House Arrest

by Mike Lawson

  A black hood. He’s seen photos of terrorists snatched by the CIA: hoods over their heads, wearing orange jumpsuits, taking short, choppy steps as they walked with manacled legs. He figured the guys who had just captured him most likely worked for the CIA—an organization unconstrained by law or morality. Rather like the GRU. The fact that they hadn’t simply shot him meant that he was most likely in for a very long and uncomfortable interrogation session. He would explain to them as soon as they took the bag off his head that he had absolutely no secret he wasn’t willing to reveal to avoid being tortured.

  Less than twenty minutes later the van stopped, and he heard what sounded like a garage door opening. The van pulled forward, stopped again, and the garage door closed. He heard the back door of the van open, and he was pulled from the van. Then, with a man on each side of him holding his arms, he was walked a short distance and shoved down into a chair.

  The hood was removed, and he saw that he was inside a large two-car garage. The van took up one bay of the garage. In the other bay was a wooden table, and sitting at the table were two old women. One of the women had short, stylish blond hair streaked with gray, and the other had an unnatural-looking platinum-colored bob. Both women radiated power and confidence.

  He wondered for a moment why they were in the garage instead of inside the house, then noticed that the chair he was sitting in was resting on a large plastic sheet. He also noticed the tools attached to a pegboard on one wall—just ordinary tools: hammers, pliers, drills—and realized that those tools could be used for something other than household repairs. Oh, Jesus.

  The two masked men who had kidnapped him were standing behind him, and the woman with the platinum bob said to the men, “Did you search him?”

  “No, not yet,” one of them said.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake. Frisk him and empty his pockets.”

  One of the masked men jerked Nikki to his feet, patted him down, and pulled everything out of his pockets. He placed Nikki’s wallet, his keys, a small box of breath mints, and his cell phone on the table in front of the old women, then shoved Nikki back down into the chair. Almost as an afterthought, he ripped the duct tape off Nikki’s mouth, peeling a layer of tender skin off his lips.

  The platinum blonde—apparently the person in charge—said to the ski-masked men, “Undo the handcuffs and wait outside.”

  Now that was insulting! The old women obviously didn’t consider him to be a physical threat.

  Emma studied Nikita Orlov. He was an extraordinarily good-looking young man, and she could see why women would be attracted to him. His sky-blue eyes were darting from side to side, looking at Emma, then at Olivia, then back at Emma, as if he were watching a tennis match. But neither Emma nor Olivia said anything immediately. They let a few moments pass as they looked at him—as if they were studying a bug trapped in a mason jar—letting the silence increase his nervousness.

  “My name is Olivia Prescott,” Olivia finally said. “I work for the National Security Agency. My associate’s name is unimportant.”

  “NSA?” Nikki said.

  “Yes. I’m sure you’ve heard of the organization. I’m here to tell you what’s going to happen to you if your refuse to cooperate. This is not a negotiation. We know you worked for the GRU in Russia and were engaged in cyber warfare against the United States. We know you entered this country illegally and are using a false identity. We also know that you’ve continued to work for the GRU while in the United States.”

  Olivia didn’t really know this, but figured Emma was most likely right about Nikita still working for his Russian masters.

  “What all this means,” Olivia said, “is that you can be sent to prison for thirty years and you’ll be incarcerated in a maximum-security federal penitentiary. I’m talking about the kind of place where you spend twenty-three hours a day in a cell by yourself with a surveillance camera watching everything you do. Most people placed in these facilities go insane long before they complete their sentences. So. Do you understand the predicament you’re in?”

  “Yes. Is there something I can do to, uh, improve my situation?”

  Olivia and Emma both displayed thin smiles. Nikki Orlov was clearly a practical young man.

  Olivia said, “You’re going to tell the NSA everything you did in Russia. Every operation you were engaged in, the people you worked with, the sort of equipment you used. Everything. I imagine debriefing you will take several months. What we do with you after you’re debriefed will depend on how cooperative you are and if you tell us anything useful.”

  “I’ll be very cooperative,” Nikki said.

  “But the first thing you’re going to do,” Emma said, “is confess to your role in Lyle Canton’s death.”

  Nikki said, “What? I had nothing to do with Congressman Canton’s death.”

  Emma figured that Nikki knew being arrested for espionage was one thing; being an accomplice to killing a United States congressman was something else.

  “Yes, you did. I know you did,” Emma said. “And if you don’t confess to what you did and testify against the people who helped you kill the congressman, then we’re back to the scenario where you spend thirty years alone in a concrete box.”

  For a moment, Emma thought that Nikki was going to deny again that he was involved in Canton’s death, but then he closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them he said, “Okay.”

  Emma heard the side door to the garage open. She assumed it was the NSA agents who’d brought Nikki to the safe house coming back into the garage for some reason.

  When she looked over at the door she saw that she was wrong.

  Very wrong.

  33

  The man and woman who walked into the garage were holding MP-443 Grach pistols equipped with silencers. The woman was short and stocky; the man was built like a Russian weight lifter, fat and strong.

  The woman said, “We don’t want to kill you, so don’t do anything foolish.” She spoke English with a strong Russian accent. She then turned to Nikki and said something quickly in Russian. Emma spoke several languages, but Russian was not one of them. Whatever the woman said, Nikki gulped, then stood and took his possessions off the table and put them back in his pockets. The woman said something else in Russian and Nikki walked over and stood behind the weight lifter.

  “Do you know who I work for?” Olivia said to the woman.

  “No,” the woman said. “And I don’t care.” She pulled several plastic zip ties out of a pocket and while still pointing her pistol at Olivia, walked behind her and said, “Put your hands behind your back.” The male Russian was now pointing his weapon at Emma’s face. Emma thought the man looked rather dull—the woman was clearly the brains of the operation—and stupid people with guns made her nervous.

  The woman used the zip ties to bind Olivia’s hands behind her back and then used more zip ties to bind her hands to the chair. She then did the same thing to Emma. After Emma and Olivia were both secure, the male came over, picked up Emma’s chair with her sitting in it, and placed her chair so she was back-to-back with Olivia, then bound the two chairs together with more zip ties. Last, the woman took a small roll of duct tape and placed a strip of tape over Emma’s mouth. Before she could gag Olivia, Olivia said, “Did you kill my men?”

  “No,” the woman said. “Tasers. They’ll come around in an hour or so.”

  “I’m going to catch you,” Olivia said. “You’ll never get out of this country alive.”

  “Good luck with that,” the woman said, the word luck sounding like “luke.” She pressed the duct tape over Olivia’s thin lips.

  About an hour later, one of Olivia’s men staggered into the garage. He was holding a pistol but barely able to walk. He went over to Olivia, took out a pocketknife, freed her, and then freed Emma.

  Olivia, looking mad enough to kill, said, “I’ll deal with you and your idiot partner later.”

  Olivia took out her cell phone, punched a button, and said, “This is P
rescott. Give me the duty officer. Now!” Emma heard her describe the Russians and Nikki Orlov and issue orders to commence a manhunt. These included checking surveillance cameras, repositioning satellites to hover over Washington, getting agents immediately out to every small airport within a hundred miles. She apparently assumed that the Russians wouldn’t fly out of a major airport on a commercial flight. She also instructed the duty officer to begin looking at seaports in Maryland and Virginia for Russian ships. One thing she didn’t do was order her man to ask for help from local law enforcement agencies—but then an organization as large as the NSA didn’t often need to ask for help.

  When she got off the phone, she said to Emma, “I’ll find them.” Then she said, “How in the hell did they know we had him?”

  “They could have been watching him,” Emma said. “But more likely, he sent out a distress signal.”

  “How?”

  “He had his cell phone in the side pocket of his sport coat. He could have reached the phone even with his hands cuffed behind his back and sent a signal. Then they used his phone to track him here.”

  Olivia said, “My men should have removed his phone and disabled it as soon as they captured him. Those two fools are going to be spending the rest of their careers in Somalia.”

  “You have to find Orlov,” Emma said. “If you don’t, DeMarco is going to jail for the rest of his life. That is, if he’s not murdered first.”

  “Oh, I’ll find him,” Olivia said. “And you can take that to the bank.” She paused, then said, “Emma, I am so embarrassed.”

  34

  Emma had a large backyard at her home in McLean—and she was fanatical about it. There were no weeds in the flower beds; there was no crabgrass in the lawn. Azaleas and rhododendrons were perfectly trimmed; a dazzling variety of lovely, healthy flowers bloomed. She used professional gardeners to maintain the grounds, and over the years the gardeners had eventually—painfully—adjusted to her high standards.

  She poured herself an iced tea and took a seat on the patio. Normally, her eyes would roam the yard, sector by sector, looking for any sign of imperfection. Imagine Patton scanning an African plain through binoculars looking for Rommel’s tanks. Today, however, after the debacle with Olivia Prescott and the Russians, she was oblivious to her surroundings.

  Olivia had sounded certain that she would find Nikita Orlov, and maybe she would. Of the sixteen intelligence agencies in the country, the NSA was the largest and arguably the one with the most brainpower. More important, it had the ability to monitor surveillance cameras, both public and private, and was probably listening—whether legally or not—to every cell-phone conversation in the D.C. area. If NSA eavesdroppers heard someone talking about Orlov and two Russians trying to get out of the country, agents would swoop down on the phone’s owner like hawks dropping out of the sky to snatch a rabbit.

  Emma, however, was not so confident. The GRU was a formidable adversary, well aware of the NSA’s capabilities, and she had no doubt that the Russians had a plan for getting Orlov out of the country that would take the NSA’s skills into account.

  She couldn’t wait for Olivia to find Orlov; she needed to come up with a way to save DeMarco without him.

  She called the hospital to check on DeMarco’s condition and was told that although he was still unconscious, he appeared to be stable and was improving—but as far as Emma was concerned, this was not necessarily good news.

  She called a friend—a retired physician who worked part-time for Doctors Without Borders—and asked for a favor. Her next call was to her lawyer, Janet Evans. She told Janet that the doctor would meet her at the hospital, and their job was to make sure that DeMarco stayed in the hospital as long as possible. Janet was to threaten the hospital with various and sundry lawsuits if he was discharged without Emma’s doctor giving his consent—and the doctor would not give his consent even if DeMarco was capable of doing backflips. Emma was convinced that DeMarco was safer in the hospital with Mike Leary’s men watching him than he would ever be in the jail.

  She called Mike next to see if he had anything to report.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was just about to call you.”

  Mike said that a few minutes before, three Hispanics teenagers got off the elevator on DeMarco’s floor, and the two guys Mike had assigned to protect DeMarco saw them coming down the hall. The three kids could have been coming to visit their sick mama—but Mike’s guys didn’t get that vibe. While the Alexandria jailer assigned to protect DeMarco sat there nodding off, oblivious to the situation, Mike’s guys faced the teenagers as they came down the hall—then opened their own jackets to display the large pistols they carried in shoulder holsters. The three teenagers stopped, one of them said something to the other two, and they left the hallway using the nearest staircase instead of the elevator.

  Mike said, “I think these kids were MS-13 newbies and someone told them that if they wanted to make their bones, they had to kill DeMarco. They were probably packing automatics and would have mowed down anyone who tried to stop them, but they hadn’t expected to run into guys armed and ready like my guys.”

  “Damn it,” Emma muttered. “If you think you need more men to protect DeMarco, assign them. Like I told you, I’ll cover the bill.”

  Mike said, “I’ve got a better idea than adding more guards.”

  Emma wasn’t sure Mike’s plan would work but it was worth a try. At any rate, she’d have to trust him to protect DeMarco until she could figure out a way to prove DeMarco innocent. She needed a plan B.

  Well, actually, she needed a plan C.

  Plan A had been to get the FBI to arrest Lynch based on what she’d found in his apartment, then get him to flip on his co-conspirators. But her lawyer had convinced her that plan A would take too long and that Emma might be the one arrested.

  Plan B had been to get Nikki Orlov, under the threat of going to prison for espionage, to confess that he’d helped frame DeMarco and then to agree to testify against whoever had helped him. Plan B, however, had gone up in flames after Orlov had been taken by the Russians. If Olivia could just find Orlov—

  Her phone rang. It was as if God had been eavesdropping on her reverie. It was Olivia calling.

  Emma said, “Did you get him?”

  Olivia paused. A long pause. “Yeah. In a way,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We had our machines set for Russian-language speakers, and we picked up a call,” Olivia said.

  Emma didn’t know a lot about the technical aspects of the NSA’s eavesdropping programs—even at her clearance level, some things were out of bounds—but she knew that the NSA could program its phone-monitoring computers to listen for certain voices, languages, and key words, like the word bomb. And that’s what Olivia was saying. They’d been plucking conversations in Russian out of the atmosphere, hoping to get a lead on Orlov.

  Olivia continued. “The phone was located near Ocean City, Maryland, in a house on the beach. I think the Russians were planning to send in a fishing trawler—or maybe a submarine—to pick Orlov up. I deployed a team, but when my guys breached the place, the Russian woman who took Orlov shot him in the head before we could stop her. I’m certain she was told that he was too valuable to be captured.”

  “What happened to the woman?”

  “She’s dead, too. She didn’t give my men any other option. As for the man who helped her snatch Orlov from our safe house, he wasn’t at the place in Maryland. So he’s in the wind, but I don’t care about him. I wanted Orlov, not a couple of Russian gunslingers. I told my guys to give Orlov and the woman a bin Laden funeral.”

  She meant burial at sea.

  Olivia sighed. “I don’t know what else to say, Emma, other than this has to be one of the lowest points in my career.”

  Emma didn’t know what to say, either. The best she could come up with was, “Well, I’m grateful that you tried to help, Olivia. One of these days we’ll get together and have dinner and
commiserate about it.” They wouldn’t.

  Emma was starting to think that the only kind of luck DeMarco had was bad luck, but there was no point dwelling on things out of her control. Back to plan C. There had to be a plan C.

  Emma had been drinking iced tea, but after the news she’d received from Olivia, she decided a gin and tonic would be more appropriate. She made one and went back out to sit on her patio to think—and again it was as if God had decided that today was the day to fuck with her. Her nemesis appeared.

  Emma didn’t think squirrels were cute—they were nothing more than bushy-tailed rodents—but she had no deep-seated animus toward the species in general. But this one particular fat, brown little creature—she hated.

  One of her neighbors had a walnut tree, and this squirrel, instead of burying the walnuts in her neighbor’s yard, as he should have, liked to bury them in Emma’s yard. Why, she had no idea. And not only would the little bastard dig up her grass to hide the nuts in the first place, but because he was a particularly stupid squirrel, he wouldn’t be able to remember where he’d hidden them and would dig a dozen holes trying to find a nut he’d buried.

  Thanks to the mood she was in after talking to Olivia, Emma felt like going into the house and getting one of her guns and blowing the destructive critter’s head off. Since she knew she couldn’t do that—who knows what bad karma could come from assassinating squirrels—she looked around for something to fling at it. Then, not able to find a suitable projectile close at hand, she had no other option but to stand, clap her hands, and yell, “Hey! You! Get out of my yard.”

  The squirrel stopped digging and looked at her. Emma could have sworn he smirked before he went back to excavating a hole twice as big as he needed to bury a single walnut.