House Secrets

by Mike Lawson

  “And when Congress doesn’t give us enough to do everything we want,” Hanover said, “Charlie’s good at finding other sources.”

  Like stealing drugs and trading them for handheld surface-to-air missiles as they had done for that operation in the Philippines, Emma thought.

  “But he’s involved in all kinds of things,” Hanover said. “He pokes his nose into ongoing ops, helps plan future ops, analyzes the intel we get. He’s like a damn spider. Most times he just sits there, watching what’s going on, but every once in awhile he’ll crawl out on his web and eat something.”

  “I don’t understand,” Emma said.

  “Now there’s a first,” Hanover said, but before Emma could say anything, he added, “What I mean is, don’t let Charlie’s twinkly-eyed ol’ grandpa act fool you. If you’ve pissed him off, he just might eat you next.”

  “Can you think of a reason why he would be interested in a particular senator?”

  “Which senator?

  “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that he’s showing an abnormal interest in a certain senator. Why would he do that?”

  Hanover shrugged. “I can think of a number of reasons. The senator could be bitching about something we did . . .”

  It was interesting, Emma thought: the man was retired and he’d been treated badly before he retired, but he kept saying “we” as if he was still working for the agency. Maybe he was more loyal than she thought.

  “. . . or he could be messing with the Company’s budget—now that would really get Charlie’s goat—or maybe he works on the Senate Intelligence Committee and he’s asking the wrong questions.” Hanover paused. “You know, Charlie’s so old that he actually knew Allen Dulles. All this crap going on now after 9-11, setting up this intelligence czar to run the show, playing mother-may-I with Congress every time we wanna take a shit, forcing us to play with every pissant cop shop in town—that kind of stuff would bother Charlie a lot. And if this senator is twisting the Company’s tail . . . Well, Charlie wants it the way it was in the old days, when nobody knew what the hell we did.”

  Emma knew Judy Powell in the most mundane way: they had been neighbors for more than a dozen years.

  “Administrative assistant” usually meant a woman was a mere secretary but the title made her role sound more important than it really was, as well as less sexist than it really was. In Judy Powell’s case, however, the term “administrative assistant” was dead-on accurate. She had worked for some of the most important people in Washington for over thirty years, and because she was so talented, what she did went far beyond answering phones and making travel arrangements for her boss. She currently worked for Senator Michael Sandoval, chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

  Emma knocked on Judy’s door.

  “Emma!” Judy said, delighted to see her. Judy liked Emma for the same reason Emma liked Judy: they were both extremely bright, capable people. Judy was a large woman and comfortable with her size. She liked who she was. She dressed well, her hair was carefully styled to suit her round face, and her makeup was always perfectly applied. Her husband worked at the National Archives but Emma had no idea what he did and doubted that she ever would. Henry Powell spoke less than any man Emma had ever known.

  Emma had been at Judy’s home one time discussing the gardening service they both employed. Service had gone downhill, and she and Judy were discussing the situation, trying to decide if they should find another outfit or just beat on the current one to make it shape up. Judy had asked her husband his opinion. He’d lowered his newspaper, made a little beats-me gesture with his face, then resumed his reading. Judy had said, “Well, thank you so much for contributing, Henry.” To Emma she’d said, “Henry almost said a complete sentence to me two weeks ago. I asked him, ‘Henry, are you still passionately, madly in love with me?’ You know what he said? He said, ‘Yep.’”

  Emma had suspected at the time that Henry was indeed still passionately, madly in love with his wife.

  After they settled into Judy’s kitchen, Emma said, “I have a favor to ask. A big one.”

  “Okay,” Judy said.

  “What is Senator Morelli’s position on the CIA?”

  Emma needed to understand why Eklund was interested in Morelli but subjects discussed in Senate Intelligence Committee meetings were often classified, and thus Emma couldn’t simply get a copy of the Congressional Record to find out what Morelli might have done to annoy folks at Langley. But as Judy attended many of these meetings with her boss, she would know. Asking Judy to tell Emma what was said in those meetings, however, was something she shouldn’t do—and both women knew this.

  Before Judy could say anything, Emma said, “I don’t want specifics, Judy. Nothing classified. And I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”

  “I already knew that,” Judy said. Judy was very bright. She took a breath and said, “On the committee, there are essentially two types of senators. The first type is the if-I-don’t-know-it-can’t-hurt-me type. They don’t wanna know what the CIA is gonna do. This way if the agency screws up they can’t be held responsible, but after the fact, they can call in the director and beat him up on C-Span. The other group wants to know exactly what the spies are doing and they’re willing to be responsible if things go wrong. Senator Morelli falls into the second camp. He wants Langley on a very, very short leash. He wants them conducting absolutely no operations that haven’t been cleared in advance by the committee. The CIA naturally finds his position rather restrictive, and considering the number of operations they conduct, impractical. They’ve made lots of noise about how their ability to respond quickly to emergent issues in the field would be jeopardized by such a requirement. Senator Morelli also wants to know exactly where they’re spending their budget. The CIA has a tendency to spend a lot of money on things they claim they can’t talk about, which means that no one really knows what happens to all the dough they get. Senator Morelli’s favorite word when it comes to Langley is ‘transparency.’ He wants the agency, its operations and its budget, clear for all on the committee to see.”

  “Has a man named Charlie Eklund been in some of these meetings where Senator Morelli has expressed this opinion?”

  Judy’s smart eyes glowed. “Oh, yeah. Little Charlie just sits there in the back row, always a smile on his sly, white face.”

  “What’ll happen if Morelli becomes president?”

  “Who knows?” Judy said. “The relationship between a president and the CIA is a whole lot different than the relationship between a senator and the CIA. My guess is, though, that Senator Morelli means what he says. He’s going to have the DCI seated at a little desk right outside the Oval Office so he can keep an eye on the guy.”

  Emma walked slowly back to her home but she didn’t enter the house right away. Instead she took a slow tour of her yard, examining the grass and the trees and various thriving shrubs. She made sure that the wicked vine she had dismembered the other day hadn’t begun a counterattack.

  If Judy was correct, Paul Morelli was not a friend of the CIA. And if Blake Hanover was correct, Charlie Eklund would be no friend of Morelli’s. The problem was that Morelli and Eklund were both capable of making it appear that they felt one way about an issue when in fact they felt just the opposite.

  After fifteen minutes, Emma concluded that it was impossible for her to know what Eklund was up to. All she knew for sure was that this thing with Terry Finley and Paul Morelli had gone to a whole new level.

  She opened the back door to her home and smelled something wonderful cooking in the kitchen. It appeared Christine was no longer mad at her. At least one thing was right in her world.

  Chapter 26

  Two days after DeMarco met Mahoney at the Greek Embassy, the Washington Post reported that Lydia Morelli had been admitted to Father Martin’s, an upscale alcohol rehabilitation facility in Havre de Grace, Maryland.

  The fact that the senator’s office had informed the media of L
ydia’s situation wasn’t in any way remarkable. After Betty Ford had set the precedent, it had become quite common for the rich and famous to call a press conference whenever it was time to pry the monkey off their backs. The other reason for telling the media was the pragmatic, political one: they’d find out eventually, so why not get credit for being open and honest.

  But in the case of Lydia Morelli, DeMarco knew there was another reason for releasing the story: if you were Paul Morelli, and you found out from a little bird—or in this case a big, white-haired bird—that your wife was thinking of going to the press and telling ugly tales of murder and molestation, you might like it firmly established that she’s a mentally unhinged alcoholic who’s not to be taken seriously.

  DeMarco didn’t know if Lydia had admitted herself to Father Martin’s or if she had been committed by her husband—but he did know he was not going to dwell on the situation any longer. After his last meeting with Mahoney, DeMarco had concluded that whatever Paul Morelli may have done, his actions belonged in that same hopper with world hunger, global warming, and all those other problems too big for him to solve. And to hell with Emma.

  And at just that moment, as if she’d been peeking in through a window into his skull, DeMarco’s cell phone rang and the caller ID said it was Emma. He didn’t want to talk to her, but he answered anyway.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Did you see the Post this morning?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No, I don’t mean the article on Lydia. Look on page three of the local section. Where are you?”

  “My office,” DeMarco said.

  “Meet me at the Library of Congress in half an hour,” Emma said and hung up. If her voice had been any colder, the phone would have frozen to DeMarco’s ear.

  DeMarco pulled the Washington Post out of his trash can and flipped to the local news. The article was halfway down the page, a single paragraph. It said the bodies of two men had been found in a car in southeast D.C. The men had been shot in the back of the head, two bullets each. The paper called the execution “gangland style,” whatever that meant. The men were identified as Tim Reed and Jerry Fallon, the false names used by Carl van Horn and James Suttel. The article noted that the area in which the men had been found was known for its drug activity, the implication being that van Horn and Suttel had been there trying to score or deal dope and someone had killed them.

  The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress is across the street from the Capitol, a two-minute walk from DeMarco’s office. The Library of Congress bears no resemblance to your typical, municipal book-lender. There are three-ton doors made from gleaming bronze, vaulted ceilings, and marble floors. The nation’s premier book depository bears a closer resemblance to a cathedral or a pagan temple than it does to the library down the block.

  DeMarco found Emma standing beneath four large paintings by an artist with the odd name of Elihu Vedder. Mr. Vedder’s paintings depicted, according to a brochure that DeMarco had once read, “the effects of good and bad government,” two of those negative effects being “Anarchy” and “Corrupt Legislation.” DeMarco had always thought there wasn’t enough wall space in any building to depict all the effects of bad government.

  “Why’d you want to meet here?” DeMarco said.

  “Because it’s close to your office. Somebody was following me this morning. I lost him, but if somebody’s following you, I was hoping to spot him when he came in here looking for you.”

  “Somebody’s following us?”

  “Yeah,” Emma said. She paused before she added, “The CIA is involved in all this and they may be following both of us.”

  “I thought you said van Horn and Suttel weren’t working for the CIA. And who in the hell killed—”

  “I know what I said, but things have changed.” Emma then told DeMarco about Charlie Eklund’s visit.

  When she said that Eklund knew that DeMarco had met with Lydia Morelli, DeMarco said, “But Suttel and van Horn didn’t follow me to those meetings.”

  “I know that,” Emma said. “Which means somebody else did, and they reported back to Eklund.”

  “So what the hell’s going on?”

  “Before we get to that, let me tell you something else I learned,” Emma said, and she told DeMarco about her conversation with Judy Powell, explaining how Paul Morelli appeared not to be the CIA’s number-one fan. “So here’s what could be going on,” Emma said.

  There were two possible scenarios, according to Emma. In scenario one, the CIA—or Charlie Eklund personally—was worried about what Paul Morelli might do to the CIA after he became president. So Eklund had assigned people to watch Morelli, hoping the senator might do something stupid—have an affair, hire a hooker, meet with the wrong people—and when Morelli became president, Eklund would walk into the Oval Office, plop his photographs onto Morelli’s new desk, and say, “Play ball.”

  Scenario two: Eklund had really been helping Paul Morelli his whole career and Morelli’s public attitude toward the CIA was just a head-fake. In this case, when he became president he’d let the CIA do whatever their dark, small hearts desired, and in turn, Charlie Eklund would continue to solve all of President Morelli’s problems that couldn’t be solved by more conventional means. In scenario two, maybe the CIA had been watching Lydia because her husband was afraid she might tell the media all the things she knew about him.

  In both of Emma’s scenarios, Suttel and van Horn worked for Eklund, which meant Emma’s pal Marv Peterson and Charlie Eklund had both lied to her.

  “But why would they kill these two guys?” DeMarco said.

  “It’s a rather big deal, Joe, the CIA spying on a senator—or spying for a senator. Eklund could have had them killed because we identified them and he was afraid they’d talk.”

  DeMarco sat there a moment trying to digest all this.

  “Lydia was positive the man helping her husband didn’t work for the CIA,” DeMarco said. “She knows him personally.”

  Emma shrugged. “I don’t think it would be all that hard for people as bright as Paul Morelli and Charlie Eklund to fool Lydia.”

  “Maybe not,” DeMarco said, “but I think there’s a third scenario. I think it’s possible that Suttel and van Horn were working for someone other than Eklund, but Eklund is watching Morelli for the reason you said, hoping Morelli would do something the CIA could later hold over the senator’s head.”

  Emma nodded. “You’re right. That’s possible too. But then why were Suttel and van Horn killed?”

  “Because after you identified them, their boss, whoever he is, decided they were a liability.”

  “But if their boss wasn’t Eklund, how would their boss know?”

  Emma said. “The only people who knew I had identified van Horn and Suttel were Marv Peterson and Charlie Eklund of the CIA. And you, of course.”

  “No, one other person knew,” DeMarco said. “Mahoney. He knew because I told him I was being tailed by these ex-CIA goons. So it’s possible that Mahoney told Morelli, and whoever Morelli talked to decided to take them off the board.”

  DeMarco looked up at the Elihu Vedder painting titled “Anarchy.” The central figure in the painting was a mad, nude Medusa standing on the ruins of what appeared to be a government building. She held a torch in her hand as if she was about to set the city—presumably Washington—on fire. Maybe not a bad idea, he thought.

  “This is just a fucking mess,” he said. “We have Lydia saying her husband’s Satan incarnate. We have this Eklund guy, who may or may not be Paul Morelli’s pal. We have two dead thugs, and we don’t know who they were working for or who killed them or why. And we have Lydia Morelli in a dry-out clinic because she’s either a delusional drunk who needs help or because her husband locked her up to keep her from talking to the press. Oh, and we have one other thing: I have a boss who thinks Paul Morelli walks on water.”

  DeMarco stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Emma said.
/>   “Boston. Mahoney’s sending me up there.”

  “Why?” Emma said.

  “Just a little job involving one of his staff. No big thing. But Mahoney could be trying to get my mind off Morelli. I don’t know. What I do know is that I work for the guy and I’m going. So you can sit there and get pissed at me, but this whole thing is way over my pay grade. I’m in no position to take on a United States senator, the Speaker of the House, and some scheming little prick at the CIA. The only thing I was asked to do was find out if there was anything funny about Terry Finley’s death.”

  “Which there was,” Emma said.

  DeMarco didn’t know what to say to that. So he left.

  Chapter 27

  Mahoney maintained a small staff in Boston and the lady who ran his Boston office—a stout, sixty-something, gray-haired woman with an impressive bosom—had been with Mahoney for years. Her name was Maggie Dolan and DeMarco was convinced that she had a multiple personality disorder. One minute she would be the soul of sweet compassion, hugging a grandmother who’d lost her Social Security check, and a minute later she would be cursing like a blue-water sailor at some idiot who wasn’t marching to the beat of Mahoney’s drum.

  Maggie had called Mahoney to report a problem. The Speaker had forced her to hire a Harvard kid to work for her part-time, the kid’s dad being a guy with big bucks and lots of influence. Maggie said that last week the kid had started acting screwy: showing up late for work, leaving early, looking as if he hadn’t slept or eaten in days. He was a basket case, Maggie said. She had talked to the kid but he wouldn’t tell her what was bugging him.

  One of Maggie’s personalities wanted to fire the Harvard boy’s useless, pampered ass but she knew that might cause Mahoney a problem with the kid’s rich daddy. Maggie Number Two said she was really worried about the poor child, afraid he might be planning to slash his wrists, and she couldn’t bear to have that on her conscience. She’d told Mahoney she wanted to borrow DeMarco to find out what was going on, so Mahoney had loaned him to her.