The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  Connie Wall awakened in the dimly lighted hospital room. She took a couple of deep breaths and realized there was no more oxygen tube parked in front of her nose. She actually felt better for the first time since…since that night. She could hear the typical sounds of a busy hospital ward in the corridor outside, sounds she recognized from years of trudging through similar corridors. This place felt different, sounded different, and then she remembered she’d been transported, a long ambulance ride down toward Washington, although she’d gone back to sleep during the trip. And Jake Cullen had been in the back with her, holding her hand. Wearing latex gloves. He’d tried to explain what was going on, but she hadn’t really cared. They’d given her a good-bye dose of something wonderful intravenously and she’d concentrated instead on the warmth of his hand.

  Now she tested her toes and fingers, and everything still responded. Her back felt as if it were padded with an infant’s crib mattress, and there was a new IV patch on her right hand. The one on her left hand was gone, but the back of her left hand was sore and felt inflamed. She remembered the old expression, When the IV stick hurts more than what they did to you, you’re healing.

  But she was better. Her lungs weren’t half-full of narco-fog anymore, and she felt the first pangs of actual hunger. Tough way to lose a couple of pounds, she thought. Keeping her right hand immobile, she moved her left and patted various parts of her body to see if everything was still there. She felt a monitoring patch above her left breast and heard the regular beep from a machine above her head. She moved her head, provoking a sudden lancing headache, so she found the call button and hit it. A nurse appeared in less than a minute, and Connie asked where she was.

  “GWU Medical Center,” the nurse replied. She was quite young, but she did an automatic scan of the IV stand and the monitors. “They brought you in from West Virginia about four hours ago.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Midnight. Shift just changed. You were a nurse?”

  “Still am, I think,” Connie said with a crooked smile. It hurt her cracked lips.

  The young nurse put her hand to her mouth in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  Connie shook her head gently. Not a wonderful idea, she discovered. “Can I have some water, and maybe some saltines?” she asked. “I have a headache and I think I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, sure,” the girl said brightly. “But let me ask you—do you drink coffee?”

  “Yes, sure.”

  “That headache may be caffeine withdrawal, you know? How about maybe a Coke with those saltines?”

  “Great idea,” Connie said, realizing the girl was probably right.

  “And there’s a cop outside. He asked to be notified when you woke up.”

  “Sergeant Cullen?”

  “Uh, no. I think his name is Butts, or something like that.” She suppressed a quick grin. “He’s in uniform. He just came on.”

  “What’s my prog?” Connie asked.

  “Upgraded to satisfactory about two hours ago,” the nurse recited. “They’ve taken you off the heavy-duty pain meds and switched you to Vicodin. No sign of infection, knock on wood. Vitals seem stable. We’re hydrating with that IV, and they’ll bring in a pain pump in the morning. Do you remember what happened?”

  “Vividly,” Connie said. Her eyelids suddenly felt heavy. “But I’m actually feeling better. Although it’s hard to talk. Mouth’s dry.”

  “I’ll get you some shaved ice and a little Coke syrup.”

  “And the crackers. Don’t forget the crackers.”

  “The crackers,” the nurse said. “Right.” But Connie was already back asleep.

  The nurse went to tell the cop that Connie Wall had surfaced for a few minutes but had gone back down again. But she said the patient did confirm that she remembered what happened. The officer thanked her and popped a cell phone to put a call in to Detective Sergeant Cullen at his home number.

  At midnight, Heismann made a trial run through the holes he had cut into the common walls between the town houses. He was dressed in a dark sweatsuit, sneakers, black leather gloves, and a black stretch-nylon hood that looked like a ski mask. He crawled silently through the boxes and reached the closet’s hallway door, where he stopped to listen for a few minutes. He opened the door and stepped out into the darkened hallway. Both the bathroom door and her bedroom door were shut. The only illumination came from a streetlight out in front of the house; it shined up the stairwell from the windows in the front room. He took some tentative steps out into the upstairs hallway to see if the floorboards creaked, but the rug apparently absorbed the pressure of his feet. He slid his feet as quietly as he could along the edge of the rug until he reached her bedroom door. He could hear her snoring.

  Should he take care of her now? He put a gloved hand on the bedroom’s door handle and began to twist it to the right. Once he had the bolt retracted, he pushed very gently, but the door did not move. What is this? he wondered. He tried to sense what was holding the door shut, but he couldn’t tell. Had he missed something here? A dead bolt, perhaps? He released the door handle and ran his hand up the side panel of the door, feeling for screws or other fasteners, but there was nothing. Maybe it wasn’t a real dead bolt, just one of those bolt-and-hasp arrangements. He slid over to the bathroom door and tried that one, and it opened. But the door connecting the master bath with her bedroom also refused to open. She was still snoring away in there, so at least she was a sound sleeper. And there was no damned little dog to yap out an alarm, thank God.

  So, come back tomorrow in the daylight and see what the hell was locking the doors. If it was a real dead bolt, he must find a key. People usually kept spare keys around for those things. If a bolt and hasp, he’d back out all but two of the screws on the hasp. Then when he needed to get in Thursday night, he’d crash right through it. By the time she realized he was in the room, she’d be dead. He backed out of the bathroom and closed the hallway door. Then he went back through his secret passage.

  Nothing beats personal reconnaissance, he thought. But you should have noticed those locks, he chided himself. He stopped for a moment in his own darkened hallway. First the damned nurse taking forever. Then the Hodler name surprise from Interpol. Then being stopped on the street. Hodler again. Now this business with the locks. Omens? He felt a twinge of fear. He knew that he was no mastermind. He’d come from nothing, and the Stasi would never have given him a second look if he hadn’t been able to pass for an American teenager back before the Wall came down and the Cold War was lost. That was a long time ago. Now he considered himself to be a competent, if somewhat mechanical, criminal, yes, but this entire business was a huge departure from his usual jobs. It was also a main chance for a second life. The money. The totally new body and face. Only the Arabs could have funded something like this, and, as they were constantly reminding him, it was war, not crime this time. A new kind of war, to be sure, but war. And in war, the Americans will never see someone like you coming, he told himself. They’re totally focused on people who look like us. You will be next to invisible.

  Exactly.

  10

  GARY WAS WAITING FOR SWAMP WHEN HE ARRIVED AT THE office at 10:10 the next morning. He produced a fat briefcase and invited Swamp to go down the hall with him to an empty conference room. Once there, he locked the door before opening the briefcase and showing Swamp a nylon-web harness for a shoulder holster, a .357-caliber Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol, a spare magazine, and a box of ammunition. Since Gary had checked out the weapon, he had Swamp check the serial number and then sign a subcustody card for the gear. Swamp left it all in the briefcase and they went back to the office.

  “Any word from the head shed?” he asked.

  “McNamara’s been in meetings this morning since eight,” Gary said. “I talked to Mary when I went down to get a copy of his calendar for the day, and she said there was another message in from PRU. Concerning you.”

  “Great. She say what it was?�
�

  “No, sir. She kinda hinted that it might spoil both our days.”

  “Probably asking if I’ve been suspended yet.”

  “Can they just do that shit without a hearing?” Gary asked as they reached Swamp’s cubicle.

  “Sure. I’m on a ‘serve at the pleasure of’ contract. As long as they don’t screw around with my pension or take any adverse personnel action, I can be sent home in a day. For that matter, so can McNamara.”

  “Damn.”

  “Technically, I am retired. None of us expects to stay forever. Any hits from those realtors?”

  Gary shook his head. “Twelve called back; no recent contracts with a Mr. Hodler or any Royal Kingdom Bank.”

  “Well, it always was a long shot,” Swamp said. “I need to talk to Cullen. Maybe try calling some of the real estate offices that haven’t answered. Push a little bit. And you keep your ears to the ground on that message from PRU.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Gary? Start thinking about where you want to go in case I really do get the ax. I’ll get McNamara to run interference for you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gary said somberly.

  Gary left to go back to his own cubicle and Swamp decided to check in with Mary before seeing McNamara. He raised his eyebrows at her. She looked around at the other agents in their cubes, then passed him a bootleg copy of the PRU message. “Himself is back and would like to see you,” she said. “And there’s a lady you know in his office with him. Maybe read that before you go down there, and then shred it. Oh, and I don’t think she’s your friend.”

  “Thanks, Mary,” Swamp said. “I owe you one. As usual.”

  “Dark chocolates are good,” she said with a smile, and wished him good luck.

  He sat back in his chair. Everyone was wishing him good luck this morning, as if they knew he had suddenly run out of that commodity. He scanned the two-paragraph memo, which was from the director of the U.S. Secret Service, addressed to the undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection, DHS, copy to McNamara, OSI. The memo stated that retired annuitant T. Lee Morgan, Senior Executive Service (retired), had improperly invoked the name of the U.S. Secret Service in an attempt to obtain information from civilian businesses concerning a figmentary foreign agent by the name of Erich Hodler. It further stated that Mr. Morgan had also been emphatically directed to cease and desist from any and all efforts to locate said Erich Hodler, and to conduct no further investigations into a purported and totally unsubstantiated plot to bomb the U.S. Capitol concurrent with the president’s upcoming address to a special joint session of the U.S. Congress.

  Then came the killer words: “In my opinion, as the director of the Secret Service, Mr. Morgan has become obsessed with a plot that exists largely in his own mind, and that Mr. Morgan’s obsessive nature springs from an incident of personal misfortune in his domestic life that has, sadly, unbalanced his judgment, diminished his fitness for further government service, and led to behavior that continues to cause unnecessary and distracting strains on the current effort to complete the security shield for the upcoming inauguration.”

  Then the clever part: “It is with great regret and some sympathy that the director of the Secret Service must now conclude that Mr. Morgan’s usefulness to the government is at an end. Since Mr. Morgan is a retired Secret Service agent, on temporary recalled annuitant status within the Department of Homeland Security, it is strongly recommended that the secretary terminate Mr. Morgan from further active duty in said department in order to avoid any further embarrassment to the U.S. Secret Service. A replacement asset will be made available to DHS-OSI as soon as the presidential inauguration has been completed.”

  Swamp put the memo down on the table and exhaled a long breath. Hallory certainly knew what he was doing by getting the director to sign this out. Everyone who was still anyone in the senior ranks of the Secret Service in Washington knew about what had happened the day he retired. Instead of a frontal attack, like trying to bring charges or generate a reprimand, Hallory was acting “sympathetically” in recommending that this annoying nutcase be sent back out to pasture. The poor guy’s lost it. He’s getting too old for this stuff, desperately doesn’t want to let go, and is interfering with security preparations for the inauguration.

  His telephone began to ring on the intercom line. Mary, no doubt, calling to say time was up and to get down there.

  He did not shred the bootleg copy. He folded it into a government franked envelope, addressed it to himself at the Jackson Inn, and dropped it into the outgoing mailbox as he went down the hall to McNamara’s office. Old habits, such as keeping a meticulous paper trail, indeed died hard. He was going to fight this, but if he lost, he’d ram that little love note right up Carlton Hallory’s tight ass on the front page of the Washington Post if anything ever did go “bomb, bomb, bomb” downtown.

  Heismann stood in his kitchen, examining the paper delivered by FedEx a moment ago. It was a plain white piece of printer paper, with no identifying letterhead or return address. The FedEx air bill indicated that an art gallery in New York City had sent the envelope. On the piece of paper were two addresses. The first was the address for the town house. The second was an address on First Street, SW. Beneath each address was a set of latitude and longitude coordinates, each expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds, followed by a second set of Universal Transverse Mercator grid coordinates, each expressed in six-digit numbers.

  Heismann retrieved the GPS unit from its carrying case and switched it on. He set the display for lat-lon and then waited for the unit to initialize and then lock on to the satellite constellation and display his present location. It agreed with what was on the paper down to the second in longitude, and it was only one second off in latitude. Good. He walked upstairs, carrying the GPS unit, and took a second reading in the room with all the marble blocks. Same agreement, a small difference in elevation. Very good. He switched it over to display UTM coordinates, and the six numbers for each coordinate agreed. So the firing point was properly established.

  He switched the unit off and went back down to the kitchen, where he retrieved the numbers derived from his walk around the Capitol. The target circle was centered on the west portico of the building, a point he could not have reached even in normal times. In theory, the numbers on the courier sheet represented the center of that circle. If those numbers were accurate, the center should lie on a straight line drawn between the town house and the corner of Constitution and First Street, NW, where he had taken his own readings. He had already computed what that azimuth was in true degrees.

  He broke out the small handheld Army calculator that had come in the box of sculptor’s tools. Mutaib had explained that it was preprogrammed to compute a fire-control solution, expressed as a firing azimuth and range between two GPS coordinate positions for the weapon. He entered the coordinates, using UTM grid numbers for firing point and aiming point. Then he entered air temperature, a notional wind vector, expressed as coming from the northwest at ten, barometric pressure from this morning’s television weather, and then pressed the calculate button. The device displayed the range as 2,660 meters, and the firing azimuth as 342 degrees true. He frowned. The GPS unit, in the navigation mode, had computed 2,580 meters. That was pretty close. But the azimuth of the line of fire was off by four whole degrees.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and thought about that. He’d drawn the line from the center of the house to the corner of the street intersection. On the map, that line passed right through the west portico of the Capitol. Assuming the map was reasonably accurate and oriented to true north, as it said it was, he had, using a large plastic protractor, come up with 338 degrees true. Being an old gunner, he knew that four degrees of error at 2,660 meters could mean a miss distance of almost 200 meters, especially when you were talking about azimuth.

  He swore softly. Mutaib had told him they were getting the Capitol target coordinates from an ordnance survey map of Washingt
on, D.C. Heismann had often wondered how many hikers and campers knew that the real purpose of an ordnance survey map was precisely what he was doing now, calculating an artillery fire-control solution. The big question now was which numbers he should use to set the weapon: his own admittedly crude estimate, the GPS, or the ones supposedly coming from an ordnance survey map created for this very purpose? And yet his numbers should be right, or very close. He had visually lined up the west portico from that intersection. But then he saw the flaw: He had not been able to see his town house. The city tourist map might have been drawn or printed in sections, and thus objects that lined up on the printed map might not actually line up on the ground.

  The GPS and Mutaib agreed within one degree of azimuth. All right. That was good enough. He exhaled in relief. He would use the surveyed coordinates.

  He went back upstairs and wrote both sets of the coordinates in pencil on the white plaster wall nearest the master bedroom’s door, then took the paper and its envelope down to the kitchen, where he burned them in the sink. He could hear the big trucks going by out on his street as the city’s road department began to set up the Jersey barriers a few blocks over. He was going to go get the minivan and position it this evening. He’d position the Suburban, with the emergency light rack back in place, late tomorrow evening. There had been police cars everywhere this morning when he walked down to the corner store to get coffee and a pastry, but the police did not appear to be doing anything but establishing a presence. None of them had been staring at pedestrians or pulling over cars in the neighborhood. The television news this morning had been full of reports about the security preparations and further announcements of traffic restrictions around the whole Capitol Hill area and, indeed, in other parts of the city. There had been footage of Air Force fighters in the air above Washington and Army helicopters staging at Andrews Air Force Base. Strangely, there had been other footage of waves of huge Air Force transports descending on bases along the East Coast, with the thinly veiled implication that there would even be troops deployed around the capital city. The Ammies were going a little crazy, in his opinion. You’d think the government was expecting a coup.