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The Grid Page 20

by Nick Cook


  DJ glances at the guy, who’s still tethered. He has to raise his voice above the noise of the protesters. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘No idea,’ she says. ‘I’m hoping you’re going to tell me. Anyone follow us here?’

  Wharton shakes his head, then turns and tilts it to study Hetta’s captive in the streetlight. He appears white, gaunt and surprisingly young.

  ‘Did he tell you anything?’

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘He’s Army CID,’ Wharton says.

  Hetta looks at him. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘This thing.’ DJ holds up the Motorola. ‘They’ve got a unique privacy code, which people think is unbreakable. It isn’t. Last time I saw one it was in the hands of a CID sergeant on a joint case we investigated out of Quantico. He told me that Army CID bought a bunch of them because the shit they were meant to have got axed in the cutbacks.’ He takes a step back, opens the door and takes a shot of the guy on his phone.

  ‘I’ll run this past some people I know. You?’

  ‘There’s somebody I’ve got to go see at National Geospatial.’ She doesn’t tell him who.

  ‘Want me to send someone else along?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  She turns to me. ‘How do I reach you?’

  ‘Molly will let you know where I am. How long will you be?’

  She glances down the street. ‘I don’t know. Quick as I can.’

  She walks off without turning back and disappears into the crowd.

  I leave DJ and walk slowly toward the line of policemen. I show one of them my pass and ask if he’ll escort me to the Northwest Gate. As we reach the end of the street, the chanting grows louder and I see a thicket of placards beyond a second cordon of cops, uniformed Secret Service and Park Police. When I reach security, the mood is no less febrile.

  While the agent runs my pass through a scanner, I try Reuben again, but still get voicemail. I WhatsApp him: On my way in.

  The agent hands me my pass. I walk across the North Lawn to the North Portico, the chanting in my ears, the rain in my face, and show my pass again. I get waved through and take the elevator to the lower level. When the doors open, the lights are low and the floor silent.

  I walk across the hallway and into Molly’s office. She’s left for the day.

  As I step into mine, I sense I am not alone.

  I turn to find Haight Graham, in a chair, pointing his pistol at me.

  31

  ‘ARE YOU PREPARED TO COOPERATE FULLY WITH ALL APPROPRIATE authorities in disclosing how you came to track down Duke Gapes?’

  Graham lifts a buff-colored file from a pile of papers and places it next to the page he’s just read from, a transcript of my polygraph.

  He invites me to take a look.

  The first shot shows me standing on the stoop of Ted van Buren’s brownstone. In the second, I’m looking around, as if I know I’m being watched. In the third, I’m shaking TVB’s hand and being ushered into the doorway. It was the night Hetta and I met Christy.

  Even to me, I appear guilty as hell.

  When faced with a subpoena for a client’s medical records, it is a psychiatrist’s or a psychologist’s right to be able to claim privilege. Or at least it was. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, that is no longer an option, nor can any delay be made by the psychiatrist or psychologist to the execution of the warrant. In fact, almost all the options typically available to my profession are now illegal.

  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Section 215 also come with this beauty: a gag order prohibiting me from telling anyone I’ve received one, which means getting to speak to a lawyer is a luxury I can’t expect. I am in the room with the table, the camp bed and the two-way mirror.

  ‘Twenty-two minutes into your polygraph, Colonel Cain, you were asked the following question: Are there any reasons that might prevent you from legitimately fulfilling your duties as White House Medical Director? You provided a negative response. That was a lie, wasn’t it?’

  I think back to our discussion in the tent. Graham knew about my drinking, and he knew about Hope’s pregnancy. Both these facts were containable – even the Secret Service’s suspicion that I’d been in a depressed mood state following my return from combat operations and had deliberately rammed the Kenworth.

  But this changes things. If they’ve got TVB’s patient notes and transcripts of any conversations he and I have had in the past week, then they also know that halfway through Georgetown I had a full-on breakdown, which never made it as far as my medical notes, and was absent from my background security check and from the subsequent declarations I made when I agreed to become the President’s doctor. Even more damningly, it begs his next question: how did I get the job?

  I wait, but it doesn’t come.

  Instead, Graham produces one of the three images Hetta, Christy and I withheld from his investigation: the guy who looks like Napoleon. There are a limited number of ways the Service could have acquired this picture. The first is via Hetta, who took it on her iPhone. The second is via Christy, who received it from Lefortz. The third is almost unthinkable: from Lefortz himself.

  ‘Hart and I did not remove those images from the cabin,’ I tell him.

  ‘Then let me in on who did.’

  ‘They were there when we kicked down the door. The following day they’d been removed and replaced. I warned you about letting the Army in, so if your guys didn’t decide on a little sanitization of the evidence, you have a sizeable problem. Did you know that at least one of the forensics team wasn’t with Army CID? A guy called Karl Dempf was masquerading as Army, but is some kind of comms specialist with a private military contractor called Triple Z Services.’

  Graham remains unmoved. ‘So, you don’t know this man?’ He points to the picture.

  ‘No. Who is he?’

  ‘Vladimir Ilitch. A Russian-Ukrainian national and friend of that other Vlad – Putin. He keeps a low profile. His interests span banking, minerals, pharmaceuticals and robotics. He also owns a couple of restaurant chains here and in Europe. And oh, I almost forgot: he’s invested a great deal of money in emerging tech and particularly in areas that intersect with his principal interests – pharma and robotics. Imagine our surprise, then, when we find information about this man on Professor van Buren’s hard drive.’

  ‘That is simply not possible.’

  ‘Oh, but it is. You see, your buddy Ted van Buren has received a great deal of cash from Ilitch’s investment company.’

  I think back to what TVB had been so excited about – his experiments into some kind of ultrasound that manipulated the brain’s neurons – the prelude, he believed, to tech that would treat a range of mental disorders, including anxiety and depression.

  ‘It is, in the opinion of this agency –’ Graham looks again at the mirror, which confirms to me that Cabot is behind it, ‘– beyond coincidental that a man who has treated you for an illness – a mental illness you withheld from every agency tasked with vetting your appointment as White House Medical Director – is intimately associated with a Russian whose image turns up in the cabin. And for that image, along with two others, to have been removed without the knowledge of the investigative team.’

  I am left alone with the light on, a bottle of water and a bucket in the corner of the room.

  I have no idea what time it is – only that it’s the small hours. They took my phone, and took my watch as well.

  On the plus side, they don’t know where Hetta is – at least, they didn’t a couple of hours ago, when Graham left me to stew. He’d asked me where she was and I’d told him to go fuck himself – and Cabot at the same time; and that was the last supposedly human contact I had.

  I’ve tried the door. It’s locked. I’ve tried to sleep, too, but there’s too much running around my head. So I lie on the bed, under the gaze of the mirror, and try to make sense of everything I’ve heard and where I see it all heading from here.

  Ili
tch, through some twist of fate, funds tech in which Ted is involved – not as crazy as it first appears, given that Ted is at the forefront of research in a field of technology that is designed to mitigate the physiological effects of trauma. But since there is scarcely an oligarch on the planet who doesn’t have connections to his nation’s security services, alarmingly the next link in the chain is Dmitri Sergeyev, a Russian intelligence agent.

  As Cabot’s three-ring circus has made bogus deductions about every other piece of evidence it’s been confronted with thus far, I have no doubt it’ll jump to the wrong conclusion about my meeting with Sergeyev – and all the arrangements for Moscow.

  The irony is that Sergeyev almost certainly is on a mission – to learn anything he can about what makes Thompson tick. I saw him coming a mile off.

  Whatever anyone says, our two nations are at war – a conflict being played out in the digital sphere, where the watchwords are dismiss, distort, distract, dismay.

  James Jesus Angleton, the paranoid – almost certainly clinically paranoid – founding head of counter-intelligence at the CIA, once paraphrased the four Ds as an ever-fluid landscape, where fact and illusion merge … a kind of wilderness of mirrors. Which is what I entered when I stepped into St John’s Church.

  Cabot will keep digging until he can demonstrate that Reuben and I are not only in league with the Russian mafia, but also killed JFK.

  So, unless I put a stop to this – right here, in this room – Cabot and Graham will blunder into the truth about No Stone Unturned and the next casualty will be Thompson’s presidency.

  I pull myself to my feet, run my hand over my unshaven jaw, stand up to the mirror, and make my confession.

  ‘My name is Joshua M. Cain, Colonel, United States Air Force, and I lied so that I could become the President’s doctor …’

  32

  I’M SHAKEN AWAKE, TO FIND GRAHAM’S FACE MILLIMETERS FROM mine.

  ‘Get up.’

  He hauls me off the bed. I have no idea how long I have been out of it.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Oh dark thirty.’ He hands me my watch and my phone.

  ‘You haven’t arrested him yet?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The President.’

  ‘Funny,’ he says. ‘Save your breath. I’m surprised you’ve any left.’ He throws me my jacket. ‘Nice speech, by the way.’

  In the Oval Office, Thompson is leaning against his desk, his hands clasped in front of him. He looks penitent. He is dressed in suit pants. The collar of his shirt is open. Behind him, through a gap in the drapes, a watery dawn is breaking beyond the trees.

  Cabot is seated to his left. ‘Thank you, Haight.’

  Thompson looks shattered. For a moment I think it’s because the dream has come for him again. ‘Josh, I’m truly sorry. There’s no need for this godawful charade any longer. A lie only begets more lies. I should have come clean the moment this thing started.

  ‘You should know that I’ve told Director Cabot and Special Agent Graham everything – about the nightmares, your treatment of them, about No Stone Unturned. I also said I would tender my resignation forthwith.’

  ‘And I said that would be quite unnecessary.’ Cabot magnanimously waves his hand, as if to erase everything that has just been said. ‘We draw a line under this. Everyone has suffered enough.’

  I hold Cabot’s gaze. ‘No resignations? No prosecutions?’

  ‘No need.’

  ‘Where’s Reuben?’

  ‘Safe,’ the President says. ‘Hart too.’

  ‘We detained them, same as we did with you,’ Cabot says. ‘We needed to be sure. We now are.’

  Thompson turns to Cabot. ‘Tell him, Tom.’

  ‘An hour ago, PIAD’s digital forensics lab got a lead on the network traffic in the moments before Gapes was shot. The data is now in: the system used to break the MPD’s tactical radio net is unlike anything we’ve seen before – quite beyond the capabilities of any organization save one. Park that thought for a moment.’

  Cabot comes and stands next to Thompson. Despite his diminutive stature, there is something statesmanlike about him I’ve not seen before. ‘Our interests have always been aligned. My duty, first and foremost, is the protection of the President. We’re under attack and the only way we’re going to find out who is responsible is if we work together – I mean, truly, properly, work together. You, me, Reuben, Christy, Hart.’ He looks at the President. ‘All of us.’

  For the first time, Thompson meets my gaze. ‘While you and Hart have been busy, so have they. You need to listen to this.’

  Cabot makes a signal to Graham, who walks over to the desk and takes up position between him and the President.

  ‘Jimenez’s apartment. Forensics have wrung every molecule out of the place and they’ve found nothing – no hair, no skin, no blood beyond that of the victims that matches with anything intelligible on a database. Which left us with only two pieces of tangible evidence: the footprint and the bullet casings.’

  The footprint was a size-ten-and-a-half Nike Air – new, no nicks or gouges on the sole or wear on the tread, which makes it the shoe equivalent of a clean skin. The bullet casing came from a Glock 19, a standard 9 mm.

  The shooter fired five times, confirming what I heard from the stairwell. The working hypothesis is that our guy – the shoe size suggests a female assassin is unlikely, although not out of the question – was in the apartment with a gun to Jimenez’s head when Anders showed; that he would have needed Jimenez’s cooperation to lure the captain into the apartment.

  Anders’ suspicions ought to have been raised the moment he pushed open the door, because, as I’d discovered, the light was off. That must have been when he pulled the trigger – one shot to Jimenez’s head and two to Anders’ chest, within a couple of seconds.

  I’m guessing my call to Lefortz rang a second before Gentleman Jim kicked in the door.

  Graham says the assassin lost his cool at that point and stepped back into the blood that had begun to pool from Jimenez’s head. He put his fourth and fifth shots into Lefortz then went for the fire escape. Lefortz staggered after him, but died before I reached him.

  ‘Sunday,’ Graham says, ‘we asked the FBI for the best forensic technician they have and they sent us this kid from the Quantico Lab. First thing he does is check the casings for prints and DNA, but again, nothing. Even if the shooter had handled the rounds unprotected, the heat of firing the gun vaporizes any prints and cooks the DNA in the chamber, making it unusable.

  ‘But moisture from the fingers of anybody handling the rounds will have corroded the surface of the brass. The lab can put a charge through the casing then dust it down with carbon powder. The current between the corroded layer and the uncorroded layer beneath it will attract the powder and reveal the print.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there is a print. It’s only a partial and doesn’t tell us jack, except that the shooter had eaten a processed meal within three hours of handling the bullet.’

  ‘Because the salt content acted on the metal?’

  Graham nods. ‘So, we crunched every bit of CCTV in every Shake Shack, Five Guys, McDonald’s, Subway and Burger King in a five-mile radius of the hit. We whittled down the list from a pool of eighteen hundred males during our window, till we were left with seven guys wearing size-ten-and-a-half Nike Airs. We followed them to their cars, ran their plates and eliminated a couple more. We tracked the others through the JOCC’s license plate recognition cameras till we were left with four. Three of them amounted to nothing, but we tracked one all the way back to an underground parking lot in a building in Herndon.’

  ‘Herndon?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That was Hart’s reaction.’

  Herndon is filled with defense primes, telecoms giants, IT companies and security contractors. But I’ve only heard it mentioned once in the past week – when Hetta was telling me about the guy at the cabin identified from the three pubes
he’d left behind in her bar of Camay – Karl Dempf of Triple Z Services.

  ‘Triple Z Services is a private military contractor,’ Cabot says. ‘It didn’t exist till a decade ago, but now it’s turning over a couple of billion from all the jobs outsourced its way by the CIA and the DoD in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Christ knows where else.

  ‘So, now we got a guy from the cabin – and a guy we’re ninety-nine per cent sure killed Jimenez, Anders and Lefortz, and both of them are with Triple Z Services.

  ‘Something else. Triple Z had a former employee take them to court for alleged war crimes in Yemen. The case was held in camera. The mission was secret. This was five years ago. Your friend Charles Land of Collins Lovelock Land represented them. He got the case thrown out.’

  No wonder Katya looked so damn scared.

  ‘And who does Triple Z represent?’

  ‘I’ll let Hart explain.’

  The Service, Cabot says, picked her up late last night – when she was on her way back to the White House after her meeting with her contact at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

  ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘Kind of. We just told her we had Lefortz’s killers.’

  And you watched as it went to work on her – the one thing that would have unzipped her like the bullet through Gapes’s skull.

  Cabot glances at the President, then me. ‘I had my differences with Lefortz, and I’ve had my differences with Hart, but she needed to know – as do you, Reuben, Christy and the President – that we all want the same thing. We’re going to get these bastards.’

  ‘The guy at Geospatial came through,’ Graham says. ‘He told Hart he was able to match the image of the bunker. It’s not on foreign soil at all. It’s here. Part of a complex built on a former National Guard training area southwest of Salt Lake City.’

  33

  HETTA, REUBEN AND CHRISTY ARE WAITING FOR US IN THE Situation Room. I take a seat next to Reuben, who gives me a weak smile. The lights come down the moment the President is in position at the head of the table, flanked by Cabot and Graham.

 

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