High Treason

by John Gilstrap

  At this time of night, parking was not a problem. Jonathan pulled into a spot directly across the street from the cathedral’s front entrance. Saint Matthew’s looked like a black stain against the night, towering over its corner of Rhode Island Avenue like a monstrous architectural sentry. As Jonathan climbed the steps toward the massive wooden doors, he couldn’t help but recall the iconic photographs of John F. Kennedy’s flag-draped casket making this same journey on the shoulders of Honor Guards selected from every branch of the service.

  Once at the top, he paused before entering to cast a suspicious glance to the two homeless men who flanked the doors. Paranoia was a survival skill in Jonathan’s world, and he wondered why they would choose to hunker down outside on a night like this when they could be inside instead. Or even camped on a steam grate.

  For that matter, why didn’t the chronically homeless spend their summers hiking to Florida where it was perpetually warm, and they wouldn’t have to worry about freezing at all? He’d never walked in their shoes, so he wasn’t passing judgment, exactly, but he had to wonder.

  The sanctuary looked even more enormous than usual in the dim nighttime lighting. Off to the right, the glimmer of candles attracted him to the Our Lady Chapel, where he knew he’d find Irene Rivers waiting, but was surprised to see that Boxers had beaten him here. Just outside the chapel’s entrance, her two-man security detail stood with their backs to their boss, their arms folded across their chests. In their matching suits, Jonathan thought that they resembled living chess pieces.

  Only a handful of people in the intelligence community—none of them with the CIA—knew that the Our Lady Chapel was one of the most acoustically dead spots on the planet. Designed to absorb sound without echo and swept multiple times a day for listening devices, the Chapel—designated Bravo Four Three for reasons Jonathan didn’t know—was one of only a handful of spots in the United States, apart from secure government facilities, where anyone could speak in complete candor without the remotest chance of being overheard or recorded.

  Jonathan approached from behind Irene and Boxers, who sat next to each other with a chair separating them. Boxers made the chairs look like they were sized for elementary school students.

  “Have I missed anything important?” Jonathan asked as he approached.

  Irene stood to greet him. What would normally have been a peck on the cheek turned out to be a hearty handshake in front of witnesses. “I wish I could say I was glad to meet you here,” she said.

  “Haven’t missed a thing, Boss. She wouldn’t talk without you here.”

  Jonathan sat sideways in his seat, with his left leg folded under his right, his left arm slung over the seat back. “This must be big,” Jonathan said.

  “It is,” Irene said. “At least, I think it is. I couldn’t mention it before, because of the company in the room. I don’t know who knows what, and under the circumstances, I’m paranoid about what I say to anyone.”

  Jonathan waited, knowing that the silence would eventually fill itself.

  “The public record on Mrs. Darmond is inaccurate,” she said. “In fact, it’s elaborate fiction that was created with the full cooperation of my predecessor at the Bureau.”

  Boxers’ jaw went slack at the news.

  “How elaborate a fiction are we talking about?” Jonathan asked.

  “The most. All of it.”

  “How can that be?”

  Irene scowled. “Of all people, how can you ask that question?”

  “We were unit operators,” Jonathan said, feeling oddly defensive. “We’re black out of necessity. And we’re not part of the president’s family.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, neither was she when it happened.”

  “You’re going to get to the story, right?” Boxers said. Mr. Patience.

  “I want to start by emphasizing that this might have nothing to do with the current circumstances,” Irene said.

  Jonathan cocked his head. “Which I interpret as meaning that it probably has everything to do with it.”

  Irene acknowledged the sentiment with a smirk. “The lady we know as Anna Darmond was actually born Yelena Poltanov.” She spelled it. “Her father was a big-time apparatchik during the last years of the Soviet Union. Yuri Poltanov. Along about the time the Poles started making trouble, Yuri read the handwriting on the walls, and found a way to send his daughter to the United States on a student visa.”

  “I thought she was Anna Nazarov.”

  “That’s what she wants you to think,” Irene said. “In fact, Uncle Sam himself wishes you think that. Thing is, young Yelena had drunk the Kool-Aid big-time. She didn’t want to leave, and in fact thought that the United States was the embodiment of evil. All that stuff they taught her in school about the evils of capitalism really stuck. She got herself wrapped up in a ton of anti-American activities. That’s how my predecessor got wind of her, and that’s how we were able to develop an extensive file on her.”

  This wasn’t clicking for Jonathan at all. “So, how come we haven’t heard about any of this? Seems to me that the tabloids would be all over this story.”

  Irene shook her head. “Because outside of our files at headquarters, none of this ever happened. This is the part I was getting to. Back then, there were throngs of Soviet expats here in the US, most of them on student visas, and many of them under the same circumstances as Yelena—committed to duty, honor, and the Motherland, yet exiled by their highly placed fathers. They wreaked all kinds of havoc. Some of what they did was just harassment of the local police, but there were some high-profile robberies and a lot of drug trafficking, too. The big-dollar stuff was all about funding anti-American activities.”

  “You mean terrorism?” Boxers asked.

  “We didn’t call it that back then,” Irene said. “They set some fires and a couple of bombs. They spent a lot of money and resources spinning up racial tension wherever they could find it. It was a bad group of people.”

  “And Mrs. Darmond was among them?” Jonathan asked. He was beginning to feel the seed of a headache.

  “As far as we can tell, she was an organizer.”

  Boxers said, “The First Lady.” Clearly, the pieces weren’t coming together for him, either.

  Irene continued, “The bottom line of all this was, Yelena wasn’t very good at being covert. Whereas her partners in crime stayed well below the radar, she actually left hints to friends that she was up to no good. For example, she told one of her suite mates in college to stay away from the Marine recruiting station on a certain day. That afternoon, a bomb blew out the front windows. A handful of people were injured by shrapnel and blast effects, but none seriously. Yelena didn’t tell the girl specifically about the bomb, but that’s a hard kind of coincidence to ignore.”

  “So, you arrested Yelena?” Jonathan said.

  Irene shook her head. “Just to be clear here, I personally had nothing to do with any of this. But no, we did not arrest her. The US attorney didn’t think we had enough to put her away.” Irene’s smirk returned. “We did, however, have plenty enough to scare her. A counterintelligence agent picked her up and told her that if she didn’t turn on her friends, she would go to prison for the rest of her life.”

  “It was a bluff?”

  “Absolutely. But as I said, she’d gulped the Kool-Aid by the gallon. At first, she proclaimed to know nothing of what the agent told her, and then she shifted into martyr mode and swore her allegiance to the Motherland.

  “Well, as it turned out, at the same time the Bureau was gathering intelligence on the network of expats, our friends in Langley had their sights on Yuri Poltanov in Moscow. The Wall was softening quickly, and apparatchiks were scrambling to reserve spots on the lifeboats for themselves. He turned on the Kremlin. The Bureau liaison to the Puzzle Palace got wind of it, and we were able to work a little magic.

  “We told Yelena what her father had done, and that we would turn him over to the KGB if she didn’t cooperate with us.
That did the trick. With her testimony, we were able to nail the entire leadership of the expat network.”

  “WitSec?” Jonathan asked. Irene would recognize the acronym for the Marshal Service’s Witness Security program.

  Irene flicked her forefinger at him. “Bingo.”

  “And what about Comrade Daddy?” Boxers asked. “Yuri.”

  Wolverine’s face darkened. “Actually, that didn’t go so well. The agency wouldn’t break him free from his agreement to snitch on the Kremlin. Things were coming undone so quickly by then that the need for intel was insatiable. Plus, he knew about what was happening with his daughter, and was convinced that the KGB would figure it out and kill him.”

  Jonathan could tell from body language alone what was coming next. “Let me guess. That’s what happened.”

  Another forefinger. “It didn’t happen until after Yelena’s testimony. They took him to Lubyanka, and he never came out. We presume they executed him, but Perestroika didn’t extend to the release of those records. Now that the new regime has re-embraced the Cold War mentality, I expect we’ll never know for sure.”

  Silence reigned as Jonathan and Boxers processed what they’d just heard. Jonathan had to say it aloud, just to make sure that he hadn’t gone nuts: “So, the First Lady of the United States is a former terrorist who is part of the witness protection program.”

  “Yes.”

  “And every hotheaded Russian with a jones for the good old days has a motivation to kidnap and kill her.”

  Irene seemed less certain on that score. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “And we paid for some major plastic surgery to change her appearance.”

  Boxers laughed. “Holy shit. Only in America.”

  Irene seized on it. “You know what, Big Guy? You’re absolutely right. Only in America. The land of second chances. And third.”

  Jonathan intervened. “I don’t think he meant to impugn the honor and dignity of the nation he’s risked his life for dozens of times.” Subtext: This was the wrong table at which to play the guilt card. “I find it astonishing, though, that some intrepid reporter didn’t dig this stuff up during the campaign.”

  Irene gave a coy smile and a shrug. “We’re good at what we do.”

  “That’s not what astonishes me,” Boxers said. His ears were red, a sure sign that he was pissed. “How is it that the FBI can know that a terrorist is on her way to the White House and still sit on the information?”

  The coy smile turned into something malignant. “What are you suggesting, Big Guy?”

  “Suggesting my ass.” He shot a look to the statue of the Blessed Mother. “Sorry. I think it’s irresponsible that the American people didn’t get to know about this.”

  Irene steeled herself with a deep breath. “Two points,” she said. “One: Never once in the history of this nation has a single American cast a vote for a spouse. They vote for the candidates.”

  Jonathan wasn’t buying. “So, there’s no restraint by the media if a candidate’s teenage kids step out to grab a drink at a bar, but having a wife who’s a bomber gets a pass? Come on, Wolfie. That can’t sit right with you.”

  “Which brings me to point two,” Irene said. “We have no way of knowing that the president himself knows of her past.”

  “Bullshit,” Boxers said. Then, to the Blessed Mother: “Sorry. Again. He’s the president, for God’s sake.”

  Irene tossed off another shrug. “As I say, we’re very good at this sort of thing. Or, more to the point, the Marshals Service is very good at this sort of thing. If Yelena didn’t reveal the secret to him, then no one else would.”

  Jonathan thought his head might explode. “What about you guys, Wolfie? We’re talking national security here. Don’t the people of the United States have a right to know that there’s a terrorist in the White House?”

  “Digger, you want things to be blacker and whiter than they ever are. I’ll use the T-word if that’s what you want, but the fact of the matter is that the same woman you characterize as a terrorist in fact did a wonderful and noble thing for her adopted country by sending a lot of very bad people to prison.”

  It was Jonathan’s turn to laugh. “You accuse me of not dealing in shades of gray, and then you put out a purple argument. By your own words, there wasn’t a lick of patriotism in what she did. That was all about saving her father’s ass. How do you know that her very presence in the White House isn’t part of some massive plan for revenge?”

  “I know that because we don’t live in a James Bond novel. There is no Dr. No, there’s no THRUSH, and there’s no KAOS. And there’s no way to plot a course to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—especially not as a First Lady. I mean, think about it.”

  She had a point. In fact, Venice had told him that Anna and Frank Darmond had met before he had even run for the House of Representatives. It would have been foolish to roll the dice on becoming a mole at the highest level even before a first vote was cast. What seemed less outrageous, though, was the thought of a developing plan to squeeze the most out of an evolving opportunity.

  “While under protection, what were her political activities?” Jonathan asked.

  “Mostly quiet. Once you cut off ties with your revolutionary brethren, and send the bosses to prison, there’s not a lot left.”

  “What about the friendships she developed afterward?” Boxers asked.

  “No one particularly scary, I don’t think. You’re not going to find any Tea Partiers in her Rolodex, but I’m guessing there aren’t many Communists in there, either.”

  “Can you get us a list of acquaintances?” Jonathan asked.

  Irene nodded, but said nothing. It was her tell for unease.

  “A complete list,” Jonathan pressed. “Anything less than complete, and we’re all wasting a lot of time.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Warning bells pounded like a great gong in his head. “Why are you gaming me like this, Irene? That’s not like you.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Life’s complicated.” Jonathan leaned in closer. “Understand me, Madam Director. I am a micrometer away from pulling the plug on this whole thing. The stakes here are huge, and whenever that happens, the danger to me and my team gets huge, too. As this is fundamentally not my problem, I will not go forward without the trust that I have earned from you and the rest of Uncle Sam’s legions.”

  Irene nodded some more. Jonathan could read in her eyes that he’d nearly convinced her, so he let the silence prevail. She signaled that the decision was made when she inhaled deeply through her nose and blew the breath out as a silent whistle. “I’ll give you everything we have,” she said. “I’ll have a courier bring it to your office first thing in the morning. And I won’t insult you by telling you how sensitive it is.”

  Jonathan turned more in his seat, and settled in for the next chapter of this conversation. “Did you know that while there were street surveillance cameras in place at the Wild Times Bar on the night Mrs. Darmond was kidnapped, none of them were in fact working?”

  “Yes,” Irene said. “I own those cameras, at least in a manner of speaking.”

  “That doesn’t seem odd to you?” Boxers prodded.

  “Oh, it seems very odd to me. Just as it seems odd to me that the attackers knew that the First Lady was on an OTR to begin with. It’s odder still that by all accounts, the car that pulled up with the shooters was a big SUV. There’s some disagreement whether it was a Suburban, an Escalade, or a Yukon, but everyone agrees that it was a big, dark-colored sports utility vehicle.”

  “Like the ones your guys drive?” Jonathan asked.

  “Like the ones that all of official Washington drives. I’ve got a few agents working that angle, trying to track the whereabouts of all of them, but I don’t expect much. Heck, if I were a bad guy pulling off something like this, maybe I’d just rent a look-alike vehicle to throw everyone off the scent.”

  Bingo! In a flash, one giant piece of the puzz
le fell into place for Jonathan. As the realization dawned, a smile bloomed. He wagged a forefinger at Irene as the reality clarified. “You guys didn’t hire us to protect the world from financial calamity. Well, maybe that was part of it, but you hired us because you don’t know if you can trust your own people.”

  “I already stipulated to that,” Irene said, but she looked away as she did.

  “No, you didn’t,” Jonathan pressed. “You said you couldn’t trust your people to keep it quiet—the financial Armageddon argument. In reality, you think that maybe your people are running this thing.”

  A longer silence this time as the director measured her words. “It’s not just my people,” she confessed at last. “Ramsey Miller can’t write off the possibility that his people might have a hand in it, too.”

  “But why?”

  Irene shook her head. “I have no idea. That’s the part that makes no sense to me. And because it makes no sense, I don’t give that possibility any more weight than, say, a thirty percent possibility.”

  “Thirty percent is a lot,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan finished the thought: “Certainly too high to take a chance.”

  Irene held up her hands as if to stop someone approaching her. “Tell you what, guys. Let me pursue that possibility on my own, okay? There are plenty enough people in the universe with motivation to do harm to Yelena Poltanov—excuse me, Anna Darmond. Why don’t you focus on those? If nothing else, those are the kinds of leads that my shop can’t follow without asking a lot of questions.”

  “And you’ll start sharing for real?” Jonathan pressed.

  Another hesitation. “Let’s do this,” Irene said. “I’ll tell you if this turns out to be a problem within the federal law enforcement community, and I promise I’ll tell you early. However, I will not gratuitously share dirty laundry with you.”