The Grid

by Nick Cook

  Lefortz has no choice. He’s told Hart that he has to let Reuben know that I’m here. He and Thompson are meeting with the Mayor of New York, then flying back into D.C. tonight.

  ‘You want to know something?’ Hetta says. ‘Something weird …’

  I am barely listening. For a moment, the idea of something weird in that cabin makes me want to laugh.

  ‘I just calculated the number of images back there – five thousand, maybe, give or take a hundred.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘One of them is different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘It’s upside down.’

  We start with the inner sanctum. I’ve tied strips of my shirt around my mouth and nose; Hetta has too. The rope holding the deer creaks.

  Hetta shines her light. Christ, front and center, is nailed to the cross, skin so white against black storm clouds it’s like his body is lit from within. Soldiers lift the cross upright.

  The camera on Hetta’s phone flashes. I set mine to record and start speaking.

  ‘The Christ painting. We need to know everything about it: the artist, exactly what it depicts, if it’s privately or publicly owned, what it means …’

  I glance to the left and shine my flashlight onto a photograph of Thompson.

  He’s speaking to reporters. His plane is behind him. I recognize Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta’s terminal building and control tower.

  I flick to another image: Thompson at the Iowa caucus. In another, he’s shaking the hand of the Pope in Dallas – their much-publicized first meeting. Senator Abnarth, Reuben’s first boss, is standing beside them. Gray and foxlike, Abnarth is wearing the smile of a man who knows that this is what will get his protégé into the White House.

  I stand in the center of my section and avoid directing the flashlight at the image of the crushed Jeep. I scan the pictures. Move closer. A whole lot of people from my past, but none of them called Mac.

  I focus instead on the portrait of Jack: old and at peace as he sat out under the big white oak in front of Hope’s mom’s home.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Hard to explain. He was kind of like my wife’s dad.’

  ‘And him?’

  I glance at the priest-cum-hijacker. I have no idea. I turn to the Jerusalem montage. I’ve never been to Israel, so it says little to me. But the fact that Jerusalem featured in Gapes’s note and the President’s dream is inescapable. The short hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

  I don’t need to ask her to take pictures of everything. She’s already there. Superior autobiographical memory is often seen as a curse. Some people affected by it remember everything that ever happened to them. Hetta’s is aligned to patterns in objects, which I suspect relates to something that once happened to her. In any case, she processed thousands of images in this section of the cabin in a beat, and determined one of them was different – low down and to the right of the fireplace: a print of an engraving, sixteenth century, maybe older; an old man at a desk.

  I squat, hold the flashlight steady and tilt my head.

  He has long hair and a beard. He’s wearing a gown and a cap. I resist the urge to turn him the right way up.

  He’s writing something. And there’s an inscription, in Latin.

  The breeze drops. I get to my feet.

  ‘Tell me what else you see.’

  She looks at the wall again.

  ‘There’s something different about those images …’ She points to a football team, a car license plate, a guy holding a lottery ticket, two or three others. They all contain numbers.

  When we’ve finished recording them, I step outside to get some more air. Hart suddenly calls me back.

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  I follow her fingertip. To the left of the fireplace, an Auschwitz survivor has raised her hand so the camera can capture the six-figure ID tattooed on her forearm, but all I can see is the pain behind her eyes.

  ‘Not that one, Colonel. The sketch to its left.’

  Framed by an arch, it has the precision of a photograph. An office building, reaching into the night sky.

  ‘It’s the place beyond the labor union. The one Gapes kept glancing at when we were at the church.’

  The viewpoint is almost exactly where I was standing, next to the trapdoor, looking over his shoulder, out of the bell tower.

  I lean closer. There’s a blur of light in one of the blacked-out windows. I point to it.

  She nods. ‘A muzzle flash.’ Her face is a mask. ‘Marine Sergeant Gapes knew how his mission was going to end.’

  I remember Misty telling us about the people who showed up without warning to ask questions about her nephew. The ones who carried no identification and wouldn’t say where they were from.

  My mouth has gone dry. When I try and swallow, I can taste something metallic at the back of my throat. Something, until my encounter in the tower, I hadn’t tasted since Fallujah.

  16

  LAST THING I DID BEFORE LEAVING THE CABIN WAS CALL LEFORTZ on Hetta’s sat-phone and ask him to throw a protective cordon around everyone we’ve spoken to. I reeled off the list – Lou and Misty, Mo, Katya, Marty the security guard, Steve at the Settlement, the Reverend Hayes.

  Gazing out the window as the LongRanger crosses vast tracts of forest, I make the most of one hour forty-five minutes of thinking time. Anders and his shoot-to-kill order swims to the forefront of my mind; the tone of voice he’d used to defend himself in the Crisis Center; Marty and his description of the processes that govern tamper circuits and call-outs; and the glitches that allowed Gapes to make his way unobserved from the river to the Settlement.

  Pinpricks of light in the darkness below register the presence of the occasional town, like pockets of mental activity on a brain scan. Gapes’s damaged posterior parietal cortex wouldn’t even have shown a glimmer – and the parietal cortex is the brain’s anchor to reality, the bit that provides us with spatial awareness. He must have been in a state of extreme dissociation.

  During my time at MacDill we conducted a study of these dissociative states, common enough in PTSD. We failed to find a cure, but we did discover that Buddhist monks switch off large parts of their brain when they’re in a highly meditative state. And psychics do too.

  Lefortz cuts a lone figure in the pad lights as we drop behind a group of low buildings in the northeast corner of Dulles Airport, which most people never see.

  There’s a double bump as the LongRanger touches down.

  I slide back the door, duck below the blades and hold up a hand, ineffectually, against the spray from the pad as the White House Special Agent in Charge guides me to a black Buick sedan with its engine running. He points me to the passenger seat, then jumps in beside me. I hand him Hetta’s USB, the full photographic record of the cabin’s interior.

  ‘You OK, Josh? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I take a breath, and tell him about the images of Hope, the backyard of our place out on the point, the mangled wreckage of the Jeep. Then I tell him about the sketch of the muzzle flash.

  ‘I was going to ask you to run this by your pals in the Agency, but now I’m not so sure. Let’s stick with Byford for now.’

  He nods. Thompson’s National Security Adviser is a far cry from the buzz-cut generals and Cheney lookalikes that he believes are sharpening their knives for him.

  We exit security and emerge on a back road through the trees, past the airport’s western perimeter and a couple of isolated, blacked-out maintenance hangars, then go left on to US-50, heading toward Chantilly, Fairfax and Washington.

  I figure Lefortz is saving his breath for when we get to Reuben’s place, a private estate with its own security outside of Fairfax. But at the turnpike we keep going on the interstate, heading for the capital.

  ‘Cabot knows, Josh. Don’t ask me how. But he knows. About Gapes. About the investigation you and Hart have been running. About my involvement. They want me to bring you in.’

>   ‘They?’

  ‘He and Reuben are on the phone right now. Cabot’s accused the Chief of Staff of conducting an illicit investigation using Agency assets – of deliberately keeping him in the dark. They want to polygraph you. And they want to do it now. I’m sorry, but he has all three of us over a goddamn barrel. This is about damage limitation now. Protecting POTUS. Our mission, first and foremost, is to prevent Cabot finding out about No Stone.’

  ‘Are the others secure?’

  ‘We got to everybody except for the lawyer and your Armenian buddy.’

  I sit up. ‘Mo?’

  ‘Relax,’ Lefortz says. ‘He’s at the theater with his wife. Two of the FBI’s finest are also enjoying the show.’

  ‘The FBI?’

  ‘An old buddy of mine fixed it. You met him. Big guy. Dave Wharton.’

  ‘DJ?’

  ‘I’ve briefed him on the key aspects. When the curtain falls, the agents will make themselves known. For as long as the threat persists, your pal Mo is going to be just fine.’

  ‘And the lawyer?’

  Lefortz’s brow creases. ‘Kind of weird, that. She told Wharton she didn’t need protection, because the two of you never met.’

  ‘We spent thirty minutes together in a coffee shop off Dupont Circle.’

  ‘Maybe she forgot.’

  ‘Since yesterday? I need to go speak to her.’

  ‘Negative. You’re not a part of the Federal Investigation. And besides, I just told you—’

  ‘Where’s Reuben?’

  ‘Still with the President. In New York.’

  ‘How easy is it to fake someone’s voice, Jim?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about Anders.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘His consistent denial that he gave the order to shoot.’

  ‘If you were in the deepest shit, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s lying.’

  ‘Christ, Josh. You listening to a word I been saying? We ran the tests. The voice on the tape was his, no question.’

  ‘A kid with an editing tool can mash up a celebrity’s voice, post the result online, and get a million hits. How easy is it to splice together three words?’

  Take the shot.

  ‘Cabot is screaming for your ass and you’re thinking about Anders?’

  ‘Just tell me, will you.’

  ‘Splicing’s a possibility,’ he concedes. ‘But the lab geeks have pretty much ruled that out too.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the methods we use to detect it. Power on the electrical grid fluctuates the whole time. Any recording device that’s near a mains supply – a CCTV camera, a camcorder, a cellphone – captures the fluctuations as background noise. We can evaluate the noise at every moment of a recording and date-stamp it.’

  The orange sodium lights along the highway pick out the crow’s feet around his eyes. ‘The fluctuations can be erased, but only by state-of-the-art equipment not generally accessible to random white supremacists or crazy people.’

  We agree that randomers and crazies don’t get to alter Agency-held records or manipulate CCTV data either.

  I tell Lefortz I forgot to put Anders and Jimenez on the list.

  He hasn’t. The plan is to drop me at a cab rank off the freeway while he delivers the USB to Byford. I’ll warn Anders, and he’ll go right on to take care of Jimenez.

  15055 Catskill Drive is half brick, half timber, in need of attention, and, I suspect, on the outer limits of an MPD captain’s capacity to finance. It’s at the end of a semi-rural street in the small commuter suburb of Middleville, a few miles from the Metro in Falls Church. There’s a light on above the porch and the garage door is open.

  The cab driver does a three-point turn, parks up and waits, engine on, wipers working against the rain. I raise the collar of my jacket, drop my head and run toward the garage. I still have Appalachian mud on my boots.

  Anders has two cars to his name: a Mazda CX-5 hatchback and a Honda Odyssey. The Honda is in the garage; the CX-5 isn’t. A kid’s pedal bike with support wheels leans against a workbench.

  I ring the bell. A sliver of light spills from a window as a drape slides back. I catch a glimpse of a woman’s face. Locks tumble and the door opens – at least as far as the chain allows.

  Her hair is scraped tight against her scalp. Her eyes are bloodshot, her complexion waxy.

  I’m about to say something, but the words die the moment she looks at me.

  ‘I know you,’ she says. ‘From the TV.’

  ‘I need to speak to your husband, Mrs Anders.’

  ‘You were in the tower …’ She falters for a moment.

  ‘Please, Mrs Anders, it’s really important I—’

  ‘He’s not here.’ Her tone is harsh. Maybe she thinks I’m on the tribunal that skewered her husband’s career. She’s skeletally thin, and has an accent. German, Scandinavian?

  I look at my watch. It’s past ten o’clock on a weeknight. Anders’ file suggests he’s not the type to drown his sorrows in a local bar, but ‘administrative leave’ and endless sessions with Internal Affairs will hurt a man like him.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ I say, ‘I believe him.’

  ‘Then go tell his boss.’

  From upstairs, I hear the sound of a child crying. Before closing the door on me, she says: ‘He took a call. Maybe thirty minutes ago. Sounded official.’

  Back in the cab, I check my messages. Lefortz has delivered the package and is now en route to the second waypoint.

  I try his cellphone. It’s busy.

  Jimenez’s place is thirty minutes from where I am and maybe fifteen from Byford’s gated compound on the Alexandria waterfront. His file says he’s recently divorced and living on the third floor of an apartment building in Clarke’s Crossroads. The rent is part-paid by an MPD assistance foundation.

  I am ten minutes closer when Lefortz calls. He’s just parked up in a nearby lot.

  I tell him about Anders. He calls a source at MPD HQ and gets straight back. No one knows about any interview request and, at this time of night, it’s unlikely.

  So his wife is lying, or he left the house to get some air – or someone is operating off the books.

  Lefortz also has a draft copy of the FBI’s preliminary account of the church shooting. He gives me the highlights.

  Anders was where Hetta and I left him, in the mobile command post, monitoring the feeds. He is heard to say: ‘Take the shot.’

  The only other person in the CP, a Secret Service comms support specialist, didn’t hear him. He was focusing on the monitors, not his boss.

  Jimenez fired at 05.52. His body camera footage and weapon analysis puts this beyond dispute. Jimenez shot Gapes. And he admits it.

  ‘Where was he?’ I already know the answer.

  ‘On the ninth floor of an office block behind the labor union headquarters.’

  The place Gapes kept looking toward. The window with the muzzle flash.

  ‘He’s forty-one,’ Lefortz continues. ‘Joined MPD ten years ago. Been deployed across the Metro area for the past six on warrant service ops, crowd control, hostage situations – standard SWAT stuff. His bosses, Anders included, have all described him as a model tac officer. An expert rating marked him out for sniper duty.’

  ‘And before MPD?’

  ‘Marines. 24th Expeditionary Unit. Iraqi Freedom. More than 150 missions in the combat zone. Mainly around Baghdad.’ He pauses. ‘Gapes was in Iraq. So was the guy he data-dumped in the Settlement.’

  And so was I. But Gentleman Jim doesn’t go there.

  I hear him swear softly. ‘Son of a bitch just pulled up and went inside.’

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about Anders, not Jimenez.

  Two minutes later, my cab draws into the same lot.

  The rain on the cab roof all but drowns out Lefortz’s next call. I wind down the window and peer at the concrete teneme
nt block. A light flickers in the second floor stairwell. It’s Lefortz’s cell. ‘I’m going on up. Meet you on the third.’

  I thrust some bills at the driver and sprint across the lot.

  As I pass the first floor, I hear a woman shouting. In Spanish, I think.

  Somewhere on the floor above a door opens and for a second or two house music pounds the fabric of the building. I carry on up. The paint on the walls, a lurid pistachio I’ve only ever seen in old movies, is chipped and graffiti-covered. The ceiling lights are all smashed.

  It’s more than fifteen years since I’ve been in combat, but the sounds of urban warfare have never faded. The two sets of shots come in close succession, and instinct kicks in. I take the steps three at a time. Moments later, I’m on the third floor.

  Wire mesh hangs from a light fitting above my head. The neon tube is just about working and I detect the byproduct of its struggling electrics, ozone, above the acrid smell of piss and vomit.

  There are ten doors down the hallway, five on each side, and I see traffic at the interchange through the end window. Lefortz is nowhere to be seen.

  My stomach lurches as I hit recall.

  I hear his ringtone. The opening bars of ‘Suspicion’ float toward me. I aim for the sound, my head filling with images I’ve spent too many years trying to forget. I can see them in the shadows – two guys, one each side of the door, weapons raised; a third, grenade in hand, preparing to kick it in.

  The music stops as I reach the last door on the right. It’s open a crack.

  Lefortz’s voice, thin and reedy, directs me to leave a message. I kill the call and push the door. It swings into the apartment. The room is dark and smells of cordite.

  I step across the threshold and move briskly right so I’m not silhouetted in the frame. I run my hand up the jamb and find the switch.

  Light floods the room. There’s an armchair with a body in it. Jimenez’s arm hangs down, an automatic a few centimeters from his fingertips, smoke still curling from the barrel. Two spent cartridges close by on the lime-green carpet. Between them, a single bloody footprint.