House Divided

by Mike Lawson

  But Clyde did. “He slinks,” Clyde said.

  “Pardon me?” Dillon said.

  “He slinks. He’s a slinker. I mean, I really don’t know him all that well but that’s the impression I get, that he’s an arrogant bastard who slinks about looking for an opportunity to stab someone in the back. There’s something ferret-like about him, but I’ve been told he’s quite bright and not afraid to work. “

  “Is that it?” Dillon said.

  “Well, let’s see. I know he came to us from some other agency, some odd place for a lawyer to have come from, but I can’t remember which one.”

  “The Pentagon,” Dillon said.

  “Yes, that’s it. The rumor was that he came to us under a cloud of some sort and we wouldn’t have normally hired him, but his wife’s family was cozy with the fool who was attorney general at the time. Not Scranton, but the fool before him. I can find out more if you’d like, Dillon.”

  “No, don’t bother. If I need to know anything else I’m fairly certain I can obtain the information.”

  Dillon wondered if Clyde appreciated the understatement.

  Claire didn’t understand why Dillon was wasting her time telling her about this man Drexler. So what if he was doing a review to see if they were complying with FISA? The head of the NSA didn’t know what Dillon was doing; there was no way some outsider from Justice was going to find anything. And right now she was up to her ass with a million other things and she didn’t have time to deal with nonsense like this.

  “Dillon,” she said, “what does this have to do with me?”

  “Claire, Mr. Drexler has asked to see the transmissions we intercepted in the D.C. area on the day Paul Russo was killed. He pretended he was selecting a random date and place for this so-called spot check he’s doing, but I would assume his selection wasn’t the least bit random.”

  Claire sat for a moment, stunned—just as stunned as Dillon had been when Drexler had told him what he wanted. Then she said, “Aw, shit!” Then she said it again, “Aw, shit, Dillon, what did I do? I must have screwed up. I must have tripped an alarm somewhere.”

  “Yes,” Dillon said quietly, “I think you did.”

  Dillon, in spite of his life-is-but-a-game attitude, took mistakes made by his subordinates quite seriously.

  “But what?” Claire said. “What could I have done that would have told anyone we were looking into Russo? Mostly all I’ve done is record searches, background checks on Hopper, the tomb guards, that sort of thing. I wonder if Hopper could have spotted the surveillance we have on him.” She was thinking about the agent she suspected might have a drinking problem—and kicking herself for not pulling him immediately off the detail.

  “Possibly,” Dillon said. He paused before he added, “Claire, what was the name of that agent who died recently? That young woman?”

  “What?” Claire said, confused for an instant by the question. “Her name was Alberta Merker. She had a heart attack.” Then Claire realized what Dillon was getting at. “The fingerprints? You think they caught on to us when I had that soldier fingerprinted?”

  “Either that or when you accessed the fingerprint files. I believe you said the files were flagged.”

  “Are you saying you think Alberta was killed by these guys?” Before Dillon could answer, Claire said, “I know she had a heart attack, Dillon. She was autopsied by one of the docs we use. And because she was an agent, I had them do a complete tox screen on her. She had a heart attack. She had a family history of heart problems.”

  “I don’t know if she was murdered or not, Claire, but the fact that she took the man’s fingerprints and died soon afterward is probably not something we should assume to be a coincidence.”

  “What does this have to do with Drexler?”

  Normally Claire would have been able to answer that question without any help from Dillon, but he could tell she was having a hard time concentrating. She had just been told it was possible that one of her agents had been killed in the line of duty—and Claire had never lost an agent before. Dillon knew how devastating that could be, even for someone so seemingly cold-blooded.

  “Well, this is what I think is going on,” Dillon said. “Whoever killed Russo knows somebody is investigating his death and they suspect it might be us, the NSA. Why they suspect this I don’t know, but they do. And so they sent in Drexler, and his job is most likely threefold: to confirm the NSA is aware of Russo; to determine exactly what we know; and, most important, to determine who at the NSA knows about Russo.”

  “But what does this have to do with Alberta?”

  “It may have nothing to do with Alberta. She may have simply had a heart attack. But what if they identified Alberta, questioned her, and then she had a heart attack?”

  “Are you saying they tortured her, Dillon? If you are, I don’t buy it. Her autopsy didn’t show anything like that. And if they did torture her, she must not have told them anything.”

  “I agree with your last conclusion,” Dillon said. “If she had told them anything, Mr. Drexler probably wouldn’t be here.”

  What Dillon meant, but didn’t say, was that if Alberta had told anyone about the Russo intercept, Claire Whiting might have found herself strapped to a chair watching someone extract her long, polished fingernails.

  “So what are you doing about Drexler?” Claire asked.

  “I’m complying with his request, of course.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’ve given him all the transmissions we intercepted in the D.C. area on the night in question—verbal, e-mail, and text. The legal intercepts, that is.” Dillon laughed. “Drexler had no idea how much information he was asking for. I’ve buried the poor fellow in electronic files and paper. Then, to make his job even harder, I’ve told him we’re behind schedule transcribing some of the conversations we’ve recorded—I didn’t tell him the computers do most of the transcribing—so he’s going to have to listen to hours of garbled, barely audible transmissions. It’ll take Mr. Drexler weeks to review everything I’ve given him.”

  “I don’t get it, Dillon. Why would Drexler even think you’d give him an illegal intercept, whether it was related to Russo or any other case?”

  “He may think he swooped down on us so fast that we wouldn’t have time to separate the legal from the illegal. But I suspect Mr. Drexler knows it’s unlikely that the Russo intercept is lying in the stacks of files I’ve given him. I think this is just his opening salvo, and what he’s doing is getting the lay of the land. He’s trying to figure out how we operate and who does what, and what he’s really looking for is the people who might have listened to a transmission of Russo being killed.”

  “Then he’s wasting his time. He’ll never identify the techs who work for me by reviewing authorized wire taps and, if by some fluke he did, none of them would talk.”

  “If Mr. Drexler asked them politely, I’m sure they wouldn’t, Claire. But how long do you think the redoubtable Gilbert would resist if somebody connected a car battery to his—uh—manly appendage?”

  Claire reluctantly nodded her head in agreement. A couple of bitch slaps to the head, and Gilbert would give up his own mother.

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “I’ll keep an eye on Mr. Drexler,” Dillon said. “What you need to do, and quickly, is figure out why Russo was killed and who ordered the killing.”

  “I know that!” Claire snapped. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?”

  “I also think you need to do a little research on Mr. Drexler. A friend of mine has given me reason to believe that there might be a skeleton or two lurking in his closet.”

  “Okay,” Claire said, rising from her chair, anxious to be on her way.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” Dillon said. “Your idea to use Mr. DeMarco? I think you should proceed with that.”

  Claire Whiting wasn’t the type to pump her fist into the air and shout, “Yes!” She simply nodded her head but Dillon saw the gleam in he
r eyes. She made him think of a cat creeping up on an inattentive canary.

  23

  “This is Joseph DeMarco, Agent Hopper, and I wanted you to know that—”

  “No, no!” Claire said. “You have the voice down, the New York accent and all, but the … the tone is wrong. He’s not so formal. He’s sort of laid back. And if he was pissed, it’d be more like: Hey, Hopper, this is DeMarco, and I just found out—Do you understand?”

  “I guess,” the impersonator said. He could imitate almost anyone, including most females. At Christmas parties, after a couple of drinks, he’d do an impression of the president and his wife talking after sex that was so funny that even Claire laughed. At this point she didn’t know what she wanted him to tell Hopper but, when she did know, she wanted the impersonator to be ready.

  “Go practice some more,” she said.

  Claire needed to spook Hopper.

  She needed to make him run, literally, to whoever was controlling him and the best way she could think to do that and keep the agency’s involvement secret was to use DeMarco. If she could get Hopper to meet his boss, that would be ideal. The other possibility was that Hopper would call his boss and his boss would decide to do something about DeMarco. They—whomever Hopper was working with—had already killed Russo and most likely the reporter, Hansen. They’d kill DeMarco, too, if they had to. So she would put people on DeMarco and when they tried to kill him or snatch him, she’d follow whoever was assigned—and try to protect DeMarco as best she could.

  DeMarco. Again, records could only tell you so much, but the impression she had was: average guy, maybe below-average guy. He was a lawyer and had passed the Virginia bar, but had never practiced law. He was a GS-13—a rank that wasn’t all that impressive in D.C.—and had been one for a long time, meaning that his career had most likely stalled. He had an office in the subbasement of the Capitol—the location of his office another indicator that he wasn’t a power player—but he wasn’t on the staff of any member of the House or Senate. So she couldn’t figure out exactly what he did but finally decided it didn’t really matter. He was just some sort of low-level legal weenie stuck in a dead-end job.

  As for his personal life, nothing leaped out at her. He’d been married once, divorced about six years ago, and the divorce had cost him a bundle. He lived in a townhouse on P Street in Georgetown; the house wasn’t all that big but the mortgage was enormous. He drove a mid-sized Japanese car, didn’t appear to cheat on his taxes, and didn’t gamble online or spend hours looking at porn sites on the Internet.

  The only thing unusual about him was his father. Gino DeMarco had been a button man for Carmine Taliaferro, an old-time Mafia guy in Queens. Taliaferro died from cancer a few years ago, and Gino DeMarco died from lead poisoning—three bullets in the chest. She supposed it was possible that Joe DeMarco, like his father, could have connections to organized crime, but based on his bank statements and his lifestyle, she didn’t think so.

  She looked at his photo again. He was a good-looking guy: a full head of dark hair, a prominent nose, blue eyes, and a big square chin with a dimple in it. Good-looking, yet at the same time hard-looking. It was most likely her imagination, and probably because of what she knew about his father, but she could picture him in a Scorsese movie playing a knee-breaker working for a loan shark. And there was something in his eyes: toughness, stubbornness, something that made her think, If you pushed him, he’d push back.

  Then she laughed, thinking that if the NSA was doing the pushing, it wouldn’t matter how hard he pushed back.

  Another of Claire’s agents—a guy, skinny, droopy-eyed like he was always on the verge of falling asleep—was slumped in a chair in front of Claire’s desk, sitting more on the base of his spine than on his butt. Claire thought about telling him to sit up straight, but she wasn’t his mother—or anyone else’s mother—and never would be.

  “I want this guy’s house and car bugged and I want a GPS tracking device installed on his car,” she said, handing the agent the slim file on DeMarco. “But I also want him bugged, and I want it done tonight. He’s got a cell phone, and he probably has it on him all the time. So bug the phone and put a GPS chip in it, too, so we always know where he is. And his belts. Bug them.” She paused for a beat, then said, “Use the gas.”

  A few years ago, Chechen terrorists invaded a theater in Moscow and took a few hundred people hostage. The Russian government responded by shooting nerve gas into the theater, the idea being that the gas would knock everybody out—the Chechens and their hostages—and then the Russians could just walk in and scoop up the bad guys. The only problem was that the gas killed more than a hundred people, mostly hostages.

  The United States, not to be outdone in any sort of weaponry, had a similar gas. There were, however, a couple of problems. The first was that the gas wasn’t particularly fast-acting, taking about ten minutes before it incapacitated the gasee, which wasn’t really a problem when it came to DeMarco. Claire’s droopy-eyed agent would wait until DeMarco was in bed, slip into his house wearing a gas mask, release the gas, then wait ten minutes and do what he needed to do. The next morning, DeMarco would wake up with the mother of all hangovers but would be otherwise healthy. Unless, of course, he was allergic to one of the ingredients in the gas, which about one person in ten thousand was, and if this was the case he wouldn’t ever wake up. That was the second problem with the gas.

  But when directed to gas an American citizen with a chemical that might turn that citizen into either a brain-dead vegetable or a corpse, all Claire’s agent said was, “Okay, boss.”

  When Dillon decided to spy illegally on American citizens, he and Claire had discussed the likelihood of their employees becoming a problem—that is, telling the media or Dillon’s bosses what they were doing. But Dillon had told Claire not to worry, their employees wouldn’t betray them, and the reason for this had to do primarily with the culture of the NSA.

  The NSA, though staffed with many civilians, is primarily a military organization, and in military organizations people tend to follow orders. NSA employees assume, if they’ve been directed to spy on someone, that their mission is lawful and their bosses have the proper warrants and authority. The employees, in other words, typically act without questioning their orders because they know it’s the bosses who’ll get in trouble if they’ve been directed to commit an illegal act.

  Then there’s the fear factor. From the minute an employee is hired, it’s beaten into his or her head that you do not talk about your job—not with anyone, for any reason. One safeguard taken to ensure that NSA employees understand this golden rule is that they are annually briefed—the word briefed being a thinly disguised euphemism for threatened—by a man who works in counterintelligence. The man who does these so-called security briefings has white hair, Nordic features, and unblinking, pale-blue eyes, and everyone who meets him instantly envisions a reincarnated Gestapo officer. The briefer, in a voice devoid of emotion, warns the employees during these annual chats that if they ever divulge classified information to anyone without a need to know—and everything they work on is classified—they will be incarcerated in a federal prison and gang-banged to death by huge tattooed sadists. That is, if they are lucky they’ll go to prison. Another possibility, implied but never directly stated, is that they might simply disappear.

  However, as effective as these yearly pep talks were, Claire felt she could not rely solely upon a sinister warning. She took things one step further.

  NSA employees, depending on the nature of their work and the classification level of their jobs, are randomly and periodically poly-graphed. Random and periodic was not good enough for Claire, however. All her people were polygraphed monthly—and they all knew they’d be polygraphed. Only one question was asked during these electronic truth-seeking sessions: Have you discussed anything you’re working on with anybody outside of the division? So far no one had answered this question in the affirmative; if anyone ever did … well, the white-hai
red counterintelligence officer would be brought in to finish the questioning.

  Claire’s agents wouldn’t talk—and they did what they were told.

  24

  DeMarco took two more Tylenol, which made a total of six that he’d taken since he had gotten out of bed. His head ached so badly his hair actually hurt. It felt like every little follicle was a wood auger boring a hole in the top of his skull.

  He couldn’t understand it. After he played eighteen holes yesterday afternoon, he sat around the clubhouse and had a couple of beers with the guys he played with, but he only had a couple. And last night, he had dinner at a steakhouse and a glass of wine with his meal, but that was it. No martini before dinner, no brandy after dinner, and no booze when he got home. So why did his head hurt so damn much? He wondered if he was coming down with the flu.

  Anthony McGuire, Paul’s old boyfriend, lived on a block in Fairfax where all the homes were one-story brick boxes that had obviously been built from the same set of boring architectural plans. The only thing that distinguished one house from another was the color the owner selected to paint the trim and shutters. McGuire had chosen hunter green.

  DeMarco rang the bell and a man he assumed was McGuire opened the little peephole installed in the front door and asked DeMarco what he wanted. A cautious guy, had been DeMarco’s first impression. DeMarco introduced himself, said he was Paul’s cousin, and wanted to ask a few questions about Paul’s will. To this McGuire had responded by saying, “How do I know you’re related to Paul?”

  Speaking to the brown eye in the peephole, DeMarco said, “Well, let’s see. I knew his mother when she was alive. Her name was Vivian. I know his Aunt Lena, and Paul was pretty close to my mom. He called her Aunt Maureen, although she’s not really his aunt. And when Paul first came to Washington, I took him around and showed him some apartments.”

  “Oh, you’re that guy. The one who works for Congress.”