by Mike Lawson
He arrived at the main entrance to Wolf Trap at 8:50 p.m., and ten minutes later a motorcycle stopped behind his car. The motorcycle was a black Harley Davidson V-Rod that looked as if it was going a hundred miles an hour standing still. The driver was wearing a helmet that made it impossible for DeMarco to see any facial features, and he wondered who in the hell it could be, until the driver took off the helmet. It was Emma.
When she joined him in his car, DeMarco said, “I didn’t know you owned a motorcycle.”
“I don’t. I think they’re rolling death traps. But they are kind of fun. I borrowed it from a friend. I figured if somebody had overheard our conversation and tried to follow me, a bike was going to be harder to follow. I didn’t bring my phone.”
“Good.”
“Now what’s going on?” Emma said.
“What was the name of that woman at the NSA, the one who helped you snatch Nikki Orlov?”
“Olivia Prescott.”
“Would you call her a close friend?”
“No. But I worked with her several times, especially after 9/11, and I like her. She’s dedicated and competent.”
“Competent?”
“Yes. Very.”
“How come if she’s so competent the Russians were able to take Orlov away from her?” DeMarco could tell Emma was getting impatient with the questions.
“I already told you what I think happened,” Emma said. “Olivia’s men failed to remove Orlov’s cell phone when they grabbed him at his apartment building, and he set off a distress signal to the Russians, and they tracked him to the NSA safe house. The GRU is a formidable adversary.”
“Right,” DeMarco said. “And then, when the NSA finds Orlov, instead of recapturing him, they let the Russians kill him.”
“The Russians couldn’t afford to let the NSA get their hands on Orlov. I told you that.”
“I know, but doesn’t it bother you that this woman manages to fuck up everything that has to do with Orlov?”
“Yes, it bothers me, but—”
“I think your buddy, Prescott, screwed you, Emma.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think the NSA wanted Orlov all to itself and didn’t want the Russians to know they had him. I think your pal, Olivia, knew that if she allowed you to use Orlov to get Brayden and Spear, then the whole world would know about him, and she’d get into a tug-of-war with the FBI, who would want to arrest him for Canton’s murder. So I don’t think the Russians killed him. I think he’s alive and well and singing to the NSA.”
Emma’s pale blue eyes bored a hole into DeMarco for a moment, then she closed those remarkable eyes, and they stayed closed for a long time, as she thought over what he’d said. When she opened her eyes, she said something DeMarco, in a million years, never thought he’d hear her say: “I feel like a fool.”
“So this was why you were worried about my phone being monitored and me being followed,” Emma said.
“Yeah. I figured that maybe the NSA was keeping tabs on you to make sure you didn’t screw things up when it came to Orlov.
“Look,” DeMarco said, “I want to talk to Orlov.”
“Why?”
“Because Sebastian Spear has ruined my life.”
DeMarco told her about the discussion he’d had with Mahoney, about how come November he might have a job or he might not. His fate was in the hands of the American public, more than half of whom didn’t even bother to vote in midterm elections.
“Even if the Democrats take back the House,” DeMarco said, “I’ll be screwed. I can’t do the stuff Mahoney had me doing if everybody knows who I am.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Emma said. “Make Mahoney get you a job where you don’t have to do things you can’t talk about. Make him get you a real job, an honest job.”
“I might do that,” DeMarco said. He’d actually given some thought to blackmailing Mahoney into using his connections to get him something better, something where he didn’t have to work out of the subbasement of the Capitol. And Lord knows he knew things about Mahoney that would make blackmail feasible.
“But if at all possible,” DeMarco said, “and no matter what happens to me in the future, I want Sebastian Spear. That son of a bitch is sitting somewhere laughing his ass off. Canton’s dead, Lynch is dead, Brayden’s going to prison for life, and I’m out of a job while Spear’s free as a bird.”
“You think Orlov may know something that can be used to get Spear?” Emma said. “Based on what Brayden told the FBI, Spear didn’t have anything to do with the operation against Canton other than give the order to kill him.”
“So maybe we can’t get him for Canton. Maybe we can get him for something else.”
57
Emma sent a text message to Olivia Prescott: Be at my house at six p.m. or I’m going to talk to the FBI about Orlov.
Emma didn’t want to speak to Olivia over the phone. She wanted to look her in the eye when she talked to her.
Five minutes passed before Olivia responded. It probably took her that long to decide exactly what she wanted to say and what she wanted on record. She finally texted: Threatening me is not wise.
Emma texted back: Six o’clock.
Emma watched through her front window as a black SUV with tinted windows pulled into her driveway at six p.m. sharp. Olivia may have been a devious bitch, but she was a punctual one.
The front passenger door of the SUV opened, and a man stepped out. He was one of the men who’d snatched Nikki Orlov from the parking garage—one of the men who’d been tased by the Russians and was supposed to have been banished to Somalia.
He opened the rear passenger door, and Olivia Prescott emerged from the car. Emma suspected the driver was the other man who’d snatched Orlov, and she couldn’t help wondering whether Olivia was thinking about snatching her if things didn’t go the way Olivia wanted. The stakes were very high for Olivia personally and for the NSA as an organization, and taking Emma off the playing field was not an unrealistic possibility. Emma was glad she’d decided to include DeMarco in the meeting. Killing or kidnapping two people would make things a bit harder for Olivia’s thugs—though not impossible.
Olivia stood for a moment, apparently admiring Emma’s house, then walked up to the front door alone and rang the bell.
Emma answered the door, and Olivia decided to immediately take the offensive. “I hope you’ve given a considerable amount of thought to what you’re doing, Emma. I like you, I truly do, but as I said, threatening me is not a wise course of action.”
Emma closed the door and without saying anything, walked away, leaving Olivia no choice but to follow her. Emma led her to her backyard patio, where DeMarco was sitting.
Olivia stopped abruptly when she saw DeMarco. She said to Emma, “We’re not going to talk about anything with this man here. I’m not about to discuss classified matters with a, a civilian.”
“Sit down, Olivia,” Emma said. “And we’re going to talk about whatever I want.”
Olivia took a seat, and DeMarco smiled at her. He was drinking a beer, and he raised the bottle and said, “You wanna beer?”
“No, I don’t want a damn beer,” Olivia said. “I want—”
Emma interrupted. “First, we’re going to skip past the part where I tell you how angry I am and how foolish I feel for having been duped by you.”
“Duped by me?”
“And you’re not going to waste my time denying that it was your people, pretending to be Russians, who took Orlov from the safe house.”
“My people?” Olivia said. “I have no idea what you’re—”
“Like I said, Olivia, we’re going to skip past the lies and the denials, and I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen next. Right now you’re holding Orlov someplace and—”
“Orlov’s dead. I told you that. We buried him at sea.”
“No, he’s not. You’ve got him stashed somewhere and you’re bleeding him dry, and I’m sure he’s te
lling you all sorts of useful things about the Russian cyber-warfare program. Which is fine with me. But if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to the FBI and the president’s chief of staff—a guy who owes me—and tell them what you’ve done. I might even go to the media, and the next thing you know, you’ll be testifying in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee.” Emma treated Olivia to a wintry smile. “I’ll bet your boss doesn’t even know what you’ve done, and by the time all is said and done the NSA will be humiliated and you’ll be out of a job. Or maybe in jail.”
Olivia Prescott had the face of a world-class poker player, but Emma noticed that her jaw had clenched when she’d mentioned Olivia’s boss.
The head of the NSA was always military—an admiral or a general. These officers usually played things by the book and didn’t commit acts that might be considered illegal and might jeopardize their careers. But the high-ranking civilian old-timers in the NSA, people like Olivia Prescott, often kept their military masters in the dark in order to better play the games they played. And that’s what Emma was saying: she doubted that the officer who ran the NSA had any idea that Olivia had snatched Orlov, not once but twice, and was now grilling him in an NSA sweatbox.
“What do you want?” Olivia said. Her tone wasn’t one of capitulation. She just wanted to know Emma’s price so she could decide whether she was willing to pay it. Emma and DeMarco, on their own, were no match for the National Security Agency.
“What I and DeMarco want,” Emma said, “is for Sebastian Spear to pay for what he’s done, and I think it’s possible that Nikki Orlov can help us. So we’re going to spend some time talking to Orlov to see what he knows. If he gives us something we can use, and if we can get Spear without exposing the fact that you have Orlov, then we won’t expose Orlov. But if necessary, for example if Orlov has to testify in court against Spear … Well, then, you give up Orlov.”
Now Olivia smiled. “What makes you think I’ll allow you to force me to do anything? Enemies of the NSA have a tendency to, I guess you’d say, evaporate.”
DeMarco came out of his chair, pointed a finger at Olivia’s face, and said, “Hey! Let me tell you something, lady.”
Emma cut him off. “Olivia, please, don’t embarrass yourself. You know that I’ve already taken steps to expose you if anything happens to us.”
Actually, Emma hadn’t done any such thing.
Emma was a better poker player than Olivia Prescott.
58
Nikki Orlov was being interrogated by the National Security Agency in a farmhouse west of Havre de Grace, Maryland.
The house was a large, two-story structure with a palpable air of neglect. The white paint was peeling off the siding, the front porch sagged, the windows were opaque with grime. Near the house was a once-red barn with listing walls and a swaybacked roof that had faded to a rusty brown. Surrounding the house and the barn were fallow fields. Closer observation, however, would have revealed barely visible surveillance cameras, floodlights activated by motion detectors, and the realization that the fallow fields provided an unobstructed 360-degree field of fire and view of anyone approaching the place.
Parked near the house was an ancient Ford pickup that could have belonged to a debt-laden farmer. Emma parked her Mercedes next to the pickup. As she and DeMarco were walking up the front steps, the door opened and a compact man wearing a tan T-shirt and jeans appeared in the doorway. Because the T-shirt was the type worn by soldiers in sandy places like Iraq, Emma suspected he was ex-military. He didn’t ask who they were—he’d obviously been told they were coming—but gestured for them to enter the house. When he turned, they could see the Beretta stuck in the back of his jeans.
The interior of the house bore no resemblance to its shabby exterior. The living room had the appearance of a high-tech office. There were three workstations with an array of computer equipment, and on one wall were monitors showing the live feed from surveillance cameras. What appeared from the outside to be dirt on the windows was instead a thin foil mesh that prevented electronic eavesdropping. At one of the workstations was an overweight white kid in his twenties wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and drinking Red Bull. Sitting at a chair in front of the security monitors was the same stocky woman who’d pretended to be Russian when she supposedly took Nikki Orlov away from Olivia Prescott. She, too, had a Beretta, hers in a military-style thigh holster. She smiled at Emma and said, “Za zdorovie.”
Emma knew that was a Russian drinking toast, but in this case it probably meant: No hard feelings, lady. I was just doing my job.
Another young guy walked into the room and took a seat in front of the other workstation. He was tall and beanpole-thin and might as well have worn a sign around his neck that said Geek. It was apparent that there were two types of people at the farmhouse: muscle and brains. The muscle was providing protection and guarding Orlov. The brains were doing something related to whatever information Nikki was giving the NSA.
“Where’s Orlov?” Emma said to the man who’d let them into the house.
At that moment, a man walked down the stairs from the second floor. He was older than the others, in his sixties. Wire-rimmed glasses covered granite-gray eyes.
“My name’s Harris,” he said to Emma. “I’m in charge here. Orlov’s in the kitchen. You can talk to him in there until noon. At noon we’ll need the kitchen for an hour to feed my crew, but after lunch, we’ll give you the room again. Or, if you prefer, you can sit with him in one of the bedrooms upstairs or in the barn, which is serving as a bunkhouse, but the kitchen will be more comfortable.”
Emma knew immediately that Harris was the one debriefing or interrogating Orlov. The difference between a debriefing and an interrogation was simple. A debriefing meant that Orlov was cooperating and voluntarily telling what he knew. An interrogation meant that he wasn’t cooperating and …
Emma had met people like Harris before and knew that sleep deprivation, drugs, and waterboarding were the tools of his trade.
Emma said, “The kitchen will be fine, as long as we’re not disturbed.”
She suspected that no matter where they questioned Orlov, their conversation would be recorded.
Nikki was sitting at a table made from rough wooden planks and designed to seat a farm family of eight. He was eating a bowl of Cheerios. He was wearing cargo shorts, a blue T-shirt that matched his eyes, and flip-flops. His dark hair was still wet from his morning shower, and he looked well rested and perfectly healthy; no one had been using a rubber hose on him.
“Hi,” he said. “I was told you’d be coming by to talk to me, but I don’t know what you want.”
DeMarco and Emma took seats at the table. When Nikki dipped his spoon into the cereal bowl, DeMarco yanked the bowl away from him, slopping milk on the table.
“Hey!” Nikki said, empty spoon in his hand.
“You can eat later,” DeMarco said. “As for what we want, we want information that will put Spear in jail. So let’s start with you telling us what you did for him.”
Nikki smiled. “Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that.”
DeMarco moved so fast that Emma wasn’t able to stop him. He cuffed Orlov on the side of the head with his open hand, knocking him out of his chair. Standing over him, DeMarco said, “Do I look like I’m in the mood for a little of this, a little of that? I was almost killed because of what you did.”
Nikki, now in the proper frame of mind, said that mostly what he did for Spear was hack into computers and steal information that would give Spear Industries a leg up on the competition, like estimates his competitors were developing for bids on upcoming projects and technical information that could give Spear an edge.
“One time,” he said, “Spear was looking for proprietary information on a device called a flux capacitor made by Siemens, a German company that does some of the same stuff Spear does. So I got into Siemens machines and pulled out everything I could about it.”
Sometimes Orlov would be asked to find info
rmation that could be used to bribe or blackmail a person. The person could be someone in a government, foreign or domestic, who would be in charge of awarding a contract. It could be a regulator who was making Spear’s life difficult. It could be a competitor who was breathing too hard down the back of Spear’s neck.
“There was this one creep,” Nikki said, “an OSHA inspector who was driving Spear nuts on this job in Alaska. The guy had two laptops. One of them he used for normal work stuff, but the other, it was filled with disgusting child porn. After I passed this on to Brayden, Brayden told the creep that if he didn’t back off, he was going to contact the FBI. I mean, it made me sick. I thought we should have given him to the FBI after the job was done, but Brayden didn’t want to, figuring he might be able to use him sometime in the future.”
In less than two hours, they had a list of twenty crimes that Orlov had committed for Spear Industries, including extortion, bribery, theft of proprietary information, violations of various financial regulations, contract fixing, and corruption of public officials. This was exactly the sort of information that DeMarco had been hoping to obtain: information that could be used to land Sebastian Spear in jail for twenty or thirty years.
But there was one major problem: Nikki Orlov had never worked directly with or for Sebastian Spear. All his orders had come from Brayden.
Seeing that DeMarco was not delighted to hear this and looked as if he might knock him out of his chair again, Nikki said, “I’m sorry, but the whole time I worked for Spear, I never spoke to him. Not once. Hell, I hardly ever saw him. Every once in a while, I’d get a glimpse of him in the building in Reston, but he was like a, a ghost wandering around a haunted house.”