House Divided (11 page)

It was also amazingly easy for Dillon to hide the activities of Claire’s secret division from his superiors. It was, in fact, depressingly easy. The current Director of the NSA was a three-star navy admiral; the deputy director, Dillon’s immediate superior, was a civilian whose primary function was defending the agency’s massive budget. The reason it was so easy for Dillon to keep these folks in the dark was not, however, because they were stupid. Earlier in his career, Admiral Fenton Wilcox had commanded a nuclear submarine, one of the most complex machines ever designed by man. No, the problem with the admiral and his deputy was not their intelligence. The problem was a prevailing American management practice: in America, these days, managers were not expected to
technically
understand the things they managed. Not long ago the CEO of Boeing became the CEO of Ford—it apparently didn’t matter that one company made airplanes and the other automobiles. Management was management, or so some thought, and the principles that applied to running one company efficiently should certainly apply to any other—and the government subscribed to this faulty thinking. Dillon’s bosses, bright as they were, did not really understand the complex technologies associated with NSA eavesdropping. Very few people did, Dillon being one of the few.

The end result of all this was that if Admiral Wilcox were ever to ask Dillon what Claire’s small division was doing, Dillon could spout pure gibberish and the admiral wouldn’t know any better. But the fact was, the admiral never asked, nor did the general before him. These men assumed that the people who worked for them would never do something illegal, that a bunch of civil servants—the word servant almost always said with a sneer—would never have the audacity to go beyond the agency’s authorized and lawful mission. This was the single biggest problem with managers who didn’t understand the technology: they had to trust the nerds who worked for them because they couldn’t tell when they were lying.

And so Dillon had created the other Net—the Shadow Net—and no one, to date, was any the wiser.

When DeMarco visited the hospice, he had asked Paul’s boss who Paul’s last patient had been—and good ol’ Jane had turned mulish on him. “Our patients and their families have a right to privacy,” she said.

“Yeah, but you said Paul had been acting strange around this guy,” DeMarco countered. “So maybe he knows something related to Paul’s death. Don’t you want to find out why Paul was killed?”

“I’m not going to tell you his name,” Jane said, and before DeMarco could say anything else, she added, “And anyway, he’s dead.”

“Oh,” DeMarco had said, momentarily taken aback. “Well, maybe his family knows something.”

“I’m not giving you a name.” Jane was a rock.

“Fine. But did you tell the FBI about this patient and that Paul looked upset the last time you saw him?”

“No. Agent Hopper never asked about Paul’s patients.”

“What did he ask?”

“Nothing. He just said he wanted to look through Paul’s desk and then took his computer.”

So DeMarco had been rather perturbed at Jane, but after thinking about the situation a bit more, he reminded himself that it wasn’t his job to find out who murdered his cousin. Paul’s death was a tragedy, and he hoped the killer would be found, but the FBI was much better equipped than he was to figure out who did it. No, his job wasn’t to play detective. His job was to find Paul’s will and dispose of all his secondhand crap, and since Paul’s landlady had told him that all of Paul’s close friends were associated with his church, DeMarco decided to stop by there.

“Father, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I’m Paul Russo’s cousin.”

Father Richard Porter was in his thirties, a good-looking guy with rimless glasses and brown hair touching his collar. He’d been on the church’s grounds pruning bushes with an electric hedge trimmer when DeMarco had driven up, and DeMarco had been surprised that the young guy dressed in jeans and an old Duke sweatshirt was not only a priest but pastor of the church.

“I was so shocked to hear about Paul,” the priest said. “He was a wonderful man.”

“Yes, he was,” DeMarco said. Why tell the priest that he barely knew his cousin? “The reason I’m here is I’m trying to settle Paul’s estate and I can’t find his will or the name of his lawyer. I was told he was close to people at your church and I was hoping one of them could help me.”

“Well, let’s see,” the priest said. “Your best bet would be Mary Albertson. She and Paul worked together a lot. And Mary’s the motherly type. If Paul confided in anyone, it would have been her.” The priest placed his hedge trimmer on the ground. “Come up to the rectory and I’ll give you her phone number.”

As they were walking away, DeMarco looked down at the extension cord attached to the hedge trimmer to see if the cord was wrapped with black electrical tape in a couple spots like his was. About every other time DeMarco used his hedge trimmer, he cut the cord; it looked like the padre was a more careful trimmer than he was.

The priest gave DeMarco Mary Albertson’s phone number and asked if there was anything else he needed. After a moment’s hesitation, DeMarco said, “Were you Paul’s confessor, father?”

“Yes.”

“I know you can’t tell me anything Paul told you in confession. I’m Catholic too”—an extremely lapsed Catholic, but there was no point bringing that up—“so I understand that. But can you think of anything Paul might have told you, uh, indirectly, that could give me—and the FBI—some reason as to why he was murdered.”

“I’m afraid not,” Father Porter said. He smiled sadly, remembering Paul. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Paul’s idea of a major transgression was losing his temper if a clerk in a store was rude to him or cursing—mildly, I might add—when someone cut him off in traffic.”

Once again, the FBI’s theory that Paul had been dealing drugs sounded more far-fetched than ever.

Mary Albertson ran a church program that served breakfast to the poor and homeless on weekends, and Paul Russo was always there with her, dishing out bacon and eggs to the needy.

Mary was a big lady in her sixties: six foot, easily two hundred and fifty pounds, cheerful brown face, warm, caring brown eyes. She teared up when DeMarco said he wanted to talk about Paul, but smiled when she talked about him. She’d known him ever since he joined the congregation four years ago and had worked with him on many a church committee. He was one of the few people, she said, who seemed to actually enjoy feeding the poor.

“Most folks, they serve these people and they act all happy and hardy, but they’re really not. They don’t like being near them, the way they look, the way they smell. But not Paul. He realized they were human beings and, but for the grace of God, he could have been the one getting served instead of doing the serving. I appreciated that because there was a time when
I
was on the other side of that serving line.”

DeMarco’s attitude toward street people was that the majority of them were pain-in-the-ass drunks, but Mary Albertson’s comment made him squirm a bit and she noticed, wise woman that she was.

When DeMarco asked her if she knew if Paul had a lawyer, Mary said she didn’t. She’d never heard him speak of one.

“Shit,” DeMarco muttered and then mumbled, “Sorry,” when he noticed the look Mary gave him. He thanked her for her time and started to leave, but then something occurred to him. “There’s one other thing I’m curious about,” he said. “Do you have any idea who Paul’s last patient was? The lady at the hospice where Paul worked couldn’t give me his name because of medical confidentiality rules, but she did say that something was bothering Paul the last time she saw him at this patient’s house. I really want to talk to the man to see if he knows anything related to my cousin’s murder.”

Unlike Paul, the occasional small white lie—in this case, that DeMarco already knew that Paul’s last patient was dead—didn’t bother DeMarco all that much. For that matter, telling whoppers didn’t bother him all that much either.

“Yes, he was really down about something the last time I saw him too,” Mary said.

“Do you have any idea why?”

She shook her head. “No. When Paul talked about the people he was caring for, he’d usually say there was something beautiful in watching how they accepted that the end was near, how it was inspiring—that’s the word he used—the way they readied their souls to meet their God. This last one, though? All Paul said was that the poor man was tormented, as if he was already burning in Hell, and Paul was trying to help him make peace with himself.”

“You mean he was trying to convert him to Catholicism?”

“Oh, no. Paul wasn’t the type to ram his religion down someone’s throat. But if a person asked for help, spiritual or otherwise, he would have given it.”

“Huh,” DeMarco said. “So do you know who this man is? Like I said, I’d really like to talk to him.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re too late for that, Mr. DeMarco,” Mary said. “They held the funeral for him yesterday, paid him the honor he was due. Paul’s last patient was General Martin Breed.”

As DeMarco was walking back to his car, he thought maybe that explained why the FBI had taken Paul’s case away from the Arlington County cops. Maybe there was some connection between Paul’s death and a two-star army general, a man who would have access to a lot of classified information. And maybe that’s why Hopper had searched Paul’s apartment and taken his computer. Yeah. Maybe.

The next thought he had was that if Paul’s death was connected in any way to a Pentagon heavyweight like Martin Breed, he’d be smart to keep his big nose out of it. He should just do what he was supposed to do: find a lawyer to deal with Paul’s four-thousand-buck estate and then go play golf like he’d originally planned.

Yep, that definitely sounded like the smart thing to do.

Claire returned to her office, still embarrassed that she had overlooked the
Post
reporter, Robert Hansen, as the man Paul Russo might have met with. She didn’t know for sure that Russo had met with Hansen, but it sounded right. It felt right. It sang to her.

Russo, this gay altar boy, just didn’t strike her as the type who would have been involved in anything illegal or even underhanded. But what if General Breed—a man privy to the Pentagon’s dirty little secrets—had told Russo something before he died? He might have even told Russo something while under the influence of whatever drugs he was being given, maybe delirious, not even knowing what he was saying.

But what about Martin Breed? The man had been an absolute poster boy for the United States Army. Handsome, charming, articulate, a born leader of men. He’d risen up through the ranks at a meteoric pace and had been involved in all the recent wars. In Afghanistan, he’d even managed to get himself wounded, which is quite hard for a general to do, so he got a Purple Heart to go along with all his other medals.

But there had been nothing in Breed’s career to indicate he was anything other than a good soldier. There’d been no financial scandals—no awards of huge army contracts to pals in big business—and his marriage had been rock solid, as far as anyone knew. Nor had he shown any desire for public office, so it didn’t seem likely that he would have compromised his principles to get himself elected after he retired. Breed’s only known ambition was to reach the pinnacle of his profession: to replace General Charles Bradford as the army’s chief of staff.

Assuming Russo had learned something significant from Breed—which was a hell of a big assumption—what could it have been? What could have been so important that someone would want to kill Russo because of what he’d heard or seen? And then there was the question of
how
Russo’s killers would have known that Breed told Russo anything?

Too many questions—not enough answers. Insufficient data, as Dillon would say.

Claire called Gilbert and two other technicians into her office and proceeded to issue orders, giving them four hours to do what she knew would take them twice as long.

The first thing she had them bring her was Martin Breed’s medical records, which had been easy to obtain. Breed had been a high-ranking army officer so Claire assumed, correctly, that he’d been treated by someone over at Walter Reed. His oncologist was a Dr. Stanley Fallon and Dr. Fallon’s notes, entered into his computer, stated that Breed had died from brain cancer, a particularly aggressive, fast-moving form of the disease. The last entry regarding Breed recommended that the general call in a hospice, as he was not expected to last more than a month, six weeks at the outside.

This gave Claire pause. Martin Breed died only three weeks after the doctor made his final entry on his patient. Did this mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. She doubted a physician could predict exactly how long a patient would last, and three weeks was pretty close to a month. Still, it made her wonder.

What she really wanted to know was who, besides Paul Russo, had talked to the general as he lay dying. That is, could General Breed have told one of his last visitors that Russo posed some kind of threat? General Breed’s phone records didn’t point to any logical person—his last calls had primarily been to family members—and the only other way Claire could think of to get the answer to her question was to ask General Breed’s grieving widow, an idea she instantly rejected. Talking to people always posed a risk because it left a human trail, and Claire was not ready to go down that path just yet. She much preferred to gather information through purloined records—and eavesdropping, if necessary.

Claire was frustrated, and not just because she wasn’t making progress on the Russo intercept. What was really frustrating her was that she might be wasting her time investigating Russo at all. Claire’s organization had been established by Dillon to spy within the country’s borders for the purpose of preventing attacks which could make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. wouldn’t just kill thousands of people; such an event could destroy the economy and cripple the very infrastructure needed to safeguard the nation. If Claire’s technicians had just heard Russo being murdered in some mundane way for some mundane reason, she wouldn’t have spent any time on him at all. But because his death might be linked to rogue elements of the U.S. military and a dead two-star general, she needed to know what the hell was going on—and she was getting nowhere.