K Street

by M. A. Lawson

  After he spoke to his secretary, he took a cab to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It was one of his favorite places to eat in D.C. because of the chef, not the name. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a Grey Goose martini. He noticed a woman in her thirties sitting at the other end of the bar. She was slender and blond. Very pretty. She reminded him of a Russian ballerina he knew but hadn’t seen in years. He raised his martini glass in a toast to her loveliness. She responded with a smile.

  Most women liked Fang. He was—and he wasn’t being immodest—a handsome man. He dressed well, he spent money freely, and he could be quite charming. The blonde was charmed. To his annoyance, his researcher called back just as they started to share an appetizer: the chef’s quail satay.

  The researcher reported that Callahan had no family. He had four ex-wives but no children. So who was the woman who had gone to see him and claimed to be his daughter? Fang wondered. He’d call the little nurse later and tell her to find out the woman’s name. But not right now.

  He asked the blonde if she would like another glass of wine.

  11

  DAY 2—10 P.M.

  Kay walked into the McDonald’s on 17th Street NW. The place was almost empty. There were three teenagers staring at their cell phones, ignoring each other, and one old woman who was probably homeless who was wearing three layers of clothing on a hot, humid night. The last customer was a heavyset man in his fifties wearing a cheap blue suit, a white shirt, and no tie. He was eating Chicken McNuggets.

  Kay figured the McNuggets eater had to be Eagleton—Prescott’s connection in the Metro P.D. Kay had called Eagleton right after she left Prescott’s apartment and told him she wanted everything they had on the attack on Callahan’s office and the murder of Sally Ann Danzinger. Eagleton had told her to meet him at the McDonald’s, but the earliest he could get there was ten p.m.

  Kay walked up to his table. “Are you Eagleton?”

  “Yep. You must be the lady from the NSA. You got ID?”

  “No,” Kay said. And she didn’t see any reason to disabuse Eagleton of the notion she was NSA.

  “Well, all right then,” Eagleton said. “Have a seat.” Kay sat.

  “You want a McNugget?” Eagleton said.

  “Tell me what you know,” Kay said.

  “Okay. Regarding the Danzinger homicide, we don’t have shit,” Eagleton said. “None of the neighbors saw anyone going into or coming out of Danzinger’s house. It doesn’t help that this went down during the middle of the day when people were working and that it was so fucking hot that nobody was outside. The forensic guys found a million prints inside the house and we’re still sorting through them. We’ll get a couple of slugs from the autopsies, and if we find a gun, maybe we’ll be able to match it to the slugs. The only other thing we found is a partial footprint from a Timberland boot when one of the killers walked through some blood.

  “The house had been ransacked but we don’t know what they took so we can’t put out a list to pawnshops. We didn’t find the victims’ cell phones, and when we tried to locate them, we couldn’t find their signals, meaning the killers probably disabled them.” Eagleton shoved another McNugget in his mouth and said, “So, like I said, we got shit.”

  “What about K Street?” Kay asked.

  Eagleton shook his head. “We’ve got almost a hundred shell casings and not one of them has a print on it. We have a bunch of tools, the kind you can buy at any Sears, and none of them have prints, either. We should have been able to get some information off surveillance cameras, but we couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “The cameras don’t record. They show a real-time picture of what they’re seeing.”

  Detective Mary Platt had already told Kay this and that meant that the D.C. cops still hadn’t figured out how to get into the guts of Callahan’s security system.

  “What about the dead guys? I don’t mean Callahan’s employees, but the intruders who were killed.”

  Eagleton nodded. “Their names were Jack Quinn and Ray Brown, both convicted in their misspent youths for armed robbery. Neither one had been arrested recently, and they both had legitimate jobs. Quinn was an electrician who worked on boat shit. You know, alternators, generators, radars, sonar systems. Brown was a welder and a mechanic. He worked part time at a garage in Fairfax.”

  “What about known associates?” Kay said. “Somebody these guys worked with in the past?”

  “We haven’t identified anybody like that yet—they never committed a crime in the District—but we’re still checking with federal agencies and other police departments. Maybe we’ll get a lead from one of them.”

  “Well, shit,” Kay said. “There has to be something that will connect these guys to the others involved. Tell me more about them.”

  “There’s not much to tell. Quinn was married once but his ex-wife now lives out west.” Eagleton laughed. “He lived with a pit bull who is now among the faithful departed.”

  “What?” Kay said.

  “We sent a couple detectives to search Quinn’s double-wide. Deputies from Prince William County assisted us. When they went into Quinn’s trailer, this fuckin’ pit bull that weighed about a hundred pounds attacked one of the deputies and almost tore his arm off. They had to kill it.” Eagleton shook his head. “Damn pit bulls have become the house pet of choice for lowlifes. It seems almost any place we raid these days, there’s a fuckin’ pit bull there.”

  “But what did you find in Quinn’s trailer?”

  “Nothing. Nothing to tie him to the job on K Street and nothing to give us a lead to whoever else was involved.”

  “Did you look at his phone records?”

  “Yeah. He didn’t have a landline, but he had a cell phone. The cell was in his trailer, along with his ID. All the calls made from the cell phone were to places related to his day job. He probably has a burner phone somewhere, or maybe a pager, but we didn’t find it.”

  “What about Brown?”

  “Brown lived with his sister. Never been married. Neither has the sister. They were both raised in a bunch of foster homes and we think they were probably abused. You know, sexually. Brown did time for a bungled bank job a dozen years ago, but nothing since then. The sister’s been arrested a couple of times for assault. Both times, she was in a bar, drunk, and she went nuts when some guy made a pass at her. She split one guy’s head open with a beer bottle and she beat up another guy with her fists. The sister’s a trip.

  “Anyway, when we sent people to tell her that her brother had been killed and to search the house, she went ballistic. Crying and screaming, throwing things, and when they started the search, she attacked one of the detectives and they had to cuff her. They would have thrown her in jail for interfering with the search but they felt bad because she’d just lost her brother. But they didn’t find anything in the house that we could tie to the robbery or to anyone else who might have been involved.”

  “And the sister didn’t give you anything? Guys her brother hung with, people he’s worked with in the past?”

  “No. Like I told you, she was so upset we couldn’t interview her. Maybe we’ll try again later.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the U-Haul they used to take the safe away. We found it in a parking lot three blocks from the building on K Street. We checked with the place that rented it and found out the guy who rented it died eighteen years ago. The U-Haul place has cameras outside but the cameras only caught the guy’s back and the top of a baseball cap. When we asked the clerk what the guy looked like, he said, ‘Shit, I don’t know. He was just a big white guy wearing coveralls.’”

  Leaving the McDonald’s, Kay thought, Now what?

  Well, there was nothing more she could do tonight. She’d get a good night’s sleep and continue the hunt first thing tomorrow. Kay smiled slightly. Even though she knew she was being manipu
lated by Prescott, she loved hunting for two-legged prey.

  12

  DAY 3—6 A.M.

  Olivia Prescott had been in her office at Fort Meade since dawn. She spent some time reviewing e-mails, various logs, and reports, and catching up on what had happened while she was in London. There was one interesting phone call that had been intercepted: a call between a Saudi prince who had aspirations to be the next bin Laden and a retired Russian colonel—a colonel who once held the keys to a site where the Russians stored a number of nuclear weapons. She would definitely follow up on that one.

  She picked up the phone on her desk and told Ackerman to come to her office. While waiting for him to arrive, she watered a ficus plant that she was convinced was suicidal. She’d done everything she could think of to keep the plant alive: installed a special bulb to trick it into thinking it was getting sunlight; loaded the soil around its roots with enough nutrients to bring back the dead. Even the water she used was special, the equivalent of water from Lourdes. But nothing helped. The plant looked limp; its broad leaves had a jaundicelike yellow tinge. Prescott knew she wasn’t popular at the agency and she couldn’t help but wonder if someone was sneaking into her office at night and slowly poisoning her plant.

  Ackerman rapped on the frame of her office door. “You wanted to see me, boss lady?” Then he sat, uninvited, in the chair in front of Prescott’s desk.

  Boss lady. She felt like ripping his head off.

  Ackerman was a repulsive individual. He was six-foot-four and morbidly obese, at least a hundred and fifty pounds overweight. Standing, he looked like a mountain of white Jell-O; sitting, his stomach occupied his lap. He had limp black hair so long it touched his shoulders and it glistened with some sort of gel—or maybe it was just naturally greasy. At the age of thirty, he still suffered from acne and he would wear the same clothes three or four days in a row. Worse than his appearance, however, was his personality: He was an annoying, condescending, abrasive smart-ass. The only reason Prescott tolerated him was because he was a genius, and as he had no wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, or pet, he would work twenty-four hours a day—provided he got overtime pay.

  “James Parker,” Prescott said.

  “The yahoo who offed himself?” Ackerman said.

  “Yeah, that yahoo. He intercepted an e-mail with an attachment from somebody who works for Zytek Systems. I know he printed out the attachment because he gave a copy to someone. I want you to find that e-mail and figure out who sent it and who received it.”

  Ackerman stood up. “Okay. Parker was an idiot. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

  She picked up her phone as soon as Ackerman left her office. “This is Prescott. Tell Fortus I want him.”

  Fortus was ex–Naval Intelligence and was now a civilian in charge of internal security at the NSA. He had an important job: making sure all the NSA’s many secrets remained secrets. He had replaced the man who occupied the position when Edward Snowden decided to share all he knew about the NSA with the media.

  He was in her office two minutes later, looking like he’d just run up the stairs. Unlike Ackerman, Fortus gave her the respect her position deserved. He was a sturdy-looking individual in his fifties, hair as short as when he was in the military. He no longer wore a uniform, but in a short-sleeved white shirt, a plain blue tie, and blue pants, he looked like he did. His shoes were so well polished he could use them as mirrors.

  “Well?” Prescott said.

  Prescott had called Fortus as soon as she heard James Parker was dead. She wanted to know why Parker would kill himself or be killed. She wanted to know why he might have sold his services to Sally Ann Danzinger.

  “Online gambling,” Fortus said. “Texas Hold’em. He owed seventy-eight thousand.”

  “Goddamnit! Why in the hell didn’t we know about this?”

  “His security review wasn’t scheduled for four months and we had no indicators.”

  NSA employees with Top Secret security clearances are subjected to periodic security reviews. These reviews look at a number of factors that could indicate whether an employee was spying for someone or likely to be turned into a spy. Phone records were examined. Home computers were checked remotely for evidence of adultery or criminal activity such as child pornography. The NSA’s concern was that if a foreign government determined an NSA employee was having an affair or committing a crime, then the individual would be susceptible to blackmail.

  The main thing Fortus’s people looked at was an employee’s finances. Was he or she carrying a large amount of debt? Had he suddenly purchased something that was outside his income range? If a person was in over his head, then a foreign operative might offer him money in return for information. If a person was suddenly living above his means, it could mean that he’d already been turned.

  It appeared that in the case of James Parker, he’d gambled himself into a money pit. At least now Prescott knew why he had betrayed the National Security Agency.

  Prescott had a briefing to attend, but before she left her office, she made two phone calls. One was to a man named Grayson; the other to a man named Lincoln. She said the same thing to both men, “We need to meet,” and specified the time. Neither man asked where they were meeting or why. They already knew.

  13

  DAY 3—10 A.M.

  Fang Zhou walked into the garage, an auto body shop owned by a Chinese immigrant. The garage smelled of acrid smoke. Two Chinese men wearing soiled gray coveralls stood at attention behind the safe from Callahan’s office. They’d finally opened it and it was sitting on the floor in front of them, making Fang think of two filthy cats displaying a dead mouse for their master.

  As soon as Otis had informed him that the safe had been taken from Callahan’s office, Fang had ordered him to deliver it to the garage, then sent two men from the embassy over to open it. He sent a third man to collect the gym bag containing Callahan’s laptop and the papers taken from his office, and bring it back to the embassy.

  Fortunately, the Chinese embassy in Washington employed a number of skilled workers who performed whatever maintenance was required. The embassy didn’t want to use Americans to fix air conditioners or plumbing or dishwashers; it would be too easy for American intelligence officers to pose as workers and install bugging equipment. However, the Chinese maintenance people were not safecrackers. It took them over thirty hours to open the safe. Fang knew it would have been more efficient to have had an experienced robber like Otis open it, but he didn’t want Otis to know more than he already did. At any rate, the embassy maintenance men called Fang an hour ago and said they had finally succeeded.

  Fang had already looked through the papers from Callahan’s office. They all appeared to be related to the stated mission of the Callahan Group and Fang found nothing that made it appear that the Callahan Group was anything more than what its website claimed. The laptop was different. Fang tried to look at its contents but it was password protected, so he sent it to the embassy’s computer experts and asked them to unlock it. A technician came to him an hour later, looking like a dog expecting to be beaten. He said that when they tried to get around the computer’s security system, it self-destructed. Callahan’s laptop was now nothing more than a plastic brick. Why would Callahan have that sort of a security on his computer, Fang wondered.

  Fang walked carefully through the garage, taking care not to rub up against any of the greasy items. He squatted on his heels and peered into the safe, which looked like a can that had had its lid removed with jackhammers. The only things in it were a single white business envelope and a few stacks of American currency. He’d expected more but he was certain that the workers hadn’t taken anything.

  He removed the envelope first, saw that it was sealed, and placed it in the inside pocket of his suit. He then flipped through the bills, and estimated that there was about fifty thousand dollars, in hundreds, fifties, and twenties. Fifty thousand seemed lik
e a lot for a lobbyist to have on hand, but maybe not. American politicians didn’t come cheaply.

  He barked an order for one of the incompetent safecrackers to find him something to carry the money in, and the man brought him a brown paper Safeway bag with handles. He took about two thousand dollars and, without making any attempt to make sure each man got the same amount, gave the money to the two men. He took another small stack of Callahan’s cash, maybe five hundred dollars, and gave it to the owner of the auto body shop.

  “Good work,” he said to the men and left the garage. It was always wise to praise and reward people for a job well done. He also decided that he should be rewarded for the job he had done: He would keep the rest of the money from the safe. No one but he and the two mechanics knew about it, and the mechanics were smart enough to know that if they told anyone, they would be on the next slow boat to China.

  • • •

  BACK INSIDE HIS TOWN HOUSE, Fang found a message waiting for him on the answering machine. It was from his wife. It appeared that his oldest son was acting out and his wife wanted Fang to speak to him. Maybe he would call them tomorrow. Fang only saw his wife when he had to return to China, and the last time he’d seen her was four months ago. He didn’t miss her at all when they were apart, but when he did see her, he was always happy to be with her. He wondered how he would feel if they lived together all the time. Whatever the case, he knew he’d never divorce her, at least not while her father lived; her father was too politically powerful.

  He took a seat in his living room and removed the envelope from his suit pocket. He studied it carefully and could see no evidence that it had been opened, but if someone had given him an envelope and told him not to look in it, he didn’t think he would be able to resist. He would be too curious.