by Mike Lawson
“I’ll tell you so what,” Claire said, answering Drexler’s question. “The only reason you’re a free man today is because one very pissed-off prosecutor couldn’t prove you tanked his case against Burton Ames. Well, Aaron, I can prove it.”
“Bullshit,” Drexler said. He was obviously thinking that if Justice couldn’t find any evidence against him after four months of digging, it was highly unlikely the NSA had been able to find anything in the few days he’d been at Fort Meade.
Aaron Drexler did not yet fully appreciate the NSA’s capabilities.
“When the government was preparing its case against Burton Ames,” Claire said, “they got warrants for his computers, and in those computers they found several encrypted e-mails. They asked the NSA to decode the e-mails but we said we couldn’t. The truth is, Aaron, we could decode them but we didn’t want to because doing so would give away the fact that we had that ability. In other words, putting you in jail just wasn’t worth it to us, as that would have meant revealing some of our secrets. Well, Aaron, now it’s worth it.”
Claire didn’t tell Drexler that she had been unaware at the time it was happening that the NSA had been asked to assist Justice in the Burton Ames case. That work had been assigned to another division and it wasn’t something she would normally see. But when her tech, Henry, started rooting around in Aaron Drexler’s past, he found the correspondence between Justice and the NSA and decoded the e-mails.
Claire opened the file folder and passed four sheets of paper to Drexler. “That’s selected bits of text we took from the encrypted e-mails you sent to Burton Ames, including one in which you said you would help him for half a million dollars. On the next page is an electronic banking transaction depositing half a million dollars in a numbered account at a bank in Nassau. On the following page is a proof that you’re the owner of that account.”
Drexler smirked and shook his head. “This is a bad bluff. There’s no way you can prove who owns this account. Nassau banking laws don’t allow them to give you that information.”
“You’re correct. That is, if we were to ask the bankers they wouldn’t tell us. But we didn’t ask them. We just looked inside their machines.”
“That’s not legal.”
“Legal is for wimps, Aaron. Finally, we can also prove that money from that same account in Nassau was used to purchase your vacation home in Tampa. I guess you figured that, since three years had passed, no one would notice that you suddenly had the money to purchase a second home.”
“You can’t prove—”
Claire raised a hand, stopping him. “Aaron, please stop telling me what I can’t do. That file contains all the information the federal prosecutor wished he’d had three years ago, and when I give him this information you’ll lose your current job at Justice and be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law by a guy who has a major hard-on for you. You will go to jail, Aaron.”
Drexler looked at her for a long time, saying nothing; then the arrogance drained out of his face like air escaping from a pin-pricked balloon. “What do you want?” he asked.
“What do I want?” Claire repeated. “I want you out of here, Aaron. I also want to know who sent you and what you were asked to do.”
“I don’t know who sent me. I was called and told I was going to be assigned by the attorney general to do a review here at the NSA. My job was to find out if the NSA had intercepted a radio transmission on April 19th that contained the words messenger and carrier and to identify who had knowledge of the intercept.”
“Why did you agree to help them?”
“Because they knew some of the same things you know. They didn’t know what was in the encrypted e-mails, but they knew about the Nassau account and my place in Tampa. I don’t know how they found out, but they did. So I agreed to do what they wanted because they weren’t asking me to do anything illegal.”
“But you must have some idea who called you.”
“No, I don’t. I swear. But it has to be someone at the Pentagon because they knew all about the Ames case.”
“How were you supposed to contact them?”
“I was given a phone number.”
It turned out to be the untraceable Fort Myer cell phone number, the same number that had been calling Hopper.
Claire rose and looked down at Drexler. He was no longer the supercilious jackass he’d been when she first walked into his office.
Drexler was finished. Her tone softened somewhat when she said, “You know something, Aaron? It just might be a good thing for you that we had this conversation. If you had heard the intercept they wanted you to find, there’s a very good possibility you would have been killed.”
“Killed?” he said.
“Oh, not by us, Aaron. By the man who sent you here.”
Eleven P.M. Claire was parked in a van in front of St. James Church with four of her agents, all men, and the van had magnetic signs attached to the side panels advertising a cleaning company. Everyone, including Claire, was dressed in blue coveralls. Claire sat in the passenger seat of the van, feeling tired but at the same time relieved that Drexler was out of her hair.
Her cell phone finally rang. “It’s safe,” the caller said, and hung up. This meant the priests were asleep—and wouldn’t wake up for at least six hours.
Claire had assigned one agent to watch the two priests who lived in the rectory and told him that after the priests had gone to bed, to gas them with the same magic gas they’d used on DeMarco. She wanted to be able to turn on all the lights in the church when she searched it and she didn’t want the priests interfering.
Claire’s men grabbed vacuum cleaners, mops, and brooms and marched up to the double doors of the church. The lock barring entry delayed them for all of twenty seconds and as soon as they were inside, Claire dispersed her team: two to start looking under pews, one to check out the choir loft and altar area, and one to poke around in the confessionals and restrooms. She had no faith, however, that they would find anything.
She stood in the center aisle of the church and did a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin. She was thinking, although she didn’t realize it, exactly what DeMarco had thought: No way would Russo have hidden something in the church, just hoping the reporter would find it. There had to be some clue as to its location.
She made a complete circuit of the church, touching nothing. She looked at the Stations of the Cross, the stands of votive candles, the high altar, and the baptismal font. She examined the statues of the saints. She noted that the most distinctive feature about the church was its stained glass windows. There must have been thirty windows, each about six feet tall and three feet wide, and each window depicted a Catholic saint. She saw St. Anthony of Padua—the saint Catholics prayed to when something has been lost, possibly the one she should be praying to now.
Claire Whiting wasn’t a Catholic, however—she was a lapsed Presbyterian—and she knew very little about the Catholic Church. But there was one thing she did know: she knew how to Google.
She sat down in a pew, took out her BlackBerry and typed into the search field various combinations of words: Paul, St. Paul, nurse, hospice, Catholic saints. It took less than five minutes before Claire smiled, put away the BlackBerry, and toured the church again, looking at the name of the saint on each stained-glass window.
And there he was: St. John of God.
St. John of God founded the order of the Hospitallers. He was the patron saint of nurses—and of those who were dying.
There was a downward-sloping ledge below each stained-glass window, creating a shallow depression, the bottom of which couldn’t be reached by a person of average height. She called her tallest agent and had him reach up to see if he could feel anything in the depression.
He pulled out a sealed white business envelope.
Inside the envelope were a handwritten letter and a small digital recorder.
27
My name is Paul Russo. I’m a hospice nurse, and I was taking care
of General Martin Breed at his home before he died. One day he told his wife he needed to see General Bradford. Up until then, he had refused all visitors because he was embarrassed by the way he looked and wanted people to remember him the way he was before the cancer. After Bradford’s visit, he told his wife he needed to see Justice Antonelli, but Antonelli couldn’t come because he’d just been admitted to the hospital for a hip replacement.
General Breed became really agitated when Antonelli couldn’t come and started acting strange. He wrote me a note saying there might be listening devices in his room and that the phones were tapped, but I thought it was just the cancer and the meds making him paranoid. Then he got a small tape recorder and had me take him into the bathroom and turn on all the faucets. When he finished in the bathroom, he wrote another note telling me to hide the recorder and said if he died before he could talk to Antonelli, I needed to get the recorder to him. He died that night, after I went home.
I’ve been a hospice nurse for ten years and I have a pretty good idea when someone’s time has come, and I thought General Breed would last at least another week, maybe even two. But then he died and I wondered if he might have been killed but then I laughed that idea off, thinking I was getting paranoid, too. The next day, the day after he died, I listened to the recording he’d made. I couldn’t believe what I heard and I have no idea if the general’s telling the truth but why would a dying man lie?
Now I’m really scared. And if General Breed’s house was bugged, I can’t remember what I said in there, if maybe I said something that would tell someone I have the recorder. I’m going to hide it, but I’m not going to give it to Antonelli. I have a friend who’s involved with a big-time reporter and I’ll get the recorder to him and let him deal with it. If what the general said is true, the public needs to know.
I don’t know who might be reading this letter but I hope you’ll do the right thing.
Paul Russo
“Is this Russo’s handwriting?” Dillon asked.
“Yes,” Claire said.
“I wonder why he didn’t just tell Hansen over the phone where he’d hidden the recorder. Why meet with him?”
“Maybe Hansen insisted on a meeting. Or maybe Russo was afraid to take the recorder with him when he met with Hansen. We’ll never know,” Claire said. “What I wonder is why Breed wanted the tape delivered to Antonelli?” Thomas Antonelli was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
“I would assume because of his position,” Dillon said, “but I think I read somewhere that he’s related to Breed through his wife’s side of the family. What I don’t understand is why Russo didn’t want to give the recording to him.”
“I think after Russo heard the recording he wasn’t willing to trust anyone in the government. You’ll understand when you hear it,” Claire said.
Dillon started to say something else, but stopped.
He hit the PLAY button on the recorder.
Thomas, this is about things I did for Charles Bradford during my career. I know when you hear this you’re going to be disappointed in me, but at this point that’s the least of my concerns. You’re the only one I can trust with this information, and the only one I know who has the courage and the influence to do what needs to be done.
Martin Breed’s voice was weak, raspy, often barely audible. It was the voice of someone in a lot of pain; it was the voice of a dying man. Water could be heard running in the background.
The first thing I did for Charles involved the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. A member of the Turkish Parliament, a man named …
Dillon knew there was nothing unusual about the American government attempting to influence policy in other countries. We did it all the time by giving money and weapons to foreign politicians we believed were sympathetic to American interests, men like the Shah of Iran for example. And then we turned around and supported Saddam Hussein when Iraq attacked Iran. Our decisions regarding which foreign regime to support sometimes backfired on us; nonetheless, that was global politics as practiced by the United States and other wealthy nations.
But what Martin Breed was describing was different in several respects.
Dillon wasn’t so naïve as to think the U.S. government had never authorized the assassination of a high-ranking foreigner for national security reasons. Although he didn’t know of any cases personally, he could certainly imagine past directors of the CIA—and a couple past presidents—authorizing such executions, particularly during the bad old days of the Cold War. But those instances would have been extremely rare, acts of last resort and only undertaken after a great deal of hand-wringing.
Charles Bradford didn’t wring his hands.
In 2003, or maybe it was ’04, we took out a Saudi banker while he was visiting London. I can’t remember his name now, my head’s just not working right, but he was funneling millions to al-Qaeda and, because he was related to the royal family, the Arabian government refused to do anything about him. We could have made his death look like an accident but Charles decided he wanted to send a message to the Saudis, so I had a man pose as a room service waiter and simply shoot him.
The second thing that was unusual was that when the United States government did deem it necessary to eliminate a foreign politician, we tried our best to get foreigners to do the killing. Castro was the best example Dillon could think of: three U.S. presidents were obsessed with the idea of removing Fidel from the planet: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. And while these presidents approved the expenditure of millions of dollars and countless schemes to do away with Fidel, they never sent in a U.S. Army sharpshooter to bump the man off. And the reason these presidents never authorized an official military operation to execute Castro had little to do with morality or legislation. It was instead that most presidents thought it might set a poor example to achieve regime change in this manner; other countries might be inclined to imitate the practice.
In 2006, Charles decided he had to do something to slow the pace at which the Iranians were developing nuclear weapons. He knew they’d eventually become a nuclear power, but he wanted to delay that as long as possible and he could see the U.N. sanctions and all the other diplomatic nonsense weren’t working. At the time, the Iranian weapons program was being steered by a brilliant Iranian physicist who’d been trained in the United States. We used a roadside bomb to take him out, and the killing was eventually traced back to a dissident in Iran. The dissident was later executed by the Iranian government.
That same year, we killed the deputy director of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, because he was selling information to the Taliban….
Breed went on to describe the assassinations of several other men, all foreigners, most with links to terrorist organizations, but some who were senior politicians or businessmen who were aggressively, dangerously, anti-American. The men who assisted Breed on these missions were selected from the sentinels who guard the Tomb of the Unknowns.
But Breed wasn’t finished with his revelations.
There’s another man like me. I’ve never met him and I don’t know his name, but I know he exists. For security reasons, Charles kept us apart. He used him for some foreign missions when I wasn’t available and to deal with American citizens that he considered to be traitors.
There was a long interruption when Breed started coughing, then choking. He sounded extremely weak when he resumed, as if he might not have the strength to finish the recording.
The U.S. operations were different from the ones overseas. Deaths were always made to appear to be accidents: car accidents, fires, illnesses actually caused by poison. Sometimes people simply disappeared. The only one I know about for sure involved a journalist named Moore who had obtained information about a covert operation in China. Charles considered Moore a traitor, and I agreed, because if Moore had published his story it would have endangered Chinese operatives the DIA had recruited.
As Dillon listened to Martin Breed talk about the things he had done for Charles Bradf
ord, he wondered why Breed had turned against Bradford in the end. It sounded as if Breed always concurred with his superior’s decisions. As in the case of the American journalist: Breed clearly agreed the journalist was a traitor. Then Breed’s own voice gave Dillon the answer, or at least a partial one.
Six months ago, right before I was diagnosed with cancer, we killed a man named Piccard. Piccard worked for a French defense contractor and Charles learned he was meeting secretly with buyers from North Korea, Iran, and a couple of South American countries. The French government said they were aware of Piccard and would stop any sales he tried to make, but Charles didn’t believe the French. He never believed the French. I tried to convince Charles that killing Piccard was unnecessary and we should let either the U.S. State Department or the French deal with him, but Charles insisted that I proceed. But I screwed up, Thomas. I screwed up terribly. We killed Piccard with a car bomb—but we also killed his twelve-year-old daughter. She wasn’t supposed to have been with him that day. When I heard about the girl, I was absolutely sick. But that wasn’t the worst of it. After Piccard was dead, we found out that he had been acting in concert with French intelligence. He was only pretending to negotiate with these buyers because by doing so he was giving the intelligence guys a better idea of the enemy’s capabilities and the players involved. If Charles hadn’t acted on his own, we might have discovered this, and we never would have killed Piccard or his daughter.
That was the last thing I did for Charles Bradford. Thomas, I don’t have the strength to tell you about all the soul-searching I’ve been through. I don’t have the strength or the time. I don’t regret most of the things I did for Charles, but he’s becoming more aggressive, more impatient. He’s not giving the government sufficient time to deal with problems before he takes action, and I’m afraid he’s going to make more mistakes like he did with Piccard.
I met with Charles two days ago and told him he had to resign before I died. I felt I had to give him the opportunity. I still admire him and I don’t want to see him disgraced, but I told him if he didn’t resign he’d be exposed. The truth is, I don’t want to expose him, because I sincerely believe that doing so would be bad for the country. I also don’t want him exposed for frankly selfish reasons. I don’t want my wife and girls to know what I’ve done. Thomas, I know you have the courage to stop him and if you must go public with this information, so be it, but I’m hoping you won’t. And God forgive me for what I’ve done.
