by Mike Lawson
Yes, Martin Breed had done much for his country, and the most important things he had done would never be known. Bradford always believed that if he had ever asked Martin to die for him, he would have done so without hesitation—and then it turned out, when it was time for Martin to die, that Martin turned against him. But he didn’t feel bitter toward his friend. Who knows what effect the cancer had on his mind at the end? And who knows what any man might do when faced with the prospect of meeting his Maker? He liked to think that impending death would never change his principles, but he had no right to judge Martin harshly. He had not yet walked in Martin’s shoes.
Linda Breed let out a heart-wrenching moan, and Bradford took her small hand into his. But as he held her hand, his thoughts turned to John Levy. Bradford prided himself on his ability to compartmentalize issues and problems, and his focus this morning had been on Martin’s funeral and his eulogy. Now that his part in the service was over, however, he couldn’t help but wonder how Levy was faring.
Levy had to find out who had identified that young soldier through his fingerprints.
“That’s her,” Perkins said, pointing at the monitor on his desk.
Perkins—a lanky, balding, bookish man in his forties—was an agent who worked for the PFPA, the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. The PFPA is the Pentagon’s police force and is composed of guards, criminal investigators, and highly trained technicians responsible for protecting the Pentagon and other DOD assets in the D.C. area. John Levy was nominally the deputy director of the agency. The reality, as Perkins and every other member of the force knew—including Levy’s boss—was that Levy reported to no one. And people in the Pentagon quickly learned to do whatever Levy asked of them. If they didn’t, someone very, very high up the chain of command would make a phone call and instruct them in the error of their ways. Levy was a shadowy presence who, for reasons no one could understand, was incredibly powerful and totally autonomous.
Levy looked at the monitor and saw a stocky black woman with henna-colored hair and black framed glasses wearing a dark pantsuit.
“We got that picture from a surveillance camera located near the hospital pharmacy,” Perkins said. “We started with a general description of the woman from a nurse’s aide, who said that a black woman identified herself as an Arlington police officer and took the fingerprints of the John Doe corpse. We showed the aide this surveillance photo, and he confirmed this was the woman.”
“So who is she?” Levy said.
“Her name is Alberta Merker. I used Homeland Security’s facial recognition software.” A second photo flashed up on the screen, showing a round-faced black woman, her hair cut in a short Afro. “That’s her Maryland driver’s license photo, minus the wig and glasses.”
“Put both photos on the screen at the same time,” Levy said. Perkins did and Levy studied the two pictures. Yes, it was the same woman, but the simple disguise she’d worn made it tough to tell.
“She’s not an Arlington cop, is she?” Levy said.
“No, sir. All I could find out about her is that she’s ex-army enlisted and works for the Department of Defense. DOD personnel records identify her as a GS-Eleven procurement specialist, but her file has nothing in it that identifies exactly what she does or which division she works for. And a title like procurement specialist is not much help; she could be procuring anything from combat boots to tanks.
“I mean, this is really strange,” Perkins added. “I’m certain this woman is connected in some way to the Pentagon, but it’s like her personnel records have been sanitized.”
Levy just stood there, looking at the two pictures of Alberta Merker still visible on the monitor. He didn’t say anything, but he was thinking that the Department of Defense employed over two million military personnel and almost a million civilians. It was spread over the entire planet and had more departments, divisions, and bureaucratic niches than anyone could possibly imagine or keep track of. The fact that Merker’s personnel records were incomplete didn’t necessarily mean that someone was trying to hide the identity of her employer—but he suspected that in this case someone was.
“Where does she live?” Levy asked.
“College Park, Maryland, according to her tax returns. Also, per her tax returns, she’s single. But I don’t know if she lives alone or not.”
When Levy didn’t say anything, Perkins added, “Sir, if you told me why you’re interested in this woman, maybe I’d be able to get more data.”
“You don’t need to know anything else,” Levy said. “All you need to know is that she’s a security risk and I don’t want you talking about her to anyone.”
“Yes, sir.”
Levy turned to leave, then, realizing he’d been too harsh with the man, he said, “You did a good job on this, Perkins, and I appreciate it. And I’d tell you more if I could. It’s just that the situation with this woman is very sensitive.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
For your sake, I hope not, Levy thought.
13
DeMarco ate a can of chili for dinner and, while he ate, he felt sorry for himself. Mahoney’s absence was a gift—a gift that was now being squandered because he was wasting his time dealing with his cousin’s death. He also wondered what the hell the FBI was doing. He agreed with Glazer, the Arlington cop, that something very odd was going on.
He grabbed a beer from his refrigerator and went into his den to watch the evening news, but just as he was about to turn on the television his phone rang. He looked at the caller ID but the number was blocked.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hi, it’s me.”
It was Angela. Thank God. He could picture her: the long dark hair, the laughing eyes, the trim body he loved.
“Are you back?” he asked, hoping like hell that she was. She’d only been gone a few days, and he couldn’t believe how much he missed her.
“No. And I probably shouldn’t even be calling you, but I just wanted to let you know I was all right and that I was thinking about you.”
“I know you can’t tell me exactly where you are, but are you someplace safe? Tell me you’re not running around in the mountains looking for al-Qaeda guys in caves.”
She didn’t answer for a moment, as if she was trying to choose her words carefully. “I’m in a safe place, so don’t worry about me. I can’t tell you any more than that, because if the NSA intercepted this phone call I could get in trouble.”
“The NSA!” he said. “You think they’re listening to this?”
“No, not really, but you can never tell with those guys.”
“Well, in case they are, let’s give them something interesting to hear. Tell me what you’re not wearing.”
“Don’t be silly. Anyway, I miss you and I love you.”
“I miss you too. When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.” To change the subject, she asked him what he’d been doing. He told her Mahoney was in the hospital, nothing serious, and he’d been planning to play golf until his boss returned to work. He was just about to tell her about his cousin getting killed when he heard a thud in the background and she said, “Joe, I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll call you again as soon as I can.”
The thud could have been anything—something falling off a shelf, a door slamming—so why did he think it was an explosion? God, he hated her job.
He turned on the television, listened to the local news as he sipped his beer—and tried not to think about Angela in Afghanistan. The anchorman was yapping about a Washington Post reporter being missing, saying how the reporter had been an investigative journalist and had broken a number of big political stories. DeMarco had never heard of the guy. Except for the sports page, he rarely paid attention to the bylines in the paper.
The newscaster went on to say that management at the Post was concerned that the reporter’s disappearance could be related to whatever he was working on, although his editor didn’t know what that could be. Which made De
Marco think that maybe they oughta supervise their damn people a little bit closer. It sounded to him like a reporter could goof around all day and his bosses wouldn’t have a clue what he was doing.
Kind of like DeMarco.
The last thing the news guy said was the reporter drove a yellow Volkswagen bug, last year’s model, and if anyone saw one abandoned someplace, they should call the DC cops.
Volkswagen bug. What man would drive one of those? DeMarco wondered. They were cute cars. Cute was, in fact, their defining quality. They were the cars rich daddies bought their college-age daughters when they sent them off to school.
The news gal who was paired up with the news guy—for some reason they always worked in pairs, like it takes two people to read a teleprompter—was now talking about some brand of pet food that was making cats sick. This had happened before and the public was going nuts and it sounded to DeMarco as if the FDA was spending more money on the problem than they would have spent if people were dying.
His mind switched lanes again, back to his cousin. If Paul wasn’t mugged and if he wasn’t selling drugs, why was he killed at one in the morning? He could have been meeting someone—maybe a lover like he’d told Jane, the hospice boss—and they had some kind of lethal spat. But that didn’t sound right either, not from everything he’d heard about Paul. And why meet your lover at a public park at one in the morning? No, it was something else.
Paul was a nurse who helped people die. What if one of his patients had told him something? What if some guy on his deathbed had gasped out I did this terrible thing or I know this horrible secret about so-and-so. Then what? Paul tries to blackmail somebody? Nah, he wouldn’t do that. But what if he’d decided to tell a reporter about something he’d learned from a patient? That was a stretch, but possible. The problem with that bright idea was the time. Why the hell would he be telling a reporter something at one in the morning? And why even meet with a reporter? Why not just call the reporter?
Whatever the case, there was something he really wanted to know: the name of Paul’s last patient. Good ol’ Jane had refused to tell him.
He picked up the remote to change the channel, to watch something less depressing than the news, when the female newscaster said, “This just came in. Speaker of the House John Mahoney is reported to be in a coma at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Speaker Mahoney was admitted to the hospital two days ago for a routine gallbladder operation, but—”
DeMarco turned off the television and immediately called Mahoney’s chief of staff, a man named Perry Wallace. Wallace was bound to know more than the press. Wallace said that after they removed Mahoney’s gallbladder everything looked fine, but then he got some kind of infection, something called gram-negative septic shock, and went into a coma.
“They think they might have nicked his appendix when they took out his gallbladder,” Perry said. He paused before he added, “He could die, Joe.”
DeMarco couldn’t imagine Mahoney sick, much less dead. The man was just too robust, too full of life, too ornery and mean to die. He thought about calling Mahoney’s wife, Mary Pat, but decided not to. She was probably at the hospital at her husband’s bedside or in the hospital chapel praying. He’d give her a call tomorrow and see how things were going.
Then another thought occurred to him, one which made him feel small for even thinking it: What would happen to his job if Mahoney died?
14
Dillon was speaking to someone on the phone and laughing when Claire entered his office. He hung up, still chuckling, and said to her, “There’s a Nigerian cabdriver in Pittsburgh. He wasn’t considered high risk, but we’ve been monitoring him periodically. Last night he called his mother and asked her to take care of his dog if something should happen to him. Mama, naturally, asks, Why would anything happen? Our cabbie’s evasive, but mama persists, and he eventually blurts out that he’s decided to become a martyr.” Dillon paused for a beat. “The man had turned his cab into a rather sizable bomb. The federal courthouse was his target. My God, these people! Why didn’t he just take the damn dog with him? They could have both been martyrs.”
“You think this is funny?” Claire said. “It sounds like it was only dumb luck that we caught this guy.”
Dillon shrugged. “Luck’s an ingredient in any game, Claire, including ours. Maybe more so in our game.”
They had had this discussion before. Dillon maintained that you had to approach the spy business as a game because if you didn’t—if you allowed yourself to dwell constantly on the enormity of the task and the consequences of failure—it would drive you mad.
Dillon had been playing the game for over thirty years. He began his career at the tail end of the Cold War, at a time when the world had been continually on the brink of Armageddon. And he was still playing, but now he watched religious fanatics more than communists; now it was trying to keep the Chinese rather than the Russians contained; now he worried more about the Russians selling their nuclear warheads to terrorists than launching them.
The game just went on.
Dillon, cynic that he was, believed the human race was incapable of any sort of lasting peace, that there would always be some tribe determined to destroy some other tribe because of greed or ideology or religion or bigotry. And when it came to solving conflicts with words rather than weapons, he maintained that we hadn’t advanced since the days when we killed each other with clubs and stones. Today’s stones were just radioactive.
There was no way all of America’s spies and warriors could keep the country totally safe. There just wasn’t enough time in the day. There weren’t enough people, money, and machines to keep the enemy constantly at bay. All you could do, he said, was come to work each day and take your seat at the table of the most fascinating game on the planet—a game that never ended and where just being alive to play was prize enough.
Well, it wasn’t a damn game to Claire Whiting.
“I’ve got something new on Russo,” she said. “Something potentially very big.”
“Yes?” Dillon said, the mirth still in his eyes.
“Russo was a hospice nurse. His last patient was Martin Breed.”
“General Martin Breed?”
“Yes, that Martin Breed.”
“I’ll be damned,” Dillon muttered, recalling how he and his poker buddies had been discussing Breed the other night. “So what’s the significance of this?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Okay. Continue.”
“The FBI falsified Russo’s autopsy report—I don’t think they even did an autopsy—and then they immediately had the body cremated.”
“How could they falsify the autopsy report?”
“The doc who supposedly performed the autopsy is a man named Lee. Dr. Lee visits the casinos in Atlantic City quite often and the day after Russo died, his checking account increased by three thousand dollars. That could be a coincidence, but I doubt it. Anyway, the autopsy report said Russo was killed at close range, most likely with a 9mm handgun, and we know he wasn’t.”
“This isn’t really new information,” Dillon said. “I mean, we already suspected the FBI was involved in some sort of cover-up when they took over the case.”
“That’s true, but claiming that Russo was killed with a handgun supports the story they’re dishing out that Nurse Russo was dealing meds and his death was drug-related, further obfuscating what really happened.”
Dillon’s mouth twitched, a gesture that Claire knew meant I am not yet impressed.
“The third item is that Hopper, the FBI agent, is on the take. Someone is feeding money to him from a phony trust fund.”
“But I take it you don’t know who’s behind the trust fund.”
“No. Next is the person who called Hopper the night Russo was killed. This person used a cell phone that was one of three hundred bought for personnel stationed at Fort Myer, but the owner of the phone is only identified as being the Fort Myer public works department and not a specific indi
vidual. When we contacted the public works department, they had no idea who the phone had been given to. They just pay the bill.”
“Certainly you can locate him via his cell phone, Claire.”
It irritated her that he would say something so obvious, but she didn’t bother to tell him that the cell phone in question was an older model without a GPS chip, and it appeared that its owner not only shut it off when he wasn’t using it, he also removed the battery. But all she said was, “We’ll locate him the next time he uses the phone.” Then, before Dillon could interrupt again, she said, “And now the big item. The ambulance driver, the one with no ID who was injured in a wreck two blocks from the memorial? The guy I thought might be Transport? I sent people to the hospital to get his fingerprints so we could identify him but when my guys arrived they discovered the driver had died suddenly and unexpectedly from his injuries.”
“How convenient.”
“Yes, too convenient. And no autopsy was performed on the driver. One was supposed to be but it wasn’t because before the autopsy was performed, the body disappeared, and whoever took it was smart enough to disable the surveillance cameras first. But we got fingerprints before they got rid of the body. My guys did good on that.”
“So who was the driver?” Dillon said, his tone implying that he’d appreciate it if she got to the point sooner rather than later. Claire didn’t know it, but he had an appointment with his Milanese tailor in an hour.
“Sergeant Mark Witherspoon, U.S. Army. And guess what? He was stationed at Fort Myer. The Third Infantry Regiment.”
“The Old Guard? The Tomb of the Unknowns?”
“Right.”
The soldiers who guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were, in Claire’s opinion, just plain weird. Claire understood the value of pageantry and patriotic symbolism but had to wonder what normal young man would volunteer for an assignment where he had to march like a robot in front of a grave. And becoming a tomb guard was no easy matter. They didn’t take just anybody. The men selected were rigorously screened and tested, and the wash-out rate was fairly high. But what really concerned her about the sentinels was their fanaticism. Fanatics could be valuable or dangerous—depending on which organization they worked for—and these particular fanatics didn’t work for the NSA.
