by Mike Lawson
30
Emma didn’t bother to wait for the elevator. She ran up the hospital steps to reach the nurses’ station in the ICU. She demanded to see DeMarco’s doctor immediately, and when a nurse asked her who she was, she said she was DeMarco’s older sister. Then, realizing that a prison inmate might not be the hospital’s highest priority, Emma added that if her precious baby brother didn’t receive the best medical care available, the hospital was going to see the largest malpractice suit it had ever seen.
A doctor was quickly brought over to talk to her.
The doctor, a brusque man with an Indian accent—and a physician’s typical air of arrogance—informed her that it appeared as if DeMarco had been poisoned and that he was doing all that could be done when a person has ingested some unknown toxin. He said he was waiting for toxicology results to determine which poison had been used, and assured her that DeMarco’s legal status would have no bearing whatsoever on the care he received. Emma doubted that.
“What’s his condition?” Emma asked.
“He’s stable, currently in a medically induced coma, and on a ventilator,” the doctor said.
“I want to see him,” Emma said.
“Like I said, he’s in a coma.”
“And like I said, I want to see him.”
The doctor led her to DeMarco’s room. Outside his door was a guard from the Alexandria jail. The man was sitting in a chair, both chins on his chest, obviously sleeping. Emma would deal with him shortly.
DeMarco was in bed, connected to machines monitoring his vital signs. Emma couldn’t see much of his face, because of the ventilator. What she could see was not encouraging: his eyes were closed, his chest was barely rising and falling, and his face was the color of cigarette ash. One of his ankles was shackled to the bed.
Emma was not an overly emotional person. Nonetheless, she took one of DeMarco’s big hands—the hand was cold and damp—and said, “You’re going to be all right, Joe. I promise.”
Turning to the doctor, she said, “He has health insurance but if you need to do something not covered by his policy, call me. I have money.” She asked for something to write on, the doctor gave her a prescription pad, and she wrote down her name and phone number. The doctor didn’t ask why her last name wasn’t DeMarco, and if he had asked she would have said it was her ex-husband’s name.
Emma left DeMarco’s room and walked over to the sleeping guard. A metal name tag on his chest said his name was Donovan. Emma pulled back her right hand and slapped Donovan hard on the side of his head, knocking off the baseball cap he was wearing.
Donovan awoke, saying, “Wha-, wha-, what the fuck.”
Emma screamed, “Stay awake! Your job is to protect the man in that room. If I catch you sleeping again, I’m not only going to make sure you’re fired, I’m going to see that you’re prosecuted for criminal negligence.”
Emma decided that she needed to get someone over to the hospital as fast as possible to protect DeMarco. Considering what had happened to him in jail—not once, but twice—and considering the incompetent guard outside his room, she had no confidence that the people who were supposed to protect him could keep him alive. It was also going to be harder to protect him in a hospital than a jail. There were no armed guards or metal detectors at the hospital’s entrances, and anyone could walk in off the street, armed to the teeth, and massacre DeMarco while he was unconscious.
She thought for a moment, then called an ex-soldier named Mike Leary. Mike was former Special Forces, and Emma had worked with him a few times when she was with the DIA. He now ran a company that provided security for relief organizations that sent their employees to dangerous places. She gave Mike the background on DeMarco and told him that someone—she didn’t mention Sebastian Spear—wanted DeMarco dead. She also told him that MS-13 had tried to kill DeMarco when he was in jail, and she was worried that the gang might try again in the hospital.
Mike said he’d get two of his best guys over to the hospital immediately.
Emma told him to send his bill to her.
Emma now knew that it was more urgent than ever that she prove to the FBI that DeMarco was innocent. He wouldn’t be safe, no matter where he was, until the bureau arrested the people really responsible for Canton’s death. While standing in the lobby of the hospital she thought about what she should do and again decided that she needed legal advice. She called Janet Evans, DeMarco’s lawyer—who was also her lawyer—and said they needed to talk immediately. Janet said she’d be happy to talk to her. As Janet billed her time at eight hundred dollars an hour, of course she’d be happy to talk.
When Janet Evans was a federal prosecutor, she’d had a small, windowless office with a cheap government-issue metal desk and mismatched metal file cabinets. Private practice was clearly more rewarding than public service, judging by her cherrywood desk, the Persian rug covering the floor, and the view of the Washington Monument in her current digs.
She offered Emma a cup of coffee made from some costly, exotic bean and said, “So. What’s the problem?”
Emma told her how she’d learned that a Capitol cop with a poor military record and no money had once served under Sebastian Spear’s head of security, Bill Brayden. Then, really based on not much more than that and Lynch’s physical similarity to DeMarco, she’d broken into Lynch’s apartment, where she found a pile of cash and a hidden burner phone containing the phone number of someone located at Spear’s headquarters.
“You broke into his apartment?” Janet said.
“Yeah, and ripped out and replaced a wall in his closet.”
“My God, Emma. Are you insane?”
“The reason I’m here,” Emma said, “is that I want your opinion on what the FBI will do when I tell them what I did.”
“For one thing, they’ll arrest you. And not just for breaking and entering. You interfered in a federal investigation and your interference might, even if you’re correct about Lynch, prevent them from convicting him.”
Before Emma could object, Janet continued. “Lynch’s lawyer will argue that the evidence you found is inadmissible because it was obtained without a warrant. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘fruit of the poisonous tree.’ Well, Emma, you’re the poisonous tree.”
“What I did may have been illegal, but since I was acting as a civilian, as opposed to a member of law enforcement, I don’t see why the FBI can’t use what I’ve found. You know, like they’d use evidence obtained from a confidential informant.”
Janet said, “Lynch’s lawyer will argue that since you were appointed by the president’s chief of staff to oversee the FBI’s investigation, you weren’t acting as a civilian. Moreover, nothing you found proves that Lynch killed Canton or conspired to kill him.”
“I realize that,” an irritated Emma said. “But I want the FBI to arrest him and squeeze him, and if they squeeze him hard enough, he’ll give up whoever he was working with.”
“Squeeze him with what?” Janet said. “It’s not illegal to hide a phone. Nor is it illegal to hide a large amount of cash the way he did. Considering the area where he lives, his lawyer will argue that hiding his money in such a way was prudent.”
“But where did he get the money?”
“Who knows?” Janet said. “Maybe he got lucky in Atlantic City. Wherever he got the money, you can’t prove it came from Spear. If I was Lynch’s lawyer, I’d advise him to take the Fifth and not say anything if the FBI arrests him. And unless the FBI can prove he did something illegal, they won’t have anything they can use to pressure him.”
Emma shook her head, not happy with anything she was hearing. “The problem I’ve got, Janet, is time. I have to prove DeMarco is innocent before someone kills him, and the longer it takes, the higher the odds are that someone will succeed.”
“If it’s time you’re worried about, going to the FBI with what you’ve found certainly won’t speed things up. I mean, you know how the FBI works as well as I do, Emma. Let’s say that they i
gnore how you learned about the cell phone and the money, and believe your theory that Lynch conspired to kill Canton. The first thing they’ll do is hold a bunch of meetings with DOJ and talk for hours about what to do next. They’ll reexamine all the evidence. They’ll spend days looking at the surveillance camera videos, trying to figure out where Lynch was when Canton was killed. They’ll try to obtain warrants to look at Lynch’s finances and his phone records, which will take more time, and in the end, they might not get the warrants. They’ll throw a thirty-man surveillance team around Lynch and watch him for days, or maybe weeks, hoping he’ll lead them to something or someone. And I can assure you that they won’t arrest Lynch and question him until they’ve done all those things.”
Emma let out a sigh. Janet was right. She had to do more to prove DeMarco was innocent—and she had to do it quickly and without the FBI.
At that moment, she noticed the sleek Apple laptop sitting on Janet’s desk—and realized that she had an option she hadn’t previously considered.
There was another player in this drama, one who could be squeezed and squeezed very hard. And once he was squeezed in the way that Emma had in mind, he’d give up everything.
She decided, however, that she wouldn’t tell her lawyer what she had in mind. If Janet had a problem with her ripping out of piece of drywall, she’d really have a problem with what Emma was planning to do next.
31
Emma took a seat at a table for two in a restaurant called the Red Sky Steak and Fish House. The reason she was there was not the food. It was instead because the restaurant was in Laurel, Maryland, which is about twelve miles from Fort Meade—home to the NSA.
At exactly seven p.m., Olivia Prescott walked into the restaurant and over to Emma’s table. Olivia, like Emma, was obsessive when it came to being punctual.
Emma knew Olivia Prescott from her days at the DIA and had worked with her on a couple of task forces. Olivia had a doctorate in mathematics from Princeton and had begun her career at the NSA working on encryption programs. Olivia’s skills, however, went beyond mathematics and code breaking. She was blessed with the Machiavellian cunning to compete in a complex, backstabbing federal bureaucracy, and after thirty years of service was now one of the highest-ranking officials at the agency.
Olivia and Emma had other things in common than being punctual. They were about the same age—Emma wondered whether Olivia was ever going to retire—and both were tall and slender. Both were extremely competent. Both tended to be aloof, had few friends, and weren’t particularly sociable. Olivia wasn’t gay—or at least Emma didn’t think so—but she’d never married. The only odd thing about Olivia—at least Emma thought it odd—was that she dyed her hair platinum blond and styled it in a bob, like a 1920s flapper’s, which Emma thought looked absurd on a woman her age.
When Emma had called Olivia after leaving her lawyer’s office, she said they needed to talk about a Russian hacker named Nikita Orlov. Olivia didn’t recognize Orlov’s name but agreed to a meeting because she knew Emma was a serious person and wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important—to national security, that is. Emma was also certain that if Neil was right about what Orlov had done when he was in Russia, Olivia’s elves at the NSA would know who Orlov was and could provide Olivia with all the information they had on the man before their meeting.
Prescott and Emma both ordered vodka martinis. They didn’t bother to toast or touch glasses as friends might do; they didn’t chat about what they’d been up to since the last time they’d seen each other. Emma got right to the point.
“Did you check out Nikita Orlov?” Emma asked.
“Yes,” Olivia said. “He was a mathematics prodigy who started working at the GRU when he was about eighteen. But we heard that he’d disappeared. One of the CIA’s sources said the GRU was hunting for him all over Russia, but we don’t know why they were hunting for him. And that’s about all we have on the man other than some background data like where he went to school. We don’t have a photo of him.”
Emma said, “I happen to know that Nikita Orlov was engaged in cyber warfare when he was in Russia. He had to run for his life when he had an affair with a general’s wife, and is now alive and well and living in the United States.”
“My, my,” Olivia said.
Emma went on to explain that a man she knew—she didn’t give Olivia Neil’s name—was an acquaintance of another Russian defector, named Dmitri Sokolov. She told Olivia how Dmitri had spotted Orlov in Las Vegas at a computer trade show a couple of years ago.
“Do you know where Orlov is right now?” Olivia asked. “I’d like to have a chat with him.”
“I thought you might. And yes, I know where he is. He works for an American company. But let me tell you one other thing. I suspect that Nikita is still working for the GRU.”
“Why do you think that?” Olivia said.
“Because a man with his intelligence would know that some of the people he worked with in Russia would almost certainly be at the trade show in Vegas. Hackers from North Korea and China and every other country in the world engaged in electronic eavesdropping and cyber warfare go to that sort of event. So I think that Orlov went to Vegas because he knew he’d be safe. He knew that GRU agents wouldn’t kill him or snatch him and send him back to Russia.”
Emma explained. She suspected—although she had no proof—that the Russians had somehow learned that Orlov had made it to the United States and was working for Sebastian Spear. How they learned this, she didn’t know. And although a certain Russian general wanted Orlov dead, saner heads in Moscow prevailed, knowing that Orlov was too valuable to waste, particularly when the only crime he’d committed was diddling a general’s young wife. Emma further suspected that when the Russians located Orlov they gave him a choice: a bullet in the head or continuing to work for the GRU in America. (In America, he wouldn’t be in the vicinity of the man he’d turned into a cuckold.) She had no idea what sort of work Orlov had been doing since he’d been in the United States—maybe he was preparing to screw up the next American election—but she was convinced that no way would Orlov have taken the risk of going to the Vegas conference if the GRU was still hunting for him. So she didn’t really know whether Orlov was still working for the Russians, but logic told her this had to be the case, and Olivia Prescott agreed with her.
“Which brings me to what I want,” Emma said.
“Ah, I should have known this wouldn’t be simple,” Olivia said.
Emma gave Olivia the background on the death of Congressman Lyle Canton—that is, the background not reported in the newspapers. She explained how she believed that a Capitol cop named John Lynch had killed Canton for Sebastian Spear. She also explained how a hacker had used Mahoney’s cell phone to send a text message to DeMarco and put money into DeMarco’s bank account, and that she was about 90 percent certain that the person who did those things was Nikita Orlov.
“What I want,” Emma said, “is for you to scoop up Orlov, and I’ll be with you when you do. Then what I want is for you to threaten him with whatever you can think of to make him talk—such as life in a cage for espionage—and force him to confess that he helped kill Canton.”
Emma knew that, unlike the FBI, the NSA wouldn’t have a problem doing what she wanted. The FBI was a Boy Scout troop. The NSA was more like … well, a motorcycle gang.
“After he confesses to his role in Canton’s death,” Emma said, “and agrees to testify against everyone involved, I’ll have enough to get DeMarco out of jail. And you, of course, will benefit by being able to squeeze everything out of him that he did while he was in Russia and whatever he’s been doing lately in the United States.”
Olivia smiled. “Emma, I believe another martini is in order.”
32
Nikki Orlov was in an excellent mood—but then he almost always was.
Nikki loved living in Washington, D.C. He had a spacious two-bedroom apartment in Georgetown, close to the bars on the M Street strip—b
ars always filled with lovely lady government workers and co-eds from the nearby universities. He had an up-to-date entertainment system in his apartment, a king-size bed with silk sheets, a closet filled with stylish clothes, and, thanks to a bonus he’d been paid by Bill Brayden, he’d recently purchased a sporty Mazda Miata convertible roadster. Life was grand. He was a lucky man.
As the elevator descended to the parking garage, he thought about the woman he had met last night at the Palm, whom he’d invited to his place for dinner tonight. She was exquisite: long red hair, green eyes, a sprinkling of freckles dusting incredible cheekbones. She also had a magnificent body, which he suspected might not be totally natural, not that he cared. Her only flaw was that she was married.
That seemed to be his curse, to fall in love with married women.
The elevator stopped, and the doors opened. As he walked toward his car, he noticed the white panel van idling near the elevators. The cab of the van had tinted windows, and the cargo bay had no windows at all. There was no logo on the vehicle to indicate ownership, but there was a ladder on the roof, making him think that it probably belonged to a contractor hired to repair something in one of the apartments. Nikki was so grateful for a job where he worked with his brains and not his hands.
He started toward his car. He’d walked only a few paces when the van surged forward and stopped next to him, and two large men jumped out. These brutes were six inches taller than Nikki was and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. They were wearing black ski masks.
They grabbed Nikki before he could run and muscled him into the van. Once he was inside they overpowered him, smothering him with their large bodies, squeezing his arms with their big hands so he couldn’t move, and handcuffed him. Then they slapped a strip of duct tape over his mouth and placed a black hood over his head.