like you, and I don’t want to sound paranoid, but why don’t you give it to me while you freshen up.”

  “I really like you, too, but that is paranoid, Sam. Who the hell would I be calling?”

  He could think of a few people. Like her boss. Or her boss’s lawyer. Or the U.S. Capitol police operations center. But he didn’t say so. Instead, he looked at her, his expression grave. “Let’s play this out my way.”

  She sighed and her eyes flashed angrily. But she reached down, opened her desk drawer, extracted her handbag, and rummaged in it until she came up with her cell phone, which she placed in Sam’s gloved palm. “Satisfied?”

  He dropped the phone in his pocket and picked up the steel box. “Absolutely. And since I’m both paranoid and in love, I’ll walk you as far as the ladies’ loo and loiter there while you do what you do. Then we can get the heck out of here.”

  CHAPTER 31

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2002

  1:02 A.M. “There are two locations. I pass them both on my way to the office.” A wrung-dry Vern Myles was sitting in a straight-backed chair that was set up against the wall. They were in a paint-by-the-numbers-decorated room on the ninth floor of the Holiday Inn in Ballston.

  “And …” John Forbes nodded. Myles was on track.

  Myles looked at Sam, then at Virginia Vacario, who were sitting side by side on the edge of the queen-size bed. “If there’s a signal on the first one, I—”

  “What is the signal, Vern?”

  Myles lifted a can of Coca-Cola off the floor and sipped. “It’s three horizontal white chalk lines on the mailbox at the corner of California and Massachusetts.”

  “Okay.”

  “So, if there’s a signal on the first one, I get off the bus at Florida Avenue and leave the same sign on a wall in an alley just off Twenty-first Street between Mass Ave. and P Street. Sometimes there’s a second signal.”

  “Which is?”

  “Vertical lines—four short ones, also white chalk—on the wall across the street from the old entrance to the Acheson Auditorium at HST.”

  Forbes glanced toward Virginia Vacario, who’d cocked her head, then focused on Vernon Myles. “ ‘HST,’ Vern?”

  Myles blinked. “Oh—it stands for Harry S. Truman. That’s what they call Main State these days. It’s where I work.”

  “And the wall? Where precisely is the wall?”

  “You know the Navy medical installation off Twenty-third Street?”

  Sam knew it all too well. It was where he’d done much of his denied area operations training course. “Yes.”

  “There are parking meters below it, and a concrete retaining wall.” Myles paused. “The site’s on that wall, just north of C Street, opposite the Acheson Auditorium. There’s a double red stripe on the parking-meter stanchion directly in front of the wall where the signal appears.”

  “And?” Forbes raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s it.”

  Forbes’s tone went pedantic. “Where do you leave your second signal, Vern—if you see a sign on the retaining wall?”

  “Oh, that. Go immediately to Union Station garage. Third column to the left of the escalator. Initials DD in capital letters. Block letters—squared off. I use white chalk.”

  Forbes nodded his head in Myles’s direction. “What about holidays?”

  “Holidays?” Myles sipped his Coke. “I’m required to check the sites holidays, unless they fall on a weekend.”

  “So no weekends.”

  Myles smiled ingratiatingly. “They give me weekends off.”

  “How thoughtful.” Sam caught Forbes’s rapid expression change. Then the G-man’s face went neutral.

  “What about afterward?” Sam interjected.

  Myles looked at him, confused. “Afterward?”

  “At the apartment.”

  “Oh—the apartment. I wait thirty-six hours after I’ve left the signals, then I go to 3624 and scrub it down. Wipe all the surfaces. Vacuum. Tidy up.”

  Sam said, “Thank you, Vern.”

  John Forbes cast a quick glance in Sam’s direction, then turned back to the cutout. “Vern, why don’t you go into the bathroom for a few minutes so I can speak with these folks alone.”

  Myles didn’t have to be asked twice. When the door was shut, Forbes walked over to the television set, turned it on, turned the volume up, and then beckoned Sam and Virginia Vacario over. “And for performing his duties he receives the maintenance fee for the apartment, plus fifteen hundred dollars a month—and a two-hundred-dollar bonus for every document he hands over.”

  “Generous,” Sam said sarcastically. “From whom?”

  “I gather from SVR. There’s an envelope placed under the cushions on the couch in the living room the fifteenth of every month.”

  Vacario said, “Like clockwork.”

  “It’s been going on for eight years.”

  Vacario said: “I wonder how many more like him there are.”

  Sam shook his head. “And this is just the Russians. The Chinese have dozens of operations like this one. And now—al-Qa’ida, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad. They’re all set up much the same.” He looked over at Vacario. “Kinda makes you wonder how well we’ve checked out all those people interrogating the detainees at Guantánamo.”

  “It’s the way things are organized that keeps the parties safe,” Forbes said. “They know we build activities matrices. Same site appears for two parties, and we get interested. But the way this is set up, the cutout does the hard work. A
ll each agent has to do is check a unilateral site. Everything’s sterile.” Forbes pulled on the edge of his stringy mustache. “It’s cell-like, not hierarchical.” He looked at Vacario. “Russians learned this from al-Qa’ida, y’know.”

  “Afghanistan?”

  “Chechnya.”

  “But the compartmented structure could work in our favor,” Sam interrupted. “Because the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing.”

  “Only if the opposition doesn’t know we snatched their cutout.”

  “It’s a holiday,”

  “Not yet it isn’t,” Forbes said. “Still, Myles says once the call-out signals have been posted, everything happens within thirty-six hours.” He bit his lower lip. “That works in our favor.”

  “We’ll need a full-court press.” Sam cracked his knuckles. “The opposition’s probably got A/V inside the safe house. We’ll need to disable it and set up our own.” He looked over at Forbes. “You have a digital recorder?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “We’ll need it. And I think we need countersurveillance. That’ll take some doing. And we’ve got to stash Vern somewhere.”

  “My God.” Virginia Vacario looked as if she’d touched a live electric line. “You two are freelancing.”

  “Keep your voice down.” Sam’s tone was severe.

  “Sam, this madness can’t continue.” She turned toward Forbes. “For Christ’s sake, John, you’re a deputy assistant director.”

  Forbes shrugged. “What can I say?” He turned the television volume a shade higher. “Look, Ginny, we’re charting new ground here. I know it seems irregular—”

  “ ‘Seems irregular’?” Vacario looked at Forbes bug- eyed. “What you’re doing is bloody illegal.” She jerked her thumb toward the bathroom. “That man is a criminal. A traitor.”

  Sam shook his head. “He’s small fry.”

  “He’s the one with the safe house, right?”

  Forbes nodded.

  “So he’s whatchamacallit, SCEPTRE.”

  Sam said, “No, he’s not.”

  “Then he’s SCARAB. Those were the two Ed Howard told us about.”