House Divided

by Mike Lawson

  Christ, he didn’t know who he could trust. He couldn’t trust the FBI and he sure as hell couldn’t trust the NSA. And he didn’t know what was really going on because he was sure the NSA man wasn’t telling him everything he knew. But there was one thing he knew for sure: He was the mouse in the elephant cage. These elephants—the FBI, the NSA, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—they were all stomping around the cage, dancing with each other, and if DeMarco’s little mouse ass tried something, one of the elephants was going to squash him.

  He figured he still had the option of going to the press. Get in his car tomorrow, make a beeline for The Washington Post, and run inside like a guy seeking sanctuary in a cathedral. The problem with that bright idea was, since he knew he was being watched—hell, they had cameras on him today, for Christ’s sake—he suspected he’d never get inside the building. And after Alice had dropped him off back at his car, he went home, looked up the NSA on the Internet, and learned that some three-star admiral ran the organization. Just what he needed: another guy with stars on his shoulders involved in this thing.

  Yeah, he could just see it: him getting out of his car and running for the front door of the Post and some navy SEAL sniper putting a bullet through his head from a mile away.

  Which also made him think: how did he know that the NSA hadn’t killed Paul and Hansen? How did he know it wasn’t really their op he’d heard on that recording?

  Yes, he was the mouse in the elephant cage. He’d read somewhere that elephants were actually afraid of mice—and maybe they were—but he was pretty sure these particular elephants weren’t afraid of him.

  Hey, Hopper, this is DeMarco.

  DeMarco had been told to call Hopper at ten fifteen the day after meeting with Dillon at the safe house. Claire was sitting in the operations room with Gilbert, listening to his conversation with Hopper. She nodded her head when she heard DeMarco speak. The way he spoke was just the way she had predicted, the way the damn impersonator had never been able to get quite right.

  What is it, DeMarco? I haven’t got time to talk right now, and I don’t have anything new to tell you about your cousin’s murder.

  Well, you better make time to talk to me, or the next call I’m making is to the press.

  Why would you talk to the press?

  Because the FBI—or maybe it’s just you—is involved in a cover-up.

  That’s an asinine thing to say. What are we covering up?

  For starters, your autopsy report says that Paul was shot at close range with a 9mm. But I talked to the Arlington detective who saw Paul’s body, and he said there was no exit wound. He said if Paul had been shot with a nine at close range there would have been an exit wound the size of my fist.

  That’s not necessarily true, DeMarco. I’m sure our ballistic experts know more about gunshot wounds than some county cop. But how do you know what the autopsy report said?

  I work for Congress, Hopper. I told you that. Getting information out of bureaucrats is what I do for a living.

  Good. DeMarco was following the script, Claire thought.

  Who told you about—

  And I’ve talked to Paul’s friends, and there’s no way he was dealing drugs. You lied about finding that bottle of pills in his apartment. I also found out that Paul’s last patient was General Martin Breed. I think that puts a whole new spin on things, Paul maybe being the last guy to see a Pentagon big shot like Breed alive. Maybe that’s why you’re not being straight with me about the investigation.

  Hopper didn’t say anything for a long time, which made Claire think that Hopper had no idea that Russo was connected to Breed.

  What do you want, DeMarco?

  I want a meeting. And when we meet, you’re going to tell me what’s really going on.

  Forty seconds later, Claire heard: Why did you page me?

  “Yes!” Claire said. The man speaking was the man with the Fort Myer cell phone. Hopper had apparently paged him and then the guy had turned on his cell phone and called Hopper back. She looked over at Gilbert, making sure he was paying attention. She wanted the damn guy’s location.

  We need to meet. It’s about … about the case I took over from the Arlington PD. That lawyer I told you about. You know, the cousin. Well, he just told me some things I think you need to know.

  What did he say?

  Not over an open line.

  Claire laughed and said, “It’s a little late for that, Bozo.”

  I’ll meet you where we met last time, at three thirty.

  Hopper’s boss hung up.

  “Well, where’s the guy Hopper was talking to?” Claire asked Gilbert. “He’s on Route One, just outside Alexandria, heading north. And he just powered down his phone.”

  “Shit,” Claire said. Was this guy always on the move?

  Claire had told Alice that she wanted Hopper smothered—and Alice was smothering him. She was leading an eight-man team in four separate vehicles, two agents per vehicle. One of the vehicles was a pickup truck, and in the bed of the truck was a dirt bike with big knobby tires. She could follow Hopper anywhere. Her team also had parabolic mikes so if Hopper met his contact outside or sitting near a window, they would be able to record whatever was said. But Claire had made it clear that recording the conversation was a secondary objective. Her primary objective was to identify the man Hopper was meeting.

  Hopper was scheduled to meet his contact at three thirty. By three o’clock, when Hopper’s car had still not exited the Hoover Building garage, Alice assumed the meeting was going to be someplace close by, unless the meeting had been canceled. Then, at three twenty, one of Alice’s team radioed her. “He’s leaving the building. The Pennsylvania Avenue exit.”

  Alice was parked in her vehicle with another agent on the corner of 9th Avenue and Pennsylvania, and she looked down Pennsylvania and saw Hopper walking directly toward her. What was he doing? She’d expected him to drive somewhere, but it appeared as if was walking to meet his contact. This was good. Maybe the meeting would take place outdoors and she could easily record what was said. The National Mall was just one long block away from the Hoover Building, and that was a likely place for a meeting. Or maybe Hopper would meet his contact in one of the public buildings on the Mall, like the Museum of Natural History, which was close, and where she could easily follow him.

  Alice watched from her SUV as Hopper stopped on the corner of 9th and Pennsylvania and waited for the light to change. She was positive by now that he wasn’t looking for a cab and was planning to walk to the rendezvous site, and she ordered three members of her team to leave their vehicles and proceed in the direction of Pennsylvania Ave to follow Hopper on foot. If a car stopped and picked Hopper up, all she had to do was radio the agents who were still in their vehicles and they would take up the pursuit.

  When the light changed and Hopper started to cross the street, Alice put on sunglasses and a baseball cap, exited her SUV, and fell into step behind him. At some point, she would walk past him and one of her team members would assume the tailing position, and by then her other agents would be in positions where they would effectively have Hopper boxed in between them. From that point forward, they would be constantly switching positions to keep Hopper in sight so he wouldn’t become used to seeing the same person behind him. They would also frequently change their appearance, donning and removing hats and jackets and glasses.

  Hopper crossed Pennsylvania but didn’t proceed down 9th Ave toward the National Mall as Alice had expected. Instead he turned to his right, walked half a block west, and entered the Department of Justice—and Alice knew she was screwed.

  The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building has a beautiful Indiana limestone façade, a red-tile hip roof, and decorative colonnades. It is a five-story one-point-two-million-square-foot behemoth, and occupies one enormous city block. And, as is the case with almost all federal buildings since nine/eleven, people don’t simply walk into the building. You either had to have identification showing you
were an employee of the department—and, as an FBI agent, Hopper had such identification—or you had stop at a security checkpoint where guards would examine your ID, verify you were an approved visitor with an appointment, and then provide you with a temporary badge and most likely someone to escort you to wherever you wanted to go. Whomever Hopper was meeting was most likely already inside the building. He could be an employee of the Justice Department or some other federal agency that was permitted access. Even if Alice were to show the security guards her NSA credentials—which she had no intention of doing—it would still take time to convince the guards to let her enter the building, and by then Hopper would have disappeared into one of the hundreds of rooms inside the place.

  She was screwed.

  Alice stood outside the building for half an hour and at four o’clock, people began to stream out of the building, going home for the day. One of the people who exited was Hopper, and his contact could be any one of the hundreds of other people exiting at approximately the same time. She watched without any indication of the frustration she was feeling as Hopper crossed Pennsylvania Avenue again and walked back into the Hoover Building, then she pulled out her cell phone, called Claire, and told her what Hopper had done.

  Claire went ballistic.

  31

  “John,” Bradford said, “I feel like things are spinning out of control. It should have ended with Russo and the reporter. But now this lawyer … what’s his name again?”

  “DeMarco,” Levy said. “Joseph DeMarco.”

  Bradford was attending a barbecue later that day at Camp David. It was the president’s wife’s birthday but hardly an occasion, in Bradford’s opinion, worth taking him away from his duties. Had the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee not been attending as well, he would have come up with some last-minute emergency that required him to stay at the Pentagon. Unfortunately, part of his job, whether he liked it or not, was cozying up to the people who funded the military.

  Not only did he not want to attend the function, he didn’t want to attend in the attire he was wearing. The invitation had emphasized casual dress, indicating they might be sitting around a bonfire, and he was consequently dressed in stiff new blue jeans, a red and blue striped shirt, and loafers. The president was a man who looked comfortable in jeans—hell, he was comfortable in jeans—but the only casual clothes Bradford liked were combat fatigues. And the damn jeans, for some illogical reason, made him feel less powerful, less able to handle the situation with this DeMarco character. He knew he was being irrational and mentally shrugged off the feeling.

  “So now this lawyer knows that Hopper’s involved in some sort of cover-up and he knows Martin was Russo’s last patient.”

  “Yes, sir,” Levy said.

  “How did DeMarco connect the nurse to Martin?”

  “He could have simply talked to Russo’s employer,” Levy said. “I didn’t have him under surveillance—maybe I should have, but I didn’t—and I had no idea he was investigating Russo’s death.”

  “But why’s he investigating?”

  “I don’t know. All he was trying to do was find his cousin’s will, but he keeps digging things up. I guess I should have watched him closer.”

  “Yes, maybe you should have.” Bradford was quiet for a moment. “You know, we’ve been very lucky up until now, John, but we can’t rely on luck any longer. We can’t afford any more mistakes. We need to wrap this up, once and for all.”

  They had been incredibly lucky. When Martin had told him he was going to expose him if he didn’t resign, he’d taken the precaution of having Levy place a listening device in Martin’s bedroom. To install the device, Levy waited until nightfall and simply drilled a small hole through the siding of Martin’s house. The bug was about a quarter inch in diameter and connected to a small recorder that Levy hid in the shrubs outside of the bedroom, and the recorder could be accessed remotely by phone like a telephone answering machine. Bradford knew Martin was so ill he rarely left his sickbed, and he figured a single device in the Martin’s bedroom would be sufficient. If anyone was seriously looking for a listening device they’d find the bug, but it was so small he doubted Martin’s visitors or his family would notice it, and he knew Martin was too weak to conduct a search himself.

  Thanks to the listening device, they heard Martin tell the nurse he had to talk to Thomas Antonelli before he died. Bradford had no doubt he was going to tell Antonelli about their relationship, and that’s when he ordered Levy to kill Martin, as much as he hated to do so. Levy picked the lock on Martin’s backdoor when Martin’s family was asleep and after the nurse had left for the day, and killed him painlessly with an overdose of morphine.

  But where they really got lucky was with the nurse.

  Bradford wasn’t sure if Martin had told the nurse anything specific but he thought he might have, so he took the precaution of having Levy watch Russo after Martin died, and one day, as Levy was tailing him, Russo suddenly stopped his car to use a pay phone. This took Levy by surprise and by the time he parked, the nurse was already on the phone, but Levy heard enough to know that Russo was planning to meet a reporter at the Iwo Jima Memorial.

  So much luck—and the problem with Martin should have ended when Martin, the nurse, and the reporter died. But then this congressional flunky comes along. How much did DeMarco know? And what did he want? And the big question: was anyone helping him?

  Levy had apparently been thinking the same thing. “Sir,” he said, “that man Drexler you sent over to the NSA. He called me yesterday. He said he didn’t find anything that tied the agency to Russo, but he sounded strange. There was something off about his … his tone of voice. I’m thinking I should talk to him in person.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Bradford said. “And I’m not surprised that Drexler didn’t find anything. They’re not fools over there at Fort Meade and, for that matter, we really don’t know the NSA is involved.”

  “Well, somebody’s involved,” Levy said. “The woman who took Witherspoon’s fingerprints worked for some organization.”

  “I know,” Bradford said. “Has anyone made any attempt to contact the two soldiers you used?”

  “No, sir.”

  Bradford rose from his desk, too agitated to sit, and began to pace his office. He wasn’t the type to feel sorry for himself, but there were times when it felt as if the responsibilities he bore were overwhelming. The Chinese were growing stronger, both financially and militarily, and the Indians weren’t far behind. Good-paying jobs for middle-class Americans were disappearing, the country’s manufacturing base was collapsing, and we were at war with religious fanatics, a war that would never end. He wondered, some days, if he was going to live long enough to witness the end of an empire.

  He had no doubt that the course he had embarked on ten years ago with the help of John Levy and Martin Breed was the right course. It was simply unconscionable to sit back, doing nothing, while the politicians wrung their hands and Americans died and suffered. But sometimes … sometimes it was just too much. Yet what choice did he have? He could retire, of course. Simply walk away and leave all this for the man who replaced him. But what was the likelihood that his replacement would do what needed to be done? Not much. He squared his shoulders. Wallowing in self-pity was unacceptable. His only choice was to keep moving forward, to keep on fighting, no matter how terrible the cost might sometimes be.

  He took a breath. “John, here’s what I want you to do. Have Hopper meet with DeMarco and, when he does, he needs to find out what DeMarco knows. Do you understand me, John? Hopper needs to do whatever’s necessary to make DeMarco talk. Do you think he has the stomach for that?”

  “Yes, sir. He won’t have any qualms about that. But why don’t I do it?”

  “No,” Bradford said. “Right now it doesn’t appear that anyone knows about you, and I want to keep it that way. But afterward, Hopper needs to go. I’ve never trusted him; he only helps us because we pay him. And at this poi
nt he’s a liability, particularly considering the magnitude of what’s involved.”

  “Sir,” Levy said, “if something happens to a guy who works for Congress and an FBI agent, their deaths are going to be vigorously investigated.”

  “I’m sure they will be, John, so the trail can’t lead back to us. See if you can find someone who might have a motive for wanting to kill DeMarco.”

  “Somebody tried to burn down his house the other day.”

  “Well, there you go,” Bradford said. “That’s perfect. The man obviously has enemies.”

  “And Hopper?”

  “Hopper should simply disappear. Arrange for a deposit to his bank account, a large deposit—use the emergency fund—and a couple of hours later withdraw the money and route it to Geneva, the Caymans, somewhere like that. Hopper’s not popular at the Bureau. His bosses will think he sold information to somebody they’re investigating, and then took his thirty pieces of silver and fled the country. But, John—and this is really important—are you positive Russo didn’t leave any sort of written record?”

  “Sir,” Levy said, “I searched Russo’s body. He had nothing on him. Hopper and I both searched Russo’s house. I looked at the reporter’s laptop and there was nothing on it. Nor did the reporter have any notes on him or in his house. I monitored Russo’s cell phone—he didn’t have a landline in his house—and the only time he left his house before he met with the reporter was when he stopped at his church.”

  “How long was he in the church?”

  “Less than ten minutes, closer to five. And when I looked inside he was just kneeling there, praying.”

  “Is there a pay phone in the church?”

  “No.” Then Levy hesitated. “Or I should say, I don’t think there is. There isn’t one outside the place or on the main floor, but I suppose there could be one in the basement or a landline in an office. But it doesn’t matter; I’m sure Russo wasn’t in the church long enough to tell anyone what he knew.”