House Divided

by Mike Lawson

  House Divided

  by Mike Lawson

  A Joe DeMarco Thriller

  1

  A satellite orbits a blue planet, huge solar panels extended like wings.

  Alpha, do you have Carrier?

  Negative. Monument blocking.

  Bravo, do you have Carrier?

  Roger that. I have him clear.

  Very well. Stand by.

  Nothing more was recorded for eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. Time was irrelevant to the machines.

  I think Messenger has arrived. Stand by.

  Confirmed. It’s Messenger. Messenger is approaching Carrier. Alpha, do you have Messenger?

  Roger that.

  Bravo, do you still have Carrier?

  Roger that.

  Very well. Stand by. Transport, move into position.

  Four point three seconds of silence followed.

  Transport. Acknowledge.

  A second later:

  Transport. Acknowledge.

  Four point nine seconds passed.

  Alpha, do you have Messenger?

  Roger that.

  Bravo, do you have Carrier?

  Roger that.

  You have my green. I repeat. You have my green.

  Three heartbeats later:

  Transport, Transport. Respond.

  There was no response.

  I’ll transport in my vehicle. Maintain positions. Keep me advised.

  Nothing more was recorded for six minutes and sixteen seconds.

  This is Alpha. Two males approaching from the north. I have them clear.

  Alpha, take no action. Do I have time to retrieve Carrier?

  Negative.

  Very well. Stand by.

  One minute and forty three seconds later:

  This is Alpha. The two males have stopped. They may have sighted Carrier. They have sighted Carrier. They’re approaching Carrier. I have them clear.

  Alpha, take no action. Transport acknowledge.

  Two point four seconds of silence.

  Return to jump-off. I repeat. Return to jump-off.

  After thirty-five minutes elapsed, a program dictated that the transmission was complete and the recording was compressed and sent in a single microsecond burst to a computer, where, in the space of nanoseconds, it was analyzed to determine if it met certain parameters. The computer concluded the recording did indeed meet those parameters, and at the speed of light it was routed through a fiberoptic cable and deposited in a server, where it would reside until a human being made a decision.

  2

  Jack Glazer was getting too old for this shit.

  It was two in the morning, rain was drizzling down on his head because he’d forgotten to bring a hat, and he was drinking 7-Eleven coffee that had been burning in the pot for six hours before he’d poured the cup.

  And there was a dead guy lying thirty yards from him.

  “Has the ME been here?” he asked the kid, some newbie who’d been on the force maybe six months and looked about sixteen years old—but then all the new guys looked absurdly young to him. And naturally the kid was totally jacked up, this being the first homicide he’d ever caught.

  “Been and gone,” the kid said. “Forensics sent one guy; he searched the vic, ID’d him from his wallet, and said he’d be back in a couple hours with his crew. They got another—”

  “So who’s the victim?”

  “The name on his driver’s license is Paul Russo. He was a nurse.”

  “How do you know that?” Glazer asked.

  “He had a card in his wallet, some kind of nurses’ association he belonged to. He also had the name of an emergency contact, some guy named—”

  “Did you write down the contact’s name?” Glazer asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you can give it to me later.”

  “The thing is, sir, this guy has cash in his wallet and he still has his credit cards and his watch. So I don’t think we got a mugging here. I’m thinking drugs. I’m thinking this guy, this nurse, was pedaling shit. You know, Oxy, Vicodin, something, and he gets popped.”

  “Could be,” Glazer said. “But now this is really important, uh …” Glazer squinted at the kid’s name tag. “Officer Hale. Where’s the body, Hale?”

  Hale, of course, was confused by the question, because the body was clearly visible.

  So Glazer clarified. “Hale, is the body in the park or out of the park?”

  “Oh. Well, that’s kind of a tough call,” Hale said. “The head’s on the sidewalk but the feet are on the grass. I guess it’s kinda half in and half out.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. So why don’t you grab his heels and pull him all the way into the park.”

  The kid immediately went all big-eyed on Glazer.

  “I’m kidding, Hale,” Glazer said, but he was thinking, Shit. Why couldn’t the body have been in the park, or at least three-quarters in the park?

  Paul Russo had been shot near the Iwo Jima Memorial, and the memorial was located in a park operated by the National Parks Service. This meant the park was federal property—technically, not part of Arlington County and out of Jack Glazer’s jurisdiction. If the guy had been shot in the park, Glazer would have pawned the case off on the feds without hesitation. He was already dealing with three unsolved homicides and he didn’t need another.

  “Where are the two witnesses?” Glazer said.

  “In the back of my squad car.”

  “Did they see anything?”

  “No. They’re dishwashers. They work at a Chinese restaurant over in Rosslyn and were on their way home. All they saw was a body on the ground and called it in.”

  Great.

  Glazer walked over to look at the body: a short-haired, slimly built man in his thirties with no distinguishing features. Just your average white guy. He was wearing a tan jacket over a green polo shirt, jeans, and running shoes. He was clean and healthy-looking—except for the small, red-black hole in his left temple.

  Glazer noticed there was no exit wound from the bullet. This surprised him because it made him think that if Russo had been shot at close range, which he most likely was, the shooter might have used a .22 or .25—and that was unusual. Most folks who bought handguns these days, particularly men, didn’t normally buy small-caliber weapons. Everybody wanted hand cannons—big-bore automatics with sixteen-round magazines.

  He took his flashlight and shined it around the area but didn’t see anything—no shell casings, no footprints, no dropped business cards from Murder, Inc. He looked again at the position of the body. Just like Hale had said: it was almost exactly half on the sidewalk—which Glazer was positive belonged to Arlington County—and half inside the park. Goddammit. It was going to be a real tussle to get the feds to take the case.

  “Hi there.”

  Glazer turned. A man was walking toward him, a handsome dark-haired guy in his early forties dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, no tie, holding an umbrella over his head.

  “Sir, this is a crime scene,” Glazer said. “Get back behind the tape.” Glazer glared over at Hale, wondering why the damn rookie had let a civilian into the area. Then he found out.

  The guy took a badge case out of the inside pocket of his suit coat and flipped it open. “Hopper, FBI,” he said. “I think this one’s ours.” He smiled at Glazer then, and he had a great smile—charming, disarming, all these even white teeth just gleaming in the dark. “I mean, I’d love to let you have it,” he said, “but my boss says we gotta take this one.”

  What the hell?

  “How did you know about the victim?” Glazer said.

  “Beats me,” Hopper said. “They just told me to get my ass over here. One of our guys must have picked it up on the scanner and hea
rd you folks talking about it. I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  The difference it made was that there was no way an FBI agent would have hustled over here at two in the morning to take over the case. Maybe when it was daylight, but not at two A.M.—and not for an apparent nobody like Paul Russo. And this agent. He wasn’t some low-level Louie; Glazer could tell just by looking at him. This guy had weight.

  “The body’s on the sidewalk,” Glazer said. “My sidewalk.”

  Hopper looked down at the body. “It’s half on the sidewalk. And the rule is—”

  “Rule? What fuckin’ rule?”

  “The rule is like football. Wherever the runner’s knee goes down is where they spot the ball. His knee went down in the park.”

  “I’ve never heard of any—”

  “Come on, Glazer. I’m tr—”

  “How do you know my name?”

  Irritation flicked across Hopper’s face. “They gave it to me when they called me. Probably got if off the scanner, too. Why are you giving me a hard time here? I’m doing you a favor. This is one less murder on Arlington’s books. It’s one less case you have to clear. You oughta be thanking me, not arguing with me.”

  Glazer already knew he was going to lose this fight—and anybody looking at the scene, not knowing a single thing about criminal jurisdictions, would know he was going to lose it, too. In one corner you had this confident six-foot-two, handsome as Mel-fucking-Gibson federal movie star. In the other corner you had Jack Glazer: five-ten, a stocky, strong-looking guy, a guy tough enough to have maybe played linebacker for a small college team but not big enough or fast enough for a big-name school. It was the neighborhood mutt squaring off against the government’s Rin Tin Tin—and nobody would have put their money on the mutt.

  But still—even knowing the feds were going to win this jurisdictional tug-of-war—this guy pissed him off. And something was seriously out of whack.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll have to settle this later, when it’s daylight,” Glazer said, shifting his position slightly, blocking off Hopper’s path to the body. “I need to check with my boss. But for now—”

  Glazer’s cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. What the hell?

  “Glazer,” he said into his phone. He listened for a few seconds, said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up.

  Glazer looked at Hopper for a moment and then slowly nodded his head. “That was my boss. He said this is your case.”

  3

  Gilbert swiped his badge through the bar-code reader, punched in a six-digit security code, and pressed his thumb against the pad. When the annex door lock clicked, he pulled the door open, nodded to the no-neck security guy who had a small desk on the other side of the door, and went to his cubicle. He tossed his backpack on the floor, spent ten minutes bullshitting with another technician about how his new cell phone was a piece of shit, then proceeded to the coffee mess, where he poured the first of a dozen cups he would drink that day.

  Back in his cubicle, he booted up all the machines, spent fifteen minutes on one of them looking at e-mail, then turned to the machine that provided him with an annotated description of transmissions intercepted in his sector in the past twelve hours. He tapped the SCROLL DOWN key as he studied the screen, sipping his coffee, then stopped. “What the hell?” he muttered.

  He tapped on a keyboard, routed the transmission he’d selected to a program that would deencrypt it, and for forty-five minutes did other work. Then he put on his headphones.

  Alpha, do you have Carrier?

  Negative. Monument blocking.

  Bravo, do you have Carrier?

  Roger that. I have him clear.

  Very well. Stand by.

  When the recording stopped, Gilbert muttered “Holy shit,” played it again to be sure, then copied the transmission to a CD.

  The label on the CD said NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. There were a lot of other words printed on the label as well and, when taken collectively, these words indicated the CD was classified at the highest level and whoever listened to it would rot in a federal prison until their teeth fell out if they didn’t have the proper clearance. There was nothing unique about the label, however. Every CD in the annex, including the one that contained forms for purchasing office supplies, had the same label.

  CD in hand, he walked through a maze of cubicles, nodding to folks he passed, but didn’t stop until he reached her office. She was sitting at her desk, head down, reading something, and when he knocked on the doorframe to let her know he was standing there, she looked up with those frosty eyes of hers.

  “Yes,” she said.

  No good morning, how-are-you, how’s-it-going? It was always business with her, never a moment wasted on mundane social interactions.

  “I think you need to hear this,” Gilbert said, holding up the CD. “I think two guys got killed last night.”

  Other than a slight elevation of one blonde eyebrow, she showed no emotion. She took the CD from him and slipped it into one of the three computer towers beneath her desk.

  “Password?” she said.

  She wasn’t asking if the disc was password-protected; of course it was. She was asking for the password because if she tried to open the CD without it everything on it would turn to gibberish.

  “Grassyknoll, lower case, one word,” Gilbert said.

  She typed the password and listened to the recording with her eyes closed, giving Gilbert a chance to study her. She was at least ten years his senior, getting close to forty, he guessed, but she had a good long-legged body, a narrow face with a model’s cheekbones, and those incredible scary blue eyes. He couldn’t understand why such a good-looking woman didn’t have a husband or a lover, but since she worked about sixteen hours a day and was the least approachable person he’d ever met, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

  “When did this take place?” she asked.

  “About one A.M.”

  “Where were they?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. Somewhere in the District or Northern Virginia. For some reason, that’s best location we could get. I need to take a look at the software to see if it’s got some kind of glitch, but it could have been the com gear these guys were using.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. She just sat there staring at him like it was his fault the fucking software didn’t work, but then she nodded and he exhaled in relief.

  Claire Whiting scared the hell out him. She scared everyone. Well, maybe not Dillon, but everyone else.

  Dillon Crane was on the phone when Claire entered his office.

  Dillon was sixty-three years old, tall and slender—and the subject of infinite office speculation. His short white hair was trimmed each week by the same barber the president used, and his suits were handmade by a Milanese tailor who now resided in Baltimore. The suit he wore today was light gray in color, and his shirt was also gray, a darker gray than the suit. Claire had no name for the color of his tie—something with maroon and charcoal black and dark blue all swirled together—but whatever the color, it matched the suit and shirt perfectly.

  Dillon never wore white shirts and simple ties to work. He’d remarked once that a white shirt, accompanied inevitably by the ubiquitous striped tie, was the uniform of a bureaucrat, and even though he was one he refused to dress like one. And since the hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year he earned from the National Security Agency was a pittance compared to the annual income from his trust fund, he could afford to dress however he pleased.

  He smiled when he saw Claire in his doorway—that annoying ain’t-life-droll smile of his—but continued with his phone call. “Clark,” he was saying, “all I can do is relay to you what we intercepted. It appears—and I can’t be any more definitive—that a certain opium-growing warlord is about to assassinate an Afghani politician who has grown contrary of late.”

  Claire realized Dillon was talking to Clark Palmer, deputy to the president’s national security advisor. Dillon, on one occasion, had
said to her, “Clark’s a rock—only not so smart.”

  He listened for a moment, rolled his eyes for Claire’s benefit, and said into the phone, “No, Clark, I won’t send you a memo. The entire conversation was two sentences long, and I’ve just given you the NSA’s translation and interpretation of those sentences. Have a nice day.”

  Dillon hung up the phone and smiled at Claire again. “You look lovely today,” he said.

  She ignored the compliment as she always did.

  “We picked up something that could be important.”

  “I’m sure it’s important, Claire, or you wouldn’t be here. But is it interesting?”

  Dillon, as she well knew, was easily bored. And she knew exactly what he meant by interesting. A White House lackey leaking a memo to the Post; a colonel at the Pentagon whispering bid specs to a contractor; an undersecretary at State calling her lover at the Israeli embassy—those things could be important and they often were—but they weren’t interesting. They were business as usual.

  The CD in Claire’s hand was not business as usual.

  “Yes, Dillon,” she said, “it’s interesting.” She handed him the CD. “The password’s grassyknoll, lower case, one word.”

  “Grassy knoll?” Dillon said, but he didn’t say more and took the CD from her and slid it into the drive of his computer.

  Alpha, do you have Carrier?

  Negative. Monument blocking.

  When he had finished listening to the recording, he said, “Now that is interesting. What do we know?”

  “What do we know?” Claire repeated. “We know nothing. But would you like me to speculate?”

  “Oh, please do, Claire. Speculate away.”

  “First,” she said, “I think these guys were military.”

  “Logic?”

  “These people were on radios, not cell phones, and the radios were something special. They weren’t using walkie-talkies from RadioShack. They were using encrypted AN/PRC-150s.”

  “Really?”