by Mike Lawson
People, in other words, who would make Mr. Drexler say, Hmm. I wonder what this person does?
“What Drexler is doing in HR is eliminating managers in large batches,” Dillon said. “For example, all managers overseas and all managers engaged in noneavesdropping functions, like research or security or encryption, he crosses off his list.”
“Yeah, but—”
“He will eventually cull the pile down to a couple hundred people who don’t seem to fit into some normal and clearly defined bureaucratic niche, and then he’ll start pulling the string. He’ll find out where these people are located and ask them what they do, and there’s a possibility, although it may be remote, that he might eventually find you: the beautiful lady tucked away in an annex with a division that doesn’t exist.”
Claire waited impatiently for one of her agents to pick the lock on the door to Aaron Drexler’s temporary office. Drexler was currently in the cafeteria eating lunch, and one of Claire’s people was watching him, but Claire knew he wouldn’t be there for long.
When Drexler arrived at Fort Meade, Dillon had helpfully provided him an office. And Dillon, having the foresight to know something like this might be necessary, gave Drexler an office that had a simple key lock on the door. Dillon claimed office space was tight—which was true—and he apologized that he didn’t have a room available with a more sophisticated lock—which was not true. Had he wanted to, Dillon could have put Drexler in an office like he and Claire had, one with both a cipher lock and a thumbprint reader.
But, Dillon said to Drexler the day he showed him his temporary office, he understood that Drexler needed to have a secure place in which to store information. So inside Drexler’s office was a very impressive-looking safe. It was six feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep, and its walls were four inches thick. It had a massive combination lock, eight inches in diameter, and one that required five numbers—not the usual three or four to open it—and it was made from an alloy that Dillon claimed was impervious to diamond-coated drill bits. It was so heavy, Dillon said, that if they ever had to move it from the office they’d have to knock out a wall and use a construction crane. And this was all true. Dillon then provided Drexler with instructions on how to change the combination for the safe to one of his own choosing.
What Dillon didn’t tell Drexler was that any decent safecracker—and Claire had three at her beck and call—would be able to open the safe in about the same amount of time as it would take to smash a kid’s piggy bank. The safe belonged in some sort of bank robbers’ museum, and the only reason it was still at the NSA was because they really would have to knock out a wall to get the monster out of the building.
Claire was surprised to find that the safe was practically empty. The only things inside it were a classified personnel directory, an outdated (and also classified) NSA organizational manual, and a stack of file folders. There were maybe a hundred folders, certainly no more than a hundred and fifty. Claire looked at the tabs on the file folders and saw people’s names. She flipped open the first folder and saw it was the personnel file of a GS-15 lawyer who was attempting to find a legitimate legal defense for secretly monitoring the ever-increasing volume of seemingly innocuous conversations occurring on Facebook and Twitter.
The folders were in alphabetical order. Claire Whiting, GS-15 Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, was six folders from the bottom of the stack.
26
“Goddammit!” Claire said, and slammed a small fist down on her desk. She had just listened to the recording of Anthony McGuire telling DeMarco that Paul Russo might have hidden something at a church. The recording had been obtained via the listening devices planted in DeMarco’s belt and cell phone.
“When did this conversation take place?” Claire asked.
“About an hour ago,” Gilbert said. “Hey,” he added defensively, “you were gone. I left you a message.”
Jesus Christ! She had that bastard Drexler breathing down her neck and now this happens.
“Where’s DeMarco now?” she said. “At the church. We have an agent watching him and—”
“Shit! Is he—”
“Calm down. He’s just—”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down!”
“He’s just sitting in his car outside the church. There’s a funeral service going on, and it was just getting started when DeMarco got there.”
Thank God for that. Claire did not want DeMarco searching that church before she did. She sat for a moment, thinking and then called the agent who had planted the bugs in DeMarco’s house.
“Start a fire at his house,” she said.
“What?” the agent said. Arson wasn’t one of his normal duties.
“Start a fire at his house. I don’t want the place burned down, just start a fire. Lots of smoke. Then call the fire department right away. Then call DeMarco, pretend you’re from the fire department, and tell him his house is burning.”
“Won’t he wonder how the fire department got his cell phone number?”
“If your house was burning down,” Claire said, “do you think you’d be thinking about something like that?”
DeMarco stood at the back of the church, thinking he shouldn’t be there at all.
What he should have done after speaking to Paul’s ex-boyfriend was call the Bureau and tell them what McGuire had said. The problem was that McGuire’s story was pretty farfetched—the part about the government having killed Paul’s patient, who DeMarco was sure was General Martin Breed. He didn’t think McGuire had lied to him; he believed Paul really had told McGuire that the G had killed Breed—but just because Paul had said this didn’t make it true.
DeMarco had always found government conspiracy theories hard to swallow, and the reason for this was because he worked for the government. Most government employees he knew—the exception being Mahoney—were not only incapable of organizing an effective conspiracy, they were, more importantly, incapable of keeping anything secret. And a conspiracy isn’t a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. The other problem he had with calling the Bureau was he didn’t trust them—or at least he didn’t trust that guy Hopper.
So if Paul really had hidden something in the church, it would be nice to know what it was before he started making outrageous claims about the government killing a two-star general. But that presented another problem: St. James wasn’t St. Peter’s in Rome, but it was still a good-sized structure. There were over a hundred rows of pews, and whatever Paul had hidden—most likely some sort of document—could be taped to the bottom of any one of them. There was also a big altar with lots of nooks and crannies, a choir loft, a pipe organ, confessionals, restrooms, and the place where the priests dressed before saying mass, whatever that space was called. It would take him a week to search the church by himself—and there was no way he was going to spend a week doing that.
But he figured there had to be some kind of clue. Certainly Paul hadn’t intended for the reporter to have to search the entire church. Maybe one of the statues was St. Paul. That is, he assumed Paul was still a saint; his knowledge of saints currently approved by the Vatican was rather spotty. He started to walk around the church, not sure exactly what he was looking for, when his cell phone rang.
His cry of “Son of a bitch!” echoed loudly throughout God’s house.
“You got any idea who might want to burn your house down, Mr. DeMarco?” the fireman asked.
“No,” DeMarco said, but what he was really thinking about was the mess the damn firemen had made—they’d caused more damage than the fire. He was also thinking about the upcoming battle he was sure to have with his fucking insurance company.
“Whoever did this,” the fireman said, “took a bunch of old magazines, put them against your back door, and doused them with gasoline.”
DeMarco wondered if he should tell the fireman that the old magazines were his. He’d put them outside by his garbage can intending to take them to one of those newspaper recycling bins they
had in some shopping malls, but he’d never gotten around to it. But if he told the fireman the magazines were his, then his insurance company could probably come up with some reason for saying the fire was his fault, and then the bastards would try to deny his claim. Hell, they’d try to deny his claim no matter what the facts were.
“The good news,” the fireman said, “is somebody called us as soon as they saw the smoke and we got here in three minutes and it only took us a couple of minutes to put the fire out.”
Because his house was made of white-painted brick, there didn’t appear to be any structural damage. The bricks near his back door were all blackened, but they could be repainted. The only thing that had been destroyed by the fire was his back door, which was made of wood, but his door wasn’t the big problem. The big problem was the damn firemen had sprayed down the door with a hose that pumped about eighteen thousand gallons a minute and the water pressure had blown out the door’s window, turning his kitchen floor into a small lake with soot floating on top. His stove, which was directly in line with his door, looked as if it had been hit by a tsunami, and everything on the kitchen counter near his stove—his coffeepot, his toaster, and a never-been-used Cuisinart given to him by his mother—had been blown off the counter. He wondered if there was water in the electrical outlets and if the linoleum floor was going to curl up and have to be replaced.
But what good would it do to bitch to the fireman about all this?
After the firemen left, DeMarco stood on his back porch looking morosely into his kitchen. He was going to have to spend the day mopping up the room and figuring out what else had been damaged. He’d also have to get a piece of plywood to nail over the opening where his back door had once been until he could get a new door. And then he’d have to call up his insurance company and have a giant fight with them to force them to honor all the false promises they made when they sold him his homeowners policy.
The last thing on his mind was whatever Paul Russo had hidden at St. James.
Claire was going to have someone search the church before DeMarco had a chance to do so, but she doubted—now that she’d calmed down somewhat—that anything was hidden there. Since Russo had met with the reporter, it seemed logical that if he had some sort of document to show him, he would have brought it with him the night he met Hansen at the Iwo Jima Memorial—and whoever had killed Russo now had the document. But maybe not. Maybe Russo was afraid of being killed before he met with Hansen so he left the document—or whatever it was—in the church for the reporter to retrieve. Or maybe he took the original of whatever he had hidden and left a copy in the church as a backup. She didn’t know. All she knew was that there was a remote possibility something was hidden in the church and she had to search it before DeMarco did and before DeMarco called up somebody—like the FBI—and told the FBI what McGuire had said.
The good news was she’d know if DeMarco made a call. Right now her technicians were laughing as they listened to him curse as he cleaned up his kitchen.
She picked up her phone. “Where’s Alice?” she said, to the agent who answered.
“Don’t you remember?” the guy said. “She’s running all around Northern Virginia.”
Claire had forgotten. She’d told a technician to hack into Virginia law enforcement computers to identify shady garages and wrecking yards where the reporter’s Volkswagen might have been taken after he was killed, and Alice was now checking out those places. Claire figured Alice would be wasting her time but if they could get some physical evidence regarding Hansen’s disappearance it could prove useful.
But since Alice wasn’t available, who could she use? She wished Alberta was still with them; she still couldn’t believe Alberta was dead. “How ’bout Sylvia?” she asked.
“She’s in New York. Her mother—”
“Oh, that’s right,” Claire said. Christ, she was losing her mind.
“Hey, I can search the church if you want,” the guy said.
Claire’s lips drooped with scorn. Yeah, right. Men can’t find anything. She was going to have to search the church herself.
“No. Your job,” she said, “is to make sure DeMarco doesn’t go to the church anytime today or tonight. If he heads in that direction, stop him.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Hell, I don’t care. Use your damn head. Ram him with your car if you have to. Hit him hard enough they have to tow his car away.”
“With my car?” the agent said, realizing Claire was serious. “How ’bout I get a car from the pool?”
“And what? Hit him with a government vehicle that can be traced back to this agency?”
“But what about my insurance rates?” the agent said.
Claire was thinking about who she’d take with her to search the church when Henry, the technician who shared the cubicle with Gilbert, walked into her office.
“What is it?” she snapped. Henry was a whiner, constantly bitching about something, and she wasn’t in the mood to deal with him right now.
He handed her a manila folder. She opened it and began to flip through the documents. As she flipped, a small smile appeared, and the more she flipped, the wider the smile became. She closed the folder and looked up at Henry who was still standing before her desk, shuffling his feet, hoping Claire was not displeased. She was not.
“You did good, Henry,” Claire said.
Henry exhaled in relief.
On the cover of the folder were the words AARON TYLER DREXLER.
It was time to remove a thorn from Dillon’s paw.
Claire removed her ID badge and walked into Drexler’s temporary office without knocking.
“Who are you?” Drexler asked, frowning at her.
Claire noticed his eyes were bloodshot and he needed a shave, and she wondered if he’d worked through the night.
“Oh,” Drexler then said, answering his own question, “you must be the gal that putz Dillon was supposed to send over to give me a hand with some of this crap. I’m telling you, honey, this is the most fucked-up, disorganized operation I’ve ever seen. It’s no wonder you people couldn’t stop nine/eleven.”
Claire sat down, unasked, in the only other chair in the room.
“To answer your question, Aaron, I’m not the gal sent to help you. I’m the gal who’s been sent to straighten your ass out.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Who are you?”
“I’m a messenger, Aaron. And the message is: Go home. Go back to whoever sent you and tell them you couldn’t find whatever they sent you here to find.”
“Who the hell do you think …” Pointing a finger at Claire’s face, he said, “Now you listen to me, lady. I was sent here by the attorney general and I’m not leaving until I—”
Claire slapped a file folder on Drexler’s desk, the sound like a bomb exploding.
“What’s that?” Drexler said.
“That’s the end of life as you know it, Aaron.”
“What are you—”
“When the bottom fell out of the market in 2008, you lost almost a half a million dollars.”
“So what? Everybody lost money during that time.”
“That’s true, but everybody didn’t do what you did to recover their losses. At the time your portfolio turned to dust, you were a member of the Pentagon’s legal staff assisting the Justice Department in their case against Ames Incorporated, and—”
“Again, so what?”
Ames Inc. was a company that had received a multimillion-dollar contract to design and install improved body armor on army personnel carriers, and a whistleblower informed the Pentagon that Ames was screwing its Uncle Sammy. Ames was charging for work that had not been performed, for overtime that had not been worked, for materials that had not been used, and anything else they could think of to increase their profit margin. The Justice Department had a strong case against a colonel at the Pentagon and a couple of executives at Ames, but Justice also wanted to nail Burton Ames, the company�
�s founder and CEO—a man reportedly worth three billion dollars who owned multiple mansions, a private jet, and a yacht the size of a light cruiser.
Burton, naturally, claimed he had no idea what his executives were doing with regard to the Pentagon contract; he just wasn’t a hands-on manager. Bullshit, the federal prosecutor said. Unfortunately, the case against Burton Ames was complex and hardly a slam-dunk but the prosecutor felt, if he presented his evidence clearly and cleverly, he could convince a jury to put greedy Burton in a cell for a few years. However, when the prosecutor got to court it became apparent that Burton’s lawyers knew his strategy and every weakness in his case. Burton Ames walked out of the courtroom smiling, and the prosecutor ended up with egg all over his face.
The prosecutor knew someone on the legal staff at the Pentagon had helped Ames’s lawyers. He knew, in fact, that the person who had done this was Aaron Drexler. He knew it—but he couldn’t prove it. Drexler was placed on administrative leave while the prosecutor attempted to get enough evidence against him to convict him for abetting Ames but gave up after four months when he couldn’t find any. And then, in the ultimate irony, Drexler sued the government, saying the prosecutor’s investigation had destroyed his reputation and ruined his career at the Pentagon, and Drexler was awarded three hundred thousand dollars in damages. Then, to add insult to injury, Drexler obtained a job at the Justice Department—the same organization that had been trying to convict him. The daughter of the last attorney general—the one who preceded Robert Scranton—had been in the same sorority with Drexler’s wife, and Drexler’s wife was able to convince the AG that her brilliant husband was the innocent victim of a Pentagon witch hunt.
