House Divided (2 page)

“Grassyknoll, lower case, one word,” Gilbert said.

She typed the password and listened to the recording with her eyes closed, giving Gilbert a chance to study her. She was at least ten years his senior, getting close to forty, he guessed, but she had a good long-legged body, a narrow face with a model’s cheekbones, and those incredible scary blue eyes. He couldn’t understand why such a good-looking woman didn’t have a husband or a lover, but since she worked about sixteen hours a day and was the least approachable person he’d ever met, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

“When did this take place?” she asked.

“About one
A.M
.”

“Where were they?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Somewhere in the District or Northern Virginia. For some reason, that’s best location we could get. I need to take a look at the software to see if it’s got some kind of glitch, but it could have been the com gear these guys were using.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. She just sat there staring at him like it was his fault the fucking software didn’t work, but then she nodded and he exhaled in relief.

Claire Whiting scared the hell out him. She scared everyone. Well, maybe not Dillon, but everyone else.

Dillon Crane was on the phone when Claire entered his office.

Dillon was sixty-three years old, tall and slender—and the subject of infinite office speculation. His short white hair was trimmed each week by the same barber the president used, and his suits were handmade by a Milanese tailor who now resided in Baltimore. The suit he wore today was light gray in color, and his shirt was also gray, a darker gray than the suit. Claire had no name for the color of his tie—something with maroon and charcoal black and dark blue all swirled together—but whatever the color, it matched the suit and shirt perfectly.

Dillon never wore white shirts and simple ties to work. He’d remarked once that a white shirt, accompanied inevitably by the ubiquitous striped tie, was the uniform of a bureaucrat, and even though he was one he refused to dress like one. And since the hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year he earned from the National Security Agency was a pittance compared to the annual income from his trust fund, he could afford to dress however he pleased.

He smiled when he saw Claire in his doorway—that annoying ain’t-life-droll smile of his—but continued with his phone call. “Clark,” he was saying, “all I can do is relay to you what we intercepted. It
appears
—and I can’t be any more definitive—that a certain opium-growing warlord is about to assassinate an Afghani politician who has grown contrary of late.”

Claire realized Dillon was talking to Clark Palmer, deputy to the president’s national security advisor. Dillon, on one occasion, had said to her, “Clark’s a rock—only not so smart.”

He listened for a moment, rolled his eyes for Claire’s benefit, and said into the phone, “No, Clark, I won’t send you a memo. The entire conversation was two sentences long, and I’ve just given you the NSA’s translation and interpretation of those sentences. Have a nice day.”

Dillon hung up the phone and smiled at Claire again. “You look lovely today,” he said.

She ignored the compliment as she always did.

“We picked up something that could be important.”

“I’m sure it’s important, Claire, or you wouldn’t be here. But is it interesting?”

Dillon, as she well knew, was easily bored. And she knew exactly what he meant by
interesting
. A White House lackey leaking a memo to the
Post;
a colonel at the Pentagon whispering bid specs to a contractor; an undersecretary at State calling her lover at the Israeli embassy—those things could be important and they often were—but they weren’t interesting. They were business as usual.

The CD in Claire’s hand was not business as usual.

“Yes, Dillon,” she said, “it’s interesting.” She handed him the CD. “The password’s grassyknoll, lower case, one word.”

“Grassy knoll?” Dillon said, but he didn’t say more and took the CD from her and slid it into the drive of his computer.

Alpha, do you have Carrier
?
Negative. Monument blocking
.

When he had finished listening to the recording, he said, “Now that
is
interesting. What do we know?”

“What do we know?” Claire repeated. “We
know
nothing. But would you like me to speculate?”

“Oh, please do, Claire. Speculate away.”

“First,” she said, “I think these guys were military.”

“Logic?”

“These people were on radios, not cell phones, and the radios were something special. They weren’t using walkie-talkies from RadioShack. They were using encrypted AN/PRC-150s.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Claire said. “They had hard-to-get, encrypted, military com gear. Then you have the lingo: roger this, roger that, return to jump-off. And the discipline. When Transport didn’t respond, the guy-in-charge never lost his cool, and when the two males showed up,
instant
damage assessment. Told his guys to beat feet and they did, no backtalk, no nothing. We’re talking serious discipline here, the kind that gets pounded into soldiers.”

Dillon waggled a hand, exposing a monogrammed cuff link. “Maybe,” he said, “but not definitive. What else?”

“Well, just the obvious. This was a hit. They knew Carrier was meeting Messenger. They may have been following Carrier. They went high-tech on the radios because they were afraid someone might intercept their chatter, maybe somebody like us, which further indicates they could be military or part of the G.”

Dillon nodded. No disagreement so far.

“This conversation took place at approximately one
A.M
., and I think this means that the meeting between Carrier and Messenger was intended to be secret. It was two people, for whatever reason, sneaking around in the dark. And now I’m winging it here, going totally from my gut, but I think Alpha and Bravo took long shots. I’m seeing snipers with night-vision scopes, sound suppressors, the whole enchilada.”

“Could be,” Dillon said.

Dillon, as Claire knew quite well, didn’t place much stock in gut feelings, even hers. He may have acted perpetually flippant but he preferred data.

“After they made the hit,” Claire said, “they were planning to take the bodies but Transport didn’t show. They got Messenger’s body but not Carrier’s, so for some reason getting Messenger was sufficient. If it hadn’t been, I think they would have popped the two males.” Claire stopped and took a breath. “And that’s it. End of speculation.”

“Do you have a location for this event?”

“Just the greater D.C. area. We couldn’t get anything better.”

“Why not?”

“We’re looking into that. We could have a software problem.”

“I don’t see how the software—”

Before Dillon could say more, Claire interrupted him. She didn’t have time to get embroiled in some nerdy technical discussion, and sometimes Dillon could be as much of a geek as her technicians. “Look, I’ll deal with the location issue, but do you want me to follow up on the intercept or not?”

Dillon hesitated and she knew why. Two people may have been killed, but solving homicides wasn’t his job—or hers. They could have solved a lot of homicides had they wanted to, but simple murder, at least from Dillon Crane’s perspective, wasn’t really all that important. On the other hand, the fact that these particular killers had been using encrypted radios and might be U.S. military personnel put a whole different spin on things. It could mean some other agency was keeping something from
his
agency.

And that was a no-no.

“Yes, let’s follow up on it,” Dillon said.

DeMarco got a bucket of balls and carried his clubs over to a slot on the driving range between two women in their fifties. His plan was to spend the next two hours whacking golf balls, concentrating particularly on his pitching, because he couldn’t pitch for shit. He was gonna play a lot of golf in the next seven days, and as he hadn’t played since last fall, he wanted to get the kinks out of his swing before he played an actual round.

Normally, he wouldn’t have a week to devote solely to golf, but he did at the moment because the two most important people in his life—and, therefore, the two people who most often prevented him from doing what he wanted to do—were both out of town. The first of those people was his boss.

His boss was inconsiderate and selfish and never gave a moment’s thought as to how his decisions adversely impacted DeMarco’s life. He was also cunning, conniving, corrupt, and unscrupulous—and, if all that wasn’t bad enough, he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. Now had his boss been a used car salesman, all those negative character traits might not have been so surprising—or maybe even expected. But his boss wasn’t a used car salesman. His boss was John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

DeMarco was, for lack of a better term, Mahoney’s fixer. He was the guy the Speaker assigned when he had some shady job he didn’t want to give to a legitimate member of his staff, jobs that were often morally questionable if not downright illegal. Jobs such as collecting undocumented contributions from Mahoney’s constituents or finding things out about other politicians that Mahoney could use to control their vote. There was very little DeMarco liked about his job, but when Mahoney was not in D.C. DeMarco was often left to his own devices, and right now his employer was lying in a hospital having his gallbladder removed—and no doubt complaining mightily to anyone forced to care for him.

DeMarco had no idea what function the gallbladder performed, but he presumed it wasn’t anything too important if they were simply plucking it out of Mahoney’s corpulent corpus. He wouldn’t have been surprised, however, if the surgeon removed several other organs as well. Mahoney not only drank too much, he also smoked half a dozen cigars a day, and DeMarco figured a heart-liver-lung transplant was overdue.

The second person currently absent from his life was Angela DeCapria, his lover—who also happened to be an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. They met last year when DeMarco was trying to figure out which member of Congress had leaked a story to a reporter that resulted in a CIA agent being killed. When they met, Angela had been married; she was now divorced and living part-time with him.

Unfortunately—and unlike DeMarco—Angela was serious about her career, and when her boss told her she had to go to Afghanistan for a while, she packed her bags without hesitation and flew away. And because she worked for the CIA, she couldn’t tell DeMarco exactly what she would be doing, how long she’d be gone, or how to reach her—all of which annoyed him. He was sure his annoyance would be replaced by loneliness—and horniness—within a few days.

So for at least a week he was on his own, and he intended to take advantage of the situation by doing only things he liked to do—one of those things being golf. He took his place on a square of green Astroturf, placed a ball on the rubber tee inserted into the carpet, pulled his driver from his bag, and made a couple of practice swings to loosen up.
Wham!
The heavy-set grandma on his right hit a ball—smacked it about a hundred and fifty yards. Using a three iron. Jesus! He wished he’d found someplace else to stand. He stepped up to take his first shot of the year—and his cell phone rang.
Shit!

“Is this Joseph DeMarco?” the caller asked.

“Yeah,” DeMarco said, relieved it wasn’t Mahoney calling from his hospital bed to make his life miserable.

“This is Detective Jack Glazer, Arlington County Police. I’d like to talk to you.”

“Police? Why?” DeMarco said.

“Hasn’t the FBI called you or been to see you?” Glazer asked.

“No, why would they?” DeMarco said.

“Huh,” Glazer said. To DeMarco it sounded as if Glazer was surprised the FBI hadn’t already contacted him.

“What’s this about?” DeMarco asked.

Glazer hesitated. “Mr. DeMarco, I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, but Paul Russo was killed last night. You were listed as an emergency contact on a card he had in his wallet.”

“Paul Russo?” DeMarco said—and then he remembered who that was. Geez, he hadn’t talked to the guy in three, maybe four years.

“Are you saying you don’t know him?’ Glazer said.

“No. I know him. He’s like a second cousin or something. His mother was my mother’s cousin. How was he killed?”

“I think it would be better if we talked about this face-to-face. Would you mind coming to my office?”

Glazer’s office turned out to be a desk in a room filled with half a dozen other desks—and the room was bedlam. Guys in shirtsleeves that DeMarco assumed were detectives were sitting at some of the desks, shouting into phones, and four uniformed cops were also in the room. Two of the uniformed cops were holding on to a guy who had a shaved head and tats all over his arms. The guy’s hands were cuffed behind his back and he was screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs.

DeMarco told one of the detectives that he was there to see Glazer, and the detective pointed to a man sitting at a cluttered desk at the back of the room. When DeMarco introduced himself, Glazer stood up, said, “Let’s go someplace where we can hear each other talk,” and led DeMarco to a small, windowless space equipped with a table and four metal chairs. DeMarco noticed a surveillance camera mounted high on one wall, pointed down at the table, and assumed he was in an interrogation room, which, for some reason, made him feel uncomfortable.

Glazer was a stocky, serious-looking guy in his fifties. He was wearing a wrinkled white shirt, his tie was undone, and he appeared harried and tired. After he thanked DeMarco for coming and asked if he wanted a cup of coffee, which DeMarco declined, Glazer told him that Paul Russo had been found dead last night at the Iwo Jima Memorial, killed by a single gunshot wound to the head.

“He was shot?” DeMarco said, unable to believe what he was hearing.

“Yeah. What can you tell me about him?” Glazer asked.