by Chuck Logan
“And?”
“We had our techies run diagnostics on the thumb drive the same night we found it. It’s a frame from a security camera in the hospital on the Balad base recorded at 3:27 p.m. local time on the afternoon of April 12th. It’s a shot of you looking a bit worse for wear, mate.”
Morgon exhales audibly.
“Bad news?”
“Probably. Good catch.”
“Like I said, I run out the slippery grounders; habit my old dad taught me. The rest was easy. We copied the drive and put it all back in the desk. Then I had some mates make some inquires at Balad. They found the contractor who was on duty that night minding the cameras. Friendly fellow, used to be a cop in South Carolina. He recalled this older master sergeant coming in who wanted to view some tapes from April 12th. Said it concerned some nickel-and-dime black-market bullshit in his unit. He didn’t remember the sergeant’s name, but he did remember he was with a North Dakota Guard helo unit and had been an investigator with the Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department.” Cawker clears his throat. “And, ah, my guys made the tape go away, and they only found one senior NCO in Guard choppers at Balad who was a Grand Forks cop.”
“You get a location on him?”
“They packed him back home to Grand Forks; apparently Dillon exceeded his shelf life—over sixty, too old for active duty.”
“You get an address?”
“I did.”
“You up to moonlight on the side?”
“I can do that.”
“You ever snoop a hard target in Grand Forks, North Dakota?”
“Can’t be worse than Alice Springs in July.”
“I want to know what’s under Dillon’s fingernails and what’s on his computer, like if he dug up anything on me. If so, this could get ugly.”
Without hesitation, Cawker answers, “Understood.”
Amanda finds Morgon in the carriage house inspecting the suit he purchased for the Washington trip. Always a thrifty man, he insisted on finding a bargain, which involved driving almost to Detroit, to the Neiman Marcus Last Call Clearance Center in Auburn Hills to get the Brioni. Amanda thinks the olive color in the weave complements his eyes. Twenty-eight hundred bucks and change, off the rack.
“How’d it go in town?” she asks.
“Made stops at the car place, Danny’s office.”
“You might think of joining the VFW.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Sit in with me and the accountant. We may have to switch foundation status from private endowment to pass-through next year, to justify appropriating the initial start-up and construction costs for the lakefront.”
Morgon raises his hands in surrender. “Mercy.”
Amanda smiles. “We’ll wait on that.”
***
While Brian Cawker travels west to Grand Forks, Morgon flies east on an Agency Lear Jet outfitted with a lift ramp to accommodate John’s wheelchair. A waiting limo ushers them to their hotel.
Getting dressed before dinner, Amanda chides him, “C’mon, Morg. Quit lollygagging.” She’s putting finishing touches on her hair.
“Lollygagging,” he repeats, savoring the word.
“We’re late,” she says as she draws a light shawl around her bare shoulders. Her dress is understated but clingy, with just two slender spaghetti straps over her collarbones. Behind her, out the sliding door leading to the balcony, the lights of Washington, D.C. are just twinkling on.
“Look at us,” Morgon says.
“What?”
“Come on over here. Give me a kiss,” he beckons.
Amanda adds a coquettish sway to her hips as she crosses the room, goes up on her toes, and busses his lips.
“A real kiss,” he says.
Her cool fingers ease up around the back of his neck. “You mean like this?” she says.
Dinner happens in a D.C. restaurant on Marker Square North with a string quartet playing in the corner and linen napkins folded like origami. Now the dishes have been cleared away and, across the table, John leans forward in his wheelchair and gabs with two old associates who are moderately in their cups. Kelly, silent and watchful in a charcoal suit, with his dark hair combed back in a sleek ponytail, sits at John’s elbow and restricts him to one lightly watered whiskey. It’s a pirates’ reunion. They sound like they’re playing Yalta, like they’re dividing up the world.
Morgon and Amanda excuse themselves, leave John in Kelly’s care, and take a cab back to the hotel and wind up in the bed.
“At some point this teenaged sex thing has to taper off,” Amanda muses as she leans back, draped in a sheet, against the balcony railing on the sixth floor of the Westin Hotel. Morgon, stretched out on the bed, fancies that her exposed skin shimmers milky pale as the monuments he can see swelling up from a carpet of city lights in the distance. She could probably pose in one of those sculptures. Not Liberty or Freedom or Charity. More like a nymph in the background. He picks his memory for an appropriate minor goddess and decides on Tyche Fortuna, the patron of gamblers and mercenaries.
“Are you listening to me?” she calls out with feigned pique.
“Every word,” he answers with an easy smile. In fact he is thinking about Cawker, whom he has set in motion purely on his own authority.
The next morning is free, so they split up. Amanda checks some shops in Georgetown, and Morgon decides to look over the capital. No gun, no eyes in the back of his head; just another tourist.
It’s warm, summery, a break in the heat. People promenade in shorts and sunglasses. He queues up and follows a group of sightseers into the Capitol Building. Inside, it’s nonstop marble, and he puts a crook in his neck, looking up to study the frescos on the rotunda dome. An informational handout informs him he’s viewing The Apotheosis of Washington: Father George rising to heaven surrounded by a harem of liberty ladies.
Afternoon is showtime, so Morgon gets back in the new suit but opts for open collar and skips the confining tie. They rendezvous in the hotel lobby. Kelly smoothly maneuvers John and his wheelchair in and out of the limousine. At the Senate Office Building Kelly ably negotiates the ramps and elevators and pushes John down a hall to the hearing room.
Kelly parks John’s wheelchair at a table dressed with a green baize cloth, where he makes small talk with a gaggle of similarly aged, stooped mandarins of a departed era. The senators and their staffs file in and sit behind a raised, curved dais. A gavel bangs. The spectators quiet down and take their seats.
“The committee will come to order.” The chairman peers over his glasses. He’s a gruff Michigan senator who looks like the tough uncle everyone wishes they had in a pinch. “Will the panel members rise and raise their right hands to be sworn. Mr. Rivard, you may remain seated.”
But John, with Kelly’s assistance, presses both his gnarled hands down on his cane, and as he slowly rises to his feet and lifts his right hand, a hush settles over the chamber.
Amanda smiles and nudges Morgon’s pant leg with her knee, and when their eyes meet, they agree they are easily the best-looking couple in this stuffy room. At that moment, when their foreheads are close together, Morgon can’t help but notice that Amanda’s gaze is rinsed clean of nervous glitter and, in the absence of medication, shines with what could only be happiness.
Just before John makes his statement, Morgon glances at his wristwatch. Cawker should be in Grand Forks by now. Then he composes himself and listens to John attribute the controversy that persists about the losses at Khost to an overreliance on drones and NSA intercepts complicated by armchair analysts who never stepped off the base or spoke the local language. At one point, he gestures with his reading glasses for emphasis and drops them. Morgon, sitting in the first row, quickly scoots forward, scoops up the spectacles, and hands them back.
Chapter Forty-Six
Sam Dillon has been keeping his electronic surfing low-profile, so he’s using an Internet connection on a computer in the Grand Forks Public Library. He logs off and lea
ns back, feeling vindicated. When he started down this path, in Iraq, it felt like he was tracking a herd of black cats in the dark. Now, with his Pentagon buddy’s assistance, he’s narrowed his search to one big cat, and his name is Morgon Jump.
A discreet visit to a friend at the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Fargo put Jump in tighter focus. The state cop used his IRS connections to provide Jump’s last 1040 form. Currently he’s employed as a security consultant with the Rivard Family Foundation in Lakeside, Michigan. From his Pentagon contact, he’s learned that Jump was previously CIA Special Activities Division by way of Fifth Special Forces. By the time Sam started Googling Rivard, he was not exactly surprised to learn that Rivard’s bio included being a former director of covert operations Far East for the Agency. So Jump is a big cat working for an even bigger cat.
After chasing around on Rivard posts he’s just confirmed that Rivard testified yesterday at a special Senate hearing, and the hearing is archived on the C-SPAN website. What makes the hearing interesting is that Jump and Rivard appear briefly together, in the same camera shot.
He removes a photocopy of Jump’s military ID card from a manila folder. It’s the gift forwarded by his Pentagon friend. A frown creases his face. He’d made an extra copy on his home fax machine, and it’s not in the folder. Quickly he runs a mental checklist. Damn, Sam. You’re getting old.You must have mislaid the other one in the study. At the finish of this slug of research he’d promised himself a couple days downtime at Devil’s Lake, eighty miles to the west on Highway 2. He’s packed all the gear and has his boat out in the lot hitched behind his truck. But he can’t leave that piece of paper laying around, so he’ll have to go back and police it up before he leaves town. Then he smoothes out the blank space below the photocopy, thumbs the plunger on a ballpoint, and begins to write:
Jesse,
Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you.
I didn’t want to mention what else I was looking into when I visited at the hospital because I was going on pure speculation. Now I have some hard information to back up my suspicions. The day you were shot down, this guy—see above—showed up in the holding ward at Balad, right at your bed. He was dressed like a troop, but he was all wrong. Can’t say for sure, but I think me being there might have scared him off. After I talked to Colbert I went back to the hospital and managed to pull the guy’s picture off a security camera and ran some checks.
Like the ID says, he was SF, then he worked for the CIA. For the last couple years he’s been employed by a retired Agency honcho named John Rivard. Rivard runs this charity foundation in Lakeside, Michigan that could be a convenient cover for all manner of rat fuckery. I can’t connect Jump directly to what happened at Turmar, but maybe you can. I want you to watch this special Senate Foreign Relations Oversight Committee Hearing on CIA Field Operations. It was recorded on C-SPAN, July 23rd, and is available online. Pay attention to Rivard’s testimony, because Jump will briefly be on-screen. Be thinking of those star doodles you drew all over your notebook. Maybe you knew all along?
After you view the hearing, write me what you think, at my home address. Let’s play dumb a while longer with phones and email.
If you can ID this prick as being at the crash site, I have a friend in CID at the Pentagon you can talk to for starters.
Good Luck,
Be in touch soon,
Sam.
Sam grimaces and flexes his cramped hand; his damn arthritis is acting up from the mere act of handling a pen. Then he folds the sheet and puts it in a stamped envelope, which he addresses to Jesse C/O the 4J Polytrauma Ward at the Minneapolis VA Hospital. He leaves the library and, on the way to the parking lot, drops the letter in a mailbox.
***
Totally relaxed, Brian Cawker pedals a bike down Seward Ave. in a quiet residential neighborhood just south of Riverside Park, a green zone that meanders along the banks of the Red River that divides Grand Forks, North Dakota, from East Grand Forks on the Minnesota side. A blazing prairie late afternoon dims toward twilight, and people flock to the illusion of coolness, jogging or riding bikes. In running shoes, shorts, a tank top, and a Twins cap, Cawker blends in. He “borrowed” the untended and unlocked bicycle earlier, from the campus of the University of North Dakota a few miles to the west.
He’s traveling “cold”; he’s unarmed and left his ID back at the motel. If this truly gets ugly and he winds up having his rights read by some hick cop, his only hope is Morgon pulling out a Homeland Security get-out-of-jail-free card.
But he puts these thoughts from his mind as he circles the block a second time and glides past well-maintained houses and lawns dappled at this hour in fuzzy shade from mature elms, oaks, and an occasional towering cottonwood. His target is a neat stucco bungalow with a garage back that’s in the middle of the block nestled between tall lilac hedges. He turns and coasts into the alley. The thick hedges are a stroke of luck. They fence in the rear yard and screen access from the alley.
Last night, after he drove up from Minneapolis International Airport in a rental Saturn, he made his first drive-by of Sam Dillon’s home. Then he grabbed a Motel 6 room near the university. Later in the evening he made a second reconnaissance on foot. After the lights and TV went off in the house, he trolled down the alley. After checking the garage that contained a Ford F-150 and a trailer holding a fiberglass johnboat, he entered Dillon’s small backyard and crept under the wall of lilacs. Gingerly he approached the kitchen windows and, by a light above the stove, observed no sign of a food or water container. So no dog. And no sign of a security system. Cautiously he hunkered to a basement window.
The travel brochures advertize Grand Forks as a great place to raise kids, with virtually no crime. So the first window he approached had no storm window and the screen panel unlatched with an easy shove. And that would be his way in.
Now, slowing the bike, he acknowledges that usually this kind of job would involve a surveillance van, a street crew, and a backup tech network to monitor Dillon’s phones and electronics—a commitment easily within the reach of Roger Torres’ ASTECH resources. But he doesn’t have time to track Dillon’s local travel pattern or his connections. Morgon needs this to happen fast and dirty and invisible. So Roger is out of the loop. And he’s very mindful that tonight’s work amounts to an audition. Rivard has stepped down, and Morgon is moving up. That leaves the action arm for the mythic Office of Perfect Crimes an open position. And, on this warm early evening, Cawker is making his bid.
He dismounts the bike just past the garage and peeks in the window. There’s enough light to see that the truck and trailer are absent. And the house windows are dark. He walks the bike into the shrubbery, out of sight, and pauses to listen to the muted sounds from the surrounding backyards—the hissing of a sprinkler, children’s voices. It’s just another peaceful early evening in Grand Forks.
Go.
He pulls on a pair of nylon gloves then slips an extra-large pair of light nylon socks over his shoes. Hugging the lilacs, he cautiously approaches the basement window, pushes back the screen, and rolls in.
Crouching, he takes a moment to listen and acclimate his eyes. The only sound in the cool basement is the furnace fan circulating air. A night-light in a wall socket reveals cheap pine paneling, linoleum, furniture covered by sheets, and a small pool table. After clicking on a pencil flashlight, he goes up the stairs for a fast walk-through. Dillon’s living space is part ship-shape barracks, part faintly musty museum. The living room and dining room appear unused, even preserved; China and knickknacks peer down from shelves like spotless statues. The same atmosphere prevails in the master bedroom, where the king-sized bed and sterile dressers could be a furniture display room. A single framed photograph sitting on the bare bureau top at the foot of the bed suggests an explanation. In a beach scene set against a moody vacation sky, a striking, dark-haired woman wearing cutoff shorts and a halter is captured in a moment of middle-aged vitality, smiling at the camera.
Inserted in the picture frame a memorial card shows the same smiling face: Anna Grace Dillon. 1954–2010.
A spare bedroom across the hall has a double bed that looks lived in; a thumbed copy of Guns and Ammo rests beside the reading lamp, and underwear and socks wait to be washed in a plastic basket in the corner. Cawker sifts through the clothes in the closet and pauses to peruse an army dress uniform with combat badges and eight rows of ribbons. Then he moves to the dresser drawers without finding anything unusual. But when he slips his hand under the mattress, his fingers touch cold metal, and he withdraws a Colt .45. A quick check reveals that the handgun is locked but not loaded. Some ex-cops are control freaks, up to their asses in trigger locks and gun safes. And some are laid-back. The aging Dillon must be of the laid-back variety. He slides the gun back into its hiding place. A moment later, inspecting the hall closet, he finds the inevitable gun safe tucked behind the hangers.
The tidy kitchen cupboards offer nothing, but, off the kitchen, a four-seasons porch is converted into a home office with a computer desk, printer, phone, and fax. When he taps the space bar the screen saver pops up, so he selects the email icon and reviews all the traffic coming and going for the last two weeks. Nothing but routine immediate-family stuff; emails from a daughter contain pictures of a granddaughter. The rest is the kind of raucous right-wing jokes you’d expect ex–law enforcement/ex-military to exchange for laughs. Then he trolls through the computer history. Again nothing. Dillon favors fishing sites, and that’s about all. Only after he searches every drawer, every cranny, every book on every shelf does he spot the sheet of paper laying in the fax tray. In plain sight. He flips it over and puts his flash on a copy of sergeant first class Morgon Jump’s Special Forces ID.
