Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “You think he was killed too?” Walker asked.

  “Three deaths make a conspiracy.”

  “Three?”

  “The wife, the widow of the guy doing the clearance report, died the same day as the deep-web guy.”

  “Damn.”

  “Right? Listed that she OD’d, but was not listed as a user, nor suicidal. So, that’s where I ended up, doing a search on the dark web—and the Senator’s name came up. Among pieces that the guy had done on how the government tracks us via flu shots.”

  “Guys writing blogs on the dark web probably talk smack about every senator since LBJ.”

  “True, but the timing is interesting. His deep-web site was wiped. But he was so paranoid he had it backed up every day, and it’s been pinging around the dark web ever since, like a time capsule of fifteen years of his paranoia, never being able to be wiped by governments anywhere. It’s a good set-up. But scary. It means if the Senator did have his background checks changed, the investigator killed, and then had the resources to reach out and hit a guy who has a dark-web conspiracy page? That’s some reach.”

  “Reach a Deputy Secretary at Homeland Security would have.”

  “That, and some. Skeptical of government agencies and eavesdropping as I am, I don’t believe they have a fleet of black helicopters flying around whacking people who threaten their positions.”

  “You really believe this story?” Walker bundled his old clothes and walked out of the change room dressed in a new suit.

  “On the surface it seems like just another nut-job conspiracy theory—but given that you’re looking into him, it jumped out at me. Then I checked her background, which this guy with his conspiracy page didn’t do. And her background was legit. So, what she was saying might be legit too.”

  “What was she saying?” Walker asked. He handed over Matt Kingsley’s credit card, the clerk ran it and Walker scribbled a signature. He left behind the old clothes, then headed out to the waiting cab.

  “I know you think this might be a crackpot talking nonsense on the web,” Paul said. “I mean, that’s what I thought at first, before I saw that all three people involved in it are dead.”

  “Okay. I agree, it’s building the case that Lewis is deep into this with Harvey.” Walker paused at the open door of the cab. “But could we use that as proof?”

  “You want to take this to court?”

  “Me personally? Probably not. So what was she saying about the Senator?”

  “She said that her husband found out that Senator Lewis was a terrorist.”

  Walker did a double-take. “What?”

  “I know, right? She said that he was running something that her husband had dug up, and that it was going to rock the world. He said he was going to reach out to someone high up, well beyond his own superiors, because this guy was a Senator.”

  “What was she saying he found on him?”

  “She said that Senator Lewis was running something called Zodiac.”

  66

  Walker ended the call and sat in the back of the cab as it motored along Massachusetts Avenue toward Dupont. Sweat beaded his forehead. Anticipation. The unexpected. Zodiac.

  Zodiac. A program of terror cells that his father had developed in a DC think tank of about eighty serving and former Intelligence officials, when he was part of an exercise to dream up worst-case scenarios that could damage, degrade and destroy the United States—a program that had in the past two years gathered a life of its own, perpetrators unknown, each terrorist attack initiating the next unlinked terror cell. So far Walker had succeeded in averting wide-scale damage during the first three attacks, but according to his father’s plans, nine more would follow . . .

  “Pass me that folder,” Walker said, and he took the thick ream from Muertos and started to flick through the pages.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Dates.” His father was the key. Walker knew that Zodiac was developed during a war-game scenario in 2003, when Intel agencies and policymakers and the military were scrambling for larger pieces of the seemingly endless gravy train that was government overspending writ large. Brainstorming future terror events that would make 9/11 seem tame. These two guys, Lewis and Harvey. He found Harvey’s record. Despite being onboard with Homeland, he was still Army, and he’d been deployed in 2003 to Afghanistan. He spent a total of three months back in the US, split over four periods. Lewis was in the Senate. These two were as close to running the US War on Terror as anyone. Senator Lewis, a terrorist. Running Zodiac. Taking it from spit-balled ideas to actuality. Orchestrating cutout terror attacks against the homeland? To generate more work for themselves? How did smuggling illegal immigrants fit into a terror attack? How did that create chaos—to bring war, eternal, upon the homeland, which is where their business interests were tied up?

  “What is it?” Muertos asked.

  “This is bigger than I thought,” Walker said, looking up at her. “Harvey and Lewis? They’re connected, in the system, going way back. Personally and professionally. Looking out for one another. Creating paths forward for one another. Having each other’s back. It’s how they’ve been able to survive and thrive all this time. It’s like you said before—this is like a gangster or mob thing, because it’s organized crime. And this is at a federal level—the airlines and the Homeland Security databases, to human trafficking and planning terror attacks.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you really should stay back,” Walker said. But he could see the resolve in her. That if there was now proof these two had a connection to her husband’s death, he’d never be able to keep her away. “I’ll get out at our next stop. You should continue on. Make contact with Somerville, meet her, wait for me to call you both in.”

  “I want my answers, Walker,” Muertos said. “I deserve them. I’ve been doing everything I can for months to find out what happened to my husband—I can’t just walk away from it now.”

  Walker was about to speak but his cell phone rang. He looked at the screen.

  Somerville.

  “Yeah?”

  “Walker!” Somerville said. It sounded like she was running. “The big guy. Krycek. He’s on the run!”

  “What?”

  There was a pause, and he heard Somerville stop running, then she was panting to catch her breath.

  “He used his cuffs to choke the driver. The vehicle crashed on the Beltway. The driver and my other agent in there are KIA, as well as the smaller Homeland guy—he’d taken on the agent in the passenger seat, and they were both shot dead in the tussle. But the big guy is loose—and he’s armed. I’ve called DC Metro PD, we’re locking down the area, but a guy like that, with his skills and connections, he’s going to disappear.”

  “Do what you can,” Walker said. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Walker, don’t go up against these guys alone,” Somerville said. “Where are you now?”

  He could hear the sound of the highway traffic in the background of Somerville’s location. Of tooting horns and the grind of air brakes of eighteen-wheelers. He could imagine the scene on the highway: the crashed FBI vehicle, maybe with blood splatter on the windows, maybe with a dead agent hanging out an open door, the traffic slowing to rubberneck at the scene.

  “When I know more I’ll contact you,” Walker said, and he ended the call.

  Muertos looked across at Walker.

  “That big scary guy, Krycek? He got loose.”

  Muertos looked at him wide-eyed, said, “Oh no . . .”

  “You really should hang back. I’ve got this.”

  Had his father known about a connection between Lewis and Zodiac?

  Muertos was silent. The driver drove on.

  Find Jed Walker.

  67

  The cab dropped off Walker and Muertos at 2118 Massachusetts Avenue, in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC.

  “Now I see why you needed the suit,” Muertos said, looking up at And
erson House, home of Society of the Cincinnati. It was a stone mansion on Embassy Row, designed in the Beaux-Arts style, grand on every scale. Through one of the two iron gates was a courtyard, where they walked beyond tall colonnades and came to a sign listing the dress code. Suit jacket and tie at all times. Inside the reception area was a uniformed armed guard, as well as a suited man sitting at an elevated reception desk.

  “Take my phone,” Walker said, passing his cell to Muertos, then pointed down the road. “There’s the hotel we just passed on Mass Avenue, The Fairfax. Go wait in there.”

  “But—”

  “Wait at the hotel bar. Call Somerville and let her know where I am. Tell her to bring some agents. Tell her I’m gonna bring Lewis and Harvey here. You’ll get your answers, I promise.”

  “Walker—”

  “Tell Somerville that Zodiac ends here,” Walker said. “That’s very important, okay? Tell her that. She’ll understand. And I swear to you, Rachel, that you’ll get your answers. Okay?”

  Her gaze searched his, and she eventually nodded. She took the folder of paper and the cell phone then turned and left, looking over her shoulder, hesitating, but she continued on, turning right at Massachusetts Avenue and heading for the hotel.

  Walker moved inside. The receptionist asked if he was there for a tour of the museum section. Instead, Walker asked him for a pen, and transcribed the number listed as DS in the cell phones of the two bent Homeland agents.

  “I need you to call that number for me, please,” Walker said.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the receptionist said. “This is a private members’ club. We have tours twice a day, but if you need to make a call, perhaps try the hotel—”

  “That is the number of one of your members, who I am meeting here, and he’s going to be pissed when I tell him I couldn’t get in touch via his own club’s receptionist.”

  “Right, sir. One moment.”

  “When he answers,” Walker said as the guy picked up his phone, “tell him where you are calling from, then pass me the phone.”

  The receptionist nodded. Walker didn’t blame the guy for being short, or rude. Dealing with rich and privileged idiots all day, one was bound to develop a defense to it. He dialed the number. He spoke, then passed Walker the phone.

  “Harvey,” Walker said, turning his back to the receptionist. “Or should I say, Deputy Secretary Harvey, driver of Zodiac.”

  There was a pause of three seconds, then: “Who is this?”

  “Jed Walker. Surely you knew this call would come.”

  Again there was silence on Harvey’s end.

  “You know where I am, and I’ll be waiting for you,” Walker said. “Bring your chum Lewis. It’s time we three talked, don’t you think? Half an hour, or I take Zodiac to the press. And I have all the information on you, and Zodiac, off site, so show up in person. Both of you.”

  He passed the phone back to the receptionist, who ended the call.

  “Deputy Secretary Harvey and Senator Lewis will be meeting me here in half an hour or so,” Walker said. “Is there a good place in the building for a private meeting?”

  “Yes, of course,” the receptionist gave a slight bow, as though making up for his earlier dismissive gesture. “If you will follow me, sir, after you sign in here, please.”

  Walker scrawled a signature on the guest book and followed the receptionist out of the foyer. In the grand ballroom, classical music was playing quietly over the sound system. Vivaldi. Some tourists were milling about talking, their voices echoing, some taking pictures. Vast tapestries on the walls. Crystal chandeliers overhead that twinkled in the light and must have weighed as much as a car. Walker followed the receptionist through a sitting room with ornate furniture and the walls adorned in portraiture and fireplaces at each end topped with baroque gilt mirrors. They took a doorway in the corner and headed up two flights of stairs, where they entered another small landing with a window looking over Massachusetts Avenue.

  The receptionist opened a door that was eight feet tall and at least three inches thick, some kind of dark wood like mahogany, like it could have been made from the same tree as the table back at the Senator’s farmhouse. Beyond was a sitting room of old. The air was stale, as though the windows had not been opened in years, and the drapes and carpets impregnated with all the cigars and pipe tobacco that had been consumed in there for over a century. There were two small timber tables with carved legs, four leather-bound chairs around each, and by the fireplace were well-worn plush armchairs for six. On the marble mantel was a heavy copper urn, and behind that the obligatory gilt mirror. The fire crackled with split logs of hardwood as they made their slow transformation to hot orange embers. The far wall was lined with leather-bound books, with a couple of Chesterfield lounges arranged for reclined reading. A time capsule for the hereditary elite.

  The receptionist stoked the fire then left, and Walker busied himself with the room. The wrought-iron fire-poker was the best improvised weapon. He scanned the books; lots of tomes on the early history of the colonies. He made his way to a side table that was set with crystal tumblers and decanters, one topped off with whisky, one with water, and Walker went to pour himself a whisky but then stopped—he opted for the water. He needed all his faculties. He imagined a line of Socratic questioning of these two, now that he’d gone through so much of their history and backstory in the form of biographical information and security checks. Of weaving the truth out of them, if they stonewalled him. Of getting an admission.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Twenty minutes or thereabouts. He was standing at one of the two sash windows, looking out the bubbly old hand-made glass across Massachusetts Avenue, and had just finished his second water when the door opened. He turned around.

  A lone figure stood in the doorway. Though it was an oversized doorway, the figure took up most of the space. It was not Harvey, and it was not Lewis.

  It was the big guy. Krycek. Tweedledumber.

  68

  “I hear you’re looking for a couple of guys,” Krycek said to Walker after closing the door. “Friends of mine.”

  “You have more than one friend?” Walker replied. He stayed by the window, crystal tumbler in his hand. A better weapon than nothing. The fall behind him wouldn’t be good, but if this guy drew a pistol he’d have a better outcome jumping out to the ground and breaking both legs. “Where is your little buddy? The mini-me I injected yesterday in San Francisco, the one who just shot Acton? He’s still with us, I hope? Oh no, he’s not . . .”

  The giant was silent. He took a couple of steps into the room and looked around, his big blunt head turning like it was on the end of a stick, his body not moving at all. It would take a lot of energy to move a body like that. Walker hoped he’d be slow, but he knew Krycek would be driven to succeed, on a personal and professional level, because he had a score to settle—not just because Walker had thus far evaded him across the country, but that his pal Tweedledumb was now dead.

  “I could shoot you,” the big guy said, taking a couple of paces into the room. He pulled a Glock, which had recently belonged to an FBI agent, from the back of his belt and placed it on the mantel above the fireplace. “But that would be too . . . merciful.”

  Walker knew it would be useless to question Krycek. Sure, he’d be privy to some useful information, like the fact that Harvey was ordering him around the country to kill fellow Americans, but this guy was all that was left of the A Team, and he’d be all clammed up in terms of snitching on his boss. Especially since he was presently pissed and driven to inflict some measure of retribution. So, that left Walker with two choices: fight, or flight. There was only one door in and out of the room, and the giant was between Walker and it. The windows behind him weren’t a good option, for the thirty-foot drop. And add to that Walker wasn’t typically a flighter.

  But he was a fighter, albeit one with a wounded leg. He kept his weight on the front of his feet, so he could spring forward or to either side, should the gian
t rush him, and he tried to rationalize that he only had to beat one man, and he’d surely fought bigger men before and won, but the truth was, this was the biggest guy Walker had seen in the flesh. Certainly the biggest he’d squared up against. But he had to fight, and win, because he needed to talk to Lewis and Harvey. He was sure that they would saunter in shortly after Tweedledumber crushed and bludgeoned the life out of him, if for nothing else than to see their grimy little clean-up job come to a close.

  “Did Harvey tell you to leave me alive?” Walker asked.

  No answer. Walker moved to his right, so that his back was to the bookshelves, and the giant mirrored his move and stepped to the left; they were now opposite each other with half the room each, the windows to one side, the fireplace to the other, their respective targets dead ahead.

  “There’s some information off site that Harvey will need,” Walker said. He was talking to get closer to the fireplace, a few paces to his right. The Glock was at Krycek’s end of the marble mantel, which would be a few paces into the giant’s territory for Walker. But the fire-poker was at his end, and it was by far the best improvised weapon in the room.

  “You don’t want me to kill you, is that it?” Tweedledumber said.

  “Dude, that was, like, ten words in a row!” Walker said. “Good for you! Who’s a big boy . . .”

  Krycek rushed forward. Walker threw his heavy crystal tumbler, but it pinged off the giant’s forehead as he kept charging. Walker feinted left, then moved right. He felt like he was back playing football at the Academy, some big dumb linebacker headed straight for him to put his lights out. But this was no game, and there were no rules, and when life and death were on the line, snap decisions had to be made.