Quantico Rules

by Gene Riehl

  I closed the satchel once more, pulled the chair back into place, then policed the area to make sure I’d left no trace of my presence. Satisfied, I headed for the door, but froze in place when I heard a soft knock.

  “Señor Finnerty,” a woman’s voice called, followed by a second knock, this one slightly louder. “Tengo correo, señor. ¿Está aqui?” Then in heavily accented English, “You are home, Mr. Finnerty? I have mail, sir.”

  I stared at the door. Damn it, Gerard. What the fuck was she doing here already?

  The knob began to turn.

  I looked for a place to hide.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I bolted for the desk, but stopped as I realized I’d never get there in time.

  I fell to my knees instead, sorting through my satchel like a real drain-cleaning guy looking for the electronic instrument he needed to find the problem. The maid would never buy it, of course, but it was the best I could do. I waited for the door to open, for the questions she’d want answered.

  But it didn’t open.

  I stared at the knob. It was no longer turning. I heard the maid’s footsteps retreating down the hall.

  My chest rose and fell as I reminded myself not to celebrate too early, that the maid was still out there someplace. Might even be calling the police for all I knew. Certainly might be listening for me from some other part of the house.

  I turned to inspect the windows behind the desk. No help. They were sealed tight, the leaded-glass panes designed never to be opened. I slipped over to the door and put my ear against it, but couldn’t hear a sound. I turned the knob and opened it a sliver. Now I could hear music—salsa—a radio playing, or a television set. The sound was distant, so I opened the door a little wider. The music was coming from the other end of the house, far in the back. The maid was most likely closer to the music than she was to me. It was now or never.

  I pulled the door open and ran on my toes to the front entry, out the door and back to the van. I sat for a moment while my breathing returned to normal. Damn it, that had been far too close, and that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  The maid had obviously come in after I was already there, but I’d heard nothing from the alarm system. It hadn’t been reset properly by the kid back at the office switchboard. The maid was bound to have noticed. She would have been ordered to call Finnerty or his wife any time there was a problem with the alarm. Bureau tech people could be on their way right now.

  I started the van and drove slowly up the street, then called Lisa and told her to come back to me, that there wasn’t any reason for her to stay on the wife anymore. I directed her toward where she could find me, a couple of blocks away from the Finnerty residence.

  “Did you have time?” she wanted to know, after she’d joined me in the French van, after I’d told her what had happened with the maid, and what I feared might happen when she discovered the alarm malfunction.

  “The bugs are in there all right,” I said, “but we’ve still got work to do with the feed.”

  I crawled past the black curtain into the back of the van to inspect the monitors. The pictures from the house were clear as a digital camcorder’s, but the transmission quality was only part of the equation.

  “Great pictures,” I called to Lisa, “but we’re still too close to the house. If the cops or the bureau show up we can’t take the chance of being anywhere near the place.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Get behind the wheel and drive. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  I watched the monitors as she drove us farther away from the house. She stopped half a minute later. “How are they now?” she called back to me.

  “Just as good. Where are we?”

  “Still too close, I think. But I see a grove of sycamores down the way. Big trees.”

  She drove more quickly now. The pictures began to degrade, then turn unusable. A minute or so later she stopped again, asked again.

  “No good,” I told her. “We’re out of range now. All we’ve got is white noise … nothing but snow … no picture at all.” I looked around the inside of the van, saw what we needed. “Find me a tree,” I told her. “A nice fat tree.”

  “I can do better than that. I can give you a choice from a hundred of them.”

  I went up to the driving compartment and looked over her shoulder. She’d delivered us into the middle of a sycamore grove, a forest of trees that would do just fine, although they were a little too winter-bare to be perfect.

  The grove was at the edge of a forest that stretched off toward Rock Creek Park. I could still see Finnerty’s street in the distance, so line of sight for the transmitter would be adequate, and hiding the van back here couldn’t be better.

  “Pull as far into the trees as you can,” I told Lisa, then went back and grabbed the relay transmitter that would make the whole setup work for us. Shaped like a boomerang but smaller, the transmitter came with its own battery pack and heavy-duty cabling.

  A moment later the van stopped. Lisa walked around and opened the back door. I carried the relay transmitter to the door and hopped to the ground.

  We worked quickly.

  Lisa stood lookout as I used wood screws to fasten the boomerang to the back side of the broad trunk of a sycamore that was ten feet deep into the forest and had a clear line of sight to the house. The boomerang was omnidirectional, would accept the signals from the bugs I’d put in the house and shoot them out in every direction at once. With a range exceeding one mile, we could sit axle-deep in the waters of Rock Creek and still enjoy both picture and sound.

  Back in the van, I drove this time while Lisa watched the monitors. Down toward Rock Creek, up a wide dirt path, into a clearing between heavy bushes. I pulled to a stop.

  “Well?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “Couldn’t be better.”

  I parked the van and climbed back to join her. The pictures were not quite as good as they’d been at the curb outside the house itself, but I could fix that. I twisted and tweaked the switches and knobs, dials and LCD displays, until the picture was perfect. Finnertys living room, TV room, and office lay perfectly centered, each room crystal clear on its own monitor screen.

  I fine-tuned the volume on the sound board next to the monitors. The maid’s salsa music was still there, louder toward the living room but indistinct in the office. I nodded at Lisa. However this thing ended up playing out, we were as ready as we’d ever be to getting it started.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Finnerty’s wife came home at two-thirty-four that afternoon. From our captain’s chairs in the van in Rock Creek Park, Lisa and I watched her move in and out of view as our cameras recorded her routine.

  I found myself staring at my partner’s profile as she watched the monitors. In the tight space, the citrus-flower combination of her perfume and shampoo was intoxicating. I watched her breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing, then caught her glancing at me. She smiled a quick smile and turned away even faster.

  Our behavior made me smile.

  Ever since we’d become lovers we were going to absurd lengths to keep our new relationship from intruding into the workplace. Like a pair of animals circling a suspiciously dangerous watering hole, we waited for only the safest moments to drink. Needing the water to stay alive, needing to stay alive to drink the water.

  Kevin Finnerty came home at five-seventeen, and I was happy to see it. According to Gerard, the ADIC never came home before nine o’clock. It was a good sign, especially on the evening before Brenda Thompson’s Senate hearings were expected to conclude.

  An hour later the Finnertys sat down to eat dinner in front of the television. CNN, I realized, as I recognized the voice of Aaron Brown. Again I was impressed by the quality of the devices I’d hidden inside the house. Not only were the pictures of Finnerty and his wife sharp and clear, but the sound was even more perfect.

  We listened as Aaron Brown delivered the latest news about the centuries-old battle in
the Middle East. We continued to listen as he changed the subject to the mounting concern over flooding in San Antonio. But we really listened when the topic turned to Judge Brenda Thompson’s amazingly rapid progress through the confirmation process, and we were riveted to our headsets when the anchorman threw the story to Catherine Crier on Capitol Hill.

  “… all the veteran Senate-watchers are agreeing, for once,” Crier was saying. “After the Clarence Thomas fiasco, the Judiciary Committee will do anything to avoid another spectacle of a black nominee for the Supreme Court being roasted alive by the senators. It appears certain that her hearings will end by noon tomorrow, that confirmation by the full Senate will follow immediately after lunch …”

  I turned to Lisa.

  “You were right, Puller. It is going to happen tonight.”

  On the TV-room screen, Kevin Finnerty showed no reaction to the CNN story we’d just heard. He continued eating without a pause. On his plate was a real dinner, but his wife had only a salad. A bottle of wine sat on a small table between them. She was drinking from a large wineglass. There was no glass on his side of the table. She drank deeply, emptied the glass and reached for the bottle, poured out the few ounces left in it.

  “Sweetheart,” she said to her husband. “Would you be kind enough to open me another bottle?”

  “Why don’t we wait awhile, dear. Maybe a nice port after we finish eating.”

  “I don’t want any port … just another bottle of the merlot.”

  “No more wine, Margaret. You know what Doctor Abra—”

  “Don’t bother then. I’ll get it myself!”

  Lisa and I looked at each other. The sudden change in her tone carried a lot of backstory.

  His wife started to get up, but Finnerty reached out and stopped her with his hand. “Sit down!” he snapped. “You will have no more wine! Don’t make me tell you again!”

  Lisa spoke without looking at me. “Consistent son of a bitch, isn’t he? No better with her than he is with the rest of us.”

  We fell silent as we continued to watch and listen, but Lisa turned away after a few minutes. I knew why.

  Most people would argue that marital intimacy was exclusive to the bedroom, but they’d be wrong. I’d watched enough scenes like this one to know when people were really naked, and seeing it made both Lisa and I feel a little like perverts. And it didn’t help to know how few FBI agents would think we were crazy to feel that way.

  Peeping is the lifeblood of a professional watcher, and the FBI is filled with people who relish the job. Just the prospect of catching sight of a naked woman can energize a team of watchers for hours, but the real brass-ring is actual copulation. The shrinks have a name for the disorder. Reaction formation, they call it. The phenomenon by which respectable people choose laudable careers that allow them to perform the same acts they would otherwise be sent to prison for.

  Surgeons get rich by dismembering people, commodity brokers even richer for gambling on everything from orange juice to pork bellies. Priests gain heaven through extraordinary attention to the boys choir, fundamentalist pastors are free to beat their sons till they bleed. And FBI surveillance teams get overtime pay for watching people fuck.

  Movement on the screen caught my eye.

  “Looks like dinner’s over, Lisa. For Finnerty anyway. And wifey’s toasted enough to take her all the way through till morning.”

  Mary Margaret was already nodding off, wineglass dangling from the tips of her fingers, a smallish puddle of purple merlot forming on the carpet near her feet. Finnerty walked out of the picture. I glanced at the office monitors, hoping to see him open the door and come through.

  And he did.

  He closed the door behind him, moved straight to the desk, around it to the high-backed leather chair. He sat with his back to the camera. His right hand reached out to the pewter-framed photograph at the head of the green blotter, to the picture of J. Edgar Hoover I’d seen earlier, the one with the intimate inscription. He straightened it, but his fingers lingered for a long moment before he let it go and went to work.

  We heard drawers opening and closing, watched him open one or another file on his desktop, jot some notes, rearrange some pages, then go to another one. Fifteen or twenty minutes later he rose from his chair and walked across the carpet to the bookshelves against the wall to the camera’s right. He stretched on his toes to remove a single volume, then reached into the empty space. There was a loud click and the bookcase appeared to move. He grasped a lower shelf and pulled gently until the bookcase pivoted away from the wall. He stepped toward what had to be a recessed door. I met Lisa’s glance.

  “Has to be a wall safe,” I told her. “Probably bureau-installed.”

  She nodded. We turned back to the picture.

  Finnerty appeared to be working a lock, until he stepped back and pulled open a grey metallic-looking door. Six feet high, I judged, much taller than a standard wall safe. In the next instant Finnerty stepped past it and disappeared into the wall.

  Moments later he came back out with two files, one slender, one almost three inches thick. The thick one was dog-eared, the other pristine, but both covers were the same nondescript tan color the official bureau had long-ago abandoned in favor of the white and brown in current use.

  The ADIC left the vault door open, returned to his desk, and chose the thick file first, opened it, and appeared to read. He made some notes, then opened the skinnier file and did the same thing, read a few pages, made more notes. Then he rose again and took the files back to his vault and disappeared into it once more. When he came out this time, his hands were empty.

  Back at the desk, he gathered his notes, opened his briefcase, and laid them inside. Then he got up and walked out of the room, reappeared in the TV room, where he took one look at his passed-out wife and shook his head. He walked over to her, touched her shoulder, then shook it. After a long moment, she came to life, stared at him with wide eyes.

  “Go to bed,” he told her. “I’ve got to work late, and I don’t want you sleeping in this chair all night again.”

  She nodded, grunted as she got out of her chair and shuffled out of the room. Finnerty shook his head again, then followed her. My microphones followed the sound of his footsteps down the hardwood floor of the hallway toward the front of the house. A moment later we could hear the front door open, then close again. Finally, faintly, we heard the sound of his car starting.

  “Shit,” Lisa said as she jumped toward the driving compartment.

  “Drive,” I said as I crawled up to join her.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  He took us to the Supreme Court.

  Lisa and I didn’t say much as we tried to keep up with Finnerty’s Marquis through the streets on the way to Capitol Hill, to keep up with the much faster car without being spotted. We spent the time listening instead for some sound from the microphone I’d planted in the ADIC’s car, but we heard nothing more than car sounds. Tires against the road, engine accelerating and backing off, the tiny squeal of disc brakes. At least the bug was working.

  Before we got to the Supreme Court building, just off Capitol Plaza on First Street, I’d already called Gerard at the embassy. It was time to bring him and his people into play.

  My microphone in Finnerty’s car was a necessary hedge against the chance that the ADIC would choose somewhere other than his own home to attack Brenda Thompson, but it wasn’t good enough anymore. It hung the entire operation on the premise that he’d use his bureau Marquis instead, and that was nowhere near a certainty. Or that he’d use any car at all for that matter.

  Gerard and his laser technician—the same guy from yesterday at the embassy—had been standing by for just such an emergency. They were on the street moments after I called, had joined Lisa and me in the drain-cleaning van not five minutes after we’d stopped on Capitol Hill, far enough away from Finnerty’s car to keep him from spotting us in the darkness.

  I could see his black Marquis perfectly, howeve
r, parked under the pallid streetlights along the circular driveway that ran through Capitol Plaza, the grass and tree-covered area outside the less-photographed back side of the Capitol. It was eight-fifty-three now, and the plaza was pretty much empty of pedestrians or vehicles. It had turned colder during the day, and it wasn’t raining for a change.

  “Hope the weather holds,” the laser tech said as he went through the process of aiming his machine at Finnerty’s car, our only option now that we had no clue where the Thompson meeting would occur. “Conditions are absolutely perfect,” he continued, “as long as it doesn’t rain, and this thing goes down inside one of the two cars.”

  I took a moment to call Brodsky.

  “Still here,” he told me when I asked. “Wax’s van is parked out front. He hasn’t come out all day.”

  I told him what we were doing, that I’d get back to him the moment we finished. He told me he’d call if Vincent Wax made a move.

  At nine-o-seven, a second car pulled into the parking space behind Finnerty’s. A tan Volvo sedan, couple of years old, not the sleeker body style of the new ones. A moment later, Judge Brenda Thompson got out of the car and walked toward the black Marquis.

  “Finnerty’s car,” I told the laser tech. “With what I put in his trunk, we won’t need you after all.”

  But Finnerty fooled us.

  “Goddamnit!” I growled, as the ADIC got out of his car and joined Brenda Thompson halfway between the two automobiles. They weren’t going to use either car. Now we had to scramble.

  I turned to Gerard, but he and his tech guy were already reaching for other equipment, something to eavesdrop on a conversation in the open air. Most likely a parabolic mike, but even that wouldn’t be any good if Finnerty took her for a walk instead, which was exactly what I would do in his place. I had a sudden picture of them walking along, our van rolling next to them, then shook my head to chase it away.

  I watched through my binoculars as the two of them stood outside his car and talked. A moment later he turned and pointed at the magnificent Supreme Court building across First Street. In the crisp clear air the building was lighted from top to bottom and shone like a lighthouse beacon. Through my binoculars I could see clearly the famous words on the pediment above the massive collection of marble columns out front. Equal justice under law. The promise to those who came to petition the Court. Reading them again tonight I shook my head. Not if Kevin Finnerty had his way.