by Mike Lawson
“I didn’t know what those two men had seen at the time,” Levy said. “And since I had to leave Russo’s body, I didn’t want to give the Arlington cops time to study the wound or do an autopsy and figure out what type of ordinance was used.”
“I understand,” Bradford said. “It was a judgment call. And you certainly made the right choice regarding which body to leave.”
“I think so,” Levy said. “Russo didn’t have a lover, and his parents are dead. Nobody will really push for a solution. I’ve told Hopper to say he was most likely dealing drugs and, with Russo being a nurse, the people who matter will buy the story.”
Bradford nodded. It appeared as if Levy had thought of everything. There were some risks—in any military operation there were always risks—but not large ones.
“All right, John,” Bradford said. “Keep me posted.”
“Yes, sir,” Levy said.
Bradford noticed Levy started to raise his right hand to salute but then stopped himself. Old habits die hard—and it was good they did. John Levy would always be a soldier, with or without a uniform.
Bradford stood, hands clasped behind his back, looking out a window. In the distance he could see a portion of Arlington National Cemetery: a rolling green hill and row after row of white headstones. He loved the view from his office and took pride in the fact that one day his body would be interred at Arlington, his grave marked only by a simple white stone marker. That was all he wanted—no grand tomb, just the same stone that marked the graves of his fallen comrades.
He could also see Levy standing on the sidewalk talking to someone on his cell phone. He was most likely checking on the young man in the coma. He was probably wishing the driver would simply die, and then he wouldn’t have to execute the order he’d been given. But Bradford had no doubt that Levy would follow the order.
He was so lucky to have a man like John. The people of this country, blissful in their ignorance, had no idea how much their survival depended on men like him.
And Martin.
Ah, Martin, I miss you so.
There was a rap on his office door. Bradford turned and saw one of his secretaries standing timidly in the doorway.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, General, but your meeting with the Secretary of Defense begins in two minutes.”
6
“Dillon, I’ll see your five and raise you five,” Harry Cramer said.
“Harry,” Dillon said, “are you sure you want to do that? The odds of you making your straight are less than sixteen percent.”
“Maybe you’ve lost track of the cards,” Harry said. “We all know you hired that young lady to distract us, but you’ve been paying more attention to her than anyone else at the table.”
The bartender Dillon had hired to serve the poker players was indeed a distraction. She was a six-foot-tall, twenty-seven-year-old brunette with lavender eyes and exquisite proportions.
“Harry, I’m shocked you’d suggest such a thing,” Dillon said. “I hired her because she makes a perfect martini and can pour with either hand. Ambidextrous bartenders are hard to find.”
Marge Fielder boomed out a laugh. Marge was the only woman player present. The other attendees of the monthly game held at Dillon’s home on the Maryland shore were: Harold Cramer, a federal judge who served on the D.C. Court of Appeals; Paul Winfield, special assistant counsel to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Stephen Demming, deputy to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon; Clyde Simmer, assistant to the Solicitor General at the Department of Justice; and Dillon Crane, deputy to the deputy director of the National Security Agency. Marge Fielder worked at the State Department and her title was Undersecretary for Political Affairs—making her the third highest ranking official in the department.
The six poker players had four things in common. They were all in their late fifties or early sixties and incredibly bright; no one player had any particular advantage over the others. Second, they were absurdly wealthy. Five of the six were heirs to obscene amounts of money willed to them by their ancestors. The exception was Stephen Demming, who had married money and then his wife had been kind enough to die and leave it all to him.
Each player occupied a powerful position in the federal government, yet none of them were known to the general public. Dillon, had he desired the job and had he been willing to contribute to whomever was running for president, could have been the Secretary of Defense; Harry Cramer had once been short-listed for a seat on the Supreme Court but had made it clear he wouldn’t serve. Marge had twice declined the job of Secretary of State, having seen all too often how the press—and Congress—devoured the person in that position. Which was the third thing they all had in common: they all loved power but were astute enough to realize that the real power in Washington lay in the hands of the long-serving bureaucrats who occupied positions below the radar—the special assistants, the undersecretaries, the deputies to the deputies. The people in these positions were less likely to be changed out when a new administration occupied the West Wing and, because of their experience and longevity, they all knew exactly which levers to pull to make the gears of Washington spin. The reason Dillon had organized the game was that his friends not only had the wealth to play for staggering amounts but the game was also a forum for exchanging information—although all the players were extremely tight-lipped about giving away secrets. They came to acquire knowledge, not to dispense it.
The last thing they had in common, maudlin as it might sound, was they all believed in public service. Like Dillon. He was a Rhode Island Crane and before the terms conservationist and environmentalist became common to the English language, in an era where worker safety was the employee’s problem and not the employer’s, at a time when the word union was most often associated with the word communism, Dillon’s great-grandfather ripped from the earth as much timber, coal, copper, and oil as he possibly could—and then emerged as a respectable fellow because he would occasionally build an orphanage or add a wing to a hospital. Dillon could have squandered his life sailing yachts or owning baseball teams, yet both he and his father, similar to the Kennedys, whom they knew quite well, had elected to devote their considerable abilities to government service. Dillon’s father had been a congressman for thirty-five years, but Dillon had opted for his nearly invisible position at the NSA.
Of all the poker players, Marge found Dillon to be the most interesting—and the best-looking. He dated stunning women but—as far as she knew—he had never come close to marriage. He was quite vain about his appearance, spending a fortune each year on clothes, but wasn’t the least bit vain about his accomplishments. His drab title of deputy to the deputy director disguised the fact that he was one of the most powerful players in the intelligence community, and although his attitude toward his job was typically flippant, as if he were completely above the fray, there was no one more adept—or more ruthless—in dealing with the Machiavellian maneuvers that occur within all bureaucracies. But the oddest thing about him was his education: he had a doctorate in physics, a field of study quite out of the norm for people from his class and background. One of the reasons he’d gone to work for the NSA was that he could actually understand what the wizards did at Fort Meade.
Dillon casually tossed five one-thousand-dollar chips into the center of the table, and Marge calculated that the pot was now at thirty-two thousand. “Okay, Judge,” Dillon said, “you’ve been called. What do you have?”
Cramer fanned his cards out on the table.
“A straight, jack high. Did I mention, Dillon, that today’s my birthday? I’m feeling very lucky tonight.”
Marge watched a look of irritation flit across Dillon’s face. He hated to lose—they all did—but the look passed quickly. He was too gracious—and too rich—to pout over the twelve thousand he’d lost on the hand. He turned to the bartender and said, “Katherine, would you mind looking below the bar? There’s a bottle of Dom Perignon Oenotheque there. Please pour us each a gl
ass so we can toast Judge Cramer’s continued good health.”
It was Marge’s turn to deal. “Seven-card stud, threes and nines are wild.”
The men all groaned. Marge liked wild card games because even geniuses like Dillon had a harder time calculating the odds.
As she was dealing, she asked Dillon, “Who do you think will replace Martin Breed?”
Paul Winfield, who worked at the Federal Reserve, said, “Who’s Martin Breed?”
“My God, Paul,” Stephen Demming said, “don’t you read anything but the financial section of the papers?”
“Why would I?” Winfield said.
Marge knew that Winfield actually read every word in four papers daily—including the entertainment sections and gossip columns. He did this because he firmly believed that everything affected the markets. Marge assumed he was pretending to be ignorant of General Breed because he thought he might learn something he didn’t already know. She loved these devious bastards.
“Martin Breed,” Demming said, “was a two-star army general who would have gotten his third star this year. The word is that Charles Bradford was grooming him to be his replacement as the army’s chief of staff. Breed died a few days ago from cancer. He was only fifty-two.” Turning to Dillon, he said, “I’ve heard that Stan Parche will most likely end up in Breed’s spot.”
“I don’t think so,” Dillon said. “My guess is Jillian Chalmers. But, of course, the final decision will be made by Bradford.”
“And you think Bradford would select a woman for that position?” Marge said.
Dillon winked at her. “Who said Jillian is female? No one has bigger balls than her.”
7
Claire approached Dillon’s office but didn’t enter because he was talking with his boss, the deputy director.
The building was buzzing with an operation in progress. One of Dillon’s other divisions—Claire’s organization was just a small part of his domain—had intercepted several cell phone calls from Yemen indicating there was something onboard a ship that would soon dock in Long Beach. But whether the cargo was a bomb or a biological weapon, or something mundane like drugs or illegal aliens, wasn’t clear. The NSA was trying to get more information so the Coast Guard would have a better idea of what they were dealing with before they stopped the ship. However, and because of the deputy director’s body language, Claire suspected they weren’t talking about the California-bound vessel.
The deputy director was simultaneously nodding and frowning. The nods implied that he agreed with everything Dillon was saying, but the frowns indicated that he didn’t like anything he was hearing. This meant, Claire was fairly sure, that they were discussing Dillon’s budget. Dillon’s attitude toward his authorized annual budget—a budget that totaled several hundred million dollars and which he agreed not to exceed each year—was that what he was doing was so important that if more money was needed, Congress could either raise taxes or take the money from some other federal agency that was less important. In other words, not an attitude the deputy director appreciated, since he was the one who would have to crawl up to Capitol Hill and beg for the money. And judging by the deputy director’s simultaneous nods and frowns, Dillon was telling the man the significance of everything he was doing and providing a reasonable explanation as to why it all cost so much—but he was also saying there was no way he could reduce his spending.
But Claire knew the real reason why Dillon could never meet his budget—and it had nothing to do with any mismanagement on Dillon’s part. The real reason was that Claire’s organization was not included in the budget and was being secretly funded out of Dillon’s other operations. This, however, was not a fact Dillon could share with his boss.
The deputy director left five minutes later, still frowning, while Dillon appeared completely unperturbed. “That poor fellow,” Dillon said, “is going to give himself an ulcer.”
Claire didn’t care. “The grassyknoll hit,” she said. “I have data now.”
Dillon’s smile widened. “I love data,” he said.
“That night three men in the D.C. area were shot at approximately one A.M.”
“Only three?”
“It was a quiet night in Dodge. One guy had his face blown off by a convenience store clerk who was staunchly defending the fifty-six dollars in his till. The second man, poor bastard, was shot by his wife when he lost his house keys and broke into his own home.”
“And the third person?”
“A man named Paul Russo was found shot in the head near the Iwo Jima Memorial.”
“Could that be the monument we heard mentioned in the intercept?” Dillon asked.
“Probably. And it gets better. Russo’s body was discovered at approximately one fifteen and, as you might expect, the Arlington cops were called to the scene. I had a tech take a peek into Arlington’s computers this morning, and, lo and behold, before the body was even loaded into the coroner’s wagon, an FBI agent by the name of David Hopper shows up and takes over the case.”
“At one in the morning?” Dillon said.
“Closer to two, actually. But that’s not all. As you heard on the intercept, Transport failed to show. Now, assuming Transport’s function was to remove the bodies, how might one go about that? Well, I discovered that at almost exactly the same time as whatever occurred, an ambulance was in a traffic accident two blocks from where Mr. Russo’s body was found.”
“Why would they use an ambulance?”
“An ambulance is an ideal vehicle for picking up and transporting dead bodies. And if traffic is jammed up or you’re in a hurry, you can use lights and sirens.”
“I agree, but what makes you think, other than the time, that this ambulance accident is related to Russo?”
“I don’t know for sure that it is. The accident was just an interesting coincidence which became even more interesting after I learned the ambulance had been stolen from a company in Fairfax and the driver, though dressed like a medic, did not work for the company and had no ID on him. The driver is currently a John Doe car thief in a coma at Arlington Hospital.”
“Now that is a fascinating … anomaly,” Dillon said, his choice of the word a reminder to Claire that she shouldn’t confuse anomalies with relevant facts until she had supporting data—a reminder Claire didn’t need or appreciate.
“But we missed an opportunity,” Claire said. “Messenger, we assume, was removed from the scene. But how did Messenger get to the scene?”
“Damn it,” Dillon muttered. “His car.”
“Right. His car. Based on what we heard, Messenger must have parked fairly close to where Russo’s body was found, so I sent agents to the memorial and had them get license plates on every car within two blocks of the kill site. All cars currently in the area belong to people who are alive, which means the shooters must have removed Messenger’s car last night, maybe even while the cops were still at the scene.”
“Nervy,” Dillon said.
“Not just nervy but connected. Very connected. Who could get the FBI to show up at two in the morning to take a case away from the Arlington cops?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“At this point, no.”
“So what are your next steps?” Dillon asked.
“I’ll see if I can figure out who Messenger is. I’m checking missing persons reports and watching to see who shows up dead in the next few days.”
“Good. What else?”
“I’ll get a copy of Russo’s autopsy and learn more about the FBI agent who was dispatched to the scene. And I’ll find out everything there is to know about Mr. Russo himself. All I know at this point is that he was a nurse.”
“A nurse? Why would someone want to kill a nurse?”
“Wrong question, Dillon. The question is: Why would someone who has access to encrypted radios and possibly military personnel, and who is able to make the FBI take away a case from the local fuzz in the middle of the night, want to kill a nurse?”
/> “I stand corrected, my dear. Keep me apprised.”
DeMarco called his mother in Queens and told her Paul had been killed. She spent a few minutes saying things like “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He was so young. He was so sweet.” She cried a bit and talked about how Paul had looked when he was a child. “Like an angel he was, with all that curly hair, those big blue eyes.”
Then, being a practical person, she got down to business.
“Well, Joe, you’re going to have to take care of the funeral. And you better find out where he lived and take care of his things, too.”
Aw, for Christ’s sake. He was sorry Paul was dead but he hardly knew the guy, and he could already see that dealing with his death was going to eat up a lot of time—time he had allotted for playing golf.
“What am I supposed to do with his things?” he whined to his mother.
“I don’t know. Give them to the Goodwill or something. And maybe he had a will. You need to see what his wishes were.”
Yeah, a will. A will was good. If Paul had appointed an executor, the executor could deal with all this shit.
“But didn’t he have any other relatives?” DeMarco said. “I thought Aunt Vivian had a sister—Tina, Lena, something like that.”
Aunt Vivian was Paul’s mother, and although she wasn’t literally DeMarco’s aunt, that’s what he’d always called her.
“Joe, what’s wrong with you!” his mother snapped. “Lena’s eighty-seven years old. You can’t burden her with this. It’s your responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.”
Sheesh.
“Agent Hopper, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I’m calling about Paul Russo.”
Hopper didn’t say anything.
“Agent, are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. How did you hear about Russo, Mr. DeMarco?”
“The Arlington cops told me about him. They said they found a card in his wallet identifying me as the person to contact in case of an emergency. In fact, I’m kinda surprised you didn’t call and tell me he’d been murdered.”
