by Mike Lawson
“Well, we must have overlooked the card. Or maybe the Arlington cops removed it from his wallet when they found the body.”
Overlooked the card? This was the fucking FBI. They were supposed to be able to find gnat DNA on the head of a pin. How could they have overlooked the card? But DeMarco didn’t say any of this. All he said was, “I just want to know when I can claim the body.”
“Why would you want to claim the body?”
“Because I’m Paul’s cousin and his only living relative.” That was a lie but he didn’t want to go into a long complex explanation of his relationship to Paul and the fact that Paul’s real closest living relative had one foot in the grave herself.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Hopper said, “but his body was cremated.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I apologize, but we don’t have a lot of room in the morgue we use, and when we found out Russo’s parents were dead and he didn’t have any siblings, after the autopsy, we—”
“You completed the autopsy already? He was only shot yesterday.”
“We’re pretty efficient,” Hopper said. “But like I was saying, after the autopsy when we couldn’t locate a next of kin, we cremated the body. I guess we really screwed up and I’m embarrassed. I hope cremation wasn’t against Mr. Russo’s religious beliefs.”
Actually, this wasn’t bad news, DeMarco thought. Now he wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of a funeral. It seemed odd that they would have cremated the body so quickly, but he could understand how they might not have been able to locate Paul’s next of kin. Paul’s Aunt Lena’s married name was Hennessy, not Russo, and he wasn’t sure how the FBI would know that people named DeMarco were related to Paul—other than the damn card in Paul’s wallet.
“Where are his ashes?” DeMarco asked.
“Give me your address and I’ll send them to you.”
DeMarco gave Hopper his home address. “Can you tell me what you’ve learned about who killed him?”
“We’re still investigating and we don’t have any suspects yet, but … well, I have to be honest with you, Mr. DeMarco. We think your cousin may have been dealing prescription drugs—illegally, that is. He was a nurse and he had access to things like OxyContin, and he may have been shot because of that. There are some pretty violent people in the world of drug trafficking.”
DeMarco felt like telling Hopper the same thing he’d told Detective Glazer, that the Paul Russo he had known hadn’t seemed like the drug-dealing type. But the fact was, he didn’t really know anything about Paul’s circumstances in the last three or four years. So all he said was, “Do you have any proof Paul was doing anything illegal?”
“No, it’s just a hunch based on the time he was killed and where he was killed. But like I said, we’re still investigating. I gotta go now, Mr. DeMarco, but I apologize again for not contacting you before we cremated the body.”
“Look, I’m not going to make a big stink about the fact you cremated him without talking to me, but I’d appreciate it if you could keep me in the loop on the investigation,” DeMarco said. And then he did something he didn’t normally do: he flexed what little political muscle he had. “By the way, I’m a lawyer who works for Congress.”
Lawyers, in general, can be a pain but a congressional lawyer could be a significantly larger pain to Hopper because there’s nothing employees in the Legislative Branch of government enjoy more than twisting the nuts of those employed by the Executive Branch. If Hopper was impressed, however, by the fact that DeMarco worked on Capitol Hill—along with several thousand other lawyers—he kept his awe hidden quite well. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and hung up.
Claire Whiting in motion: long-legged strides, staring straight ahead, intense, unsmiling, her heels striking hard on the linoleum floor. She was always in a hurry—a woman forever at war against the clock.
She entered a room containing thirty cubicles, and in each cubicle sat two technicians, most wearing headsets, all pecking away at keyboards and studying the monitors on their desks. Large plasma screens were mounted on the walls of the room and fiber-optic cables snaked in thick bundles, invisible beneath the floor. The cables were connected to large Cray computers and rack upon rack of servers in nearby buildings. The room was always somewhat chilly because the temperature was set to meet the rigid needs of the machines and not for the comfort of human beings.
The room was part of the Net.
The word Net was not shorthand for Network, as one might assume. It was instead exactly what the name implied: a device for capturing things, in this case the whispers of a planet. The mesh of the Net consisted of acres of computers, thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, fleets of satellites orbiting the globe, vast arrays of dish antennae on desert plains—and much, much more.
The Net never slept. It was always awake—and always listening.
It recorded, analyzed, and transmitted.
It translated and interpreted.
There were some who believed it might even be able to think.
The Net was the heart, if not the soul, of the NSA.
Claire strode over to Gilbert, the technician who had brought her the intercept of—she was sure—Paul Russo being killed. Gilbert had tubular arms, straw-in-the-manger dirty-blond hair spiking up from his head, and nails chewed to the bloody quick. He was addicted to caffeine and sugar and, even sitting, was in constant motion—fingers tapping, right knee bouncing, nose twitching. Because his eyes were now closed and he was absorbed completely in whatever he was listening to, Claire used a polished fingernail to tap on one of the headset earpieces, causing a burst of noise to explode in the technician’s ear. She preferred to touch the headset rather than him.
“Fuck!” Gilbert said, ripping his headset off and spinning around to confront his tormentor. Then seeing it was Claire and not the man he shared the cubicle with, he sat up a bit straighter and said, “Oh, it’s you. Look, I’m still working on that software problem, but I haven’t found—”
“I want you to get into the Bureau’s system and get me the autopsy report on Paul Russo. I also want you to get me every record you can find on Russo himself: tax returns, employment records, scholastic history, credit reports, et cetera, et cetera. I want you to do the same thing for an FBI agent named David Hopper.”
“Okay,” Gilbert said.
Okay. That’s all.
That Claire had just asked him to invade several federal, state, and private record-keeping systems, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s heavily protected computer network—to obtain information on two American citizens—didn’t faze Gilbert at all.
He’d done it before.
Claire summoned an agent to her office.
Claire’s technicians manned the machines and, in general, matched all the nerdy stereotypes: fingers grafted to keyboards and the social skills of bright, obnoxious twelve-years-olds, more comfortable in online chat rooms than at office parties.
Claire’s agents—many of whom were women—did the fieldwork Claire and Dillon needed done and, like her technicians, they shared certain common characteristics: they had the intelligence to understand the high-tech gear used by the NSA but they were also cocky and aggressive and physical. And they carried weapons. They rarely got to fire their weapons—but they all wanted to.
This particular agent was dark-haired, slim, and wiry and was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt that hugged his body. One advantage to being an agent was that the dress code was flexible. That is, what the agents wore to the office was irrelevant, but there were certain standards regarding appearance. The first of those was that the ideal agent was blessed with a face that no one would remember: no albinos, Jimmy Durante hooters, or tattoos of writhing snakes encircling their necks. The other requirements were short hair—bald was acceptable—no facial hair, and no glasses, contacts only. The reason for these requirements was Claire’s agents had to be able to change their appearance often and rapidly and it w
as best—when required to don wigs or mustaches or any other type of disguise—to start with a relatively blank canvas.
The other thing about agents—and she often had to remind Dillon of this when he wanted to fire one—was that they were expensive. Not their salaries but their training. They had to know how to break into buildings with sophisticated alarm systems; how to follow a subject and not be seen; how to plant listening devices that would not be detected. The agents didn’t have to know how the listening devices worked—that was knowledge only the technicians were given—but they did have to know enough to install the gizmos.
Yes, agents were expensive and therefore not casually discarded, so when one of them misbehaved or acted rashly, he or she wasn’t usually fired. Instead, the agent was disciplined and Claire was the one who decided upon the appropriate punishment—and Claire could be quite cruel and quite inventive.
Even the agents feared Claire Whiting.
“I want an FBI employee named David Hopper smothered,” she said to the agent. “Twenty-four/seven surveillance. Landlines tapped. Cell phone monitored. Bugs in his house and his car.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the agent said.
Paul Russo had lived in a duplex near the Court House metro station and his landlady had been his next-door neighbor, a sweet old woman in her eighties with snow-white hair and Dresden-china blue eyes. The landlady’s name was Betty.
DeMarco explained to Betty that he was Paul’s cousin—it was easier to say cousin than second cousin—and he was dealing with Paul’s estate. That is, he was dealing with it until he could find someone else to stick with the job.
“I need to get into his place,” DeMarco said. “I need to see if he had a will and try to figure out what to do with his things.”
He was surprised Betty didn’t ask to see proof that he was related to Paul but she didn’t. Maybe she was trusting and naïve—or maybe she was just happy to have someone take care of Paul’s furniture so she could lease out his side of the duplex.
“I just can’t believe he’s dead,” Betty said. “He was such a wonderful young man. If I ever needed anything, he was always there for me. When that FBI agent told me he’d been killed, my heart almost stopped.”
“The FBI called you?” DeMarco asked, wondering why they’d called his landlord and not him.
“No, an agent came here and told me.”
“Do you remember the name of the agent?”
“Oh, what was his name? Whoever he was, he was a very handsome man but very serious.”
“Was his name Hopper?”
“Yes, that was it. He said he had to look inside Paul’s apartment. For clues, I guess.”
“When did he come here?”
“Yesterday morning, about six. Fortunately, I’m an early riser. I don’t know what he did, but he spent a couple hours inside Paul’s apartment.”
It sounded to DeMarco like the FBI was really moving on Paul’s case. They perform an autopsy on him faster than you can dice an onion and then Hopper rushes right from the murder site to Paul’s apartment to search it. DeMarco didn’t know how the FBI normally did things, but he couldn’t help but think of what Glazer had said. If Paul had been somebody famous he could understand the FBI making his case a high priority, but he couldn’t imagine what made Paul so important.
DeMarco concluded his cousin wasn’t into material possessions in a major way. There was no big-screen TV or fancy audio system inside his apartment, and his furniture was inexpensive and mismatched, like stuff you’d buy at yard sales or from secondhand stores. He noticed a crucifix over the bed and one of those Sacred Heart pictures of Jesus in the living room.
The second bedroom in the apartment had served as an office, so DeMarco took a seat behind Paul’s small desk and spent some time looking through the file folders in the desk. He didn’t find what he was hoping to find: a will. He did find a bunch of pay slips from a hospice organization. A hospice? He’d always assumed that Paul worked at a regular hospital, and again he felt guilty that he hadn’t made a better effort to get to know the guy. He also found statements from a bank where Paul had his savings and checking accounts. As of two weeks ago, Paul had almost four hundred in checking and thirty-eight hundred in savings. If he’d been a drug dealer, it didn’t appear that he was a very successful one.
He sat back, trying to decide what to do next, when he noticed there was a printer and a monitor for a computer on the desk, but no computer. He wondered if Hopper had taken Paul’s computer or if the computer was being repaired.
His next thought was that the money in Paul’s bank account should go to somebody—probably his Aunt Lena—but how in the hell was he supposed to get access to the money if he couldn’t find a will? And if Paul did have a will, it might be in a safety deposit box at his bank, but how was he supposed to get into that? This whole thing was becoming a gigantic pain in the ass.
He decided he was probably going to have to talk to an estate lawyer to figure out what the procedure was if he couldn’t find a will—and it was gonna really piss him off if he had to spend his own money on the lawyer. As for Paul’s possessions, he’d do like his mother said and call Goodwill and see if they could pick up the clothes and furniture. He’d take Paul’s files over to his place and shred the paper, but he wasn’t going to do that right now.
What he wanted to do next was go to the place where Paul had worked. Maybe his boss or one of his coworkers would know if he had a lawyer and where his will might be. Or maybe he kept his will at work. Yeah, right, like he would ever get that lucky.
He knocked on Betty’s door again and told her he was leaving and it was going to take him a few days to figure out what to do with Paul’s things. She said that was all right, and started to go on again about what a fine young man Paul had been and how much she was going to miss him. Then she said, “Even if he was gay, if I had a son, I would have wanted him to be just like Paul, to be as decent as he was, I mean.”
“He was gay?” DeMarco said.
“Yes. Didn’t you know?”
“Uh, no. We weren’t close. Was he dating someone?” DeMarco was thinking that a lover might know about Paul’s will.
“No, not at the moment,” Betty said. “At least I don’t think so.”
“How ’bout close friends?”
“As far as I know, all his close friends were people at his church. He spent most of his free time there.”
“Which church is that?” DeMarco asked.
8
“Good morning, gentlemen,” the president said, as he took his seat at the head of the conference table.
Charles Bradford didn’t like the president—but then, he couldn’t remember the last president he had liked. He didn’t agree with the man’s social programs, disagreed completely with his handling of the recent financial crisis, and thought he was overly ambitious, as if he were trying to create a legacy in the first year of his first term. He was a bright guy, though—that much he had to admit—and no president since Kennedy could give a speech like he could. But overall, Bradford had the same disdain for him that he had for every other so-called commander in chief who had never worn a uniform.
There was one good thing about the president, however: on any matter even remotely related to national defense, he relied heavily on the opinion of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bradford suspected the president trusted him on military matters not only because of his experience and reputation but also because of his appearance: Charles Bradford looked the way army generals were supposed to look. He was six foot four and his stomach was washboard-flat because he exercised religiously. His skin was tanned and leathery; he wore his gray hair cut close to his skull; and he had a large bony nose that gave him the profile of a bird of prey. The left half of his chest was covered with campaign ribbons and medals, and he had two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star. The Silver Star had been awarded when he was a second lieutenant in Vietnam; he’d always believed he should have received the Medal of Hon
or but never said so publicly.
Also present in the White House Situation Room were Gregory Hamilton, the Secretary of Defense; Martin Cohen, the president’s national security advisor; Cohen’s deputy, an idiot named Clark Palmer; CIA Director Samuel Mentor; NSA Director Admiral Fenton Wilcox; and one of Wilcox’s top men, a man named Dillon Crane. Bradford had met Crane before. He was a rich smart-ass. Bradford suspected that if times ever got tough, Crane would run back to the silver-spoon mansion where he’d been raised.
Not present in the room, but appearing on a video screen, was the American general who had overall command in Afghanistan, and the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the status of the war, which wasn’t going well at all. Bradford believed the reason the war was taking so long and costing so many American lives was because the president was too concerned about public opinion polls and placating our so-called ally, the Pakistanis. If Bradford had been given a free hand, he would have sent in thirty thousand more troops, pushed directly into Pakistan, dropped bunker busters on every cave in the region, and disarmed the entire population.
Forty minutes later—and after no decisions of any magnitude had been made—the president was ready to adjourn the meeting. But at that point, Clark Palmer, the deputy national security advisor, said, “Mr. President, there’s one other issue.”
The president looked at his watch. “What is it?”
“It’s something the NSA brought to my attention a couple of days ago. Admiral Wilcox, if you wouldn’t mind,” Clark said, nodding to the NSA director.
Admiral Wilcox was a short, slim, perpetually frowning man with iron-gray hair. He quickly explained that the NSA had intercepted a phone call between an opium warlord in Afghanistan named Sayed Wafa and one of his underlings discussing the elimination of a provincial governor whose province bordered Pakistan.
As Bradford listened to Wilcox, his knuckles turned white gripping the edge of the conference table. He couldn’t believe Wilcox had spoken to the White House about the situation before he had consulted with Bradford.
