Camel Club 01 - The Camel Club

by David Baldacci

  Tom Hemingway eventually came to terms with his father’s violent death; however, he knew it was not something he would ever get over, nor should he. He had loved and respected his father, learning civility and compassion by the man’s example. Unlike many other ambassadors who “purchased” their title with large campaign donations and who never even bothered to adequately learn the language and culture of the country they were sent to, Franklin Hemingway immersed himself and his family in the language and history of whatever land he was assigned. Thus, Tom Hemingway had a far better understanding and appreciation of both the Islamic and Asian worlds than virtually any other American.

  He had not gone the route of his diplomatic father, however, because Tom Hemingway didn’t believe he had the temperament for such a career. He had instead entered the spy world, beginning with the National Security Agency before transferring to the CIA and working his way up. It seemed an important even honorable career, and he’d thrown himself at it with the work ethic his father had instilled in him.

  He’d become a superb field agent, assigned to some of the most dangerous hot spots in the world. He had survived, sometimes just by minutes, attempts to kill him. He had, in turn, killed, on behalf of his government. He helped orchestrate coups that toppled popularly elected governments. He also oversaw operations that created instability in fragile third-world countries, because this was deemed the best way to foster an atmosphere most beneficial to the United States. He had done all that was asked of him, and more.

  And ultimately, it had been for nothing. The precious work that he’d performed was a sham, fueled more by business interests than national ones, accomplishing nothing other than making a bad situation worse. The world was as close to destruction as he had ever seen, and Tom Hemingway had seen a lot.

  There were many reasons, beginning with critical shortages of water, oil and gas, steel, coal and other natural resources. Rich countries like the United States, Japan and China took the lion’s share of these precious commodities, leaving scraps for the poorest nations. But it was more than the historically complex issue of the haves and the have-nots. It was a fundamental question of ignorance and intolerance. Hemingway had always considered ignorance and intolerance to be like commas, because you often found them in pairs, and almost never did you find one, ignorance, without its evil twin, intolerance.

  At age forty Hemingway’s father had helped create peace in lands that had known only war. At the same age his son had helped to rip peace from lands all over the world, leaving much of it in shambles. It had been a devastating revelation, given his provenance.

  And then he had sat down and looked at his options, and a plan had slowly coalesced. There were many who would have looked at what he intended and called him hopelessly naive. That was not the way the world worked, they would have argued. You are doomed to pitiful failure, they would have pronounced. And yet these were the same people who had performed atrocities in certain parts of the world under the pretense of helping them. They committed these “crimes” for reasons as crude as money and power and expected to have their own way without ever being seriously challenged by those they had so clearly wronged. Now who was the naive one? Hemingway thought.

  His “official” occupation had allowed him to crisscross the Middle East over the last few years. During that time he slowly formed the pieces to his puzzle, meeting with people he needed assistance from. He found skeptics aplenty, but then one man, someone he deeply respected and a longtime friend of his father’s, agreed to help. The man gave Hemingway not only access to people but the necessary funds to construct an elaborate operation. Hemingway did not believe for an instant that this gentleman didn’t have reasons of his own to do so. However, Tom Hemingway, American-born and -bred, even with all his contacts in that region and familiarity with its language and culture, couldn’t have possibly pulled off something this monumental on his own. And if he suffered from a certain idealism that bordered on naiveté, he was brutally realistic about how best his plan could be successfully carried out.

  He often wished his father were still alive so that he could ask for his advice. He knew, though, what Franklin Hemingway would say: It is wrong. Don’t do it. But the son was going to do it.

  And what was his true motivation? Hemingway had asked himself that question often as the process was unfolding. He had come up with different answers at times. He had finally concluded that he was not doing this for his country, and he was not doing this for the Middle East. He was doing this for a planet that was quickly running out of second chances. And perhaps also as a tribute for a father who was a man of peace but who died a violent death, because people patently refused to understand each other.

  Perhaps it was as simple, and complex, as that.

  CHAPTER

  14

  THE BODY OF PATRICK JOHNSON was discovered early the next morning by a group of fifth graders and their teachers from a Maryland elementary school, who wanted to learn more about Teddy Roosevelt. Unfortunately, they learned far more than they’d bargained for.

  Later that morning Alex Ford was driving his creaky government Crown Vic into work and thinking about what he’d be doing that day. If nothing else, duty at the Washington Field Office provided a lot of variety. The head of WFO, the special agent in charge, or SAIC, believed that agents with broad experience in all areas of concern to the Service were better agents because of it. Alex generally agreed with this approach. Already this week he’d performed surveillance on a couple of ongoing cases, pulled a few hours of prisoner transport, stood post for several visiting foreign dignitaries and been called in once as part of the Gate Caller Squad maintained 24/7 at the WFO’s duty desk.

  The Gate Caller Squad, part of the Secret Service’s Protective Intelligence Squad, was summoned whenever someone walked up to the White House, knocked on the gate and wanted to see the president without an appointment, which happened more frequently than most people imagined. There was one guy who showed up every six months and informed the guards that this was “his” house and they were all trespassing. There was also increased activity like this when the moon was full, the Service had discovered. Such bizarre behavior would win the gate caller a visit from the Secret Service, some shrink time and possibly a trip to jail or St. Elizabeth’s, depending on how deranged the agents found the person.

  Alex parked his car, walked into the WFO, nodded to a broad-hipped female guard in the lobby, swiped his security card in the slot in the elevator and rode up to the fourth floor, where the Metro Area Task Force was located. For part of his work, Alex was assigned to the task force, as were many of the more veteran agents at WFO. The task force worked closely with Virginia and Maryland state police and other federal law enforcement on myriad financial felony cases. That was the good news. The bad news was that criminals were so active the task force had more work than it could reasonably handle.

  The Service had three floors in the building, and he headed to his wall-less work cubby in a large open area of the fourth floor. There was an e-mail from Jerry Sykes, his ATSAIC, or assistant to the special agent in charge, telling him to come up to the sixth floor as soon as he got in.

  Okay, that was a little out of the ordinary, he thought. Had he violated some civil rights he was unaware of when arresting the two ATM goofballs last night?

  Alex rode the elevator to the sixth floor, got off and walked down the hallway, nodding to people he knew along the way. He passed the duty board that hung on one wall in the corridor. It had magnetic pictures of all the agents at WFO arranged in clusters according to their current assignments. It was a good, if not exactly high-tech way of keeping abreast of people’s whereabouts. There was also an electronic backup duty roster, because some pranksters would switch the pictures of agents on this board to other assignments. So an agent tasked to Criminal could suddenly find himself, at least according to the board, being in the desk-bound insomniac land of the Recruitment Division.

  A few of the pictures were
hung upside down; that meant that an agent was leaving the WFO for an assignment elsewhere. There were also red or blue dots on many of the pictures. This didn’t designate whether an agent was a Republican or Democrat, though some agents tried to sell that line to their friends and families who visited here; it designated whether the agent lived in Virginia or Maryland.

  Sykes rose from his desk when Alex appeared in the doorway.

  “Have a seat, Alex,” Sykes said, motioning to a chair.

  Alex sat and unbuttoned his suit jacket. “So am I in trouble, or is this just a fun date?” Alex smiled and, thankfully, Sykes grinned in return.

  “Heard about your heroics last night. We love agents who work unpaid overtime like that. Feel free to do it more often.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t turn down a nice bump in salary as a thank-you.”

  “In your dreams. Got a brand-new toy for you, something really hot.” He tapped a file lying on his desk. “This came on a slingshot from HQ to the SAIC here and then on to me.”

  Alex looked doubtful. “My load’s pretty full, Jerry. So long as people use money, other people will try and steal it or forge it.”

  “Forget that for now. How about making a run at a homicide?”

  “I don’t remember that being in our statutory mandate,” Alex said slowly.

  “Check your badge and your paycheck. It says Homeland Security now and not Treasury, so we have lots of new goodies in our bag to hand out.” Sykes glanced at the file. “A man named Patrick Johnson was found this morning on Roosevelt Island with a gunshot wound in his mouth, a revolver and bottle of Scotch next to him and a suicide note in his pocket.”

  “And he is?” Alex asked.

  “Employed at N-TAC,” Sykes replied, referring to the National Threat Assessment Center. “In other words, he’s one of us. That’s where you come in.”

  “But N-TAC’s not really part of the Service anymore, not after the intelligence shake-up. It’s with NIC now. Along with damn near everything else.”

  “Right but we still have our fingers in that pie, and Johnson at least technically was a joint employee of the Secret Service and NIC.”

  “Gunshot wound to the mouth, guy was probably drunk, revolver right there and a note. What’s to investigate?”

  “Suicide is what it looks like so far, and it’ll probably stick. Since it occurred on federal property and he was a federal employee, the FBI and Park Police are investigating. But we want somebody looking out for our interests too. If it was a suicide, we can handle the spin okay. But if it’s something else, well, then, we need to run that down. That’s where you come in.”

  “Why Roosevelt Island? Was Johnson a T.R. freak?”

  “That’s for you to find out. But don’t let the Bureau run you off.”

  “So why am I so lucky, Jerry?” Alex asked. “I mean isn’t this something for the Inspections Division to do?”

  “Yes. But I like you,” Sykes replied sarcastically. “And after all that time on protection, you really need as much real work as you can get.”

  “Funny, that’s what they said when I went into protection detail.”

  “Whoever said life was fair?”

  “No one who’s ever worn a badge,” Alex shot back.

  Sykes took on a serious expression. “You’ve seen the kids running around here. They’re good and they’re smart and they work their butts off, but their average experience is less than six years. You’ve got three times that. And speaking of baby agents, take Simpson with you. Rookie needs some breaking in.”

  “I’m curious,” Alex said. “Has Simpson got any strings upstairs?”

  “Why?” Sykes asked, although Alex thought he saw a smile flit across the man’s face.

  “Because the crap duty doesn’t seem to stick to that rook, that’s why.”

  “All I can say is Simpson’s the blessed relation of some big muckety-muck, and people tend to give ‘that rook’ a little slack. Do not feel so inclined. Here’s the file. The crime scene awaits you. Go get ’em.”

  As Alex rose, Sykes added, “The ninety-day report cycle is out on this one. We want daily detailed e-mails. And just so you know, they’ll be going directly to the SAIC and HQ.”

  “Okay.”

  “Like I said, Alex, this one is hot, treat it accordingly.”

  “I get the point, Jerry.”

  Alex returned to his desk, hung his jacket over his chair and opened the file. The first thing he encountered was a photo of Patrick Johnson looking very much alive. There was a hand-scribbled note that said Johnson was engaged to be married. The name and phone number of his fiancée were underneath this note. Alex assumed the woman had already been told of the man’s death. Johnson’s employment history looked pretty routine.

  Johnson had been with the N-TAC division of the National Intelligence Center, or NIC as the D.C. bureaucrats referred to it. In layman’s terms N-TAC put together information and strategies that cops could use to prevent everything from presidential assassinations to terrorist attacks to another Columbine. No Secret Service agent ever wanted to arrest an assassin. That meant the person you were guarding was dead.

  Alex remembered the huge battle that erupted when NIC made clear it wanted to absorb N-TAC into its intelligence empire. The Service had put up a vigorous counterattack, but in the end the president sided with Gray and NIC. However, because the Service had such a unique relationship with the president, it had been able to keep some connection to N-TAC, which was why Johnson had still technically been a joint employee of the Service, if in name only.

  Alex flipped through the rest of the file making mental notes. Finally, he stood and put on his jacket. He grabbed Simpson on the way out.

  Jackie Simpson was petite and dark-haired with an olive complexion and strong facial features dominated by a pair of startling blue eyes. Though a rookie at the Secret Service, she was no novice when it came to detective work, having spent nearly eight years as a police officer before joining the Service. When she spoke, no one could miss Simpson’s southern origins, in her case Alabama. She was dressed in a dark pantsuit and carried her sidearm on a belt clip riding near her left hand. Alex raised his eyebrows at the three-inch blocky heels she wore that still left her six inches shorter than he was. Then his gaze took in the wedge of red handkerchief poking out from the lady’s breast pocket. That was a little fashion statement that could get you killed. Alex also knew that her pistol was a custom piece that she had somehow gotten approval for. The Service liked uniformity when it came to its agents’ weapons, in the event they had to share ammo during a shoot-out.

  Like many people in a new job, she was full of bountiful enthusiasm as well as a startling lack of tact. When told of their new assignment, she responded, “Sweet.”

  “It wasn’t too sweet for Patrick Johnson,” Alex pointed out.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Glad to hear it. Let’s go.” Alex walked off fast, leaving Simpson to scurry after him.

  CHAPTER

  15

  DJAMILA, THE NANNY, CHANGED the diaper of the youngest boy, then turned her attention and considerable patience to feeding the one-year-old’s two brothers, aged two and three. After she’d finished this task, she played with them and then put the boys down for naps. She took her prayer rug out of the bag she brought with her to work and prepared to perform the salat, or prayer, by undertaking the ablution, or wudu, of the face, head, hands, arms up to the elbows, and the feet up to the ankles. Barefoot, Djamila faced the qibla, the direction of Mecca, and performed her prayer. It was a ritual she did five times each day beginning two hours before sunrise and ending with the last prayer at nightfall, when the twilight disappears. This was Djamila’s second prayer of the day, performed at noon, when the sun begins its decline.

  A few minutes after she’d finished, the boys’ mother, Lori Franklin, came downstairs and gazed admiringly at her well-kept house and then looked in at her sons sleeping very soundly in their respect
ive berths in the large playroom. Franklin was barely thirty and very attractive, with a slim, yet curvy figure and well-toned muscles. She carried a small bag with her.

  “Going to the club, miss?” Djamila said.

  “Yes, Djamila; a set of tennis and then who knows.” She laughed lightly and drew a contented breath in the way that young, well-off people often did. She nodded at her sons. “I see you have the army down already.”

  “Yes, they are good boys. They play hard and sleep harder.”

  “They’re good boys with you. They aren’t so good with me, or the three nannies that came before you. Now I can actually have a life even if my husband works twenty hours a day. Men, Djamila, can’t live with them, can’t live without their W-2s.”

  “In my country a man he is head of the home,” Djamila noted as she put some toys away in a storage box. “A woman’s duty is to help her husband, keep the home in a good way, and to take care of the children. But you must marry a man you respect and whose wishes you can carry out with a good conscience. Your husband is not your master; only God is.”

  The American rolled her eyes. “Oh, men are kings here too, Djamila, at least in their own minds.” She laughed again. “And I gave George the family he wanted. And I give him his wishes when he really needs me to. It’s not such a bad bargain.”

  “So you won’t be back this afternoon,” Djamila said, frowning, as she hurriedly changed the subject. She had found her employer far too frank sometimes.

  “I’ll be here in time to make dinner. George is out of town again. You can eat during the day now, can’t you? Your fasting thing is over?”

  “Ramadan has passed, yes.”

  “I can never keep the dates straight.”