House Divided

by Mike Lawson

  DeMarco heard his cell phone make a funny click and cursed, figuring the operator at the Post had accidentally disconnected him. But then he heard: “You don’t really want to talk to Bob Woodward, Mr. DeMarco.”

  “What?” DeMarco said, and then looked at his cell phone like it had turned into a snake. “Who the hell’s this? How the … how the fuck did you get on my phone?”

  “Magic, sir. The same magic I used to determine that you’re in possession of a recording made by the late General Breed.”

  “You got me bugged?” DeMarco said.

  “Three ways from Sunday, my friend,” Dillon said.

  “Who the hell is this? FBI? Is this you, Hopper?”

  It didn’t sound like Hopper, though.

  “No, Mr. DeMarco. As I think you know, Special Agent Hopper is not your friend. I, on the other hand, am the man who can keep you alive.”

  “Keep me alive? Who the hell is this?”

  “Mr. DeMarco, you are now in possession of the same information that got your cousin killed. And since I know this, and if I was the person who killed Paul Russo, you’d be dead right now, right there where you’re parked on the banks of the Potomac.”

  “What? How the hell do you—”

  “Turn around and look behind you. No, turn the other way. Do you see the SUV, the black one with the tinted windows? The driver’s a nice young lady named Alice. I want you to join Alice. She’s going to drive around for a while to make sure she’s not being followed, and then she’s going to bring you to me.”

  “Hey, screw you, whoever you are. I’m not going anywhere with your people.”

  DeMarco heard the guy laugh. “DeMarco, I can see you. I can hear you. I can cut in on your cell phone conversations. Think about that. So, please, just calm down and do what I say. I want to help you. There are some other people out there, however—the kind of people General Breed speaks about on that recording—who want to kill you. And maybe they’ll kill your girlfriend as well. Killing someone in Afghanistan isn’t all that hard to do.”

  Jesus, they knew about Angela and where she was. Who the hell was this guy?

  “Please join Alice in her car, Mr. DeMarco.”

  29

  Alice was an athletic-looking young woman in her early thirties, wearing a black blazer over a white blouse, jeans, and running shoes. She had a cell phone gizmo in her ear. She was kind of cute, DeMarco thought: long black hair, brown eyes, a long straight nose, and a red-bronze complexion. Because of the nose and her coloring, DeMarco thought she might have some Native American in her, but the main impression he had of Alice was: serious.

  Alice was as serious as a heart attack.

  “Kneel on the seat,” Alice said. “I need to frisk you to see if you’re carrying a weapon.”

  “I’m not carrying one,” DeMarco said. “I still need to pat you down.”

  “Bite me,” DeMarco said.

  Before Alice could respond to DeMarco’s childish comment, the man who had spoken to him previously, said, “It’s okay, Alice. I doubt Mr. DeMarco is armed. I’m sure I’ll be safe from him.” The man’s voice came from a speaker in Alice’s vehicle which was directly behind DeMarco’s head and he jumped in his seat when he heard the voice.

  Alice stared at DeMarco for a few seconds—letting him know she wasn’t pleased that he’d interfered with her job—then said, “Buckle your seat belt.” She didn’t speak to him again for thirty minutes.

  Alice drove onto the Memorial Parkway, crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge into the District of Columbia, and then got on 395. She stayed on 395 until she came to the Capitol South exit, took the exit, and then made a tour of Capitol Hill, turning frequently, backtracking occasionally. A couple of times she spoke to someone, saying, “Am I clear?” Apparently whoever she was talking to said she was. From Capitol Hill she took surface streets to reach the D.C. Beltway and then took the beltway exit to Silver Spring, Maryland, where she once again began driving through residential areas, this time dodging down the occasional alley, blowing through stop signs as if they didn’t exist, scaring the shit out of DeMarco. Finally, she stopped in front of a small house whose lawn was badly in need of cutting. There was a kid’s big-wheeled tricycle sitting on the grass near the front door.

  DeMarco followed Alice into the house. The front door opened into a living room filled with inexpensive, mismatched furniture and smelled musty, as if the house had been locked up for some time. DeMarco stood in the living room for a moment, not sure what to do next, until a voice called out, “Mr. DeMarco, I’m in the kitchen.”

  DeMarco entered the kitchen and saw a white-haired man in his sixties pouring coffee into two cups, and the guy was dressed like he’d just posed for the cover of GQ. DeMarco couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on his clothes. He bought the suits he wore for work at a Men’s Wearhouse in Alexandria and his casual clothes at outlet malls. He figured the guy pouring coffee had spent more on his tie than he had spent on his suit.

  “I believe you take your coffee black,” the man said, as he handed DeMarco a cup.

  DeMarco nodded. He wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew that.

  The man sat down at the small kitchen table and gestured for DeMarco to take a seat. As soon as he did, DeMarco said, “Who are you?”

  “Before we start,” the man said, “would you mind giving Alice the recorder you took from St. James?”

  DeMarco looked over his shoulder. Alice was standing behind him, about four feet away, her face expressionless. He turned back to the white haired man and said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Alice,” the man said, and because of the tone of voice he used, DeMarco glanced back at Alice again. This time she was holding an odd-looking plastic gun with a yellow hand grip.

  “That’s a Taser, Mr. DeMarco,” the man said. “It won’t kill you but I understand being shot with one is rather uncomfortable. So, please, may I have the recorder?”

  DeMarco thought for a moment about shoving his chair back into Alice and hopefully knocking her off balance long enough for him to wrestle the Taser away from her. Not a chance. If he tried he was just going to end up on the floor twitching like a guy with St. Vitus dance. He pulled the recorder from his pocket and slid it across the table to the white-haired man, and he tossed it to Alice.

  “Thank you,” the man said to DeMarco. To Alice he said, “Alice, would you please wait in the living room until I’m finished talking to Mr. DeMarco.”

  What the guy meant was, Stick around, Alice, in case I need you to shoot DeMarco.

  After Alice departed, DeMarco asked for a second time, “Who are you?”

  The man smiled slightly, this annoying Cheshire Cat smile. “Do you know what the NSA is, Mr. De—May I call you Joe, please? Mr. DeMarco is just too cumbersome, too formal.”

  “Yeah, you can call me Joe. And what do I call you?”

  “As I was saying, Joe. Do you know what the NSA is?”

  “The National Security Administration.”

  The man shook his head. “The National Security Agency, Joe. Not Administration. The NSA is the largest intelligence service in this country, both in terms of money and manpower, and yet you, like most people, don’t even know its proper name.”

  DeMarco started to say that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the proper name, but the man asked, “And do you know what the NSA does, Joe?”

  “I know you guys got caught bugging a bunch of telephones without warrants a few years ago.”

  “That’s not quite accurate, but close enough. At any rate, the NSA has two primary functions. The first of those is cryptography. To keep it simple, we devise codes and encrypted systems to protect America’s secrets, and we break the codes of nations who may be unfriendly toward us. Our second mission is, in a word, eavesdropping. We eavesdrop in every way imaginable, Joe, on America’s enemies and our allies. We eavesdrop on cell phones and faxes and e-mails. We eavesdrop on satellite and microwave transmis
sions and undersea cables. There is virtually no form of communication that we can’t intercept and record.

  “When you think of spies, Joe, you probably imagine Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, a cynical man in a rumpled trench coat paying greedy communists for their secrets. Well, that’s not the way it works most of the time. Not in the twenty-first century. The NSA is the spies, Joe. Spying today, the largest part of it, the most effective part of it, is done by eavesdropping on our enemies.

  “So you asked who I am. Well, I’m a spy. Think of me as Richard Burton, minus the bad trench coat.”

  “What does this have to do with—”

  “Unfortunately, when we’re listening to all these transmissions—these radio and telephone communications—sometimes, although not intentionally, we intercept transmissions here in this country. We don’t mean to but …”

  “Bullshit,” DeMarco said.

  “… but sometimes we do. And therein lies the problem, Joe. Our problem. Yours and mine. We overheard, quite by accident, a very disturbing conversation. And now I’m going to play that conversation for you.”

  He took a small digital recorder from the inside pocket of his suit coat, a recorder similar to the one DeMarco had found in the church. He hit the PLAY button and DeMarco heard:

  Alpha, do you have Carrier?

  Negative. Monument blocking.

  Bravo, do you have Carrier?

  Roger that. I have him clear.

  Very well. Stand by.

  DeMarco sat, mesmerized, listening to the recording until the NSA man tapped the STOP button.

  “Well, Joe, what do you think of that?”

  “I think somebody popped Carrier and Messenger. And I think Carrier was my cousin and Messenger was a Washington Post reporter named Hansen.”

  “Very good. And they were killed because of what General Breed said on that recorder you found in the church.”

  “But what the hell does this have to do with me?” DeMarco said. “I mean, if you know all this stuff—”

  “Joe, your country needs you.”

  “My country! What is this horse—”

  “The NSA can’t admit that we overheard Paul being killed. I’m afraid that would cause us a major political problem.”

  “Well you know something, Richard Burton? I don’t give a shit about your political problems.”

  As if DeMarco hadn’t spoken, the man said, “It would erode the public’s trust in us, which in turn would make us less able to do our mission—which is to protect the country. So you see, we need you. We need you to pursue what you heard on that recording.”

  “Pursue it how? What the hell am I supposed to do? You guys need to go to the FBI with what you have. Or somebody in Congress, somebody who has the clout to deal with this, not somebody like me.”

  “Joe, clout is the least of our problems. We have clout. What we can’t do is involve more people in this issue, because the more people we talk to, the greater the likelihood becomes that what we’ve done will become public knowledge. But since you already know what we’ve done, and since you’re already involved in Paul’s murder, you’re the perfect person to help us.”

  “Help you do what, for Christ’s sake!”

  “We want you to help us find the man you heard directing your cousin’s execution. And then we need to bring that man and his boss to justice, not only for killing Paul but for doing the things that General Breed accuses Charles of doing on that recording.”

  “And who the hell is Charles?” DeMarco asked. “And who’s Thomas?”

  Dillon had directed Claire not to give DeMarco Paul Russo’s letter and to delete last names from the recording. So what DeMarco had ended up with was a recording that described all the things that Breed had done for Charles Bradford, but Charles Bradford and Justice Thomas Antonelli were identified only by their first names.

  Answering DeMarco’s question, Dillon said, “Thomas is retired Senator Thomas Whitman. He was a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee and he worked closely with General Breed. He was incorruptible.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, Senator Whitman had a stroke four days ago and died last night. He was eighty-three.”

  It had taken some effort for Claire to come up with a plausible and unavailable man whose first name was Thomas. She’d looked at army officers that Breed had worked with, senior civilians at the Pentagon, and finally settled on Senator Whitman when the man fortuitously kicked the bucket. Dillon did not want DeMarco to know the recording had been intended for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, at least not yet.

  “Okay,” DeMarco said, not sure he believed this. “But who’s Charles?” Dillon paused. “Charles is Charles Bradford, Joe. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  30

  “Is something bothering you, honey?” the bartender asked.

  “What?” DeMarco said.

  He was at the bar in Sam & Harry’s on 19th Street, having a Stoli martini. The bartender was a good-looking gal a little younger than him, and he flirted with her whenever she was behind the bar. He had thought about asking her out before he met Angela; he had no intention of doing that now, but he still flirted with her. But tonight he didn’t feel like flirting. Tonight he was stewing over the trap he was caught in—and the bartender had noticed.

  He told her everything was fine, that he’d just had a bad day at work. What he wanted to tell her was: Yeah, something is bothering me. I’m being manipulated and lied to and threatened by an evil old prick who works for the NSA.

  When he’d asked the NSA guy what he wanted him to do, he said he just wanted DeMarco to meet with Hopper. And to make sure Hopper met with him, he would give DeMarco some additional information about Paul’s death.

  “But what’s the purpose of the meeting?” DeMarco had asked.

  “We believe, after you meet with Hopper, that Hopper will contact the man he’s working for and we’ll be able to identify that man.”

  “But why do you need to identify him? You already know Bradford’s responsible.”

  “We know it but we can’t prove it. General Breed’s recording doesn’t include Bradford’s last name and the recording alone isn’t proof that Bradford ordered Breed to do anything. And although we’ve recorded the voice of your cousin’s executioner, we don’t know his name. Furthermore, the radio intercept of your cousin being killed is inadmissible as evidence.”

  “It’s not inadmissible,” DeMarco had said. “You just don’t want to admit you’ve been intercepting communications in the U.S. without a warrant.”

  “Be that as it may,” Richard Burton had said, “we need proof. We need evidence. We need to know who’s working for Bradford and maybe, using the intercept, whether it’s legal or not, we can convince him to testify against Bradford.” Before DeMarco could pose another argument, the man said, “Come on, Joe. I’m not asking for all that much. I just want you to meet with Hopper and then we’ll take it from there, and you can go back to doing whatever it is you do.”

  DeMarco had mulled over the request—he mulled it over for about a nanosecond. “I don’t think so,” he had said. “I don’t know you, I don’t trust you, and I’m not going to become part of whatever game you’re playing. You need to turn over everything you have to some law enforcement agency. If you don’t, I’m gonna talk to the press. Even without the recording, somebody will listen to me.”

  And that’s when the threat came.

  “Joe, do you know what you are right now?” the NSA man said, his eyes twinkling.

  “Yeah. I’m a guy who doesn’t work for you.”

  “No, Joe. You’re a suspected terrorist.”

  “A suspected … Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Not at all. You received a call from Afghanistan the other night, a call we intercepted, quite legally by the way, since it originated from Afghanistan. The transmission was somewhat garbled, however. We had some sort of problem with our equ
ipment, but we recorded you saying something about al-Qaeda and caves. Yes, that part of the transmission was quite distinct.”

  “I was talking to my girlfriend,” DeMarco had said. “That was a joke.”

  “We don’t know who you were talking to, Joe. Like I said, we had some equipment problems. But when an American citizen gets a call from Afghanistan discussing al-Qaeda…. Well, it’s not a joke to us. We take that sort of thing rather seriously, and I’m afraid that when we pass this information on to Homeland Security, you’re going to be detained for questioning. And you may be detained for quite some time.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” DeMarco had said, instantly dismissing the threat. “Homeland doesn’t have any basis for detaining me, and no judge would ever allow it.”

  “Who says a judge will ever know you’ve been detained? The world’s changed since nine/eleven. And once you’re detained for possibly being in allegiance with terrorists…. Well, Joe, if you think you have a hard time getting on an airplane now, wait until you’ve been added to the TSA’s watch list. And then there’s the fact that you have a security clearance and access to the Capitol. I don’t think the Secret Service and the Capitol Police will look kindly on a man on the no-fly list working in such a sensitive place.”

  Before DeMarco had been able to say anything else, Richard Burton had smiled and added, “All we want you to do is meet a man. What’s so horrible about that? And you’ll be helping us catch the people who killed your cousin. Don’t you want to catch those people?”

  In the end, DeMarco agreed to do what the NSA man wanted—but he’d only agreed to give himself time to figure a way out of the mess he’d gotten himself into. He’d been an idiot to go to St. James after McGuire had told him that Paul might have hidden something there. There was no doubt about it: curiosity did kill cats—or, if not cats, morons who didn’t have the good sense to mind their own business.

  Another thing bothering him, as he sat there sipping his martini and feeling sorry for himself, was that he couldn’t even be sure the recording he’d heard of Paul being killed was legitimate. For all he knew the NSA had fabricated the recording, which in turn meant he could be involved in some devious NSA plot against Bradford, some sort of internal Pentagon feud.