The Enemy Inside

by Steve Martini

  It was the kind of stuff a wily lawyer and pillar of the community like Proffit generally didn’t want to know about. He had imagination enough to fill in the blanks. And if Serna got in trouble, Proffit would protect himself like a mobster with at least three or four layers of subordinates to insulate him from accountability. But now that Serna was dead he had no choice. If there were damaging documents lurking in her files, he had to protect the firm, and by extension, himself. They would have to find some lawyerly way to inoculate themselves and disinfect the office.

  Serna was the firm’s “juice lady,” specializing in political law and lobbying—“mother’s milk,” political money, action committees, and donor lists—the dark side of democracy. She had no personal life, no family, and seemingly no existence outside of the steaming swamp that was Washington and in which she seemed to thrive. For some time now, from what Proffit could see, her ambition had gotten the better of her. She had turned her job into a launching pad in an increasingly obvious campaign to unseat him at the head of the table within the firm.

  “I’ve got two trusted associates and three secretaries auditing her files and checking her e-mails as we speak,” said Fischer. “If there’s anything there, I’m sure we’ve got it contained.”

  This is what Proffit expected. They were looking in all the wrong places. “What I’m worried about you won’t find in her files.” Proffit knew that anything in her office files, short of hostage notes or blackmail letters, the firm could probably throw a blanket over under attorney-client privilege or lawyer work product and probably make it stick. “That’s not the problem.”

  “What then?” said Fischer.

  “Sit down for a minute and let me think.”

  Fischer wandered toward one of the client chairs across from Proffit’s enormous mahogany desk, slumped into the deep cushions, and stared at his boss across the shimmering plate-glass surface.

  What troubled Proffit was that Serna was a loner. If she had shot a dozen people in a shopping mall they would have said she fit the profile. Usually in a hurry, irritable, always on her own mission, a cipher you couldn’t read if they gave you the code. She was dedicated to her work in the way a zealot is to his ideology. She had her fingers in almost everything the firm handled if it had to do with the gods of politics. She blanketed Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the White House and did it all by herself. At times Proffit was left to wonder if she had cloned herself. If she had posted a sixty-hour day on her billings no one who knew her would have accused her of padding the bill. Her work ethic wasn’t the problem. The fact that she had an ambition to match it was.

  More to the point, Serna had her own power base outside the firm, mostly friends on Capitol Hill and in the bowels of the administration. She was a registered lobbyist, one of only three in the firm. She either directly or indirectly ladled campaign money on members of the House and Senate from well-heeled clients, many of them large well-organized trade associations and corporate business groups. It wasn’t her money, but as far as the recipients were concerned, it didn’t matter. She was on the giving end. Otherwise, it would have been an easy task for Proffit and his supporters in the firm to outflank her, undercut her, and send her packing. The problem was, if they did that, they couldn’t be sure of the political or economic fallout.

  If deals were made on critical legislation with Serna in the middle and her friends in Congress on the doing end, high-paying clients of the firm might feel more comfortable with her than with Mandella. Especially if they started receiving phone calls or e-mails from Serna’s friends in the Capitol. She had come from congressional staff when they hired her, consultant to the Senate Banking Committee. She had a lot of friends there. It was a delicate problem, not one that was easily or quickly dealt with.

  “Where did she live?” Proffit looked off into the distance to the side away from Fischer as he asked the question.

  “Somewhere in Silver Spring. We have the address in our records.”

  “Has anybody been over there since the accident? Anybody with a key?” Proffit turned and burned two holes through Fischer with his gaze. He didn’t have to wait for an answer. The expression on Fischer’s face said it. Fischer hadn’t thought about this.

  “She wasn’t married, had no lovers that we know of. Lived alone, right?”

  Fischer nodded. “As far as I know.”

  “She didn’t or I would have known about it,” said Proffit.

  Fischer didn’t ask how. Clete always had his sources.

  “If there is anything we should worry about, it’s not going to be in her files here at the firm. It’s going to be in one of two places,” said Proffit. “She may have stashed documents at her house. That includes her home computer, any thumb drives or other portable storage devices, and paper records. Perhaps a safe-deposit box. Did she have one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The weight of what you don’t know could sink us,” said Proffit.

  “What is it exactly that you’re worried about?” asked Fischer. “If you could give me some specifics it might help.”

  “I’m worried about whatever it is that I don’t know,” said Proffit. If Serna had been one of their corporate lawyers, even one of their stables of criminal trial lawyers, Proffit wouldn’t have been so concerned. It was the nature of her work that scared him, and her ambition. She was in a position to do real damage both to himself and the firm. They were one and the same as far as Proffit was concerned. From what he could see, she was already in the process of doing that damage when she died.

  “Who is her next of kin?” he asked.

  Fischer shook his head, shrugged a shoulder.

  “Well, goddamn it, find out! See if she had a company life insurance policy. If so, there should be a named beneficiary. That may be it. Did she have any other property besides the place in Georgetown? A vacation hideaway where she may have stored documents?”

  Again Fischer didn’t know. But by now he was taking notes on Post-it slips from the little square holder on Proffit’s desk.

  “Did she own or rent the place in Georgetown?”

  “Owned. I think.”

  “Well, find out!” said Proffit. “We don’t want some nosy landlord traipsing through the place looking at things until we’ve had a chance to do it ourselves. Did she have anybody else in the firm she trusted, any associates?”

  “She wanted to hire an assistant. You said no.”

  “I know what I said. Was there anybody in the office she confided in?”

  “I didn’t follow her into the ladies’ room, if that’s what you mean. Vicki Preebles was her secretary. I assume if she trusted anybody it would have been her.”

  “Was Preebles upset by the news? Serna’s death, I mean?”

  “Sure. Wouldn’t you be? She wanted to stay and help out, but I told her to take a couple days off. I felt it was the thing to do,” said Fischer. “We can wait a respectful period and then debrief her. See what Serna may have told her. If anybody knows anything, I suspect it’s her.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “And I changed the locks on Serna’s office just like you said.”

  “Good.” Proffit thought to himself that if Cyril Fischer ever got disbarred, perhaps he could make a living as a locksmith.

  FOUR

  Her principal value rested not in her ability to kill her victims, though she was proficient in this. Her usefulness flowed from her knowledge of forensic science and, in particular, trace evidence, hair and fibers, minute particles of dirt, pollen, and other microscopic bits of information that could compromise a job. Sometimes she worked alone and sometimes with others to make sure they made no mistakes and left no telltale signs behind.

  You could call her a hired mercenary, but of a special kind. She seldom, if ever, worked in a war zone; almost always in developed countries, Western Europe, the first world nations of Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

  Governments and large corporations hired her because
they knew her skills and could afford the price of her services. She spoke several languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French, a smattering of German along with some Russian. Her English, though fluent, if you listened closely, carried a hint of what sounded like a Spanish trill, so that you might mistake her background as Latin American if you didn’t know better.

  Ana Agirre was Basque, born in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Her great-grandfather died in the bombing of Guernica by the Germans in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, a travesty made famous by Picasso’s painting of the same name. Both her father and her mother worked in the Basque underground before the end of the Franco regime and then afterward, part of the ETA, the Basque separatist movement. Her mother died smuggling explosives during an ETA mission in Barcelona. Her father was taken prisoner. She never saw him again. At the time Ana was eight.

  Raised by her maternal grandmother, she excelled in school, particularly in science. She graduated from secondary school a year ahead of her classmates. Given her family background and the fear of retaliation by the Spanish government, Ana was sent to college in Paris. She could have taken courses preparing her for medical school or any of the research fields. Instead, she chose criminalistics and later took a job in the crime lab of the Police Nationale, successor to the fabled Sûreté. The French didn’t seem to care about her family’s background. In fact, some voiced sympathy for the Basque people and their repression under Franco. There she learned and refined her forensic skills.

  One would have thought she was on a mission to rehabilitate her family so earnestly did she study, absorbing everything she saw and learned with the zeal of a monk. What she masked was anger, anger at the world for having taken from her the one person in her life who she loved more than life itself, her mother. It was a painful loss, one she could never get over. It came to her in her nightmares, the brilliant flash of fire, the sensation of heat and the shattering sound of the explosion that ripped her mother to pieces. Though she had not witnessed it, she had now seen enough to know what it would have been like, the aftermath of a blast from nearly two kilos, four pounds, of RDX, what the American military called C-4 and the British termed PE-4.

  Since she was ten, when she had overheard the whispered conversations of her aunts and uncles in the parlor of her grandmother’s house, Ana had known that her mother’s coffin, buried in the graveyard of the small church in their village, was empty. There was no body inside. After the blast, police and firefighters had found nothing except bits of charred fabric from her mother’s clothing, none of them larger than a few centimeters in size. They determined the source of the explosion from chemical tests at the site.

  C-4 was stable. It smelled like motor oil and had the pliable texture of children’s clay. But when subjected to heat or the shock produced by a detonator, it would explode with a fiery ear-shattering blast that could level half a city block.

  Ana concluded that the bomb must have already been armed with a detonator when whoever made it handed it to her mother. It went off on a quiet street in a Barcelona suburb. The only victims were her mother and Ana, who was left to fend for herself.

  She remained with the Paris crime lab for six years before moving on to a private laboratory that contracted its services to the French military. There she came in contact with representatives for corporate mercenaries who ultimately hired her as an independent contractor. Ana set up her own business. For large fees, sometimes seven figures, she asked no questions and did whatever was asked of her.

  Want to burn down a building? Ana would provide you with an incendiary device that would completely consume itself in the flames. Investigators might find the precise location where the fire originated, and if they had sufficient equipment they might sniff out the chemical accelerants. But as to any other evidence, there would be none.

  With the money she earned, she purchased a small estate in the hills above the Côte d’Azur in the South of France. There she moved in her grandmother and one of her aging aunts.

  While they quietly plied the garden and cooked, Ana traveled the world rendering advice to her corporate and government black-bag clients on how best to sanitize crime scenes, the proper clothing to wear to avoid leaving trace evidence, as well as ways and means to commit undetectable “accidents,” almost all of them fatal.

  Drug overdoses were often the death of choice if for no other reason than that most people, including the authorities, believed that those who possessed power and wealth might also be possessed by powerful demons. If there was any hint of past drug use, police seldom looked too far in the direction of criminal homicide unless there was some reason to do so. Ana’s job was to make sure there was none. This was the kind of subtle refinement that the terrorist community was edging toward as a means of avoiding state-led military retribution whenever possible. If authorities could not prove an intentional killing, it was politically difficult to strike back. Yet the result was the same: an enemy was dead. There was a growing demand for Ana’s services, acts that seldom made bold headlines in newspapers and were a blip on the radar of networks and cable news stations.

  At times she would render personal service, hands-on expertise, but that always required a substantially higher fee because of the risks involved.

  As you might assume, one did not find a listing for Ana Agirre in any phone book or on the World Wide Web. To those who used her services, she was known as “L’architecte de la mort,” “the Architect of Death.” Jobs were always on a referral basis, from those she trusted and who had used her services previously. One always kept a low profile in her business.

  She was lean and strong, five foot nine, a little taller than average, a face you would not notice in a crowd, neither ugly nor fetching, a passing figure no one would ever remember. Ana the Architect did nothing to alter this appearance. She wore no makeup, never donned high heels, and wore no jewelry. Her uniform of choice was a dark sweater-jersey, dark slacks, and black flat rubber-soled deck shoes. Nothing expensive or unique with intricate sole patterns. Her hair was cut short in the fashion of early photographs taken of Audrey Hepburn, something that a victim would have difficulty getting a grip on in a frenzied attempt to fight her off—that is, if they ever saw her coming in the first place. Usually she was so quick and agile that all they would catch was a glimpse through glazed eyes of her back as she walked away. It would likely be the last thing they would ever see.

  This morning she was busy reading the online version of the San Diego Union-Tribune about an accident near San Diego, California. She sipped her coffee while sitting at one of the outdoor tables at Le Sancerre on the rue des Abbesses in Paris. It was close to the apartment she maintained in the city. She read the scant details on her e-tablet using the portable hot spot in her purse.

  “A single fatality, an unidentified woman. The other driver was arrested, believed to have been under the influence of alcohol. The survivor, a man in his twenties, suffered only minor injuries and was taken to a local area hospital for treatment. No identification of the dead driver has been made pending notification of next of kin.”

  Ana did not know the dead woman’s name, but she knew she had been murdered. The French mercenaries, a group of high-tech engineers who had constructed the equipment that caused the accident, had told her to watch the news in this part of California, the area around San Diego.

  She had seen only digital pictures of the items, including the large rolling case that was highly unique. It was too big to carry on board an airplane, so it had to be checked. They had marked the case with holograms, making it easily identifiable at baggage claim so that no one would carry it off by mistake. You could just grab it and go. They also sent the specs for the equipment.

  This was composed of a computer, its software, and a portable satellite antenna dish capable of overriding most of the electronics and computer-driven safety and other features built into late-model passenger cars.

  Ana made a down payment on the equipment because she need
ed it for a job in Europe. It was a highly lucrative contract involving the untimely accidental death of an executive, the managing partner of a large multinational corporation. If the schedule on the contract for the executive was to be maintained, the gentleman was slated to be dead in two weeks. After that, bad things would happen to the people who hired her.

  Ana was anxious to get her hands on the equipment and get the job done. However, the French technicians who built the system insisted on “field-testing” it first before they delivered it to her. They said nothing about a field test at the time she ordered the equipment. Now the stuff was off in California somewhere. According to the French makers, if all went well there would be two dead targets, separate motorists in separate vehicles on a two-lane highway in a rural area east of San Diego. The Frenchmen gave her the date and told her to watch the news. They seemed giddy with excitement.

  The news story gave the sorry details. They had not banked on the intervention of a passing motorist. By then it was too late. The surviving victim had been pulled from the burning wreckage. What should have been two clean fatalities and a closed accident file suddenly turned into vehicular manslaughter with dangling threads and probing lawyers who, if they persisted, might find their way back to her. She wanted her software and her equipment back, or better yet destroyed so that no part of it could end up in a crime lab.

  She had visions of Lockerbie, where a massive Pan Am passenger jet was brought down by a small explosive device. Two years later scientists in a crime lab managed to identify a single electronic component from the bomb’s detonator, a piece of plastic smaller than a baby’s fingernail. They traced it back to its point of sale, and from there to two Libyan nationals, who were delivered up by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

  Ana worried that the same could happen with the equipment she had commissioned if it fell into the hands of the authorities. They would trace it back to its French builders, and from them to her, even though she had never used it. She could end up dressed in an orange jumpsuit in the place the Americans called Gitmo.