The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Yes, sir, okay,” the driver said. He was a young man under all that flesh, but his uniform was visibly straining its buttons. “We got it covered, sir,” he said reassuringly. “You go on home now. We’ll catch the bastards.”

  Heismann straightened up, nodding approval. “Good,” he said. “Very good! We cannot be too careful. The Communists are everywhere, you know.” He made a great show of looking carefully up and down the street for Communists, glancing around one last time as he did so to see if he could spot the other surveillance unit. But none of the nearby vehicles seemed to be reacting to his small theater. So he bent down again, pointed the Taser behind the driver’s neck, and fired once at the woman, sending the needle-thin stream into the side of her throat, which caused her to slam sideways against the right front door, then back against the seat, her head bucking upward and back into the headrest with an audible thump. Before the fat driver could react, Heismann backed away and fired again, hitting him in the left temple, barely missing his own hand with the back spray. The policeman’s arms and legs spasmed wildly, his body looking like a puppet whose master has fallen off his stool behind the curtain as he made a gagging sound and slumped sideways against the left front door.

  Heismann maintained his position, bent down by the driver’s side window, as if he were still talking to the two cops inside, while looking around again slowly, deliberately, half-expecting cops to come boiling out of the bushes or to hear excited yells over the radio. But there was absolutely no reaction. The policewoman seemed to be having trouble breathing. Her jaw was working, although no sounds came out. Heismann reached into the car and hit the master door locks, then opened the rear door behind the driver and got in. Just like in German police cars, the automatic dome light had been disabled.

  Keeping the door partially open, he sat down in the backseat behind the driver. There was a wire-mesh screen between the front and back seats, with Plexiglas inserts directly behind where the policemen would normally be sitting. He pulled out the two Levolor cords and then threaded one end of each cord through the center of the screen. He got back out, leaned into the front seat, found the power switch for the computer, and shut it off, darkening the interior of the cruiser. Then he fashioned quick nooses, slipping one over each policeman’s head, settling them under their chins and then pulling them tight, but not too tight. Then he slid the locking clamp up the right-hand side of the loop until it held the noose tight enough to dent the flesh of their necks just barely. Then he pushed the other end of the cords back through the screen, got back in the rear seat, and tied them off on the headrest support brackets.

  The man was out of it, but the woman was aware of what he was doing, and her eyes widened in fear. That’s right, Fraulein copper, he thought, I could strangle the both of you if I wanted to, and you could do absolutely nothing about it. But then there would be much too much commotion. I don’t need that just now. One dead policeman is enough. But do not struggle, hein?

  Checking once more to make sure no one was coming, he fished out their cuffs, made a chain through the steering wheel, and locked the man’s right hand to the woman’s left hand, effectively imprisoning them in the car. They had keys, of course, but the Taser’s effects would make it very difficult for them to manage even such a simple task as putting a key into a lock. He thought briefly about starting a fire in the car to see if their survival instincts could overcome their paralysis. He smiled to himself. That was something his uncle Karl, a real German, would have done. But he had one more thing to do, and a fire might arouse the neighborhood. Definitely second class Polizei, he thought contemptuously. If there was a second surveillance unit, they were obviously asleep.

  He got out and closed the door. He bent down again, pretending to talk to them in case anyone inside a house was watching, then waved good-bye and walked back up the street marginally faster than he had come. A car came down the street but turned into a driveway before reaching him. He walked right on past that house as the people got out of the car. They did not appear to have seen him.

  When he reached the dogleg turn in Quebec Street, he turned around. He could still see the top half of the nurse’s house. Two windows showed lights upstairs. Bedroom and bathroom, if he remembered correctly. That would do. He stepped off the sidewalk and stood in front of a large SUV, which was in the shadow of a big tree. He waited for a long minute, looking around and listening carefully for signs that someone had discovered the situation in the police cruiser, but the neighborhood remained quiet. He could hear the background hum of traffic up on Connecticut Avenue, and what sounded like the audio from a television set in a nearby house. Good enough, he thought.

  He pulled out the Walther and rested it on the driver’s side mirror and aimed carefully down the street at the nurse’s second-story windows. Bedroom or bathroom? Bathroom. More glass in there. It was a very long shot for a pistol, of course, but all he really wanted to achieve was to hit the house. There was no wind, so he looked around one more time to make sure no one was standing in their doorway looking at him, and then he lined up the bathroom window in his gun sight, elevated the barrel about an inch, and carefully fired two rounds. Then he pocketed the Walther and began walking quickly up Quebec Street toward Connecticut, abandoning all pretense at lame old age, the cane under his arm now like a drill sergeant’s baton. He was aware of some front porch lights coming on behind him down in Quebec Street, but he was across Connecticut Avenue at the light in the next minute, then back in his van two minutes after that.

  A joke, he told himself as he drove away. The Washington police were just what all his sources said they were: a total joke. And now that nurse would know it, too, once they found the two patrol officers. If he’d had a telephone, he would have been tempted to call her and ask her if she was all right.

  They met in the Oyster Bar of the Old Ebbitt Grill on Fifteenth Street, a block from the White House. Swamp, who knew the maître d’, had asked for a table for two in the bar for a twenty-minute meeting, with the understanding they’d give up the table whenever the maître d’ needed it after that. Lucy, elegant in a gray silk suit, caused a small stir when she came through the restaurant, heading toward the bar at the back of the rapidly filling dining area. Swamp had arrived five minutes earlier and had a glass of wine going. Lucy told the waiter she’d have a vodka rocks with a twist. When the waiter left, she produced a franked government envelope.

  “Your memo,” she said, passing it to him.

  The envelope wasn’t sealed, so Swamp opened it and read the action paragraph in the memorandum, Hallory writing in the bureaucratic third person. “It has been decided that the original transcript does not indicate a credible threat to presidential security, and that the Secret Service requires no further action or assistance from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) on this matter.” That was it. The memo was signed out, however, by Lucy VanMetre, by direction. Swamp smiled. By having her sign it, Hallory was protecting himself. If this thing ever coiled back to bite him, Hallory could always say he didn’t know anything about the memo and thereby blame Lucy. He looked at her and she smiled back at him, acknowledging the game.

  “Thanks for bringing this,” he said, pocketing it. “Old habits are hard to break.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” she replied. The waiter brought her drink. “Do you really intend to go to the fusion committee with this problem?”

  “If I have to,” he said. The room was noisy enough that they could speak privately even in such a public place.

  “Then perhaps you have more information than you gave Mr. Hallory this morning?”

  He nodded. “Since Hallory refused to get an FBI forensics team into it,” he said, “I tapped a few sources from a prior life. In fact, I think I now have a name and a tentative face to put to that transcript.”

  “Really,” she said, her eyebrows rising. Her ice blue eyes were all business. Swamp remembered Bertie’s comment about La Mamba, and that Bertie had told him he could tr
ust Lucy to be working her own agenda, even as Hallory’s deputy. She had signed the memo. If Swamp had new and more substantial information, she was definitely interested in hearing it.

  “Yep,” he said. “Still no solid evidence, but we’ve made a connection between the original transcript and a voice message left on that nurse’s answering machine—after the lieutenant got killed. The District cops had her phone tapped, with her permission. We think the guy’s a German national.”

  She sipped some of her drink. “They’re using her as bait to try to catch the lieutenant’s killer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any details on this German?”

  He nodded. “I can send you a secure fax in the morning. Then you’ll have what we have. The next step, of course, is to find him. We’ll have an Interpol picture, but of course if he was at that clinic, he’s had cosmetic surgery. But at least we’re going to take a shot at finding him.”

  She put her drink down and looked away for a moment. In profile, her face was all lines and angles. Highly defined facial bones. Straight, sculpted nose. Lips full, although not too full. Her hands were elegantly long, with delicately shaped fingers and polished neutral-colored nails. No rings or jewelry of any sort, he noticed. Not even a watch. Her hair was amazing, and he found himself wanting to touch it.

  “Has your superior in OSI authorized an investigation?” she asked. “Beyond the first phase?”

  “That’s Tad McNamara,” he said. “And no, not yet.” He wondered where she was going with this.

  “So, you’re sharing information with me. Why? Ah, so you can tell him that you are keeping the Service in the loop, even though Mr. Hallory has, in fact, turned it off. And thereby you maintain control of what happens to it in OSI, yes?”

  He tipped his glass at her. Full marks.

  She nodded. “That’s intelligent,” she said. “Would you be willing to interface with me directly? In return for which, I’ll do two things: One, I’ll make the requisite responses to any queries from your Mr. McNamara. And, two, at the appropriate time, I will approach Mr. Hallory to argue that perhaps further assets should be deployed. Assuming you produce tangible evidence, of course.”

  “Deal,” he said immediately. “And please understand, I’m not so rabid about this that I can’t admit I’m wrong. If it crumbles, I’ll trash it myself.”

  “Very good, Mr. Morgan. I was told you were someone with whom one could do business.”

  By whom? Swamp wondered. “Why is Hallory so hard-over on this issue?” he asked.

  “Well, first, he’s totally absorbed by the inauguration problem,” she said, finishing her drink. “Which, as you might remember, is a security nightmare.”

  “A target-rich environment, as the Army likes to say.”

  “Indeed. From our perspective, we want to limit access, while everyone who’s anyone in Washington is trying to get in.”

  He shook his head. “Better thee than me-e,” he intoned. “The good news for me is that I’ve got some time with this one. That speech to the joint session is almost a month away. Not like your problem.”

  She swirled the ice in her glass for a moment. “I’ve heard some stories about you, Mr. Morgan,” she said, looking away again. “One in particular. About the day you retired from active duty with the Service.”

  Swamp didn’t say anything. Again, he just waited.

  “Did that really happen?” she asked. “That your wife went with you to your retirement ceremony and then announced she was leaving you?”

  Swamp simply nodded, not trusting himself to speak. No one had ever come right out and said such a thing to his face.

  “And then…”

  “Yes.”

  She blinked and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then she leaned forward. “I don’t mean to pull emotional scabs, Mr. Morgan. It’s just that some people think Mr. Hallory is a jerk. He’s not. Overfaced by his job right now, perhaps, but he’s not an incompetent or indifferent boss.”

  “I remember him when he was an up-and-coming staff officer at headquarters. I don’t think he’s a jerk.”

  “Well, you should understand that he truly believes that your zeal on this transcript matter stems at least in part from the fact that you came back to government service because your life was otherwise empty. And that what happened that day has perhaps clouded your judgment.”

  Well, bully for him, Swamp thought. “In what way, specifically?” he asked.

  “In the sense that you might attach disproportionate significance to an issue like this just to stay in the game.”

  “He send you to tell me this, Ms. VanMetre?”

  “No,” she said immediately. “No. This meeting was my idea. Just so you know that there’s no conspiracy to marginalize you or what you’re doing. There’s no turf fight here. We’re all too busy for that kind of thing.”

  “All right,” he said, anxious to get back on firmer ground. “Glad to hear that. I’ll keep you informed, one way or another. Like I said, if it’s a firefly, I’ll swat it myself.”

  “All right, good.”

  “And my emotional gyros are pretty stable these days, Ms. VanMetre. I admit that I don’t date or otherwise socialize with anyone. My kids, who are both grown, think that I am responsible for what happened to my wife. She wouldn’t have been there if I’d been a better husband, and so forth. So now we don’t communicate anymore. In effect, I’ve lost my entire family.”

  He paused for a few seconds to let that sink in. “And it’s absolutely true,” he continued, “that I’m still working because that’s all I know how to do, which also happens to be the point Sherry was making that day. But that fact hasn’t clouded my judgment.”

  “That’s all?” she asked quietly. Swamp almost didn’t hear her.

  “What?” he asked.

  “That’s all? I mean, no affairs, alcoholism, abusive behavior—she left you because you worked too much?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I was married more to the job than I was to her. Those were her words.”

  She sighed. “I’m German by ethnic heritage, Mr. Morgan,” she said. “A reasonable woman does not divorce a man who works too hard.”

  She obviously meant that. He smiled, surprisingly relieved. “Well, those are the facts, Ms. VanMetre. I’m not nuts, or no more so than any of us in federal LE. If I’d still had my badge and my gun that day, maybe some things would be different. Maybe not. I’ll never know. I don’t feel guilty anymore, just sad.”

  She gazed across the table at him for what seemed a long time. A man could get lost in those blue eyes, he thought, if she ever softened them. “I believe you, Mr. Morgan,” she said, finally. “And I hope things get better for you soon.”

  “So do I,” Swamp said, and then he spotted the maître d’ pointing a finger at their table. “Our time’s up, I’m afraid,” he said. “Thanks for meeting me.”

  She smiled, and for the first time he caught just a glimpse of the woman who might live behind the silvery mask. “Stay in touch, Mr. Morgan,” she said as she got up and slipped her coat back on. “And please, I preferred it when you called me Lucy.”

  He followed her across the dining room area. The maître d’ passed them with a young couple and two menus, giving Swamp a conspiratorial man-to-man wink as he went by. As if, Swamp thought wearily. By the time he got his coat and made it to the front door, Lucy was already gone. As he stepped out onto the sidewalk, his cell phone vibrated in his suit pocket.

  “Morgan,” he said, turning his face out of the cold wind blowing along Fifteenth Street.

  “Sir. This is Gary. You need to come back to the office.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Swamp sat on the edge of his desk while Gary told him about what had happened in Quebec Street earlier that evening.

  “He shot at the house?”

  “Two rounds. One went through the bathroom window; the other hit the window frame. She was in the bathroom. Some kind of medium-caliber pis
tol. Too long a range to have been a serious attempt to hit anyone inside.”

  “That’s probably a distinction without a difference to Ms. Wall,” Swamp said. “Judas Priest! Where was the covert team?”

  “Parked out back by the garage, so they could watch the approaches from the park. That’s how he’d come twice before, apparently, but they were beyond line of sight on the overt unit. Never even heard the shots. Didn’t know squat until the nurse came running out of the house with her hair on fire, figuratively speaking. Then they found their buddies trussed up like Sunday chickens. Carl said it’s a regular Lebanese goat grab out there right now.”

  Swamp couldn’t suppress a grin. “I can believe that. But in a way, this is good news for us. He’s still trying for the nurse, which means he’s still in town.”

  He got up and walked around the tiny office, the fumes of Chardonnay and Lucy’s subtle perfume still rising in his nose. “And it reinforces my sense that Connie Wall knows more than she’s told us.”

  “About?”

  “About some bastard bombing the Capitol.”

  “Is it possible she knows but doesn’t know that she knows?”

  “Maybe,” Swamp said. “Or it’s possible she does know what he looks like but can’t surface it.”

  “She ought to remember some big balls,” Gary said. “First, he whacks a cop, just to get him out of his way, and then two nights later, he comes strolling down the street right in front of two surveillance units and disables two more cops. Making it clear he could have killed them, too. All over this nurse.”

  “He certainly thinks she knows something.”

  Gary perched a hip on the edge of Swamp’s desk. “With all this heat, if I had a mission to bomb the Capitol, I’d be laying low. Letting things subside, so I could do the job, whatever it is. Not go throwing gasoline on the fire like this.”

  “Correct,” Swamp said. “So there’s a reason for all this. I think we need to go back to interview Ms. Wall. Before her role as bait gets her dead.”